By David Futrelle
Incels have a lot of thoughts about slavery. When they’re not fantasizing about enslaving women, or comparing their own plight to slavery, they sometimes ponder the history of slavery in the real world.
In general, their thoughts on this subject are not restrained by any actual knowledge, so their imaginations are free to wander. Consider, for example, this post on the Incels.is forum form last fall, in which a fellow calling himself ControlledInsanity asserted that enslaved women have historically had it extremely easy, living lives of happy idleness interrupted only by a few mostly pleasurable moments of sex.
Slavery itself accentuates the inherent value of each gender.
Enslaved men —> physical labor
Enslaved women —> sex
I cannot trick myself into believing that being forced to work hard manual labor is in any way “equal” to being kept to dispense periodic pleasure. Easy mode is not even a meme to me anymore, foids really actually do have a lower difficulty setting aura that follows them through life. All of their greatest successes and all of their greatest hardships are padded by special treatment.
Would anyone on this forum ever object to being a sex slave?
Naturally, a commenter quickly stepped up to praise Mr. Insanity’s post as “high IQ,.” Another congratulated him for his original insight:
i never thought it like that, hell even in ancient times foid slaves had it easy…fuck…..
To be a sex slave you have to be normie tier at least.
Still another contrasted the life of “a man slave” trapped in a life of “torturing labour” to the
female version … forced to lend her body couple of minutes a day to experience rough copulation and maybe orgasm with her owner.
One suggested that many men would kill to lead a life in which they were raped on a daily basis.
Truly wtf is it that what females consider a tortured existence would actually be a godsend for many men?
“Being a sex slave wouldn’t be bad,” added someone called Blue Squirtle.
but [foids] make … it seem worse, how is being a slave for sex as bad as labor? At least sex doesn’t result in getting whipped and beaten it the job isn’t done right.
Uh, I’m pretty sure it did, but never mind.
Still, not all of the commenters agreed that slavery had been a paradise of strawberries and rape for enslaved women. A commenter called JovanD, for example, was pretty sure that female slaves had to work, too.
Are you even aware how much slaves cost back in the day?
I highly doubt slave owner would have them sit around and do nothing but have sex…
Others suggested that being raped by a “big ugly man” on a daily basis might not actually be all that much fun for enslaved women — or men.
“You know that women really don’t want to fuck ugly, sweaty guys, right?” asked INeed4000Bucks.
That’s why chads don’t need sex slaves. I’m pretty sure the only sex those fat guys would have if they weren’t powerful men is through rape or with no one at all.
Well, to be fair, plenty of women do happily fuck ugly, sweaty guys. But no woman wants to be raped, no matter who is doing the raping.
Mr. Insanity clarified that what he meant by sexual slavery for men involved being sexily enslaved by women, not men.
I get what you’re saying but that isn’t a direct analog. Enslaved women are forced to fuck men, generally not forced to fuck women. I know that in reality, male sex slaves would also be taking dick but, for illustrative purposes, my analogy assumes the male sex slaves equivalent would be forced to fuck women.
And what man wouldn’t like that?
“I think most men wouldn’t mind being raped by women at all,” chirped someone called Frankenstein’s M, who has evidently never spoken to any man who actually has been raped.
For his part, Mr. Insanity was simply incredulous that anyone could possibly think that “fucking somebody you’re not attracted to = forced backbreaking labor.”
I have no words left at this point, so here’s a gif that, while wildly overused, pretty much nails my reaction right now better than anything else out there.
I’m going to go lie down for a while.
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@Full Metal Ox
I clicked through. Thanks for this important clarification.
Mind blown.
Slavery is an objectively bad business decision, and the entire reason it was abolished in Europe in the first place was exactly because the elite realized that instead of using forcibly enslaved people, and thus having to spend resources to guard them and prevent them from escaping, in addition feed and clothe them, they could simply convert them to serfs who were paying them in exchange for living on their land and instead of having to buy or kidnap slaves, serfs would come freely looking for a place to live and grow crops to feed their families.
And in Latin America robber barons came up with the idea of getting desperate people to work on their haciendas, but they were remotely located and the only place to buy food and goods was in the store owned by the hacienda owner, usually at usury prices, so the workers would essentially pay the owner to work for them, and were kept in line mainly by debt instead of guards.
