The debates about this 17th century Mughal gained much momentum in 2015, when New Delhi's Aurangzeb Road was rechristened Dr APJ Abdul Kalam Road, owing to the myth of 'Aurangzeb, the villain'. So naturally, a year and a half later, when Truschke published her book, she was subjected to a lot of hatred, especially from the right wing. Other researchers deny the existence of the G-spot in anyone. Recently, a review looked at 96 different studies of the G-spot in the 60 years after Grafenberg described it and concluded “without a doubt” that the G-spot does not exist. Radu is a history/science buff with an interest in all things bizarre and obscure.
Nearly as long as people have been recording history, they have documented sexual assaults. From the writings of ancient Greece to the Bible to the letters of early explorers, sexual violence has long been a brutal part of the human story. Some assaults have even changed the course of history. And, like all history, what we know about sexual assaults of the past is generally what was told by the victors—mostly men.
“Women are erased,” says Sharon Block, professor of history at University of California, Irvine and the author of Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America. “The historic rapes that ‘mattered’ are the only ones where men saw themselves damaged.”
Wars, especially, have been linked to egregious sexual assaults, from mass rape committed by Soviet soldiers as they advanced into Germany during World War II to sexual violence amid the genocides in Rwanda in 1995. In fact, the ubiquity of sexual assault in wars makes those crimes a category unto themselves.
With the understanding that no list could ever be comprehensive, below are sexual assaults that have both influenced history and those that, notably, did not.
1. The rise of Alexander the Great
An act of sexual violence may have contributed to the rise of Alexander the Great, according to Greek historians Diodorus Siculus and Plutarch. Their accounts were written hundreds of years after the event was supposed to have taken place, but the story goes like this: In 336 B.C., Pausanias of Orestis, a member of the bodyguard of King Philip II of Macedonia (and possibly his lover), was invited to a banquet by Philip’s father-in-law, Attalus. There, he was raped by Attalus’s servants. When Philip refused to punish the attackers (he did give Pausanias a promotion), Pausanias murdered the king, paving the way for the ascension of Philip’s son, Alexander the Great.
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2. The rape of the Sabine women
The Roman historian Livy, writing during the first century, traces Rome’s origins to the mid-8th century B.C., when the warrior tribe was facing a shortage of women. “Population growth was the most difficult thing to achieve in antiquity,” says Thomas Martin, author of Ancient Rome: From Romulus to Justinian. According to Livy, the Roman leader, Romulus, held a religious festival and invited the neighboring Sabine tribe, (“Free food and drink,” notes Martin.) At Romulus’s signal, the Romans attacked and killed the Sabine men at the festival and carried off the women. In the resulting bloody war, the Sabine women called a halt to the hostilities, making allies of the tribes and allowing the Romans to multiply. As with the rape of Lucretia, and then Virginia, both recounted by Livy, there is disagreement among historians as to the veracity of this story. 'It's a myth,' contends Mary Beard, historian and author of SPQR: A History of Ancient Rome.
3. Boudicca’s fight for independence
Celtic tribes were a constant thorn in the Roman Empire’s side from the moment they invaded the Island of Britain in 45 A.D. The Iceni, a Celtic tribe in East Anglia, were led by a king named Prasutagus, who was married to Boudicca. When Prasutagus died, Rome claimed his kingdom, over the objections of Boudicca, who was flogged publicly and forced to watch her daughters raped by Roman soldiers. Boudicca then assembled a powerful army and rebelled against the Romans, eventually sacking London (then called Londinium). The Roman historian Cassius Dio describes how Boudicca’s own soldiers then violently assaulted Roman women there: 'Their breasts were cut off and stuffed in their mouths, so that they seemed to be eating them, then their bodies were skewered lengthwise on sharp stakes.' Boudicca’s rebellion was eventually crushed by the Roman general, Gaius Suetonius in 60 or 61 A.D.
4. Columbus and slavery
When Italian explorer, Christopher Columbus voyaged to the Caribbean in the 1490s, he not only discovered new lands, at least one of his men would document his own rape and torture of an indigenous woman. Michele de Cuneo, a noble friend of Columbus, tells of a “Carib woman” given to him by the admiral. When she fought back against his attempted sexual attacks, he “took a piece of rope and whipped her soundly...finally we came to an agreement in such manner that I can tell you she seemed to have been brought up in a school for harlots.” Columbus’ ships would eventually sail back to Europe, carrying more than 1,000 slaves.
