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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@Kat: I’m not sure “romantic” can really be applied given that she didn’t have the ability to decline. I vaguely recall she did eventually persuade him to free his children, though he was reluctant.
Kept to dispense periodic pleasure? Are you aware that women are not candy vending machines?
You play games on easy mode. Women live life on the best terms they can manage, and sometimes those terms aren’t so great. Sometimes those terms are terrible. And sometimes — in the case of enslaved women, for example — women might prefer death to the lives they are forced to endure.
@Specialffrog
Of course. But I have to wonder if Jefferson saw his relationship with his slave Sally Hemings as romantic.
@Specialffrog @Kat
Considering she was his dead wife’s half-sister, she lived with the Jeffersons from childhood, and he essentially groomed and manipulated Sally into not taking her legal freedom in France but staying with him so he would maybe someday free her family, I don’t think he did. TJ was a controlling asshole, and he, as a man of the planter class, saw Sally as his due. Was it possible there was affection between them? Certainly. She was in his bed for most of her life and had several children by him. But he only freed them on his death, and a relation had to free Sally herself, iirc. (I lived in Charlottesville, VA, it’s always Jefferson o’clock there.) I don’t think we can even talk about romance. If there was, it’s because she looked uncannily like Martha Jefferson and he could project his intense grief onto Sally.
@wehgurhg – Echoing @Pie. The ‘deep in the closet’ jokes aren’t funny, these people are the straights problem to sort out. Don’t push it on GRSM folxs.
(Thanks Pie for replying!!)
Also learning a lot of horrifying history, thank you all for sharing.
Quoth the raven: he’s kidding, right?
WT the F-ing F?!?
OP can take his creepy, uninformed rape fetish fantasy and stuff it.
How can someone have so little empathy for another person that they can’t understand how basic and necessary the concept of owning one’s own body is?
Both slavery and rape violate that.
I could generate some hypotheticals to give him a better frame of reference in his safe little world, but it would most likely violate one or more comments policies.
So the experts above have said pretty much everything, so I’ll just add that one thing I’ve noticed about a lot of these dipshits is that they really have no idea just how traumatic pregnancy and childbirth are, particularly before modern medicine was a thing. It was the number one cause of death for women, certainly during the antebellum period.
Regarding the particular topic of slavery in Rome I’d like to take the opportunity to weigh in and clarify that the often used White supremacist defense that “Every country had slavery and/or was conquered at some point!” is bullshit.
The Codex Iustinianus forbid cruel punishment, starvation, intolerable insults hurled at slaves (Title VIII of the Code), and would punish slave owners who engaged in such practices, and others. From what I remember from Roman Law, the treatment of slaves was far more benign than chattel slavery in the US.
And this is not to paint slavery as something benign in and by itself, but to highlight the particular cruelty, savagery and barbarism of chattel slavery. Imagine people so fucking backwards and bigoted that they showed less signs of empathy and civility than ancestors from at least fifteen centuries before them.
Rome was fucked up and often renowned for its cruelty, but to think the United States topped all of that shit, and that this not so long ago should give anyone pause.
Just spit-balling, but maybe the reason that slaver in ancient Rome was less soul-destroyingly horrific was the fact that Roman citizens could, due to fault or circumstance, end up as slaves themselves?
Roman slaves were also used as more things that just manual labour. Educating your slave was a valid investment.
@TheKND
Indeed, in Rome you could sell yourself into and buy your way out of slavery. Slavery was also far more nuanced, not everyone got an easy ride.
Incidentally the right to private property, the cornerstone of capitalism, was first institutionalized there. The main reason was because ancient Romans worshipped their ancestors, and houses typically had a form of crypt, usually located in the middle of the property, where their remains were kept.
Romans believed that it was bad luck if your descendants did not pray for you, so the right of private property came about so as to ensure the property would stay within the family, and the souls of the departed would be prayed to.
You know how Republicans love to cut funding for education (along with pretty much any other public service)? That’s one reason why ControlledInsanity and his pals are so fucking stupid–they never learned anything about history in the first place. (Maybe if they had, they wouldn’t be the horrible people they are now; who can say?) And the less they know about American crimes in the past, the more likely they are to support American crimes in the present. I doubt the GOP planned in that way–they’re not that smart themselves–but they’ve certainly benefited from promoting ignorance.
@Diego Duarte
Do you have a reference for that? Cos it smells slightly apocryphal. The Romans codified private property and inheritance, but I’m pretty certain the ideas predated them by thousands of years. Same with trying to make your descendants continue praying/making offerings for you (though the traditional solution was to threaten the ungrateful jerks with some horrible curse).
@personalpest
I know Hanlon’s Razor supports you, but you should not underestimate the intelligence and malice of those who bankroll the party and drive its policy. The myth of American Exceptionalism is too valuable to them to let it be eroded by education, introspection and study of history, and they know full well how to deal with those problems.
Isn’t the right to private property inherent to the Code of Hammurabi? That predates the founding of Rome by a thousand years.
@Moggie
I stand corrected then.
@PersonalPest
I’m gonna look for a reference because that is what I was taught in my Roman Civil Law courses. I’ll get back to you on that bit.
