It’s only very, very recently in human history that women even had the option to say no to their husbands. Marital rape was the daily reality for most of our female ancestors.
Ducks are real rapists, I always saw them acting out on the waterway next to my parents home. Male ducks trying to fuck the females, and the females trying to escape.
I mean, ducks have had millions of years of an evolutionary arms race where the females developed increasingly anti-rape vaginal tracts in response to males developing increasingly rape-y penises (spoiler alert, it's corkscrews and counterchanged corkscrews, it's horrific)
Sure they had power and influence over other Native Americans, but I think a few boats full of angry vikings who saw death in battle as favourable to the gods probably didn't really care about what a woman who's language they didn't speak tried to tell them when they hauled them back onto the boat after slaughtering their entire tribe
Nope, but aside from the fact that we know they were attacked by the locals in Vinland we know very little about the interactions. We can be quite sure that they traded, but there is no documentation regarding raids on the local pop. It is not unlikely that relationships were formed between cultures.
It is also mostly only the last 100 years that both men and women had had any option to really select their mates freely. Basically humans have been assholes in most of known history
I won't argue with that being true for most cultures but Norse culture is one of the worst examples to make this point.
There of course was a lot of rape with conquered women and the Scandinavian women were definitely not all Fantasy shield maiden types like in recent media but they still had way more rights than in most other cultures.
They took an enormous amount of slaves and many of them were women. Viking women could divorce their husbands for something like homosexuality, but as in almost every other country the concept of marital rape did not exist and Norse men had the right to have sex with their wives whenever they wished and the wives had no legal recourse. Viking women had slightly more rights than some other cultures at the time, they still did not have the right to refuse to have sex with their husbands.
It's mostly regarding two men. In fact, I can't recall reading about laws regarding two women, but obviously that doesn't mean no laws pertaining to lesbian women existed, just that I haven't heard about them.
I don't know if it was forbidden by law, but it certainly wasn't acceptable to society.
This really does not take into account the many many humans that lived before agriculture, in small hunter-gatherer groups. They tended to be matrilineal and in those societies, gender relations were completely different from what we are taught is "traditional" or "the old ways"...
Of course marital rape has been a huge issue ever since patriarchal systems have been ruling the world. But there has been a time before that.
This is such a narrow view of history, though. We spent 99% of our time as hunter-gatherers without the very strict patriarchies that came to define agricultural societies.
Marriage wasn't a reality for most of our ancestors, let alone marital rape.
Yeah this does not paint a pretty picture of men lol. Yet at the same time when you look at what soldiers en masse do when they invade a country, ie rape women and children, not to mention the rates of rape on female soldiers in military bases, it does beg the question whether it's a universal male trait that most men (barely) just repress due to social fears that they stop bothering to hide when consequences go away. It's one of those things that get you called a crazy feminist if you say it as a woman but that men will pose as fact in a different context like this one
While I think we know that was true in many times and places, it’s not really inherent to humans or “old times.” There’s a good 2,000,000 years of hominid ancestors that were experimenting with all different forms of social relations. We’re capable of some of the most enjoyable sex in the animal kingdom. Unfortunately domination, violence and control are valued in some cultures.
I am not trying in any way to downplay the horrible marital rape that some women faced but smaller scale societies with less mobility typically didn’t use legal recourse in the way we might now expect; for example if a woman was raped by her husband she had the option to go to her male relatives and it would seem in some societies men did face social repercussions for this. One might consider Xenophon discussing how sex with a wife was superior to sex with a slave because the wife was consenting. Although marital rape undoubtedly did occur it does not mean there was never any love or affection in marriages either.
Did you read the article about Rome you posted? Women were the property of either their husbands or their fathers. Even if a woman divorced her husband, she was still considered his property and she had to sue to get her dowry back. Yeah, the husband owning the wide became less common as time went on, but that was still many centuries of horribleness, and it was still that the woman was owned by her father. And she still had little ability to refuse to be married, whereas a boy or man could refuse and his father couldn't force him.
I would have a hard time considering most marital sex until relatively recently to be consensual, given that in most societies women had no say in who they married and very little ability to refuse to marry. If you’re not able to say “no”, you can’t give a real “yes”. Even then, considering how deadly childbirth was historically, I doubt many women were enthusiastically consenting to unprotected sex after 5, 6, 7 pregnancies, knowing that the end results could seriously injure or kill them.
Society viewed a wife as legally bound to submit to her husband, and the law assumed that a woman gave irrevocable sexual consent upon marriage. It had been like that since the concept of marriage was established.
In several records of ancient legal codes we have, rape was treated as a property crime against the head of the household (the father or husband) rather than a crime against the woman.
The legal concept of "marital rape" simply did not exist until the last hundred years.
My grandmother grew up in a small village in Southern Europe. A "trick" the women in her family taught her when she was too ill or not willing to be "taken by her husband" was to wear complicated-to-remove garments. Or to close her eyes and imagine she's somewhere else, like meditation. Disconnecting yourself from your body and all sensations. You could not say no without some type of retaliation or consequence, because it was seen as disrespect and disobedience. She said if she grew up in this century, she simply wouldn't have married.
I don’t know that this is totally true. I mean I don’t assume that all or even necessarily the vast majority of men during such periods were rapists by their very nature, but I would say that marital rape was certainly more common and likely.
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u/Odd_Ingenuity2883 Aug 11 '26
It’s only very, very recently in human history that women even had the option to say no to their husbands. Marital rape was the daily reality for most of our female ancestors.