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This Valentine's Day, I am thinking about why the Pelicot rape case has received so little attention, sparked so little discussion. This is the case of a French man, Dominique Pelicot, who invited 72 men to rape his drugged wife, Gisèle Pelicot, over the course of nine years. The trial took place in 2024 (all accused found guilty), but it surfaced in the NYT again this week. I could not find a single mention of it in on this site.
Yes, it's been reported in every media outlet. No, I'm not claiming it's been hidden or suppressed. But the case has no political relevance. It hasn't generated heated discussion. No one seems to care or talk about it that much. Why? Here are my speculations.
You could claim that this was an isolated incident that has no implications for society in general, that one specific forum enabled the perpetrators to find each other. But these men were mostly from nearby towns, within 50km, from all walks of life.
I think it's simpler to just say that some large fraction of men would jump at the opportunity to have sex with an unconscious woman if there were no consequences. This is the nature of men. We have known this since the beginning of time. Most adults understand this already. The vast majority of men know this, because some part of them has the same urge, or if not, they are familiar with the corrupting force of male sexuality in general, and this particular manifestation is hardly a surprise. Women largely know this force, too, because they have been told of it, or because they have been targeted by it, though they sometimes pretend not to know.
Men aren't eager to discuss this particular case because it is unflattering to the male sex. Furthermore, it doesn't seem to inspire moral outrage among men. It doesn't trigger tribal instincts - race was not a factor, for instance. And a couple of the elements that make rape viscerally repugnant are absent in this case. For one, she was unconscious during the rapes. In some sense, apart from the drugging, the violation was merely psychological - the knowledge post facto of the strangers' assault, and the knowledge of her husband's betrayal - and I have the sense that many men simply struggle to empathize with psychological harms to women. Men can empathize with other men, but in this case the would-be secondary victim, her husband, wanted to cuck himself. "So be it," seems to be the unsaid reaction.
It's harder for me to say why women aren't eager to bring this up as ammunition in the gender wars. Doesn't this vindicate the radical feminists? I see it discussed in forums dominated by women, but not much beyond that, and even there not particularly passionately. Maybe one factor is that Gisèle Pelicot herself apparently didn't believe her daughter's claims of abuses at the hands of her husband, and so isn't the perfect victim. But perhaps the whole thing is just unpleasant and depressing. It seems to shatter the possibility of love, and of the dignity of women among men. She thought he was a good husband.
And perhaps it's simply that there is nothing to fight about. There is no toxoplasma, no scissor statement. No surprises at the trial. No one even cares to come out and repeat the defense of the accused, that they thought she had consented. No one wants to argue. There is nothing to be done. Castrate all men? Don't have the bad luck of marrying a depraved cuck? Conservatives have nothing to say. Do liberals have something to say? If so, I haven't heard it either.
Have we really known this? What large fraction?
It would be uncharitable to say you are typical-minding here, and I am not trying to establish myself as some kind of saint by saying "What the fuck?" but really... what the fuck? To me, having sex with an unconscious woman would have pretty much zero appeal no matter how hot she is, and I have a hard time believing I'm some weird undersexed outlier. It's not even just about it being rape (which it obviously is), but it would also be like fucking a RealDoll, which I know some men do also but I have always thought has to be the absolute last refuge of the desperate and pathetic.
Obviously there are men who get off on it (I know there are men who will stick their dicks in anything warm), but I'm unconvinced, even if this guy found 72 of them, that they aren't akin to rapists and pedophiles... sure, we all know these urges exist in the male population, and they aren't super-rare, but neither are they... normal.
It only vindicates them if you agree with them that this is in fact the natural state of men and we'd all do it if given the chance and that every husband secretly hates his wife. That's certainly a view unironically held in parallel, horseshoe-like, by a certain strain of radical feminists and ultra-misogynists, but the problem is that they are largely wrong about men being amoral rapacious monsters barely(unfairly) held in check by society.
Well, yeah. I doubt even our he-man woman-haters will be able to muster much of a "This wasn't actually bad" argument. How do you defend it? She was unconscious so she didn't really suffer? She's female and therefore should be available for any use to which her husband sees fit? You have to go pretty far out there to defend the indefensible. Some things don't engender disagreement even between liberals and conservatives.
