I would point out that, in societies where women NEVER had a right to consent to sex or not to consent to sex, it was absolutely normal, proper, and expected for women to be forced into arranged marriages, and her husband was skillful or not skillful at figuring out how to make her obey his will. While there was such a thing as a concept of rape outside the context of a marriage, what happened when a woman became a wife was that she was socially and morally obligated to cooperate, whether she wanted to or not. If she made an undignified fuss over it, then this was contemptible.
Marriage often occurred when women were only 14 year old children or sometimes younger (assuming they started menstruating at 12, they were assumed to need a couple of years of instruction by their mothers, but if they started at 8, they could therefore be married as early as 10), so their minds were still profoundly impressionable. If they ever did resist when their husbands consummated their marriages, they eventually just felt guilty over that resistance because society told them that a disobedient wife was shameful and despicable. By the time they were mature adult women, they had never heard of any other way to exist, and the concept of "women's equality" would have sounded to them like a lot of nonsense, maybe even a Satanic plot. When change came, many women were quite frankly against it and fearful of it.
I am also not entirely confident that those societies were less moral than ours. Their way of life made quite a lot of practical sense from their point-of-view, especially directly prior to industrialization. The outsides of badly constructed hand-made homes were constantly falling apart, and it wasn't going to get any warmer. Men, even ones with less than stellar imagination and intelligence, were the ones stuck with going out in subzero temperatures to patch holes and redo thatching. Firewood had to be split BY HAND. Fields had to be plowed, and even if you had horses or mules or some oxen, holding the plow steady while it was being dragged forward was dangerous and difficult and physically demanding. If you did not have draft animals, you had to find a way to drag a more primitive scratch plow through the earth by hand, which probably involved you and a half-dozen other men lashing ropes to it and laboring to drag it through the permafrost and racing against the clock and the moon to get the field ready in time for the planting of the crops. If you did have animals, they started moving forward and pulling the plow exactly when you bullied them into doing so by beating them with a lash that would cut human flesh to ribbons. Would you have been a Nobel Prize-winning engineer in a different world? Good for you, big boy: take your genius brain, and do up the harness so that the horse pulls the plow straighter, thank you. This is what you had to do, in order to save your own life, during peace-time under the most ideal conditions conceivable.
Women were not available to do this sort of work because they had problems of their own going on inside. They had to keep watch over household inventory, manufacture candles, help with beekeeping so that there would be wax for the candles, manufacture soap, and use a mortar and pestle to mill their own grain because they did not live close enough to a mill or did not have enough family wealth to go and buy a bag of flour. While there were mills and other businesses that manufactured many of these products even during Medieval times, you still had to live near one and have sufficient wealth in order to buy them, which was not always your luck, and the miller got sick or got old and had to hand the mill over to a disinterested son that really wanted to be a farrier. If your husband was not a skilled artisan like a cobbler and therefore reasonably wealthy, then you did the work yourself by hand, and you liked it because it was that or lie down and croak, ma'am. That happened often enough, too! Women faded away and died from melancholia or came down with female hysteria. The ones that stayed sane were the ones that found something to do and kept doing it as long as they could, and nobody was even sure if they were really sane: people just needed the product and didn't dare look too closely at where it came from.
“It reminds me of that old joke- you know, a guy walks into a psychiatrist's office and says, hey doc, my brother's crazy! He thinks he's a chicken. Then the doc says, why don't you turn him in? Then the guy says, I would but I need the eggs. I guess that's how I feel about relationships. They're totally crazy, irrational, and absurd, but we keep going through it because we need the eggs.” -- Woody Allan.
In our privileged times, it is tempting to look scornfully upon people that lived differently, but I am not going to go that route. Those people had problems of their own.
Cultures change, and it is normal for cultures to change. This is the only constant. To regard things as absolute, fixed, and eternal usually causes more trouble and more complications than it is worth.
The roles of animals in our lives is changing. We are in the middle of a wave of animal rights legislation. It's going to get bigger. There is a positive side to this, including from the standpoints of zoos who are also animal-lovers because they are zoos, but we have been getting caught in the crossfire of warring ideologies.
