Writer of “Going Medieval” turns her attention to period’s attitudes on sex

New book details how some attitudes changed less than their justifications.

See full article...

 

[VelvetGlove]

And spinners. Even in a poor farming household, the women doing the spinning did probably significantly contributed to the household economy, especially as the technology improved with the move from spindle and distaff to spinning wheels and better looms. One estimate has it took over 7 hrs of spinning 24/365 for one spinner to provide basic clothing to a household of six. But add a surplus worker (e.g. a small girl, and there was always a surplus of workers in poor agri households, not having enough land to work, hence the big landowners using them as serfs), a spindle and a loom, and the women could have produced enough cloth to possibly contribute to the household even more than the men, financially (selling any surplus). All the while still doing other chores, especially during the harvest or seeding seasons when every hand was needed.

And with household cloth production being the vast majority of all the commercial cloth produced, at least until the industrial revolution, even these women "at home" would have contributed a lot to a small household's finances. Which kinda showcases how both the modern cultural notion of "always at home, never bringing any money" and the pre‑modern one of "always belonging below the man, even if possibly bringing more money" are culturally biased and wrong.

As always, a nice and very deep dive on the subject of pre‑modern cloth production on the Acoup blog.

Yes, it brings up the typical type of incorrect circular argument used to support the status quo:
I. Women's labor should not be paid, because women are an inferior class of being.
II. Women are an inferior class of being since they don't contribute to the economy.

A similar circular argument is used to justify tyranny:
I. I'm the ruler because I'm intrinsically superior, therefore I deserve tribute from everyone else.
II. The proof that I'm intrinsically superior? It's that I'm ruling.

These arguments both depend on an unspoken axiom: given two categories A and B, assume A is intrinsically superior to B. Keeping this part unspoken makes harder to poke apart the argument.

 

[Varste]

As enlightening as it is frustrating. As noted, yes we have made significant progress since those times but the undercurrents are ever-present, and it's actually anger inducing to see recent progress coming undone at the hand of religious zealots (abortions being the current "battleground" it seems). Childrearing and housekeeping are still too commonly seen as gendered work, yet somehow not worth pay? I don't know how much of this is mostly older generations still being in charge but at least in my millenial age group I rarely see it as much. I'm a mechanical engineer and we have a good mix gender-wise in our team, all young, and I don't witness sexism from them. But I do still hear stories from my female coworkers about it from those outside our group, and yep they're usually Gen X/boomers that perpetuate it.
And with many prominent right-wing/aLpHa MaLe influencers spouting absolute dogshit to millions of impressionable youngsters, I start to worry the next generations could slip back as well. Hell you have grifters like Candice Owen going on about how women in the workplace is a mistake! Nothing validates a bigot's view like hearing their target of derision agree that they are inferior.

 

[DovePig]

I suspect a more universal element of beauty has much more to do with the subconscious perception of a woman's fertility and health, hence why most men prefer women who are "curvy" but not obese.

I suspect this unfortunate subject of "men‑perceived beauty" to be much more cultural. Contrast Palaeolithic Venus figurines (wide exaggerated hips and breasts, emphasising fertility – even though that interpretation might be just a modern stereotype in itself!) with the Greek one as described, or the later Ottoman ideal of "Circassian beauty", so much "priced" as enslaved women in the Sultan's harem (pale, auburn or blond, per some historical or slightly later descriptions, even though that might again be just an Orientalist stereotype in itself!).

Or In a society that prices women more as property, a pale, blonde, milk‑white skinned one in their house or harem could be also an ostentatious expression of wealth, especially around the sun‑drenched Mediterranean. It could still be expressing "I am that wealthy that I can afford 'my' women to never have to work out in the sun, as I have so many slaves for that!". Or just a similar Orientalist attitude to the much later centuries' one, "I can afford the exotic!".

Beauty norms can be as much cultural as biology or physique based, especially in a mainly patriarchal society with a big divide between the have and have‑nots.

Especially if the only literary sources we have are inevitably written by the rich landowners, i.e. the ruling class (even most Greek & Roman historical sources are much focused on the affluent and the politically important, overlooking anybody else), who always wanted to be seen as separate‑from and above the serfs and have‑nots in any and all ways possible (see sumptuary laws and severe penalties for wearing clothing above one's station).

A "rare" pale trophy wife from afar, even visually different from most of the "darker" commoners, could well be seen by the ruling class as the epitome of beauty for all the above reasons, then reinforced through survivorship bias through the centuries.

 

[llanitedave]

I am amazed that women in this country will put up with continued domination and oppression by us males- even going to the extent to ensure this oppression gets worse by backing the extreme fringes during any public election. It’s almost as if it is medieval times and there is no ability to organize, woman can’t read or write, and are too busy having babies to worry about it. These are normal educated women who are constrained to believe it’s okay to be treated this way. 42% voted for trump in 2020. After Jeffry Epstein, after grab your p*ssy, and after he spent his time in office ensuring that all protections for womens rights would be dismantled for 30 plus years in the future. (Yes, I know that this was even worse for immigrants and people of color etc.). Are you sure we aren’t in the New Dark Ages? I can’t handle another Ron desantos story today. Please. No more.

