After a few hours of surfing the internet, Jon had a better understanding of what this world was like. (Who needs the wishing stone when you could find almost anything you want to know on the internet, right?)
First of all, certain words didn't seem to exist in this world. "Lesbian", "faggot", "queer", "homo" - no one used them. "Homosexual" was still used, obviously, as was the word "gay". But the rest was completely unheard of. Now on the opposite side, "heterosexual" was used, obviously, but the word "straight" was also used, as was the word "hetero". But "hetero" (like the word "homo" in Jon's own reality) was a derogatory term, as was the word "breeder" (which was this world's equivalent to "faggot").
As far as families went, traditionally, women raised children. Men didn't. Fathers weren't allowed to be part of the family that their children were a part of. That explained why Jon's own dad wasn't in any of the family portraits. Yes, he was Jon's father, but he wasn't part of his family. Up until the last few decades, women had to take part in the distasteful, but necessary, act of having sex with a man to have a baby (but only after the woman got married, to another woman, of course). But over the last few decades more and more women have opted to go to fertility clinics instead and be artificially inseminated. A lot of women now (including his own mothers, Jon figured) have never had sex with a man. Traditionally, one woman stayed home with the children while her wife went out and worked. Married men, on the other hand, both worked and neither stayed home, since (again, traditionally) they weren't allowed to raise children. Part of the married men's income was taken by the government and put into a fund that was disseminated among the married women population. A certain amount of money was given for every child that the married women had, but stopped when the number of children reached three. This would allow one of the women to stay at home with the children and still have the married couple retain a comfortable life.
But recently, things have been changing from what was considered traditional.
Men have been fighting for "parental rights", saying that they were just as qualified to raise children as women were. And in some cases, men have integrated themselves in the families that they weren't allowed to be a part of, which a lot of women viewed as deviant behavior. But more and more, society was softening to the idea. Women, on the other hand, found that they needed to work more. So now, when they could, both married women worked, to make up for the fact that the government had been "bowing" to some of the married men's demands. The government referred to it as "parental equality".
And speaking of the government bowing to demands, the "straight community" was making great strides in some states, getting the government to make "straight marriage" legal. For people like Jon's second mother, that was distasteful and shouldn't be allowed. But what could they do? The government kept saying that it was unconstitutional for heterosexuals to be banned from getting married. Every time people like Jon's second mother tried to make their point that heterosexuality was wrong and perverted, the straights accused them of being bigots.
Of course, that all seemed very familiar to Jon. It was pretty much the same thing in his own reality, only there the sexual preferences were reversed.
Jon found websites devoted to opposite-sex couples. Straight pride parades, men and women showing affection towards each other ... pretty much the same as in his own reality, except that it was for heterosexuals and not homosexuals.
The rainbow flag thing didn't exist here. Instead, it was a half light blue and half pink flag, just like that bumper sticker his second mother was talking about at dinner. Whenever people saw it, they knew that it meant "straight pride".
And the term LGBT was replaced in this reality by the term SBT (straight, bisexual, and transgender). Bisexuals and transgenders were viewed about the same as they were in Jon's own reality. Only now it was the homosexuals who viewed them in a distasteful light.
Jon turned and looked at the clock - 9:30 PM. Whoa, was it that time already? He hadn't even done his homework yet. He hoped it was just math and science, because he wasn't sure he'd be able to do history and literature, given that he only now had a basic sense of what this world was like. (You can only absorb so much information in a couple of hours.)
Turning away from his desk, he remembered another thing he neglected to do - look for the stone. He assumed that he didn't have it in this world, especially now that he knew more about how society was. In his reality, his grandfather gave him the stone, but if fathers weren't traditionally part of their offspring's family, then he probably would never have met him. So if his grandfather did have the stone in this reality, he certainly wouldn't give it to Jon as an inheritance. That made sense, right?
But regardless, Jon decided to look for it anyway.
