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

Victorian era - Woman's moral virtue and ability to cope with the constant flux of menstruation and the challenges of reproduction made her better suited to the domestic sphere - and unsuited to the challenges of public life.
The women who went out into public life were seen as manly.
The ones who had mental health problems were hysterics (all traceable to the womb although Freud linked hysteria to sexual abuse as a child, he later changed tack)
Those lacking moral virtue were seen as fallen.

Bear in mind this is just over a century ago; about 1.5 average lifespans, and it is not hard to see why equality is precarious and still to be fought for.

(Again jumping in not having followed whole thread, but not just little woman who doesn't know her mind -though yes, that- but also the elevation of motherhood to woman's primary duty and role)

That said, and I think this is important, feminists have also long fought for recognition that women do need protection around maternity - whether that be the ability to control fertility or the right for maternity provision and the right not to be financially desperate because they have children.
I think in such a sexualised culture as ours, given gender hierarchy, the latter has translated to - hormonal contraception being the default, despite risks, thus no reason not to be sexually available; abortion being a defended right (rightly, but again, no reason not to be sexually available) and the financial risks, if you don't wish to use hormonal contraception or it fails, or you don't wish to have an abortion, still being largely born by women.

I don't see this as a sexual utopia at all, for what it is worth. I see this as another gendered set of constrained choices. Not disagreeing with the provision of contraception and abortion, but the premise that the consequences of unplanned pregnancy are still borne by women whilst the expectation of PIV as the norm has risen.

(Hope this is not too way off topic)

Oh that is easy, the little woman who can't think properly were perfectly suited to that role, they had "evolved" perfectly for it, or god had "designed" them, whichever camp you were in.

Passive, not a silly plan, I just couldn't see men in general going along with that plan.

There were some caricatures where a being a househusband was depicted as a fate worse than death, at the time when the suffragettes fought for voting rights. (How the men at the time justified doing something to women that they themselves thought of as so utterly horrible, I have no idea.)

People who were young after WW1 talk about lots of aunties living with their friend

To garlick at 2:15
If there were more women to men wouldn't it be better if men became stay at home fathers to all their kids, so the unemployed one being supported by many working women?
Now to carry on reading and hoping this hasn't already been talked down as a silly plan.

I'm only up to the end of page 9 so far. Such an interesting thread. And similar to experience when I started to see inequality everywhere, this thread has been an epiphany. It has thrown my entire sexual history into sharp relief. In a rather disturbing way.

I hope the disturbing epiphany helps you to make better experiences in the future!

I'm only up to the end of page 9 so far. Such an interesting thread. And similar to experience when I started to see inequality everywhere, this thread has been an epiphany. It has thrown my entire sexual history into sharp relief. In a rather disturbing way.

"Perhaps women do make more progress when there is a man shortage.

It is known for certain that whenever there are more men (and people in general) we get our rights taken away."

Yes this happened after WW1 when many men were killed. Women comparatively gained in terms of emancipation and the ability to have a job - albeit at half the wages of a man in the same job. There just were not enough men even when men returned home after the war.

My mother remembers as a child often meeting older middle aged women who simply would never marry and instead had formed partnerships and small home based businesses with other women.

That's why the patriarchy often isolates women - to stop them playing away and cuckolding the husband.

Rather unsuccessfully so, if your numbers are correct.

Maybe they should try to be decent and honorable men instead, so that a woman would feel bad about cheating them.
I, for one, would cheat on a rapist I was forced to marry on principle, so that he doesn't get to spread his rapist genes.

However, in the "test babies to expose cheating women" thread, some people mentioned that this kind of test is chronically unreliable, and a man's sperm might have different genes than his mouth, where the sample is usually taken. Which is why I am rather sceptical about those numbers.

Indeed. In societies where women tend not to earn the 10x their husband which I did, women often marry dull providers and have sex and babies with exciting men on the side as it were.

The BBC program about the Ascent of women showed how women's rights and position was slowly chipped away and away in culture after culture. I bet ISIS/Daesh don't like the recent discovery of fairly powerful Nefertiti's tomb in Egypt.

FW, there's a long running thread about DNA testing elsewhere at present. Estimates of prevalence vary but I certainly wouldn't take 10% as gospel.

I am also surprised as in the UK at least, I don't think men are routinely required to give their blood type during ante natal care; I'm not even sure babies are tested for blood type at birth.

The ratio of boy babies to girl babies is 103:100 at birth but by the time they reach age 20 it is about the same 100:100.

That said, a consultant obstetrician once told me that routine blood testing of babies born to women in stable couple partnerships shows that 1:10 babies are not the baby of the father (i.e the blood type of the baby is impossible given the blood type of mother and stated father).

Now that doesn't mean 1/10 of all women are having an extra marital affair but 1:10 women who have a baby are. Women cheat for a very good biological reason. Her eggs are precious and babies are hard to look after and she is not going to have many babies so she wants a man who is going to hang around after the birth but at the same time she wants a mate who is healthy and virile so she covers her options by mating with both - to create a bit of intersperm competition. Even though men and women are equal in numbers the woman can still create a bit of healthy competition.

