Faceblindness

I don't think this is a scent-heavy race, although pheromones are a subtle factor for most species. From what I know so far, I'd suspect subtle physical differences ... oh, wait. *facepalm* I'm usually looking at them when they're not in their breeding cycle. When the monsoon comes, their skin color patterns change in certain ways, differently for males and females.

They don't have gender roles, really. Sex/gender for them seems to be like, oh, eye color or height for us. It's part of who you are, but not significant for most purposes. The salient division for social roles is age, not sex.

Sex is strongly important only during mating season. Outside that, they don't think of it much. I suspect they can tell the difference between males and females, if they concentrate on it.

The ones I have seen are doing pair-bonding, and the children are raised by their parents and older siblings. I wouldn't be surprised if others do it differently.

Children are still able to function during the monsoon, which is why older children wind up watching the young ones. Adolescents and menopausers are completely distracted with the change. Adults are completely distracted by mating activity. And the elders go into a kind of creative coma. It makes life interesting. They have to accommodate a near-total shutdown of their society every few years.

The spring rains come every year, mildly. Every 3-5 years, there's a large-scale climactic cycle that flips into an alternate mode, which triggers the monsoon season with torrential rains. The peak of it lasts about two weeks and then there's more moderate rain for a while longer. A lot of the plants and animals on that planet have their reproductive cycles tied to that monsoon cycle. It's a little bit like the El Nino/La Nina effect here. Rarely in history, the monsoon has happened twice in a row or every other year; or with longer gaps.

The monsoon triggers a physical and mental growth spurt for this species. They get a much smaller boost from the ordinary spring rains -- the year after a monsoon, babies from the previous year usually start talking. So they have a very solid physiological reason for practicing gerontocracy: the elders are substantially smarter than the adults, plus they get that phenomenal dreamtide in the monsoons. Elders will burrow down with a conundrum in mind, and more often than not, several of them will come out with a solution.

The triggers are climactic, environmental, and physiological -- some of it spills over into pheromones from animals and pollen from plants and what-all else. The whole ecosystem does this cool little orgiastic dance for a while. It's powerful enough to spill over slightly to humans. Not everyone is affected, but it puts a bump in the statistics: adolescents are more likely to hit puberty, adults are more likely to be horny (and fertile), and some seniors get torpid and creative.

I'm not entirely sure how the historic cultures dealt with the interruption, but it's not a time when it's convenient to do much anyhow. The weather is horrid; you can't farm or do other outside work. Spring planting comes right after the rains, and the crops have evolved to work with the local cycle. Modern civilization is designed with that interruption in mind; either to be automated or to be shut down for a while, or to be tendable by novices. There are always a few people who don't, for whatever reason, respond normally to the seasonal triggers; they are variously considered freaks or holy people, but they're very useful during the monsoons. But some disadvantages are unavoidable: if you get seriously injured during this time, your chances of survival are not high, because the nurses will be busy screwing and the doctors will be asleep.

One of the more interesting features of the society is how all the professions are stacked, and the education matches. There's a child-school for however long childhood lasts. Adolescents go to a different school that trains them for their adult job, between their metamorphic monsoon and the next one. Then when adults metamorphose into elders, they go back to school and train for their elder job. So nurses become doctors, secretaries become executives, local leaders become regional politicians, and so forth. It's really a mesh of job paths, but there are very definite divisions: a job is either for adults or elders. They don't really count the little tidbit jobs that children and adolescents can do, just "career" jobs.