I’d add my 2 cents from a dudebro perspective.
If you’re a toxic shitty dudebro with a friend group of the same sort, you’re likely to regularly engage in acts that you basically consider to be pranks. Either you do this in a pair or in a group, or by yourself, but also in the latter case you’re mostly doing it to gain bragging rights and form memories with other shithead dudebros.
Some examples I can think of: acts of vandalism and theft typically associated with teenage delinquency. (Smashing up the mailbox of that neighbor you hate. Stealing a car while drunk, going on a joyride at night, abandoning it at some desolate place. Stealing and shoplifting for the hell of it.) Pulling pranks on your loser computer nerd classmates and bullying them. Getting blackout drunk and boning the town slut. Getting some loser broad drunk/drugged and spit-and-roasting her with your bro. Lying to some woman you picked up that you’ll use a rubber and then doing her bareback. Going on an exotic vacation and boning some whorey tourist girls. Picking up some fat girl who’s clearly desperate and without self-esteem, debasing her sexually (but still consensually, at least in the everyday normie sense of the word) and never calling her afterwards. Jizzing on your girlfriend’s hair even though you promised her you won’t do that. And boning some unconscious / passed-out girl.
The sole reason you’re engaging in any of this is so that you can brag and tell stories about it to your bros, have a good laugh about it and down another round of drinks, and forget about it until you bring it up again sometime later. It’s not that you’re proud about it; on some level you do realize that all of this is kind of wrong, and that you’d never do this to a woman you do care about, or you imagine you would care about. And it’s also assumed that you’ll embellish or simply make up some details. After all, it’s done for laughs, to have fun. Your bros know it, and you know that they do the same things, the embellishment included. It’s basically a male bonding ritual. And it’s not like sleazy women don’t have something similar anyway.
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I am a man who happens to have this fetish, and indeed I am a man who related this fetish to my gf, she thought it was hot, and we contrived some bs about our apartment being too close to a busy highway in order to get a doctor to prescribe heavy-duty sleeping pills that we could indulge this fetish. And it was great.
It’s the “doing another guy’s wife” and “doing a fugly old grandma” that confuses me about the appeal. Not the unconsciousness, which, indeed, is a distinct improvement over the vanilla sex act.
Out of curiosity – I assume you mean it was great for you? Presumably your girlfriend didn't remember it? Or did she?
I did indeed mean that it was great for me and she didn’t remember it. However, she’s a self-proclaimed sub, and so while she didn’t remember the act, the abstract knowledge of it has an enduring appeal.
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Well, I believe there is a fetish for everything, but you know that fetishes by definition are outside the norm, right? And your girlfriend was willing - would you actually do it to a woman who hadn't consented?
Well that’s begging the question isn’t it? We are trying to puzzle out who are really the minority, those who see the unconscious woman as a gross RealDoll vs those who still see her as person.
No, sure, but your previous post wasn’t complaining about the absence of consent, it was complaining about the absence of consciousness.
Okay, but specifically asking a woman to let you drug her so you can fuck her unconscious body and her agreeing to cater to this very specific fetish is not the central example of "Guys who like fucking unconscious women."
If she's into it, okay, whatever. (Though, sorry, yes, I still think that's weird. But lots of people are into things I think are weird.)
You are basing this statement on what evidence?
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I can get the appeal of sleep sex as an extension of a freeuse fetish (where the focus is on relieving oneself without the worry of mutual pleasure, essentially enhanced masturbation) but I'm baffled that you consider it a strict improvement. Not being able to see the woman in pleasure is a considerable opportunity cost, even setting aside the lost potential of her active participation.
As someone with a hobby for trying to theory-of-mind others' fetishes, I would imagine that there is some element of taking observation/judgement to detract from the enjoyability of the act, or feel oppressive in a way that doesn't let you fully indulge sexually - some sort of anti-exhibitionism (except not necessarily concerned with the gaze of third parties as much as with that of your target?), and closely related to the time stop trope (the thing where the protagonist can freeze his time for everyone but himself and have his way with the bodies of other people in everyday situations, the targets being none the wiser).
If you were to feel crushingly self-conscious about how the person you are performing any sexual act with perceives you, it would make sense that any act where that possibility is not removed would be strictly inferior.
