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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   32405 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of January 23, 2023

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Christianity solves this. Arguably it was one of the greatest solutions to incel issues. And by limiting females to one male guaranteed one female for every male.

I don’t believe this is the solution he is searching for.

Monogamy is not a Christian invention. I'm not sure where people get this idea.

Maybe not a Christian invention (since the Romans also had monogamy), but it was Christian Popes that forced monogamy on non-Roman Europe, by threat of excommunication.

I don't believe non-monogamous systems were prevalent in pre-Christian Europe.

since the Romans also had monogamy

Did they? My understanding is that the Greco-Roman take was basically that a man could only marry one wife but he could essentially free access to slave and subordinate class women and males (this sort of system would also be prone to the inequity problem of polygamy - unless you have a broad class of exploited women to use as cheap relief for the lower class men*)

(This is also the status quo with Islam - except without the homosexuality. Thanks to Western Christian influence both polygamy and sex slavery have been suppressed but that's relatively recently)

Monogamy in the sense of the (alleged) Pauline epistles - husband of one wife - was a moral injunction for sexual monogamy on top of social monogamy and was thus substantially different.

* Which the Romans did. The price of sex at some points was distressingly low

My understanding is that the Greco-Roman take was basically that a man could only marry one wife but he could essentially free access to slave and subordinate class women and males (this sort of system would also be prone to the inequity problem of polygamy - unless you have a broad class of exploited women to use as cheap relief for the lower class men*)

In practice, this has been true in a lot of (most?) Christian societies, especially at the top of social hirearchy. "To wives and sweethearts... May they never meet."

Even in the Enthusiastic ferment of the Reformation, James VI still seems to have been able to have plenty of male lovers, and whether Shakespeare was intimate with men or not, his Sonnets certainly show that had a perfect language for seducing other men. Surely this is unsurprising: if Christianity has been an unreliable way of enforcing chastity among popes and bishops, it will naturally be an unreliable way of enforcing monogamy among other powerful men.

What Christianity has generally achieved is the practice of only allowing powerful men to marry one woman, but that was also practice in a lot of places, including Greece and Rome, IIRC.

In practice, this has been true in a lot of (most?) Christian societies, especially at the top of social hirearchy

It's true of every society that sex is not perfectly controlled (because it can't be - especially in premodern societies with very limited monitoring) and that the upper classes especially always have more routes to circumvent restrictions.

It doesn't mean that the change in standards wasn't substantial, or that it couldn't affect society broadly (in the case of the sex distribution problem the broad trend matters the most) and, sometimes, even the rich (as you point out: Henry VIII's circuitous route to getting rid of his wife would be hilarious to a Muslim sultan. Just take another?! Or set her aside!)

Even in the Enthusiastic ferment of the Reformation, James VI still seems to have been able to have plenty of male lovers

Case in point: this may be true but would anyone argue that the gains we've made in gay acceptance since then are unnecessary? If you agree not, then the general social taboos matter.

Case in point: this may be true but would anyone argue that the gains we've made in gay acceptance since then are unnecessary? If you agree not, then the general social taboos matter.

I'm fine with "Christian social taboos matter". I'm not fine with the suggestion that Christianity eliminated the dynamic described in the initial bit I quoted.

You don’t need to invent something to be the primary cultural conduit for a thing. Apple didn’t invent the smart phone.

Arguably it was one of the greatest solutions to incel issues. And by limiting females to one male guaranteed one female for every male.

You said this, which seems to imply it was a Christian 'solution.'

Has Christianity (or any religion, for that matter) ever prevented serial monogamy or cheating? Or guaranteed a fulfilling marriage?

A male loser always struggled for a partner, regardless of the cultural context. The biggest difference is that in the past surplus men were burned off through a variety of mechanisms, while contemporary society only has suicide as a release valve.

A male loser always struggled for a partner, regardless of the cultural context

Relative standard of 'loser', though.

My dad's in his mid-70s and comes from a family of 7 siblings from a working class Northern English setting. 5 sisters, all of whom were married before they were 20 due to essentially the non-viability of single life and the standard of 'good husband' being 'doesn't beat wife/kids too often, has an income, not a complete alcoholic'. Like a large part of the Incel issue is that there's a lot of men of reasonable means and unreasonable social awkwardness who'd make perfectly capable husbands and/or fathers who are kept out of contention due to 'the Ick'.

Has Christianity (or any religion, for that matter) ever prevented serial monogamy or cheating? Or guaranteed a fulfilling marriage?

Why would the standard be a guarantee? What other social institution is held to this standard?

Does feminism guarantee a fulfilling life for women?

Does welfare guarantee a better life?

Do traffic lights guarantee no car accidents?

Do police guarantee an absence of crime?

No, but these also don't solve these problems - they (allegedly) mitigate them.

Hm...this is actually relevant to your other response: Depends on the problem and the level we zoom in on; I think a reasonable observer could say that the ethnic Danes have "solved" mass illiteracy as an issue*, even if any individual may be illiterate.

You could argue that Christianity solved mass inceldom as an issue even if it didn't solve it for everyone... But was it an issue?

But was it an issue?

Unattached males are sort of a continual issue, like weeds, and there's evidence today that polygamous societies face challenges due to the sex distribution problem and the troublesome young men it leaves behind (it also goes in the other way; Mormon elders used to cast out younger men to monopolize females)

I guess it depends on whether you consider those sorts of situations as being the same species as the modern incel crisis we're talking about.

But Ancient Rome wasn't polygamous in the modern sense. As you suggested, rich men had access to multiple partners, just like in most Christian societies, but they could only marry one. This was also true of Ancient Greece, another key area for early Christianity. The Jews did practice polygamy, but it doesn't seem to have been common (this is debated) by the time of the early Christians.

It certainly helped that Christianity was compatible with the existing Greco-Roman monogamous approach, but Christianity didn't introduce it.

It certainly helped that Christianity was compatible with the existing Greco-Roman monogamous approach, but Christianity didn't introduce it.

I'm kind of sleepy and I feel like I'm going full circle from my original post so I've kind of lost the thread here on the bone of contention tbh. I never said it invented social monogamy, more that it did promulgate sexual monogamy as an ideal though. Men weren't expected to be monogamous or even necessarily exclusively focus on women* beforehand. That's why Paul uses a constructed phrase of something like "husband of one wife" or "one-man wife"

Islam has a more restrained version of the same thing; it is formally socially and sexually polygamous and men weren't expected to be monogamous. But it closes access to women who "your right hand does not possess".

* Though you'd avoid well off Roman boys and other high class people if you knew what was good for you.

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