The First Naked Kiss on Camera: Eadweard Muybridge, Sex and Murder
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> against the judge’s direction they acquitted him on account of justifiable homicide.
The most interesting part to me is how he was so casually acquitted of murder.
Marriage actually 'ment' something in a fairly direct way.
Some man fucked a married woman, he got killed. At no point does this bring up questions of "ownership" or "random psychopathy".
A random psychopath out of nowhere didn't kill you, you got killed by a husband of a married woman you fucked. Action -> Consequence. Very deterministic.
There's no randomness in who got killed in this circumstance, in fact it's pretty predictable outcome (like rolling a dice where one face of a dice might kill you).
Actions had consequences.
Unless the woman hid that she was married, and the man had no way of knowing then that'd be bit different.
Additionally, according to the article, they did end up getting divorced, which seems to indicate that a divorce was an available option.
I get it, consequence-free, zero responsibility stuff is all the rage now, and thus marriage means jack shit now (and little to no reason to do it really)
Legality is absolutely irrelevant in any conversation about morality, ethics or societal norms and their decline and similar. They are not laws of universe and are malleable, made up and thus completely irrelevant outside of context of seeking legal advice.
Legality of thing X, implies absolutely NOTHING about thing X, other than it being legal that is.
It's the hidden implicit implication (but "hey, it's perfectly legal", and therefore) which is particularly dishonest and insidious.
And in many cases a murder as a consequence of adultery would not necessarily be classified as "premediated first-degree murder" either.
You're still using terminology like "first degree murder", any kind of "killing" which could be called "justifiable" can't be without provocation or prior infliction of serious harm from the victim beforehand directly or indirectly. In other words, it's retaliatory and defensive in some sense.
>what other acts would justify killing somebody?
From top of my head, probably transmission of HIV without disclosing your status might be there (with some exceptions).
Legality of this warries from country to country and punishment for it is often times not proportional to the severity of the crime (of bodily harm/transmission). Like what's 5years for ruining somebody's life? Or no punishment at all?
But I think you're missing the key point and it isn't justifying "murders", but about actions having serious consequences. Compared to having ...... none basically.
Would the loss of home, potentially children, definitely household income, life partner, probably some respect from peers, etc, not be enough punishment for an unfaithful wife?
Her actions clearly had serious consequences.
Or are you crying that it's unfair that she didn't get her head blown off too?
Fair enough, these cases do occasionally end up with both perpetrators getting their head blown off.
However in this case, that wouldn't be advised since she already had a child (and not even necessarily his!)
>Would the loss of home, potentially children, definitely household income, life partner, probably some respect from peers, etc, not be enough punishment for an unfaithful wife?
You surely can't be serious. This would have happened regardless is she just had a divorce first, and that would have been the proper procedure for her in this case anyway if she "wants to be with somebody else" (I like how casual this sounds LOL).
Especially taking into account how these things are settled nowadays? Fuck, it's anything but a punishment.
And the man would just..... walk it off?
Of course wifes/woman have to be guarded. Can they defend themselves in an attack? No?
However in this case, what's defended is the institution of marriage. Without adultery having serious conseqence, marriage is utterly and absolutely meaningless procedure, without any benefit or consequence.
Which has nothing to do with "women in our lives" whatsover, since it easily could have been a wife who gunned down the mistress and/or husband for adultery.
Everyone seemed to haphazardly latch onto "womans rights and agency", which I find particularly odd since when zero consequences for actions is some sort of fundamental (woman?) right or something to that effect.
The only way I can interpret is that they desire and quite enjoy the "zero consequences" pure indulgence, hedonistic culture and are too cowardly to own up to it, instead hide behind all sorts of other excuses("but what about them women agency") which makes no sense whatsover given the context.
Ie. they want to be able to fuck somebodys wife with the legal protection on their side, thus somewhat reducing the risk of their face getting mashed in with a steel pipe.
The crucial part of the discussion is whether:
(a) marriage as an institution should be serious and have serious consequences
(b) or should it be abolished and/or remain an empty meaningless husk of it's former self, a pure old fashioned tradition/sentimentality without any real substance behind it
Even today there are still places where honor is more important than life.