Technically, this can't be a new Dark Ages, because today's dystopia is too well documented.

 

[S-T-R]

After all, Rome before them also had a bad case of Greekophilia, and whilst it had similar patriarchal social views, in that there was a shame and sin in taking a passive/receiving role in sexuality, but as a polytheistic society of more humanistic gods, a whole lot of whoring and debauching wasn't seen in quite the same negative way; you'd famously have mosiacs of orgies or the Rape of Lucretia above the family dining table, because that wasn't "ungodly" in the modern sense.

It's not just that, and TBH, the love of Greek by the likes of Marcus Aurelius has a lot less to do with the transmission of Greek ideas than the fact that fully half of the Roman Empire was nominally Greek speaking. It was a bilingual empire. And the Greek half was the part where Christianity was founded and initially expanded. The bible, and Christian liturgy was originally in Greek. Latin didn't come to the church until the late 4th century.

It was the Greek half of the empire that survived past the 5th century, the Greek half that reconquered Italy and Africa in the 6th century. It was where most of the early Christian thinkers lived. It was the Greek part that was arguably the most consolidated and even most powerful European power for most of the middle ages up through the crusader era in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Throughout this period, the Greeks themselves actually rejected the "Hellenic" label entirely in favor of a Roman (which also meant Christian) label. So while Greek ideas suffused Christianity, Christianity almost entirely subsumed Greek and Roman identity. So while western writers often derided the Byzantine Romans as an nation of and for Greeks, the citizens of the empire viewed their own state as a universalist Christian empire and themselves as God's chosen people.

 

[llanitedave]

To be clear the treatment of women to date across the planet varies but it is not (generously) close to equitable.

That being said, I think the viewpoint presented is shockingly narrow and I take some umbrage to it. Essentially, what I read states: our species’ definition of beauty came from Ancient Greece and Christianity? I feel the entire rest of the planet may have something to say about that. Both historically and contemporaneously.

I must say, there are some strikingly beautiful African, Asian, Hispanic, and other women I've been huge admirers of, who's cheeks could in no way be called "rosy."

 

[llanitedave]

...thus illustrating the adage, 'If it's not Baroque, don't fix it.'

Excuse me, but I invented that quip years ago!

(And I thought I'd kept it to myself.)

 

[DovePig]

Yes, it brings up the typical type of incorrect circular argument used to support the status quo:
I. Women's labor should not be paid, because women are an inferior class of being.
II. Women are an inferior class of being since they don't contribute to the economy.

A similar circular argument is used to justify tyranny:
I. I'm the ruler because I'm intrinsically superior, therefore I deserve tribute from everyone else.
II. The proof that I'm intrinsically superior? It's that I'm ruling.

These arguments both depend on an unspoken axiom: given two categories A and B, assume A is intrinsically superior to B. Keeping this part unspoken makes harder to poke apart the argument.

As again, the acoup.blog had some nice (if longwinded!) posts on that, IIRC (if only I could find the exact post in all their walls of text, lol).

More about land ownership and how having more land means you can afford better means of production and scale up, especially in a pre‑industrial agrarian society (human and animal shit for fertiliser, spare un‑farmed land for grazing of any ploughing animals you can then lend to the serfs in exchange for labour, spare shit for fertiliser to sell to the serfs in exchange for labour, being able to feed and afford slaves for their labour, etc...).

Like today, it's a self‑perpetuating circle – maybe even much more so back then, when the "means of production" (small sorry for the Marxist term, but I find it entirely correct here!) had been entirely physical and totally depended and scaled up nonlinearly with the amount of land owned. Just like all of today's Musks had a much better starting position.

 

[Albino_Boo]

I suspect this unfortunate subject of "men‑perceived beauty" to be much more cultural. Contrast Palaeolithic Venus figurines (wide exaggerated hips and breasts, emphasising fertility – even though that interpretation might be just a modern stereotype in itself!) with the Greek one as described, or the later Ottoman ideal of "Circassian beauty", so much "priced" as enslaved women in the Sultan's harem (pale, auburn or blond, per some historical or slightly later descriptions, even though that might again be just an Orientalist stereotype in itself!).

Or In a society that prices women more as property, a pale, blonde, milk‑white skinned one in their house or harem could be also an ostentatious expression of wealth, especially around the sun‑drenched Mediterranean. It could still be expressing "I am that wealthy that I can afford 'my' women to never have to work out in the sun, as I have so many slaves for that!". Or just a similar Orientalist attitude to the much later centuries' one, "I can afford the exotic!".

