If you view history in time-lapse, it's like a Benny Hill sketch with the ethnic majority zanily scrambling around to the tune of "Yakety Sax," beating the minorities with their shoes ... then brutally raping and murdering them. We're a terrible species, and it's only recently that we've started to accept that we should maybe possibly (kind of) consider accepting each other's differences (a little bit), rather than trying to oppress folks into normality. But that's a faulty assumption: We're not only less progressive today than you might think, but there have been some truly shocking moments of tolerance in history that make the modern world look downright bigoted.

5 Vikings Had Progressive Rape Laws

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When you think "Vikings," you think "casual rapists" somewhere after "horned helmets," but before "longboats." But in actuality, Vikings win extra bonus points for their relatively fair treatment of women. It wasn't full equality, but in family life, women were the ones in charge of finances, and they had total freedom to divorce their husbands. Their sagas also featured strong female characters -- something many male writers are still struggling with today, unless "strong female character" means "drama ballast with tits."

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To boldly go where several cliched female scenes have gone before.

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Vikings weren't an entire culture of casual rape. In fact, Viking rape laws were far more progressive than their so-called "civilized" European counterparts. On the continent, women were considered property and so rape was a property crime -- there was no "victim," but the father or husband, whose property had been damaged. While Icelandic law punished both rape and attempted rape with outlawry, which was basically the death penalty. Rapists weren't executed outright, but it was totally legal to kill outlaws with impunity. And knowing the Vikings, "no consequence kill" was probably roughly analogous to "free ice cream buffet."

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Sadly both of those things came to a head after a tragic misunderstanding at Dagr the Dairyer's ice cream social.

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Compare that with the "you were asking for it" defense of today, and you get the sense that Vikings would be awfully disappointed with the "progressive" future. If the spirit of Olaf the Mad saw the way we treat rape in modern courts, he would shake his head and walk away, shedding a single tear into his beard at the injustice of it all. Just before cleaving a man in two with his axe and setting fire to a passing horse-cart.