I find it very amusing when the worst people are like “Its Just Biological men cant control not being cheaters/pressuring women for sex” when the medieval view was generally “unlike men, women are super horny and will absolutely bang the scarecrow if left unattended”
Every so often I read a thing about how medieval folks viewed sex as a reproductive act and yeah for male/female pairings it was more often than not. Because contraception amounted to tying a weasel’s testicles in goose skin.
Actual human biology has been very pointedly ignored by male evolutionary psychologists.
The more promiscuous female primates are, the bigger the male's balls are. Not only are ours huge, like chimps, we have that penile ridge that creates suction, pulling out a competitor's sperm.
Women tend to orgasm more slowly because our bodies evolved in an environment where fucking several members of the tribe in a row was normal. It's also why women tend to be more vocal, calling men at other fires to join in.
Men "needing" to know their children are "theirs" is an invented concept.
Invented by men who talk about resources a lot, without understanding that none of us had resources to hand down to our children until after the invention of farming. That was not a concern in the environment in which we evolved
There are still a few remnants of Stone Age behavior that exist today
The people in those tribes understand the concept of genetic fatherhood when it's explained to them.
But that is simply not how they think of fatherhood. All the men are fathers to all the children.
Whole swathes of their gender relations, good and ill, are based around this idea! One of the handful of reasons a woman could get a civil divorce was impotence, and it wasn't just about children- it was considered a man's duty to please his wife (so she wouldn't go seeking satisfaction elsewhere).
I recall reading it in a book, but I can't remember which one- however, this method of divorce required "impotence trials" and those are widely written about because they're, uh, spicy. Men had to perform in front of an audience. www.salon.com/2023/02/11/t...
Wait, I do remember where it comes up at least once- "The Very Secret Sex Lives of Medieval Women" by Rosalie Gilbert, which also has a TON of general information on sex in the middle ages and all the unique cultural weirdness surrounding it.
Yep. And in the 1700-hundreds men were considered the emotional gender while women were generally held to be incapable of harbouring deeply felt emotions.
Shoutout to @goingmedieval.bsky.social 's book that touches on this.
Whatever is the moral thing in society. Women are opposite. Prudes today and sluts centuries ago.
