I feel like framing it in terms of orgasm is inherently masculine though. It’s more about the journey than the destination, isn’t it? Aren’t men the ones who are obsessed with numbers and stuff? What about personal emotional connection?

There is a theory that the character 民 depicts a slaves eye being blinded; this character is recorded back to Shang times where there was ritual sacrifice too. It's recorded in pre-Qin books (see 周礼 in link below) with 人 as 人民 in a way that suggests they are two separate nouns in an unmarked conjunction; this would later have led to the current 2 character word perhaps as the social conditions under which pre-Qin slaves existed disappeared?

https://zi.tools/zi/%E6%B0%91

https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E4%BA%BA%E6%B0%91

I'm no expert so just trying to reconstruct your professors logic, which seems plausible with my limited knowledge.

Wax tablets were only for temporary notes. You wiped it clean when you were done, and then it was ready to be reused, so you only needed one. Books, and more permanent texts, were written on papyrus scrolls and later also on parchment. Scrolls were stored in wooden boxes with labels, one scroll per box. Scrolls could not have as much texts as our books today (that they only wrote on one side made sure of that) and literary works of considerable length made up several scrolls. For example, nowadays we can get Plato's Republic in one book, but back then it consisted of 10 scrolls (and also ten wooden boxes). As a vestige Plato's Republic is still divided not in chapters, but in books (marked with Roman numerals; this is also the case with many other works from antiquity).

Never said they were, but I always thought slavery had an economic element to it that made it more prevalent in some cultures versus others.

I was reading an abbreviated version, but found one fully translated copy here: https://lsc.chineselegalculture.org/Asset/Source/lscDocument_ID-12_No-01.pdf

It's indeed a fascinating read. In regards to family law, the state seemed to have a vested interest in maintaining stability and (mostly patriarchal) hierarchy in private households.

Like one, you can't just divorce or leave your first wife for no reason (unless she committed one of the "deadly sins" for a married woman, one of them being talking too much). It's apparently also a CAPITAL punishment to hit your parents or husband's parents. If a husband catches her wife cheating on him with another man, he can kill them both with no legal repercussions. If he only kills the man, than it falls upon the local magistrate to seize the offending wife to be remarried or sold off as a slave (in which case the profits go to the state).

Thanks for your reply. This topic interests me because I've been led to believe that societies with a surplus in labour had little need for slavery on the level that we saw in say, ancient Rome or 17/18th century Americas. This is obviously not completely true. I'm going to see if I can score some primary sources and have my Chinese friends translate it for me :).

Great response; the idea that the Cubans totally failed in the landing so now the US should invade and fight through the streets of Havana is crazy.

Kennedy was pressured / rolled by the CIA who were supremely overconfident (after all, in Guatemala, all they had to do was basically say "boo" and the government collapsed). It was still his mistake to authorize it, and he did note he took sole responsibility.

Read the Devils Chessboard based on a recommendation. Couldn’t finish it all the way from how disgusted I was about the Dulles Bros. Fucking genuinely horrible people.

There was a refusal to understand - the head of the Joint Chiefs opined that we'd need 400,000+ troops to ensure law and order and a stable country and was fired for giving that opinion to Congress.

And then after the US went in light with just 130,000, Bremer disbanded the Iraqi Army. The insane thing is that he just kind of did it on a whim. The pre-war plan called for the end to Saddam's favored units - the Iraqi Republican Guard - but a significant use of the army in reconstruction efforts and the creation of a new Iraqi government. Bremer and his team looked at that and decided it would be hard, so he decided to just order the army to disband (rather than even try to pull things together and establish order), sent a memo up the chain, and it was approved based on his recommendation in Baghdad. But it was never discussed by the Joint Chiefs, by the National Security Council, or the State Department. Nuts.

Just terrible; every major policy initiative of theirs caused major headaches for the US for decades to come.

They have multiple "worse than a crime, a blunder" policy decisions.