5. A baron's quick acquittal
Baron Frederick Calvert may have been an early study in affluenza. Left a large amount of money—and the proprietary governorship of Maryland—at age 20, the English playboy was kicked out of Turkey for keeping a harem, and was rumored to have murdered his first wife. In 1768, he was charged with the kidnapping and rape of Sarah Woodcock, a milliner. The jury took all of an hour to acquit him (they decided she hadn't tried hard enough to escape), but he was cast out from British society and his title died with him in 1771.
6. 'Mutiny on the Bounty' and Pitcairn’s dark legacy
In April of 1779, Fletcher Christian and 18 of his loyal seamen seized a ship from Captain William Bligh in an incident made famous in the novel and movie, Mutiny on the Bounty. Christian and his sailors settled on the tiny Pitcairn Islands in the South Pacific, as well as on Tahiti, where their descendants still live. In 1999, a rape accusation from a 15-year-old girl was brought against an older man on the island. The trial revealed a culture of sexual abuse of children that had carried on for generations. In 2004, seven men, who comprised one-third of the island’s male population, went on trial for sexual offenses. The trials were complicated by many factors, including the island’s remoteness and lack of a legal system. In the end, six of the seven accused were found guilty and three were jailed, although none received significant sentences.
7. ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself.’
It is impossible to estimate the number of enslaved women of color assaulted by slave owners in the colonies and the United States before the end of the Civil War. What is clear is that such instances were common and wouldn't have been considered “assault.” As early as 1662, Virginia’s governing body, the House of Burgesses, instituted rules addressing children born of enslaved women wherein the father might be a white (free) man: “If mother (whatever her racial background, whether Indian, black, or mixed) is a slave, child is a slave—no matter who the father might be,” says Peter Wallenstein, author of Cradle of America: A History of Virginia. Surviving stories of such assaults only came from escaped or freed slaves, who managed to record them. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Written by Herself by Harriet Jacobs is an example. The father of two of her enslaved children, Samuel Treadwell Sawyer, was elected to Congress.
8. The Pogrom of Kishinev
The murder of 49 Jews in the town of Kishinev in the Russian Empire in 1903 also included the rape of scores of Jewish women. In his book, Pogrom: Kishinev and the Tilt of History, Stephen J. Zipperstein, a professor of history at Stanford, notes that images, as well as tales and poems of the transgressions in Kishinev circled the globe, including America. Outcry over the Kishinev reports motivated Russian Jews to join revolutionary activity against the Czarist regime and influenced the migration of thousands of Eastern European Jews towards the West and Palestine. At the same time, the pogrom lay the framework for the horrors that European Jews would face 40 years later during the Holocaust.
9. The rape of Recy Taylor
Recy Taylor was 24 when, in 1944, she was kidnapped by six men while walking home from church in Abbeville, Alabama, and gang-raped in the back of a truck. Even though one of the perpetrators had confessed, two white juries refused to indict the accused. Taylor’s rape and the reaction, emblematic of the repressive Jim Crow south, helped galvanize the civil-rights movement. When the details of her story were reported in the black press, the NAACP sent Rosa Parks to Abbeville to investigate the matter. Parks established the Committee for Equal Justice for Mrs. Recy Taylor, the leaders of which went on to organize the Montgomery Bus Boycotts. In 2011, the Alabama State Legislature officially apologized to Taylor for its lack of prosecution.
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In many societies, rape was defined as a crime against property—if it was defined as a crime at all.
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Painting of the rape of Lucretia via Wikipedia
All of a sudden, Brock Turner is the most famous rapist in America. The 20-year-old former Stanford swimmer was sentenced last week to just six months in jail for sexually assaulting a passed-out woman behind a dumpster; the light punishment drew outrage, as did a letter from Turner's father saying that his son's life had still been ruined more than '20 minutes worth of action' and a letter from a childhood friend of Turner's blaming the whole thing on political correctness.
Nearly a week after the sentencing, the media and public is still fixated on the case. A statement the anonymous victim read aloud in court went viral after being posted on BuzzFeed, an online petition is calling for the lenient judge's removal, observers have called Turner's case a glaring example of white privilege, and Turner himself is still casting about for excuses, calling his crime a result of college 'party culture.'
At the heart of the controversy is the complex and sometimes seemingly unfair way sexual assault is prosecuted. In April, for instance, a judge in Oklahoma found that according to state statutes, performing oral sex on an unconscious person is technically legal. But at least we think of rape as a violent crime—historically, in societies where rape was even a crime, it was often a property crime, not a violation of a person. Here are how some cultures dealt with people like Brock Turner:
The Ancient Near East
Life in Biblical times wasn't a barrel of laughs for anyone, but women, unsurprisingly, consistently got the short end of the staff. Robert Kawashima, who teaches Biblical law at the University of Florida, referenced Exodus 20:17 as evidence that women were legally thought of as objects, because they're listed among things that people shouldn't covet alongside homes and servants. 'The basic shocking principle––in my view––is that women were seen as a type of property,' he told VICE. 'So the ancient near east, including Israel, didn't have a proper notion of 'forcible rape'––just adultery with another man's wife or fornication with another man's virgin daughter. The other man, in either case, was the victim of the crime.'
