Apologies for no upload yesterday, everything I tried make out wrong, and this one is pretty wonky too 😅

Although dwarves are a conservative people by nature (owing to their long lifespans and the tendency for their minds to harden in tandem with the solidification of their stone flesh around their malleable inner cores) the culture of top-dwelling dwarves has nonetheless absorbed many of the customs of the humans they live alongside. Some of these acquired habits are so contrary to their nature as to be considered deviant by their cavern-dwelling counterparts.

The human preoccupation with gender norms is a particular cultural import. While endlessly fascinating to humans, strict gender roles have little direct equivalence in natural dwarven society, and so were adopted wholesale. The vast majority of dwarves (with their love of drinking, fighting, and metallurgy) naturally gravitate toward a gender identity in line with stereotypical human masculinity, regardless of their interior biological sex, of which they may be entirely unaware.

This absence of “female” dwarves and the lopsided predominance of macho, lusty males has led to a thriving market in dwarven pornography, performed live on stage by traveling troupes of dwarven female- impersonators, with painters and skalds recording these acts for the mass market.

"Hard core" dwarven pornography is so named for the slow, sensual reshaping of the hard outer shell into a desirable form, with an emphasis on the erotic removal of the stone flesh, much as a human stripper might remove clothing, utilizing such “toys” as chisels and augurs. Among certain circles, these performances are considered tasteful, even artistic, though the inclusion of human actors remains somewhat taboo.

"Soft core" dwarven pornography, by comparison, is considerably more obscene, since it involves stripping away all of the defensive layers of flesh, exposing the dwarf down to their soft, supple, semi-crystalline core, which is a level of physical and emotional vulnerability that top-dwelling dwarves find profoundly unsettling.

The opposite holds true for deep-dwelling dwarves, who consider the voluntary reshaping of the body into a human ideal of feminine beauty to be degrading, while soft core acts simply represent the normal, natural method by which dwarves reproduce.