Slop.

i can't remember who pointed it out to me, but whenever somebody tries the whole "[heinous social institution] wasn't seen as bad back then, so we shouldn't judge it by today's standards", they're consistently justifying elite behavior as "normal" for the time by only considering the values and principles of elites at the time. i.e. "the power structure back then thought its crimes against humanity were ok, so who are we to judge in hindsight?"

like, they'll say that slavery was legal and not seen as scandalous. of course, they mean it didn't scandalize the courts, the aristocrats, the slaver owners, the overseers, or the capitalist investors. there were absolutely abolitionists in every age, but besides that, there were slaves. judging from the numbers of those punished, maimed, murdered, and the widespread effort to stop/pursue/capture runaways and general background fear of insurrection, it sure as shit seems like the slaves objected to slavery.

there are geographies of the slave states and islands where enslaved outnumbered free peoples by a huge margin, but for some crazy reason these people would never even consider that means MOST people in these places at these exact times were against slavery.

That reminds me of a recent study that determined (for pre-agricultural populations I believe it was) that the median age for parents at the time of any given birth was something like ~22 for women and ~28-30 for men, so while there historically was an age gap it was very close with both parents generally still being in their 20s.

AFAIK that's similar to what's known about the medieval period in europe, too, with most marriages happening with both participants around or above 20, and political marriages involving children or young teens very explicitly not involving consummation, cohabitation, or even unsupervised contact until both parties were older teens or in their twenties, with exceptions to that being lurid scandals.

The whole libertarian fantasy of like "strong middle aged alpha male patriarchs" getting their pick of child brides is ahistorical nonsense in most contexts. Like I'm not gonna say that warlords or other elite fancy lads were never able to do heinous things with societal approval or that some cultures in some time periods didn't have even worse standards than the bloodthirsty savages of medieval europe somehow with ideas like "adulthood starts at menarche" cropping up in some places, just that the whole libertarian idea of the past as like some pulpy sword and sorcery youth-fixated predator playground is complete nonsense.

"This thing was common in the past so its OK to do now" is such a weird leap of logic.

OK, it was normal to throw piss out the window in the past too, should've we kept doing that?

God forbid human intelligence improves over time and realizes "Oh shit this sucks and is harmful, we should stop doing that."

No normal person has ever uttered the phrase "fertile women"

I don't want to think to hard about what books this person is reading about age difference not being a thing

Even if this were true, the correct conclusion would be "reject tradition, embrace modernity"

"fucking me may have literally killed you in the past" is an insane way to start an argument about why you should fuck the person.

According to this logic they should now seek older women because average lifespan of women is longer than men.

Can say with 100% certainty that he hasn't cracked open a single book since he was forced to do a book report in school and even then it was probably a 15-page picture book.

if you aren't a sex pest you're actually uneducated

Um akshually it's called ephebophilia and its how we used to find a mate, but you can't do that now because of woke.

Ewwwwwwwwwwwwwwww Make it stop

institutionalized

Eww

Very curious what book would cover this topic matter

Medieval peasants regularly wet themselves and never bathed. I guess we should all do that too, right?