"If you put me in charge of haut social structures and we assumed everyone would go along with my plan? Well, then I'd want to think about it considerably more and talk to some people, but off the top of my head - I'd have an option for haut of either sex to demote themselves at will to ghem. No marriage required, you'd have to work out what clan to count them as belonging to or whether to count them as having clans at all but something could be worked out. Ghem are often motivated by things that keep them in more or less approved order - they want status and positions and advantageous marriages and so on - but they have none of the restrictions on their movement that were so annoying to me. They can emigrate or take up some economically productive activity if they want, they can associate with haut who want them around and with proles if they care to.
"If I'd been allowed to do that, I would probably have waited until I was a little older - no sense turning down the education and resources before I needed to trade them in for freedom of movement if the possibility would still be waiting for me when I was twenty-three or what have you. And then I'd have sold pens or opened a commercial genomics consultation clinic on Illyrica or performed music for audiences larger than whichever fifty haut were invited to this or that party. Or all of the above and then some. Without having to marry someone who - I've been very lucky, I love my husband, but I didn't exactly know Miles well when I seized on the idea of running off with him."
![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
timeasmymeasure
no subject
Date: 2014-08-26 07:16 pm (UTC)"If I'd been allowed to do that, I would probably have waited until I was a little older - no sense turning down the education and resources before I needed to trade them in for freedom of movement if the possibility would still be waiting for me when I was twenty-three or what have you. And then I'd have sold pens or opened a commercial genomics consultation clinic on Illyrica or performed music for audiences larger than whichever fifty haut were invited to this or that party. Or all of the above and then some. Without having to marry someone who - I've been very lucky, I love my husband, but I didn't exactly know Miles well when I seized on the idea of running off with him."