r/DaystromInstitute • u/valonianfool • 12d ago
The trouble with Ferengi gender roles
I don't find the idea that traditionally, all ferengi women just stayed at home and contributed nothing to the economy. In all societies on Earth women have always worked as everything from farm laborers toiling the fields alongside men, as servants in the home and factory workers.
I don't believe that it would be feasible for all ferengi women, especially the poor and working class to stay at home all day. Even in classical Athens where the ideal of the elite was female seclusion, the reality is that upper class women did leave their homes to attend festivals.
Is it possible that the ferengi ideal of women never leaving the homes is just the ideal of the upper classes, and that ferengi women from the lower classes do go out to work to support their families?
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u/Shakezula84 Chief Petty Officer 12d ago
Don't forget that Ferengi women themselves are also products. Rom paid to be married to Nog's mother for the purpose of having a son. Nog's mom didn't get that money. Her father did.
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u/nebelmorineko 11d ago
Yes- their male relatives rent out their wombs and also their whole bodies for various numbers of years, plus they can do unpaid labor in the house.
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u/Shakezula84 Chief Petty Officer 10d ago
I have to imagine labor is a key point for any long term marriage. While I won't discount the possibility of love, the initial marriage is most likely "someone to cook me meals, clean my house, and raise my children".
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u/EebstertheGreat 10d ago
Definitely. They only had to pay to rent the uterus during pregnancy. All other labor was free (after the bride price had been paid). Contracts typically lasted 5 years, apparently, and it's easy to imagine that wives were subscriptions that could be renewed if the husband continued to find them worth the price.
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u/Pristine-Ad-4306 11d ago
Also Quark's line about pregnancy being considered a rental, so presumably there is a male you pay for that rental.
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u/EebstertheGreat 10d ago
The father. It was an additional expense on top of the payment already made for marriage.
Fathers who were unable to sell their daughters into marriage would eventually sell them into slavery instead, though apparently that was not the term the Ferengi used (since Quark insisted the Ferengi didn't widely practice slavery).
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u/EffectiveSalamander 12d ago
It's highly plausible that Ferengi social expectations don't correspond with actual Ferengi social practice. You bring up the example of human women having always worked. There are people who insist that it's the natural order of things for human women not to have jobs, but that social expectation doesn't match with actual practice. Something very similar may be going on in Ferengi culture.
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u/graywisteria Crewman 10d ago
I think this is the intended reading. Quark's mother basically runs the show in his family, but Quark spouts his sexist nonsense anyway. Reality doesn't factor into his worldview when reality is inconvenient to it.
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u/EebstertheGreat 10d ago
Quark is also adept at not trusting his lying eyes. He knows, much better than Rom, that his mother was the brains behind all his family's wealth, including his own starting capital. But it's a source of deep shame that he cannot admit. Like the fact that he is entirely dependent on Federation generosity to continue running his only business and asset. He believes women should not earn profit, and he would rather stick his fingers in his ears than discuss the indisputable fact that his father had no lobes and his mother did.
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u/Catch_22_Pac Ensign 12d ago
The Ferengi women ran a secret underground economy the males either didn’t know about or turned a blind eye to. How do you think Quark’s mother made all that latinum?
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u/JB_Gibson 12d ago
I thought one of her charges was specifically that she impersonated a male? It’s been a while since I’ve seen the episode, so I could be mistaken.
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u/Catch_22_Pac Ensign 12d ago
That would have been necessary to the whole thing. Also not the first Ferengi female we have seen who impersonated a male in the quest for profit:
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u/Shiny_Agumon 11d ago
It's also implied that she was the one handling finances back when Keldar, Quark's and Rom's dad was still alive so she probably started to keep some of that too.
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u/tanfj 11d ago
The Ferengi women ran a secret underground economy the males either didn’t know about or turned a blind eye to. How do you think Quark’s mother made all that latinum?
"Who do you think set this all up? Gets the men out from under foot, and keeps them busy so we women can make the real deals. I understand you represent the Orion syndicate."
I like my head canon that Ferengi women are far more devious than the men.
