There is some fascinating literature on the link between the rise of money and men starting to legislate on women’s bodies (so that, as Foreman describes, in ancient Babylonian texts, “rape became an economic crime against the man”). The anthropologist David Graeber argues that it is the explosion of debt that turns human relations – specifically, women’s bodies – into commodities, which in turn generates “a horrified reaction on the part of the (male) winners of the economic game, who felt forced to go to greater and greater lengths to prove that their women could in no sense be bought or sold."
ound: