(no subject)

[verbminx]

Hey hey, there are still something like 18 out of 40 unanswered in the SONG LYRIC GAME.

I had a dark night. I have not been sleeping enough over the last few days, and have reached the point where things crawl in my peripheral vision. Then some link I clicked last night wound up being on Crime Library. It's a great website, if sometimes sensationalistic; if you are of a certain disposition, there's a lot of reading material there. (And no, that disposition need not necessarily be the kind that collects Serial Killer trading cards; it might just be the kind that likes to watch CSI, Cold Case, Law and Order, and Crossing Jordan.) I just managed to get terribly spooked because of my lack of sleep.

Reading Marilyn Yalom's Birth of the Chess Queen and thinking about medieval sexual politics. They aren't what you might think if you haven't studied the period, because people forget that most of Europe - England especially - didn't use precepts of "Roman law" (women are chattel etc) until around 1500. The average medieval woman, especially one with money, would have had greater potential for relative independence than a woman living in similar economic and social circumstances in, say, 1690 or 1850. But something has been on my mind lately, I think since finishing 1215: The Year of Magna Carta.

There was a medieval medical belief that in order to conceive a child, a woman had to have an orgasm during the conceptual sex act. This is all well and good, and in a culture desirous of producing many heirs could have nice side effects for the ladies involved. However, before applauding this, I think it's good to examine the obvious, logical flip side that popular history books don't mention: men who didn't want their partners to get pregnant probably intentionally neglected the women's pleasure, something akin to treating them like meat tubes. Worse, men who had treated their partners like this could then accuse the women of infidelity if they conceived, because "hey, I know I didn't get you off."

And... meh, my head swims imagining all the trouble this could have caused.

Comments

[easilyirritable.livejournal.com]

OMG, THANK YOU. You've just given me an idea for my humanities paper proposal which is due today. THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU.

Do you have any other books about the status of women in medieval times that you could share with me?

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

I'd take a stroll around Amazon and just look for books about medieval women.

I don't know if they contain exactly this information, but other books to check out would be the medieval volume of Duby and Arries' "History of Private Live" series (the whole series is really interesting), and Reay Tannahill's "Sex In History". I may be off about the authors' last names by a little, but the book titles are correct.

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

ps - re STATUS of women, also try reading up about christine de pisan.

[ayun.livejournal.com]

Natalie Angier wrote a bit about this belief in An Intimage Geography, which is a fun read, and full of interesting facts about hyena clits and the like. She pointed out another drawback - a woman who was raped and became pregnant had obviously enjoyed the act, so no harm, no foul.

[aranel.livejournal.com]

And could lead to faking by women who didn't want to have any more kids, maybe...

I've read this before, and I always wonder how many people really believed it to be infallible, even if it was considered a valid medical fact. The same way some people now don't really believe that tanning booths and smoking cause cancer, no matter how many times their doctor tells them. Or, for that matter, the fact that we "know" you won't get pregnant if you use birth control, and yet everybody also knows there's a chance you will. I guess in a larger sense I'm wondering what impact not having the scientific method or statistics or probability had on the strength which with people held beliefs about things being possible/impossible.

It could explain a lot about Leontes' irrational jealousy in The Winter's Tale, though. I wonder if anyone's thought of that before?

[verbminx.livejournal.com]

Another issue is that the only way we could know this is if it was being written down, and the only people who were writing much down were monks and clerks in large households. You've gotta assume that at least some of the monks didn't know what they were talking about... though there were a LOT of married priests at the time. Passing on rumors, something like "red M&Ms give you cancer"? Or folk beliefs - stuff more like "jumping up and down after sex prevents pregnancy"? What exactly WERE they writing down? Where did they hear it? I'm pretty sure this tidbit must occur in more than one source, though.