Yesterday, by accident, at night, I read about the barbaric things done to women in Israel by the Hamass terrorist attack on 10/7. I enjoin you not to follow that link, if you don’t want my nightmares last night.
And I woke up and was thinking… well, about a lot of things.
The only thing unusual about the way Hamass treated those women (and children) is that they killed most of them. Unusual, I mean from an historical perspective.
I was thinking of the rape of the Sabines, upon which the founding of Rome rested. Bunch of young braves, (given Romulus and Remus’s origin probably expelled from some community for being outlaws) claims land, then kills all men in a neighboring tribe and kidnaps every woman: crone, pregnant mother, young woman, barely pubescent child, rapes them and sometimes — sometimes — marries them. “Marries” them.
There are certain beats to this horror throughout history. And variables. Whether old women are killed is a variable. How young the age of “women” kidnapped is another. We know for a fact Plains Indians kidnapped girls as young as 6 and subjected them to the same treatment as all women. The horrific beats of this treatment included beatings, starving and serial rapes. It might or might not include the killing of the first child born. (Why? well, because it could be the woman’s murdered husband’s.) And everyone was subjected to this, from very young to very old.
The purpose, evolutionary was to break these women, to give them what was later described as Stockholm syndrome, so that they would, by the time they were given to a single man, cling to him as a protector and give him all their loyalty. So that they became willing broodmares for those who had killed their own families in front of them.
These stories are no longer told. Not the deep past ones because women have been lied to and told of some mythical past of powerful women who could have whatever men they wanted and no one was “judged.” (Oh, and there was no property, etc.) Marina Gimbutas should take a bow for her fraudulent insane theory of pre-history here. You know, the one where all the bulls heads were interpreted as uteri and she sold the story of a great, pacifist feminist religion, which somehow — inexplicably — was destroyed by the evil patriarchy, even though every one, men and women were much happier under matriarchy. (Everyone who really, really, really wants the crazy people to stop rewriting Eden and calling it science join me. We’re going to throw plastic ducks at them till they stop. This might stop us having to buy a fleet of helicopters. In minecraft.)
And even the relatively recent incidents in American history are never mentioned, because that would be raccciiiiiis. They were neither rare nor did they use to be hidden. If you check your local library you’ll probably find some in the older local history books. But they are so taboo to even be mentioned that some young twit on twittex was talking about how there was no rape in the Americas before the white men came. White men invented rape.
In a way she’s correct, but only so far as the concept of rape demands the acceptance of women as beings who can say no and have personal agency. This was utterly unknown for most people’s throughout history until the advent of Judaic-Christian morality and it was surpassingly rare until Western Civilization became a thing. And therefore there was no “rape” because you can’t rape a table or a chair, and women were perceived as things, just as those objects are things.
I’m fairly sure this is still going on in most of the world, where tribal culture prevails, but again, it would never be mentioned, because “racism.”
(And yes, as the dog returns to his vomit and the sow to her mire, someone will come to explain to me that the poorly understood and less well known culture xyz of the deepest Amazon had in fact the deepest respect for women and– Maybe. But that’s not the way to bet. In the immense variety of the human race, it’s bound to have emerged and disappeared a few times. But for any given culture until western Civ, that’s not the way to bet.)
But it actually has zero to do with race. It’s all culture. ALL culture. And it’s baseline human, before Western civilization.
Because that’s fairly recent, insofar as the history of the world goes, you probably are descended from at least 25% of such couplings, regardless of where you’re from. Given my ancestry and the wars involved, probably more.
The fact that women are weaker, men are stronger and that women are the only ones who can bear that precious commodity: the next generation, sets us up for this dynamic. To be fair to most human cultures throughout history, aka tribal cultures, men weren’t exactly non-objects either. A few of the men, the ones who managed to rise above the others might have agency and be considered human beings, but anyone who was poor, vulnerable, or just not part of the tribe, was a thing, to be disposed of or pushed around as it suited his “betters.” (Our “betters” still think this way.) And it had nothing to do with patriarchy that women rarely (though sometimes, but very rarely) made the class of deciders and pushers-around. It had to do with physical strength, in a day and age where everything from producing food to defending yourself depended on that.)
That is the state of nature — human nature — red in tooth and claw. If you were a woman you were always, your whole life, at risk of a raid, and having your entire family and community destroyed, and being subjected to a fate literally worse than death.
We’ve risen above it in pockets of time and places here and there, by effort and civilization. Western civilization.
But we’re teaching innocent children — particularly females — the opposite of that. We’re teaching them that if they help destroy the civilization that protects them and makes their lives peaceful, and allows them the dignity and choice that humans should have is the oppressor. We’re teaching them that if they destroy it, they will revert to Eden, where everyone was free, didn’t have to work and there was no sin.
And with what glee these pampered daughters of good and plenty have set to work.
Teach the children well. Not tenderly, but well. Which includes making them aware of the horrors of the past.
Lest they come again.