Discussion
RE: https://social.coop/@CaitlinWaddick/117361048106557305
Droit du seigneur—the claimed right to rape of upper class men/rulers—goes back a *very* long way, bronze age or earlier: it's in the Epic of Gilgamesh.
Totally not surprised that they still practice it today, but furtively rather than openly.
@cstross It's so weird that English uses a French expression that is different from the French version, «droit de cuissage» which is more explicit…
I was going to mention that name myself.
It's a tricky piece of history, because it is written about as a source of antagonism in novels more than it is written about as a genuine custom.
There was a big hoo-hah about its reality in the middle 19th century, and apparently a smaller revival of the same debate in the 1990s. From what I've read and been told over the years, it's pretty much a myth about the Middle Ages that sprung up during the Enlightenment, when of course people wanted to cast the Middle Ages in a barbaric light.
And the societies where more modern writers said that it occurred, all turn out to be being cast by those writers as foreign barbarians, not civilized as 'we' are.
Post-Revolutionary France made out that it was a habit of Pre-Revolutionary France. Georges Marchais claimed that 1970s #Afghanistan practiced it, thereby justifying the Soviet invasion. And so on.
@cstross @JdeBP I feel one key aspect of the whole Epstein thing is that the powerful could do whatever they wanted, which is somehow antinomic of having a codified practice.
The moment you have a codified practice (with a name), institutions will interfere with it, claim control, the catholic church will say you can only do it on week-days (except if you buy the premium version), Wall Street will want reports.
@cstross Depending on the interpretation, droit du seigneur was always satirical rather than normative?
@sabik The claim that it was a *law* conferring a right of nobility was satirical, but you don't generally satirize something that isn't happening! It implies it was so common that there was widespread awareness of it.
@cstross
I mean, it may have always been done furtively rather than openly, even if (then as now) there's widespread awareness
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@cstross Trump gave an interview in 2015 saying all America's rapes were committed by Mexicans. And people still voted for him.