This is horrifying, and also not surprising, which is somehow worse to me in 2026. What gets me isn't any single atrocity. It's the pattern that keeps repeating across disconnected eras and political systems: institutions protecting their own reputation over protecting women (about half of the global population), EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Rome did it. Colonial Latin America did it. Village councils in India do it. And the Casey audit shows British institutions doing the same thing in real time, not through some coordinated design, but through fear, avoidance, and self-protection, which somehow makes it more disturbing, not less.Sadly this VENI, RAPUI, GENUI doesn't belong to any single culture, one era, or one government. It just keeps morphing into what unrestrained coalitions of men do when impunity is available.
"Europe and North America ultimately diverged. Thanks to more professional policing, effective criminal justice, advanced technology and feminist activism, they ultimately became more peaceful, safer, and constrained male violence." Do we perhaps also have Christianity to thank? Very much like the abolition of slavery, the idea that women have inherent, individual rights over their own bodies is an historical anomaly. You can't walk through the Uffizi museum or many others in Europe without being bombarded with images of the Madonna and child, surely a kind of veneration of the female as mother, at least, which reflects a higher status for women than we are afforded in many other cultures. Ave Maria, gratia plena. Was it the Enlightenment or Christianity that lead to emancipation for women in the West, or is that a chicken and egg question since the two are inseparable? Honest question.
The Conquistadors quickly drew allies from tribes that had been conquered and colonized by the Aztecs and Incas, and converts as well. Maybe Christianity seemed preferable to rituals of child sacrifice and cannibalism.
Considering Latin America is the most devoutly Christian region of the world hundreds of years later, I wouldn't underestimate the sincerity of their conversions. I'm not sure what point you are making.
1. Even if Latin America were as devout as you claim, the conversion was some 400 years ago and has little to do with devotion now.
2. Latin America is mostly culturally Christian, at least as far as the Catholic Church is concerned. In fact, American-style evangelicalism is spreading rapidly, and whatever you may say about Pizarro, he was no evangelical protestant. (For that matter, the Incas didn't practice child sacrifice, at least not on any kind of scale. Nor were they cannibals.)
Evangelical Christianity, Catholic as with the Conquistadors or Protestant, is still Christianity. The Aztecs practiced cannibalism and the Incas practiced child sacrifice. The point of my reply to the post was that Christianity had some positive influence on women's status in the West. I'm not sure what your argument is.
Plausible. But didn't Tacitus observe that Germanic societies had greater gender equality even pre-Christianization? Perhaps in a cold climate, it is more important to care for your wife if you want your offspring to survive. Supposedly ancient Inuits also had a high degree of gender equality.
>The findings also back up Roman writings at the time which suggested that women in Britain were quite powerful, more so than in Rome.
>But Romans like Julius Caeser viewed that as a sign of backwardness.
>"Women in Britain had power and it was a more egalitarian place. That was the biggest problem that Romans had with the Britons because Rome was a deeply patriarchal society. To them, it marked Britons as the ultimate Barbarians," says Professor Miles Russell at Bournemouth University.
Nowadays, of course, we view *patriarchical* societies as barbaric! Interesting reversal.
Given the high rate of fertility among conservatives and religious sects, I expect the prevailing view to reverse yet again in the next few hundred years, and current libertine/egalitarian culture will be viewed as self-evidently decadent/degenerate/primitive by future intellectuals.
Greater equality than the Romans isn't saying much though. The concept of lifelong monogamy has never been universal; most men would not have been sure which children in a tribe were theirs. Harsh conditions do require a focus on survival over custom, so that whoever is good at hunting, fighting, or decision making would pitch in, so a kind of equality out of necessity. Paternity requires control of women’s bodies, and Judeo-Christianity gave women more status in that arrangement by putting requirements on men as well.
Fascinating research. Shame on those armies and organisations using rape as a weapon of war. Well done to the west for evolving but clearly it needs to ensure that continues.
Yours is a curious choice of example. Of all their atrocities, and they are many, sexual violence against occupied populations is one area where the Nazis least stood out. Not that rape didn’t happened, but the German military has not been credibly accused of anything on the scale of the Soviet army. Even in concentration camps, I am not aware of accusations that the women were systematically raped before being killed, even though the circumstances made that type of crime quite possible.
Why this should be is actually an interesting question. It certainly wasn’t tender feelings for non-Germans. I doubt seeing lots of Madonna images had much effect either, but sexual morality likely played a part. Raping outsider women does not seem to have been valorized in Nazi Germany, rather it could be seen as shameful race-betrayal. In that sense, you may have actually identified a bit of an outlier in typical male conquest morality.
One should be careful here. While the notion of "race betrayal" existed, the forcible conscription of (e.g.) Polish women into military brothels is an acknowledged, documented fact. Outside that, rapes on the part of the Wehrmacht and the SS did happen in occupied territories, but are underrepresented in the collective memory. The subject came up in conversation some time ago when I was speaking with a historian friend in Poland. The crime of rape is simply difficult to fit within the collective memory of the German as an inhuman, incomprehensible destroyer.
