men inferior in guile and manipulation of paternity
Despite the development of cheap, accurate genetic paternity testing, most men lack this high-quality knowledge about who are their biological children. Moreover, important legal rulings are rendered without regard for accurate paternity knowledge. These rulings are part of public actions that deliberately obscure true paternity knowledge. Biological paternity is fundamental to human evolution. Why do so many men continue to remain ignorant of their true biological paternity? The answer may be that men are inferior to women in communicative sophistication, emotional resourcefulness, and guile.
While men’s inferiority is of relatively little public concern today, it has attracted considerable attention in ancient and medieval literature. Consider, for example, a story included in a thirteenth-century European work:
Guy found his wife in their bedroom underneath Simon, who was humping her on the edge of the bed. After that piece of work, Guy was furious. He scolded and criticized his wife, saying, “Get out, wicked woman, may God destroy you, body and soul, for your wickedness is now only too clear.” But the woman quickly contradicted her husband, replying, “Are you trying to kill me? What’s wrong with you?” And the martyr said to her, “I want a divorce.” “Uuah,” she said “why do you dare to speak such evil words to me? My father was once deluded into thinking that what you accuse me of now happened to him. He imagined that he had seen my mother behaving in a wifely manner underneath another man, but his eyesight was defective. I know that my mother died as a result of such an incident, and just so also my other female ancestors. Dear husband, tell me, where did you get such a crazy idea? Why comes this melancholy mood? Dear friend, do you want to destroy me? Do you want me to live, or to die having done no wrong and without reason? You would be a wicked man indeed. Tell me, what do you want me to do?” The poor wretch wept as he embraced her and said to her, “Sweet sister, I want you to live. If you were ever to be snatched away before a century of life, as your mother was, your death would be for me a blow too bitter.” She replied. “It is therefore necessary that you acknowledge publicly that I was never guilty of this doing, or I will die, and that’s no fable. Go, say that it was a lie and that you dreamed it, for in this way my female ancestors expired.” Against this argument the husband could find no defense, and without further delay, in the presence of their female neighbors, gossips, and cousins, he repented fully and swore that he had lied and had wrongly accused her. [1]
In this story, the wife and husband interact with remarkable emotional realism and depth of personal feeling. Nonetheless, modern commentators treat such literature as contemptuous or hateful. They also tend to emphasize the straight-forward moral teaching: a man should not breach a controversial issue and threaten his wife with death.[2]
Other literature similarly underscores men’s inferiority in wit and subtlety. A story included in another thirteenth-century work describes a husband deeply worried about his wife’s sexual fidelity. The husband purchased a caged parrot. After the husband went out to work, his wife’s lover arrived. The wife and the lover had sex. Returning later, the husband ordered the parrot to tell what he saw. The parrot told of the wife’s infidelity. The husband, furious, left to spend the night elsewhere. After nightfall, the wife put the parrot on the floor and poured water over its cage like rain. With a lamp and a mirror the wife mimicked lightening, and with a grindstone, thunder. All night long she continued to make weather. In the morning, the husband returned to the home to get a further report from the parrot. The parrot stated that he couldn’t see or hear anything because of the night-long storm. The husband, with direct, contrary knowledge of that night’s weather, denounced the parrot as a liar. The husband apologized to his wife for accusing her of infidelity and ordered the parrot to be killed.[3] The husband’s guile thus fell far short of his wife’s.
The literature presents even two men as not equal in guile to one woman. In this account, a wife had as a lover a high official in the king’s court. The official-master sent a male servant to the wife to check if she was ready for a tryst. The wife, finding the servant handsome, propositioned him. They then had sex. Wondering what was delaying his servant’s report, the master himself came to the house. The servant responded to the knock on the door with panic. The wife calmly commanded him to hide in the alcove. Just as the master entered, the husband arrived at the door. The wife then commanded the master to draw his sword and threaten her. After the husband entered and saw the master with drawn sword, the master left quickly. The wife explained to her husband:
The young man in that alcove came fleeing in terror from him, and finding the door unlocked, he came in crying for help, with his master on his heels ready to murder him. He ran to me, and I stood in front of him and prevented the man from killing him. That is why the man left here insulting and threatening me. But as God is my witness, he didn’t frighten me! [4]
The wife thus described herself as a strong, independent woman. After checking at the door that the master was gone, the husband summoned the servant from the alcove and told him that he could now safely leave. The husband praised his wife:
You have played the role of a fine woman and you have done well, and I am very grateful to you. [5]
Just so throughout history have many good men encouraged and empowered women. Much progress has been made, but much work remains to be done.
Achieving gender equality requires giving men true knowledge about who are their biological children. Cheap, highly accurate genetic testing technology is readily available. The main obstacle to its use is men’s inferiority in guile and manipulation.[6] To encourage and empower men, good women should advocate for paternity testing as a default procedure prior to including a man’s name on a child’s birth certificate.
