"Several hundred years of it."

Shrug. "As long as you can fix it I think anyone being shocked that a society that hadn't invented plumbing also hadn't invented modern sexual ethics has, uh, skipped even more history classes for being depressing than I did."

"Elves usually get ethics first."

"To some extent it's actually weird Elves get ethics at all, given the degree to which - at least among our people - they're the thing extracted from watching history happen and going 'okay, that thing, it's bad, can we enforce a taboo against it?'"

"It really seems like something you'd get right on the first try."

"But that's what I'm saying, it doesn't actually seem to be something societies get right on the first try. Except bizarre Elf societies, and this Elf society is just - not-bizarre."

"It's definitely bizarre," say several Elves emphatically.

Beka is looking confusedly between various Macalaurës.

Rabka has tuned out to have a side conversation with Rebecca about how Pink II can totally have a lactation potion if the wizards have enough ingredients.

"I don't see what the problem is," volunteers Beka's original Macalaurë.

"The problem is that your world is apparently evil!!"

"Yes! We are! That's how people are when the Valar aren't twisting them!"

" - I would phrase the problem as 'someone is suffering a lot, and also inconveniently the form this takes is one that modern societies have a very strong taboo on because having a very strong taboo on it dramatically reduces the rate of all kinds of problems, and yet more inconveniently one of the ways strong taboos are enforced is by being really appalled at violations even if they're committed by people who couldn't have been deterred by your taboo because they have been planet-shuffled by mysterious possibly-snakes.

And the solution is just 'find ways of expressing your defiance of the Valar which involve less suffering and which won't run you into this problem'. I actually bet we've invented lots of things they'd disapprove of, going off, uh, descriptions." 

"I don't want to stop having sex with people who want to have sex with me just because they're prisoners."

"Well, now that the war's over they aren't prisoners, right? So you're fine."

"I wasn't doing anything wrong before, either."

"His Beka is happier," says the other Macalaurë.

" - look, if you'd known any of this your military would have rules about conduct towards prisoners which meet the standards for that sort of thing, and then you wouldn't be trying to swim through a random alien taboo that makes no sense. Before the next time your military takes prisoners you should have those written up. But you didn't, and without that, sure, you're trying to invent something from scratch that was very much not invented from scratch in most civilized societies, and you're trying to generalize from a single-digit number of wildly atypical situations, and that's just a bad way to come up with military procedures."

"But you know better."

"Well, yeah, we've been at it longer."

"Wait, why am I happier? Did I miss something?"

"I didn't touch my Beka because of the thing where it is evil to have sex with people who can't turn you down."

"...you coulda said 'I will back off if you want' and then she coulda turned you down."

"I don't think that's supposed to be good enough."

"...why?"