Women were too insignificant. A peasant beating his wife might have derived an honor- surrogate from her humiliation, but lords obtained honor by defeating other lords in battle. Taking and raping their women was part of that, but it was like taking any other chattel, their land, chiefly, their ox, their ass, and the other things listed in the Biblical commandment against covetousness, along with wives. It might have been more humiliating to steal a neighbor's ox or ass, which was worth money in non-slave societies.
Upper class woman killing, humiliation, etc., did not directly enhance warrior honor, but asserted a property right that a woman or worse, another man might have challenged, thus dishonoring her master by showing him to be weak and unable to control his property, by showing a will of her own or his subjection to the will of another master, typically by having sex with someone else. This helps explain why adultery was punishable by death but lesbianism was invisible.
I don't know enough about the history of women's education, but in medieval Europe wasn't reading and writing part of a proper lady's accomplishments along with sewing, singing, dressing decoratively, being a good hostess? To the extent it was not so, as perhaps in the Muslim world, about which my Ignorance is shameful, maintaining control over property seems a more economical explanation, like similar prohibitions against slave literacy in the US South.
Women were just too far down on the pecking order for their humiliation to confer honor. A lord might as well have attempt to demonstrate his honor by debasing his ox or his ass. I am making all this up based on vague general knowledge of premodern society and that dangerous resource, common sense.
Sent from my iPad
On Oct 11, 2012, at 6:12 AM, Wojtek S <wsoko52 at gmail.com> wrote:
> Marv: "However, "killing these guys" augments their ranks precisely
> because innocent victims are being blown to bits. "
>
> [WS:] Exactly, what does murdering schoolgirls for wanting to have
> education have to do with USAF bombing villages? You seem to be
> following the red herring set up by Shane to divert attention from the
> actual issue at hand.
>
> As I said before, to me the "actual issue" is whether to support
> different types of insurgencies - communist or islamist - in the faced
> of the fact that both may commit murders. I suggested that communists
> deserve some credit because of their cause, while islamists do not for
> the same reason. So in a way, this was the question whether the end
> justifies the means.
>
> However, I later realized that there is a second layer in this issue -
> one eloquently elaborated by Graeber when he discussed a close
> connection between honor and power and humiliation in warrior
> societies. Graeber's argument, in a nutshell, is that such societies
> power and honor is manifested by the degree to which persons - or
> rather men- wielding it can humiliate others, typically women. To
> support this, he quotes extensively from medieval English sources.
> Graeber may have put a rather weak case against finance capital, as
> some on this list have pointed out, but there is a lot of other good
> stuff in his book - and his analysis of the connection between honor
> and humiliation is a gem.
>
> It is rather obvious that this argument can explain quite a bit about
> the draw of Taliban, wahabism, salafism, and religious fundamentalism
> in general. It provides a moral justification of a sort to the male
> desire to establish or defend "honor" by humiliating others,
> especially women. By this logic of honor/power, without the ability to
> humiliate, these males would be reduced to the lowlife vermin status
> which they accord to their victims. Religious justification of this
> ability to humiliate is important, because it redefines these males
> from being common gangsters who rely on raw power and violence to
> uphold their status, to noble defenders of tradition and a way of
> life.
>
> I think that is the main reason why these men murder women who want to
> get education. They correctly sense that getting education would
> remove these women from their power to humiliate them, so they kill or
> maim them to maintain their honor.
>
> This is why I have such a visceral reaction toward these ""warrior"
> men. I believe that their desire to protect their honor undermines
> the most fundamental social relations - empathy, reciprocity, mutual
> trust and solidarity.
>
> --
> Wojtek
>
> "An anarchist is a neoliberal without money."
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