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Read more:
- men to blame for lack of gender equality in love
- addressing men’s mortality with guile
- Charlie Chaplin’s acting skills not sufficient to avoid paternity persecution
Notes:
[1] Jean le Fèvre, Les Lamentations de Matheolus, Bk. I, ll. 850-899, my translation from Old French, benefiting from Karen Pratt’s translation, Blamires, Pratt & Williams (1992) pp. 179-180. Le Fèvre’s work, written in 1371-2, is an adaptation of Matheolus’s Latin work Liber lamentationum Matheoluli, written between 1295 and 1301. Both source texts are in Van Hamel (1892) pp. 27-8. Matheolus is also known as Mathieu of Boulogne, and by the deprecatory names Matheolulus (a self-description) and Matthew the Bigamist (he married a widow). Le Fèvre retained the plot, but elaborated upon the husband and wife’s interaction in translating Matheolus’s text. Here’s my English translation of Matheolus’s Latin text:
Guy sees his wife in their bedroom having sex with Simon. After that deed, Guy exclaims, “Get out, you blatant whore!” Interrupting her husband, the wife says: “My dear sweetie, what’s the problem?” He recounts what he saw. And she says: “Husband! You want a divorce? Uuah! So it happened to my father before the death of my mother; in this way my forefathers caused the death of all my foremothers, who were innocent. What should I do? Husband, what do you say to me? Behold, I will die soon.” Pro, con, the husband ponders; But in the end he believes his wife and begins to cry. His wife says, “My dear, do you want me to live?” — “I want you to live, sweet, loyal and good sister; your death would be too bitter oh! for me to see.” “Therefore, it is necessary for you to say that you were entirely lying about this matter, or I will die soon, just as my mothers were made to die.” Calling together the neighbors, the husband swears that he lied.
A very similar story exists in Old French among the fables of Marie de France. Marie de France’s story ends:
And so, forewarned all men should be
That women know good strategy.
They’ve more art in their craft and lies
Than all the devil can devise.
Fables, n. 45 (“The Peasant Who Saw His Wife With Her Lover”), trans. Spiegel (1987) p. 139. Many similar codas occur in stories within the Book of Sindibad / Seven Sages corpus. Id., p. 3, suggests that Marie de France is “one of the greatest writers of the Middle Ages and one of the greatest of all women writers.” Not surprisingly, Marie de France recognized men’s inferiority in guile.
Marie de France’s concern for men’s inferiority in guile isn’t limited to one fable. In Marie de France’s fable collection, the fable immediately preceding “The Peasant Who Saw His Wife With Her Lover” is “The Peasant Who Saw Another With His Wife.” In the latter fable, a wife convinces her husband to doubt the truth of his sight of her in their marital bed with another man. The wife shows her husband his reflection in vat of water, urges him to recognize that he is not actually in the vat of water and that, likewise, she was not actually in bed with another man. The husband defers to his wife’s insight and repudiates his sight. The fable concludes:
Each one has best believe and know
Whatever his wife says, is so!
And not believe what false eyes see;
Their vision can be trickery!
Fables, n. 44, trans. Spiegel (1987) p. 137. Matheolus, apparently following in Latin the lead of Marie de France in Old French, similarly groups with the above story another that concludes:
So the sight he sees shows non-sight
Thus is proved that woman can contradict seeing.Sic visus visum nonvisum testificatur;
Ergo redargutus visus muliere probatur.
Liber lamentationum Matheoluli, Bk. 1, ll. 419-420, Van Hamel (1892), v. 1, p. 29. The large scholarly literature on Marie de France seems not to have fully seen her contribution to Matheolus’s Lamentations.
[2] This approach, for example, pervades the collection, organization, and comments in Blamires, Pratt & Williams (1992). For readers with understanding, the editors thus add humor to a rather tiresome collection of texts.
[3] This story is part of the Book of Sindibad / Seven Sages corpus. Within that corpus, it is known as Avis. The summary above is based mainly on the English translation in Keller (1956) pp. 22-24, which is based on a medieval Spanish manuscript dated 1253.
[4] Translated id. pp. 25-6. This story, also from the Book of Sindibad / Seven Sages corpus, is known within that corpus as Gladius. Early Hebrew manuscripts in the Book of Sindibad / Seven Sages corpus include a story, not found elsewhere in that corpus, of men’s susceptibility to guile. A merchant who had a beautiful wife went on a business trip to a far-off land. While her husband was gone, the wife had trysts with her lover. Upon returning, the husband noticed on the walls of the room “phlegm” (probably meaning watery signs of heavy breathing). He accused his wife of adultery. She denied the affair and declared, “no man has touched me even with his little finger.” When her husband didn’t believe her denial, the wife said she would take an oath on the matter. She arranged to have her unrecognized lover spill the contents of a pot in front of her as she walked to take the oath. She then slipped and fell. Her lover helped her up. The wife then swore on the Holy Scroll, “no man has touched me except the man who helped me when I fell in the mud.” The husband thus believed the wife’s denial of adultery. The story, in Hebrew and English translation, is available in Epstein (1967) pp. 251-7. A similar story occurs in the twelfth-century French romance of Tristan and Iseult. Id. pp. 22-3.
