The Fool on the Hill: Sexual morality in the world of the Witcher

Monogamy, as it has developed in the west, it intimately related to the concept of heritable personal property. The male partner gains confidence that the children of the female partner, who will inherit the wealth and power he is able to accumulate, are his get; the female partner gains confidence that all the wealth and power accumulated by the male partner will be inherited by her children. Thus monogamy became established in the highest echelons of society, where there was significant amounts of wealth and power to be passed on.

Indeed, one may speculate that the reason for the sheer amount of loot buried with the elites of pre-monogamous societies was that it prevented fights about who was going to inherit.

This blog post is written partly as a response to where I am in my current play-through of The Witcher 3, partly in response to the Cast a pod to your Witcher podcast's episode on A Shard of Ice, and partly as a response to Josef Anderson's critique of Tris' sexual morality in his review of The Witcher. The presenters of the podcast have a similarly very negative response to Triss' sexual morality, while ignoring Yennefer's (in my opinion) much more serious sins.

Briefly, in my current play through, I had intended to follow the Triss romance path, for reasons I set out in this essay and shan't repeat here. However, I was also exploring whether it's possible to complete the main quest without Yennefer destroying Freya's Garden, and, if not, whether it's possible to complete it without Geralt being complicit in the destruction of Freya's Garden. Yes, I do know I could answer these questions simply by searching my old friend Carrol Dufault's The Witcher wiki, but I want to experience them for myself.

So, in the playthrough, I've got as far as Skellige, and into the 'The King is Dead' quest, and in that quest Yennefer inveigles Geralt into helping her to steal a valuable artefact from Mousesack, who is a friend of Geralt's — reinforcing my perception that Yennefer is a thoroughly amoral and unlikeable character. And because of the well discussed 'feature' of the games in The Witcher trilogy that it isn't always clear what the consequences of a dialogue choice will be, I've accidentally had sex with Yennefer, which I hadn't intend to do.

This means, of course, that I can play forward and see the notorious handcuffs scene, which I know about but haven't actually experienced; or I can go back to my last save before that choice and make a different one. And I think that actually I shall do the latter, because otherwise I will waste a lot of progress just to see one amusing cut-scene.

But it raises a question about consistency of morality: you can in the game have sex with Kiera Metz, who is also a sorceress and also a friend of both Yennefer and Triss, and who, if she isn't burned on a pyre in Novigrad will also show up for the siege of Kaer Morhen so it's probable that all three will meet (and presumably exchange gossip). Yet, whether Geralt is following the Yennefer or the Triss romance path, his lover will not complain about his being unfaithful with Kiera.

In the excerpt I've linked to from Josef Anderson's critique, Triss' behaviour in The Witcher is described as 'rapey'. It's 'rapey', because Triss knows that Geralt had been in a stormy, on-again, off-again relationship with Yennefer, but Geralt, having amnesia, does not remember this. It's also, I think, 'rapey' because Triss is assertive about her sexual desires, and in modern western societies women are not supposed to be so.

So I think what Anderson is arguing, is that Triss should at least have told Geralt about Yennefer, and about his relationship with her, before making her (fairly direct) sexual advances — or possibly that (because of this knowledge) she should not have made direct sexual advances at all.

But it's absolutely canon that Geralt and Yennefer are not sexually faithful to one another; in A Shard of Ice, Yennefer has sex with both Geralt and Istredd on the same day, and it's explicit in the text that Yennefer has been carrying on parallel relationships with them over years, and has been deceiving both of them about this. And it's explicit that Yennefer doesn't feel guilty about it.

Furthermore, it's clear from Sapkowski's text, passim, that while Geralt is — deeply — in love with Yennefer, the converse is not true. Yennefer uses sex — with Geralt and with other male characters — largely transactionally, to achieve her own ends. She's far from unique in this; all of the sorceresses, it seems to me, do (which is yet another reason why I think that the best love interest for Geralt is 'not a sorceress at all', and underlies why I still root for Shani).

Furthermore, it's almost canon (The Last Wish is, I think, intentionally ambiguous here) that the reason Geralt and Yennefer have an ongoing relationship at all is not because either truly loves the other, but because of the wish Geralt made in order to save their lives. It is, in effect, a logic bomb — a consequence of taking the only way out of a very difficult situation which occurred to him in a very short decision time.

It is, then, a magically compelled relationship, and that in itself should give us grounds to question whether it's reasonable to demand — of either party — that they be faithful. And I'm very sure that Sapkowski intended us to be aware of, and to interrogate, this ambiguity.

Transactionallity is of course, one of the main drivers of human sexual behaviour, in most cultures, in most periods of history. Recreation — the fact that we enjoy it — is another. Relationship bonding is a third. Procreation, I would suggest, only the fourth; and it is only procreation (and then, only under a market economy with inheritance) that makes fidelity an important corollary. For witchers, mages and sorceresses in the universe of The Witcher, procreation is impossible. So why should we consider, for them at least, that infidelity is a moral failing?

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