"anything on the scale of the Soviet army": again one should be careful to compare like with like. Rape by Soviet soldiers did happen and was widespread; the fact that the Soviet army made rape punible with the death penalty did little to contain it. At the same time, it's a Cold War legacy that testimony and estimates on rape by Soviet soldiers is served up completely unfiltered. That includes texts such as "A woman in Berlin" (it's conveniently omitted that its author was a trained Nazi propagandist; her published diary is a mixture of an actual contemporary diary of hers with passages she constructed much later in contradiction with the actual diary), "BeFreier und Befreite" (whose evidentiary basis seems poor at times if one follows through the footnotes, and which, tellingly, had at its avowed goal to move German women from the category of accomplices or perpetrators to that of victims - a fallacy if there is one; surely a person is defined by her actions?) and so forth. None of that goes to diminish what numbers of Soviet soldiers - and not so few soldiers among the other Allies - perpetrated, but these weaknesses matter in themselves and above all in a comparative study.
Something missing from this analysis is an acknowledgment of the ways that Christianity that allowed Europe to become a place where women are respected, and marriage is a mutual gift of self. Certainly, these ideals are not well-stewarded or lived out in every circumstance. Christianity has a well-defined and very deep Theology of the Body that pivots on mutual self-gift. I’m a civilian w limited academic knowledge, but it seems to me that Islam has no comparable wellspring of theology, practice, etc.
Its not 'missing', it just isnt true. Christianity imagined God as a european man and pinned the original sin on Eve. It created an era of repression and austerity that slowly excluded and disempowered those that did not fit that man god archetype. It achieved this by either by implementing policy or validating existing ones by "divinely ordained" rulers which happened to be anyone the Church liked.
Did you read the article at all? Christianity did not remotely "create" that. It exists normatively in places of the world that never heard of Christ. Taking the good conditions in the West today for granted is a dangerous game.
I did read the article, what is your objection exactly? Christian rule in Europe did indeed implement policies that deteriorated the status and disempowered European women. The Church was the most powerful institution in Europe and it excluded women from the clergy. And no, it wasn't the same everywhere around the world. European women, relative to their society had less economic and political power than in some Islamic, Pagan European, and Pagan/animist North American societies.
European policies like primogeniture, coverture, guild restrictions, inability to divorce, and crackdowns on convents decimated women's ability to inherit wealth and political power and they were implemented through a joint effort by the Church and its 'divinely blessed' rulers. It is difficult to argue that the Church did not agree with these policies.
I do understand however that the enlightenment and Protestantism(both a strong divorce from Europe under the Church) laid the foundations for liberalism which in turn paved the way for Christian feminism. But the distinction has to be made because while some form of Christian thought did indeed aid feminism, the mainstream interpretation of Christianity for millennia was by contrast anti-feminist.
I see the problem. You don’t know actual history, you believe a myth. The rights of women did not diminish in the least under Christianity. They were gradually but wildly improved than what they were over Pagan societies. You are comparing the rights of women under Christianity in 1300 To the rights of unbelieving women in 2000. Seeing that the women in the year 2000 have more rights than the Christian women of 1300 you somehow conclude that before the church came in women must’ve had more rights.
They didn’t. Worldwide, the places outside of Christianity have had horribly worse conditions for women and still due today. If you want to deposit that secular rights over the last couple of centuries are better still that’s a reasonable argument that could be discussed. But the article gives dramatic and horrifying examples of how women are treated any place else, including the present day.
It is just insane to think that you can go to Papua New Guinea at any time in the last 10,000 years and see more rights for women, or deep into the Amazon, or in Native American communities, or in Central Asia
The policies I mentioned were passed during Christian rule. I did not compare women of today with European women of 1300. But rather European women of 1300 with women in other societies in 1300.
Do you believe primogeniture, coverture, placing heavy movement constrictions on nuns(who often did business on land owned by the convents) somehow empowered women?
It is without a doubt that European women had more rights and political power during early Christian/late Pagan era Europe than they did during the medieval period up until women's suffrage. The point I am making is that Church rule in Europe did not improve women's condition but a breakaway from the Church did. This is academic consensus for what its worth.
As for this article, it doesn't claim that women outside of Europe were treated worse than they were in Europe. Its a feminist piece about the patriarchy having a 'dual strategy' when it comes to the treatment of women inside and outside its society. Not that relevant to what we are talking about.
If you think any women in the world had more rights than European women in 1500 and I will not bother to go any further.
The original article does make the point that patriarchal societies(which are all of them) use that dual strategy. It seems to be pre-installed and is only lessened by enormous effort. My point is that there seems to have been only one path by which women escaped from that and it is at least associated with Christianity.
Usual thing with siblings. The rest of the world still very much wants to be in the world that christians have built. Do you enjoy internet, for example?
Some were created in china, yes. But the idea of appliances and all manufacturing technics came from christian countries. The world would be a shithole without Europe and christians, face it bro.
I think it's very hard for women to write about this. I don't want to be disrespectful but you have to speak candidly for a topic like this. A lot of male sexual success is tied to social dominance. Women respond very positively to it, voluntarily. That basically means unbounded evil is, as long as you can get away with it, favored to some degree since people won't just allow you to dominate them socially for free as the reward is so high (this is why fights break out in school, parties and clubs). All is fair in love (and war). Conversely, just live and let live is a very poor strategy unless you have some other way to offer value that overcomes it.