[5] Keller (1956) p. 26. Blamires, Pratt & Williams (1992), p. 130, declares that such fabliaux express “admiration for the ingenuity shown by the women in circumventing sexually unattractive, possessive husbands.” That view shows insufficient appreciation for men’s inferiority and women’s guile. Women deserve more credit. Under current regulation of paternity, women can not only circumvent sexually unattractive, possessive husbands, but actually have the force of the state compel the husband to make monthly payments to support his wife’s lover’s child. Not surprisingly given the book’s failure to appreciate fully women, a review of Blamires, Pratt & Williams (1992) declared:
a feminist perspective does not always inform the editorial commentary, a consideration for faculty using the text in women’s studies courses. … Given this unevenness in perspective, a teacher using the book as a classroom text might want to prepare for additional feminist analysis.
Newlyn (1994) p. 142.
[6] Another medieval text declares that woman’s ingenuity surpasses men’s acuity. From the fabliau “Le Chevalier a la Corbeille” (The Knight of the Basket), ll. 15-16, surviving in Old French in the manuscript Harley 2253 (copied in 1340). The fabliau is available in Old French and English translation in Revard (2005) pp. 117-123. New technology that allows men to see better the truth about paternity is of no value if personal and social forces prevent it from being used. Technology is not a good substitute for guile.
References:
Blamires, Alcuin, Karen Pratt, and C. William Marx. 1992. Men impugned, woman defamed and woman defended: an anthology of Medieval texts. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Epstein, Morris. 1967. Tales of Sendebar. An edition and translation of the Hebrew version of the Seven sages, based on unpublished manuscripts. Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America.
Keller, John Esten. 1956. The book of the wiles of women. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Newlyn, Evelyn S. 1994. “Review. Woman Defamed and Woman Defended: An Anthology of Medieval Texts.” NWSA Journal {National Women Studies Association Journal}. 6 (1): 141-144.
Revard, Carter. 2005. “Four Fabliaux from London, British Library MS Harley 2253, Translated Into English Verse.” The Chaucer Review. 40 (2): 111-140.
Spiegel, Harriet, trans. 1987. Marie de France. Fables. Toronto: University of Toronto Press.
Van Hamel, Anton Gerard, ed. and trans. 1892. Mathéolus, Jean Le Fèvre. Les lamentations de Mathéolus et le livre de leesce de Jehan Le Fèvre, de Ressons: poèmes français du XIVe siècle. Paris: Bouillon.
Tagged: paternity
gladiators’ sexual allure in real understanding
Like rogues, thugs, and bad boys today, Roman gladiators were highly attractive to women. Within the old gladiatorial barracks in Pompeii have survived graffiti indicating gladiators’ sexual allure. Among the graffiti are these:
- Celadus, heartthrob of the girls
- Celadus, the girls’ idol
- Cresces, the net-man, puts right the night-time girls, the morning girls and all the others [1]
According to a leading scholar of ordinary life in ancient Rome, these graffiti are:
simultaneously bloke-ish boasting and the poignant fantasies of a couple of young fighters, who faced a short life and may never have got their girl, or at least not for long. [2]
Only an academic with no memory of masculine men could interpret as “bloke-ish boasting … poignant fantasies” a gladiator writing “Celadus, heartthrob of the girls” or “Celadus, the girls’ idol.”[3] Men typically don’t boast or fantasize about being the center of attention. Men’s interests are usually more act-oriented. Moreover, much closely observed and carefully analyzed experience indicates that men who act like they are not desperate for sex or for women’s attention are more successful in getting just that. Scholars of the new applied game theory call this “aloof asshole game.”
Rather than representing Celadus’s boasting or fantasies, the Celadus heartthrob/idol graffiti more probably represent another gladiator taunting Celadus. Men’s sexual allure to women depends strongly on their status among men. Describing Celadus as the hearthrob/idol of the girls implicitly questions his status among men. One aspect of that status challenge might be homosexual, but it’s not necessarily so. Describing Celadus as the hearthrob/idol of the girls also puts pressure on Celadus’s ability to run aloof asshole game. Pretending that you aren’t eager to have sex with girls requires more guile when your brothers-in-arms are taunting you about how much girls adore you.
The richly jeweled woman found within the volcanic ash that smothered the Pompeii gladiator barracks most probably is further evidence of gladiators’ sexual allure. No one plausibly believes that the rich woman was in the gladiator barracks having sex with a gladiator during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Seventeen other persons and a couple of dogs were also in the small room during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Knowing that isn’t necessary to surmise that the rich woman and a gladiator weren’t having sex during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. Nonetheless, a Cambridge don who has a prominent newspaper column (a symbolic superpower!) authoritatively declared:
the myth of the upmarket Pompeian lady being caught red-handed in the gladiatorial barracks, with her gladiator lover, is just that: a myth [4]
That’s a thought-suffocating myth of a myth. Do you believe that during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius a richly jeweled woman took shelter in a gladiator barrack with strong, dangerous men that she did not know? That’s possible. But reason, feeling, and experience tend to suggest otherwise. During the terror that Mt. Vesuvius rained down on Pompeii, the rich woman probably sought out the strong arms of her gladiator-lover.
