Monogamy

Monogamy is the biological and social practice among sexually-reproducing species in which a single male and a single female enter into a permanent, exclusive sexual arrangement. They often invest care in the offspring resulting from their sexual congress.

The practice is common (though often imperfectly observed) by Tosevites and other higher animals native to Tosev 3. Among the Race, the Rabotevs, the Hallessi, and the animals native to the planets of all three, however, it is unheard of. This is because these species are sexually inactive at all times but their mating seasons, at which point sexual congress is undertaken with extremely casual attitudes. When hatchlings result from these matings, little or no parental care is invested to them. (Unlike human children, they emerge from their shells wth their motor skills and survival instincts fully developed.)

The Race first encountered monogamy when it was observed among Tosevite prisoners of the Conquest Fleet. After their confusion was clarified, their initial response to the practice was disgust and horror. They considered it the height of sexual perversion.

However, when the Colonization Fleet arrived and introduced females to the Race's territory on the planet, and it was found that the drug ginger caused females to become fertile and emit sexual pheromones whenever it was tasted, many ginger-addicted male and female friends frequently mated and developed emotional attachment. These couples began practicing monogamy; one female wrote an enthusiastic defense of the practice in the controversial book One Life, One Mate.

The Race attempted to exile these sexual deviants, usually to the United States. However, by the early twenty-first century, it was recognized that the practice had become so widespread among their colonists that this was no longer practicable. Gone with the Wind