No, religion was just one of the ways it was enforced, and the harms were quite 'real': > the adultery double-standard in many of these societies is that adult

No, religion was just one of the ways it was enforced, and the harms were quite 'real': > the adultery double-standard in many of these societies is that adultery law was primarily concerned with the secure parentage of children in a marriage and so cared quite a lot less about a married man having sex outside of marriage so long as it was not with another married or marriageable woman. Instead, adultery was the crime of illicit sex with a married woman, not a married person. Some societies also had laws against illicit sexual acts outside of marriage – in Roman law this was stuprum – which often carried lesser penalties. because > this question matters much more in a society where nearly all wealth comes in the form of scarce farmland that is inherited from one generation to another and overwhelmingly if not entirely owned by men – even in societies like Rome where women could hold and pass down property, most of the landed wealth passed down the male line. Social status in these societies is essentially predicated on land ownership, without that farm the social position of even the peasant functionally collapses and given the extremely low social mobility in these societies, it collapses with little if any chance to ever regain it. Consequently, as you might imagine, the men who dominate these patriarchal societies are extremely anxious that their holdings – their position in society, however meager, which grants them a more-or-less stable living – pass to their actual, biological descendants. https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-and-the-peasant-part-iiib-children-and-childrearing/ https://acoup.blog/2025/08/08/collections-life-work-death-an... And I expect that would have been even worse for the ruling classes ?