"Intercourse/PIV is always rape, plain and simple."

Whoops! They do you, that should have been..........

I should have added that the premise is that most of the time you end up with a couple with one male and one female. Drugs or preference for one sex as opposed to the other is frowned upon, so I presume trying to be a lesbian on such a world would be a bit complicated! But then again in some ways, a little more like a homosexual heterosexuality, in that all members of that society would, on average, have the same body experiences as any other. Which is a way of looking at what she wrote that I have never considered before......................

Another interesting book ('cos SciFi by women tends to consider gender at some point) is 'Golden Witchbreed' by Mary Gentle. The aliens there don't have a sex whilst they are children/sub-adult, but develop one during a transition period (which can be quite physically demanding). The point being, of course, how do they know how to teach or train a child when you really don't know if it will develop into a male or female adult? And then you have the rare individuals who fail to make this transition, and become sexless adults.

Basic premise here seems to be -- where gender when sex is either hidden totally or non-existent? Rather than the more modern non-binary gender nonsense.

I still think that the Le Guin case, where anyone can get pregnant, is the most interesting, and as I recall she says that since anyone can get pregnant, no one is as quite as free as males are in our society. I suspect PIV would also be viewed rather differently! You do them this month, you do them next time round! And the fact that most of the time people are just people, no sex, and no male gaze!

Snails win out then... hermaphrodite all the way.

"The mating practices of snails allow them to deliver eggs for new snails to be brought into life at a consistent rate. Snails will go through a complete mating ritual with each other, usually which will communicate to the other snail for an average of two to twelve hours. At the end of this ritual, the pair will fertilize the eggs in the other, so both of them will deliver eggs. It is known that a snail can carry up to 100 eggs at a time.

When the eggs are fertilized, they will go through a process of growth inside the snail, until they are ready to be delivered. After that, both snails lay their eggs and bury them into separate places inside a small hole made in the topsoil in a cool place. This will allow the eggs to develop without being harmed."

One book I really appreciated was 'The Left Hand of Darkness', by Ursula K. LeGuin, where the race on the planet is no longer bisexual. As I recall, people only gain sexual charactersistics/differentiated genitalia during a period of mutual heat (or pregnancy), and there is no pre-set sex that a person will acquire. So someone can both birth children, and father them. So for most of the time, people are just people.

Of course, the bisexual human alien visitors find this all very disconcerting!

The interesting issue is if only men breastfed or got up in the night and if they did about 80% of domestic chores and childcare and women earned a lot more than men would women want more sex than men do in the young children stage of life?

If you don't limit that to PiV, which I imagine would be rather unwanted a couple of weeks or longer after giving birth ... yes, probably.

And if sex was centred on women's pleasure instead of men's (not the "it's over when the man had an orgasm" PiV thing), women might quite probably want more sex than men all the time.

Yes and from the men's point of view one reason they get married is to have a lot of sex.

The Woody Allen quote is not wrong:

[Alvy and Annie are seeing their therapists at the same time on a split screen]
Alvy Singer's Therapist: How often do you sleep together?
Annie Hall's Therapist: Do you have sex often?
Alvy Singer: [lamenting] Hardly ever. Maybe three times a week.
Annie Hall: [annoyed] Constantly. I'd say three times a week.

The interesting issue is if only men breastfed or got up in the night and if they did about 80% of domestic chores and childcare and women earned a lot more than men would women want more sex than men do in the young children stage of life?

Deo I knew several people, all professionals, who said that if they didn't give in to their husbands, they would leave. A couple of them were still paying off the wedding cost! This was in the 90s.

Personally, I think men have got around the 'rape in marriage' thing by veiled threats of leaving, by the assumption that once in a partnership, sex (PIV) is on tap, regardless, and the availability of women via the internet dating sites.

Yes, it is an interesting thread.
My view is that prior to about 10,000 years ago we were all in small groups and there probably was more of a measure of equality between men and women (but no one really knows). The Ascent of Women BBC series certainly also suggested as much earlier this year. The Venus figures which were made about 28,000 years ago possibly illustrate female power. They look powerful to me and women can produce children and men can't so in a sense the vagina is the thing to fear and is all powerful and captures and retains the penis.

Then about 10,000 years ago we learned how to grow crops, could stay in one place more, possibly ate worse but at least we had reliable food sources and men (and some women) started acquiring thing - lots of women, slaves, land, building stone monuments etc and things turned from the spiritual to the physical in a sense and men started taking more and more power. Much more recently women got the vote and started taking power back again.

As to how I react to an article that vaginal sex is rape, I'm a lawyer so it's purely a legal issue. In the UK today but not back in the 80s men can in law rape their wives so no continuous consent is given in marital sex which it used to be and still is in many places on the planet. Most sex in most UK marriages is consensual although plenty of women on MN will be giving it to get it over and then get their sleep when they're up all night with a baby I suspect as that's the nature of new motherhood.

I just wanted to stick up my hand and say, what an interesting thread!

I've learned a lot, thank you. I've got a lot to think about. I'm fascinated by the reaction that the article provoked in me and in others - quite viscerally dismissive in some cases, and isn't that interesting? Why should that be, I wonder

I think one can state that women are powerful as we have the power of giving birth. That is true regardless of culture and time period.

However, whether men actually respected that power, or exploited it for ulterior purposes, or just counteracted it by killing, we cannot know.

