The 84th verse says not to trust girls or women; that their hearts are molded on a wobbly wheel, and faithlessness lies in their hearts.

I’ll remind any women who may be reading this that I’m just the messenger. I’m sure many women could legitimately levy the same complaint at men. But for this week, we deal with the words of the 84th verse, which concerns women.

In terms of the value to an Old Norseman, this verse seems to warn of infidelities, and the deceptions of love. Women were probably less-likely to be involved, at the time, in highway banditry and pyramid schemes. It must have been a somewhat-ordinary occurrence that some woman pledged her love to a man, then left for or at least consorted with another.

I’m tempted to file this one away as a version of, “Don’t believe everything you hear,” and be done with it, because I dislike stereotypes of broad groups of people. Let me resist that urge, and see if there’s something more. Maybe one of the reasons that the female side of infidelities strike so hard at men is that, fairly or unfairly, women are expected to be more honest and chaste. Remember that we are hardly disappointed when our expectations are met, which means if men were widely-considered to be unreliable in matters of love, or even not held to any such vow, few would think to remark on their inevitable transgressions.

Women do indeed seem to carry that expectation, even today. Observe the reactions that men and women get when some high-profile cheating scandal erupts. While the fury has been more evenly distributed in recent years, historically and still, the brunt of it is borne by women. Some of it may come down to biology. If a man steps out, even if he fathers a string of bastards, he could simply return home with no additional burden to the family. Before child support, there wasn’t much more than gossip to deal with. Whereas when a women sleeps with another man, she can become pregnant. There were no abortions in the 10th century. What to do with a child, and if it remained with its mother the economic burden, were more difficult. So was discretion. A man’s infidelities may go unnoticed, but in the case of pregnancy, it’s obvious, and so are the ways the child looks different than his siblings, which were still apparent to people who lacked knowledge of genetics.

I don’t think that explains the whole story, though. To an extent, it may simply be that the writer of Havamal was a male, and a female would have said the opposite. Yet the Greenland Eskimo, to my knowledge, had no such feelings of disappointment. Married couples traded sexual partners frequently, and when European explorers first showed up, a man would often send his wife aboard the ship for a night in exchange for a rusty nail or a piece of rope. Those women, from European eyes, behaved much worse, but suffered no equivalent shame or scorn. I think it’s because they met their husbands expectations of how a wife should act.

We have strong archetypes for mothers in the west—so strong, that we may be tempted to think of them as universal. A glance at other cultures reveals that what we consider essential virtues are more like societal tastes. Roald Amundssen was shocked to note that two Eskimo couples he met had, at some point in the past, simply traded spouses permanently, and remained great friends and neighbors. This likely didn’t show up on the native people’s radar as interesting. That culture still had sharp divides, with men hunting, women preparing clothes, etc. It just didn’t extend to sex. There are other cultures with less of a gender role divide, and perhaps other attitudes.

In the West, women are held more firmly to chastity, loyalty, purity, or any number of virtues that our culture has decided make for the best society. I have argued elsewhere that a virtue is nothing more than a pattern of behaviors that a society selects for a survival advantage of the group. I don’t claim to know when these attitudes arose, but it’s possible that they did in fact (maybe still do) afford some advantage to early farming societies.

Many European things, once imported to America, couldn’t retain their original shape. American Christianity, in its many forms, differs quite a bit from the way it was practiced in Europe before colonization. I can’t help but notice that many different Native American tribes had a wide range of attitudes toward marriage and sex. Americans developed—if not such a range—a little more leeway in the centuries following its founding, and Europe has imitated us to some degree, shifting its tolerance of “error” if not its basic attitudes.

Neither men for women like it when the other fails to live up to their expectations. Those expectations are grounded in cultural preferences that may have been shaped to some degree by a natural selection process. This verse reveals to us that human nature runs deeper. That women, no matter how pure you make them out to be, will in some cases develop extramarital sexual desires, or change their minds about who they love. It’s worth noticing that our preferences have only a limited influence on others’ behavior. Better to see the deeper reality, contrast it to the local flavor of virtue, and respect that both may have their reasons for being. They also have their exceptions, and just because things were once a certain way doesn’t mean that through natural processes, we won’t come to hold different expectations, and measure one another accordingly.

Date: 2023-02-12 09:22 am (UTC)
kallianeira: (garden venus)
From: [personal profile] kallianeira

Can you tell whether the text implies only not to trust us(!) in love... are there other ways and reasons to be betrayed?

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