Sex and Punishment: Four Thousand Years of Judging Desire Read Online Free PDF

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. 5

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