this post was submitted on 08 Apr 2025
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For posting all the anonymous reactionary bullshit that you can't post anywhere else.
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going purely off of the clickbait titles, most of this doesn't seem incorrect.
The internet did lie about trad wives, modern christianity is an abomination compared to older variants of catholicism in many ways, peasants were less depressed and had more freedom than depicted in media. There's a reason peasants almost universally resisted proletarianization across the board, and why women had to be shoved into the "trad wife" role via the witch hunts.
I recommend Caliban and the Witch.
This is one reason I roll my eyes whenever fantasy writers/tabletop DMs use "realism" to justify
CW: SV
cramming SA into their stories at every opportunity and having settings that resemble World of Gor.one of the reasons for that, if I'm being generous to them, is that their settings usually take place during times of war. There was massive SA and death during those periods, all throughout human history war and SA go hand-in-hand almost universally with the few exceptions standing out in stark contrast (Such as Saladin's forces).
What they don't realize is that 95% of the time, the realm wasn't at war.
My "favorite" thing about the fash tradwife fantasy is that they think those wives would look like airbrushed supermodels while also simultaneously cooking and cleaning for 15 hours a day.
My gf's mother would be a real tradwife with 6 children and the damage it did to her body is pretty obvious.
Yes women became a threat to early capitalism due to their strong unsupervised role as healers, herbalists, midwives and various other position of communal authority.
yep. Capitalist industrialization required mass proletarianization and urbanization. People who had been attached to the land had to be uprooted, moved to cities, and made to work far more hours than they ever had before.
Men were forced into the heavy industry factories and mines, while women were forced into textile factories and into exclusively raising children. Before this, each peasant family determined their own division of labor on their farm as they saw fit. The land lord didn't care as long as the taxes were paid.
Whereas the factory floor and modern gender norms lead to a dictatorship of steam that was much crueler, and required a much stronger grip on the day-to-day lives and identities of its workers
Urbanisation in the late middle ages and early modern period was in part a voluntary thing in much of Europe, as a form of resistance by the lower classes to serfdom and manoralism. That's why we see so many laws in parts of the world where the feudal contracts were the strongest about the exact requirements to become a city dweller, and why we saw attempts by aristocrats in the late middle ages and early modern period to limit urbanisation by force. You're conflating time periods again.
Not true at all. It was done by force in most cases, with the commons being fenced off and privatized by violent force and serfs evicted from the land via wars (after which they were never given their land back). In almost all historical cases Proletarianization was done via economic, legal or violent coercion.
No. Because you're conflating time periods, countries and projecting stuff backwards. Enclosure riots began in the 16th century in England, but prior to that in the holy roman empire you had laws limiting urbanisation and laws for when a peasant could be collected by his landlord even if he had attempted to move into the city. Even as late as the 18th century you had laws in parts of Europe like the Stavnesbånd which outright banned serfs from moving to the city.
Beer brewers too
In waht ways are those? Because I'll remind you that medieval Catholicism included a pay-2-win scheme and early modern Catholic doctrine was that black people didn't have souls.
There is a several century long gap between these two phenomena. What are you talking about.
While witch hunts were undoubtedly in part a measure of social control in the early modern period, the concepts involved in a "trad wife" (A wife who is unemployed, who engages solely in tasks like cleaning, cooking and child rearing and who is subservient to her husband) would be completely fucking alien to a medieval or even early modern european person. You are inventing a time period that is somehow the medieval period, the early modern period and the first industrial revolution at the same time.
Early Catholicism placed extremely high value on communal wellbeing, as well as work-life balance. Also they valued scholasticism and held lots of festivals and feasts. The sick and elderly and poor were cared for. The misfits could join the clergy and still serve an esteemed life. "Black people" is a concept of racialism that was invented in the modern period, this was not anything anybody in Medieval Times would have any idea what you're talking about. It's you that's muddling your timelines.
Nowadays you have prosperity gospel, where the core central tenet is that being wealthy makes you righteous (and vice versa). Straight up worship of mammon. Protestant "work ethic" being developed to force slave-like conditions on proles. You have the abomination that is Calvinism that has seeped into every Protestant religion by osmosis. It was this toxic stew from which Witch Hunting arose, not from early feudal catholicism but from modern protestantism. Yes, modern Protestantism arose from feudal Catholicism, but it’s one more degree removed. We are talking relativity here.
