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I think spousal infidelity either appeared with the neolithic revolution, or did already happen in the ancestral environment.
At least as long as men have gone to war, they had the opportunity to fuck around, at least if the brother of their wife is not in their unit keeping an eye on them.
For women, cheating was probably a bit harder in the ancestral environment, but I personally do not envision it like there were sabre-tooth tigers constantly circling around the tribe just waiting for their chance to eat a lone woman lagging a bit behind to meet her lover. Basically, as soon as you have cities which are safe enough to traverse unarmed, most societies will evolve norms to allow lone women to do so. This opens up the opportunity for a booty call on the way back from the market or whatever. Even in the countryside, a woman bringing her peasant husband his lunch could probably arrange a date in the woods on her way back.
I mean, sure, capitalism made it much more convenient, now There Is An App For That. But the only men in history who could really be reasonably sure that their kids were really theirs were men living in societies which were rather strict about policing women.
So my read of your argument is "what is bad about modernity is that it allows for more female infidelity than Saudi Arabia".
I think there is a common pattern where technological progress fixed a problem, which in turn created another problem, which was again fixed through technology. For example, in the good old days, child mortality was sky high. A woman might bury half of her kids or more. Modern medicine fixed that, which in turn might have meant that the population would double every generation. So we invented another ungodly modernist workaround: birth control. That in turn created some problems down the line, etc. Still, very few suggest that we should just go back to letting half the kids die of dysentery or whatever Just Like God Intended.
Which is a specific defining feature of all successful civilizations until very recently.
Yes of course. Adultery should be a crime. And arguably a capital one. How is marriage supposed to exist or men supposed to be expected to participate in a society that doesn't give them certainty the fruits of their labor will go to their line? Why sire children at all in such a system?
You act as of cities were naturally dens of sin and conveniently forget we specifically evolved morality to solve such problems.
On this particular point, and as of now, the Arab world is civilized and the West is barbaric.
This isn't to say that female autonomy isn't an advancement in some sense, and it's always been a peculiarity of Western civilization to elevate such an autonomy. But paternity fraud is as antisocial as rape and needs to be punished as such. Or people will switch from orderly pair bonding to a free for all and thus dissolve society altogether, which is indubitably what's happening to the West.
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