re: #366 Obdicut

I’m just not sure we’re actually moving backwards by weakening the inhibition. I think, biologically, that the inhibition is not one against violence towards women, but against violence towards women other than your mate or your children. Men who abuse women aren’t like to go around beating up women in general, they almost always beat up their wives and their daughters. To me, the inhibition isn’t against using violence towards women, it’s about more ‘respecting’ the monopoly of violence that that woman’s mate and family has towards her.

It was socially acceptable in Victorian society to beat your wife. Even if it was seen, in the upper classes, as a bit of a sign of a bad temper, it didn’t get you ejected from polite society, arrested, or suffer any negative consequence whatsoever. I’d say inhibitions against beating women mostly started with the feminist revelations about domestic violence, rather than having been part of our culture for a long time.

We’re talking about something that has been an ideal (i.e. not widely implemented) since the Middle Ages. It was also very class-oriented: “We defend the Flower of Southr’n Womanhood, but not those women picking cotton over there.” In the poor parts of Pittsburgh in the ’50s, hitting a girl was irretrievable loss of pre-teen face.