not really, it’s kind of hard to explain but the way i understand it is that it’s reclaiming femininity as a lesbian? i’m not femme so i’m not really good at explaining it bxhbbdbdb
Femme is gender norm SUBVERTING, butch is gender norm REJECTING.
Butches reclaim their identity by rejecting the norms placed on womanhood by the patriarchy. If men say women must be soft, fragile, and gentle, butches are hard, strong, and assertive.
Femmes reclaim their identity by SUBVERTING the norms placed on womenhood by the patriarchy. If men say women must dress ‘girly’ and have long flowing hair and wear makeup and heels in order to be attractive to men, femmes say “I’ll be soft and beautiful and feminine, but it’s not for you, it’s for other women.”
That’s why butch and femme are lesbian only identities. Not only did lesbians make them, but they are inherently tied up with rejecting men and decentering men in our lives. They’re identities that both revolve around being women-aligned and only attracted to other women-aligned people at the specific and aggressive exclusion of men.
I am really baffled by the people attacking AO3 for hosting stories that involve rape, incest, pedophilia, and other dark things. Have…have they never been to a bookstore or library? People write stories about all manner of dark, horrible things. This is not remotely new. And at least on AO3 and other fandom platforms, the dark things are generally tagged. In bookstores and libraries, not so much.
V.C. Andrews was freaking popular when I was in jr. high and high school. Her books were in the school libraries. They needed to be stamped with trigger warning: EVERYTHING, but mainly things from the fun list of rape, incest, pedophilia, and child abuse. Her books are still sufficiently popular that there are new ones coming out despite the fact that she’s been dead for years!
Her books are in the library I work at. Her books are in most bookstores. Her books are probably still in the libraries of the jr high and high school I went to. Does that mean anywhere that has her books supports rape, incest, pedophilia, and child abuse?
That’s not how it works. Yes, there are occasionally things that a store or library will decide they don’t want to carry, no matter what. The first bookstore I worked at wouldn’t even special order The Turner Diaries. A lot of bookstores won’t even special order The Anarchist Cookbook. I’m sure there are other books out there that people are reluctant to touch, even with a ten foot pole. But, barring those few exceptions, most bookstores and libraries are not in the business of policing the content of the books they deal in.
Not because booksellers and librarians are all monsters who should be reported to the FBI, but because there’s a long history of censorship going very bad places very fast. Also, free speech is considered an American value. Hell, let me just link to the ALA page on censorship.
I don’t pretend to know why stuff like V.C. Andrews’ books, or the fics on AO3 that some people want to report to the FBI, are popular. I don’t get it. It doesn’t appeal to me. Yet I recognize that different dark things are in kinds of fiction that I do like – violence, murder, torture, war, other things that most of us really fervantly hope never to experience in our lives. I don’t know whether fiction is an outlet for whatever darkness lurks in everyone’s hearts, whether it’s a way of dealing with our fear of bad things happening, whether human culture just finds bad things fascinating, or what. Maybe humanity is just super fucked up and Pluto really is a warning buoy telling other civilizations not to go near the planet with the creepy mammal infestation on it.
But I don’t think going after fic platforms because some of the fic hosted there is disturbing is a solution to anything. (And if the people doing so are not also on an equivalent campaign against bookstores and libraries, I suspect that what’s going on is not what they claim is going on.)
VC Andrews was ABSOLUTELY the first thing I thought of when I started hearing about this, because hoooooo my god. And I definitely remember being able to get my hands on those at a young age.
There’s plenty of shit I don’t want to read on AO3. Luckily, that stuff – or at least most of it! – is TAGGED, so I don’t have to. That’s the ENTIRE POINT. It’s not breaking a law, and you are not being forced to read it.
Fandom purity politics are fucking tiring.
“Have…have they never been to a bookstore or library?”
This!!!
I work in a library. Specifically, I work in the children’s section. Obviously, that’s where we keep age appropriate books.
But nothing is stopping those children from wandering around the library and reading a graphic book. Nothing but their parents, that is, but let me tell you, people treat the library like daycare.
It’s not my job to watch over those children and hold their hand. It’s not my responsibility, nor do I want it to be, either in person or online.
You make your own fandom experience. At least fanfiction is tagged.
I worked at a book store. A kid wanted to read Steven King’s “It”. That book has abuse and sex and sex between children and isn’t appropriate for 13 year olds.
