Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire (4 page)

Over the centuries, menstrual blood found its way into recipes for sex potions as a key ingredient. In several European cultures during the Middle Ages, mothers collected their daughters’ first menstrual flows, saving them and later mixing them into aphrodisiacs to spark desire in their sons-in-law. In fifteenth-century Venice, a lower-class girl used a mixture of her own menstrual blood, a rooster heart, wine, and flour to make a young aristocratic man “insane” with love for her. She was put to death; the young man was viewed by the court as an unwitting victim. As late as 1878,
The British Medical Journal
ran extensive correspondence on the question of whether or not a ham could turn rancid at the touch of a menstruating woman.
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ANOTHER PREHISTORIC SEXUAL taboo, which probably led to the first formal law of any kind, banned incest. While few would disagree that sex within families is repulsive, the rule against it is not so simple. For most of human existence until relatively recently, there were no cities or towns, and very few people. Life was lived in tiny groups, and while interbreeding between tribes did occur, bands of several dozen people might live for extended periods without ever seeing any other human beings. Reproduction between close relatives must have occurred all the time. Nevertheless, without prohibitions against close inbreeding, human DNA would never have acquired the strength to adapt to the climatic and other challenges faced by our ancestors. The formation of cross-tribal societies about fifty thousand years ago allowed people to “outbreed,” diversifying their genetic makeup and making possible the most recent stages of human evolution.

Anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss regarded the incest taboo as a critical element of “culture itself,” and much of ancient history backs him up. The Babylonians treated incest as a source of contagion and punished it with banishment, drowning, or burning. Once the deed was done, the pollution had to be cleansed regardless of whether or not either of the participants was at fault. A mother raped by her son, for instance, would burn to death right alongside him. The fact that she was taken by force meant nothing; for the sake of everyone and to appease the gods, she had to die. The Hittites and Assyrians also considered incest an abomination punishable by death, as did their neighbors the Hebrews and most every other society since then. Even monkeys avoid it.

Thus incest appears to be not only the first, but also the one universal, “natural” sexual taboo. If that were the case, though, no one told the peoples of ancient Hawaii, Peru, Mexico, and especially Egypt and Persia. For the ancient Egyptians, incest was not only a natural aspect of human life, it was also the key event in one of their most sacred and enduring creation myths: that of Isis, the mother-whore-goddess who divided earth from heaven and assigned languages to nations. Isis married her brother, the sun god Osiris, whom she adored even when they were still in their mother’s womb. Their perfect union was shattered when Osiris was murdered by his brother Set, god of darkness. Set cut Osiris into pieces, which he flung all over Egypt. Bereft, Isis searched for her beloved everywhere. She managed to retrieve every part of him except the most important one, the engine of their sacred union—his penis. Nevertheless, she resuscitated him and, with the help of a replica of his genitals, the reunited lovers produced a child, Horus. This tale, told in countless versions throughout the Mediterranean, made Isis a holy and deeply resonant symbol of renewal and immortality. During celebrations, Osiris was represented as a giant phallus.

Egyptian pharaohs often married their sisters, half sisters, and daughters, especially during the Eighteenth Dynasty (1570–1397 BC). The idea was to exclude outsiders from the bloodline, and ensure that the bounty of conquest would not be shared with in-laws. Sometimes, as in the families of the pharaohs Seqenenre Tao II and Ahhotep I, royal daughters were only allowed to marry their fathers. However, the same restrictions never bound the pharaohs themselves: They kept a supply of secondary queens at hand with whom to have children. New kings were usually mothered by nonroyal women, which sometimes made family lines quite complicated.

Egyptian incest was not restricted to the society’s upper crust; the practice was adopted by the lower orders, and became common among people of all ranks. At the time of the Roman conquest of Egypt in 30 BC, sisters typically married their full or half brothers or their fathers. In the cities, one-third of all young men with marriageable sisters married them, doing away with any need to find a bride from outside the family. (In Arsinoe, virtually
every
man with a living younger sister married her.) The Romans shared none of the Egyptians’ incestuous customs, and worked hard to suppress them—after about three centuries, they succeeded.