Subvert the power of myth-makers with real understanding and your own creative thinking.
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Read more:
- marginal men’s graffiti in the Roman Empire
- Henry Mayhew laments women’s choices of lovers
- appreciating ancient Roman pantomime
Notes:
[1] Reported in the above English translation in Beard (2008) p. 275.
[2] Id. If a male scholar put forward such an obtuse, tendentious, and belittling interpretation of a woman’s writing, he would be condemned as a misogynist and sternly instructed that only women can justly celebrate women’s voices.
[3] The third graffito probably isn’t a fantasy. It seems to reflect a man’s sense of instrumental achievement. That mode of personal valuation contributes to men’s relative disposability. Other Roman graffiti also display that sense of men’s sexual achievement, with one rare note of protest.
[4] Id. The remains of the persons in the gladiators’ barracks were found in the eighteenth century and subsequently lost. Hence scientific testing on the age and sex of the skeletons cannot now be performed. The reports indicate that only one richly jeweled woman was found in the room. Roman literature now moralistically disparaged humorously described gladiators’ sexual allure:
Eppia, the senator’s wife, ran off with a gladiator … And what were the youthful charms which captivated Eppia? What did she see in him to allow herself to be called “a she-Gladiator”? Her dear Sergius had already begun to shave; a wounded arm gave promise of a discharge, and there were sundry deformities in his face: a scar caused by the helmet, a huge wen upon his nose, a nasty humour always trickling from his eye. But then he was a gladiator! It is this that transforms these fellows into Hyacinths! it was this that she preferred to children and to country, to sister and to husband. What these women love is the sword: had this same Sergius received his discharge, he would have been no better than a Veiento.
Juvenal, Satires 6, ll. 103-113. Another contemporary writer sarcastically refers to “those most loving gladiators, to whom men prostitute their souls, women too their bodies.” Tertullian, The Shows (De Spectaculis) Ch. 22.
[image] Guardian figure, Japan, Kamakura period (1185–1333), Wood, 226.4 cm. (F1949.20), 233.5 cm. (F1949.21), Freer Gallery of Art, Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C.
Reference:
Beard, Mary. 2008. The fires of Vesuvius: Pompeii lost and found. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.
Ōtomo no Kuronushi, immortal of poetry
In Japan in 905, a highly influential poetry anthology established six immortals of poetry. Ōtomo no Kuronushi, a ninth-century Japanese poet, was among those six immortal poets.[1]
Kuronushi lasted as an immortal of poetry less than two centuries. A highly influential Japanese literary work from the early eleventh century did not include Kuronushi in a list of thirty-six immortals of poetry. Moreover, a poem by Kuronushi wasn’t included in an anthology of one hundred classical Japanese poems, each from a different classical Japanese poet, written about 1235.[2]
While Kuronushi lived into the 890s, his poetic reputation was under threat even by 905. A compiler of the poetry anthology that came to define the six immortals of poetry criticized Kuronushi for being vulgar and provincial. By the thirteenth century his poetry was described as “like a mountaineer with a load of wood on his back stopping to rest under cherry blossoms.”[3] Criticism of Kuronushi was remembered as his immortal status died.
Among the six immortal poets, Kuronushi was not the only one to be forgotten. Three others mentioned with him in 905 also faded in literary status. But those other immortals did not disappear from the lists of immortals as quickly as Kuronushi did. Ōtomo no Kuronushi has a distinguished position among the six immortals of poetry.[4]
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Read more:
- long-run development of the poetry industry
- the misery of being a poet
- bitterness about communications industry change
Notes:
[1] The six immortals of poetry (rokkasen) were listed in the Kokin Wakashu. Ōtomo no Kuronushi had large landholdings in Otsu in the Omni province of Japan. He was from the influential provincial Ōtomo family that had connections with the Japanese imperial court going back at least to the seventh century.
[2] The thirty-six immortal poets come from Fujiwara no Kinto’s “Anthology of Poems by the Thirty-Six Poets” (Sanjūrokkasen). The hundred poets are from Fujiwara no Teika’s Ogura Hayakunin Isshu.
[3] Ki no Tsurayuki, from his introduction to the Kokin Wakashu. Fujiwara (1967) p. 17.
[4] Among the six immortal poets recognized in Japan in 905, two have had a large, enduring effect on Japanese literary imagination. These two are Ono no Komachi and Ariwara no Narihira. Komachi wrote complex erotic poems. She is remembered as a beautiful woman who had many love affairs before she became old and ugly. Narihira was a grandson of the Japanese emperor and also had many love affairs. He is thought to have been a primary contributor to the Tales of Ise and to have served as a model for the leading man in The Tale of the Genji. Komachi and Narihira were celebrated as archetypes of the beautiful woman and man in the imperial court of Heian-period Japan (794-1185). According to a scholarly authority, “Ono no Komachi is even better known today, mainly because of the legends that grew up around her.” Keene (1999) p. 224.
