Could you clarify what you said about women's complicity at the end? Every other part of your comment seemed to attribute very little agency to women (they are essentially prizes for whoever wins a fight, with seemingly no other choice).
Vae victis: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vae_victis
Once you understand that you will understand that the gender of the losers didn't matter one bit once the fighting was done, they were killed, enslaved, conquered, raped or whatever else the victors felt like at the time.
This isn't about men and women, this is about winners and losers.
Or to quote Rosa Luxembourg about the same phenomenon a couple of millennia later:
>Most of those bourgeois women who act like lionesses in the struggle against “male prerogatives” would trot like docile lambs in the camp of conservative and clerical reaction if they had suffrage. Indeed, they would certainly be a good deal more reactionary than the male part of their class. Aside from the few who have jobs or professions, the women of the bourgeoisie do not take part in social production. They are nothing but co-consumers of the surplus value their men extort from the proletariat. They are parasites of the parasites of the social body. And consumers are usually even more rabid and cruel in defending their “right” to a parasite’s life than the direct agents of class rule and exploitation.
One of the many writings she was raped with a saber for, but for some reason isn't popular today.
She got it quite right.
And not sure how Thucydides' Pericles telling the future widows of Athens to basically have a 'stiff upper lip' is evidence of them being "absolutely despised". If anything I'd take it as evidence they had status and influence because otherwise the first man of Athens wouldn't be addressing them.
And also from Plutarch, women are the ones who stop Rome from being destroyed w/ Coriolanus.
The behavior of the captured woman would be:
- do everything possible to ensure her young previous children are not killed, but accompany her in captivity;
- don't try to escape, which would probably be impossible anyway;
- don't fight or assassinate her new captor 'husband', it would mean certain death;
- try to make the enslaved relationship work as well as possible; please the new master;
- seek to have successful children in the new context;
- marry-up in the new society, if at all possible, such as on death of the first 'husband'.
Many women would have already had arranged marriages out from their home village, to a new husband in another location, even within the same tribe or society. They may never have seen their original family again.
They would be dominated by their new mother-in-law, and treated like a slave in the new extended household. Being captured and enslaved again was probably not so different - unless it was by different and abhorrent barbarians.
For example, China had arranged out-marriage of daughters, and many of their lives were totally miserable (e.g. foot-binding so they couldn't run away). But being captured by the Mongols was probably extremely unpleasant (I mean, they never washed :)
or soethe story goes, I imangine cases of women fighting back would be surpressed in, such societies.
In your analogy imagine being held at gunpoint knowing that if you give up your riches you will ultimately survive but the behavior that caused you to give up your riches will be incentivized and perpetuated due to your compliance. Now contrast that with the situation where you refuse to hand over your riches and the would be robber walks away or kills you only to have the riches disappear the instant you do.
Granted it is not an easy situation for an individual to make but choosing to be complicit and acting accordingly is still an exercise of an individuals agency.
I'm really confused by this, it feels like a modern framing is being applied to a really long period of time a very very long time ago.
Why would a band of pillagers stop pillaging because the women in one village slit their throats rather than be taken captive? If anything, it seems more likely that a band would settle down and take over existing defenses and start a new life if there were people there to start new lives with, even as slaves.
Anyway it seems a little silly to suggest ancient peoples would be concerned with, or should be concerned with, the greater incentive structure of pillaging. Either way, pillagers gonna pillage.
I am not asserting this. It's simply a matter of did the women help or hinder the violence? I argue that by virtue of being taken captive with hopes of integrating into the new tribe in some shape or form they helped perpetuated the violence.
If you share this opinion with some women you know irl, I would be really interested to hear how they respond.
>Associated with or participating in a questionable act or a crime; having complicity.
>Associated with or participating in an activity, especially one of a questionable nature.
I find it sickening that someone would even try to describe a woman having to give up her agency due to not having the physical power to fight off a man as “complicit”.
It's a dark way of thinking about it but I guess it's why 'just following orders' is generally not considered a valid legal or moral excuse even in situations when insubordination likely results in death or imprisonment.
I am talking about cause and effect.
My point is that actions (or lack of action) determine the outcome. The emotions that the actor feels towards the available actions does not determine the outcome of whatever action they choose. Just the actions count.
By your definition every girl who has been raped or abused and survived is.
Some situations like a single instance of SA cannot be reasonably predicted and attempts at fight, flight or freeze will end up with SA occurring regardless.
So in these situations the person who is being assaulted is not complicit because no action whatsoever could have prevented the SA from happening.