Close, but you’re way off. I think I’d describe it more as “Will you please just shut up and stop getting in the way of my enjoyment”. Sex with a conscious partner is like trying to watch a movie with someone who’s always interrupting: “Ooh can we rewind I liked that bit”, “Volume up please!”, “Want some popcorn?”; and I’m like do you mind I’m trying to concentrate. Being obliged to consider someone else’s watching preferences takes me right out of the zone.
Now, in fairness, sometimes you really are more interested in the watch party bantz than the watching itself. But not often.
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It's a fetish so of course it doesn't have to be rational, and it's been around a long time. I can't remember where I read this years ago, and I don't know if it's true or just fiction, but there were claims that some Victorian brothels specialised in having prostitutes who pretended to be, or were drugged to be, sleeping while clients had sex with them. Other claims were pretending to be dead, to the extent of lying in a coffin and wearing heavy makeup to look pale and bloodless.
Again, no idea if this is truth or fiction, but it's possible.
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The two parts of your statement do not logically synch up. If you don’t consider it an improvement, then you don’t see the appeal, because, by your own logic, it is not appealing (compared to the default).
I think Eupraxia means that it's one thing for sleep sex to have its own appeal that might make up for the advantages it otherwise lacks relative to conventional mutual sex; and another thing to declare it a strict improvement.
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I don’t know what the percentage is, but it seems we have ample evidence to conclude that some nontrivial percentage of men really would rape more or less any human given the chance. Between this case, the Epstein Files, Rotherham, wartime rape, I wouldn’t be surprised at any number between 5 and 80 percent of men.
5 percent I believe. I don't think you'd find 80 percent in an Indian slum.
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I'm just a "desperate and pathetic" virgin, but I think this sounds unreasonable. Isn't it a stereotype that the hotter a woman is, the less effort she feels that she needs to put into sex? Yet, despite this stereotype, men still seek out hot women (including prostitutes). The difference between sex with a lazy "starfish" woman and sex with an unconscious woman seems negligible.
I've encountered this claim on many occasions. There's no way to express the following opinion without sounding like I'm humblebragging, so consider this an inb4.
I've had an unusually high number of female sexual partners, so my sample size is unusually large. Some of those partners I would consider quite attractive (with the caveat that none were literal supermodels or Hollywood actresses); some were "mid"; some were not even that, and I only had sex with them out of sheer desperation at the tail end of a lengthy dry spell. If this claim (that attractive women put in less effort in the bedroom) has any truth to it, then in my fairly extensive sexual history I honestly cannot claim to have observed it firsthand. I've been with hot girls who starfished and passable girls who starfished; I've been with hot girls who were rearing to go and passable girls who were rearing to go. I think the best predictors of how enthusiastic a woman will be in bed are a) her basal sex drive (controlling for how long it's been her last sexual encounter); b) her sexual experience (everyone's a little shy and awkward their first few times; the trope of the pure virgin who's a demon in the sack during her deflowering only exists in porn); and c) how attracted she is to her sexual partner. In the latter case I'm thinking in particular of a fairly hot girl I met ~7 years ago, who did have sex with me but seemed of two minds about it. I imagine it would have been a very different experience if I'd been someone with whom she had more chemistry.
Frankly, I think this "hot girls are all crap in bed, while mid girls give it socks" thing is one of the purest, most transparent examples of sour grapes in human history. I daresay most men claiming as much have literally never had sex with an unusually attractive woman, and so aren't in a position to make any kind of generalisation.
ADDENDUM: I forgot to mention that my assorted sexual partners came from a diverse array of ethnic backgrounds, nationalities, socioeconomic statuses and so on. It's not like I'm making a sweeping generalisation about the entire fairer sex based on a sample drawn from a single country.
I assure you, it is not. I've had sex with women who seemed a bit unenthused or tired etc., but I would never dream of having sex with a woman who was literally unconscious.
As a contra anecdote - I've also slept with lots of women, and I've found my level of attractiveness varying quite a bit over the course of my life so I've done a decent range.