The issue is, not everyone is going to be inheriting a sufficient plot of land or craft (or the modern equivalents). Furthermore, many boys grow up in poverty and disease burden so they have visibly low status markers. That basically means the most realistic value they can offer is savagery. Social dominance often just requires willingness to get hurt in the process. This is what motivates everything from entrapping women with violence and trauma bonding to gang violence to armies to imperialism. It's all the same instinct done by the same men often for the same reasons. As low as the orphan and as high as Napoleon.
There's really no way around this, it's just part of humanity. I live in North America so I don't know about Europe, but I never met a woman here that opened up to me and wasn't a victim of sexual violence. And it wasn't from a migrant. The same dynamics play out in the developed world, it's just not reported.
The anti-racist instinct is that men must be the same all over the world, regardless of the culture they came from or the circumstances of migration.
The European experience over recent decades doesn't support that belief regarding the treatment of women, children, gay men or Jews, particularly since our political elites abandoned the integration principle which the USA has long invested in.
Multiculturalism isn't possible unless multiple, diverse cultures exist. The problem in Britain is that our elites cannot accept the implication of this basic point. While protecting and exalting difference, they are unable to accept the proposition that this diversity must imply differences in attitudes to or acceptance of the 20th century liberal project we call 'rights'.
So, while white women and girls have certainly been abused by white men in Britain, in the entertainment and cultural industries for example, what we refer to as the grooming gangs operated a business model or franchise which enabled the abuse of certain vulnerable girls at scale. That business model was predicated on cultural attitudes to those girls which granted them no rights whatsoever.
Thanks for this essay, Alice. I believe there are key differences which place the current British context outside of the implied normality of historic invasion and conquest, which I'll summarise below.
1. Sex-selective abortion technology has resulted in tens of millions of missing women and girls across south Asia. The UN's latest estimate I've seen is 130 million females not allowed to live, which by any definition must be a femicide.
I believe this to be the primary driver of male intercontinental migration out of Asia today. There is no point to a young man migrating within Asia if he discovers the same lack of marriage prospects wherever he goes.
As a consequence, young south Asian women living into their teenage years are now relatively scarce and are valued more highly by a patriarchal society in terms of being marriage commodities. There is evidence of child brides being secured at ever-younger ages in Pakistan, perhaps due to this scarcity. One girl was recently reported as married at five years old, which is illegal in Pakistan but happened anyway.
2. The postmodern turn in social work, policing and the judiciary now regards the commercial exploitation of young children as normal and unsuitable for state intervention, following Foucault and his 'game of curdled milk'. I believe this is just as important a factor as allegations of racism. See for example the leniency allowed to BBC newsreader Huw Edwards, who is not known to be Asian.
3. The widespread availability of abortion pills in Britain, including legal abortion completion at home and illegal sources, means that men can exploit girls and women, risking pregnancy, without leaving DNA evidence. This is a very different context to male invaders seeking to spread their genes. In fact, a pregnant child is diminished in value in the exploitation market because their appeal to an abuser derives from their supposed virginity. Grooming gang survivors have described being discarded when they reached adulthood.
4. The devadasi tradition of temple prostitution in south Asia which pre-dates the Islamic conquest, in which unwanted girls are sold or donated to local religious leaders for exploitation by male temple patrons, as a form of fundraising. Other girls volunteer out of destitution or are kidnapped, out of the seven types of devadasi. The principle is that a devadasi belongs to the village, not any husband, and the temple patrons typically have their own wives. Very recently made illegal in Asia, but it still goes on.
I would welcome further discussion on this subject if you are interested in it.
This was very informative albeit difficult to read (which makes it all the more important).
You mention that: "European countries are increasingly diverse, welcoming migrants from more patriarchal cultures, but without investing in policies that would promote integration, such that all women can achieve economic inclusion, while being protected from violence. This failure is manifest in employment, attitudes, and honour-based abuse. ... European politicians have generally been reluctant to recognise these cultural differences, and have even suppressed investigations into rapes."
We all know about the economic and bureaucratic reasons for why authorities are doing this (e.g., the need for migrant labor, fear of "providing ammo to the far-right," etc.), but I recently came across a very compelling IDEOLOGICAL explanation for this. Ori Zimmels of the Life Awake substack explains it in his essay titled: "Liberationism." As he puts it:
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"Liberationism is the ideology and belief system that all people fundamentally share the same desire to be liberated. It is also the desire to liberate them, and to think it is our role to liberate them — in complete disregard of whether their culture does or does not desire liberation. It holds that no [group of people] can be [naturally] motivated by the desire to dominate or to impose their vision on the world. Where such desires appear, they are explained away as responses to trauma, oppression, or just bad education — never as authentic expressions of will. At its core, liberationism maintains that if we simply treat everyone with respect, they will surely choose to share the path of liberation with us. [...i.e.,] 'You have the same universal capacity as I do — for reason, for freedom, for choosing liberation — and because of that, your culture, your religion, your actual commitments, even what you are telling me to my face, are all irrelevant. My capacity is yours, and it overrides your identity.'
