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A short brainstorming session comes up with the following norms which will be actively prosecuted:
In short, "historically attested heterosexual norms" is the weakest possible defense short of "attested in the fiction of de Sade". If someone wants to legalize having sex slaves being raised in a brothel, (first catering to pedophiles, I would guess) before being bred to get more whores (with male infants being killed at birth), guess what, that is a "historically attested heterosexual norm".
And I do not think that the law has it in especially for the heterosexuals, either. There are plenty of attested homosexual norms around boy-fucking which are just as outlawed.
I don't think this is a particularly fair portrayal of historical norms. Two examples of the sort of historical analysis I take issue with:
Here is the text of Deuteronomy 22.
"[22] If a man be found lying with a woman married to an husband, then they shall both of them die, both the man that lay with the woman, and the woman: so shalt thou put away evil from Israel."
"[23] If a damsel that is a virgin be betrothed unto an husband, and a man find her in the city, and lie with her;"
"[24] Then ye shall bring them both out unto the gate of that city, and ye shall stone them with stones that they die; the damsel, because she cried not, being in the city; and the man, because he hath humbled his neighbour's wife: so thou shalt put away evil from among you."
This describes adultery. If she were being raped she would have cried out, and in a city, someone would have heard her. She would have witnesses to testify that the sex was not consensual.
Notice here, both the woman and the man receive the death penalty. The sex is assumed to be consensual on both parts, therefore they are seen to have committed the crime together, and they are punished equally for their mutual participation in a criminal act.
Then:
"[25] But if a man find a betrothed damsel in the field, and the man force her, and lie with her: then the man only that lay with her shall die:"
"[26] But unto the damsel thou shalt do nothing; there is in the damsel no sin worthy of death: for as when a man riseth against his neighbour, and slayeth him, even so is this matter:"
"[27] For he found her in the field, and the betrothed damsel cried, and there was none to save her."
This describes rape (or alleged rape), and an adulterous violation of the woman by the man. There is no evidence of complicity in the act on her part, because there was no one in the open country to hear her cry out for help, and therefore no one can know that she did NOT cry out for help or resist.
The passage plainly describes this as a he-said she-said allegation of rape where there are no corroborating witnesses, and it dictates that in such a case, the woman should be believed. Keep in mind, the punishment for this crime is death for the man.
Then:
"[28] If a man find a damsel that is a virgin, which is not betrothed, and lay hold on her, and lie with her, and they be found;"
"[29] Then the man that lay with her shall give unto the damsel's father fifty shekels of silver, and she shall be his wife; because he hath humbled her, he may not put her away all his days."
She is not betrothed, so there is no adultery here. Note the different verbiage for 28 vs 25, "lay hold" vs "force". Note also the usage of "they" in "they be found" here, implying mutual complicity in the act.
So in 23, the two parties are punished equally for the same crime (adultery).
And of course, if she does cry out and there are witnesses who will be able to testify to this, and if so, as suggested by the next verse, she will be held blameless.
In 25, there is no corroboration - only he said-she said. No way to know. And wouldn't you know it? The default for belief is to believe the woman.
In 28, this describes fornication, not adultery OR rape.
And keep this in mind: "If they be found." It does not designate a location (within or outside of earshot of others). If she cried out, there would be a witness to that. She is not promised or married to another, so there is no adultery - no violation of a third party (the betrothed or husband).
And look at the punishment: the man must pay her father (who might have been able to make a better marriage for his daughter), and then he must marry her and is never permitted to divorce her under any circumstances. She faces no consequences, since she COULD have cried rape the moment she realized the act was being witnessed, and if it was not rape, she's now locked a man down by law into marriage with no possibility of divorce.
In the moment when the act is witnessed, she has the right under biblical law to claim to that witness that the man is raping her, at which point he will be sentenced to death. If she makes no such claim, she and her family can force him to marry her and deprive him of any right to divorce her.
In each of these scenarios, the man is punished by default with either death or a lifetime obligation to her. In one, the woman is punished with the same penalty as the man.
The law as written here actually favours the woman. While there are possible failure modes inherent within this system, I think it does show that historical societies did make this distinction between extramarital sex and rape, and levied different penalties based on it. Note also that these protections surrounding rape only applied to the protection of women.
This is a half-truth, and there's an implied selectivity within this comment which I find to be misleading. The idea at the time was that there could not be such a thing as marital rape because as a married person you are owed sex from your spouse, i.e. conjugal rights. This applied to both men and women, and was exercisable in law in a marriage.
1 Corinthians 7:
"[1] Now concerning the things whereof ye wrote unto me: It is good for a man not to touch a woman."
"[2] Nevertheless, to avoid fornication, let every man have his own wife, and let every woman have her own husband."
"[3] Let the husband render unto the wife due benevolence: and likewise also the wife unto the husband."
"[4] The wife hath not power of her own body, but the husband: and likewise also the husband hath not power of his own body, but the wife."