Yes it would be alien to medieval women, which is what I said and was my point. No it was not alien to early modern women, hundreds of millions of women were forced into this role starting around the 1500s and the advent of capitalism.
I'm not "inventing" any time period. I'm pointing out how witch hunting, trad wives and now racialism did not exist in the medieval world. They are modern age artifacts that we project back anachronistically on previous time periods to justify to ourselves "well at least life is better than back then" or, in reactionaries case, "we can retvrn to when it was so awesome" (both reaching back at a fantasy past that never existed)
What. While it's true that the church ran hospitals, and that the monasteries (Not the clergy. Come on) provided some measure of a social release valve. This screed goes beyond rose tinted glasses into pure trad cath delusion. By the period we usually call the high middle ages joining a monastary would usually involve both a literacy requirement and providing an endowment of land or a gift of money to the monastary, which effectively removed the poor from consideration. As a result several movements emerged to create impromptu monastic life in urban centers (Primarily by women too poor to join a convent or who did not wish to live in seclusion) which were all cracked down on by the church.
The valladolid debate took place in 1550, which places it firmly in the early modern period, which is where I said it took place.
The medieval church literally made the aristocracy God's representatives on earth. The emperor was literally a symbol of God's power on earth and imbued with the absolute power to kill in his name as per the two swords doctrine.
I'm just... what are you doing?
Nowhere did I universally defend catholicism or say it had no issues. Obviously their incestuous relationship with aristocracy is the number one problem, and the biggest contradiction which caused protestantism to take off in the first place. It was highly corrupt.
I'm just pushing back on the Liberal "understanding" that Medieval Catholicism was super backwards compared to modern ideologies, when in fact it didn't gain the racist aspect until the Modern Age - further supporting my argument and not detracting from it by the way. Modern religions and ideologies are fucked up in a way that medieval people could not even dream of, with new types of reactionary technology they would never even think about.
I'm also pushing back on the Liberal "understanding" that medieval peasants had the worst existence in human history and it was universally terrible for them, and the enlightenment made everything better across the board. These types of flat progressive views of history are anti-Marxist and are not dialectical. I'm providing the other side of the dialectic for people in here who think trad wives and witch hunting was a thing in medieval europe.
You sought to forward a view of history that saw an institution that any material analysis of history would show you existed to prop up a a regressive and exploitative social order, actually being better than a modern institution that does the same based on the existence of made up virtues. It is pure reaction to modern christianity without a real analysis of the older christianity to which you are comparing it. The medieval church defended slavery and used enslavement as a tool of discipline, it defended a regressive social order, it participated in genocide, and it existed for the defense of the feudal order. And you say that modern christianity is an abomination in comparison to it based on the existence of sects that defend a modern regressive social order.
Pay 2 Win was ~~introduced~~ reintroduced in the early modern period and it broke the meta so badly, people started their own studio.
Not only were indulgences a thing way before Luther, you even had mass opposition to indulgences a century before Luther. Not much of what Luther said was original, he just argued it best. Paying to have years shaved off your time in purgatory, cut down on penance or ensure salvation goes back into the early medieval period. It just got more blatant with time
I think we are actually pretty much in agreement I just used “trad wife” in a less narrow sense than you, to describe women forced into a modern prole female gender role, which to be specific I mean that most poor women were pressured to work in things like textiles, housekeeping, etc if they were single, old or poor and to raise their children predominantly if they were none of those. Breaking up of communities so the efficiencies of collective labor is lost and women have to spend so much more of their time doing domestic labor
I also maybe overstated how “good” the medieval Catholic Church was because I was playing devil’s advocate to get the other side of the dialectic and point out modern Protestantism's many many flaws - and the newer, more advanced reactionary tendencies that emerge from it specifically honed to be effective in our current age.
With these caveats I agree that we are very close to being aligned on most issues.
My own ahistorical oversimplification is that the Dutch and British were such psychos because of their Protestantism that they were way more proficient in colonialism and imperialism. The Catholic nations couldn’t keep up, they did their best but they couldn’t go through all the way to completion like their northern neighbors did so they are relegated to backwater has beens.
I just vibe way better with Catholics personally, as an ex/cultural Muslim. They are way more chill, way more compassionate and have an implicit understanding of the contradictions of the bullshit they believe. They can half-believe it. Protestants seem very all or nothing.