The other four immortals are largely forgotten. Kisen Hōshi and Fun’ya no Yasuhide were “minor poets who are remembered mainly because Tsurayuki mentioned them {in his introduction to Kokin Wakashu in 905}.” Id. pp. 224-5. A third immortal, Sōjō Henjō, was a grandson of the emperor and seems to be remembered mainly for rumors that he had a love affair with Komachi. Nonetheless, all three of these poets made the early eleventh-century list of thirty-six immortals of poetry. Only Ōtomo no Kuronushi has the distinction of being on the 905 list of six immortals of poetry, but not on the subsequent list of thirty-six immortals of poetry.
[image] Ōtomo no Kuronushi. One of a set of six hanging scrolls of the six immortals of poetry by Katsushika Hokusai (1750-1849). Japan, Edo period, ca. 1806-8. In Freer Gallery, F1907.369.
Reference:
Keene, Donald. 1993. Seeds in the heart: Japanese literature from earliest times to the late sixteenth century. New York: Henry Holt & Co.
Fujiwara, Sadaie. 1967. Fujiwara Teika’s Superior poems of our time; a thirteenth-century poetic treatise and sequence. Stanford, Calif: Stanford University Press.
more ancient history of bad breath
In proclaiming the virtues of women in a work written in 393, the learned Christian scholar Jerome set out the example of Bilia and her husband Duilus. Duilus once criticized Bilia:
After Duilus had grown old and feeble, he was once in the course of a quarrel taunted with having bad breath. Feeling deeply shamed, he went home and complained to his wife that she had never told him of his bad breath so that he might remedy that fault. She replied that she would have done so, but she thought that all men had foul breath as he had. [1]
This isn’t an example of misandry. Jerome’s point is that Bilia was so chaste that she did not know the smell of the breath of any man other than her husband. Jerome’s story implicitly suggests that other wives had greater knowledge.
Bad breath seems to have become a conventional gag. In a thirteenth-century European fabliau, a widow who remarried is complaining about her new husband. She describes her suffering from her new husband and fondly addresses her dead, former husband:
All he {her new husband} wants to do is eat and sleep. All night long he snores like a pig. That’s his delight and pastime. Am I not ill treated then? When I stretch out next to him all naked and he turns away from me, it almost tears the heart out of me. My husband, my lord, you never treated me that way. You called me your sweet beloved, and I called you too, because you turned to me and kissed me sweetly and said to begin with: “My beautiful wife and lady, what a sweet breath you have!” Husband, those were your very words. May your soul rest in heaven! [2]
Academics might categorized this passage as an example of misandry, the savaging of the real man set against the socially constructed, unreal ideal Man. But there’s something funny here. Maybe the remarried widow actually had bad breath, and the former husband never actually said she had sweet breath!
Bad breath is no joke. Without bad breath, Alexander the Great’s reshaping of western Eurasia would have started from Persia.
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Read more:
- Nahid’s bad breath makes history in the Shahnameh
- ancient bird-shit medicine
- bad breath no problem in ancient love story
Notes:
[1] Jerome, Contra Jovinianum, Bk. I, para. 46, translated from the Latin as Against Jovinianus. Jerome also quotes Theophrastus, who warned about bad breath and other personal characteristics:
in the case of a wife you cannot pick and choose: you must take her as you find her. If she has a bad temper, or is a fool, if she has a blemish, or is proud, or has bad breath, whatever her fault may be— all this we learn after marriage.
Id. para. 47. In contrast to Theophrastus’s warning, Jerome seems to have been concerned that women were learning too much about men before marriage.
[2] Gautier le Leu, “La Veuve” (The Widow), trans. Hellman & O’Gorman (1965) p. 153.
Reference:
Hellman, Robert, and Richard O’Gorman. 1965. Fabliaux; ribald tales from the old French. New York: Crowell.
understanding sexual inequality and men’s needs
Many men today lack encouragement and support for their sexuality. The persecution of Charlie Chaplin for his sexuality has transmogrified into a state system that holds in prison or jail roughly 45,000 men for having done nothing more than have consensual sex of reproductive type. Academics treat masculinity as a disease. The media ignores important dimensions of sexual inequality and treats men’s sexuality as dangerous and in need of suppression. Everyone should be concerned, because this situation hurts women.
A thirteenth-century author of a fabliau offered sage counsel. He wrote wearily:
For I tell you once again, according to the proverb: she who would have her husband soothe her tail must pile endearments on his head. [1]
The thirteenth-century proverbial wisdom emphasizes the importance of encouraging men sexually. That idea is well-nigh incomprehensible today.
This problem needs to be understood within the history of sexual inequality. Historically, men’s sexual appetite was considered inferior to women’s. In his seminal work The Art of Love, Ovid about 2000 years ago declared:
The cow lows to the bull in gentle pastures:
the mare whinnies to the hoofed stallion.
Desire in us {men} is milder and less frantic:
the male fire has its lawful limits. [2]
A Latin school commentary from the eleventh or twelfth century explained the situation less poetically and more directly:
Sexual drive is greater in women than in men. [3]
The medieval literature of men’s sexed protests includes a Latin lyric describing dangers of having a wife:
Her appetite no man fulfills,
For too much copulation kills.