I've found this meme to be an exaggeration but mostly true. Plenty of mid women are mid in bed, but the gorgeous women were way more likely to be bad, especially 9s and 10s. Being bad in bed doesn't always mean unenthusiastic, but plenty of 9s and 10s just didn't know how to do anything. Importantly this sometimes included what they liked - since they knew they could count on a man trying as hard as possible they never put much effort into figuring themselves out either, much less a dick.
Might be enthusiastic, but technical skills were rare.
Women have a meme about men with big dicks being bad in bed, and similarly it's not universally true but really does seem to capture the heart of it.
I suppose everyone has their own definition, but assuming a “10” is at least 99.9th percentile for fit, healthy people your age (so probably 99.99th percentile overall; one in ten thousand men or women) I think seducing many 10s would be quite impressive.
Isn't a "10" more likely to be, uh -- 90th %tile?
Unless you are using the female scale, which as I recall is exponential to the point where a 90th %tile man is like a "5" -- men are much more linear!
It seems better to model it like a normal distribution where the vast majority of people are in the 3.5 to 6.5 range. Your way seems to lead to a lot of ambiguity between what counts as an 8 or a 9 or a 10, for example, because they’re all equally common.
That's the female scale! I maintain that my way is far closer to the way that men see the world; it is, in fact, non-trivial to tell the difference between a 9 (maybe even an 8) and a 10.
The neat part is that this... kind of reflects the male view on attractiveness pretty perfectly.
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Fair dinkum - my standard for what a 9 or a 10 is is something like "is a model" "could be a model" "if you told your friends she was a model they would believe it." With a 10 being more of a get drunk with your bros and sass each other and they won't disagree she is a 10 even though that is a big brag.
I don't think I've thought of it the terms you describe but it's an interesting thought. If a 10 means 99.9th percentile then it really means something, but I suspect you'd run into taste issues. Sydney Sweeney, Zendaya, and Lisa (Blackpink) are all probably 10s by any objective standard but if you go by 99.9th percentile for an individual man's interest then at least one of those three is likely to get thrown out most of the time (see: the hate for Zendaya here).
I agree that the people calling Zendaya ugly are overdoing it: by any metric she's a pretty girl. But I'd hardly call her a 10/10. In fact, I think part of the basis of her appeal is that she has a certain girl-next-door quality that makes her seem approachable and down-to-earth: a nerdy MCU fan projecting himself onto Tom Holland could imagine himself dating Zendaya in a way he couldn't with (to pick a handful of her MCU costars) Scarlett Johansson, Natalie Portman or Cobie Smulders. I think any of these women (in their prime) would be considered more attractive than Zendaya by just about everyone.
I mean this is where taste comes in - you'll note that she doesn't look at all like your other examples.
That said she's literally famous for being beautiful in an industry that the most beautiful people in the world go into. If getting paid millions of dollars a year to be beautiful isn't a sign of being a 10/10 then I don't know what is.
You are allowed to find her not attractive. Many people don't like um ethnic women, or women who are low on curves. That's preference, but if we are looking objectively...
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We should compare spreadsheets. (You do have a spreadsheet, right?)
I am an adult in a committed relationship now. For legal reasons any spreadsheet would have been deleted looooong ago.
I did have a (female???) friend who kept detailed information on her phone with phallus stats, which should would whip out at parties from time to time.
That was always horrifying and amusing.
Dying to understand the significance of the three question marks.
So am I. The spreadsheet stays.😁
Gossiping with your girlies about men's performance is very female coded. A spreadsheet (or document) with detailed stats is very male coded.
I like my balls attached, thanks.
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Uh, I understood the stereotype is that the hotter she is, the less effort she needs to put into obtaining sex. Which is pretty obviously true. The stereotype that hot women neither enjoy nor actively participate in sex is a new one to me, unless you're just referring to the stereotype that women in general don't really enjoy sex and only perform it to the minimum degree necessary to secure a mate. Which, may be true for a lot of women, but (ahem) I have it on good authority, not all of them.
I cannot say I am a connoisseur of prostitutes but my understanding also is that men generally prefer hookers to at least pretend to be into it and are not going to enjoy the experience much if she just lies there with an "Are you done yet?" expression on her face.
Can't say I've done either, but damn, who are these guys finding? And obviously, the difference would still be pretty significant in terms of at least implied consent (which, evidently and depressingly, a lot of guys still seem to think is a quaint modern notion that we shouldn't care about that much).
