A Statistic of Silence:
Unwanted Humanity Between Meat and Incubator
(On Symbols of the Control of Women Throughout History)
1. Introduction: Natural Law
For the vast majority of human history, there was no institutional framework to protect women from violence. Reproduction was left to so-called “natural law,” which in essence meant the law of the stronger. In war, women were prize; in peace, they were property. In slave-owning and feudal systems, a woman’s fate depended on the status of the man to whom she belonged. In that system, a woman was reduced to a physical object without autonomy, voice, identity, or rights, and her existence to a function: reproduction, sexual satisfaction of the man, labor. There was only purpose, and that purpose was controlled by the owner – the man.
2. The Statistic of Silence
Looking back through history, a global-anthropological estimate would be the following: around 70–80% of humanity was conceived in a context where the woman not only did not have a free and voluntary role in her own reproduction, but was the object of systemic sexual violence. Perhaps only 20–30% of all humans throughout the entirety of history up to the present were born from relations that could be called freely consensual. That number includes all forms of physical violence as well as cultural and legal coercion – from rape and slavery, to arranged marriages, religious prohibitions, and economic dependence. This statistic is not just a number – it is an anthropological insight. An insight that reveals a deeply disturbing truth: a human conceived in love is the exception rather than the rule. In other words, humanity as a whole is not the product of love, freedom, and mutual desire, but the result of crime, violence, domination, and interest.
3. Violence as a Natural Part of the Divine Order
But what is truly disturbing is the fact that this terrifying continuity of millennia-long violence did not survive solely through brutal physical coercion. For centuries, it was legitimized by religion, legal systems, and ideologies. Monotheistic religions – Christianity, Judaism, Islam, and even Buddhism – built their pantheons in which the man assumes the role of divine intermediary, while the woman remains a passive vessel, a being without voice or access to sanctity. Woman was systematically reduced to the role of object: servant, mother, bearer of lineage. In many myths, it is women who had to be sacrificed.
Starting from the rejection of the apocryphal Gospel of Mary – a text never recognized because it portrayed a woman as spiritually equal, a bearer of knowledge and holiness – the Christian Church systematically anathematized every form of female self-awareness: by excluding women from clerical service, banning access to the altar, and cultivating an ideology of the female body as the source of sin. This shaped the foundational doctrinal pattern by which woman must be metaphysically diminished, possessed, and controlled. During the period of the Inquisition (between 1450 and 1750), this pattern turned into open terror, when between 40,000 and 60,000 women were burned under accusations of witchcraft.
To the religious subjugation of women were added secular ideologies and legal systems. Marx and Engels had already written that woman was the earliest form of private property – a possession to be transferred, controlled, and legally protected as the man’s asset. Thus, the divine order was re-dressed as a legal one, but the essence remained the same: woman as means, commodity – not as goal in her own right.
4. Under the Knife of Ravage or the Glass Bell: Meat or Incubator
The historical fate of women as objects of abuse, depersonalization, and humiliation has been torn between two extremes: violent possession (as spoils, objects of sexual gratification, and direct violence) and control (ideological and political shaping, a technical platform for reproduction). This dual exploitation is symbolically expressed through the metaphors of “meat” and “incubator.” “Meat” and “incubator” are not successive historical phases but two parallel and complementary modes of domination and control – one brutally raw, the other rationally cold. Both symbols erase all individuality and subjectivity of the woman: the first through force, the second through function.
Meat
Throughout nearly all of human history, with rare exceptions, there was no institutional framework that protected women from violence. The reproductive act was part of a system of repressive power, not intimacy, and the female body bore the universal stamp of “meat” – whether through centuries of rape, abduction, slave trade, or institutional ownership. In slave-owning societies, female slaves were legally property; their bodies were used for labor, sex, and reproduction without any restriction. In feudalism, the feudal lord owned the land, the people, and the women – the “right of the first night” (ius primae noctis) symbolizes precisely that logic. In wars and military campaigns, women were the assumed part of the war prize, while wartime circumstances unleashed “natural law” as the only and dominant one. Throughout all known history, girls were sold into marriage, used as collateral, promised to demons, confined to monasteries, sexually abused, and sacrificed as symbolically “pure meat” in myths, cults, and patriarchal orders¹. The female body has been mass-sacrificed in the history of humankind: the aforementioned European witch hunts between 15 and 17 century are only one example.