If she'd left him and taken the child with her, I'd think of it very differently.
I could understand how mass-audience public discourse might not admit such a thing.
But I'd assume there were enough people in sexual relationships that, at least in private or cras venues, reality would prevail.
I do vaguely recall there was a lot of "medical" science about sex at the time, it might be it's from that one; see also hysteria, the treatment of which was a vibrator, but the remaining publications are clinical at best - denying that women have a sex drive, basically.
> The true story is that the use of vibrators became widespread only when they were marketed to the general public, both men and women, as domestic and medical appliances in the early 1900s. Ads featuring men and women, babies and older people, promised vibrators could do everything from eliminating wrinkles to curing tuberculosis. When doctors did use vibrators on women, they assiduously avoided touching their clitorises. “The greatest objection to vibration thus applied is that in overly sensitive patients it is liable to cause sexual excitement,” the gynecologist James Craven Wood wrote in 1917. If, however, he continued, “the vibratode is kept well back from the clitoris, there is but little danger of causing such excitement.”
The brain elasticity of an 80yo might not always be up to learning the JS framework of the week (though perhaps that is a wisdom in itself...), but I find, when talking to older folks, that their years of experience offer an irreplaceable perspective. That I would consider to be a form of wisdom.
Its not that they know everything about everything or that being old makes them automatically smart, but experiencing the world through a much longer lens of time (then my lens) can change how they see things and in particular can allow them to recognize patterns that younger folks would miss...
(None of this should be construed as me advocating for a geritocrasy, but just as a reminder to take the time to listen to the older folks around you. You do not (and probably should not) take what they say at face value as given facts, but listen, consider, and test their perspective as you form your own opinions of the world...
I can think of contradicting evidence, e.g., the novel Fanny Hill (pre Victorian but still English)
I am convinced most of the Victorian behavior is an act. It is the classical game of seduction, up to 11.
For example, indeed sex itself was frowned upon from many angles, but prostitution was rampant in London. Same for drugs. And indeed it was often the same people holding the same views at the same time.
I think there are similar themes in other historical settings. I remember reading that many of key drivers of US prohibitions were themselves major alcohol abusers.
I think the hypocrisy itself isn't that unusual, but the scale of it (how widely the "public" beliefs were held and how large the gap between private and public was) was quite extreme, compared to similar cases.
Not a historian, no sources.
And ours isn't? Societies tend to have serious taboos that are nevertheless transgressed in private all the time.
Muslims drink. Chinese people curse the CCP. Western companies avoid hiring members of certain ethnic groups if possible.
If your partner is not at all concerned with your pleasure/enjoyment/feelings during a sexual encounter, it's probably not going to be particularly enjoyable for you. It's not surprising people don't enjoy being treated like a Fleshlight.
I STILL hear modern day men saying (or implying) that women don't really like sex or care about it very much. It's not a cultural view, but sexually active individuals absolutely still hold that belief to an extent.
So there might be some truth to the trope.
I think there's a bad assumption here that women felt safe to express or acknowledge a sex drive, even in private, even to their husbands. Then, just as now, the main danger to a woman was her husband.
If only whores or women who are insane have a sex drive, that's a backwards way of saying that you will be judged for having a sex drive, and if you're found guilty, you will be punished as a whore, and if you are found innocent, you will be medicalized as a crazy person. Taboos are restrictions.
I'm not saying that's happening here because I really have no idea what was happening with this photographer but it's an interesting thing to keep in mind.
EDIT:
Here’s the link
That's kind of the terminal state of most subreddits, so maybe it was better once.
This feels like all those accounts of "room mates".
Christianity's Genesis directly involves both nakedness and being covered and directly relates the latter to the knowledge of good and evil.
Before the fall, we didn't know any better. Afterwards, they "knew they were naked" and the immediate response was for Adam and Eve to cover themselves—before being given the skins of a slain animal for clothing.
This is literally a story as old as time.