Beauty norms can be as much cultural as biology or physique based, especially in a mainly patriarchal society with a big divide between the have and have‑nots.

Especially if the only literary sources we have are inevitably written by the rich landowners, i.e. the ruling class (even most Greek & Roman historical sources are much focused on the affluent and the politically important, overlooking anybody else), who always wanted to be seen as separate‑from and above the serfs and have‑nots in any and all ways possible (see sumptuary laws and severe penalties for wearing clothing above one's station).

A "rare" pale trophy wife from afar, even visually different from most of the "darker" commoners, could well be seen by the ruling class as the epitome of beauty for all the above reasons, then reinforced through survivorship bias through the centuries.

It's based on the cold hard fact of the sales records of slaves. Women from Europe and the Caucasus had the highest price, boys from Europe and the Caucasus next highest, all other women, all other boys and the least valued was adult males. As European power grew and Ottoman power waned the supply dropped to Circassian women. The former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is the decadent of a mid 19th Century Circassian slave girl.

 

[Zukunftsweber]

Maintaining that things were horrible then deludes us into thinking that they must be at their pinnacle now

I'm unconvinced by the argument that "worse in past, better now" leads one to think "now is best." To me, a natural conclusion given the state of the world would be that "the best is yet to come." IMHO, the particularly damaging assumption would be that it's inevitable, and soon, and that no effort is required to make it happen.

That said, I am skeptical that anyone paying attention to current events thinks tomorrow will definitely be better than today, or without effort.

 

[The Lurker Beneath]

It’s worth thinking about how they’re not the same. The flip from women to men being described as uncontrollable horndogs has implications for harassment and assault (consider how frequently that line of reasoning is used to defend a creep), and it’s especially important to remember any time you have some religious or evo-psych guy making arguments that the status quo is how it’s naturally supposed to be. A complete flip over such a short period of time shows that this is a social construct, since there’s no way biology is changing on that timescale.

Believing in such a complete flip over such a short period of time should make you realise that most of what you read on the internet is secondary, tertiary or worse, filtered through a maze of cherry-picking, Chinese whispers, and echo chambers where nuance and ultimately sanity go to die.

Going Medieval is an interesting albeit opinionated blog, and I will certainly read more of it. But in my short perusal (in a section called 'these hoes ain't loyal') I found:

"[]... that the Church on the whole says that sex is quite naughty and should only be done by the marrieds, it would be easy to assume that any sex for funsies was off limits.

This is only half true, however, because the Church whilst announcing that sex is Well Bad, and Definitely Not Holy, also acknowledged that it’s probably sorta kinda necessary. Not for women of course – don’t go crazy! – but for men.

In fact, it was the Church’s position that men need sex so badly that if they don’t have access to it, they might just burn the goddamn city down. Any city. Cuz boys will be boys."

Just how fast are those flips coming?

 

[llanitedave]

It's based on the cold hard fact of the sales records of slaves. Women from Europe and the Caucasus had the highest price, boys from Europe and the Caucasus next highest, all other women, all other boys and the least valued was adult males. As European power grew and Ottoman power waned the supply dropped to Circassian women. The former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is the decadent of a mid 19th Century Circassian slave girl.

Well, I knew Johnson was decadent, but thanks for explaining why!

 

[James Brooks]

Technically, this can't be a new Dark Ages, because today's dystopia is too well documented.

New Excellently Documented but not Great Ages?

 

[DovePig]

It's based on the cold hard fact of the sales records of slaves. Women from Europe and the Caucasus had the highest price, boys from Europe and the Caucasus next highest, all other women, all other boys and the least valued was adult males. As European power grew and Ottoman power waned the supply dropped to Circassian women. The former British Prime Minister Boris Johnson is the decadent of a mid 19th Century Circassian slave girl.

Isn't that basically saying the same thing? That the perceived value of an enslaved human being followed their rarity, hence a higher price for certain locally more exotic phenotypes, hence their higher flaunt social value as a trophy wife or concubine, hence a bigger written record of that being perceived as "beauty", as written by those who had all the wealth to afford them and who left the only written records?

And ouch, just typing the above sentence out so dispassionately felt so fundamentally fucking wrong!!! Fuck all the slavers and patriarchy with a nice thick spiny cactus...

 

[Albino_Boo]

Isn't that basically saying the same thing? That the perceived value of an enslaved human being followed their rarity, hence a higher price for certain locally more exotic phenotypes, hence their higher flaunt social value as a trophy wife or concubine, hence a bigger written record of that being perceived as "beauty", as written by those who had all the wealth to afford them and who left the only written records?

And ouch, just typing the above sentence out so dispassionately felt so fundamentally fucking wrong!!! Fuck all the slavers and patriarchy with a nice thick spiny cactus...

