No, in a medieval world where most people are peasant farmers familiar with breeding, it’s well-known that sex causes and is necessary for pregnancy. Hence, the extreme sanctions against unmarried women risking getting pregnant and having to raise “bastards”. Doubtless a lot of fornication happened nonetheless but reliable birth control is a social game-changer.
I really liked the last line. If she got hold of Mistertique, he would be not only be fucked, but fucked over.
I assume they have magical birth control. Or at least magical means of determining parentage, since that was the real reason for the stigma. People in agricultural societies generally wanted more offspring, not fewer, they just wanted to be sure whose they were.
It’s generally pretty obvious who the mother is, what they wanted to conclusively establish was paternity.
Well, in our history that’s true. In the Oglafverse, who knows!
Off topic, my favorite blonde joke: What did the blonde say when the doctor told her she was pregnant? Is it mine?
And really, as long as you at least have plausible deniability and a little discretion, you can pass off any man’s child as your husband’s. Might be a dangerous game for royalty or nobility (and then again it might not) but lower down the social scale it seems as though people were knocking boots all over the place by what you read in Chaucer. Unless a woman’s actually been caught in the act, or produced a black baby, or her husband’s been out of the country for a year, he’s going to think twice about letting the world know he’s been cuckolded.
I’m 100% certain that this happened all the time. That’s why I roll my eyes at people claiming to have tracked their ancestry back hundreds of years.
Actually, the real difference from our world, now that I think about it, is not magical contraception, but women’s lib. There seems to be no problem in the Oglafverse with women acting independently as shopkeepers, priestesses, thieves, rogues, “doctors,” evil mistresses, or whatever they feel like. The real problem with premarital sex among the lower classes was not determining paternity, but the fact that the baby’s grandfather would end up supporting both the mother and baby until the mother married (which would be difficult) and then the mother’s husband would benefit from the extra labor when the baby becomes a child. A young woman who had sex in premodern Europe had to either be willing to marry whomever she had sex with or ready to marry another suitor who was lined up and who could plausibly be convinced the baby was his. Those three in the Oglafverse were presumably ladies of means who could raise a child on their own without suffering any more stigma that they would in our world today, should the condomagic break.
Magic is definitely an equalizer in the war of the sexes.
Magic works in that world. A contraception cantrip is probably one of the first things mothers teach their daughters. Along with that “keep a model’s figure” spell they all seem to use.
Or they were bored married ladies who had a husband they could blame any resulting baby on.
A little too accurate to be that funny. At least for those of us who’ve had to deal with this kind of “submissive.”
It reminds me of an old joke:
The masochist says, ‘Hurt me! Hurt me!’
The sadist replies evilly, ‘No.’
I’m sure you’re right.
But ancestry is not just genes, it’s tracing a family. I have two second cousins, sisters, who were born in South Korea and adopted from there. And by golly they have been grafted onto our family tree and are each of them a valid leaf there. In generations to come they and their descendants will be family, no matter who popped them out.
I agree. I’m well aware that families are made, not born. I’m just saying I laugh at people who believe that the names on their genealogies are the people they’re literally descended from. And many people certainly do believe they’re tracing their literal descent and not just names.
Actually, I’m not so sure that cuckoldry is all that common. Consider the case of Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemmings. OK, yes, the first generation were obviously bastards… But to this day, the men who are purported to be the male-line descendants of Hemmings’ sons do, in fact, bear the same Y chromosome as do men who purport to be male-line descendants of the Jeffersons through legitimate lines. That’s either a coincidence of epic proportions, or both sides of that lineage are exactly what they purport to be.
I’m not saying everyone’s illegitimate. Just that, given enough generations, you’re more likely to have a cuckoo ancestor than not. Certainly it’s possible that you’re descended from the exact people listed on your family tree. It’s just not as definite as many people seem to believe.
ETA: I’m more doubtful of people who believe they’ve traced their ancestry back hundreds of years than I am of people who are only considering recent generations.
Oh, sure, eventually you’re bound to get a few branches of your family tree wrong. That doesn’t mean it isn’t mostly right, though. And a lot of the time when you do get it wrong, it’s self-correcting: A woman cheats with her husband’s brother, for instance, or a baby born to a teen mother is presented as being her parents’.
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ETA: I’m more doubtful of people who believe they’ve traced their ancestry back hundreds of years than I am of people who are only considering recent generations.[/QUOTE]
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Don’t look at me, man, my dad just traced my family tree by individual name back to the 1100s, and then by DNA back to (mumble). And, by god, the DNA matched, according to descendant. While the male line is very common in Ireland, the specific lack of mutation on it is not.
The DNA matches the family history.
Now, it’s possible every woman had sex with their husband’s brother, but I find that dubious.
Occam’s razor says that maybe cuckolding is not as common as you think.
I’m a bit bored with this digression now, so let’s just say that if I had said that everyone is always illegitimate, then you’d have a point.
Since I’ve made clear several times now that I didn’t say that, could we please stop arguing with me as if I did say it and move on with our lives now?