xenia’s Reviews > Radical Antiquity: Free Love Zoroastrians, Farming Pirates, and Ancient Uprisings > Status Update
xenia
is 60% done
this is not just a fantastic analysis of class, but of patriarchy and heteronormativity in antiquity. im kinda blown away. over and again, chris shows how integral patriarchal control of women's bodies was to the aristocracy, whether of the greek pater or arabic harem. marriage consolidated class through the mechanism of inheritance. over and again, peasant revolted through collective property and care. its profound.
— Dec 18, 2025 06:09PM
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xenia’s Previous Updates
xenia
is 30% done
heh, so on the other pole from celibacy was cynicism, another refusal of patriarchy and marriage, but this time through sexual promiscuity, nonmonogamy, and gender noncomformity. no slavish fixation to the social ladder, to chauvinist norms of honour and propriety, just fucking public in a park cuz it makes you happy and embracing your son's loving marriage to a sex worker 💖
— Dec 17, 2025 09:37PM
xenia
is 30% done
sooo, from antiquity to the medieval period (hell, even to now), celibacy was used to refuse patriarchal injunctions, because marriage centralised power into the patriarch. celibacy was an escape from gendered violence and institutionalised misogyny.
— Dec 16, 2025 06:26PM
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xenia
(last edited Dec 18, 2025 06:18PM)
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rated it 3 stars
Dec 18, 2025 06:15PM
many of these alternative societies centred consent as a core value, because their lives under the aristocracy was characterised by coercion: taxes that propped up the rich, marriages that enslaved peasant women, and rapes from soldiers and husbands. a classless society had to dismantle patriarchy, because it was core to the consolidation of power and inequality.
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