Being angry doesn't change objective reality. It's not based on rarity because European and Caucasian women were more common and closer to the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman vassal states launched raids slave raids on the European coast of the Mediterranean and occasionally even far as the South Coast of England. Circassian slave girls in the 19t century was practically the only women for sale because of the Royal Navy's anti slavery patrols cut off the sea routes from Africa. The purpose of history is explain what happened, when it happened and to try and offer explanations of why it happened. Its not history to be anrgy and impose your own politics on the past.

 

[dikbozo]

I'm not sure what I'm reading here. Is this a review of the Blog, the book, "One and Future Sex", or Diana Gitig's take on it all or all of the above. Here's Cory Doctorow's take, provided for additional context: pluralistic-dot-net/2023/01/17/ren-faire/
Enjoy!

The 'live fish' revelation is certainly one I had never run across before and hope to never need to refer to for the rest of my life. YEESH.

 

[HobbitsHaveThePower]

It's not just that, and TBH, the love of Greek by the likes of Marcus Aurelius has a lot less to do with the transmission of Greek ideas than the fact that fully half of the Roman Empire was nominally Greek speaking. It was a bilingual empire. And the Greek half was the part where Christianity was founded and initially expanded. The bible, and Christian liturgy was originally in Greek. Latin didn't come to the church until the late 4th century.

It was the Greek half of the empire that survived past the 5th century, the Greek half that reconquered Italy and Africa in the 6th century. It was where most of the early Christian thinkers lived. It was the Greek part that was arguably the most consolidated and even most powerful European power for most of the middle ages up through the crusader era in the 11th and 12th centuries.

Throughout this period, the Greeks themselves actually rejected the "Hellenic" label entirely in favor of a Roman (which also meant Christian) label. So while Greek ideas suffused Christianity, Christianity almost entirely subsumed Greek and Roman identity. So while western writers often derided the Byzantine Romans as an nation of and for Greeks, the citizens of the empire viewed their own state as a universalist Christian empire and themselves as God's chosen people.

True factually, but you're making the same category error as Christian theology deliberately does; The Romano-Greek of immediately Post-Alexander isn't the same as the deliberate urban Hellenisation of later Roman Emperors hundreds of years later, and isn't the same as the rejection of Hellenic labels as you put it... but everyone likes to think they can trace their lineage back thousands of years and claim to be the true heirs of the past. And incidentally, the Russian Orthodox church derides both halves of the Roman Empire that you speak about; Moscow is in fact the Third Rome. The real one, of course.

It's one of those historical debates that we can only ever make educated guesses about, but it's an interesting question as to whether Christianity would have taken off as a European-wide religion if it didn't have that appeal to a shared Greek and Roman identity; just as we can't know for certain, but can make educated guesses that the abandonment of strict Judaic law opened it up for spreading amongst the gentiles... as Extra History amusing put it, you can pursuade men to become a martyr more easily than you can get them to convert when you say "and we're totally going to chop a bit of your dick off when you do". Without that compromise, and countless other factors, that faith may never have won over the Greek speaking people at all, and thus later subsumed the Greek and Roman identities.

And we can see parallels today with the British Empire; people around the world speak English because of the past reach of the said Empire, even though today most of the influence comes from one half of the Empire that split off and became independent 250 odd years ago. America is the British Byzantine, in a way. But where ever you find the reach of the English language, you'll find people who trace their beliefs, even personal origins, to a largely mythicised past of the British Isles specifically. They're pagan Druids taking descriptions of beliefs written by Julius Caesar who was monsterising them to titilate the folks back in Rome, they're proud American Scots wearing tartan that didn't exist at the time and worshipping a movie by an Australian who hates the fictional English, they're Indian democrats treasuring the Magna Carta which was a document legalizing the Feudal Lord's right to brutalising the Serfs and Villeins...

But the historical facts are not what matters; the appeal is that imagined link from X, to Y, all the way back to some conceptualised Z. My point is that Z for later Christian theology was that it was tying itself to the Roman Greekophilia, in general, to claim historical legitimacy, but cherry picking which Greeks it wanted to claim. Because there really isn't one dominant Roman culture, perhaps outside of the Imperial Cult; There were radically different Greek traditions; there wasn't even one particular Christian theology in the early days.. but by the time the Church got to The Council of Nicea et all, they were crystallizing around a particular interpretation, and it really wanted the one that claimed the Roman Empire as a bastion of puritanical authoritarianism...

... and anything that showed the ancient world was rather more kinky than that got locked in Secret Museums, if it was lucky.

They might not have done it to their believers, but they totally were going to knock the dicks off any pagan statues they found. And can you really claim to be following the Greek traditions when you're denying the awesome sexy power of civilised small dicks? Gotta have those wee willy winkles on display...

Aristotle could be warped into seeming like he said "No, that's not what they're for", and that's why that particular philosophy was chosen. But the puritanism came first, not the Greek philosophy.

