If it's tripe then you will have to provide academic evidence to refute it. I provided several scholarly sources saying arranged marriages did NOT require the consent of Nordic women. You're saying you know more than these scholars I cited or know these scholars are wrong...well let's see some comparable evidence to the contrary.
I've read that the Germanic Tribes weren't monogamous either - polygamy was practiced by those who could afford it:
Tacitus portrayed the sexual habits of the Germans as upright and austere and marriage as a solemn undertaking in which monogamy was implicit, at least for women." ... "Polygyny was also a common feature of Germanic domestic life, although most men probably contented themselves with a single wife because they could not afford to do otherwise. Among royal families and the upper ranks of the nobility, however, polygyny was common prior to the conversion of the Germans to Christianity. In many cases the practice persisted for several generations after conversion, and the law continued to ignore sexual promiscuity among men while penalizing it among women"
-p. 128 of "Law and Sex in Early Medieval Europe, Sixth to Eleventh Centuries: The Germanic Invasions and Germanic Law" by James A. Brundage
Here is a full copy of the book:
http://the-eye.eu/public/concen.org/...e.Jan,1990.pdf
Maybe it got better or maybe it didn't get better under Christianity. Even if people over-exaggerated the benefits of Christianity, what we do know was that pre-Christian Vikings did not require the consent of the women for arranged marriages. Consent was beneficial, but in most cases was not necessary.
The most detailed eye witness accounts of the medieval Viking sacrifice clearly portrays it as not voluntary because the slaves didn't know they were going to get gang raped and murdered. And the Vikings had to hide the noises from her scream so she wouldn't scare the other slaves from "volunteering."
The two are not in the same category. Self Crucifixion is more similar to foot binding and corsets as it is just physical mutilation - they don't actually die. They are not volunteering themselves to get gang raped and murdered. They're all crazy practices, but they're on different levels of crazy.
And you ignored my point about 1) no historical evidence of foot binding during the Tang Dynasty and 2) foot binding being an optional practice for high class women, and was not even practiced by commoners until very late in the imperial era (eg. by the time corsets came around).
If we really want address slaves vs free women and distinguish between female slaves vs female non-slaves, we can distinguish between female upper class vs female everybody else too...see discussion at the end.
And that someone let you know that there is no evidence foot binding even originated in the Tang Dynasty, as there are only anachronistic stories from Song era and later. We really only have evidence that foot binding existed during the late Southern Tang and early Song Dynasty, so your original claim that the women's rights during the Tang Dynasty (especially during the early Tang during Wu Zeitan or Princess/General Pingyang) was bad simply because of foot binding is based on a faulty premise.
I refuted your claim that women were treated worse in the periods after the Han Dynasty, so you brought up the issue of foot binding to claim the Tang Dynasty women were really badly treated (even though we have no evidence of the practice during the Tang era). You were implying that society's rights for women can be judge by a single bad practice, so it was logical to bring up the Vikings who gang raped and murdered slave women in rituals because you kept harping on the idea that pre-Christian Germanic peoples as a shining example of women's rights.
It never was an east vs west argument. It was an argument about how it was silly to use a single cultural practice to judge the entire society. Your only argument for your claim that the Tang Dynasty had poor women's rights was your claim about the practice of foot binding...which is a practice that likely didn't even exist during the Tang Dynasty.
I only brought up examples of Viking gang rape and murder and corsets so you can see the problem of the logic of judging societies based on a single practice. You're claiming one bad practice = entire society is bad, so I said let's see how your logic can be applied to the pre-Christian Germanic peoples and others.
You claimed the Tang Dynasty's rights for women were bad simply because of one practice: "foot binding," which likely didn't even exist during the Tang Dynasty because there isn't historical evidence it existed during that time outside of anachronistic stories from later periods. I brought up Vikings gang raping females to prove a point about your own logic, not to claim the Vikings had poor women's rights.
You brought up an anachronistic story about an optional practice for mostly upper class women to slander the Tang Dynasty, when there is no evidence the practice even existed during the Tang era in the first place.
I've already provided academic sources stating that pre-Christian Germanic arranged generally did not require the women's consent. Seeking their opinion was beneficial, but not required. As a scarred veteran of PreChristian European history, you can go ahead and provide sources proving me wrong.
Ibn Fadlan's account is one of the most detailed [if not the only detailed] accounts of a early medieval Viking burial ritual we have anywhere, and he had a mixture of praises and criticisms in his writings. If we judge them based on even the standards of their time - the gang rape and murder of female slaves would be pretty shocking even to slave owning civilizations.
The distinctions you're drawing between slave women vs free women brings up distinctions that we can also apply to foot binding. So we can ignore certain groups of women in this discussion about women's rights because of their social class? If we want to remove entire categories of women from the women's rights equation based on social status, then we can do the same for foot binding, because it was a procedure relegated to the upper class for much of its history. The vast majority of women during the Song Dynasty did not practice foot binding, as the practice didn't spread among the other social classes until many centuries after the Song collapse.
Re: Mod&Fix ideas for Records mode.
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Originally Posted by Intranetusa
