My wife, the stark raving feministFollow

That's a little late in the game, you think? Teach the person to drive the car only after they drove across the country on a month long road trip?


SpoilerI am assuming you meant "when you are born" instead of "when you give birth"?

Those people are fun to **** with on Twitter, if you ever get bored. I especially recommend ******** with Anti-Vaxxers.

As a general rule, either because of societal conditioning or because of biology, the default reaction for human beings seems to be to care for and protect girls, sometimes to the detriment of boys. I recall hearing about one study where it took a significant time longer for parents to respond to the cries of baby boys than baby girls, for instance.

Regardless of the cause, however, this has benefits and detriments for both. In the case you're describing, the boy's agency is more respected across the culture, which is fine if we're talking about two same age kids experimenting. The flipside is that since boys are attributed more agency, female perpetrators have an easier time victimizing boys and getting away with it because "obviously he must have chosen it", so the same boys are less protected. This can go to silly levels.

The internet wouldn't be the same without them though.

Yeah. It's even a bit more involved than that. It's basically saying that if she's taken "as a wife", she can't just be kicked to the curb if the guy dislikes her, or marries another woman (or if he buys her for his son, and he does either of those things). If she's never taken that way, and is just treated as any servant, then the same rules apply to her that apply to men.

I suppose you could make a case for sexism given that it's assumed that only women would be purchased to be wives, while men would not be purchased to be husbands, but again, that rests more on the social reality of men as providers and women as child bearers which existed for most of human history. Why would any woman of sufficient means to buy a slave take a man for a husband who's family was so poor they had to sell him into slavery? Assumed gender roles? Absolutely. But probably correct like 99.9999999999% of the time back then.

They would buy them so they could commit heinous sex acts without the authorities getting involved, and to do things they didn't want to handle themselves, same as everyone else.

I was being overly broad in that one statement. I would hope that in the context of my entire post, you got that I was speaking more of women staying "near the hearth/home/village/etc", while men were more likely to do things like fighting in the military, long distance merchant trading, or any other work that required traveling away from the home for days or months at a time, and a higher risk to life and limb.

I absolutely agree with you that most of our modern perception of women's roles in society is based almost exclusively on the relatively brief Victorian era, and is not at all accurate in broader historical terms. I didn't want to raise that point because it seems like whenever I do, it raises people's hackles as a perceived attack on modern feminism. And frankly, I didn't want to get too far off the original point, which was about roles that would have been present in ancient Hebrew tribes and thus be represented in the stories told in the old testament. But yeah, counter to what Lolgaxe implied, there have been many women of wealth and power throughout history. And women not of wealth and power worked the fields, and helped build homes, fired pots in kilns, laid brick, worked in numerous trades, and otherwise contributed in the workforces of the societies they lived in. They didn't all sit at home, looking pretty, bearing children, cooking meals, serving tea, but otherwise staying out of the way of the menfolk who did all the "important business".

There's a whole book of the OT named after a woman who disproves what you're saying. Not as a general rule, of course, but you can't claim the no financially independent women existed *at all* in the OT. Because that's simply not true. And aside from Ruth, there were presumably quite a number of women who were widows who were in charge of the family finances and would have owned property, run businesses, etc. Because there existed a whole set of rules for exactly that scenario.

As with most things in history, there's the rules as they were written, and then there's the realities of how the society actually worked. And they're rarely so clearly defined.

And? I'll note that you didn't actually say that upon reading Ruth one would arrive at any different conclusion than that some women did in fact wield power and wealth in the culture in question. Did you mean to imply that? Because if so, then perhaps you should take your own advice.

Probably hoped Ruth was one of the longer books written metaphorically.

Ester also starts with a woman being disowned because she wouldn't strip in front of strangers.

What? Naomi told her every step of the way how to get Boaz to marry her. And, frankly, started the ball rolling because she thought Ruth should go get married already.

Seriously, just stop talking about Ruth

I forgot all about the Book of Deborah.

Edited, May 3rd 2016 9:36pm by Jophiel

Wow. You're right. That's totally not an example of women exerting any control over their own lives in the OT.



Er... If that's how you choose to interpret things. Or, you could make the more reasonable assumption that I was thinking of the female judge, couldn't remember her name, but did remember the book of Ruth, and mixed them up. Cause that totally make more sense, right?

Either way, the point is that the idea that no women in the OT ever had any power or influence is absurd. Of course they did. Just as they did in the Roman Empire, and in both Ancient and Classical Greece, and frankly in pretty much every male dominated society. They just may not have been as openly reported by said male dominated societies as one might think (or perhaps exactly as much as one might think).