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Originally Posted by jammies
I'd say the outrage was more due to rape being seen as a violation of property rights, rather than selective concern for certain women. Wives and daughters belonged to a man, so other men weren't allowed to touch, but any woman who belonged only to herself was always in danger of being claimed, whether she willed it or not.
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That's simplistic, doctrinaire feminism talking. You honestly don't think men felt affection for their sisters, their daughters, and their neighbours? Women weren't simply chattel. They had rights and a role to play in every society. People loved one another, and had strong bonds with their community.
Quote:
Originally Posted by jammies
Our ancestors may not have been monsters, but they were in many ways monstrous. Wondrous, too, considering the milieu of poverty, ignorance, and death they lived in, but we should expect much more of ourselves than what would come of harking back to social structures based on a fundamental inequality of men and women.
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Of course we should expect more. The past was unjust in many ways. Everything you say about women also applied to men who had no property (which was the vast majority of them). Those higher up the ladder provided protection in exchange for their grinding toil.
But that does not mean the world from 4,000 B.C. to 1960 was one undifferentiated nightmare. Or that social structures that could be oppressive didn't also provide security, mutual obligations, and meaning to people's lives. There's a reason why there's nothing settled peoples dread so much as social breakdown. Get rid of those structures and then the wolves really are at the door.
It might boggle our mind that people who didn't believe a man could rape his spouse* would genuinely care about rape in other contexts. I have no doubt that in a century it will boggle the minds of our descendents that we get outraged over stories about mistreated pets while filling our bellies with the meat of animals that spent their entire lives in misery before being industrially slaughtered and packaged. People are complicated.
* Even that's a simplification, as in most societies a woman from a high-status family could divorce if she was mistreated. Historically, the greatest disparity in how people are treated and what rights they have aren't along gender lines, but along class and status lines.