Basically, there were no economic advantages to the antebellum slavery and it was 100% a result of ideological factors, mainly to use racism to keep the black people and poor white workers from joining forces and ganging up on the white elite.
One of the many things I hate about Game of Thrones is that for all their supposedly intelligent scheming, not one of Danery’s advisers simply thinks of asking the slave owners to consider the economic advantages that made real-life medieval people get rid of slavery.
Yup. Not only was it evil, it was stupid.
@Alex
Slave women were also experimented on, in order to develop new surgical techniques. If those experiments were ever performed today J. Marion Sims would have found himself in jail. Hell they were considered unethical in his day.
Of course they think it’d be fun to be a sex slave. Since childhood, they’ve been fed the gender-essentialist BS that men are always in the mood for sex and always enjoy it no matter what, because the male anatomy is nothing but a crude life-support system for a sentient, free-floating penis constantly seeking to insert itself in the nearest available orifice. Anything else would make them not “real men,” and therefore worse than “real men.” That’s the real tragedy of toxic masculinity: it hurts men just as much as women. If it weren’t for the belief that sex is the be-all, end-all for a man, they’d be able to get over being virgins and enjoy happiness independent of whether or not they can get laid.
@Rabid Rabbit
Thanks. I clicked through to this fascinating article and also had a look at some of the comments, 99 percent of which were interesting and respectful.
@Kevin
In much of the Imperial era, this was a legal requirement, as freedmen were second class citizens still legally beholden to their patron.
@Rabid Rabbit
It’s all chattel slavery, but that doesn’t mean there weren’t differences. Frex, in many historical slaveholding societies, slavery wasn’t hereditary, and a slave’s children were free peasants. Which granted, wasn’t always a huge step up, but you take what you can get.
To a certain extent it did in the antebellum South, as skilled trades aren’t necessarily the same thing as educated ones. Many an enslaved blacksmith or cooper or suchlike had a shop in the city. Of course, unless the master was generous, they didn’t get to keep any of that money, whereas many older legal codes required that such a slave be given a share, with which to eventually buy back their freedom.
It had to be, otherwise it could never have stood. There were times when Rome was nearly as reliant on slave labour as the US/Confederacy, but the boundaries between slave and free were always more permeable, because their slavery wasn’t predicated on race; people got enslaved for debt, or living somewhere that lost a war or whatever, and sucks to be them, but there but for the grace of gods go I. And even when freedmen were second class citizens, their children were as good as any other Roman.And despite this, they had chronic servile rebellions, of which the one led by Spartacus was only the most famous. The Southern planter class knew this perfectly well, and that was one reason for the draconian restrictions on educating slaves, unsupervised gatherings of black people, slave or free, etc.: they knew perfectly well that only the harshest and strictest measures would save them from a fate involving torches and pitchforks in the night. Further, poor whites were kept poor by slavery: how can a small farmer make any money off cash crops if their prices are undercut by slave-worked plantations? How is a carpenter to make a living when a slave carpenter can be rented for half the price? And they knew this perfectly well too. If it was ever for even a moment allowed into the public discourse that black folk were as human as whites, the inevitable result (and one which had occured already in the past) would be poor whites making common cause with enslaved blacks to mutually burn the planters in their mansions and divide out the fields as spoils.
@Scanisaurus
The planters managed a massive concentration of wealth in their hands, the which they took for economic advantage, despite the catastrophic effects on everyone else. Plus ça change…
I think that wealthy capitalists care about power, not so much money. They want to amass more wealth than they can ever spend because it gets them more power.
Treating not enslaved workers poorly is often not the best business decision either. Sick, stressed, underpaid and unhappy workers are less productive and less loyal. Overwork is bad for productivity. Big business in the US should advocate for socialized medicine because eliminating the cost of employer sponsored health care would be great for business. Yet, capitalists are doing everything they can to keep workers as oppressed as they can. Why? Because they have less power over workers if they start actually treating them like human beings. They have less power over workers who are one missed paycheck away from utter destitution.
