It’s been a long hiatus, and woefully unplanned, but at last Runicfire returns with a new edition of Monday Links!

The notion that humans are obsessed with sex is all but an axiom. Every society on earth possesses its own sets of customs and taboos regarding sexuality, with some cultivating its expression and others suppressing or controlling the prurient instinct as much as possible. Our society frowns on adultery, considering the practice an insult to the sanctity of marriage, but Sarah Laskow at Atlas Obscura contends that American lawsagainst adultery were employed largely to enforce an altogether different setof taboos (NSFW). Rather than to avenge breaches of fidelity, adultery laws—which have been on the books and enforced as recently as the 1980s in some of the United States—served to punish female sexual expression as well as affections between people of different races.

On an entirely different but no less tawdry subject, Scott Mendleson at Forbes writes about why speculators on the upcoming Star Warsfilm’s profits are setting themselves (and us) up for disappointment.

Lastly, I came across a fascinating article while trying to determine if anyone else had written a novel that could be described as Renpunk. This blog post, by author Balogun O. Abeegunde, posits a name for a hypothetical genre of heroic fantasy set around the time of the Haitian Revolution. Mr. Abeegunde himself is, according to his bio, “one of the leading authorities on Steamfunk—a philosophy of or style of writing that combines the African and/or African American culture and approach to life with that of the steampunk philosophy[.]” I had not heard of Steamfunk before, but I guarantee you I will be looking into the genre more intently, as well as Mr. Abeegunde’s blog, in the future.