For instance, in Babylonia, if a woman who was set to be married was raped and she was a virgin, the rapist would be killed. But if the woman was married, she would be killed, too. In Assyria, the father of a rape victim was allowed to rape the rapist's wife as punishment.
Perhaps the strangest piece of rape law from the region comes from the Israelites, who made a distinction between what happens in the city and in the field. Basically, if a woman was raped inside the city walls, it was assumed that she could have cried out for help if it wasn't actually consensual. She and her attacker would be stoned to death. If the rape took place outside of city walls, however, the woman would be blameless, since no one would have been around to help her. Instead of being stoned to death, she would be forced to marry her attacker (who would pay a dowry to her father) if she were not set to be wed already. If she was already engaged, that arrangement would be canceled because she was considered damaged goods, and she would be put back on the market at a discount price.
America Before Columbus
Women in pre-Columbian American were safer than their Biblical counterparts, according to Amy Casselman, a professor of Native American studies at San Francisco State University. She told VICE that sexual assault was basically unheard of in America before the Europeans came over. 'Because women played central roles in all aspects of indigenous culture, violence against them was fundamentally incongruent with one's conception of self and society,' she told me. 'And, in the rare cases in which violence against native women did occur, native nations used their own fully functioning systems of law and order to swiftly address the perpetrator and restore balance to the community.'
Native Americans had their own tribal courts, which Casselman contrasted with the American ones of today, which she called less survivor-oriented because they rely on maximum/minimum sentences and presume the alleged assailant's innocence. Tribal courts would let victims decide what punishment they want to see doled out––like if they wanted an apology, a shorter sentence than what a federal court would give now, or some form of public shaming. 'Today, women who report sexual assault are routinely put on trial themselves and rarely get a voice in the outcome,' she said. 'Stanford's Brock Turner is a perfect example of this.'
The Roman Empire
Rape as a concept didn't exist in either Ancient Greece or Rome––there wasn't a word for it, even though it seems like every story in mythology involves what we'd call sexual assault. 'If one were wealthy and/or powerful enough, personal revenge was a possibility,' says Michael Peachin, a classics professor at New York University. 'However, sexual assault of any and every kind was simply not understood as a matter in which the state should involve itself.'
He says that unlike in the near east, rape wasn't even considered a property crime. In fact, it was worse in some ways: If the woman was married, she could be tried for adultery. Rome was an even more lawless place when it came to protecting children, though. 'Indeed, if one did not want a baby, one could, without any legal consequence, throw it away––literally, on the garbage dump,' Peachin says.
Medieval England
Rape was made a capital punishment in 1285 in England, but jurors were always reluctant to convict people of the crime because women were perceived of as temptresses who asked for or deserved assault, according to historian Sean McGlynn. In an article for History Today, he wrote about how unlikely it was for all-male juries condemn one of their peers for what we would today called sexual assault: 'In the English Midlands between 1400 and 1430, of 280 rape cases, not one led to a conviction.'
While noting that women had little recourse if they were raped, he added one exception. In 1438, an English jury acquitted Joan Chapelyn for killing a man in self-defense as he was assaulting her. The past pretty much sucked.
Colonial America
In America, the word 'rapist' wasn't referred to until the late 19th century, in reference to lynchings. The Oxford English Dictionary notes its first use in reference to a 'nigger rapist.' It was much easier to convict black men of crimes than whites, because they were tried in slave courts that did not require unanimous jury verdicts. Sharon Block, the author of Rape and Sexual Power in Early America, told VICE that white men accused of rape would often get their charges reduced.
She gave the example of a woman named Sylvia Patterson, who was raped by Captain James Dunn in New York City during the early 19th century. He was only charged with 'assault with intent to seduce,' which was common when powerful white men were accused of raping working-class women––particularly women of color. During the course of the trial, Patterson was called promiscuous, and it was said that she had venereal diseases.
'In the end, the court convicted Dunn, but the judgment was only one dollar––a real commentary on what they thought her sexual integrity was worth,' Block said. 'What went on in the Stanford case is very much reminiscent about colonial America. Men with social power could engage in sex virtually unheeded––social power translated to sexual power.'
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