You mentioned & I'd heard before that agriculture & the concept of paternity/lineage is the cause of Patriarchy, but I would imagine that rape had gone on before that point (isn't that how all babies would've been made then since most women don't enjoy PIV as much as other sex) since men are, in general, larger & stronger and thus able to overpower women. I just truly cannot imagine a gender-less post- (or pre-?) patriarchy if physical differences are the same as they are today :/

Sorry, I guess my last “question” is more fit for a discussion than a Q&A. Maybe my question would be then, did rape and patriarchy arise at the same time or are they not necessarily related? If they are related, which one caused which? (This is a difficult concept for me to articulate well, sorry!)

This is really interesting, because i just found out yesterday that men and women are different sizes because of patriarchy (it was in a science documentary). Female bodies need more nutrition than men (because of menstruation and pregnancy), and what’s biologically most reasonable, so to speak, would be that women are as large or larger than men. So in reality, women are smaller than men because of thousands of years of stunted growth - men grew because of patriarchy (they get served first in most cultures and to put it simply: basically took our food for thousands of years), women shrunk (and women still get served less food on their plates, so it won’t change).

So, not even difference in sizing can be used to argue that men rape women “naturally”, because the size is literally man made.

Before agriculture, we didn’t need NEARLY as many humans as post-agriculture. Children was probably not considered labor before agriculture and domestication. I mean, I’m just speculating here, but I’d imagine it looking something like this: before agriculture and domestication, women had much fewer children (a lot of them probably didn’t have any), Earths population was significantly smaller. Agriculture needed a baby boom for labor. So the theory is that rape and forced pregnancy stemmed from this; humans needed labor, women could get pregnant, and herders started to figure out what made them pregnant - and made them pregnant for labor.

So, I definitely think patriarchy came before rape did, or that they occurred simultaneously. Just like violent crimes in general, there might’ve been isolated incidents before it (there were psychos in the stone age too), but not systematic like it is today. Remember: men don’t rape someone because they’re horny, rape is about power. So yes, patriarchy and rape necessarily goes together. If it was natural for men to rape women, I honestly don’t understand why we haven’t built a giant concrete wall yet to separate the two sexes from each other.

- Pi