 

[dikbozo]

Technically, this can't be a new Dark Ages, because today's dystopia is too well documented.

as in buried. The adage about 'burying in bullshit'. TMI as in the mass of information that is dumped daily into the world. Dark BC these towers of crap will literally bury us all in BS.
Too well documented? Only over documented. And its overwhelming mass of of accompanying lies, deceptions, mis and dis information and a volume of data that beggars comprehension. Yup, a verbal and written avalanche that buries all before it. The scholars of the future will have quite the time sifting through the current era's detritus. New Dark Ages? Most likely.

 

[Disordered]

I haven't read the book of course, but my understanding of history is that it was very narrower, specific set of Greek thoughts, chosen because those particular philosophies agreed with the emerging Christian view of the world.

After all, Rome before them also had a bad case of Greekophilia, and whilst it had similar patriarchal social views, in that there was a shame and sin in taking a passive/receiving role in sexuality, but as a polytheistic society of more humanistic gods, a whole lot of whoring and debauching wasn't seen in quite the same negative way; you'd famously have mosiacs of orgies or the Rape of Lucretia above the family dining table, because that wasn't "ungodly" in the modern sense.

However, the article mentions Plato's view of what the nature of women supposedly was, but interestingly, Christian philosophy outright rejected Plato on one particular claim, in favour of Aristotle. And that comes down to the debate of "The Theory Of Forms".

Very very simplistically, it's a debate about what something "Is". Plato believed that there were abstractable ideals, that you could identify something by how closely it matched to that ideal... So a table with 3 legs is still a table in form, "something that supports objects placed upon it for their further use", just not as good a "Table" as one with 4 legs. But you can use other things as a table, a pile of books say, because it also has "tableosity."

Aristotle however believed that what something was, was defined by design; a pile of books is not, and never can be a table, not in any true sense, because it's main purpose is to transmit the written word. It's a much more absolutist position; objects may have abstract secondary uses, but the primary purpose is what it is.

Why am I detailing this? Well, the early Christian philosophers saw these debates, and decided Aristotle had to be right; because if something has a design, a purpose, that must mean there's a designer with purpose. This is something which is absolutely not settled or universal a belief in Greco-Roman thought, but to early Christians cherry picking to prove the validity of their certainty, they leapt upon Aristotle.

So yes, sexual organs can be used for pleasure. But that's not their primary purpose. What they do that other organs can't, is that they make babies. And God designed those parts. Therefore the purpose of Gods design must be for making babies. There is no "sexuality", only sex for reproduction; To do otherwise is to go against God's will for what he wants you to do with them. Hence the Catholic stance on contraceptives and abortion...

It should go without saying that this isn't a view that the Spartan Greeks would have agreed with; their ideal was warrior men in a homosexual relationship. And babies are only of use because some of them can grow up to be warrior men. But as an absolutist position, Aristotle did accord with the Apostle Paul's apparent sexual puritanism, and as everyone still admired Greek philosophy in general, co-opting one such philosopher (but not Plato on this) was a matching of thought that had a lot of social evangelical power; even the "enlightened Greco-Romans" can see the logic in Paul's teachings, eh? Maybe it's not so new after all?

A logic that absolutely falls apart in the modern age of science and understanding that gender itself isn't an absolute but rather a spectrum... And to make a rather contrived joke I just thought of, makes Plato one of the earliest SJWs; but more of a Socratic Justice Warrior, eh philosophy fans? No? I'll see myself out.

Hobbit, I always enjoy your in-depth posts. Thanks!

 

[DovePig]

Thanks! New blog to read and book to order!

Dr. Eleanor Janega's blog is indeed pretty great! I was aware of their youtube videos, but I much prefer written word. And their writing is fucking hilarious, in a good way!

The ability to go off on an interesting and historically accurate "medieval facts" tangent even after reading some alt‑right patriarchal BS, smashing said BS in the process with a scathing smirk, all the while being pretty funny in the process is quite rare.

I'll give you these medieval sex gems, since the article's and book's theme is all about sex (and patriarchy):

https://going-medieval.com/2021/09/03/on-semen-retention/
https://going-medieval.com/2020/07/30/on-sex-with-demons/
https://going-medieval.com/2022/03/24/on-women-pleasure-and-semen/
Another great history blog to follow and book to buy, quite indeed!

 

[Disordered]

Probably (maybe even a chatelaine). Most people don't know that "pockets" were something you wore in addition to your clothes, not built into them.

The shifting and even opposed reasons used by society to keep women "in their place" over the centuries is really telling. What's most important is the result; the justification can be discarded or even rotated 180 degrees, as long as the function remains the same. Women subordinate to men in society and the home.
What I found interesting is the ping-pong of attitudes about women's sexuality. According to this review of medieval attitudes, women were sex fiends. Yet by the 19th century, women were seen as virtually sexless (and sexual desire was seen as a disease to be treated). Somewhere along the line, religious views of women and sex went in opposite directions. I wonder if it has anything to do with literal Puritanical beliefs that became en vogue in the late 17th and 18th centuries.