[This is because] the liberationist is not anchored in an identity of their own. They have often rejected nationality, religion, and cultural particularity as valid forms of belonging — coding them as primitive or even dangerous. And you cannot grant in the other what you have refused in yourself. The liberationist’s blindness to the other’s identity is a direct consequence of their refusal to inhabit their own. This is why national identity is so often coded as right-wing. From inside liberationism, any strong identity commitment looks like a failure to evolve. Patriotism, religious devotion, cultural particularity — these all look like stages on the way to the universal human who has shed all that. The liberationist sees themselves as the finished product, and everyone else as still under construction.
Liberationism creates another distortion that runs even deeper — the inability to differentiate, understand, and comprehend the reality of individualism and the reality of tribe. ...
We see this most clearly in terror attacks and suicide bombers. The liberationist sees [an individual] sacrificing themselves for the freedom of others. But in reality, the individual does not exist in the way the liberationist imagines them. ... In a tribal culture, where the individual is not the fundamental unit or concern, the goal is not freedom but the dominance of the tribe. ...
Today, liberationism is the most destructive force in the West. As it was in 1979 in Iran, it brings about the disarming of its own believers. It dismantles the very protections that democracy needs against forces that seek to destroy it, ... because when a society is infected with liberationism, you don’t even need to hide your intent. The liberationist [will refuse] to hear the real message of the other — which is the desire to fully dominate. ... The distortion at times is so profound that even if they openly admit their intent to dominate, the liberationist will ignore their words in favor of seeing them as suffering victims."
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Simply put: Liberal politicians in the West naively - and incorrectly - assume that the only reason why some people AREN'T liberally-minded (like them) is because of suffering/trauma/poverty, lack of education and/or irrational stubbornness (this assumption is reflected in phrases like: "Hurt people hurt people," or "Reality has a liberal bias"). Thus, they turn a blind eye to atrocities committed by minorities from 3rd world nations, because they see them as abuse victims who "can't be expected to know any better."
These liberationists seem to think that: if you just GIVE money, education and humanitarian aid to people, they will naturally become "enlightened liberals" like them. It's the political equivalent of an idiot mother who defends her delinquent son with: "He's only misbehaving because life has been unfair to him! If only people were KINDER to each other, he wouldn't feel the need to take his anger out on the world."
And lest you think I’m being uncharitable, take a look at this excerpt from an op-ed in the Guardian, where the author states:
“An asylum seeker from the hotel was accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and concerns were raised about potential future threats. Since then, the hotel has become a site of protest, with large groups gathering with flares, flags and signs. … If your accommodation is regularly surrounded by a small, hostile mob that sometimes wants to set fire to it, it’s probably quite difficult to slot into a normal, law-abiding life, or even know what a law-abiding life looks like, in this country you escaped to, having heard it was civilized.”
In other words: "He's only raping teen girls because life has been cruel to him! If everyone were just KIND to him, he would stop taking his anger out on the world."
I was surprised that Hindu caste showed up here, because the genetic evidence shows there has been strict endogamy for a long time rather than the claiming of women from an outgroup (like the Irish maternal DNA found on Iceland from Vikings seizing captive women).
Yes male sexual violence has been constrained in Western Europe, but modern day Europe is still incredibly unsure of itself (maybe a hangover from colonialism, WW2 etc?).
The lack of conviction that a culture in which sexual violence is minimised is better than one in which it is not means that Western Europe is uniquely vulnerable to “invasion”. In Rotherham and elsewhere, people who should have been safeguarding vulnerable girls chose to instead safeguard against community tensions.
Cultural relativism has run amok and so, so many girls have paid the price for it in Britain.
Western Europe and its Anglosphere colonies developed high trust over long and painful centuries. Bringing in people who do not come from high-trust societies has sometimes worked, but usually not. They take advantage of the trust, and this has emphatically including not respecting women.
Male coalitions continue to form because men desire agency and power. Most men are not happy to have their reproductive future and social prestige be at the mercy of woman run institutions which is the feminist proposal essentially.
The reasons for the decrease in violence in Europe and America leaves out the main one: genetics. The Western European Marriage Pattern, also known as the Hajnal Line reflects feudalism and the forbidding of cousin marriage, originally in Germanic cultures but strongly reinforced by the Catholic Church. This resulted in increased trust in non-family and more voluntary rather than entirely clan-based tribal affiliations. This in turn spilled over to less violence against women.
I am not saying that none of the cultural influences are real, only that they were and are secondary.
Thank you for the reminder that this horrible state of affairs is normative for humans and its absence is not a given. It is precious and easily breached. Any radical screwing around with this, whether by traditionalist or feminist or any other groups (especially the self-congratulatory extremists), runs a very high risk for all of us. We have gradually become a high-trust society and women have benefited most from that. They have more to lose if trust erodes.
This is horrifying, and also not surprising, which is somehow worse to me in 2026. What gets me isn't any single atrocity. It's the pattern that keeps repeating across disconnected eras and political systems: institutions protecting their own reputation over protecting women (about half of the global population), EVERY. SINGLE. TIME. Rome did it. Colonial Latin America did it. Village councils in India do it. And the Casey audit shows British institutions doing the same thing in real time, not through some coordinated design, but through fear, avoidance, and self-protection, which somehow makes it more disturbing, not less.Sadly this VENI, RAPUI, GENUI doesn't belong to any single culture, one era, or one government. It just keeps morphing into what unrestrained coalitions of men do when impunity is available.