She rewards the faithful man by giving him a long term monogamous relationship as long as he looks after the kids and puts out the bins but plays away with the virile but unfaithful bad boys.

That's why the patriarchy often isolates women - to stop them playing away and cuckolding the husband.

If you were to have a modern society with more women than men, where women did NOT compete for men, both the women and men would want to be promiscuous - if only somewhat. Pair-bonding would cause rivalries; the expectation of raising families as a couple would have to go. (It's not that reliable anyway.)

Women would have to have access to adequate resources. In the interest of a healthy, well-fed society they'd need to be able to make plenty of money. It might be likely they'd band together, to ensure continuity of care and of income (this is thought to be why 25% of humans are sub-fertile, btw.)

This edges towards a scenario where the men can float around, feckless and free, getting laid now and again with no fear of consequences. So the imaginary society must have expectations of men - that they make themselves useful or face ostracism, with no sex or familial relationships.

Problem being that this could already happen! But it doesn't. Women still plug away in unsatisfactory relationships for the sake of the children 'having a father', everyone mostly accepts that men have a right to more of the resources; rapists rape and women hope.

I have no idea whether this is sort of hard-wired in our species or is the outcome of 5,000 years' conditioning.

The impact of the pill on London drinking water... but that doesn't make men women so I don't think I can use that in my thinking here.

No, but it could be used as a reason why PiV practised as it is today, is unsustainable.

Perhaps women do make more progress when there is a man shortage.

It is known for certain that whenever there are more men (and people in general) we get our rights taken away. I think it happened even in the Middle Ages that men legislated women out of their jobs when there was a shortage of jobs.

People should really know better than to believe this "men have families to feed" nonsense - it is women who have families to feed. With so many single mothers, it logically follows that there are many men who do not, in fact, feed a family.

Yes, that wiki is what I'd remembered. It works out pretty evenly and boys tends to have more problems - more likely to be colour blind, autistic, more at the extremes so it ends up around 50/50.

Lots of women and not many men - in bits of China where that is so some men share a wife. I don't think we have often had that in history However if you take my grandfather and his 10 siblings (he was born 1880) only 2 of those siblings had children because his 3 sisters (who worked in the 1920s) found a shortage of men (as a whole generation was wiped out in WWI) and 3 of the boys went to the US and virtually starved after the crash and never married, sleeping rough etc and no chance of getting a wife and another male died young. So when there was a man shortage after WWI I suppose that co-related to women getting more jobs (my father disgracefully as a local councillor was reported in the press as arguing in the 1920s crash that male doctors should be given jobs and not female ones locally as the men had families to feed - I still have the press cuttings, no wonder my feminist mother didn't like him). Perhaps women do make more progress when there is a man shortage.

The impact of the pill on London drinking water... but that doesn't make men women so I don't think I can use that in my thinking here.

Oh dear

**

But that will alienate people from feminism!!!111

Yes, it is more boys. But I am not entirely sure this is the natural ratio, as some countries also have something closer to 103/100. Maybe there are abortions of girl fetuses in Europe, too.

In most populations, adult males tend to have higher death rates than adult females of the same age (even after allowing for causes specific to females such as death in childbirth), both due to natural causes such as heart attacks and strokes, which account for by far the majority of deaths and also to violent causes, such as homicide and warfare (for example, in the USA as of 2006, an adult non-elderly male is 3 to 6 times more likely to become a victim of a homicide and 2.5 to 3.5 times more likely to die in an accident than a female of the same age). - Wikipedia.

Sorry, I got that back to front. Wikipedia says human ratio at birth is thought to be 107/100 m/f.

I think historically boy babies die before reaching adulthood at a slightly higher rate. Not sure about now.

@slugs: Average or absolute? I think nuns always lived pretty long. Probably also to do with them not having to compete with males for food, while a woman living with a man would go hungry to feed her husband and kids.

Just skimmed through that, slugs - they're saying that all life expectancy has risen dramatically, but the differential between men & women has reversed? Due to lower rates of perinatal mortality in women, presumably.

I imagine the slightly higher ratio of female births to male is to compensate for women's deaths in childbirth, though somewhat inadequately. Or it could be our bonobo heritage hangin' on in there

If you look at groups where men have several wives and you need a lot of women (and they deal with it by casting out teenage and adult men so reserve the women for a few of the men only) they tend to exploit women more not less.

I assume you are talking about mormon sects in the US? I wouldn't consider those an example of society at large. They only manage to exist in that way because the society around them is different.

In societies where few men have several wives and many young men have none, those young men are still there and still aggressively compete, and may play an important role in upholding the patriarchy.

In the world at large, the surplus men from Islamist terror groups certainly serve a purpose in reinforcing patriarchy.

If you think of a small model of such a world ... I don't think an isolated village with, say, ten men, who have three wives each, would be able to uphold patriarchy for long if they killed two thirds of all male babies.
Aggressive teenage males can be used for a variety of purposes, be it intimidating the women into marrying one rather than be raped by many, or by having one of the surplus males executed every year to produce a climate of fear and hopelessness.