No man, as often as she’d choose,
Could pay to her his carnal dues.Thus married women love to stray
And wish their husbands’ lives away.
Since none a woman’s lust can sate
I don’t commend the married state. [4]
Christian morality contributed to the hardship of marriage. Before the development of non-sexual freedom, Christian husbands and wives were required to have sex, even if they didn’t feel like it, as part of their marital debt to each other. The result was exhausted husbands being forced to just do it out of Christian duty.
Compared to now, in the European Middle Ages fewer men had the advantage of having wives with high-paying jobs. Men thus faced a greater burden of earning money. But even medieval men who shrewdly married wealthy widows were not well-rested enough to keep up with their wives. One such man complained to his wife:
Lady, you have a greedy mouth in you that too often demands to be fed. It has tired my poor old war-horse out. I’ve just withdrawn him all shrunken and sore. One cannot work so much without getting weary and limp. The peasant may be a good worker, but not every day is a working day. You can drive the mare so hard as not to leave a drop of blood or saliva in her. You have so milked and drained me that I am half dead and half mad too. [5]
The husband requested his monetary allowance from his wife. He threatened that if he didn’t receive it he wouldn’t do any more of “this back-humping work.” The wife refused his request for some monetary compensation for his work within the home.
The new field of sexual economics describes rather different sexual circumstances today. A leading academic work in sexual economics declares:
Sexual economics theory has pointed to a wealth of data depicting marriage as a transaction in which the male contributes status and resources while the woman contributes sex (Baumeister and Vohs 2004). How will that play out in the coming decades? The female contribution of sex to the marriage is evanescent: As women age, they lose their sexual appeal much faster than men lose their status and resources, and some alarming evidence even indicates that wives rather quickly lose their desire for sex (Arndt 2009). To sustain a marriage across multiple decades, many husbands must accommodate to the reality of having to contribute work and other resources to a wife whose contribution of sex dwindles sharply in both quantity and quality—and who also may disapprove sharply of him seeking satisfaction in alternative outlets such as prostitution, pornography, and extramarital dalliance. [6]
This analysis rests on finding men’s sexual desire to be stronger than women’s. A variety of social-scientific studies support that finding in contemporary circumstances.[7] The male-female intensity of sexual desire seems to have reversed over history. The result is much different sexual economics:
We speculate that today’s young men may be exceptionally ill prepared for a lifetime of sexual starvation that is the lot of many modern husbands. The traditional view that a wife should sexually satisfy her husband regardless of her own lack of desire has been eroded if not demolished by feminist ideology that has encouraged wives to expect husbands to wait patiently until the wife actually desires sex, with the result that marriage is a prolonged episode of sexual starvation for the husband. (A memorable anecdote from Arndt’s 2009 diary study on marital sexuality involved a couple in which the wife refused sex so often that the husband finally said that they would not have sex again until the wife initiated it. When Arndt interviewed them nine years later, he was still waiting.) Today’s young men spend their young adulthood having abundant sex with multiple partners, and that seems to us to be an exceptionally poor preparation for a lifetime of sexual starvation.[8]
New developments in communications technology, such as the rapidly growing mobile app Bang With Friends, are likely to exacerbate married men’s relative sexual deprivation. The flourishing of men’s sexual desire in modern society is nothing less than remarkable. That achievement should be celebrated with concerted efforts to alleviate married men’s sexual starvation.
* * * * *
Read more:
- achieving gender symmetry in love
- men in Roman Egypt used love spells
- sophisticated Hellenistic epigrams on the sexual allure of old women
Notes:
[1] Gautier le Leu, “La Veuve” (The Widow), trans. Hellman & O’Gorman (1965) p. 155. A fabliau is:
a brief tale in verse written to amuse, with characters, actions, and scenes drawn from real life, and with few supernatural or marvelous elements.
Id. p. 182. About 160 fabliaux have survived in Old French from the final years of the twelfth century to 1346. Subsequently the genre lost favor. Id. pp. 182-3.
[2] Ovid, Ars Amatoria, I.279-82, trans. Kline (2001). Similarly, id. I.343 declares women’s sexuality “more fierce than ours, and more frenzied.” With respect to “lawful limits,” a thirteenth-century work within the literature of men’s sexed protests complained, “Woman, you swear, but with no care for perjury, / Woman has no concern that the law can sentence death.” See Arbore sub quadam dictavit clericus Adam.
[3] Hafn. G1. kgl. Saml. 2015 (Copenhagen), f. 18r, quoted and translated from Latin in Hexter (1982) p. 86. According to a scholarly authority, “medieval thought attributed superior sexual appetite to the female.” Muscatine (1986) pp. 121-2.
[4] De Conjuge Non Ducenda, trans. Rigg (1986) p. 91 (J10-J11).
[5] Gautier le Leu, “La Veuve” (The Widow), trans. Hellman & O’Gorman (1965) p. 154. The fourteenth joy in the fifteenth-century Quinze Joyes de Mariage (The Fifteen Joys of Marriage) also depicts a sexually exhausted new husband of a former widow. Pitts (1985) provides an English translation.
