Musonius Rufus, Lectures 12.6

In reply to this I have just one thing to say: if it seems neither shameful nor out of place for a master to have relations with his own slave, particularly if she happens to be unmarried, let him consider how he would like it if his wife had relations with a male slave.

Would it not seem completely intolerable not only if the woman who had a lawful husband had relations with a slave, but even if a woman without a husband should have?

Yes, here is the notorious double standard!

The way Musonius puts it might make it sound like it is all about male pride, but in the order of Nature it will necessarily go both ways. We are tempted to want one thing for ourselves, and quite different things for others.

How many men have I now known, who look at a woman like a piece of meat, and will then say and do the foulest things? I’ve lost count.

“I wanna tap that!”

But wait, we now live in a supposed age of equality. I’ve also seen much the same from many women.

“I’ll let him take me any day of the week!”

And, at the risk of having my face bashed in, I can’t help but ask them: how would you feel if someone spoke that way about your wife or husband, or your daughter or son, or your brother or sister, or your father or mother?

“I’d kill them where they stood!”

Indeed. Do you still not see your problem?

And when they are alone, both the men and the women, they bemoan their fate, how they can’t find loving partners, how they feel so forgotten and alone.

“Why can’t I find true love?”

Because you have no sense of how to give love, or even what it means to love.

We don’t have legal slavery as an institution, and yet we still treat people like things. Where the most basic of all relationships, that between a husband and a wife, is so deeply corrupted, there is no way you will ever have a just society. The rot works from the inside out.

Is she only a pleasure to you? Is he only a convenience for you? You’re not loving; you’re buying and selling a commodity.

Written in 12/1999

IMAGE: Jean-Leon Gerome, Slave Market in Ancient Rome (c. 1884)