Likewise, a child who can build a beautiful sand castle is certainly more admirable than a child who can destroy the beautiful sand castle, but who is more powerful?

Words can be weird. "Impregnable" can have two meanings, one being "invulnerable" and the other "able to be impregnated; fertile" (per online dictionary).

So, should a man attempt to have sex with an impregnable woman, or avoid her?

Deo, is enough known about the cultural background to state that? Equally, a barren wife could be in danger so a statue of fertility might be her "prayer for Salvation" or indeed to request a safe delivery (as with saints' girdles etc in medieval Christianity)

And yet if you look at Venus of Willendorf statues it is strong very fertile women who seem to have the power (in that time anyway). Although without doubt having a baby you are feeding does make you more vulnerable but also more powerful as men cannot produce life like that.

I was thinking more something like those small native tribes where the one with the highest social status is the one who throws the most parties where everyone gets free food, and stuff like this - a society structure where the most generous and kind people end up in the most influential positions.

In The Gate to Women's Country they use behavioural analysis so segregate those genetically inclined to violence, lie to them about their breeding (when women do go with them they use contraception) and then arrange for the rest to be deceived and slaughtered.

So the women have sex with them for the sole purpose of deceiving them into thinking they have fathered children?

Sound like something nice and creepy to read around Christmas.

Though I was more looking for a society model that works self-reinforcing, like the real patriarchies, just, you know, more beneficial.
The one in that books seems to require constant intervention by the authorities.

Do you think we could re-shape society to disadvantage people with dark personality traits in terms of reproduction, etc?

In The Gate to Women's Country they use behavioural analysis so segregate those genetically inclined to violence, lie to them about their breeding (when women do go with them they use contraception) and then arrange for the rest to be deceived and slaughtered.

Yes, and led to the haemophilia of the Russian royal son and others. Too much in breeding.

The other example I was thinking of last night was the ultra orthodox Jewish practice of controlling sexual intercourse which controls both the husband and wife. No sex until she has stopped menstruating and has had the ritual mikveh bath in public baths for that purpose. It means when you have sex you really want it because it's been denied to you both until then and also you have it when you're most likely to conceive. This might well be against women's interests unless they want 14 children but is also controls when men have PiV sex too.

I suppose the other "control" is the most common in the UK - women not wanting sex because they are tired and have babies up all night so have no PiV sex for what starts as a few months and morphs into just about never as the couple get out of the habit. That tends to be female control and of course her right.

In the uk monarchs and nobles used to marry cousins and uncles etc to reinforce "noble blood" - plus villagers often intermarried as travelling long distances to meet others was harder.

That's true. Your average UK medieval peasant might form a love match if she were lucky but most better off girls were married off by their fathers for financial and succession reasons - marriage was the financial and societal contract not necessarily leading to much marital sex other than to have a few heirs and spares and those (women as well as men to some extent) who are successful tend to have more children. It is one reason blonde hair is flourishing apparently despite genetically brown prevailing, because blonde women are so much more preferred by men (which was a very surprising trend when I read about it).

Some women through their progress and cultures move away from living with men and then just taking PIV sex when they choose. You see that at the bottom end where there are no jobs for young men but a good few for women so women tend to prefer a life of benefits and work than having to subsidise some hapless local youth who will never get a job and perhaps at the upper end too - would I have divorced if I was not the higher earner or at least financially able to bring up a large family without a man?

The biggest increase in households in the UK is households with one person them although they tend to be either widows or else men alone whose wives chose to divorce them (most divorce in the UK initated by men) as the divorced women usually have their children with them so I suppose if you take single person households plus divorced women with children who don't have a partner and the elderly who have no spouse that is a huge group of people who may well not be getting/not be subjected to PIV sex.

I would like to see that society too Vestal

but not to say that there aren't plenty of people with unbroken lines of loving relationships in their lineage...

I would like to live in a society where that is the case for everyone. :)

But probably such societies would inevitably be invaded by the psychopaths from other countries.

Do you think we could re-shape society to disadvantage people with dark personality traits in terms of reproduction, etc?

(I, personally, am of the opinion that fully legal abortion is one of the things necessary for that, as it would remove one reproductive advantage of rapists. However, there are certainly many other things that could be done.)

I'm not saying that they necessarily interbreed Deogratias, just that they feel affinity for one another, so form a strong and self-perpetuating society.

And not all sex, especially historically, is based on both parties wanting to have sex with one another.

(But also look at historical things like in-breeding amongst the Egyptian pharoahs, or all european royal families being inter-related- sex, conquest, power, succession, provenance and blood lines).

Not quite...just that there will be people, who, across the course of history, as the result of pretty dark personality traits (psychopathy, narcissism, Machiavellianism) manage to get themselves into positions where they not only reproduce in disproportionate number, but they manage to set and maintain power structures that are directly related to those traits.

So some aspects of society are disproportionately shaped by those traits, traits that if we encountered in a friend/colleague we'd be worried about (and similar to the current idea that high placed executives are more like to show traits of pyschopathy/sociopathy). So things like inheritance, property rights, how sexuality, property rights and power relate to one another (e.g. Genghis Khan would marry the daughters of kings who submitted to him, so sexuality, inheritance, property and power are all combined there, and that becomes a norm of transmission).

So Genghis Khan might be one source, Manchu dynasty might be another, a Roman emperor might be another...but not to say that there aren't plenty of people with unbroken lines of loving relationships in their lineage...