That’s not my call to make since it wasn’t my kid, but I did ask the parent if they’d read the book and when they said they hadn’t I did take the parent aside and let them know there is adult content. The parent then decided they weren’t comfortable getting them that book, so I suggested other Steven King books that are less graphic and more age appropriate for a kid that wants to read adult horror (Carrie, Pet Cemetery) and the Meddling Kids which has a similar plot like to “IT” (people who dealt with a monster as children return home as adults to deal with monsters again) but is more grown up Scooby Doo level stuff.
(Seriously, someone needs to write a YA horror series because kids need something between RL Stine and Steven King).
So the kid got three books instead of one big one, and still got what they were looking fo and I felt good about it but you know what – most book sellers would have probably just sold the book since the job is to make sales. And no library would have stopped a kid from checking “It” out.
But just because “It” is not for children doesn’t mean it shouldn’t be available for anyone. Because after the movie came out my store sold out of “It” for awhile and I had a man come in who bought that last copy in the store. He told me he’d never been in a bookstore before and he hadn’t read a book since he was forced to read books for school as kid.
So many adults just stop reading after High School.
And here is this man who is going buy and voluntarily read a giant book (“It” is a brick and could have been split into smaller books). That’s amazing!
Books are a good thing, even if they aren’t for children or aren’t for everyone and have disturbing things, people enjoying books doesn’t hurt anyone.
And if people are reading stories online instead of books, hey they’re still reading!
Using your brain faculties to analyse what yu read – or do not read and do not want to read – is a thing! Reading something does not equal either supporting that hting, wanting to experience the thing, wanting someone esle to experience the thing. We read – and write – a lot of things for a lot of different reasons that are not in an one-to-one correlation with reality. This is why it is called FICTION. A few facets and purposes of fiction is to allow or make you to think or experience emotions – also those that you might never encounter in reality, or analyse concepts that are safer to analyse in fiction. Dammit, why is it so hard to understand? Why does every generation get their own stupid Fahrenheit 451 zombie acolytes of ‘purity’?
reblogging for
“Fahrenheit 451 zombie acolytes of ‘purity’”
[If you found my blog because you’re curious about Greek people mixing up prehistoric bears and demigods, this post is for you. I studied archaeology with a focus on other things, and the research on this topic goes back decades, but imo the best book on how dinosaur bones influenced mythology is Adrienne Mayor’s The First Fossil Hunters. I strongly suggest you support this amazing historian and buy her stuff – she’s a great writer and she specializes in folklore and geomythology, it doesn’t get much cooler than that – but if you can’t and you’re interested in the subject – well, I believe scientific knowledge should be shared and accessible to everyone, so here are a few highlights. Part one of six.]
Griffins: a very mysterious mystery
“A race of four-footed birds, almost as large as wolves and with legs and claws like lions.”
The one thing you need to know about griffins is that they don’t really fit in anywhere. They have no powers, they don’t help heroes, they’re not defeating gods or anything like that. Technically speaking, they’re not even monsters – people thought griffins were legit – real animals who lived in Central Asia and sat on golden eggs and mostly killed anyone who went near them. And okay, someone might say, ‘Frog, what’s fishy about that? People used to be dumb as rocks and there’s plenty of bizarro animals out there, anyway’ and yeah, that’s a very good point – except for one thing. See, what’s creepy about griffins is that we’ve got drawings and descriptions of them spanning ten centuries and thousands of miles, and yet they always. look. the. freaking. same.
Like, here’s how people imagined elephants.
This is insanely funny and probably why God sent the Black Death to kill everyone, but also pretty common tbh, because a) people want to feel involved, b) people are liars who lie and c) it’s hard to imagine stuff you’ve never seen. So the more a story is passed around, the more it’s going to gain and lose details here and there, until you get from dog-footed hairy monkey of doom to plunger-nosed horror on stilts. But griffins – art or books, they’re consistently described as wolves-sized mammals with a beaked face. So that’s what made Adrienne Mayor go, Uh.
And what she did next is she started digging around in Central Asia, because that’s the other thing everyone agreed on: that griffins definitely lived there and definitely came from there. And this is where things get really interesting, because as it turns out, on one side of the Urals you’ve got Greeks going, ‘Mate, the Scythians, you know – they’ve got these huge-ass lion birds, I’m not even shitting you rn’ while on the other side of the Urals – wow and amaze – you’ve got Siberian tribes singing songs about the ‘bird-monsters’ and how their ancestors slaughtered them all because they were Valiant and Good.