What??? Of course they planned it that way! Any public education (whether with facts or falsehoods) beyond what it takes to be a basically competent, loyal worker or soldier is dangerous to the wealthy class.
It’s the same reason it was illegal to teach slaves to read.
There’s always been a debate in public education about whether to teach facts or patriotism, and patriotism has won that debate every time. They categorically do not want people to know the truth.
@Mexican Hot Chocolate:
If any of these nitwits think slave women have it easy, they should read Sojourner Truth’s memoir: The Narrative of Sojourner Truth: a Northern Slave.
A further important note: Truth’s famous speech listing her ordeals as a slave was delivered in standard American English (her first language was Dutch.) Here’s an original transcription side-by-side with the White Feminist™ Edit:
https://www.thesojournertruthproject.com/compare-the-speeches
So, last weekend I visited the Smithsonian National Museum of African American History & Culture. Spend 4 hours just in the history section. Reading this…shit…after that is pretty upsetting.
With all seriousness, I think undiagnosed depression plays a role here. One of the points of depression is despair, feeling EVERYBODY who ever lived had it better than you.
I recall, when depressed, bring envious of death row inmates – I wish I was dead and they get that for free! Being jealous of slaves seem to be of the same general form.
Of course I haven’t the slightest disagreement with the claim being a female slave is not better than being an incel (duh). Thinking so is abnormal.
But you’re using logic and common sense to analyze the statements of a (literally) sick mind.
Is this the real answer to all this…? Maybe they should hurry up and sell themselves into sex slavery; they’ll finally get laid and all they could want, albeit against their will, and since they’ll likely be denied internet access the rest of the world will no longer have to hear their b*tching and whining anymore. Either they’ll finally be happy or, if they come to some kind of realization and if they can escape, come crawling back with a new awareness about life.
My thoughts exactly, because as I’ve said before, forcing someone to have sex against their will, which is rape, is a far worse crime than forcing someone to do physical labor against their will.
I’m not denying that the male slaves who were “just” forced to do backbreaking work suffered a lot too, but at the very least the night brought a moment of respite to them whereas the women and some of the young men always had to fear their masters sneaking in on them at any given time, but especially after the daily work shifts ended.
This also reminds me of guys thinking women are “privileged” because in war they are more likely to be enslaved while the men are just killed. Not only is this a load of BS because in almost all larger conflicts huge numbers of men are also taken prisoner and subjected to sexual violence, but it also ignores all instances of women having killed themselves rather than being taken alive. It’s said that once Genghis Khan started laying siege to a city, hundreds of women would jump from the city walls, and more recently, Germany saw a huge wave of suicides at the end of WW2, the overwhelming majority women and children. So much for “privilege”.
But the saddest part is that I can sort of see why so many of these types would think that sexual slavery is just a minor inconvenience when you look at pretty much any media depicting brothels in historical eras, just look at Game of Thrones, the new Das Boot TV-series and tons of pirate and cowboy movies where brothels are shown to be silly funhouses and the women there are all young and pretty and wearing sexy lace-rimmed corsets, if they wear anything at all, and happily giggling as the hero enters and oftentimes even offering him a freebie just because, to filmmakers, selling sex in an age without any reliable protection against STDs or pregnancy is just that fun and completely harmless.
I just find it so insane that whilst no serious filmmaker today would dream of depicting plantation slaves or Victorian children working in factories as joyous workers who’d all be clean and happy, but the same depiction of women* in brothels and harems is A-OK apparently.
*And there have been plenty of men trapped in sexual slavery throughout history too, but you’re more likely to see female characters wearing historically accurate head coverings than that in mainstream media.
A little over a year ago I visited the Sachenhausen concentration camp. That’s roughly the survival rate for non-jewish skilled workers there.
A point, Roman burial customs, a television programme by Professor Mary Beard I think, indicated that burial had to be outside the city walls. Side point, Freedmen often stayed on as paid retainers in Roman times, and would often be interred in their patrons’ burial vaults on death. Thinking on Roman real estate property rights, continuity of the dedication of family shrines comes to mind, without necessarily invoking on site burial.
The difference between slavery in antiquity and chattel slavery really is fascinating.
Antiquity: “Hey, I’ve got a slave with a brain! Cool! If I educate them, I’ll get a really good return on investment.”
Chattel: “WHATEVER YOU DO, DON’T EDUCATE THE SLAVES!!!”
Obviously, not all slavery was like that in antiquity, but the possibility existed. It’s weird that Sourthern slavery was such a capitalist enterprise, but such a poorly managed one. Not using your slaves’ brains is just wasting your capital. Complete failure to learn the moral of the Parable of the Talents. I wonder if that could become a response to Confederacy apologists, along the lines of “Why do you want monuments to losers like the Confederates?”: “Why are you defending people who were so bad at taking advantage of all slavery had to offer them???”
Of course, once you’ve decided your slaves are subhuman because that makes them easier to dehumanize, it’s hard to see what else they might offer. Which just goes to show that racism is inefficient.
Coincidentally, a really interesting article that just came out, about the woman who may have been the last surviving slave to have been brought over on a slave ship: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/03/us/transatlantic-slave-trade-last-survivor.html