But those "beliefs" never died, in some quarters, and are regaining popularity. Quite useful, those "beliefs".

 

[catty66]

Agreed with poster #2, wonderful review, dynamite! No complaints.
But I think most women will just shrug. Old news to them.

 

[Wheels Of Confusion]

But those "beliefs" never died, in some quarters, and are regaining popularity. Quite useful, those "beliefs".

Sexual shame is a perennial method of exhorting control.

 

[la_xirsoi]

So yes, sexual organs can be used for pleasure. But that's not their primary purpose. What they do that other organs can't, is that they make babies. And God designed those parts. Therefore the purpose of Gods design must be for making babies. There is no "sexuality", only sex for reproduction; To do otherwise is to go against God's will for what he wants you to do with them. Hence the Catholic stance on contraceptives and abortion...

A huge part of that stance is actually from a different (but still Neoplatonic) influence. Catholic doctrine heavily emphasizes rising above our base, physical, desires. Contraceptives remove the consequences of giving into sexual desire, and thus encourage it. Their anti-abortion stance is almost entirely based on the Jeremiah 1:5 “Before I formed you in the womb I knew you, before you were born I set you apart; I appointed you as a prophet to the nations.”

Unfortunately, Biblical scholars take the bizarre position that the first half of the first sentence refers to all humans, but the second half is specifically to Jeremiah. Makes no fucking sense, but the mental gymnastics some will go to in order to justify what they want from a respected source is nothing if not impressive.

 

[pphahnl]

Thank you for this article! Added 'Going Medieval' to my RSS-Feed at once.

 

[Disordered]

Isn't that basically saying the same thing? That the perceived value of an enslaved human being followed their rarity, hence a higher price for certain locally more exotic phenotypes, hence their higher flaunt social value as a trophy wife or concubine, hence a bigger written record of that being perceived as "beauty", as written by those who had all the wealth to afford them and who left the only written records?

And ouch, just typing the above sentence out so dispassionately felt so fundamentally fucking wrong!!! Fuck all the slavers and patriarchy with a nice thick spiny cactus...

I don't go to news outlets much these days, I'm sufficiently depressed already. But I did come upon this -

https://www.theguardian.com/world/2...wners-family-apologise-reparations-trevelyans

Interesting that this is strictly a "grass-roots" thing.

 

[Shavano]

With today's technology, this applies to child birth too.

I would say it has always applied to childbirth.

 

[DovePig]

Being angry doesn't change objective reality. It's not based on rarity because European and Caucasian women were more common and closer to the Ottoman Empire. Ottoman vassal states launched raids slave raids on the European coast of the Mediterranean and occasionally even far as the South Coast of England. Circassian slave girls in the 19t century was practically the only women for sale because of the Royal Navy's anti slavery patrols cut off the sea routes from Africa. The purpose of history is explain what happened, when it happened and to try and offer explanations of why it happened. Its not history to be anrgy and impose your own politics on the past.

1. I feel angry because I find it hard to discuss such issues dispassionately, even if I did exactly that before. I am no historian, but even the historians specialising in the much later, modern history that I know (like "my" former parner) were pretty passionate about the fate of the small players. Especially since lots of modern historiography has moved over to oral history or "small history", however you call it (and sorry, my terms my be wrong here in English nomenclature). That doesn't preclude talking about some possible "mechanics" dispassionately, but if you do abhor the practice of slavery or similar (like anybody!), it still simply instills feelings of anger. That feeling of anger doesn't go against explaining of what and why something happened, either.

2. Again, I am no historian. I posited that some of the old "standards" of beauty that survived in the inherently survivorship‑biased classical texts and later accounts might be due to either kind of Orientalist attitude back then ("rarer" slaves are "better") and/or wealth flaunting in a very hierarchical and stratified society (One who can afford "rarer", "exotic" or "paler" slaves or wives, compared to the local population phenotype, means that they are affluent, since they can also afford to keep them out of field work and out of the sun). That could be totally wrong, of course, but it made a modicum of sense to me, considering a strongly patriarchal society that's also highly hierarchical. But since the pre‑antiquity and the rise of bigger landowners (Roman empire

3. Circassians (or better called Adyghe people, as by their language) in the 19th century were already without a homeland, after the Russian empire's brutal genocide and expulsion of them a century or so prior. As far as I can tell, the notion of "exotic" wives from the Adyghe among the Ottoman Sultans goes quite well before that.

But I don't really want to dwell just on that one ethnicity, it was just an example how a patriarchal and strongly hierarchical society might make up some physical beauty standards that would be purely cultural, based on the individual wealth of the men. Having a pale wife that obviously doesn't have to work in the scorching Mediterranean sun, since you are wealthy enough to get a lot of slaves to do all the work instead might have been appreciated even by the classical Greek and Roman big landowners, who – once again, the survivorship bias – were the only ones who left us most of the written records, including the ones of "classical beauty".