The research appears to show the exact opposite. The west has managed to diverge which I think is the main point of the article.
"Europe and North America ultimately diverged. Thanks to more professional policing, effective criminal justice, advanced technology and feminist activism, they ultimately became more peaceful, safer, and constrained male violence." Do we perhaps also have Christianity to thank? Very much like the abolition of slavery, the idea that women have inherent, individual rights over their own bodies is an historical anomaly. You can't walk through the Uffizi museum or many others in Europe without being bombarded with images of the Madonna and child, surely a kind of veneration of the female as mother, at least, which reflects a higher status for women than we are afforded in many other cultures. Ave Maria, gratia plena. Was it the Enlightenment or Christianity that lead to emancipation for women in the West, or is that a chicken and egg question since the two are inseparable? Honest question.
The Conquistadors were far more publicly and aggressively Christian and christianizing than just about anyone alive today.
The Conquistadors quickly drew allies from tribes that had been conquered and colonized by the Aztecs and Incas, and converts as well. Maybe Christianity seemed preferable to rituals of child sacrifice and cannibalism.
I suspect that their allies were mostly just itching for revenge, and if adopting Catholicism got them on the Spanish side, they were fine with that.
Considering Latin America is the most devoutly Christian region of the world hundreds of years later, I wouldn't underestimate the sincerity of their conversions. I'm not sure what point you are making.
1. Even if Latin America were as devout as you claim, the conversion was some 400 years ago and has little to do with devotion now.
2. Latin America is mostly culturally Christian, at least as far as the Catholic Church is concerned. In fact, American-style evangelicalism is spreading rapidly, and whatever you may say about Pizarro, he was no evangelical protestant. (For that matter, the Incas didn't practice child sacrifice, at least not on any kind of scale. Nor were they cannibals.)
Evangelical Christianity, Catholic as with the Conquistadors or Protestant, is still Christianity. The Aztecs practiced cannibalism and the Incas practiced child sacrifice. The point of my reply to the post was that Christianity had some positive influence on women's status in the West. I'm not sure what your argument is.
Plausible. But didn't Tacitus observe that Germanic societies had greater gender equality even pre-Christianization? Perhaps in a cold climate, it is more important to care for your wife if you want your offspring to survive. Supposedly ancient Inuits also had a high degree of gender equality.
BBC says Celtic Britons may have had matriarchical tendencies: https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c20g7j707g8o
Side note, interesting quote from the BBC:
>The findings also back up Roman writings at the time which suggested that women in Britain were quite powerful, more so than in Rome.
>But Romans like Julius Caeser viewed that as a sign of backwardness.
>"Women in Britain had power and it was a more egalitarian place. That was the biggest problem that Romans had with the Britons because Rome was a deeply patriarchal society. To them, it marked Britons as the ultimate Barbarians," says Professor Miles Russell at Bournemouth University.
Nowadays, of course, we view *patriarchical* societies as barbaric! Interesting reversal.
Given the high rate of fertility among conservatives and religious sects, I expect the prevailing view to reverse yet again in the next few hundred years, and current libertine/egalitarian culture will be viewed as self-evidently decadent/degenerate/primitive by future intellectuals.
Greater equality than the Romans isn't saying much though. The concept of lifelong monogamy has never been universal; most men would not have been sure which children in a tribe were theirs. Harsh conditions do require a focus on survival over custom, so that whoever is good at hunting, fighting, or decision making would pitch in, so a kind of equality out of necessity. Paternity requires control of women’s bodies, and Judeo-Christianity gave women more status in that arrangement by putting requirements on men as well.
Please see my comment of Jul 27, which I think bears strongly on this discussion below.
Fascinating research. Shame on those armies and organisations using rape as a weapon of war. Well done to the west for evolving but clearly it needs to ensure that continues.
Where were these inherent rights less than a century ago in Nazi occupied Europe? 😅
Yours is a curious choice of example. Of all their atrocities, and they are many, sexual violence against occupied populations is one area where the Nazis least stood out. Not that rape didn’t happened, but the German military has not been credibly accused of anything on the scale of the Soviet army. Even in concentration camps, I am not aware of accusations that the women were systematically raped before being killed, even though the circumstances made that type of crime quite possible.
Why this should be is actually an interesting question. It certainly wasn’t tender feelings for non-Germans. I doubt seeing lots of Madonna images had much effect either, but sexual morality likely played a part. Raping outsider women does not seem to have been valorized in Nazi Germany, rather it could be seen as shameful race-betrayal. In that sense, you may have actually identified a bit of an outlier in typical male conquest morality.
One should be careful here. While the notion of "race betrayal" existed, the forcible conscription of (e.g.) Polish women into military brothels is an acknowledged, documented fact. Outside that, rapes on the part of the Wehrmacht and the SS did happen in occupied territories, but are underrepresented in the collective memory. The subject came up in conversation some time ago when I was speaking with a historian friend in Poland. The crime of rape is simply difficult to fit within the collective memory of the German as an inhuman, incomprehensible destroyer.
