The social/religious pressure toward virginity, the man’s ownership of women as chattel, is all about economics, fundamentally. It gets dressed up in fine lofty language, but the bottom line is… the bottom line.
The original motivation is to keep property in the family. At some point a family’s ownership of property became tied to the concept of the male lineage. Why that connection was made, I wonder.
“Fatherhood, in the sense of conscious begetting, is unknown to man. It is a mystical estate, an apostolic succession, from only begetter to only begotten. On that mystery and not on the madonna which the cunning Italian intellect flung to the mob of Europe the church is founded and founded irremovably because founded, like the world, macro- and microcosm, upon the void. Upon incertitude, upon unlikelihood. Amor matris, subjective and objective genitive, may be the only true thing in life. Paternity may be a legal fiction.”
—James Joyce, Ulysses
Paternity is “mystical,” “incertitude,” and even “fiction” according to Joyce because (prior to DNA testing) it can’t be proven. Maternity needs no proof.
The problem from the patrilineal property-owning point of view: Your mission is to keep all the property as the possession of your male line. If external DNA (“seed” in the old days) impregnates any of the wombs you control, your property is wasted on not-you. This requires strict rules to keep the wombs under control. The veil. The harem. Religion. From the concept of women as men’s chattel it’s only one more step to “giving away” one’s daughter to her new male owner.
This economic theory attributes the origin of the practice to the beginning of sedentary agriculture, when families first became able to accumulate property to be inherited through the generations. But this doesn’t explain why the control of women in the service of patrilineal inheritance became so strict among nomadic Arabs, the Bedouin. Possibly as a result of Islam, which originated in cities, not the desert, and is mainly geared to an agricultural culture.
The patriarchal powers that be got these rules encoded into religion. While religion is an effective way to gain sway over people’s behavior, the danger is when it overrides rational thought; even a mundane practice like chattel slavery of women becomes sanctified as something holy because it was incorporated into the religious law. People fight, kill, and die for religion, even when if they followed their reason they might well have made better choices. Separating female chattel slavery from its religious trappings, looking at it as an economic phenomenon of the early agricultural era, allows humans to ask whether such rules are really in people’s interest, especially when the economy has changed so much and left agricultural conditions far behind in the past for most of us. It becomes clear there’s no rational purpose in continuing it.