"[5] Defraud ye not one the other, except it be with consent for a time, that ye may give yourselves to fasting and prayer; and come together again, that Satan tempt you not for your incontinency."
Married couples were literally required to have sex. And in line with this, in pre-modern societies, impotence on the part of the husband, or otherwise inability or unwillingness for the man to have sex was grounds for divorce/annulment (the inverse was true, but extremely rare in practice). But how did the pre-modern legal authorities determine whether such a claim for divorce was baseless or grounded? Why, the husband had to prove his ability to perform for the court of course! This would often entail either actually having sex with his wife in front of the court or a physician, or have his genitals fondled (basically masturbated) by volunteer women to prove his potency, or something similar. For example, some of the cases are described like this:
"the member of the [husband] is like an empty intestine of mottled skin and it does not have any flesh in it, nor veins in the skin, and the middle of its front is totally black. And said witness stroked it with her hands and put it in semen and having thus been stroked and put in that place it neither expanded nor grew."
"[the examining woman] exposed her naked breasts and with her hands warmed at the said fire, she held and rubbed the penis and testicles of the [husband]. And she embraced and frequently kissed the [husband], and stirred him up in so far as she could to show his virility and potency, admonishing him for shame that he should then and there prove and render himself a man. And she says, examined and diligently questioned, that the whole time aforesaid, the said penis was scarcely three inches long."
Here is an illustration of such an impotence trial from the Decretium (which is a collection of 12th century canon law, written by Gratian). If we apply modern definitions to what these men experienced, then their experiences in court would have at least qualified as sexual assault, and the requirement to perform for their wives or face consequences may very well be considered a form of marital rape. Some remnants of this mindset have survived to the modern day, and you still find weird cases like this where a B.C. judge annulled a marriage in which the husband could not perform.
I will also note that there's an increasingly large corpus of data seeming to indicate that forced sex in relationships is not actually nearly as asymmetrical as people think, and even in multinational samples people end up finding similar rates of sexual assault victimisation by sex within romantic dyads. Here is an example.
Ultimately, while I've long accepted the idea that history is a set of lies agreed upon, I'm always surprised at how much purchase this idea of historic female oppression has among the userbase here, since this forum is ostensibly full of contrarians.
My interpretation is that having sex with a woman who is betrothed or married to another is primarily seen as a crime against the husband. If the woman is found to be an accomplice, she is killed, if not, she is seen as an innocent bystander. The fields rule reads more like in dubio pro reo than believe women to me.
There is some dispute about what behavior is covered by 22:28, with WP (which is likely leaning woke, especially given the lemma of the article in question) citing a Rabbi Moses Maimonides who clarifies that 28-28 definitely mean rape, I have not followed the sources to see if this is a true representation of modern scholarship.
Of interest is also Deuteronomy 20 and 21, which regulate the legal status and rights of female civilians captured in wartime. Spoiler alert: they have precious few rights -- mostly you can just not sell them into slavery after trying to make them your legitimate wife.
I do not think that the bible mentions gay rape very much, presumably the standard of 22:23-27 could be transferred to male victims, but I do not know if that case has ever been made to avoid getting stoned as a male victim.
Your point with regard to male marital rape equivalents is well taken. Just because being the median woman in the ancient world would have sucked, that does not mean that being the median man in the ancient world would not have sucked too. Oppression is not zero sum, the fact that women were generally oppressed did not mean that being a guy was great, because the rigid social expectations which resulted in the oppression of women also constrained most men.
I don't agree with this point at all, because no third party actually witnesses the sex happening under the circumstance envisioned in Deuteronomy 22:25 - meaning the woman is not the defendant. Rather the man is the defendant in this situation, since the woman is essentially alleging two things which cannot be substantiated - 1: that the sex happened in the first place and 2: that she was blameless in it (inevitably, the woman would be the one to levy such accusations, since nobody else witnessed it and the man would be punished regardless of complicity or lack thereof). To adopt this stance is a violation of in dubio pro reo, not an expression of it.
There's also the fact that 22:25 describes the rape as being analogous to the situation "as when a man riseth against his neighbour, and slayeth him" with the woman being in the position of the neighbour, which would seem to suggest that the woman is also seen as being the victim of the crime in question.
I have read this Wikipedia page and pretty much disagree with most of their conclusions. With regards to that Maimonides text, this is the passage it cites: "Every maiden expects to be married, her seducer therefore is only ordered to marry her; for he is undoubtedly the fittest husband for her. He will better heal her wound and redeem her character than any other husband. If, however, he is rejected by her or her father, he must give the dowry (Exodus 22:16). If he uses violence he has to submit to the additional punishment, "he may not put her away all his days" (Deuteronomy 22:29)."