"anything on the scale of the Soviet army": again one should be careful to compare like with like. Rape by Soviet soldiers did happen and was widespread; the fact that the Soviet army made rape punible with the death penalty did little to contain it. At the same time, it's a Cold War legacy that testimony and estimates on rape by Soviet soldiers is served up completely unfiltered. That includes texts such as "A woman in Berlin" (it's conveniently omitted that its author was a trained Nazi propagandist; her published diary is a mixture of an actual contemporary diary of hers with passages she constructed much later in contradiction with the actual diary), "BeFreier und Befreite" (whose evidentiary basis seems poor at times if one follows through the footnotes, and which, tellingly, had at its avowed goal to move German women from the category of accomplices or perpetrators to that of victims - a fallacy if there is one; surely a person is defined by her actions?) and so forth. None of that goes to diminish what numbers of Soviet soldiers - and not so few soldiers among the other Allies - perpetrated, but these weaknesses matter in themselves and above all in a comparative study.
I don't think women realize the extent men like violence against them even the one that study these topics deeply I believe
Didn't Aella's data show that women are more into violent porn than men?
https://aella.substack.com/p/women-prefer-more-violent-porn-and
Something missing from this analysis is an acknowledgment of the ways that Christianity that allowed Europe to become a place where women are respected, and marriage is a mutual gift of self. Certainly, these ideals are not well-stewarded or lived out in every circumstance. Christianity has a well-defined and very deep Theology of the Body that pivots on mutual self-gift. I’m a civilian w limited academic knowledge, but it seems to me that Islam has no comparable wellspring of theology, practice, etc.
Its not 'missing', it just isnt true. Christianity imagined God as a european man and pinned the original sin on Eve. It created an era of repression and austerity that slowly excluded and disempowered those that did not fit that man god archetype. It achieved this by either by implementing policy or validating existing ones by "divinely ordained" rulers which happened to be anyone the Church liked.
Did you read the article at all? Christianity did not remotely "create" that. It exists normatively in places of the world that never heard of Christ. Taking the good conditions in the West today for granted is a dangerous game.
I did read the article, what is your objection exactly? Christian rule in Europe did indeed implement policies that deteriorated the status and disempowered European women. The Church was the most powerful institution in Europe and it excluded women from the clergy. And no, it wasn't the same everywhere around the world. European women, relative to their society had less economic and political power than in some Islamic, Pagan European, and Pagan/animist North American societies.
European policies like primogeniture, coverture, guild restrictions, inability to divorce, and crackdowns on convents decimated women's ability to inherit wealth and political power and they were implemented through a joint effort by the Church and its 'divinely blessed' rulers. It is difficult to argue that the Church did not agree with these policies.
I do understand however that the enlightenment and Protestantism(both a strong divorce from Europe under the Church) laid the foundations for liberalism which in turn paved the way for Christian feminism. But the distinction has to be made because while some form of Christian thought did indeed aid feminism, the mainstream interpretation of Christianity for millennia was by contrast anti-feminist.
I see the problem. You don’t know actual history, you believe a myth. The rights of women did not diminish in the least under Christianity. They were gradually but wildly improved than what they were over Pagan societies. You are comparing the rights of women under Christianity in 1300 To the rights of unbelieving women in 2000. Seeing that the women in the year 2000 have more rights than the Christian women of 1300 you somehow conclude that before the church came in women must’ve had more rights.
They didn’t. Worldwide, the places outside of Christianity have had horribly worse conditions for women and still due today. If you want to deposit that secular rights over the last couple of centuries are better still that’s a reasonable argument that could be discussed. But the article gives dramatic and horrifying examples of how women are treated any place else, including the present day.
It is just insane to think that you can go to Papua New Guinea at any time in the last 10,000 years and see more rights for women, or deep into the Amazon, or in Native American communities, or in Central Asia
The policies I mentioned were passed during Christian rule. I did not compare women of today with European women of 1300. But rather European women of 1300 with women in other societies in 1300.
Do you believe primogeniture, coverture, placing heavy movement constrictions on nuns(who often did business on land owned by the convents) somehow empowered women?
It is without a doubt that European women had more rights and political power during early Christian/late Pagan era Europe than they did during the medieval period up until women's suffrage. The point I am making is that Church rule in Europe did not improve women's condition but a breakaway from the Church did. This is academic consensus for what its worth.
As for this article, it doesn't claim that women outside of Europe were treated worse than they were in Europe. Its a feminist piece about the patriarchy having a 'dual strategy' when it comes to the treatment of women inside and outside its society. Not that relevant to what we are talking about.
If you think any women in the world had more rights than European women in 1500 and I will not bother to go any further.
The original article does make the point that patriarchal societies(which are all of them) use that dual strategy. It seems to be pre-installed and is only lessened by enormous effort. My point is that there seems to have been only one path by which women escaped from that and it is at least associated with Christianity.
I am content to let my argument stand as it is
Where was this Christianity less than a century ago in Nazi occupied Europe? Just asking for a friend 👍
It was there, fighting nazis.
Christians fighting other Christians. Funny
Usual thing with siblings. The rest of the world still very much wants to be in the world that christians have built. Do you enjoy internet, for example?
Nearly all the technological goods in your house were developed in Asia 😊
Some were created in china, yes. But the idea of appliances and all manufacturing technics came from christian countries. The world would be a shithole without Europe and christians, face it bro.
