i can’t remember who pointed it out to me, but whenever somebody tries the whole “[heinous social institution] wasn’t seen as bad back then, so we shouldn’t judge it by today’s standards”, they’re consistently justifying elite behavior as “normal” for the time by only considering the values and principles of elites at the time. i.e. “the power structure back then thought its crimes against humanity were ok, so who are we to judge in hindsight?”
like, they’ll say that slavery was legal and not seen as scandalous. of course, they mean it didn’t scandalize the courts, the aristocrats, the slaver owners, the overseers, or the capitalist investors. there were absolutely abolitionists in every age, but besides that, there were slaves. judging from the numbers of those punished, maimed, murdered, and the widespread effort to stop/pursue/capture runaways and general background fear of insurrection, it sure as shit seems like the slaves objected to slavery.
there are geographies of the slave states and islands where enslaved outnumbered free peoples by a huge margin, but for some crazy reason these people would never even consider that means MOST people in these places at these exact times were against slavery.
It’s what happens when you don’t understand history in terms of material interests and class struggle. “This is what the society practiced and none of the writing and art we’ve seen portrayed it negatively so none of them wanted anything different” vs. “this is how the society’s ruling class shaped its structure to support their interests and used their control over the means to propagate culture to legitimize that structure.”
I’ve been told Michael Parenti made that argument in his book on Roman history, although I haven’t read that book personally. I think it’s a pretty common leftist take when the subject comes up, to the point that it’s even penetrated into liberal historian spheres to an extent too.
That reminds me of a recent study that determined (for pre-agricultural populations I believe it was) that the median age for parents at the time of any given birth was something like ~22 for women and ~28-30 for men, so while there historically was an age gap it was very close with both parents generally still being in their 20s.
AFAIK that’s similar to what’s known about the medieval period in europe, too, with most marriages happening with both participants around or above 20, and political marriages involving children or young teens very explicitly not involving consummation, cohabitation, or even unsupervised contact until both parties were older teens or in their twenties, with exceptions to that being lurid scandals.
The whole libertarian fantasy of like “strong middle aged alpha male patriarchs” getting their pick of child brides is ahistorical nonsense in most contexts. Like I’m not gonna say that warlords or other elite fancy lads were never able to do heinous things with societal approval or that some cultures in some time periods didn’t have even worse standards than the bloodthirsty savages of medieval europe somehow with ideas like “adulthood starts at menarche” cropping up in some places, just that the whole libertarian idea of the past as like some pulpy sword and sorcery youth-fixated predator playground is complete nonsense.
No normal person has ever uttered the phrase “fertile women”
At the very least he said “women” instead of “females”
spoiler
He’s still a fuckin creep lmao
“This thing was common in the past so its OK to do now” is such a weird leap of logic.
OK, it was normal to throw piss out the window in the past too, should’ve we kept doing that?
God forbid human intelligence improves over time and realizes “Oh shit this sucks and is harmful, we should stop doing that.”
Not to mention that very young mothers tend to have more complications, which would make them less suitable it in times of high pregnancy mortality.
IIRC some people married younger in the past but if the bride was young, pregnancy wasn’t really attempted until she was a bit older.
OK, it was normal to throw piss out the window in the past too, should’ve we kept doing that?
andrew cuomo shouldn’t be able to walk anywhere in nyc without piss being dumped on him
These people sincerely think that the rules applied to for Monarchs would apply for them. Main character syndrome type of shit
It’s partly the result of popular media only featuring the stories of the privileged classes
According to this logic they should now seek older women because average lifespan of women is longer than men.
7·6 days agoI dont understand, could you expand?
They say in the past men seeked younger women because women often died during childbirth so that created an age gap. But now we have real and proven age gap in population where women live on average even 10 years longer than men in some countries, so by the same age gap logic they should seek older women.
Can say with 100% certainty that he hasn’t cracked open a single book since he was forced to do a book report in school and even then it was probably a 15-page picture book.
Even if this were true, the correct conclusion would be “reject tradition, embrace modernity”
I don’t want to think to hard about what books this person is reading about age difference not being a thing
Reading Lolita and listening to R Kelly
“fucking me may have literally killed you in the past” is an insane way to start an argument about why you should fuck the person.
if you aren’t a sex pest you’re actually uneducated
Um akshually it’s called ephebophilia and its how we used to find a mate, but you can’t do that now because of woke.
We need a bot that says this every time someone says “libertarian”.
Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Make it stop
institutionalized
Eww
