marycatelli (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
marycatelli) wrote2013-07-08 02:13 pm
marycatelli) wrote2013-07-08 02:13 pm
first comes marriage
Got thrown out of a pseudo-medieval-setting book recently. . . the heroine didn't want to get married. Her friend laughed at the very notion, but no, she didn't want to. . .
And this in a culture where she might as well have said that she didn't want to curtsey to the king.
The odd thing was that her mother kept trying to marry her off to unpleasant old widowers, and she probably couldn't have married without her mother's leave. Yet it kept returning to objecting to marriage. And not with any fear of childbirth.
Other books I've read had her fear domestic tyranny. None of them seem to doubt that avoiding matrimony was the way to pull that off. As if your mother didn't keep you under her thumb. As if your stepmother was not a real possibility. As if your sister-in-law couldn't be as much a pest as any husband. At least you would be mistress of your own household. (One reason why clergy fought tooth-and-nail against the law allowing you to marry your dead spouse's sibling was that a lot of unmarried Victorian women had to take refuge with their married sisters, and they did not want the master of the house to think she was sexually available.)
Nor do these heroines ever considering a living mother-in-law to be a liability. All right, they probably won't face Sleeping Beauty's mother-in-law, who, you may not know, tried to have her two children and Sleeping Beauty herself killed so she could eat them. Or the mother-in-law in Six Swans, who kidnapped her grandchildren at birth and smeared her daughter-in-law's mouth with blood so she could claim she killed and ate them. Still problems less drastic than that could be unpleasant.
To be sure, there were eras in which people would try to evade marriage. Women were less able to evade than men -- but then, a lot of pressure could be applied to men, too. Plato in his Laws discusses the proper way to enact laws, the better sort using both influence and force, by justifying as well as prescribing penalties.
That there should be a law requiring men to marry he takes for granted.
Even when there were no laws, there could be plenty of pressure.
And this in a culture where she might as well have said that she didn't want to curtsey to the king.
The odd thing was that her mother kept trying to marry her off to unpleasant old widowers, and she probably couldn't have married without her mother's leave. Yet it kept returning to objecting to marriage. And not with any fear of childbirth.
Other books I've read had her fear domestic tyranny. None of them seem to doubt that avoiding matrimony was the way to pull that off. As if your mother didn't keep you under her thumb. As if your stepmother was not a real possibility. As if your sister-in-law couldn't be as much a pest as any husband. At least you would be mistress of your own household. (One reason why clergy fought tooth-and-nail against the law allowing you to marry your dead spouse's sibling was that a lot of unmarried Victorian women had to take refuge with their married sisters, and they did not want the master of the house to think she was sexually available.)
Nor do these heroines ever considering a living mother-in-law to be a liability. All right, they probably won't face Sleeping Beauty's mother-in-law, who, you may not know, tried to have her two children and Sleeping Beauty herself killed so she could eat them. Or the mother-in-law in Six Swans, who kidnapped her grandchildren at birth and smeared her daughter-in-law's mouth with blood so she could claim she killed and ate them. Still problems less drastic than that could be unpleasant.
To be sure, there were eras in which people would try to evade marriage. Women were less able to evade than men -- but then, a lot of pressure could be applied to men, too. Plato in his Laws discusses the proper way to enact laws, the better sort using both influence and force, by justifying as well as prescribing penalties.
The laws relating to marriage naturally come first, and therefore we may begin with them. The simple law would be as follows:—A man shall marry between the ages of thirty and thirty-five; if he do not, he shall be fined or deprived of certain privileges. The double law would add the reason why: Forasmuch as man desires immortality, which he attains by the procreation of children, no one should deprive himself of his share in this good. He who obeys the law is blameless, but he who disobeys must not be a gainer by his celibacy; and therefore he shall pay a yearly fine, and shall not be allowed to receive honour from the young.
That there should be a law requiring men to marry he takes for granted.
Even when there were no laws, there could be plenty of pressure.
As fast as thou shalt wane, so fast thou growest
In one of thine, from that which thou departest;
And that fresh blood which youngly thou bestow'st
Thou mayst call thine when thou from youth convertest.
Herein lives wisdom, beauty and increase:
Without this, folly, age and cold decay:
If all were minded so, the times should cease
And threescore year would make the world away.
Let those whom Nature hath not made for store,
Harsh featureless and rude, barrenly perish:
Look, whom she best endow'd she gave the more;
Which bounteous gift thou shouldst in bounty cherish:
She carved thee for her seal, and meant thereby
Thou shouldst print more, not let that copy die.
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Ironicially, this effect has worked far more extremely upon the Great Russian population themselves. But yes -- and the amazing thing is that these women claim to "believe" in biological evolution -- but don't seem to grasp that their decisions are editing out their own contributions to the gene pool. Or that there's a problem with doing so.
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The Woman in White -- which interestingly was published right around the same time as The Origin of Species -- demonstrates kinship-based altruism in action. Whether or not there's anything sexual going on, the only two people in that triangle who are likely to have children are Frank and Laurie. Marian, however, is kinship-altruistically attached to Laura as her half-sister and will probably help take care of Laura's eventual offspring from Frank. She also strongly cares for Frank, with whom in law she will never have and in fact probably never have fruitful sexual intercours but who will help care for Marian's children. Interestingly (though I'm pretty sure Collins didn't have this in mind!) this situation works perfectly from the point-of-view of Dawkinsian selfish-genetic theory: Marian is unlikely to ever wed and hence can best secure her own genetic legacy through a strong emotional attachment to Laurie, and Laurie's chosen mate, since Frank and Laurie's children will have a good portion of the same genes that Marian carries in her own body.
And this was written by a man and in a time that knew little of biological evolution, and nothing of the details of genetic evolution (since genetics wouldn't be discovered for another half-century and DNA wouldn't be understood for another century. Yet Wilkie Collins demonstrated the dynamics of such an arrangement with such intensity that it's hard to tell the difference between the platonic and the romantic love in the arrangement; by contrast, the university-educated women you're discussing, who may have been taught the explicit governing theories, utterly miss the point.
Sad.
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To be sure, they could regard themselves as an elite for escaping evolution and treating it as a means to themselves, not themselves as a means to it.
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Where are you getting that about Russia? Because I know the exact opposite to be true - the “national liberation front” called “Women's Lib” was not inflicted upon the Soviet people (why would it be?) and even today, twenty years after the Big Oops, Russian women still don't buy into the forcibly-fashionable “We Must Be Men with Boobs” mindset. There are ex-pat websites all over the Internet rejoicing in the graceful beauty, good manners and family-oriented priorities they've found in the women of Russia. I saw it for myself in 1996, and when I got back here, the total revulsion I felt towards these vulgar, ignorant, shockingly rude пиндос суки I'd taken as normal was difficult to conceal.
Russian men, however, appear to already be the drunken abusive losers that militant feminism's destruction of the nuclear family is turning American men into, so there is that overlap, at least.
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One of the funny things about the Western Left is that it managed to so-idealize Russia yet never grasped how many of its own prejudices were inflicted upon them by the Russians specifically to render them ineffectual. For instance, at the same time as the Western Left was turning against atomic energy, civil defense and spaceflight, the Russians were boasting in their popular magazines about nuclear power plant, shelter and spacecraft programmes. The very theories of diplomacy and war which I learned as a young man, and which the Politically-Correct dismiss as "right wing propaganda" came, in large part, from the Soviet academies. In some narrow ways, the Soviets were highly rational thinkers: unfortunately for them, life isn't totally like a game of chess.
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It amused observers that the country which idealized collectivism produced only individual champions - chess grandmasters, Olympic athletes, scientists, &c., while their sports teams got blown off the field routinely. [It wasn't just that one hoopla-ed American hockey game they lost - the Soviet Red Army hockey team got routinely punished when they went up against the Canadian All-Stars. It was embarrassing.]
Yes, while the “nuclear freeze” movement as a whole was acting with the blessing and covert support of the Party, it turns out that the carefully-choreographed outcry against the neutron bomb was directly engineered by the KGB for their own purposes, as it was the one theatre-tactical nuclear weapon which would stop a Soviet armored blitzkrieg with the least collateral damage and thus, was most likely to be used.
I used to be quite angry at the “useful fools” of the Western Left - and this was before it turned out that Carl Sagan had cooked his data to produce the outcome he desired, that the Earth of his “nuclear winter” doom scare was a dry, featureless billiard ball because it had to be for what he was saying to happen. He was simply, literally a bad scientist, producing junk science for political purposes.
[Not the only such, of course; it's practically the defining characteristic of “Women's Studies,” the “academic discipline which is neither academic nor disciplined.” But that damage has taken longer to accomplish.]
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… And meanwhile, the Japanese field an Olympic basketball team every olympiad! Like that Jamaican bobsled team, no one would be more astounded than they if they ever actually succeeded, but they cheerfully try anyway despite losing out, well, as quickly as you'd expect. It's literally the thought that counts, and they're greatly respected for persevering!
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