Don’t forget that there was a great incentive to argue against the humanity of slaves, as slavery was a direct contradiction to the of philosophies of Christianity and Freedom that many of them claimed to believe. You cannot consider yourself a devout supporter of Jesus and a good person when you’re enslaving and brutalizing people (or just being apathetic about it). The way to get around that is to declare they’re not human beings to begin with. I’ve noticed this attitude a lot in the arguments around police brutality and other forms of systemic racism that people are apathetic to.
I also wonder how much of the slavemasters attitudes came from their knowledge of what happened during the French Revolution? I wonder if that event influenced a lot of attitudes of the rich back then, especially the British.
@TB Tabby a classic example of what you’re talking about is reactions to cases of female teachers taking advantage of their underaged male students. You’ll always see comments about how it’s every teenage boy’s dream to have sex with their hot, experienced teacher, and worse.
It’s like it escaped them that leaving aside it wasn’t “sex” it was rape and all the masochism that attends it as these women were viewed as property, female slaves also were made to do physical manual labour so…
??
@Pie and @JessicaRed: You make good points. The GOP is so dominated by stupidity at all levels that I sometimes underestimate the huge influence of sociopathic mega-donors like the Kochs. If any Republicans are consciously trying to keep Americans as ignorant as possible, while using the likes of Trump as “useful idiots”, it’s them.
If any of those brain-free incels were remotely interested in learning real-life history about slavery, I’d suggest they read 12 Years a Slave by Solomon Northup. He describes in painful detail how a female slave, Patsey, worked alongside the men in the cotton field, then was forced to sexually service the “master” – then was whipped half to death to assuage the “mistress’s” jealousy. “Easy mode,” yeah right. sheesh.
Oh and @Alex –
Thank you for the information and references. Certainly something for me to read further about as it’s not that uncommon for people to think slavery was just about hard work for no money.
@Anonymous
I have depression and still manage to have empathy and understand that other people have been through worse shit than me, even when having a major episode. Please read through the comments policy.
Rabbit –
Slavery in antiquity, in Greece especially, was a matter of war making some people slaves, some free. It was not racial – it was a matter of fate. It was a commonplace for any Greek that his slave might be a better man than he is.
Kupo – Will be more careful in the future, sorry about that.
for the record, I didn’t mean to imply incels aren’t jerks, or that they are jerks *because* of depression. I was just saying that a *particular claim* they made seems to be due to depression. Not their overall behavior.
Some people famously don’t get it. There was a southern 19th-century psychiatrist who coined the term “drapetomania” to describe the “irrational obsession” some slaves had with the idea of running away.
It is a disease “unknown to our medical authorities, although its diagnostic symptom, the absconding from service, is well known to our planters and overseers” (what a surprise). It’s all the liberals’ fault, however: a consequence of masters who “made themselves too familiar with [slaves], treating them as equals”.
Interestingly, this shows that, even among slaveowners in the antebellum south, there were enough which actually considered their slaves as (shockingly) fellow human beings to worry the racists.
This, in my experience, is not too surprising. There’s nothing more common than a racist who hates all blacks or jews or whomever *except* for those they happen to know personally. Ah well, common sense, logic, and racism don’t go together. At least in this case the logical contradiction plays out in a good way, making the racist behave better than he would if he were consistent.
And, in fact, technically speaking the psychiatrist was right: the only way to keep slaves slaves IS to make them completely convinced they’re subhuman. Treat them as if they were actually human beings, and pretty soon they WILL get crazy ideas like “slavery is wrong” into their heads.
Huckelberry Finn is shocked that Jim, now that he managed to escape, immediatelly turns his thoughts into freeing his wife and children, too. “They belong to a man he doesn’t even know!” Thinks Finn. Why is Jim so ungrateful?
BTW racism in the modern sense is obviously NOT biblical, as the drapetomania author also claimed.
Ham the son of Noah is cursed to be a servant (for seeing his father naked and laughing about it) and he is traditionally considered in the middle ages as the father of all blacks. But this is a much later interpretation; in the Bible he is not described as black, and the real point pf cursing him is to also curse Cna’an, his son, considered the father of the Cna’anites, the Israelites’ enemies.
When the Bible mentions actual Black people – usually called “Kushites”, i.e., people from Kush (modern Ethiopia) – there is no hint that they are inferior, let alone natural slaves. At most “Kushite” has (naturally) the sense of “foreign” or ” far-away” people, due to looking different.