I think it's very hard for women to write about this. I don't want to be disrespectful but you have to speak candidly for a topic like this. A lot of male sexual success is tied to social dominance. Women respond very positively to it, voluntarily. That basically means unbounded evil is, as long as you can get away with it, favored to some degree since people won't just allow you to dominate them socially for free as the reward is so high (this is why fights break out in school, parties and clubs). All is fair in love (and war). Conversely, just live and let live is a very poor strategy unless you have some other way to offer value that overcomes it.
The issue is, not everyone is going to be inheriting a sufficient plot of land or craft (or the modern equivalents). Furthermore, many boys grow up in poverty and disease burden so they have visibly low status markers. That basically means the most realistic value they can offer is savagery. Social dominance often just requires willingness to get hurt in the process. This is what motivates everything from entrapping women with violence and trauma bonding to gang violence to armies to imperialism. It's all the same instinct done by the same men often for the same reasons. As low as the orphan and as high as Napoleon.
There's really no way around this, it's just part of humanity. I live in North America so I don't know about Europe, but I never met a woman here that opened up to me and wasn't a victim of sexual violence. And it wasn't from a migrant. The same dynamics play out in the developed world, it's just not reported.
The anti-racist instinct is that men must be the same all over the world, regardless of the culture they came from or the circumstances of migration.
The European experience over recent decades doesn't support that belief regarding the treatment of women, children, gay men or Jews, particularly since our political elites abandoned the integration principle which the USA has long invested in.
Multiculturalism isn't possible unless multiple, diverse cultures exist. The problem in Britain is that our elites cannot accept the implication of this basic point. While protecting and exalting difference, they are unable to accept the proposition that this diversity must imply differences in attitudes to or acceptance of the 20th century liberal project we call 'rights'.
So, while white women and girls have certainly been abused by white men in Britain, in the entertainment and cultural industries for example, what we refer to as the grooming gangs operated a business model or franchise which enabled the abuse of certain vulnerable girls at scale. That business model was predicated on cultural attitudes to those girls which granted them no rights whatsoever.
Thanks for this essay, Alice. I believe there are key differences which place the current British context outside of the implied normality of historic invasion and conquest, which I'll summarise below.
1. Sex-selective abortion technology has resulted in tens of millions of missing women and girls across south Asia. The UN's latest estimate I've seen is 130 million females not allowed to live, which by any definition must be a femicide.
I believe this to be the primary driver of male intercontinental migration out of Asia today. There is no point to a young man migrating within Asia if he discovers the same lack of marriage prospects wherever he goes.
As a consequence, young south Asian women living into their teenage years are now relatively scarce and are valued more highly by a patriarchal society in terms of being marriage commodities. There is evidence of child brides being secured at ever-younger ages in Pakistan, perhaps due to this scarcity. One girl was recently reported as married at five years old, which is illegal in Pakistan but happened anyway.
2. The postmodern turn in social work, policing and the judiciary now regards the commercial exploitation of young children as normal and unsuitable for state intervention, following Foucault and his 'game of curdled milk'. I believe this is just as important a factor as allegations of racism. See for example the leniency allowed to BBC newsreader Huw Edwards, who is not known to be Asian.
3. The widespread availability of abortion pills in Britain, including legal abortion completion at home and illegal sources, means that men can exploit girls and women, risking pregnancy, without leaving DNA evidence. This is a very different context to male invaders seeking to spread their genes. In fact, a pregnant child is diminished in value in the exploitation market because their appeal to an abuser derives from their supposed virginity. Grooming gang survivors have described being discarded when they reached adulthood.
4. The devadasi tradition of temple prostitution in south Asia which pre-dates the Islamic conquest, in which unwanted girls are sold or donated to local religious leaders for exploitation by male temple patrons, as a form of fundraising. Other girls volunteer out of destitution or are kidnapped, out of the seven types of devadasi. The principle is that a devadasi belongs to the village, not any husband, and the temple patrons typically have their own wives. Very recently made illegal in Asia, but it still goes on.
I would welcome further discussion on this subject if you are interested in it.
This was very informative albeit difficult to read (which makes it all the more important).
You mention that: "European countries are increasingly diverse, welcoming migrants from more patriarchal cultures, but without investing in policies that would promote integration, such that all women can achieve economic inclusion, while being protected from violence. This failure is manifest in employment, attitudes, and honour-based abuse. ... European politicians have generally been reluctant to recognise these cultural differences, and have even suppressed investigations into rapes."
We all know about the economic and bureaucratic reasons for why authorities are doing this (e.g., the need for migrant labor, fear of "providing ammo to the far-right," etc.), but I recently came across a very compelling IDEOLOGICAL explanation for this. Ori Zimmels of the Life Awake substack explains it in his essay titled: "Liberationism." As he puts it:
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"Liberationism is the ideology and belief system that all people fundamentally share the same desire to be liberated. It is also the desire to liberate them, and to think it is our role to liberate them — in complete disregard of whether their culture does or does not desire liberation. It holds that no [group of people] can be [naturally] motivated by the desire to dominate or to impose their vision on the world. Where such desires appear, they are explained away as responses to trauma, oppression, or just bad education — never as authentic expressions of will. At its core, liberationism maintains that if we simply treat everyone with respect, they will surely choose to share the path of liberation with us. [...i.e.,] 'You have the same universal capacity as I do — for reason, for freedom, for choosing liberation — and because of that, your culture, your religion, your actual commitments, even what you are telling me to my face, are all irrelevant. My capacity is yours, and it overrides your identity.'