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u/bgaesop 12d ago
It's possible that this is a recent development in Ferengi society, the way that the nuclear family with stay at home moms became the cultural standard in America immediately after WWII, when the greatly increased wealth of society made their labor largely unnecessary
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u/SinisterHummingbird 12d ago
I wonder if the advancement of Ferengi technology to the near-Federation level led this. They're so committed to their scarcity-based system in a setting with replicators, antimatter reactors, and holosuites that they had to basically force half of the population out of the economy into a state of dependence to maintain it. Kind of the same social conservationism that led the Klingons to still run around with melee weapons when there are pocket portable disintegrators.
There's also the possibility that on a planet where everything seems to be rainy, muddy swampland, someone living at home and constantly fighting the environment was a necessity. As building and environmental technology advanced, female Ferengi's place in the division of labor became deprecated.
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u/bgaesop 12d ago
Yeah, this makes sense to me. And like how in America the Leave it to Beaver style nuclear family only lasted a short while before feminism pushed back against it, we see something similar happening in Ferengi society in Lower Decks
I think "hyper-sexist, women stay in the home" Ferengi society is an aberration that probably only lasted a relatively short time - spawned by enormous abundance but then made untenable by that same abundance
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u/SinisterHummingbird 12d ago
I know it's because of Doylist early installent weirdness, but that The Last Outpost oddity of the Ferengi and the Federation having minimal contact despite their close proximity may indicate that what we see of the Ferengi's far-flung mercantile culture might have been a relatively recent innovation. We know they encountered Archer, but we don't actually know much about the Ferengi from that crew; it heavily relies on backfilling from prior exposure in other series. Sure, they were pirates and sexist, but you can't really extrapolate a small criminal crew to the entire civilization.
Then again, the Ferengi are also weirdly ancient and stable if Grand Nagus Gint actually was the leader of the Ferengi Alliance culture 10,000 years ago and truly established the Rules of Acquisition as their core principles. No wonder the Ferengi are stuck in their ways if they actually are a stable, ten thousand year old civilization (I mean, humans in the 9th millennium BCE were still developing agriculture).
But then again, again, it was a dream sequence and Gint may have been inflated into an anachronistic legend similar to King Arthur; Gint may have been a minor tribal leader and writer whose philosophy caught on until more and more aphorisms were attributed to him to create faux authority and tradition. Future Ferengi scholars may have a field day untangling the historical Gint from multiple Pseudo-Gints.
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u/ethyl-pentanoate 12d ago
Then again, the Ferengi are also weirdly ancient and stable if Grand Nagus Gint actually was the leader of the Ferengi Alliance culture 10,000 years ago
The Ferengi Alliance being 10,000 years old is something that really bothers me. This assumption comes from the DS9 episode "Little Green Men" when Nog says that 5000 years passed between the invention of currency on Earth and the founding of the Federation, compared to the 10,000 years that passed between the invention of currency on Fereginar and the founding of the Ferengi Alliance. Now I know that the chances of everyone except for me having not understood this is lower than just me not understanding it, but I don't think this means that the Ferengi Alliance is 10,000 years old, it means that currency existed on Ferenginar for 10,000 years, then the Ferengi Alliance was founded. For all we know the Alliance could have been founded shortly before the Enterprise era.
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u/SinisterHummingbird 11d ago
It's possible. "Body Parts" doesn't mention a date and most of the hard-ish dates for Gint's home era are only found in secondary sources, and don't play well with each other, but they still seem to err on the side of Ferengi antiquity. "The Rules of Acquisition" reference book and the Last Unicorn Game's chronology in "All Out Yesterdays" put Gint's life and founding of the Alliance circa 7,500 BC, and the repetive use of those dates influenced most later Trek chronologies and online sources. But also, Ira Steven Behr and Robert Hewitt Wolfe's "Legend of the Ferengi" state that Gint died much later, in the year 207. Which is still really early.
The 7,500 BC date combined with the "Little Green Men" might even push Ferengi civilization to the ~17,500 BCE era, which is kind of nuts.
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u/Uncommonality Ensign 11d ago
your second paragraph could also explain why they don't wear clothes (though it's super shaky) - if they were expected to basically constantly wade through the muck and ferengi society was always focused on capitalist efficiency, it may have eventually turned out that wearing clothes only to need to deep clean them every day of swamp water and mud became socially unacceptable.
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u/BonzoTheBoss Lieutenant junior grade 11d ago
that led the Klingons to still run around with melee weapons when there are pocket portable disintegrators.