If anything, they are often used as an example that God cares for them too – i.e., for all of humanity, not just the Israelites. Not to mention the magnificent character of the queen of Sheba, who is obviously not inferior to anyone.
I love the assumption that women didn’t do manual labor lmao
In the original ’80’s Conan The Barbarian movie – yeah the Arnold Schwarzenegger one – it’s an early plot point that Young Conan is enslaved by the Evil Baddie’s Evil Hippy Horde when they wipe out his village and murder his folks and he grows to manhood as, essentially, a slave gladiator.
And that whole sequence is sort of a Dude Fantasy of what slavery would be like (for them, of course: the hero of this story), because it’s…literally Easy Mode? Baby Conan a) works out ’til he’s ripped, b)gets trained to fight and c) is ‘given’ female slaves – they’re all sexy babes of course – to rape, and then d) conveniently escapes once he’s Leveled Up to manhood.
Despite the fact that the leaders of the Evil Hippy Horde responsible for Young Conan’s training are strongly queer-coded, e.g. implied to be evil gays/ child-molesters/ sadists/ rapists etc., etc., throughout the entire movie, Young Conan is never brutalized for ‘character development’. You’d think the writers would jump at the chance to show just how eeeeeevilllll the Evil Hippies are, but for some reason that kind of ‘character development’ only happens to female Fantasy Heroes gosh I wonder why.
TLDR: Dumbass “slavery is EZ mode” opinions aren’t just pulled out of Assfax University PhD, there’s lots of bad media representation that fuels and promotes it.
I think it’s worth noting that the Roman kingdom, republic, and empire lasted a very long time. Over the course of 2000+ years of Roman history, slavery took many forms.
Because people became Roman citizens once they were manumitted, a fair number of Greek scholars sold themselves as pedagogues. They’d work for a family or two and be manumitted.
Abandoned new born babies were fair game. Most died, some were adopted, some were enslaved.
Roman slavery could be horrendous. The slaves in the mines and working on latifundia had a very short life expectancy, for example. All enslaved people were subject to owners’ sexual demands.
Oh hai ! I think this is my first post.
@Anonymous
I had completely forgotten about that. It’s amazing how far people will go to find complex “scientific” reasons for things rather than consider that they might have the underlying cause wrong. Oh, hello, incels, MGTOWs, etc.
Of course, internalization goes a long way. There were some free black people in the antebellum south, some of whom actually owned slaves themselves. And how the newly free people who were sent to colonize Liberia treated the locals wasn’t exactly what one might have hoped.
I also seem to remember a theory that high rates of domestic violence among African-Americans could be traced back to slavery, in a cycle of abuse sort of way: overseers mistreat black men, black men take it out on black women because that’s the only sense of superiority they can feel, kids see it and keep it up even after slavery’s over, etc. No idea what the consensus on that is these days, or even on whether rates of domestic violence are actually higher in that community, or just talked about more often because it makes the racists happy.
Tara, they don’t even have to read the book to see that. They can watch the movie. Playing Patsey is what Lupita Nyong’o won her Academy Award for.
The most important difference between “African slavery” & slavery in other times, was that it was TOTALITY racially based.
Slaves in other times came from defeated enemies, or the poor selling themselves or their children into servitude – often they were from the same race as their owners.
“African slaves” were black Africans. To rationalize enslaving people based on their race, especially in countries like England & America that were beginning to awaken to the concept of individual human rights, required the diminishment of the humanity of that race.
It required defining who a “black” person was and denying human rights to anyone so defined. (A son sired on a white woman inherits your property; a son sired on a black woman becomes a slave.)
The whole ugly 400 year history of racism in the U.S. is rooted in the need to claim that the race of “black Africans” merited their enslavement.
Hypatia’s daughter,
Indeed, I’ve only seen a few examples of how black slaves were discussed in terms of early US slave industry, but it certainly seems the word “slave” was not generally used. Instead, black people were seemingly always referred to as a racial category, as if their unfree status was a natural. unspoken and assumed part of their biological status. Kinda like a “dog” is assumed to be someone’s pet.
