Shotgun Weddings

Shotgun wedding means "Say I do or die because she's pregnant." It means her FATHER shows up with a shotgun and a pregnant daughter and drags them both at gunpoint to the courthouse. 

The US is a YOUNG country and we used to have duels and family fueds in which people were killed. That shit isn't just some cutesy colorful metaphor. 

I have this hypothesis that shotgun weddings are rooted in a culture where "virgin" meant "never been pregnant" NOT "hymen is still intact."

And basically you fucked around until a gal got knocked up, then the community MADE you marry. Because MOST cases of infertility can be fixed by trying enough partners <-- stuff I know from my hard core infertile sister who worked at the Centers for Disease Control forwarding me articles and studies.

I know "never been pregnant" was the standard test for "virgin" in some places because one university had to change its policy of granting scholarships to "virgin girls" (who met one or two other tests, like adequate grades) after birth control got invented because their test for "virgin girl" was "never been pregnant."

Our current fertility crisis is probably partly rooted in becoming too uptight White. The older I get, the more confident I am that historically people fucked around until she got pregnant, then you married her. 

I think it was common practice that first you proved you two were genetically compatible if neither of you was nobility or royalty. 

I did a college paper on Catherine de Medici, the last of the bloody as hell cut throat Italian de Medicis. Contrary to the sedate information on Wikipedia, she got smuggled out of the coming massacre of her family at age 14 and married to a French prince who was second in line to the throne. 

She was barren the first ten years of her marriage, then had ten kids in ten years if I recall correctly. After his brother died and her husband became heir to the throne, some people wanted him to repudiate her due to her infertility. 

She tried everything to cure her infertility, including "drinking mule's urine" (see footnote). This may be what worked, especially if the animal was pregnant, as pregnant mare urine is a rich source of estrogen. 

(Pregnant mare urine (PMU) is used to create estrogen-based drugs in hormone replacement therapies (HRT). The most well-known drug derived from PMU is Premarin, which stands for PREgnant MARe's urINe.)

Anyway, reproduction was a primary duty of married women historically and she felt enormous pressure to reproduce, but she was a noble woman marrying royalty. Nobility and royalty routinely had arranged marriages with people they hadn't previously met for political reasons which helped foster a culture of rampant infidelity among the upper classes. 

Her husband had an acknowledged bastard child, proving he was fertile and providing a potential heir for him. Mistresses on the side were common place among nobility and royalty and acknowledged bastards could inherit.

From what I gather, commoners didn't typically operate that way. You could have two women if you were a rich man. A poor man slept alone or was faithfully married because he couldn't afford to support two families. 

I've never managed to read the original Shakespeare but my sons tell me that Romeo and Juliette wasn't a romance. Romeo supposedly tells his friends "I'm in love! She's the one." and they say something like "Yeah, exactly like all the others."

He was a man whore and the story is about two feuding families where the town authorities tell them "We are so done with your shit. ONE more incident and (there will be dome kind of serious consequences)" when Romeo and Juliette decide to shit stir.

Star crossed lovers didn't mean "Two people who SHOULD be together! You are meant for each other! If only your families weren't such buttheads ruining it!"

It meant "These astrological charts are a synastry shit show, oh god! You're CURSED! Cross the street when you see her coming your way, stupid."

In astrology, a cross is two oppositions and four squares. Those are all "bad" angles. It is a rare pattern. If your two charts combined create a cross, walk the fuck away, stupid. 

If that's what star crossed means -- an astrological grand cross -- it's what astrologers historically said was an ill omen big time.

Anyway the point is I have heard Romeo wasn't mad in love with Juliette. He was a man whore. 

This was a play for commoners. About ordinary life, like a modern day soap opera. 

It implies that fucking everything that moves was something ordinary guys did in youth, not being a virgin until marriage.

For that and other reasons, I suspect they slept around a lot more than modern youth do and when she turned up pregnant, you married her. 

I knew a guy twelve years older than me who told me he had more lovers than me before marriage because TV went off the air at 9 p.m. and there was nothing to do but have sex at that point. Prior to TV, it was vastly worse and sex was such a commonplace recreational sport that old literature is filled with common slang for "They did it in the grass and got grass stains on her clothes." or "It was a woman on top position these two illicit lovers were seen in."

Romeo and Juliette isn't about her falling for the man whore in the stockades awaiting beheadment because he deflowered too many virgins. His friends are rolling their eyes and razzing him "Yup, madly in love, just like yesterday and the day before. You meet The One every other day, dude."

So the older I get, the more I suspect that if you weren't nobility or royalty, the defacto standard practice was "Get jiggy all you want until you get a gal pregnant, then get hitched now that we KNOW you two are genetically compatible and can make children."

And that's how we reproduced like rabbits before modern fertility treatments existed.

Footnote 

Drinking mule's urine comes from the Wikipedia article and mules are the offspring of a donkey and a horse (strictly, a male donkey and a female horse) and are typically sterile. So it probably wasn't a pregnant mule.

But, hey, Wikipedia lacks the critical detail she was smuggled out and married off to save her life before a gruesome massacre of her cutthroat family and it's in English and she was an Italian-born French queen. So maybe something was lost in translation somewhere along the way.

I'm guessing it was because when I wrote my paper, she refused to ride a mule because they are sterile. Mule and donkey aren't synonyms but modern peoples seem to use mule and donkey interchangeably. 

I took French in college. My paper is long gone, but I believe I cited both English and French sources.