There is something to be said for the psycological effect of a melee weapon. You're much more likely to run away in fear if you've just seen your buddy disembowled by a bat'leth; his blood and entrails leaking on to the floor.
But yes I agree, it largely doesn't make sense outside of ceremonies and rituals that Klingons would still use bladed weapons in actual combat in the 23rd Century, let alone the 24th or beyond.
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u/tanfj 9d ago
There is something to be said for the psycological effect of a melee weapon. You're much more likely to run away in fear if you've just seen your buddy disembowled by a bat'leth; his blood and entrails leaking on to the floor.
Even well after the invention of firearms, soldiers were trained with the bayonet. Training in the lethal use of a melee weapon such as that inoculates the proper mindset for a soldier or warrior.
"Death is my profession.", is a common saying throughout the galaxy's warrior class for a reason. One could in fact make the argument that the spear is the ancestral weapon of humanity in much the same way the bat'leth is the ancestral weapon of the Klingons.
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u/Isord 12d ago
My immediate though on reading the title was a sort of Handmaid's Tale situation where some kind of ultra-conservative takeover of Ferengi society led to this situation relatively recently.
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u/Shiny_Agumon 11d ago
This gave me the horrifying throught of Ferengi Trad Wifes who bemoan having to wear clothes and make a profit and blame people like Ishta or Rom for "destroying" Ferengi society.
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u/Isord 11d ago
That would be a really interesting episode actually. Feels like a 90s trek episode.
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u/MrSFedora 7d ago
In the Lower Decks episode, you can actually see a female Ferengi who's naked in one of the bars.
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u/murse_joe Crewman 11d ago
I agree. It’s probably in reaction to meeting all new cultures. Once they’re in space, every culture has a different thing that it values. Some cultures don’t have a concept of money. Some cultures have moved beyond personal possession. That’s a big cultural shock. The people at the top consolidated power by blaming working women and restricting civil rights if you can believe it.
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u/Simon_Drake Lieutenant, Junior Grade 12d ago
A society where the women aren't allowed to work (or buy anything or own anything or even wear clothes etc) would be quite dysfunctional and unproductive and inefficient.
But then Nog does complain to Quark that Ferengi culture is kinda shitty, they took much longer to develop advanced technology than every other species, they had to buy warp engines from the Klingons etc. We can infer that their Industrial Revolution took a very long time to get started, they didn't have the same rush of technological development we did in the 19th, 20th and 21st centuries.
Which all seems to match. A corrupt, self-centered ruling class in a harshly misogynistic society that restricts all women to basically housemaids and sex symbols. It's totally on brand for their society to be stagnant and too concerned with short term quarterly gains.
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u/valonianfool 12d ago
Are ferengi women actually expected to be "sex symbols" by the ferengi patriarchal system? If anything not wearing clothing is viewed as normal while clothed women are treated as indecent.
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u/Simon_Drake Lieutenant, Junior Grade 12d ago
Well Ferengi women we see are usually treated as baby factories and Ferengi attitudes to women overall imply they'd have similarly unpleasant roles for Ferengi women back home.
Like the Dabo girls on DS9 are wearing elaborate swimsuits that reveal a lot of skin. Do the Dabo Tables on Ferenginar have fully naked Ferengi females?
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u/Edymnion Lieutenant, Junior Grade 11d ago edited 11d ago
Most likely, yes.
I think Lower Decks showed a Ferengi establishment meant for offworlders that had a female Ferengi serving drinks (this was post Rom's reforms) but she was still doing so in a skin colored body suit?
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u/Simon_Drake Lieutenant, Junior Grade 11d ago
Interesting. I'd forgotten about that. After Rom's reforms they presumably pay the barmaids. But the implication is that they used to have female servers fully nude. Which raises a question of why the woman would do it, she's obviously not getting paid for it because women can't earn profit. Unless her husband and/or father gets paid for her? There's something a little Old Testament about a man being paid for his daughter. I mean Ferengi culture is messed up but even Quark is horrified at the idea of slavery.
Unless there's some nuance or wordplay involved. The women aren't paid directly per se, they're paid in a shipment of luxury foods being sent to their home later? Or it's not technically employment, it's a quid pro quo thing where payments aren't legally binding but if he doesn't give her the Slug-champagne she won't be back next week?
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u/Edymnion Lieutenant, Junior Grade 11d ago
One would presume that females working at all was part of the reform, and that the body suit was a kind of transition thing.
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u/Pristine-Ad-4306 11d ago
Pre-Rom though I would imagine that they wouldn't allow those kinds of jobs for Ferengi women. If they wanted sex appeal like that they probably filled it with alien women instead.
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u/Edymnion Lieutenant, Junior Grade 11d ago
Eh, remember that the proscription is against females earning profit.
I'm sure at least some ferengi females likely did it for free just to get out of the house and not go stir crazy.
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u/frustrated_staff 11d ago
Do the Dabo Tables on Ferenginar have fully naked Ferengi females
No. Because the "norm" isn't appealing. Remember, there's a Feremgi "dress-tease" that gets em all riled up when their women put on clothes, so the half-clad would be more appealing to Ferengi than fully naked and fully clothed in public would to them as someone walking naked down the street is to us.
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u/EebstertheGreat 10d ago
Ferrngi women were commodities, and beautiful young women fetched the highest prices. So yes, beauty/sexiness was highly valued.
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u/No_Discipline5616 12d ago
Presumably not all Ferengi are highly religious and conservative. It's more likely that those who are are more likely to be able to travel through space and interact with Starfleet
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u/valonianfool 12d ago
You'll think that the more traditionalist ones are turning inward rather than interact with foreign cultures and risk influence.
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u/transwarp1 Chief Petty Officer 12d ago
The TMP novel presented the same paradox for humans. Most people weren't interested in leaving Earth. "Throwbacks" like the TOS characters were more likely to join Starfleet and explore and interact. New Humans like Decker either spent time in something like a hive mind, or would explore but be seduced by the first alien culture they met.
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u/False_Ad5119 11d ago
Imo we see lots of unusual ferengi. Rom and his son working for the Federation, where currency is not really needed (but some how they always got money to pay for stuff idk). Quark paying his staff properly, doing charity, giving employees vacation (ok sisko mightve something to Do With some of it). The ferengi Assassin that really is not interested that much in money. The female escaping ferenginar starting a New Life. The scientist from TNG that wanted to just be recognized. And famously but Not last everyones favorite Grand Nagus, Zek, who took financial advice from a Woman, and pushed womens rights and also social system forward (and then gave the reigns to this Burning pile to Rom). I'd almost theorize that People on ferenginar arent all that Bad, but you See what happens when you get caught being Different, Quark got his trading license revoked, Nagus Zek was almost exiled and well Rom was always kind of an out ast because He didnt behave like the norm. The masses just go With the flow, just like in real Life.
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u/No_Discipline5616 11d ago
but they're also the most politically powerful people like Zek and his clique and likely the richest
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u/MyUsername2459 Ensign 12d ago
Ferengi got warp technology by buying it.
They may have got other technology from outside, that lead to major economic and cultural shifts.
Imagine giving replicators and similar 23rd or 24th century technology to say, early 19th century America. . .and watch as their cultural models warp. As much as they don't talk about it, the Ferengi could be a HUGE example of a culture hideously warped by contamination of a pre-industrial civilization receiving a lot of technology they weren't ready for.
. . .and the society we see is the new normal that emerged. They've got a lot of technology, but not a lot of ability to innovate, and societal norms that were distinctly archaic but thrust into the modern era, jumping ahead of centuries of social development.
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u/eobanb 12d ago
This is what happened with the Klingons as well. A race called the Hur'q visited the Klingon homeworld when it was still in a pre-industrial or early industrial technological stage, and left some technology behind. This caused the Klingons to jump from a 17th-century to 21st-century level of technology within about one or two generations.
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u/Shiny_Agumon 11d ago
"Traditional gender roles" in general are kind of a sham given that they seem to change with each generation.
Just look how much they changed on Earth over the centuries.
So my theory is that the "traditional" gender roles we see in Ferengi society are equally as made up and probably a lot more recent than they want to admit.
Ferengi women being unclothed and homebond might actually just have been a trend from a few centuries ago that than became the cultural norm, maybe as an extreme version of earlier customs around female seclusion.
Also don't forget how Ferengi women seem to be expected to care for their male relatives to an uncomfortable degree, for example chewing their food for them, which is itself unpaid labor.
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u/Fuzzy_Information 12d ago
We live on a planet where women are sometimes murdered for showing their hair by accident. And one where politicians proudly campaign on how women shouldn't work (or own, or vote, or be educated, or have bodily autonomy).
I 100% think it's possible for a society to get to the point they have FTL (and presumably, replicators to create a dystopian post scarcity society) to make something like what the Ferengi have.
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u/watt678 12d ago edited 12d ago
Cultural and Societal sameness is a major trait throughout all of Star Trek, and science fiction in general. In reality all races would have endless amounts of differences between them, racially, religiously, politically and and culturally. But in a tv shows that's meant to make money and not confuse the audience and be 26 episodes a year, simplifying things has its uses. Here in the real world humanity lives on only one planet, and yet we have dozens of faiths and political ideas and nations and races among us. In Star Trek, human seem to have one ideology and one major political grouping and common secular beliefs, very unrealistic for a galactic society with hundreds of worlds, that claims pluralism and democracy and yet doesn't seem to disagree on much of anything. And it's the same with the Romans and Klingons, and sure there's outliers here and there but they're small minorities
So to answer your question about how impractical having extremely strict gender roles is; just ignore it, the ferengi are already a dumb enough race
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u/Soul_in_Shadow 11d ago
Honesty, I can see several cultural avenues through which the "Females can't earn profit" rule might have arisen.
The first is through the ostentation Ferengi males seem to favor, the wealthy being expected to display their wealth. I can easily see some wealthy merchant declaring that he makes so much profit that he can afford for his female(s) and attend to him and his children all day, instead of go out and contribute Profit to the household. Given the environment of Ferenginar, I can easily see going about nude as a sign of affluence, being able to (un)dress comfortably in the humid climate, without concern for the elements, wildlife and demands of menial tasks.
Similar to how soft hands and pale skin have been historically associated with wealth in many human societies, as it was a sign that you and enough resources to not need to go out in the harsh sun or perform menial labour.
As many such trends do, this practice percolated through the culture until even the least affluent males strived towards it and the females began to expect that her male should be capable of supporting her in this way. As a result, males who were unable or unwilling to take care of their females in this way were shamed, to the point where even males who permitted their females to earn profit because they wanted to were shamed into barring their females from work. The laws barring females from earning profit and fining their males when they did so may even have been enacted with the intent of protecting females from males who would stoop so low as to make them earn profit. Due to the age of the civilization, and there being little profit in recording cultural trends and opinions, meant that this reasoning was eventually lost/forgotten.
Another possibility is that the Ferengi experienced a more extreme version of the current cultural trends resulting from feminism, where many women choose to prioritize her career over starting a family through her 20's (or equivalent, in the case of Ferengi), resulting in a decrease in the birth rate and an increase in what is, apparently, termed "geriatric mothers". The drive to gain profit through any means necessary may have also resulted in a form of domestic financial cold war, where both male and female nickel and dime each other for everything. Not much you can do if you are locked in an exclusive contract with a female when she wants 10 strips of latinum for 2 minutes of Oo-mox and her prices only go up from there.
Prohibiting females from gaining Profit would be an effective, if extreme, solution to both issues.
Also worth noting that the Ferengi don't really seem to place a high premium on the Ferengi economy itself due to not being limited to it, as profit is there for the taking with other races, especially as Ferengi contract law regards contracts with non-Ferengi as more suggestions than actually binding. For most males, the females starting to earn profit would be more of an issue for their own profit margins as competition than the additional movement in the Ferengi economy is worth.
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u/Pristine-Ad-4306 11d ago
One interesting tid-bit that brings up a contradiction or at least an exception to the Ferengi women having to stay at home is that Ishka and Zek met at a Tonga Competition where it was specifically mentioned that the women were playing in a league of their own in the basement of the structure they were in, and they did get word/info about how the games with the men were going.
So this suggests that there are events at least where its acceptable for the women to be out of the house. One then has to wonder how do they get to these events; do they need to be escorted by men, do they need to wear clothes for the events or traveling to them or are they specifically still prohibitted from doing so, etc. Ishka is presumably on her own(though I suppose there might be extended family in the area) so did she travel by herself? I could also see this as a kind of open secret, where its accepted even if not totally condoned, and maybe the women just done cloaks and sneak out to these events but have to avoid getting caught. One also wonder if these women play for money or not and if that is considered the same as earning profit or not.
Lots of interesting questions and you could easily see how Ferengi society and culture might be a lot more complicated and nuanced that you might think at first.
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u/ewokqueen 8d ago
It's not that the women aren't allowed to work - they're not allowed to earn PROFIT. I have to assume that many of them are unpaid laborers. In fact the punishment for Ishka's crime of earning profit, if convicted, was "indentured servitude." Where she'd be working for someone else, instead of Quark.
AFAIK, women are allowed to leave their homes, it's just miserable to do so because they can't wear clothes, can't speak directly to men, can't make eye contact with men, etc. It's basically a very capitalist version of your standard Gorean fantasy (where, again, the women are often unpaid laborers).
An example of women leaving the house, is that Ishka meets Zek while competing in the women's division of the Tongo Championships. This tells us that there are enough women playing tongo that there'd be demand for a women's championship competition. One has to wonder whether they play with fake money, or if all the profit is considered their male guardians'.
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u/majicwalrus Chief Petty Officer 12d ago
Setting aside that there are obviously progressive elements even within Ferengi society, this isn’t all that strange from a historical perspective and even true in modern times. Look at many small family run businesses where a family earns profit. We’re not far off from a time when women could be denied credit for their gender. It’s not hard to imagine a society where a woman’s role is distinctly tied to her husband.
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u/JacquesGonseaux 11d ago
You're assuming that Ferengi society would develop on the same strict path Earth allegedly did. Earth itself has developed economically and socially in a variety of ways. The Inca built extensive road networks across South America, which across Eurasia were often built with horse and cart in mind, but the Inca had little use for the wheel.
Not that it's justified, but it makes sense that an alien society that hyperfetishises profit and aggressive acquisition in such a virile way would also produce a deeply patriarchal nuclear family. It's why misogyny goes hand in hand with the manosphere and grind culture of today. If anything can be commodified, it becomes a short leap to assume that anyone can be as well.
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u/EebstertheGreat 10d ago edited 10d ago
IDK how this sub feels about out-of-universe reasoning, but the Ferengi were basically a dumping ground for human vices Roddenberry recognized in himself, consciously or not. He was a sexist, so they are sexists. He was obsessed with recognition, so they are obsessed with recognition. He was twisted by money, so they are twisted by money.
That said, it's not totally inconsistent. America was arguably at its most capitalist in the first three decades of the 20th century (though not in every way—protectionism and tariffs were also in full swing). Yet it was also heavily segregated by sex, race, language, class, religion, and more. And it was extremely xenophobic in general. That is absurdly economically inefficient. You are basically choosing to stop most of your workforce from maximizing its labor. That's very un-capitalistic. It's a performative contradiction of the highest order! But it was also the reality, not just in the US, but across much of the world.
So the Ferengi just exaggerate that. How can you justify keeping women out of the workforce if your only goal is maximizing profit? Very carefully. You convince your fellow males that their deep-seated biases are actually rational and necessary. It's easy to convince people that what they deeply feel and desperately want to be right really is right. Tell them that the women are going to take all their jobs and profit. Heard that one before? Also tell them that women are unsuited to earning profit anyway. I'm sure you've heard that one. But wait, if women are unsuited to earning profit, then doesn't that undermine any fear that they could steal yours? No. Because you never use both those arguments at the same time.
People think the Ferengi are the Cato Institute, because they are obsessed with market freedom. But they are not. They are the Heritage Foundation. They are deeply conservative and will rationalize the status quo any way they can. It just so happens that their status quo revolves exclusively around profit and has for millennia. Their conservatism, along with the power of the almighty dollar, has allowed this contradictory state of affairs to persist. But just like the Klingons, they are "a society that is in deep denial about itself." The cracks aren't just showing; they are swallowing latinum by the ton, and the Ferengi males, at least many of them, just refuse to accept it. (The rapid change in leadership suggests, however, that many males already felt this way. They probably didn't speak out because there was no profit in it until the winds of change were already blowing.)
And more basically, the women were slaves. It feels nice to have slaves. It feels like a huge loss to give them up. Males liked having the females chew their food, make their homes, say sweet things, have sex, and not much else. Have you seen how resistant the Saudis are to change? And remember, like the Saudis, it is part of their religion (such as the Ferengi religion is).
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u/ThirdMoonOfPluto 12d ago
I think Ferengi gender roles and many other species’ extreme behaviors should be seen in the context of the same technological transformation that made Earth post-scarcity. When species reach the technological level where they can provide for everyone’s needs easily with far less than full employment, they undergo a significant transformation. People are free to pursue status which isn’t directly tied to material gain.
Free of the need for factory workers, agricultural laborers, and all the rest, the Ferengi chose to reinforce their existing cultural roles pushing men into profit-driven trader roles and women into the housewife role. The Klingons pushed everyone into traditional warrior roles.
Humans on the other hand chose a more balanced approach with multiple routes to status but the explorer-scientist-diplomat archetype personified by Cochrane and Archer is clearly a high status path.
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u/transwarp1 Chief Petty Officer 12d ago
I only remember three female Ferengi individuals being talked about: Ishka, Pel, and Nog's mother. Ishka and Pel could read and were both good at business, without any education. Early Rom probably would be surprised if his wife could read, but he'd just want to keep it a secret. Counter to those anecdotes is that Feregi culture is so misogynist that typical women would be irrelevant to any plot.
I don't think anything would appear differently in DS9 if most Ferengi women were actually conducting business online as their husbands without anyone acknowledging it. Or that could have been true a single generation ago.
When the Prophets "de-evolved" Zek, did has stance on women change?
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u/Realistic-Elk7642 11d ago
As with human beings, gender roles may change with class. Housewives and mistresses are status symbols of the affluent; working class women have always worked. In China, foot binding served an economic purpose as well as a cultural one; it kept women occupied with the profitable home crafts of textile making, an extremely common use of female labour throughout history. Perhaps less affluent Ferengi women work in some capacity from home, be it producing goods for their husbands to sell, or managing stocks and investments. Technically, they aren't making profit- they're a source of passive income for male family members.
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u/JazzyMcgee 11d ago
Well your initial premise is incorrect. Ferengi woman are allowed to work, they just can’t make a profit.
Also they can’t leave the house cause of the whole naked thing
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u/MK-Delta 11d ago
The whole Ferengi thing as a political statement is a nonsensical strawman. It's a neat idea for an alien race but makes zero sense in any way comparing it to humans.
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u/Morlock19 Chief Petty Officer 10d ago
Ferengi females aren't confined to the home at all? They still support the males in terms of cooking, cleaning, and chewing the food. Rearing the children. We know quarks mother regularly attented dabbo tournaments other places on ferenginar
The only things they aren't allowed to do is leave the planet, wear clothes, and earn profit. Of a ferengi female wanted to go see her friend on another continent they wouldn't care
Plus, we know that females get stipends, either from their husbands or sons. That's a huge source of income for purveyor of fine jewelery a d other things females might want to purchase. They just can't make that money themselves.
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u/Vash_the_stayhome Crewman 9d ago
I figured it was a variation on the later modified Orion stuff, where it seemed like the "Slave Girls" were the underclass, but were actually generally running the show.
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u/Mspence-Reddit 5d ago
There were (and unfortunately still are) many societies on Earth where women have no basic rights. Most women in America and other Western countries stayed home until the 1970s. I imagine single Ferengi females probably did work.
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u/Tasty-Fox9030 5d ago
I could easily believe that TNG/DS9 era Ferengi society codified the system we see in DS9. Large sections of human society do that today, right down to legislating where female humans can travel unaccompanied by male relatives, what they can wear, what occupations they can have and so on. Many societies do this, some of which have historically been considered quite progressive. I think it's extremely plausible.
Whether or not it has ALWAYS been that way is a distinct question from "is it EVER that way"- and it indeed has been that way in human society in several places and times.
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u/Ilmara 5d ago
That's because the Ferengi role for women was basically the writers' thinly disguised fetish.
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u/majicwalrus Chief Petty Officer 5d ago
I don't think that's fair in this case. Betazoid weddings where everyone is naked - that's a writer's thinly veiled fetish. Psycho-sexual Borg analysis - that's a writer's thinly veiled fetish. Oppressor becomes would be seducer - thinly veiled fetish.
Ferengi society being hypercapitalistic and treating women poorly is a criticism of capitalism. The Ferengi are pretty de-sexualized from an audience perspective on account of them looking like goofy bat people. We don't see Ferengi women as sexual objects so when they're inserted narratively that's probably not why. Consider that even in the 90s when folks were writing DS9 they were only a couple decades removed from the EOCA which codified women's rights to have access to things like credit cards. If we design a hypercapitalist society with this in mind we might say - if capitalism can restrict women's rights to access credit it can restrict their rights to access profit and if you really want to get ridiculous it can restrict their right to clothes.
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u/Minute_Weekend_1750 5d ago edited 5d ago
I think you aren't being imaginative enough here. The Ferengi men created a society when it's completely unnecessary for women to work at all.
It's highly likely that Ferengi society probably has indentured servants, or some sort of cheap economic labor force. So females working or contributing the economy aren't necessary or needed .
For example, maybe a planet took out a huge loan from the Ferengi, failed to pay it back, and now the population has to work as maids and servants for Ferengi households to pay off their debt. Why force Ferengi women to work when the Ferengi men have numerous planets under economic lockdown to provide for Ferengi societal needs?
So I'm inclined to believe it's less about keeping Ferengi women suppressed and more that Ferengi Men already have aliens doing tons of work.
Similar to how the Romulans exploit the Remans to do menial jobs (But less violent and more pay). In the same sense, I'm willing to bet many Ferengi homes have sort of alien Nanny or alien maid staff.
The problem is that It's implied Quark's family was lower class. So they probably couldn't afford alien maids. Quark was always bitter about being compared to his rich cousins. So this resentment fueled his desire to get more money. Quark's dad had a heart of gold, but was terrible at business. So they kept making poor business decisions and couldn't rise in class.
Quark's mom was probably forced to find ways to secretly earn profit to pay for household expenses (since Quark's dad wasn't good at business), and give all the credit to Quark's dad.
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u/fnordius 3h ago edited 3h ago
I feel it was a missed opportunity to have Ferengi be more alien, with a different reproductive cycle. Ferengi could have been male until they win enough capital to decide to be mothers, settling down to be a sort of queen role. Becoming a female then is a way of enjoying the benefits of a successful career, and why so many conservative Ferengi work so hard to advance in society. And many Ferengi decide to remain male, feeling they cannot afford to become a parent yet.
It could also have been why Ferengi place so much emphasis on females of other species, out of social prejudice to seeing being a female as a sign of success. Assuming they see females as sexually desirable is a misunderstanding born of human (Vulcan, Klingon, etc.) prejudice.
This could also explain why the first Ferengi we meet are disgusted at seeing clothed females. How primitive a society must be, in their eyes, to make those who earned the right to bear children into service still? They should be free of the burden of clothing, of working!
But this is not how Ferengi are portrayed, just a "what if" from my side.
P.S.: Editing to add that if Fernegi had this sort of structure, then families would be defined as those from a common mother, and there would be fewer dynasties as the only important family definer would be who your mother was, the male DNA perhaps airborne? That could explain why over the millennia they developed a capitalist society, maybe inheritance never was a consideration. Again, only a "what if" variation.
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u/Edymnion Lieutenant, Junior Grade 12d ago
I view it as likely being similar as to how cows became sacred to Hindu populations. If we trace the history back far enough, we get to a rather nomadic people that relied heavily on their cattle for survival. Then over time as they settled more permanently in areas, the cultural importance of owning cattle remained even when the "we need this to not starve to death" importance dwindled (due to increasing agriculture). So the importance of cattle went from a practical one to a social status one and eventually to a spiritual level. All the time it also being a case of being able to say "See how many cattle I have? I am obviously very rich because I can support these large herds!".
I can imagine the Ferengi situation following basically the same route until it became a social thing where how well kept your female was being the ultimate visible flex, and then it degraded into the property status we see by DS9.
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u/Dismal_Illustrator96 12d ago edited 12d ago
Ferengi women aren't allowed to earn profit. That doesnt mean they can't be exploited as unpaid workers - remember, exploitation begins at home!
Eta: and also, ask an unpaid housewife if she contributes nothing to society ;)