Even in the most civilized century in the history of the human species – the twentieth – the numbers testify to the same picture. Just a few examples are more than monstrous. During the Ottoman genocide of the Armenians in 1915, tens of thousands of women and girls were raped during death marches in Syria, and many ended up as slaves in markets in Aleppo, Damascus, and Mosul. During the Russian Civil War (1917–1923), violence against women was a legal form of dealing with the “class enemy,” in which tens of thousands of women perished. Later, in the gulags, women were subjected to mass organized rapes and beatings. The estimates suggest that between 1.8 and 2.5 million women passed through the gulags during the existence of the USSR. In the final months of World War II, about two million women in Germany were raped by the Red Army. In Asia, around 200,000 so-called “comfort women” were forced into sexual slavery by the Japanese military. During the war for the independence of Bangladesh in 1971, between 200,000 and 400,000 women were raped by Pakistani forces. Most of these crimes were organized and ideologically justified – violence against women was not the result of “wartime chaos” but a systemic part of war doctrine.
And as the product of that violence, all those women who were treated as “meat” for thousands of years, for thousands of years gave birth to children – hundreds of generations of people born in the shadow of crime.
Incubator
While women of lower classes were treated as "meat" for centuries, women of privileged classes were treated as "incubators." Their bodies were regarded as functional, biological apparatuses, tools of ideology; they were objects of surveillance, eugenic planning, and political molding—through dynastic marriages, inheritance control, and sexual chastity. This was not biological eugenics in the modern sense (e.g., genetic testing), but social eugenics with a high degree of control.
In antiquity (Egypt, Persia, Greece, Rome), the aristocracy married exclusively within their class. Marriages were political, not romantic. In both European and Islamic medieval aristocracies, marriages were often arranged during childhood. The main criteria were ancestry, property, and bloodline. In China, India, and Japan, it was similar: strict rules of caste, class, and gender. During the Crusades, even physical instruments for protecting property and enforcing control emerged—such as chastity belts. In modern times, “purity of lineage” remained crucial: between 80% and 90% of marriages in the European aristocracy up to the 19th century were arranged based solely on eugenic (status-based, bloodline, political) criteria, not love. The British and French courts recorded even marriages among relatives to preserve “royal blood.”
In the totalitarian regimes of the 20th century, eugenic policies further rationalized this instrumentalization: reproduction became a function of the state, and the woman was again not a subject of love and choice, but a national womb. Womanhood was even linguistically deconstructed—no longer a “woman,” but a “birther,” “carrier,” “genetic investment.”. In the Nazi Lebensborn program, which aimed to produce “racially pure” babies, thousands of “blue-blooded” women and men participated in state reproductive policy. At the same time, tens of thousands of “undesirable” women were forcibly sterilized—not only in Nazi Germany, but also in Sweden (1935–1976), the USA (1900–1970), Japan (1948–1996), and Singapore (during the 1980s).
5. The Holy Grail: The Forbidden Sacred
Before the world stepped into civilized society and became dominated by the symbols of “meat” and “incubator,” in some early communal forms (e.g., the Iroquois, the Minangkabau, some African and Polynesian groups), women and the female body held a sacred status. Not in terms of moral control, but as a cosmological and natural mystery—a bearer of life, wisdom, and natural powers. The female body was indeed subject to social regulation, but not owned, as in class-based societies where the man holds ius in corpore—the right over a woman’s body as over property. In those communities, the body was not property, but a source of power and respect—even without the modern concept of individual freedom.
This symbolism survived in the myth of the Holy Grail—the sacred vessel that holds life, meaning, and mystery. It was also preserved in the apocryphal Gospel of Mary, which the Christian Church banned because it offered a different, feminine perspective on spirituality. With the rise of Christianity, this third symbol—the Holy Grail—disappeared from the history of the Western world and survived only in myths, art, and rare spiritual enclaves.
6. The Modern World: “Meat” and “Incubator” on the Market
Although analyses and statistics show that even in highly developed 21st-century societies, a significant percentage of women still report having been forced into sex or having become pregnant under coercion—and that sexual violence occurs within families, religious communities, and schools—the female body has been formally “liberated”: through voting rights, the right to choose, access to abortion, medical care, and more. Unfortunately, this “liberation” has been accompanied by a new form of control—market-based and functional. The female body is no longer prey or property—it has become a commodity and a biological resource on the free market, and as a commodity, potentially the property of all. The woman’s body is subjected to imperatives of performance: aesthetic, reproductive, and technological. On the markets of attention, fertility, and youth, it is valued according to function and desirability.