TL;DR: The whole premise of the "classical beauty" as mentioned in "milk‑skinned, pale, rose‑cheeked, and possibly blond" Phrygius quote would have been from men flaunting their wealth and having enough slaves on their huge estate that their trophy wives would not have to work outside at all, unlike everybody else. Basically the women as an equivalent to the Simpson's Canyonero...

Edited to add: obviously it's just a posit and modern day interpretation from a non‑historian (me). Might be totally off, for all I know...

 

[Robin-3]

Liberals. Not leftists or progressives; liberals believe this. This is word-for-word what passes for "mainstream liberal" ideology.

This is why a bunch of liberals woke the fuck up when SCOTUS overturned Roe. They thought that things could only get better for women, that the only struggle was for improvement, not to prevent a fall.

I think you're mistaking "will" for "should."

That is, I see as one of the central aspects of general liberalism the idea that we should work to improve conditions, to treat people more equitably (not the same as equally), to make the world a better place in general, etc. But that's very different from thinking we are progressing inevitably into a golden age.

Roe v. Wade being overturned is awful because it's an obvious, direct hit on individual liberty and it is further proof of the radical direction modern (American) conservatism is taking. The fact that conservatives were both willing and able to take that step says a lot about their priorities and approach to governing. I think a lot of people (of all political affiliations) were too idealistic to believe it would be overturned, so that was a wake-up call. And for anyone who believes we should work to improve society (including women's rights, privacy, and reproductive & healthcare rights) it's a heck of a smack in the face.

I don't think it's accurate to extrapolate from that to a generalized belief that "things could only get better for women," though.

 

[Cax]

*: What nonsense. Everyone knows they were called the dark ages because there were so many knights.

 

[Oldmanalex]

I must say, there are some strikingly beautiful African, Asian, Hispanic, and other women I've been huge admirers of, who's cheeks could in no way be called "rosy."

Youth, symmetry and lack of blemish or unusual features seem to be the main hallmarks for beauty in both sexes. About 10 years ago a paper published in Nature constructed faces by digitally averaging photographs of young men or young women. The composite faces were judged more attractive by all audiences than the individual photographs from which they were derived, and the more photographs averaged into a composite, the more attractive it was deemed. Thus for faces at least the most attractive are the flawlessly average, while still relatively young.

 

[Albino_Boo]

1. I feel angry because I find it hard to discuss such issues dispassionately, even if I did exactly that before. I am no historian, but even the historians specialising in the much later, modern history that I know (like "my" former parner) were pretty passionate about the fate of the small players. Especially since lots of modern historiography has moved over to oral history or "small history", however you call it (and sorry, my terms my be wrong here in English nomenclature). That doesn't preclude talking about some possible "mechanics" dispassionately, but if you do abhor the practice of slavery or similar (like anybody!), it still simply instills feelings of anger. That feeling of anger doesn't go against explaining of what and why something happened, either.

2. Again, I am no historian. I posited that some of the old "standards" of beauty that survived in the inherently survivorship‑biased classical texts and later accounts might be due to either kind of Orientalist attitude back then ("rarer" slaves are "better") and/or wealth flaunting in a very hierarchical and stratified society (One who can afford "rarer", "exotic" or "paler" slaves or wives, compared to the local population phenotype, means that they are affluent, since they can also afford to keep them out of field work and out of the sun). That could be totally wrong, of course, but it made a modicum of sense to me, considering a strongly patriarchal society that's also highly hierarchical. But since the pre‑antiquity and the rise of bigger landowners (Roman empire

3. Circassians (or better called Adyghe people, as by their language) in the 19th century were already without a homeland, after the Russian empire's brutal genocide and expulsion of them a century or so prior. As far as I can tell, the notion of "exotic" wives from the Adyghe among the Ottoman Sultans goes quite well before that.

But I don't really want to dwell just on that one ethnicity, it was just an example how a patriarchal and strongly hierarchical society might make up some physical beauty standards that would be purely cultural, based on the individual wealth of the men. Having a pale wife that obviously doesn't have to work in the scorching Mediterranean sun, since you are wealthy enough to get a lot of slaves to do all the work instead might have been appreciated even by the classical Greek and Roman big landowners, who – once again, the survivorship bias – were the only ones who left us most of the written records, including the ones of "classical beauty".

TL;DR: The whole premise of the "classical beauty" as mentioned in "milk‑skinned, pale, rose‑cheeked, and possibly blond" Phrygius quote would have been from men flaunting their wealth and having enough slaves on their huge estate that their trophy wives would not have to work outside at all, unlike everybody else. Basically the women as an equivalent to the Simpson's Canyonero...