"Obtaining" is probably not the correct word. She's "obtaining" sex with the man whether she's enthusiastic or not, after all. That's not the relevant part. What I think is going on here is that hot women normally assume, for a good reason, that they have a strong mesmerizing effect on men. If she submits to a man's desire, she assumes that he'll be so overwhelmed with urge and longing that he'll be unable to think of anything else but taking her in hand and ravishing her. This has indeed been normally the case throughout history. It's just the typical female fantasy (heh) and the reason why "rape fantasies" exist. The idea that she'd need to proactively take additional steps to inflame his urges so as to ensure that he really wants her and that he's really enjoying it all is, frankly, not only alien but also degrading and demoralizing to her.
That sounds like a just-so story. How many hot women have you had sex with, to know so much about the calculations in their mind and their sexual performance? Do you base this on anything at all other than supposition?
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That's less a stereotype than a factual statement. But @ToaKraka is far from the first person I've seen claiming that attractive women are crap in bed, while mid women are demons in the sack. I don't think there's anything to it, but I have independently encountered multiple men making such a claim.
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I'm pretty sure I've seen jokes on 4chan (and possibly even on Reddit) about how the ugly "practice girlfriend" will put in extra effort in bed while a hotter woman will not. But I can't find any such jokes after a cursory search.
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I think you're wrong here actually. I think you're the one doing typical minding, and most men are actually like this. Some are like you and me, who find that behavior repugnant, but then... Africa. And India. And and and.
I think this is another case of fish in the post-Christian sea having no idea about water.
I linked this down-thread but there's notes about each of the convicted rapists in this case here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pelicot_rape_case#Convicted
Do you see a pattern?
I'll admit some of these fit some stereotypes.
Nizar Hamida
Mohamed Rafaa
Hassan Ouamou
But to me it's not that solid a pattern. Plenty of these people have proper French sounding names and like they'd be familiar with Christianity.
The most solid theme for me is: losers and imbeciles with a splash of psychopathy.
I also noticed the overrepresentation of Arab names among the perpetrators.
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I'm skeptical that Christianity (or Western civilization) is the sole difference, though I know this is a popular theory (with Christians). Yes, large parts of the third world are rapacious hellholes, but there are ancient and contemporary non-Christian societies that do not seem to have been such.
I'd like to draw the distinction between states with enough capacity (and will) to deter rape by threat of violent reprisal, and peoples who believe that rape is implicitly morally wrong regardless of circumstance.
As far as I can tell this is a uniquely Christian innovation. Even the notion that a woman should have the final veto in whether she gets married seems to be Christian; c.f. the custom of the priest asking her if 'she does'.
Jewish legal codes speak for themselves and Islam is cool with sex slaves taken in wartime. Pagans understood rape as a normal reward for conquering armies and that higher class men could naturally enough have their way with lower class women, not to mention slaves.
Really, the notion that rape is wrong is fairly peculiar historically.
Same with murdering one's own infant children but that's another topic.
Could you expand on this? I'm not familiar.
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I mean, the Chinese have evidence of this in writing even in pre-Imperial history; 墨子 discusses punishments for rape during the Warring States period, and various annals including 春秋左傳 and 詩經 describe rape in a decidedly disapproving manner. I'm sure other cultures would
This is, of course, in the background of a very different philosophical culture and climate than Christian Europe. For one, the Christian idea of sin is probably actually quite peculiar, which I suspect makes much of the difference in mental interpretation.
Yeah but they disapprove because it soils the man’s qi, in a ‘this practice is not consistent with obviating temporal desire and attaining the Dao’ sort of way. That a woman is involved at all, let alone an unwilling one, is of no consequence - they’d complain just as much about a long goon session.
I think this is really quite inaccurate, and frankly, quite disparaging and myopic.
For one, since I previously referenced 墨子 Mozi:
We can see that rape is packaged as part of actions that harm others.
Aside from this, while rape (as 强姦/彊姦) is not often directly mentioned in Chinese annals except in legal settings, the euphemisms used are telling.