In ancient Persia, marriage within immediate families was seen as a blessed thing. Under Zoroastrianism, which came into being sometime between the second millennium and sixth century BC, royal, priestly, and common families all practiced incest. Such unions were praised in legal and religious texts as “perfect” acts that brought great rewards in heaven and wiped away nearly all sins. Said one ancient source:

[B]lessed is he who has a child of his child . . . pleasure, sweetness and joy are owing to a son that begets from a daughter of his own, who is also a brother of that same mother, and he who is born of a son and a mother is also a brother of that same father; this is a much greater pleasure, which is a blessing of the joy . . . the family is more perfect; its nature is without vexation and gathering affection.

For the Persians, a sexual union within a family was so sanctified that the fluids produced by an incestuous couple were thought to have curative powers. A passage from the Vendidad, a collection of Zoroastrian holy texts, advises corpse-bearers that they may purify themselves with the mingled urine of a closely related married couple. Conversely, any reluctance on a man’s part to marry his sister or mother was considered a grave sin deserving of “damnation in the highest degree,” even if he troubled to find his intended bride another husband. Women who refused to marry their relatives fared even worse: In one Zoroastrian text, a visitor to hell finds a woman condemned to suffer the pain of having a snake crawl in and out of her mouth for eternity. The visitor is told: “This is the soul of that wicked woman who violated next-of-kin marriage.”

Like the Egyptians, the Persians used intrafamily marriages to hoard property, but that only partly explains why such unions—so rare in the ancient and modern worlds alike—were venerated. A full understanding requires a greater degree of probing into the religious practices of these societies than this book permits, but the key point is that there are in fact no “eternal” or “natural” sex laws. What is contrary to nature for one group can be a blessing for others. The Egyptians and Persians were not nomads or cave dwellers who had no choice but to reproduce within close family groups. Theirs were two of humanity’s longest-lasting civilizations. Lévi-Strauss was surely wrong, then, to claim that the ban against incest is culture itself. Like homosexuality, fellatio, and dozens of other sex acts that have been condemned as both unnatural and against God’s will, intrafamily sex was a matter of choice.

Taboos against incest and sex during menstruation have evolved in nearly opposite directions. Bans against sexual contact with women during their periods persist in some religious contexts, but have been ignored by secular law. The Talmud requires flogging for such things, but no modern Western government has given the subject any attention. Incest, however, remains a “universal taboo” and is a crime almost everywhere. It is a felony in nearly every American state, punishable by prison terms of up to twenty years. In Utah, a five-year prison sentence awaits anyone having sex even with a “half” first cousin. Many states also mandate punishments even when the incestuous sex is forced, or when, as with sexual relations between step- and adoptive relations, there is no risk of genetic harm. It is enough that such relations resemble sex within the same blood family for the offenders to be removed from society.
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VIRGIN TERRITORY

Female virginity was a commodity in the ancient world, with a price, a market, and laws to protect its male owners. Ancient Egyptians had little concern with a woman’s virginity at marriage, but that was atypical. Virtually everywhere else, “a maiden who has never stripped off her clothes in her husband’s lap” or, somewhat less graphically, a woman who “has not known a man” was precious indeed—or at least her maidenhead was. The right to deflower a girl belonged to her husband and no one else, and anyone interfering with it was severely punished.

During Ur-Nammu’s reign, a man who raped a betrothed virgin was put to death. The punishment did not address the violence committed against the girl, but rather the theft of the intended bridegroom’s opportunity to be the first to have her. By the time of the Assyrians, more than a thousand years later, the laws were more intricate and, in keeping with Assyrian tradition, more vicious. Rapists of betrothed girls were killed as they always had been, but the law now also turned its attention to the rape of females who had not yet been promised in marriage. In such cases, compensation was due to a father for his lost chance at marrying his daughter off at the high price virgins commanded. He could sue the rapist and collect three times his virgin daughter’s marriage value, and then either force the rapist to marry the girl or keep her to sell off to someone else. A sullied girl would fetch a smaller bride-price on the open market, but the father still came out ahead. To add a dollop of sweet revenge to the deal, Assyrian fathers in such cases also had the option of taking a rapist’s wife as a slave to rape and abuse as often as he wished. Thus two innocent women might suffer when a man raped a virgin girl: the victim herself, who might be forced by her father to spend the rest of her life with the man who attacked her, and the rapist’s wife, who might be delivered into the vicious embrace of the victim’s family.