[This is because] the liberationist is not anchored in an identity of their own. They have often rejected nationality, religion, and cultural particularity as valid forms of belonging — coding them as primitive or even dangerous. And you cannot grant in the other what you have refused in yourself. The liberationist’s blindness to the other’s identity is a direct consequence of their refusal to inhabit their own. This is why national identity is so often coded as right-wing. From inside liberationism, any strong identity commitment looks like a failure to evolve. Patriotism, religious devotion, cultural particularity — these all look like stages on the way to the universal human who has shed all that. The liberationist sees themselves as the finished product, and everyone else as still under construction.
Liberationism creates another distortion that runs even deeper — the inability to differentiate, understand, and comprehend the reality of individualism and the reality of tribe. ...
We see this most clearly in terror attacks and suicide bombers. The liberationist sees [an individual] sacrificing themselves for the freedom of others. But in reality, the individual does not exist in the way the liberationist imagines them. ... In a tribal culture, where the individual is not the fundamental unit or concern, the goal is not freedom but the dominance of the tribe. ...
Today, liberationism is the most destructive force in the West. As it was in 1979 in Iran, it brings about the disarming of its own believers. It dismantles the very protections that democracy needs against forces that seek to destroy it, ... because when a society is infected with liberationism, you don’t even need to hide your intent. The liberationist [will refuse] to hear the real message of the other — which is the desire to fully dominate. ... The distortion at times is so profound that even if they openly admit their intent to dominate, the liberationist will ignore their words in favor of seeing them as suffering victims."
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Simply put: Liberal politicians in the West naively - and incorrectly - assume that the only reason why some people AREN'T liberally-minded (like them) is because of suffering/trauma/poverty, lack of education and/or irrational stubbornness (this assumption is reflected in phrases like: "Hurt people hurt people," or "Reality has a liberal bias"). Thus, they turn a blind eye to atrocities committed by minorities from 3rd world nations, because they see them as abuse victims who "can't be expected to know any better."
These liberationists seem to think that: if you just GIVE money, education and humanitarian aid to people, they will naturally become "enlightened liberals" like them. It's the political equivalent of an idiot mother who defends her delinquent son with: "He's only misbehaving because life has been unfair to him! If only people were KINDER to each other, he wouldn't feel the need to take his anger out on the world."
And lest you think I’m being uncharitable, take a look at this excerpt from an op-ed in the Guardian, where the author states:
“An asylum seeker from the hotel was accused of sexually assaulting a 14-year-old girl and concerns were raised about potential future threats. Since then, the hotel has become a site of protest, with large groups gathering with flares, flags and signs. … If your accommodation is regularly surrounded by a small, hostile mob that sometimes wants to set fire to it, it’s probably quite difficult to slot into a normal, law-abiding life, or even know what a law-abiding life looks like, in this country you escaped to, having heard it was civilized.”
In other words: "He's only raping teen girls because life has been cruel to him! If everyone were just KIND to him, he would stop taking his anger out on the world."
I was surprised that Hindu caste showed up here, because the genetic evidence shows there has been strict endogamy for a long time rather than the claiming of women from an outgroup (like the Irish maternal DNA found on Iceland from Vikings seizing captive women).
A simple analysis for your consideration.
Compare rape rates in Western Europe and Poland. What is the key variable?
Yes male sexual violence has been constrained in Western Europe, but modern day Europe is still incredibly unsure of itself (maybe a hangover from colonialism, WW2 etc?).
The lack of conviction that a culture in which sexual violence is minimised is better than one in which it is not means that Western Europe is uniquely vulnerable to “invasion”. In Rotherham and elsewhere, people who should have been safeguarding vulnerable girls chose to instead safeguard against community tensions.
Cultural relativism has run amok and so, so many girls have paid the price for it in Britain.
Western Europe and its Anglosphere colonies developed high trust over long and painful centuries. Bringing in people who do not come from high-trust societies has sometimes worked, but usually not. They take advantage of the trust, and this has emphatically including not respecting women.
Male coalitions continue to form because men desire agency and power. Most men are not happy to have their reproductive future and social prestige be at the mercy of woman run institutions which is the feminist proposal essentially.
The reasons for the decrease in violence in Europe and America leaves out the main one: genetics. The Western European Marriage Pattern, also known as the Hajnal Line reflects feudalism and the forbidding of cousin marriage, originally in Germanic cultures but strongly reinforced by the Catholic Church. This resulted in increased trust in non-family and more voluntary rather than entirely clan-based tribal affiliations. This in turn spilled over to less violence against women.
I am not saying that none of the cultural influences are real, only that they were and are secondary.
Thank you for the reminder that this horrible state of affairs is normative for humans and its absence is not a given. It is precious and easily breached. Any radical screwing around with this, whether by traditionalist or feminist or any other groups (especially the self-congratulatory extremists), runs a very high risk for all of us. We have gradually become a high-trust society and women have benefited most from that. They have more to lose if trust erodes.
So can we at least finally ditch the romanticist myth of the Noble Savage?
Good article. I think the prophet Mohammad's behavior (Mary the Copt in particular) gives an extremely strong justification for this.