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Comment by charlangas | Hacker News Reader

In Mexico it is common to say that a woman was stolen or kidnapped ("Se la robó") when a couple elopes. Curious that the same face-saving mechanism is common in other parts of the world.

As a boy whenever I heard a woman had been "stolen" I couldn't help but picture a man carrying her off on his shoulders in the middle of the night while she helplessly tried to get away. Took me a while to understand it was usually consensual.

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> Curious that the same face-saving mechanism is common in other parts of the world.

In many cases, it is just preserving language describing the act given the prior assumption that the woman was property of the male head of household until disposed of by them in marriage, devoid of her own agency, while the man attempting to marry her without that consent was fully possessed of moral agency and thus had stolen her from her appropriate custodian.

In the case of Kyrgyzstan that doesn't seem to be a "prior" assumption.

I meant that as why it would be common where the current use is primarily “face saving”, but even in those cases it is still bowing to the continued social relevance of the same attitude, because it only saves face if you assume that abduction is less of an affront to norms than a woman exercising agency with regard to marriage, so “prior” is something of an exaggeration in any case.

OK, point taken.

https://youtu.be/tT03T7SlLb8?t=3235 There was a scene in The Emerald Forest (1985): Boy taps girl lightly with ceremonial club. "No, do it right!" (WHOMP)

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