Plutarch on Marital Relations

"Some men, either unable or unwilling to mount themselves into their saddles through infirmity or laziness, teach their horses to fall upon their knees, and in that posture to receive their riders. In like manner there are some persons who, having married young ladies not less considerable for the nobility of their birth than their wealthy dowries, take little care themselves to improve the advantages of such a splendid conjunction, but with a severe moroseness labor to depress and degrade their wives, proud of the mastery and vaunting in domestic tyranny. Whereas in this case it becomes a man to use the reins of government with as equal regard to the quality and dignity of the woman as to the stature of the horse." -- Plutarch, Conjugal Precepts

I came across this today, and it struck me as a fine example of the inaccuracy of the standard modern feminist narrative of the past. That is, that before feminism came and enlightened us and set women free from the shackles and dungeons of patriarchalism, all women were everywhere oppressed by cruel men who valued them not at all except for the pleasure and fruit their bodies afforded. Here is an example from the first century A.D. of a man--a Greco-Roman and a pagan, no less, teaching other men that they should be respectful and gentle to their wives.

I, on the other hand, maintain that, though it is true, has been true, and unfortunately, always will be true (until the restoration of Justice and all things upon the Earth), that there are bad men who treat women badly, that the patriarchal past is not nearly so monolithically oppressive and evil as they pretend. There were men who treated their wives badly. And there were men who treated their wives well. Just as there are now. Different ages and cultures contained varying mixes of the two: one could very easily say, for example that women were treated much better on the whole in Victorian England than they were in Taliban-controlled Afghanistan. I would argue that women are treated much worse on average in relationships by men in our society today than they were a hundred, or even fifty years ago. But there have always been good men, who genuinely love women and desire and strive to treat them kindly and with respect and dignity.

But the feminist narrative is not about accuracy or truth. It is propaganda, pure and simple. In order to sell a radical ideology, one must create a dichotomy of oppressor class vs. victim class, and then re-write history and define the world according to that view. Communists use proletariat and bourgeoisie; Nazis used Jews and Arians; the French reign of terror used common and noble; and feminists use women and men.

As an example, feminists reading this passage will no doubt seize immediately upon the use of the horse as a metaphor, and claim that Plutarch is equating women to livestock. But in reality, it is just a metaphor: just as, when Jesus uses agricultural parables to demonstrate spiritual truths, he is not equating his disciples to plants in value or worth--it's just a metaphor. Focus instead, on his actual theme--that husbands should show "equal regard to the quality and dignity of the woman". And it's not equal regard to the quality and dignity of the horse--it's to the physical stature of the horse, in regard to mounting it. Again, metaphor. Meaning that the man must himself rise up to the challenge of being the husband of a woman of quality and dignity, as he must make the effort to mount a tall horse, rather than lowering the horse to his own level.