Edited to add: obviously it's just a posit and modern day interpretation from a non‑historian (me). Might be totally off, for all I know...

If you insist on seeing the past through a narrow lens of your politics you will never understand the past. Your definitions of Orientalist doesn't change the sales ledgers. In addition the Ottoman Sultan's claimed legitimacy by virtue of being the descendants of Byzantine Emperors and thus the rulers of the Roman Empire. You are imposing your definitions on the past not the ones held by people at the time. I'm not going to play the name game because its a waste of time, the Germans use the German name for the French and English not the French and English names. It's clearly understood by everyone who speaks German what the name refers to. Empty gestures over names doesn't change the fact the Circassians have been called Circassians for centuries. You can either play politics or you can actually study history. Your views won't change the past, it's happened. There are no goodies and badies, you going on about patriarchy won't change the past.

 

[Redsnertz]

I don't recall where I read it (perhaps William Gibson's Blu Ant trilogy?) but I recall a discussion of the Minoan (honoring women) and Mycenean (not so much) civilizations and how badly the world was warped by the Minoans being wiped out by a natural disaster.

We've taken so much from the Greeks, and the Greeks don't want no freaks.

Hmm, and apparently there's conjecture that the Minoans fell to a Men's Revolt, not a natural disaster. What a surprise.

 

[MrWalrus]

Who exactly thinks that we are monotonically progressing into a golden age? To reactionary conservatives things are going to the dogs, and have been for at least the 4000 years that we know of due to the invention of writing systems. To rational people some things improve sometimes, but we are far from any Platonic ideal world, (or even the Roman world of Galen).

Centrists. The lionization of present-day society is the primary dogma of the 'better things aren't possible' crowd, and is almost always accompanied by a belief in slow, steady progress that brought us this ideal state, and that any change from where we are now is necessarily negative.

 

[MrWalrus]

New Excellently Documented but not Great Ages?

I propose The Stark Ages. Harshly illuminated harms all over the place.

 

[DovePig]

If you insist on seeing the past through a narrow lens of your politics you will never understand the past. Your definitions of Orientalist doesn't change the sales ledgers. In addition the Ottoman Sultan's claimed legitimacy by virtue of being the descendants of Byzantine Emperors and thus the rulers of the Roman Empire. You are imposing your definitions on the past not the ones held by people at the time. I'm not going to play the name game because its a waste of time, the Germans use the German name for the French and English not the French and English names. It's clearly understood by everyone who speaks German what the name refers to. Empty gestures over names doesn't change the fact the Circassians have been called Circassians for centuries. You can either play politics or you can actually study history. Your views won't change the past, it's happened. There are no goodies and badies, you going on about patriarchy won't change the past.

Maybe you need to calm down a bit? I rather like your posts usually, but why that rant now, especially about "politics", "name games", "waste of time" and such? I don't see I went into any of that, really? Is that some local political problem you got or what?!? Because if you just escalate it like that, nobody is gonna learn anything, and everybody will think you a fool. Please explain yourself, that really helps. If any of your concerns make real sense, I'd be more than happy to change my ways!

And if I ever did "see it through a narrow lens of my politics", it might be a better idea to just point out which way that imaginary lens was pointed, according to you, because I just don't see it...

Oh, I am acquainted with some Circassian, or Adyghe, exiles. Some of them did actually appreciate being called Adyghe, as far as I could tell, hence my use of it. Is that wrong? I don't know – all I know is the ones I knew seemed to prefer it and it's the more accepted academic name. Was I wrong? Just like I may perfectly finely use terms like Deutsche, Türkiye, or any other domestic terms. Got a problem with that? Is that wrong? Please elaborate, as if it is, I'll be more than willing to change.

Frankly, your last post mostly feels like an angry rant here – and while that attitude I might even quite understand, given all the historical inaccuracies from the West around the whole of Caucasus, but if you really want to be heard, please try to explain yourself without all that anger again. I know, it can be hard, but currently you are just not understood at all.

 

[vonduck]

greeks, catholics, homosexuality.
that didn't quite work out, aside from the priests doing the buggery and telling everyone else not to.

 

[Oldmanalex]

Centrists. The lionization of present-day society is the primary dogma of the 'better things aren't possible' crowd, and is almost always accompanied by a belief in slow, steady progress that brought us this ideal state, and that any change from where we are now is necessarily negative.

Better things are not possible is not the same as if this goes south, we will be a lot worse off. So, before one moves to improve things, it is probably a good idea to think through as many of the possible ramifications as one can, and then assign probabilities, and game out possible Plan Bs. Of course those working with historic inevitability never have to worry that things may not turn out exactly as foreseen. But then, I will admit that when Spillary was shanked so that a whiff of Trumputini would inevitably lead to the workers uprising and a socialist paradise, I was a doubting Thomas. And I am not sure where these Panglossians you excoriate exist outside your own mind.