[Pramāṇa](https://indike.org/pramana/) › [Studies](https://indike.org/pramana/ins) › [Polity, law and society](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity) › [Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.meyer-1915) › v1.c5.372 # Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c5.372 Sexual Life in Ancient India: A Study in the Comparative History of Indian Culture v1.c5.372 - **Language:** English ### [v1.c5.372](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.meyer-1915.v1.c5.372) The woman is only a chattel; her good points or her defects have their meaning and being only with reference to the man: to his sexual pleasure, his feeling of power, his vanity, and so forth. The virginity of girls is very generally, among the ruder peoples and tribes, not in the slightest an object of desire. Prostitution as a matter of course for the as yet unmarried woman is what may be really called the rule among them. Of course there are many exceptions. Indeed, what is there for the man in such a comfortless "fiction of the brain", as Brantôme calls the maidenhead! Maidenly purity, indeed, often is looked on as a shame, even a crime, plenty of intercourse as an honour for the girl—anyhow a more consistent view for all that than that found among us, which one-sidedly so appraises only the man. See, e.g. Daçakumāracaritam (in my transl.), p. 45, n. 2; Ploss-Bartels⁴, pp. 172, 349, 429, 459; ii, 429; Finck, \*Prim. Love\*, 44; 543 ff.; Engels, \*Ursprung d. Familie\*, etc. (1894), pp. 35 f.; Westermarck, \*Human Marriage\*³, p. 81; Starcke, \*Prim. Family\*, 121 ff.; Hartland, i, 31; ii, 102 ff. (the whole of the 6th chapter with numberless examples), 254 ff., and elsewhere in the 7th chapter; Schurtz, \*Urgesch. d. Kultur\*, ch. ii, espec. p. 123 ff.; \*Altersklassen u. Männerbünde\*, 91-93; Reitzenstein, \*Zeitschr. f. Ethnolog.\*, Bd. 41, p. 676; \*Anthropos\*, vi, 372; vii, 100; Yule's \*Marco Polo\*³, ii, 44 (in Tebet \[Tibet\] every girl got a ring from each man that had enjoyed her, and unless she could show at least twenty she did not find a husband; cp. the further examples there p. 48). And so on \*ad infinitum\*. This may then not seldom lead to such incidents as the Finnish peasant writer Alkio describes in \*Puukojunkarit\* ("Knife Heroes"), his great picture of life in Österbotten in the sixties of last century: here too, many girls at least find a pride in letting as many young men as possible have a share in their bed. If a new love candidate then comes while one is already lying in the fair one's arms, then there is a proper fight, in which the knife, too, is often used, till one of them is beaten and thrown down the stairs. Then while the loser is picking up his bones down below as well as he can, the one favoured by the god of battle refreshes himself upstairs in the bosom of the large-hearted country girl. The same thing is also often found elsewhere among the peasantry. Cp. for instance Jeremias Gotthelf's great novel \*Anne Bäbi Jowäger\*, espec. i, ch. 13-15. That retrospective proprietary feeling of the man is either not yet to be found there, or it is satisfied by the vanity of the - [Previous: v1.c5.371](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.meyer-1915.v1.c5.371) - [Next: v1.c5.373](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.meyer-1915.v1.c5.373) - [Up: v1.c5](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.meyer-1915.v1.c5) --- Source: [https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.meyer-1915.v1.c5.372](https://indike.org/pramana/ins.polity.meyer-1915.v1.c5.372) · Pramāṇa