To End Abuse of Women? Act Like a Son of a Bitch
Human beings pride themselves in being the most intelligent, the most advanced, the most everything, of all the animals.
In one very important area evolution has left homo sapiens light years behind the canine. And no one has any explanation.
Abuse of females is common throughout the globe involving enormous numbers of victims of rape, assault, domestic violence, you name it. The UN says that 35 percent of women world-wide have been victims of violence and in some countries this goes up to 70%.
It wasn’t always like this, especially in ancient times
I recall in my home in Canada when I was quite young my father started a discussion on this topic and he told me, “You must never hit a girl.” I didn’t think that was right because we lived in a rough neighborhood and some of the bigger girls were tougher than the boys. How are you going to defend yourself? For some reason, my mother later broached that subject as well and she said, “You must never hit a girl in the stomach.” I thought that was a much more reasonable instruction, but in the end I did follow my father’s advice all my life.
In ancient Egypt, the law was draconian. If a man struck a married woman, they cut off his hand. Since everyone got married early that really covered all adult females. On the other side, you can’t suspend the basic law of nature that everyone has the right to defend himself regardless of who the attacker is, so I think justifiable self-defence would probably have saved a guy his hand.
I am by no means a religious scholar, but I do not think there is a law in Torah against a man striking a woman. Correct me if I am wrong. You promulgate laws because people are doing something unacceptable to the society so maybe because their culture was Egyptian, abuse of women just never happened so there was no need for a law.
In the two societies where they trained women in war, Sparta and Arabia, no man would strike a woman. In Sparta, where they had a strong sense of fair play, men knew, because of their larger size, they could win any argument with a woman. Since that was an unfair advantage, they never argued.
Robert Briffault: “The position of women in … Sparta differed completely from their condition in other parts of Greece. They were, says Plutarch, ‘the only women in Greece who ruled over their men.”
But in Arabia it was because a man knew if he struck a woman, as soon as he turned around, he would get a knife in the back.
The Spartan women were trained primarily for homeland defence but Arabian women from earliest times rode with the men into battle and even 170 years after they came out of the peninsula, women’s cavalry were riding against the Byzantines. The amazing thing was that women rose through the ranks and Arabia produced one warrior queen after another. The best one known in Israel was the Queen of Sheba. The Romans were astounded by Arabia. Here he is talking about the south but this was true everywhere.
Claudian: “The female sex rules among the Sabeans (southern Arabs) and a large proportion of the barbarians is under the armed domination of queens.”
(The law in the Koran endorsing wife-beating reflects Athenian culture. That was the one society where women had no rights at all. They were treated like chattel, veiled and cloistered. Aristotle set the tone. He declared that women are inferior beings. The final version of the Koran was written in Greek lands after they had been there for a quite some time and assimilated Greek culture where wife-beating was common and so was women wearing the veil, unknown in Arabia.)
The bottom line is that in ancient times societies where women were not abused at all were frequently encountered whether they were trained in war or not. We’ve gone backwards since then right into the caves.
Let’s go to the dogs and see how things work in a species advanced far beyond humanity. All male dogs are sons of bitches but they don’t act like it.
These are experts on the subject.
Wolfgang Lederer: “Aggressiveness, it would seem, is a desirable quality in a male, but it is to be directed against other males, not against the female. Again, looking for what is ‘natural’ (what occurs in nature), we may note that there are, in animals, a whole series of species in which, under normal, that is, nonpathological, conditions, a male never seriously attacks a female.”
Konrad Lorenz: “This is true of our domestic dogs and of the wolf too. I would not trust a dog that bit bitches and would warn his owner to be most careful, especially if there were children in the house, for something must be out of order with the social inhibitions of such an animal. When I once tried to mate my bitch Stasi, a Chow-Alsatian hybrid, to a huge Siberian wolf, she became jealous because I played with him and she attacked him in real earnest. He did nothing except present his big gray shoulder to the snapping red fury, in order to receive her bites in a less vulnerable place.”
“Even when these attacks are meant seriously … ritual demands of the male that he should not bite back but that he should preserve a ‘friendly face’ with ears laid back high on the head and the skin of the forehead smooth across the temples. Keep smiling!”
Wolfgang Lederer: “Are we to model our behavior on dogs?
“I do not cite the dog as model, or as proof of anything. I merely wish to point to the possibility, or likelihood that a certain gentle type of behavior of man toward woman is more solidly rooted in biology than any brutish aggression toward her. In fact, I would be inclined to say of a man what Lorenz says of a dog that if he strikes a female under any but the most pathological conditions, there must be something wrong with him, and he should not be trusted.”
I think they should lock up abusers of women not in prisons but in kennels with dogs. There they might learn how to behave with females which they will never learn in prisons.