Though I don’t think a son sired outside of marriage would inherit anything back then, regardless of race?
@Lumipuna
Yeah, a bastard child would have to be legitimized to inherit anything, and even then there would have to be no legitimate children.
@Rabid Rabbit
An attested will could override that though, at any time in US law. Jefferson (frex) could perfectly well have left his children by Sally Hemmings both their freedom and an inheritance, had he chosen so to do. Later on it was illegal to do that sort of thing in much of the South, for fairly obvious reasons.
@Dalillama
Fair enough. I’m much more familiar with historical British/European law.
I’m constantly impressed by the level of historical and legal geekery we have represented here… hence I’d like to ask something for my fanfic writing purposes.
This relates to medieval Norman nobility inheritance rules (specifically in Italy ca. 1100). I understand that the whole estate would be normally inherited by the eldest brother (or in absence of sons, a daughter) and then by his heir.
Suppose you’re the only child (a daughter) of an older brother, who died before his own father, so he never owned the estate? I understand then the younger brother (your uncle) would be the heir, and then his children.
On the other hand, what if your father briefly outlived his father (and possibly there’s some uncertainty about this)? Then you’d be an underaged heiress, guarded by your mother and stepfather, waiting to grow up and marry, so your husband could run the estate, which until then is guarded by your uncle.
Now, suppose you’ve grown up far away with your stepfather (who has another heir for his own estate). How likely it is that your uncle would/could have taken over your estate over the years? What if your mother and stepfather initially agreed to this takeover, but now they/you/your husband want to dispute it afterwards? What would be legal, and what would be practically plausible?
(sorry for going off topic)
@ Lumipuna
I can’t answer for Italy back then, but in the Mediaeval world, being an inconvenient aristocratic niece or nephew wasn’t always a guarantee of long term survival prospects, legal issues notwithstanding. English and Anglo -French kings Athelstan (or possibly his father Edward the Elder,) John and Richard III are all known or suspected to have had a hand in the disappearance or untimely deaths of nieces or nephews who had a better claim on the throne, or could at least muddy that king’s own claim.
@Lumipuna
Norman inheritance rules would only apply far to the north of the Italian Peninsula at that time. Also, there wasn’t any such place as Italy in 1100. There was the Serene Republic of Venice, the Superb Republic of Genoa, the Margraviate of Tuscany, the Kingdom of Lombardy, the Papal statea, and a dozen vestpocket principalities trying to stay independent of any of them. Inheritance rules could vary quite a lot.
@NiOg, Tater Aficionado
Yes, I’ve already ranted on how bad media treats sexual slavery in my previous comment here, but you are 100% right in the Conan movie glorifying slavery. I found it particularly disconcerting that TVtropes lists a scene where he’s given a woman and leads her to bed, instead of assaulting her on the spot, is seen considered “heartwarming” by the person writing that article.
And I’m not surprised that they left out the part where historically, gladiators were pimped out between fights and Conan most likely would have been at serious risk of being forced to sleep with a skeevy rich man, because while this part of “historical accuracy” is treated as practically mandatory for female fantasy heroes, putting heroic men that male audience members are suppose to project themselves on in sexually vulnerable positions would make most of them uncomfortable, and making male audience members go through that in a story just meant to be a cool adventure is just wrong.
Seriously, I hate this double standard.
@Dalillama:
Given the dates Lumipuna provided, this would be during the Norman conquest of Sicily: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Norman_conquest_of_southern_Italy
@Lumipuna:
To a large extent, I think events would depend on the uncle’s temperament, not to mention the stepfather’s. Questions the scenario raises for me: Why is the heiress living so far away, when keeping her around the estate would make everyone remember she’s the heir? Why did the stepfather choose the uncle to take care of the estate until the heiress’ majority instead of taking it into his own care? Maybe he and the mother were just in love, but the automatic assumption is that part of the mother’s attractiveness was access to her dower and the possibility of milking the daughter’s estate before marrying her off to some member of his own family.
