Only Children

only child?

  • Only Child is ME

    Votes: 10 20.0%
  • 1 sibling

    Votes: 22 44.0%
  • 2 siblings

    Votes: 14 28.0%
  • 2 siblings and i'm the middle 1 like hitler and napoleon

    Votes: 2 4.0%
  • 3 or more brothers and sisters

    Votes: 2 4.0%
  • my mum says she found me under a mulberry bush

    Votes: 0 0.0%

  • Total voters
    50

nomadthethird

more issues than Time mag
From an anthropology textbook

Ortner examines the process of state formation, with particular regard to its effect on gender ideology. She analyzes the widespread ideology that associates the purity of women with the honor and status of their families. This pattern is evident in Latin America and the Mediterranean, and in societies of the Middle East, India, and China. Broad similarities exist in these varied societies. Ortner questions why the control of female sexual purity is such a ubiquitous and important phenomenon. She notes that all modern cases of societies concerned with female purity occur in states or systems with highly developed stratification, and they bear the cultural ideologies and religions that were part of the emergence of these states. She argues that no prestate societies manifest the pattern linking female virginity and chastity to the social honor of the group. Thus, concern with the purity of women was, in Ortner’s view, structurally, functionally, and symbolically linked to the historical emergence of state structures.

The rise of the state heralds a radical shift in ideology and practice, with the emergence of the patriarchal extended family in which the senior man has absolute authority over everyone in the household. Women are brought under direct control of men in their natal families and later by their husbands and affinal kin. Ideologically women are thought to be in danger, requiring male protection; they are idealized as mothers and for their purity.

One of the central questions in the anlysis of the impact of state formation is the role of hyper gamy (up-status marriage, usually between higher-status men and lower-status women.) Ortner suggests that a significant development in stratified society involved the transformation of marriage from an essentially equal transaction into a potentially vertical one, where one’s sister or daughter could presumably marry into a higher stata (wife of a nobleman, consort of a king.) Hypergamy may help explain the ideal of female purity because concepts of purity and virginity may symbolize the value of a girl for a higher-status spouse. Thus “a virgin is an elite female among females, withheld, untouched, exclusive.”

From "Gender, Property, and the State" in Gender in X-Cultural Perspective

Really worth reading...lots of good stuff on north Indian dowry wife burnings, throwing widows on their dead husband's funeral pyres (alive), lots of interesting stuff in that chapter alone. Patriarchy should be crystal clear after you're finished. If it's not then I don't know what to tell you.
 

grizzleb

Well-known member
Yeah that sounds interesting, I'll have a stab at that when I've got more time. I've not read any argument thus before.
 
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