The most direct is 妻/妻略 - “to wickedly take [as if she was] a wife”; others include:
Even in veiled form, these terms show disapproval of rape both as a personal affront to the woman as well as besmirching the honour of her husband or clan. Of course this is not quite the same idea as our liberal standards of rape, but it nevertheless is very far from the idea “that a woman is involved at all, let alone an unwilling one, is of no consequence”. And to this day, the term for molestation is 非禮.
Or you could go through eyewitness accounts of the Nanjing event for more details about how the Chinese reacted to the rape of their women. That works, too.
What makes your statement even more bizarre is that some Chinese cults that actually do have a strong proscription not just on rape, but on sex in general, sometimes were also the most sex-egalitarian; IIRC some millenarian cults (maybe some parts of the White Lotus societies?) worshipping Wusheng Laomu were like this, though I couldn’t find any sources in a hurry. Traditional Daoist thinking would both admit that 精 "essence" is lost in ejaculation, but that abstinence produced various maladies and infirmities, so caution and moderation would be most healthful.
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Links: 1 2 3
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I would argue that it is more accurate to say that it is "uniquely Western" as we see similar attitudes present in the late Roman Republic, but to the extent that one's notion of "Western Civilization" is inextricably entangled with the influence of Christianity, I agree.
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I would argue that women have always thought it's wrong, so it seems more like the notion that women's feelings should be considered is peculiar historically. And I don't think it's that peculiar, or that Christians have been particularly better about not raping and treating lower class women as public goods. It is definitely not a uniquely Christian innovation that women have some say in who they marry; Christians are not the first people ever who recognized female agency and gave women rights.
Your reference to Jewish legal codes and Islam makes me think we're going to go down the same road we've gone before, where the worst and most uncharitable readings of what other religious books say should be taken literally, without context, and as exactly what all those people really believe and those with a more humanitarian reading aren't really following their religion, whereas Christianity (and the Old Testament in particular) should be not subjected to similar treatment.
I weary of the women-haters (I don't mean you, though you seem to be giving them too much credit) who argue that the natural (and implied: correct) state of man is to treat women as property and before our modern age, no man in any civilization ever gave a shit how females felt about their treatment.
The changes to law codes imposed by Christian missionaries are, afaik, not really disputable; they do seem to involve women being asked their consent to marriage. This process occasionally happens today in parts of the deep third world where Christianization imposes huge increases in the rights of women over very low baselines.
It's fair to point out that Christianity does not immediately solve every problem with poor treatment of marginalized groups, and that societies which are not Christian often have some informal pressure for women to get the rights Christian law codes later guarantee(the Viking sagas are quite explicit that a woman's father's consent is important to a marriage, not hers, but use the girl's consent as a trope marker for good fatherhood). But anthropologists are still making hay out of cultural differences between villages in polynesia and remote parts of Africa and the Amazon which were Christianized at different times. It seems to be a robust finding that women and girls in traditional societies have a much better go(albeit not up to modern western societies) when their village is Christian.
I'm not disputing that Christianity greatly improved the lot of women (and the poor, and many other marginalized groups). I'm disputing that improvements in women's rights are uniquely Christian and that only Christian societies ever treated them as more than property.
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There are precious few (though admittedly not zero) women-haters here who "argue that the natural (and implied: correct) state of man is to treat women as property". Most restrain themselves to recognizing that humans tend to view each other instrumentally by default, and that includes men viewing women instrumentally, women viewing men instrumentally, and society viewing both instrumentally. That the non-women-haters seem to only be concerned about the former and sometimes the latter--when women are being viewed instrumentally by society--demonstrates they don't view men as humans deserving rights and view women as inherently superior to men.
If I had a nickel...
It wouldn't be a lot of nickels, but it would be more than one.
The concise response to this is "balderdash."
The less concise response is basically the same with more words: people (like me) who push back against those who view women as instrumental goods/property are not the "Women Are Wonderful" simps the latter like to characterize the former as, but merely arguing that we are all human beings and part of rising above our monkey natures (which should be our goal as a species with starfaring ambitions) requires not viewing every relationship as transactional and every other human being as an instrumental good. This includes treating women as Sex, and whatever bad thing you think women treat men as.
How are "people who push back against those who view women as instrumental goods/property" and never push back against those who view men as instrumental goods/property while smearing any who do as "women-hater" not deserving of the title "Women Are Wonderful" simps?
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