• Thehalfjew@lemmy.world
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    1 year ago

    So imagine a society dominated by men.

    This society knows that sex is what leads to children. What it doesn’t know is how to verify if a child belongs to a particular man.

    As this society is patriarchal in nature, it’s very important to the leaders/men that their lineage is protected. So they need a way to ensure that children’s bloodline can be properly guaranteed. The only way to control that is to make sure that women are bound to a specific man, and that sex with any other man is forbidden/disgusting. This is why bastard children and unwed mothers have historically been treated with such disdain. But men were often given a pass. The women were screwing up lineage tracking.

    Tracking is less an issue these days, but the social conditioning is still there. We’ve forgotten why we prioritized it in the first place (right or wrong). Now it’s the way many people think because it’s been the way we’ve behaved for so long, much of society is geared around it being a basic truth.