James:
You're the moderator; I'll let you decide if this is to be posted. |->
[Metlay, this is fine. It seems reasonably tasteful and discreet. I
appreciate you sending possibly controversial topics to me first, and
hope that you and other TMLers will continue to do so in the future.
- -- James]
***********
I recently received a rather interesting piece of mail from a TML reader who
asked to be kept anonymous. He beseeched me, in my capacity as TML historian
and fount of all knowledge Travellerish, to answer a question that had been
bothering him for a long time: put as delicately as possible, how well
endowed are Aslan and Vargr women? He'd had his curiosity piqued by
conflicting representations in works by various "official" Traveller artists,
and was hoping that I could shed some official light on the subject. Well, I
can't; GDW and DGP, for reasons of public good taste, avoid any but the most
basic discussions of sexuality in their materials. But if people trust my
judgement and the logical arguments I'll use below, then we can probably
consider what I'm about to say as "official," and someone with more guts than
I have can send it to DGP or something. |->
Anyway, my logic is as follows. The closest thing to a discussion of sexuality
among the Vargr and the Aslan (the two races under serious consideration here)
that we have had to date is the TRAVELLERS' DIGEST article on children, and on
information on marital patterns in older rule books. The chaos in Vargr
society as a whole tells us nothing, but the male/female ratio in Aslan
society and the prevalent polygamy in Aslan ekho (family) structure indicates
a long-standing need for several females to be sexually associated with one
male, so as to assure the maximum number of offspring per year and per
available healthy male. This would tend to hint at a small litter size, and in
fact the TD article bears this out; Aslan mothers give birth to only one child
at a time, after long gestation periods, and twinning is not unknown but is
rarer than it is among humans. The TD article also tells us what we need to
know about Vargr pregnancy; the mother gives birth to a litter of up to six
pups, and the experience of pregnancy, whelping, and rearing/weaning leaves
her bedridden for several years. Based on my knowledge of the Vargr ancestors
(which I've raised and bred all my life), I believe I can realistically fill
in the missing details here.
Aslan women have two breasts, bilaterally symmetric in much the same fashion
as human women. They change size only slightly with the rhythms of the
female's sexual cycles, as do those of human women, and pregnancy and nursing
increase these changes for a period of one to two years. There is no need for
any more than these, as there are never more than two kits to feed. Because of
the torso strength of the female's upper body, and the occasional perogative
to take over the rearing of the kits belonging to another female in the ekho
who is dies in childbirth or is killed soon after birthing, the breasts are
always in a state where proper stimulation can encourage lactation after a
short delay (several days), and do not shrink substantially with disuse. This
picture is borne out in the early drawings of Aslan women by William Keith
and David Dietrick (refer to the front cover art of Alien Module 1 for a
perfect example of the female Aslan). The only counterexample, and in my
opinion a glaring failure in continuity on the part of DGP, was the drawing of
the female Aslan guide in the recent adventure on Kusyu in TD, where she is
depicted as having four breasts. This oversight can easily be attributed to
William Keith's astounding lack of continuity in drawing in the past; he has
drawn anatomically perfect Aslan in many cases (FAR TRAVELLER magazine's
early issues, and the introduction of the Aslan in old JTAS), but is also
guilty of terrible oversights (ALIEN REALMS, the Alien adventure module set
from GDW, contains several hideously distorted Aslan pictures, where the poor
creatures are depicted as having human hands!). This one erroneous artist's
depiction aside, then, the question is settled for the Aslan.
The Vargr present a more difficult puzzle, however. Only one, count'em, ONE
female Vargr has ever been drawn in any Traveller publication, and that is
Gharukh, the cryptographer of THE TRAVELLER ADVENTURE, as drawn by Liz
Danforth, David Dietrick and Brad Foster. (Refer to the many drawings of
Gvoudzon, the ex- Corsair gadabout, in the same book, or to ALIEN REALMS or
many other places, for representation of male Vargr.) Her clothing was such
that little or nothing of her anatomy was visible, and the confusion among the
many artists who draw for Traveller as to how the bone structure of the Vargr
torso is to be represented makes matters confusing. The crux of the puzzle is
as follows: the Vargr was an obvious genetic alteration of the dog toward the
model of the human. Its arms are human. Its legs, tail, and head are canine.
But what is its torso? Artists are split down the middle on the matter; the
anatomical drawings in Alien Module 3 distinctly represent the torso and
ribcage of the Vargr as being the narrow design of a dog's chest, and it is
this interpretation that I favor, as do artists like Donna J. Barr. However,
many artists have drawn Vargr as having human torsos and abdominal
musculature, which strikes me as ludicrous in consideration of the rest of
their bodies, particularly the legs and tail. So let me base the rest of my
argument on the assumption that the arrangement of the Vargr torso and organs
follows that of the Terran dog. The female dog has two rows of teats, several
on a side. This allows for large litters of pups to be fed simultaneously.
However, the presence of so much excess weight when there are no pups to be
fed is detrimental to the female's survival in the wild; hence the size and
functionality of the mammary glands is directly linked to advanced pregnancy
and the years immediately thereafter. The female's weight can increase by up
to 50% as her body prepares for the task of feeding eight hungry pups; is it
any wonder why she is too exhausted to move from her bed for any length of
time? But when she is not expecting or has recently birthed, the glands shrink
to invisibility. A healthy female Vargr who is not expecting can not be told
from a male merely upon inspection of the torso; her fur hides what little
structure remains. I am sure that a Vargr could tell the difference, but that
is not a matter for discussion here.
I apologize for the longwindedness of this discussion, but I wanted to be as
precise in my terminology as possible. Consider this a plea for more careful
continuity in Traveller art; the question never would have arisen if people
had taken a little bit more care, and had been a bit less prudish, in the
past.
The frightening part of all of this is that DGP is about to release some new
Alien books, in which these conclusions are likely to be ignored or carelessly
refuted, and we can look forward to a long spell of trying to reconcile some
basically contradictory and silly views of races in whose essential realism
we would like to believe. Oh, well....
Yours with a slightly red face,
metlay