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I'll take the bait. Go on then, spell it out
I am absolutely not pro-infanticide, but the killing, or at least exposure of crippled or deformed infants is extremely common throughout history. In ancient Rome it was considered something you kept quiet, but by no means a crime or a horrific crime as it might be considered today. Oftentimes people were not considered 'full' humans until they had lived a few years already, partially because mortality rates among infants and young children were so high. The idea infanticide is a heinous moral abomination seems to be a product of the slow christianization of western morality.
You could say that about a lot of things. Institutionalised rape, slavery and child brides were pretty common and accepted throughout the ancient world as well, but it would be unusual for a person to defend those things today.
Ancient world? A lot of the things were popular at most 200 years ago.
Some forms of institutionalized rape I think I could still argue for in an anonymous format. I think a reasonable argument can be made of a husband having sexual rights in a marriage presupposing he’s being a good husband and it’s part of the marriage compact. And Russian serfdom (which was supposedly quite harsh) and Chattel slavery was less than 200 hundred years.
That's the marriage debt, it applies to both spouses (wives too have a right to sex) and it's not rape, since in marriage you are presumed to give consent to sexual activity with your spouse. There was a fine-grained legal distinction that rape was sex without consent, and since married couples consented to have sex, the crime of rape could not be committed within marriage (which is not to say that the act of rape could not be committed).
Forcing someone unwilling, by threats, violence, or other coercion, is wrong. That's not what marriage is supposed to be. So even if the spouses have a right to ask for sex from each other, and merely "I don't feel like it" is not good enough reason to refuse, you should not rape your wife (or husband).
Well then what IS your prescription for the scenario where Spouse A says "Sex please" and Spouse B says "No I don't feel like it"?
I have enough Chestertonian-fence respect in the wisdom of the ten thousand generations before me to suspect that if there WAS a solution better than marital rape, they'd have thought of it.
This reminds me of many of Vox Day's blog posts back in the day. He'd say "Marital rape doesn't exist" and "Getting married implicitly gives permanent consent." People would ask him "Does that mean if your wife says 'Not tonight, I have a headache' you can just smack her around until she submits?" He would always dodge or just sneer at the question.
I thought he was being disingenuous then, and I think your "Chesterston's fence" here is a bit disingenuous.
Well, first of all, no, I think it's ridiculous to think that we should just accept the received wisdom of ten thousand generations of savages. There are a whole lot of things our ancestors believed for ten thousand generations and we only realized in the last few hundred years were stupid.
So legally, yes, a husband in most societies historically had the right to literally rape his wife (by which I mean "rape rape", not just threats, pressure, and cajoling), but even the most misogynistic cultures generally didn't think highly of a man who physically abused his wife and had to force her to have sex with him. I strongly suspect that even back in caveman days, couples with genuine affection for each other were looked on with much more respect than couples where the man was literally having to knock his wife over the head and drag her by the hair to get laid.
On to the present day, which you seem to think is missing a little something something because a man can't knock his wife over the head and drag her by the hair anymore. But presumably you didn't mean literally that. But then I would ask you the same question put to Vox Day: what did you mean? If your wife says "Not tonight, I have a headache," are you claiming that you should literally have the right to say "Tough shit, on your back," backed up by force if necessary?
So presuming the actual question is not "What if she's not in the mood sometimes?" but "What if she refuses to sleep with me, ever?" Well, obviously, your marriage is dysfunctional, and you have a range of options from counseling to divorce. Even if you're a tradcon who believes divorce should be off the table, I would think you would want to find out why your wife is refusing to have sex with you, and try to fix that. If it's a physical ailment, well, you did promise "in sickness or in health," right? If it's depression, she needs help, not being compelled to put out because it's her "wifely duty." If it's none of these things, and it's genuinely not your fault for being a jerk husband - if you're stuck with a woman who pretended to like sex until you got married and then turned it off afterwards, like in those horrible old Playboy cartoons, well, I guess if you won't divorce her, then it kind of sucks to have made a poor life choice. But seriously, what do you think should be your options in that case?
(And yes, I've made the assumption above that we are talking about the woman being the one who refuses sex, because realistically, if it's the man refusing to have sex, it's very rare that his wife has any ability to force him. But I'd say the same thing to a woman whose husband rejects her and the situation doesn't appear fixable: if you won't consider divorce, then I guess you're trapped in an unhappy marriage. Which is why I don't think divorce should be off the table.)
That's a little bit... antagonistic. These are the people who built Classical Greece, the Pyramids, the University of Sankore. And even hunter-gatherers had enough civilization to care for their wounded and infirm, as the archaeological evidence of bone healing suggests. "Savages" is kinda harsh.
I strongly suspect that in caveman days "couples" didn't exist, because you lived fast and died young. Seems kind of a waste of time, and deleterious to the tribe's survival chances, to become particularly emotionally attached to a partner who has a ~40% chance of dying in childbirth every 9 months. If the sabre-tooth tigers don't get her in the interim (a big if).
Well, if you insist on this line of inquiry...
Rape fantasies are the #1 female fantasy, remember. And it turns out that accomodating to your partner's bedroom fantasies - shock! - improves your sex life, who'd'a thunk it?
So, observe my biting down hard on this bullet: yes, I do mean "Tough shit, on your back, by force if necessary", and I can tell you from the practical application of this principal in my own life that it is salutary to a relationship. I don't know whether it's a general principle of female psychology or just a peculiarly of my own girlfriends, but a few seconds of complaining is followed by years of her being smugly happy that her partner finds her attractive enough to be compelled to run roughshod over her consent. Acting like a troglodyte caveman is, it turns out, more attractive to the opposite sex than acting like a Title IX lawyer at a risk-averse university campus.
If we're going back literally ten thousand generations, I'll stand by "savages." Doesn't mean they weren't human, but I do not think we should credit the "wisdom" of people from the stone age just because they did things a certain way for a very long time.
And yes, I was being a little tongue-in-cheek about cavemen, but I still assume they had relationships (if not necessarily lifetime monogamous partnerships) which did not typically consist of a man grabbing the nearest available woman and raping her. (And if they did, then, well, "savages.")
Granting that a lot of women do get turned on by being dominated, I don't doubt there are times when that works for you. But do you recognize the difference between a partner who generally wants to have sex with you, might not be in the mood at this particular moment, but finds it hot when you make her, and a partner who genuinely, seriously does not want to have sex and whose partner forces her anyway?
If you want to take issue with contemporary notions of "consent," yes, I recognize the problem here in that what you've described with your partner is in fact technically rape and you probably realize she could have you prosecuted for it if she got it into her mind to do so, which is another reason why we should pick our partners very carefully and have very good communication. (I also assume that as a decent human being, you wouldn't pull the "tough shit, on your back" routine if you knew she really, truly did not want to have sex right now and was not going to like it if you forced her.) I don't know exactly how the law can differentiate between "We like to do caveman stuff in the bedroom sometimes" and "My husband is an abusive rapist" other than with a lot of fallible subjectivity, but if we have to choose between "You can 'rape' your wife but take the risk of her someday actually treating it like rape" or "Your wife literally has no legal recourse if you start brutalizing her," I'll go with the first option.
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