Skip to content

Hmm

A man filmed having sex with a woman on a Ryanair flight was reportedly on his stag do while his pregnant fiancee was at home.

So much modernity in one sentence. Actually quite a bit of archaism as well. There was only a short period of history when, for the normal folk, pregnancy didn’t come before the marriage. Marriage being what happened when the betrothal had shown that pregnancy did indeed happen in this couple. Obviously, not always and everywhere and so on but entirely usually.

So, we can call that bit modern or archaic as we wish. So too in fact the stag do part. shagging on such is hardly unknown.

Must have been a young couple though. There’s not much room on Ryanair, is there, gotta be supple to manage it.

13 thoughts on “Hmm”

  1. So first they got engaged, then they had sex, and then they got married?

    In some cultures today, the husband expects to break the wife’s hymen on the wedding night. Doesn’t fit the above pattern.

  2. The whole point of marriage was to produce children. If, after a suitable period of trying, the children didn’t seem to be on the way, it was assumed the parties were incompatible, or God wasn’t willing, and they’d each have to try again elsewhere.

  3. In some cultures today, the husband expects to break the wife’s hymen on the wedding night.

    But there the cultural expectation, slightly modified because there is a vague chance we will lock the bastards up, is that the wife is twelve or thirteen?

    BiW has it right – although there was an expectancy of virginity amongst some classes – usually where there were titles or estates to be inherited.

    But the expectation amongst the mass peasantry and much of the (small) professional and (somewhat larger) merchant classes was betrothal and then, if pregnancy resulted within a year, marriage.

    Remember the old phrase “born out of wedlock”? ‘Wedlock’ included betrothal. Not just marriage.

  4. The “Ryanair” bit is unequivocally modern!

    Their next policy, I understand, is to charge passengers extra if they want to board a plane that has wings.

  5. One can’t help but be impressed by the guy. The plane leaves Manchester at 20:15 on the Friday night. Within an hour he has not only chatted up a reasonably attractive stranger (her face is blurred in the video, but you can tell she’s young and in shape); he has actually convinced her to have sex with him on the plane.

    Time was when I’d consider it a win if I merely managed to get the girl’s number.

  6. Bloke in Wales,

    The hymen thing looks a bit like a Victorian myth about the middle ages which has then undergone a dose of orientalism and been applied to Muslims. And like any Victorian myth about the medieval period, it will not survive a dose of Boccaccio (or indeed of many Arabic writers), where extramarital sex is pretty much a normal plot device.

    If you actually look at a Muslim community, there is a reassuringly familiar rate of children born surprisingly soon after weddings, fathers with several families (this is hardly Islam-specific), single parents and all the other trappings of a normal society. Sure, there are the moralists and the pure-until-marriage types, but I suspect there are less of those per head in Bradford than in many mid-western US towns. Certainly I’ve never heard of virginity inspections, and this would surely be an abuse that would be reported by now if it happened.

    One way to look at it is that the child groomers are able to get into this practice simply because they come from families that are not moralistic about sex and the like (either in the UK or the home of the extended family) – it is notable there does not seem to be an overlap between groomers and extremists anyway.

  7. Close readings of many classic novels of the 19th century reveal clues about pre-marital pregnancy – it really was pretty much the norm.

  8. They were novels! Back then often it was one from one family marrying one from another known family or such mutual group benefit. The church oversaw the whole deal. Look up genealogy.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *