bachin221b replied to your post: marsdaydream answered your question: Omegaverse…

I love that you know how omega pheromones would affect not just alphas, but betas and other omegas. <3

^_^  It’s one part trying to think through how it would logically work, and one part wanting to do things a bit differently than other writers have done.

I feel like I should talk more about betas.  I do know about them, but the alphas and omegas always get the attention.

The majority of the penis-possessing population are betas.  If the world’s population is broken down by sex, then it is roughly 50% women, 25% betas, 12.5% alphas, and 12.5% omegas.  (Or to more easily visualize, in a healthy population, for every 8 people, 4 are female, 2 are beta, 1 is an alpha and 1 is omega.)  Betas are fertile.  They can have kids, and do.  They frequently get married, and do all the normal-guy things that men do in the real world.  Contrasted with the aggressive, competitive alphas (in essence, the same kind of men you’d call ‘alpha male’ in the real world), betas are…well, everyone else.

Realistically, in this arrangement, ‘male’ is not an actual sex.  It’s just a collective term for ‘somebody with a penis.’  Which would make ‘female’ actually a meaningless term too.  But that would involve indoctrinating my readers into elaborate new terminology for this setting, and I didn’t want to go to that trouble.  Maybe I should have, because it would also allow me to do more interesting things with sex vs. gender.

For example, while ‘male’ is not a sex, it could be a gender.  You could identify as a penis-having person, or as a womb-having person.  If you’re omega, you might pretty easily identify either way.  In fact, I suspect omegas often have rather fluid gender.  Actually no, that’s wrong, omegas have an omega gender.  Because of what they are, they have a societal role and expectations of their own, and it partakes somewhat of male and somewhat of female, and a few things that are uniquely them.

But so then that means that if you have a ‘male,’ hm, ‘over-gender,’ then it also sub-divides, because betas and alphas are not quite the same.  And the ‘womb-having’ ‘over-gender’ would also subdivide into woman and omega.

I’m sure there are trans* people, in all this, which has to get particularly interesting.  And of course there are gender expectations and the people who defy them.  Like John.  He’s akin to a girl who grows up around four brothers.  She’s just primed to be a tomboy.  Likewise, John hung out with all those manly special forces guys for all that time; they definitely rubbed off on him.