[6] Baumeister & Vohs (2012).
[7] Baumeister, Catanese & Vohs (2001) provides a good review of the data.
[8] Baumeister & Vohs (2012).
References:
Baumeister, Roy F., Kathleen R. Catanese, and Kathleen D. Vohs. 2001. “Is There a Gender Difference in Strength of Sex Drive? Theoretical Views, Conceptual Distinctions, and a Review of Relevant Evidence”. Personality and Social Psychology Review. 5 (3): 242-273.
Baumeister, Roy F., and Kathleen D. Vohs. 2012. “Sexual Economics, Culture, Men, and Modern Sexual Trends.” Society. 49 (6): 520-524.
Hellman, Robert, and Richard O’Gorman. 1965. Fabliaux; ribald tales from the old French. New York: Crowell.
Hexter, Ralph Jay. 1982. Medieval school commentaries on Ovid’s “Ars amatoria”, “Epistulae ex Ponto” and “Epistulae heroidum.” Ph.D. Dissertation. Yale University.
Kline, A.S., trans. 2001. Ovid: The Art of Love. Poetry in Translation website.
Muscatine, Charles. 1986. The Old French fabliaux. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Pitts, Brent A., trans. 1985. The fifteen joys of marriage = Les XV joies de mariage. New York: P. Lang.
Rigg, A. G. 1986. Gawain on marriage: the textual tradition of the De coniuge non ducenda with critical edition and translation. Toronto, Ont., Canada: Pontifical Institute of Mediaeval Studies.
translations and substitutions in ancient medicine
About two decades ago, sequencing the human genome was thought to be a highly profitable path to developing new medicines and medical treatments. The immediate results of genetic research for drug development have been largely disappointing. But genetic research has increased biological understanding fundamentally. Researchers now have much greater appreciation for the importance of a living organism’s bio-chemical communication with its environment in shaping gene expression, protein synthesis, and the organism’s behavior.[1]
Humans are highly distinctive animals in their bio-cultural evolution and development. If you want to understand the creation of human life, studying human DNA is not sufficient. Nor is studying what’s traditionally understood as human culture: what humans see, say, hear, read, and write. Fundamentally important to human behavior is what humans smell, eat, and touch. By those means, humans, like other living organisms, engage in bio-chemical communication with their environment.
Arduous study of the recently discovered Syriac Galen Palimpsest can contribute to understanding human communication that encompasses bio-chemical communication. The Syriac Galen Palimpsest is a manuscript apparently containing as an undertext a sixth-century Syriac translation of Galen’s work On Simple Drugs.[2] Galen wrote in Greek. Translating Greek medicine into Syriac is thought to have been an important early stage in the long communicative circuit of Greek medicine throughout western Eurasia and north Africa. The Syriac Galen Palimpsest documents materia medica moving across cultures, languages, and physical environments.
Linguistically translating materia medica is closely related to making material substitutions. Sergius of Resh Aina translated Galen’s On Simple Drugs into Syriac. To each of the individual books of Galen’s work Sergius prefaced a list of the form “x which is y, with x being a Syriac transliteration of a Greek botanical term, and y its suggested Syriac equivalent.”[3] The suggested Syriac equivalent y could be a linguistic translation of x. But given the different bio-geography relevant to the translation, y could also be a material substitute. Ancient lists of substitute medicines exist in the form “if not x, then y.” Surviving evidence shows that translating Greek medical texts into Syriac included adapting, acclimatizing, and combining the Greek texts.[4] Making material substitutions could have been an additional dimension of translation, broadly understood.
The relative weights of linguistic translation and material substitution depend on the specific circumstances of communication. Galen’s On Simple Drugs includes physical and ecological descriptions of materia medica. Translation through material substitution could create incoherence in physical and ecological descriptions. That’s not necessarily implausible. Surviving texts explicitly described as lists of substitutes lack logical coherence across substitute pairs. Linguistic translation probably contributed to the form of lists of material substitutes. To the extent that linguistic translation dominated material substitution, translation probably was a relatively formal process separate from medical practice.[5] Close study of the Syriac Galen Palimpsest could lead to better insight into the relation of linguistic translation and material substitution.
Linguistic culture is highly distinctive to humans. Bio-chemical culture is important to all living organisms. Studying the translation of materia medica across the long duration of human development and a wide geographic span of human societies provides a unique window into human being and human welfare.
* * * * *
Read more:
- logic of substitutes in ancient medicine
- contrasting fourth-century translations of the Life of Antony
- comparing Syriac and Latin translations of the Life of Saint Pelagia
Notes:
[1] Kohl (2012) provides a helpful review and synthesis of relevant biological research.
[2] Bhayro, Hawley, Kessel & Pormann (2013) describes the manuscript. It was scientifically imaged in 2010. The image data are publicly available, along with a brief description. Preliminary study (id.) indicates that the Syriac Galen Palimpsest includes Books IX to XI of Galen’s On Simple Drugs. The Syriac translation of those books had been regarded as lost.