An Assyrian father could cash in on his daughter’s lost virginity even when she gave it away willingly. In that case, the girl’s lover would still owe the father three times her marriage value, but he would not be required to serve up his own wife for abuse. Rather, the father was encouraged to take out his anger on his daughter: “The father shall treat his daughter in whatever manner he chooses.” This sentence was perhaps legal overkill, as there were no restraints on what a father could do to his children. In any event, women were no better treated after they were married. The law was clear that a husband could punish his wife by whipping and hitting her, pulling her hair, and mutilating her ears.

The Torah tracks the Assyrian system of compensating fathers for their daughters’ lost virginity. As everywhere else in the Near East, respectable Hebrew girls had no right to choose their sex partners. Only prostitutes could do that. If a virgin girl decided to have sex with a man anyway, that choice was made permanent: Any man who slept with such a maiden was required to pay the girl’s bride-price (that is, her price as a virgin) to her father, then marry her. As with the Assyrians, the father was also allowed to take the money and marry his daughter off to someone else, presumably for a lower price. The thinking changed somewhat if the maiden had been taken by force. In that case, the man was bound to pay the father a larger sum of money and then marry the girl without the possibility of ever divorcing her. Again, the happiness of the girl was immaterial. The pain of having been raped would be compounded by having to spend the rest of her life with the assailant, subject to his will as his wife.

The laws of the Bible are less violent than those of Assyria—for example, there is no recourse to raping another man’s wife as retribution—but biblical mythology is just as savage. The book of Genesis tells the story of Dinah, daughter of the patriarch Jacob, who “went out” from her house and then was “taken” by a neighboring prince named Shechem. The text is not clear as to whether the “taking” was the result of rape, persuasion, or something in between, but there is no doubt that Shechem fell in love with Dinah and, after installing her in his house, decided to marry her. Yet he had made a terrible mistake by not going to Dinah’s family for permission before bedding her. The disgrace he brought to Jacob’s house would need to be wiped away before anything else could take place.

Shechem and his father Hamor tried to make amends by offering Jacob any bride-price he demanded, no matter how much. This offer of money would normally have been enough to assuage a family’s hurt pride and lost investment in the girl’s virginity. It seemed to have been acceptable to Jacob, but not to Dinah’s brothers, whose rage could only be assuaged with violence. They told Shechem and Hamor they would accept the offer of money, and then, after their enemies were lulled into a state of vulnerability, they made their attack:

Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brothers, took their swords and attacked the unsuspecting city, killing every male. They put Hamor and his son Shechem to the sword and took Dinah from Shechem’s house and left. The sons of Jacob came upon the dead bodies and looted the city where their sister had been defiled. They seized their flocks and herds and donkeys and everything else of theirs in the city and out in the fields. They carried off all their wealth and all their women and children, taking as plunder everything in the houses. Jacob was angry when he heard what his sons had done, and also scared of reprisals, but Simon and Levi had one concern on their minds: “Should he [Shechem] have treated our sister like a prostitute?”

To Dinah’s brothers, the destruction of Shechem’s city and the murder and enslavement of its inhabitants constituted appropriate payback for their sister’s lost virginity. Dinah’s fate was not spelled out because it did not matter. She was merely a prop in the story. The main issue at stake was the lost honor of her male family members, and what they did to regain it. Dinah’s intentions would only have entered the picture had she sneaked off with Shechem and willingly had sex with him. Luckily for her, that did not happen.