Building Religions 23: Sex and Gender

In my post on Mary Douglas, I described some of the ways that religious societies create and enforce categories of thought, as well as their reactions to phenomena that transgress the bounds of those categories. My post today, which examines how to approach questions of sexuality as a worldbuilder, is to some degree an extension of that. Obviously, it's an enormous topic, and one that I won't even attempt to cover completely; instead, I'd like to focus on a few basic ideas.

Monsters

Most of what I wrote in my last few posts was fairly abstract, and while that shouldn't be a tremendous shock for anyone who's been following this blog, I want to show how some of those ideas can be turned into something more practical for worldbuilders.

So let's talk about monsters.

Building Religions 14: Mary Douglas

In my last post, I wrote something that wasn't entirely true, namely that a society's categories are "arbitrary." That was not only inaccurate, but it gives the impression that people create systems without putting any thought into them, and that they only adhere to them out of some irrational attachment to tradition. It also does a disservice to the scholars who've put a great deal of work into explaining the internal logic of these systems. Consider this post to be an extended mea culpa.