(This according to a guy studying Siberian traditions in the early 1800s, anyway, because you know who writes stuff down? Not nomads, bless them: dragging around a shitload of books on fucking horseback is not a kind of life anyone deserve to live.)
And anyway, do you know what else those Mighty Ancestors did? They mined gold sand, and they kept tripping over dinosaur bones because that entire area is full of both things and some places are lucky like that. And in fact, the more excavations were carried out in ancient Scythian settlements, the more we started to realize that those guys were even more obsessed with griffins than the Greek were. Hell, some warriors even had griffins tattooed on their bodies?
And it’s probably all they ever talked about, because that’s when griffins suddenly appear in the Mediterreanean landscape: when Greek people start trading (and talking) with the Scythians.
(Another important note here, not that I’m not bitter or anything: something else those excavations are showing is that Herodotus was fucking right about fucking everything, SO THERE. Father of lies my ass, he was the only sensible guy in that whole bean-avoiding, monster-fucking, psychopathic and self-important Greek ‘intelligentsia’ and they can all fuck off and die and we don’t care about temples Pausy you dumb bitch we want to hear about the tree people and the Amazons and the fucking griffins goddammit. Uuugh. /rant)
So anyway, Scythian nomads had been hunting for gold in places with exciting names like ‘the field of the white bones’ and basically dying of exposure because mountains, so Herodotus (and others) got this right as well: that successful campaigns could take a long-ass time, and very often people just disappeared, never to be heard from again. What everybody got less right: the nomads and adventurers and gold miners weren’t killed by griffins, because by the time they started traveling into those mountains, ‘griffins’ had been dead for hundreds of thousands of years. What they did see, and what was sure to spook the fuck out of them, were fossils – and, more precisely, protoceratops skulls, which can be found on all the major caravan routes from China all the way to Uzbekistan and are so ubiquitous paleontologists call them ‘a damn nuisance’.
And guess what they look like.
Just fucking guess.
[Left: a golden griffin, Saka-Scyhtian culture; right: psittacosaurus skull, commonly found in Uzbekistan and the western Gobi.]
Also, fun detail if you’re into gory and painful ways of dying: many of the dino skeletons are found standing up, because the animals would be caught in sand storms and drop dead. So basically you’d be riding your horse and minding your own gold-related business when all of a sudden you see the empty sockets of a beaked something staring at you and yeah – as a reminder, the idea of evolution was not a thing until Darwin, so any Scythian or Siberian tribesman seeing something like that would assume there was a fairly good fucking chance of a live whatever-the-hell-this-is waiting for him behind the next hill. And that’s what he’d say to Greek traders over a bowl of fermented mare’s milk: to stay the fuck away from those mountains, because griffins, man, they’re fucking real and there’s hundreds of them and anyway, maybe write that down if writing’s something you’re into, never saw the point myself but eh, to each his own, right, and cheers, good health, peace and joy to the ancestors.
Man, don’t you just love mythology?
(How fossils influenced mythology: part two, Cyclops, will be up soon.)
@awed-frog has a great blog! As they said in a follow-up post, “the lack of interdisciplinary research is a huge problem in academia”. Think outside the box. Read outside your field. Read widely.
don’t you love when you’re gay and you, go for a walk and see a rainbow. it’s like… that’s for me, damn! anyway the straights can’t see this particular shade of orange so here’s the tea fellow gays: Dark Pride is gonna take place halloween night under the old mausoleum. it starts at 6pm and runs all night. please come in costume. the code phrase to get the coffin to open up and let you access the stairs is “heterosexualis renouncis”
whenever people get all snippy about “you’re recording an event rather than actually living it” I think about all the amazing videos and pictures I’ve seen because of strangers
what a wonderfully human impulse it is to see something neat and immediately think “how can I share this”
I feel like our economy has been driven by mass production for so long that we’ve forgotten just how intensely time-consuming making things by hand is. Mass production was revolutionary for a reason. It DRASTICALLY reduced the cost of things. And I’m all for making things more affordable! But the problem arises when people decide they want something handmade for the cost of something mass produced. People get an idea in their mind “this is how much x item should cost” when in actuality that’s how much a machine made version of that thing costs. Then they hear the price of something made entirely by hand and think “that person is ripping me off.” If you want something handmade, you have to compensate the person making it fairly.
ugh 