It’s not the idiocy.
It’s, well, these things -
(I am assuming here that we’re omitting the approximately 87% of the Empire’s population for whom such things would require technical assistance ranging from the merely NSFW to the not-safe-for-anyone-in-several-miles-radius. I mean, not to single anyone out, but when you’re a 30’ long multitentacled worm who enjoys temperatures in excess of 1,800 K, you’re gonna need more than the usual line of sex aids.)
- I should first note that the eldrae have exactly the sort of sexuality that might be expected of Wellsian “intellects vast and cool and [mostly] unsympathetic”:
My id is crushed to a tiny nub under the weight of my enormous neocortex!
Not like Vulcans, either; they’re not bottling it up for one big explosion. They just live intellectually, love intellectually, laugh intellectually, and hard as it probably is to empathize with from the human point of view, lust [desire] intellectually.
You can see this in the literature: in all the great classical tales and legends, you can find plenty of heroes led astray to their doom by beliefs, ideas, and tragic romances, and exactly none of our popular genre of those doomed by letting their dick do the thinking.
- See also here and here and here for more specific reasons why this is not in the modal instinctive/cultural sphere.
Yes, their quote-sex-industry-unquote is basically like the Companions’ Guild turned up to eleven because without the ability to form a real and meaningful intellectual-emotional relationship, no-one would be able to see the point. That this is essentially the same industry that sells products like “a fine dinner and a satisfying philosophical debate over it” to lonely salarymen far from home should not surprise anyone.
- Not to put too fine a point on it, human sexuality or the psychology of same is gross and horrifying to them.
Blame porn tropes for this, because even if you ignore the porn tropes in actual porn (and in so doing claim that one of our largest cultural products is somehow nonrepresentative of our culture), there’s enough power dynamics, status games, degradation, and occasional violence in popcul sex to be incredibly squicky by their cultural norms.
This, incidentally, is almost certainly called out in travel warnings as it’s the kind of thing in which cultural misunderstandings can escalate to extremely serious violence very, very quickly.
(Don’t the kaeth mingle violence and sex, one might ask? Well, yes, but not in that way. They like steamy post-victory sex, which is why the love hotels on Paltraeth come with arenas and disposable mooks. It’s not the same thing at all.)
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I’ve said it before, but it’s worth mentioning again: not the same species. To be fair, intellectual desire as mentioned above is really the root of exophilia in any species, since you don’t have instinct working for you, but it doesn’t help when you’re close enough to hit the uncanny valley - defined in this case as looking like the creepy uncle-species reconstruction at the Museum of Paleontology.
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I haven’t said this one before since it only just occurred to me, but man, consider the age difference. Not just the literal bio-age difference (“Wait, you’re forty? That’s not old enough to know a goddamned thing about a goddamned thing.”), but also the “ancient, sophisticated culture” aspect.
By which I mean, more or less, that while I’ve got less of a butt-stick about imperialism than most, if you’re taking port liberty from the aircraft carrier in the bay, trying to pick up a local who only realized that there was something bigger than a canoe last week is, well, just a mite tacky.
(Side note: also remember, they don’t have - actually, most of the Worlds doesn’t have - our brain bug about considering peoples, cultures, nations, etc., basically equal. If you were to ask directly and get an honest answer, the Empire - “eldest of the younger races, bright center of civilization” - would admit to having maybe three peers, one of whom is the dutiful younger brother and another one of whom is the senile grandfather of the metaphor, and everyone else is “the children”. That applies on a civilizational level, of course, and individuals are treated individually… but it helps to be John Sheridan, if you know what I mean?)
- Humans don’t have a liacoré complex in their brains - the one which enables farspeech/telepathy/telempathy - notwithstanding some extraordinarily expensive brain surgery of limited local use. Now, any reasonably cosmopolitan knows that exotics have exotic senses on which one may or may not show up, and for most purposes, people politely ignore this fact. Unfortunately for exophiles, intimate moments are one of those times when it’s real hard to ignore the fact that one’s partner has less psychic presence than house pets and server racks.
So, y’know, what you have here is apparently the equivalent, in human terms, of someone who flies to south-east Asian slum brothels to dubcon-fuck zombified baby chimps.
(And as such, Abby’s got this, even if she doesn’t know it yet. All that’s needed is to keep it quiet until the nice soph from the Shadow Ministry of Image turns up to explain that while they may have avoided giving the organs of the law a case against them, they might want to consider dropping everything and taking a nice long holiday somewhere so far off the map that the first light of creation has yet to reach it.
Because the organs of society can and will make him wish the organs of the law got to him first.)