Marco Porno
For those of you who don't watch Netflix, Marco Polo is a recent series detailing the exploits and adventures of a famous Venetian merchant who (according to the series) became an advisor of sorts to Kublai Khan during his trouncing of the Song Dynasty in the 12th century. Forget whether the show is accurate for a moment so we can talk about all of the sex that goes on...
The way it all seems to go down, is that if you are a female and depending on what bloodline you were born into, you either become a high class wife/prostitute, a warrior/prostitute, a middle class pleasure girl/prostitute, or a prostitute...../prostitute. Men become warriors, done. So naturally, straight men love this show.
Okay okay okay, wait one sec....wait a sec....WAIT WAIT COME BACK!
This opens up one big ass can of worms, and here's why. If there is any group in history that represents the primal nature of man, it's the Mongols! They eat, fight, fuck, and die. Shouldn't Mongols then be a case study in human social systems? If we want an example society where men and women are driven by their biological urges and thus represent a possible point for serious reflection, Mongols should be it...or not. They may be great study material, but Mongols represent some serious deviation from what you could call 'natural'.
The Mongol society shown in Marco Polo is more akin to mass, organized rape. In their defense, rape is an established mating strategy in the animal kingdom (go ahead and Wiki it, you'll see). For us humans, it's traditionally seen that a man must psychologically appeal to a woman, effectively proving his ability to care for her potential offspring, before she allows him to mate with her. There is female selection in this system for good reason. If she is going to spend nine months carrying and many years raising her offspring, she wants the most fit offspring she can get. It's a legitimate argument that the world we live in today, where a man's education is so tied to his ability to carry on an intelligent conversation is closer to 'natural' than almost any other time in history.
We could go further, asserting that Mongol society was highly distorted, in that the men were sexually selecting each other during battle. The stronger and smarter a man was, the more apt he was to survive a deadly confrontation. Men were weeding each other out, and those with the keenest survival instincts, rose up the social ladder, earning their raping rights. This is also an oddity because in the animal kingdom, rape is often what occurs when males who are not fit enough to attract a willing participant, just take what they want by shear force. However, in Mongols, the raping was often carried out by men who were most capable of attracting a mate.
One big ass can of worms. As soon as you think you've discovered a measure of validity, it all crumbles. In case you didn't wiki animal rape, we'll point out that one of the most prolific rapers in the animal kingdom; with around half of all copulation being rape-ish... are Orangutans, our closest cousins. Wait bluebird, but you just said... Confusion! Hypocrisy! Complexity! Welcome to human sexuality. Happy New Year!
Follow the bluebird.