Biotechnology and market logic extend the patterns of control: the body as a source of egg cells, the body as a surrogate. “Meat” and “incubator” are still present—but now with a neoliberal face. The cosmetics industry and aesthetic surgery (in which the ravager’s knife has been replaced by the scalpel) faithfully reflect the symbol of “meat,” while artificial insemination and genetic engineering perfect the function of the “incubator.” In vitro fertilization, surrogate motherhood, genetic editing of embryos (CRISPR)—these are all forms that can (though not necessarily) depersonalize women and turn them into literal incubators. The fear of a “post-human” world in which the body is no longer a mystery but a function is justified by centuries of experience. The new god is called functionality, its prophets are market designers, and their sacred secret—the laws of profit.
7. Conclusion: The Return of Apocatastasis
Ultimately, did all those women who were treated for thousands of years as “meat” or “incubators” ever have the right to decide whether to term a pregnancy—their own pregnancy— or not? Of course, not! They gave birth to children not by choice, but by force, expectation, or design. Hundreds of generations were born under the shadow of coercion. And if it is said that man was created “in the image of God,” yet most people were conceived in violence, what does that say about that image? And this is not anymore a metaphor. It is a confrontation with truth—with history, the body, and the brutal memory of humanity, in which man was not created by a God of love, but by coersion: a blind mechanism of violence that does not know what it does, and that spontaneously produces a world in pain. In that image of the world, birth is not a blessing, but for the vast majority of people in the history of humankind – a fall into pain and tragedy.
“Humanity is unwanted”—that is the true ontological rupture. In that one sentence, the entire history of human origin is compressed, and all the lies about man as the fruit of divine love, spirit, or anyone’s free will are erased. For if humanity was born of violence, not of love—then there is no metaphysical justification either for its existence, nor for love itself. We were not born of love, so we did not inherit it. That means we did not arrive in a world with love, but in a world where love has yet to be created.
That is a terrible, but liberating truth. If humanity is a world in which all people are the result of genetic violence, coercion, trade, or deceit, then every child conceived in love is a miracle in the strictest sense of the word: the appearance of something that does not arise from the law of force, but from its negation. Every child born of love is a subversion of cosmic statistics, divine laws, religions, sacred texts, and mythic doctrines.
If anything holds meaning in this history of violence, it is the trace that leads from voiceless flesh to a human being who demands the right to speak, to feel, to desire, to say NO. That is the only true teleology we possess: not “salvation,” but the acceptance of that which has never been accepted. The question that remains is: can the symbol of the Holy Grail—banished from all temples of our world—return, not as mysticism, but as an ethical foundation? Can the apocryphal Gospel of Mary be acknowledged, not merely as a historical artifact, but as an alternative to violence and domination? Can we once again imagine the woman’s body not as “meat,” not as “incubator,” but as the sanctuary of a free person?
Footnotes and Literature:
1 In Buddhism, there are schools in which women hold a higher spiritual status (e.g., Tibetan Tantrism)
2. Brian Levack, The Witch-Hunt in Early Modern Europe, Routledge, 2006 (3rd ed.); Lyndal Roper, Witch Craze: Terror and Fantasy in Baroque Germany, Yale University Press, 2004.
3. A man's right to have sexual relations with his wife without her consent was common in the legal systems of many countries until the late 20th century. In France, marital rape was not considered a criminal offense until 1990. See: Catharine A. MacKinnon, Toward a Feminist Theory of the State, Harvard University Press, 1989; also: Marie-Victoire Louis, “Le viol conjugal: une conquête féministe,” Cahiers du Genre, 2006/1, no. 40-
4. Ethnological and historical analyses of the systemic abuse and instrumentalization of young girls can be found in: Gerda Lerner, The Creation of Patriarchy, Oxford University Press, 1986 – especially the chapters on women as commodities in marital exchanges and rituals. See also: Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation, Autonomedia, 2004.
5. "Gulag." Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia. Last modified April 2024. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gulag; MacGregor, D. (n.d.). Women in Stalin’s Russia; Gulag. Facts and Details. Accessed May 2025. https://factsanddetails.com/russia/History/sub9_1e/entry-4969.html
6. Antony Beevor, Berlin: The Downfall 1945, Penguin Books, 2002.; Vidi takođe: Norman Naimark, The Russians in Germany: A History of the Soviet Zone of Occupation, 1945–1949, Harvard University Press, 1995.
7. Yoshiaki Yoshimi, Comfort Women: Sexual Slavery in the Japanese Military During World War II, Columbia University Press, 2001.
8. Rounaq Jahan, “Genocide in Bangladesh,” Race & Class, vol. 16, no. 4 (1975): 385–393.
9. Alison Bashford & Philippa Levine (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Eugenics, Oxford University Press, 2010. Also: Miroslava P. Radojčić, “Eugenika i prisilna sterilizacija: transnacionalne politike tela u 20. veku,” Zbornik Instituta za noviju istoriju Srbije, br. 2 (2018): 45–66.