[3] Bhayro (2005) p. 162. Sergius occasionally stated “x which is perhaps y.” Id. That statement of probability suggests a mapping of words to physical materials. Translation, however, doesn’t typically imply complete correspondence for words or physical materials.
[4] Bhayro (2013) pp. 126-135; Bhayro, Hawley, Kessel & Pormann (2013) pp. 141-143. Socio-economic circumstances seem to have affected the materials of medicines.
[5] Sergius of Resh Aina was a Christian priest. Yet that doesn’t mean that he didn’t offer services like those of physicians. Jesus of Nazareth and his first disciplines competed with incumbent providers of medical services. Over time Jesus acquired the epithet “the good physician.”
[image] Detail from an image of the Syrian Galen Palimpsest, SYR 178r Pseudocolor, thanks to the Galen Syriac Palimpsest Image Bank.
References:
Bhayro, Siam. 2005. “Syriac Medical Terminology: Sergius and Galen’s Pharmacopia.” Aramaic Studies. 3 (2): 147-165.
Bhayro, Siam. 2013. “The Reception of Galen’s Art of Medicine in the Syriac Book of Medicines,” in Barbara Zipser (ed.), Medical Books in the Byzantine World (Bologna: Eikasmós), pp. 123-144.
Bhayro, Siam, Robert Hawley, Grigory Kessel, and Peter E. Pormann. 2013. “The Syriac Galen Palimpsest: Progress, Prospects and Problems.” Journal of Semitic Studies. 58 (1): 131-148.
Kohl, James V. 2012. “Human pheromones and food odors: epigenetic influences on the socioaffective nature of evolved behaviors.” Socioaffective Neuroscience & Psychology. 2.
Tagged: Galen
blame men for lack of gender symmetry in love
Men’s sadomasochistic interest in penal sex has prevented the achievement of gender symmetry in love. Ancient Greek novels and modern academic gender literature have set out the ideal.[1] The task for a progressive society is to achieve it. Much progress has been made, but much work remains to be done.
The chief problem is men. Men are skipping, skimming, and misunderstanding the wise instruction of Ovid, the great teacher of love.[2] Ever since the big egg united with the small seed, long before the arrival of the stork, women have suffered under men’s suppression of gender symmetry. Men are to blame. I still remember that a man in twelfth-century Europe said:
I want to live a man’s life in manliness.
I’ll offer my love if I’m loved on equal terms.
That’s my idea of right loving. No other is acceptable. [3]
A fine man was he, sure to make his mother proud and pleased. But as soon as he saw a beautiful, young woman, here’s what he said:
Oh my, I don’t like the song I’ve sung; I’ll now whistle differently.
I’m a prisoner to your charms, lovely one. I was forgetting how exquisite you are.
My manly sin deserves heavy punishment.
I’m so abjectly sorry. Flog me, please, in your bedroom. [4]
After he bought her dinner, and paid for two tickets to an expensive show, she satisfied his desire. Until this changes, women will never achieve equality and gender symmetry in love.
* * * * *
Read more:
- rare medieval protest against devaluing masculine love
- Persian King Anushirwan responds to a description of a beautiful woman
- marginal men’s voices in the Roman Empire
Notes:
[1] On the distinctiveness of gender symmetry in ancient Greek novels, see Konstan (1994). The tale of Aziz and Azizah from the Thousand and One Nights provides an alternate perspective on gender symmetry.
[2] On medieval understanding of Ovid, see Elliott (1981).
[3] From Carmina Burana, no. 178. Above is my translation of the first three lines. The Latin text: “Volo virum vivere viriliter; / diligam, si diligar equaliter. / sic amandum censeo, non aliter.” Walsh (1993), pp. 198-9, provides the Latin text and an English translation, to which my translations are indebted.
[4] Id. The Latin text: “Ecce, michi displicet quod cecini, / et meo contrarius sum carmini, / tue reus, domina, dulcedini, / cuius elegantie non memini. / quia sic erravi / sum dignus pena gravi; / penitentum corripe, si placet, in conclavi.” Here’s the complete Latin text of the song. R. Howard Bloch exemplifies a similar development in academia. With subtle reasoning drawing on feminism, psychoanalysis, theorizing, and in-group affiliating citations, Bloch declares “the patristic invention of gender in the first centuries of the Christian era” and concludes that both misogyny and courtly love intentionally debase women. Bloch (1991) pp. 8, 164.
Courtly love is perhaps the best example of what Gisèle Halimi, in an anthology entitled New French Feminisms, terms “Doormat-Pedestal” tactics, which seek to elevate woman in order to debase her.
Id. p. 197. Such wit is difficult to appreciate, but the profit is obvious.
References:
Bloch, R. Howard. 1991. Medieval misogyny and the invention of Western romantic love. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Elliott, Alison Goddard. 1981. “The Bedraggled Cupid: Ovidian Satire in ‘Carmina Burana’ 105.” Traditio. 37: 426-437.
Konstan, David. 1994. Sexual symmetry: love in the ancient novel and related genres. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press.
Walsh, Patrick Gerard. 1993. Love lyrics from the Carmina Burana. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press.
Tagged: love
