Lv. 3 Genasi Wizard
Sex, it's a like handshakes, but now without the consequences.
No wait, ST Ds. Well, it'd still allow for a far more sex oriented society.
The thing about making witty signature lines is that it first needs to actually be witty.
Den harde nordmann
The first major change would have been how marriage would have been.
The entire fundation of "marriage" and "virginity to the bride" is based on breeding. If women had 100% control over ovulation then there is no reason to remain "pure" :P It would basically turn into modern day, except with a bit more STD.
Would that not also mean that women could throw out egg cells at will? O.o
I think there would have been a lot more female power grabbing, and a lot more war.
Rape is not about getting women pregnant. Actaully, most of rapists would prefer to avoid that. And yes, cotnrolling ovulation would give women some kind of power. Maybe very little. Maybe too much. This topic is too much 'what-if' to mae coherent discussions serious as the chain of events since the dawn of humanity is too long to be predictable
"Take your (...) hippy dream world, I'll take reality and earning my happiness with my own efforts" - Barkey
I think it would depend on the mechanisms of control.
It would make some historical situations come out differently though.
There would be less Double Standard, for starters.
After that, it depends on pretty much everyone.
In war, courage. In peace, wisdom. In life, friendship.
![[up]](https://static.tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pub/smiles/arrow_up.png "[up]"){kind=icon}
How would there be less Double Standards? I don't get it
Like how women should be virgins, since they can choose to be pregnant or not. Also, women would also have a sort of 'screw you' against the fact that it's the male that choose whether she'd be pregnant or not.
Just to clarify though: I didn't said it would completely wipe out Double Standard. I know full well how humans are.
In war, courage. In peace, wisdom. In life, friendship.
Den harde nordmann
nzm 1536: For the same reason you can not have a revolution until the side that is grabbing power has soem guns.
A guy called dvorak is tired. Tired of humanity not wanting to change to improve itself. Quite the sad tale.
Only One Avatar
The world would be a less painful place. The need for adoption would be almost nonexistent.
Anime geemu wo shinasai!
I don't get it. How is monogamy a double standard and how getting rid of it would make world better?
WHARRGARBL
I think the double standard he's referring to is the whole "women need to be virgins" thing, seeing as this only ever got started because of lack of paternity testing and thus men being unsure of who the father really is unless he's the only one who sleeps with her.
Den harde nordmann
nzm 1536: Not that, everything surround monogamy before the invention of the condom, and everything surrounding monogamy that has not yet been purged by this change in techology.
A guy called dvorak is tired. Tired of humanity not wanting to change to improve itself. Quite the sad tale.
Before invention of condom the biggest argument for monogamy was not patriarchal and it was not moral. It was strictly practical - STD avoidance
"Take your (...) hippy dream world, I'll take reality and earning my happiness with my own efforts" - Barkey
it's not what modern rape is about. but that behavior pattern was evolutionary selected because men who practiced it had more offsprings because they didn't have to spend a lot of time impressing a female. without that benefit, by the time humans would have become sophisticated enough to try to blackmail a woman into getting pregnant, they probably would have already been selected against even thinking about this possibility.
PREGNANCY - caused either by rape or by blackmail
"Take your (...) hippy dream world, I'll take reality and earning my happiness with my own efforts" - Barkey
Well, that would be awesome. Transhumanists need to get working on giving women this ability.
Even if the woman can control whether she ovulates, the man still won't know if any baby born is his. That's where the virgin bride thing originated. He'll still only have the woman's word that she ovulated only when she was with him. If anything, removing a monthly ovulation cycle may make the male even more paranoid and react accordingly.
yes, but if he won't behave he won't get a son 
Eye'm the cutest!
^ That's where the phrase "get medieval" comes in. Had human history had this ability, domestic abuse would quickly have become a way of life to stop such bullshit.
And I'm not talking the "beat your wife" concept, more like torture and beat and more or less throw her to the edge of death for such an attitude.
Gender equality is a very modern concept. Prior to that, well...
"Allah may guide their bullets, but Jesus helps those who aim down the sights."
^^ It cuts both ways. If a woman doesn't get pregnant, a male has even more reason to blame the woman for not submitting and ovulating. He may resort to harsher coercion and isolation of the woman rather than the opposite.
edited 29th May '11 11:15:29 AM by nightwyrm_zero
Y'know, I wonder why it's always the woman who's to blame and not the male for being, y'know, sterile.
Didn't it change in our current society?
edited 29th May '11 11:19:27 AM by Delles
In war, courage. In peace, wisdom. In life, friendship.
^ Yes, coz we have modern medicine with hard biological evidence of male sterility. But for most of human history, it was easier to blame the ones with less power, woman.
watching down on us
I like how people view any time period before the 20th century as being dark times in which life for a woman was ALWAYS living hell yadda yadda, because it's not like equal rights for the sexes was a thing that kept see-sawing back and forth throughout history. Nope.
No woman or maiden shall ever be forced to marry one whom she dislikes, nor be sold for money.
Early divorce laws granted the wife half the household goods, but as the Church tightened its grip towards the end of the period, divorce became rarer and marriage itself more regulated. No Church blessing was required to legalize the marriage union, though the Church encouraged it.
For more about Anglo-Saxon law and society, I highly recommend The Beginnings of English Society by Dorothy Whitelock, Penguin Books 1974; and Alfred the Great: Asser's Life of King Alfred and Other Contemporary Sources, translated by Simon Keynes and Michael Lapidge, Penguin Books 1983, from which I excerpted portions of Ælfred's law code.
I want to slap Alfred a big giant high five.
edited 29th May '11 11:32:10 AM by annebeeche
Banned entirely for telling FE that he was being rude and not contributing to the discussion. I shall watch down from the goon heavens.
Pro-Freedom Fanatic
Technically, there have always been ways to prove whether the man or the womanwas sterile.
If a man begat illegitimate children, assuming the woman was sterile was not an entirely stupid idea. If he were to be incapable of siring illegitimate children, the safe assumption would be that he was indeed sterile.
edited 29th May '11 11:32:21 AM by SavageHeathen
You exist because we allow it and you will end because we demand it.
OK. so I was browsing the latest abortion discussion and suddenly I thought "what if this wasn't an issue". suppose that since the dawn of humanity women would have only been able to get pregnant when they choose to. how different would history have been? it would definitely give women a lot of power and it would have made rape (at least the straight forward kind) evolutionary useless.