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10,000 word long-take I wrote on the history of female warriors, North European human Sacrifice rituals, Girardian mimetic selection, and the incompatibility of the west's current conceptions of Freedom and women's liberation.
What occured in the forests of Germany and on the Eurasian steppe for 1000s of years was one of the most extreme experiments in selective breeding and selective killing practised anywhere on earth. The Aztec and Maya were the only ones with a ritual breeding/killing program so extreme
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Notes -
I really have to say: a man wrote this.
Won't sleep with any man who asks: frigid prude Protestant schoolmarm Will sleep with any man who asks: BDSM slave girl (Gor, I hear you calling!)
This is a male idea of female psychology. Why would women prefer death to slavery, he wonders. Well gee, could it be that being a slave in the house of your conqueror, with his legitimate wife and family over you, was a pretty shitty experience? At the best, grinding hard labour for life. At the worst, she goes all Clytemnestra on you.
Why would women go along with the idea of sacrificing themselves? Well, why do men? Why did men think a glorious death in battle was better than being a coward? Why better a dead lion than a live dog? Why the idea that dying in bed in old age was the worst fate of all?
If you're soaking in the attitudes of your culture and society all your life, you'll adopt them. The pretty slave girls who didn't leap up and volunteer survived, but the status went to the girl who did. Same with the warrior.
As to the rest of it, that there was only one pretty girl per generation and all the other women were ugly, in the ritual sacrifice societies, I have to laugh at that. Oh yeah, Miss Universe is the one pretty girl who wins the contest and all the other girls are uggos. Ritual sacrifice societies also permitted or winked at giving substitutes - maybe you provided a slave, or bought a child off a poor family, instead of your own child. Maybe in time you substituted animals, or symbolic sacrifices. The Aztecs were bloody maniacs because they sincerely believed that the world would end without the shedding of blood to maintain the weakened gods and enable them to keep creation going. They weren't sacrificing people for eugenic purposes. Sure, part of the flower wars was to keep subject and tributary chieftains weakened and subordinate, but they also needed vast amounts of bodies for sacrifice. And the end result was that they made themselves so hated, when the Spanish turned up, the other tribes supported them to bring down the Aztecs.
I don't agree with the Feral Aryan Blonde hypothesis, but I think you're missing a few key points.
Because the side that broke first would be ridden down and slaughtered, the survivors sold into slavery. In ancient warfare the vast majority of casualties were suffered in the rout, not in the battle. If your tribe is more courageous, then you'll win the battle, massacre the opposing men, and capture their women, thus propagating your courageous genes. Over time this results in more courage among men.
But not women. When the men are all wiped out and the women are hauled back to be second wives to the victors, they still reproduce. If anything, women are selected for being more cowardly. The most effective action for a woman in war is to calculate the best moment to flee or surrender to maximize her own chance of survival. The only time physical courage will increase a woman's reproductive fitness is if she has to protect her baby from a mountain lion, and that didn't happen very often after we wiped out the megafauna.
Courage among mammals is an essentially male phenomenon to increase reproductive fitness at the cost of safety. From an evolutionary standpoint that's an easy trade. Of course, in modern times that trend will naturally reverse. In a post-Malthusian world, courage is now anti-correlated with reproductive success. Modern wars are won by artillery from hundreds of miles away.
But women facing slavery are not calculating "I can still reproduce". See the play The Trojan Women, where their fates are discussed. Their children will be killed, and if they do have children by their new masters (not their new husbands) those children will always be second-class to the legitimate children, and probably also second-class in life, either slaves themselves, or even if freed, denied citizenship.
Hecuba was a queen, now she's just going to be an old woman servant in a foreign land. Her daughter is killed as a ritual sacrifice, her grandson is murdered:
The women won't be lolling around in a harem like some Orientalist fantasy, they'll be put to work. There's no reason to think their owners will be particularly fond of them, after all their main value is as booty to demonstrate the warrior's status. If he wants a woman to fuck, he can probably get one easily enough. The legitimate wife, the mistress of the house, will have a lot more control over the life of the slave, and if her husband is partial to the slave, so much the worse consequences for the slave woman. A slave woman who had been high status in her old life might have some protection, but the ordinary women won't even have that.
And of course, as societies became more evolved and civilised, the economic benefits of "don't kill all the men, enslave the boys and some of the men" were evident.
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