But note he was a specific scholar from much later on whose interpretations of Biblical law were by no means universally accepted or agreed upon in his time. In addition, this portion of the Maimonides text was initially in Judeo-Arabic, whereas now it is being presented as an English translation which probably obscures some of the textual nuances within the original thing. So I don't think this is sufficient to prove the point. In contrast, I have looked into the textual analysis of the original Hebrew of Deuteronomy 22:28 to an extent, and definitely find the idea that it's a marry your rapist law to be... questionable at least. I think the use of the Hebrew word taphas in 22:28 creates a meaningful distinction - the passage 22:25 that's just before it uses a different and more serious verb to connote the force of a rape: hazaq.
Note also that Deuteronomy 22:29 says nothing about her right to reject! The man must take her as a wife, but it is only concerned with his obligations and states he may not divorce her all his days, it says nothing at all about her ability to renege on that. Interpreting that as a section of the Bible forcing a woman to marry her rapist requires a lot of logical leaps that doesn't necessarily follow. And note that even the Maimonides passage explicitly appears to synthesise and interpret Exodus and Deuteronomy in a way which acknowledges the right of the woman to reject the man: "If, however, he is rejected by her or her father, he must give the dowry (Exodus 22:16)." So even if we are to trust that picture of Maimonides' interpretation, the woman is not being forced into marriage; she can refuse and receive compensation for it instead.
Also on the Wikipedia page is this claim: "The Hebrew word used here for "violated" is עָנָה anah (or inah[35]), which (depending on the context) can mean "to rape, to force [sexually], to defile, to violate, to ravish, to mistreat, to afflict, to humble/humiliate, to oppress, to subject/submit/subdue, to weaken".[23][36] Especially when a Hebrew verb is in the pi'el (intensifying) form, this adds force,[23]: 120 and in Deuteronomy 22:29 עִנָּ֔הּ ‘in-nāh is in the pi'el.[23]: 141 " But I don't agree with this either; here is scholarship that Wikipedia left out, suggesting that the inclusion of "inah" in the pi'el form does not in fact indicate a "rape" occurred.
Your source then refers to this passage: "14 But the women, and the little ones, and the cattle, and all that is in the city, even all the spoil thereof, shalt thou take unto thyself; and thou shalt eat the spoil of thine enemies, which the Lord thy God hath given thee." But that then raises the question: what about the legal status and rights of male civilians captured in wartime?
Why, the passage that details this comes right before the one they're citing. "13 And when the Lord thy God hath delivered it into thine hands, thou shalt smite every male thereof with the edge of the sword".
Androcide of the entire male population is quite the moral commandment. The right to life is basically the foundational one upon which all the others rest.
The only passage I am aware of regulating gay sex at all (consent or lack thereof not specified) is Leviticus 20, which imposes punishments for both parties. I can't find anything more specific than that.
I mean, I certainly agree with the idea that both sexes' lives were pretty shit and very circumscribed. But I find the modern portrayal of premodern societies' gender roles to be extremely unbalanced, and IMO either we can consider both sexes as having been oppressed, or neither. The constant and endless focus on female victimisation and almost complete ignoring of the other side of the coin just gets tiring overtime, and is used to justify a lot of questionable modern politicking which also offends (classically) liberal sensibilities.
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I don't think incest is a really royal 'kink' rather a political driven byproduct under a hereditary system where marriage is limited between royal or formerly royal families, further limited by religion (rare Catholics and Protestant intermarriages, and only one royal Orthodox country [though Montenegro punches above its weight before WWI]), and treaty considerations. Which under a paucity of male dynasts can exasperate the situation. So Spanish Hapsburg infantas are marrying Austrian Hapsburgs Archdukes to prevent a succession of their enemies the French Bourbons.
I agree, although I understand how “Genetic Sexual Attraction” (wikipedia, SFW) might make it seem like a kink.
Probably politics first, with GSA helping implementation.
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While I find the "kink" framing distasteful and obfuscatory, there were definitely pagan cultures that celebrated royal incest for its own sake, most notably the Egyptians.
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This is a misrepresentation of ancient law codes around rape; a distinction between forcible and statutory(and these societies tended to define 'minor unable to consent' as 'woman who has never been married') rape generally existed. The distinction was often primitive by today's standards- eg the bible's 'did someone hear her scream' standard- but it existed. What ancient law codes did round off as seduction was what we would call 'date rape' today.
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It's not clear to me what your point is, here. My point was that we do in fact live in a liberal nation; if your point is "and that's a good thing," like--okay? I happen to be a liberal myself! My point was simply that we should presumably therefore expect "political violence" to generally not come from liberals, given that liberals pretty much live in the society they want to live in. And indeed, both right-wing and left-wing political violence appears to generally come from the illiberal factions of those political tribes.
But we did just recently have a discussion on the Motte about the criminalization of heterosexual norms, if this is something of particular interest to you.
Oh, I had no problem with your overall point, it was just that your phrasing in that sentence irked me. I agree that criminalizing all sorts of cat-calling is silly.
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