Not sure how masturbation is less stigmatized for men than women when womens sex toys are ubiquitous and on billboards. I’d hazard to guess most women in their 20s own a masturbation toy while I’d say an extreme minority of men own a masturbation toy.

That's true, but in our modern society sex is also skewed to be more satisfying for men than women.

Alone or with a female partner, women orgasm 80 to 95% of the time, whereas with a male partner it drops to 64% of the time. Masturbation for men is also less stigmatized than for women.

So it's not surprising that some women tend to avoid sex altogether.

The Chinese were not saints. They enslaved when they wanted the labor, just like the rest of the planet.

If I’m not mistaken, wasn’t the Monroe Doctrine in response to these wars?

If you ask any expert in behavioral endocrinology, they will inform you that men indeed have more voracious libidos than women on average and that this is in part explained by the stark difference in testosterone levels (the male vs female distributions are so different they don't even overlap). One of the obvious ways to see this is the stark difference in sexual promiscuity between homosexual males and females, where the former have exponentially more partners and more sex.

If you don't trust me, read up from the bonafide experts. Carole Hooven's book T: The Story of Testosterone is a good option.

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Speaking for ancient egypt, they actually made ink from a number of materials and, though more expensive, even were able to produce different colors.

Writing was done with different materials, for instance pens carved from reed plants. Like this: https://d18xwelq3wp3pf.cloudfront.net/community/blogosphere/wp-content/uploads/Rachel/Image_3.jpg

Basically, aslong as you have ink and are creative you can use anything as a pencil.

I did want to add that China has always had a lot of people, so that changes the dynamics of available labor and would therefore change the need for a chattel slavery system ala Dixie.

What did they right with on leather and papyrus?

Hi, amateur (and minor degree holder) of Chinese history, language and culture here. This is somewhat dependent on the historical period, but there is evidence of chattel slavery (along with convict slavery) used for megastructures like the Great Wall and irrigation/land reclamation projects in the flood plains during the Qin and Han. There is also evidence that the caste systems during and preceding the Han supported inherited slave-status, i.e. you were a slave if your mother was one. This shows up in Confucian works occasionally. The popularity of slavery seems to have waxed and waned throughout China's dynastic eras. One of my Chinese professors explained the Chinese word 人民 renmin as proof of social stratification and evidence of feudal slavery. Not sure how right he was on that, but interesting idea.

IMO traditional bondage and commodification of women in China counts as slavery, and that's seen throughout its entire history. Not chattel slavery but slavery nonetheless.

Expansionistic dynasties surely would have taken war slaves, and there seems to be evidence of this in various complied histories like the Tangshi. Of course, you have the Yuan dynasty that enslaved many peoples both endemic and foreign to China, and the rendering of the native Chinese to second class citizens. This occurs during Qing (they were invaders as well), but you see a decline and eventually abolition of slavery post 1909. This did not really end indentured servitude or convict labor systems that were then adapted by the CCP's Laogai system (Chinese analog of the Soviet gulag).

I don't know if one has ever found any evidence for the chattel slavery similar to the American South's systems, but I'm guessing it's probably still possible, although many of the conditions that made the American system monolithic (colonialism, capitalism, industrialist, etc.) may not have been so at any point in Chinese history.

I have not read many scholarly works on slavery in China, but the evidence for multiple systems of slavery do seem to exist throughout its history, from imperial correspondences to pieces of art. It would be worth research, and would make a good history grad thesis.

While I agree that the societal issues you’re calling attention to are important and need addressing, it has to be noted that your answer is speculation.

The US war already in Vietnam, Kennedy escalated it.

Do you have a link to the translated Qing Penal Code? That would be a fascinating read

They wrote on wax tablets but also things like leather and papyrus. The oldest found papyrus scroll I beleive was in 3000 bc, so it way predates the roman times.

I am studying the fear that male characters nurtured over female characters, in the novel: Mina, Lucy, and the three vampires.