Legally, I don’t think the uncle would have a leg to stand on, as it would have been understood that he was only managing the estate, not inheriting it. But depending on how long it’s been since the father died, he may well have built up a power base, which would complicate matters more than a little. Especially since the Normans didn’t tend to be that fussed about legality. The heiress’ position would be extremely weakened if she wasn’t already married, and therefore able to call on the threat of military action. Unless you’re going to make her a warrior princess, of course. (Yes, there could be the stepfather’s men, but that would be read less as “Fighting for her rights” than “Fighting to conquer the place,” and probably legitimize the uncle more than anything.)
Even if the uncle was apparently willing to do the decent thing, it would be very wise on the stepfather and mother’s part to find some way to pay him off. Suggest to him that he go on crusade, look at how rich some people have managed to become in the Holy Land, we’ll even pay the costs. Find him a very rich bride.
Depending on how high in the nobility these people are, the church would probably also end up deeply involved. Especially in the presence of uncertainty about who died when, as you’d need witnesses willing to swear on their souls one way or the other.
None of which, I admit, is precise legal information, sorry. Maybe some studies of William the Conqueror’s youth would help? The fact he was a bastard means that historians must have looked into inheritance rules in some depth, and some of them may have considered how they applied to women.
Yeah, I meant the Norman duchy in southern Italy, whatever it was properly called.
(this is largely my headcanon for the original story)
The stepfather is the count of place A and wants to return there, after already having spent several years on the First Crusade, instead of guarding his stepdaughter’s county at place B in Italy. Later, they return to the vicinity of place B for reasons.
In the canon, it’s indeed a love marriage (which, as the author notes, is kinda anachronistic). They married on the crusade after her first husband’s death, probably assuming the old count of B was still alive back in Italy.
In the canon, the uncle is maternally inheriting a small barony that happens to be a vassal of county B. Though in my fanfic, maybe they actually let him de facto take over the county, but it’s not legally proper? Then again, he’s just a teenager at the time the crusade ends, and likely relies on his mother, who’s also a grandmother of the young heiress (it’s complicated).
In the canon, the old count of B has an archbishop in his town, who’d likely preside over his burial. His older son’s death in a battle in Palestine would be witnessed by various knights, some of whom return to Italy.
Addendum:
Sorry, I just realized normally they’d be related anyway, notwithstanding the peculiarities of this particular family tree.
@ Lumipuna
Doesn’t sound that far removed from the Anarchy, when Empress Matilda and King Stephen were contending for the thrones of England and Normandy, though they were first cousins rather than uncle and niece. Matilda was the designated heir of Henry I, King of England and Duke of Normandy, after her brother, the Crown Prince, died in a shipwreck.
I remember a story I was told by a Professor and Doctor of History who’s a family friend (I’m from the Caribbean), about a slave girl who was raped every night by the plantation owner. Every night she would try to escape, only to be recaptured by the handlers.
One night she escaped as usual, but ran into a platoon detachment from the British Regiment. By the time the handlers found her, she had been raped to death, much of her body, including her genitals, mutilated.
My blood boiled when I heard that story, as it boiled when I went to university myself and learned so much more about slavery, and as it boils right now after having read that unconscionable drivel from these Incel degenerates.
But not for Aristotle, who argued that some slaves at least merit slavery because of some essential slavishness of their nature.
You have to wonder whether he included Greeks from his city, Stagira, who were sold into slavery when Philip of Macedon – Aristotle’s employer – destroyed the place.
In British history, there’s a point where the question “who can be a slave?” shifts from a political to a religious to a racial question: basically from “did we beat you?” to “are you a Christian?” to “what skin colour do you have?”
With the last two questions, the guidance moved from “You can enslave Africans so long as you don’t convert them to Christianity” to “You must enslave Africans because that’s the only way to convert them to Christianity.”
@Rabid Rabbit, Kat:
Regarding ‘last survivor’… I haven’t read the article yet, but one thing I remember coming up was that when the trans-Atlantic slave trade was officially banned in 1807, the big American slave owners were actually all for banning the slave trade… because drying up the outside supply made the slave women they had more valuable.
Also, you can’t really ignore in all this the fact that a religion was literally created in the U.S. for pretty much the sole purpose of justifying slavery and making it still seem ‘Christian’. There’s a reason why Mark Twain was rather anti-religion in his books, up to and including Huck Finn’s famous line of ‘All right then, I’ll go to Hell’.