Female Property

I think we've all heard some version of the fairy tale where the king keeps his daughter locked in a tower until a suitable prince can "win" her hand. Such, and similar, fairy tales depict the relationship between men, women and property throughout most of human history.

There's a distinct pattern of inequality between men and women that repeats itself in all nations and most of human history. Women have historically been treated as property, first of the father and later of their husband. There's no romanticizing or covering up this fact. The locking up of women by their fathers was to protect their virginity, not for the sake of the daughter, but to ensure a high enough price for the father when it came time to sell the daughter to the highest bidder; that's the historical meaning and function of the dowry. Once the woman is sold, she's locked up by her husband, and when she has to leave the house, she can do so only in clothes that remove as much as possible any features that could be attractive to other men; the veil is just a woman's portable prison.

The explanation that a man merely protective of their daughters and wive for their sake is not borne out in history. Polygamous relationships and marriages have been common in vast stretches of our past, and even our present in some places and cases. Men do compete, not for the attention and approval of women, but among each other for status, and the number and beauty of their female companions are vital in signalling that status. When the princess is given away to, or is won by the prince from a far away opposing kingdom in books, movies and fairy tales, no one ever considers what it means for the poor young woman who has to sleep in the bed of the enemy, far away from the safety of home. The treatment of women as men's property has been normalized through thousands of years of history.

We however, live in a age of women's liberation, and it's about bloody time. For most of our history, women have been depending on men for nearly everything. "A women cannot own property because she is property," is a phrase Linda Scott heard in Africa, and it inspired her to investigate the origins of the worldwide inequality between men and women. Her years long research on the subject culminated in her 2020 book "The Double X Economy: The Epic Potential of Empowering Women". She also has her own website, on which she answers the question "Did Men Own Women?": I recommend you read that article to get some background against which to watch the below linked video.

Jordan Peterson is at it again. He recently interviewed journalist Louise Perry on the Daily Wire. Perry asserted that a positive by-product of the sexual revolution is that rape became less of a property crime and more of a crime against a person. That person can be of any sex or gender of course, but it's still mostly women that are the victim of rape or attempted rape. Note that sex without consent within a marriage was not seen as rape until the second half of the 20th century in most countries. The traditional definition of rape in the United States is the forced sexual intercourse by a male with a "female not his wife", making it clear that the statutes did not apply to married couples, and it took until 1993 for marital rape to be considered a crime in all 50 states. The man's right to have sex with his wive is an obvious remnant of the historical view that women are men's property.

Anyway, Peterson, as a true old-fashioned conservative pushed back against Louise Perry's assertion that it's a good thing for rape to be considered a crime against a person rather than a property crime. I'm not going to spoil it here; just watch the video.

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