im not a classicist or anything but imperatrix caesarissa marcia aurelia antonina augusta deserved so much fucking better and i will fight anyone, including those with degrees, and especially whoever changed her wikipedia page to he/him again
she and her mother were murdered by the praetorian guard—her own fucking bodyguards—and their bodies stripped and dragged through the streets when she was eighteen years old. she was a child. a trans girl and her mother were killed because they were women and because they were emesenes who worshipped an emesene god, and they were subject then to damnatio memoriae and to this fucking day to slander
plain english: one of the roman “emperors” was an openly bisexual trans girl called varia or marcia aurelia or, after her death, “elagabalus”. she was an emesene (arab) priestess of the god el gabal (which is where her common name comes), and she and her mother made many religious and social changes in rome, including beginning a “women’s senate”. that they were women and foreign and disrespected the roman state religion—and that varia called a carian slave named hierocles her husband—really pissed off the roman populace. they were murdered by her own bodyguards when she was eighteen years old.
This is The New Yorker article about how Korea is the world capital of plastic surgery. Which is true. But a white American visiting Korea to find out more about its innate inferiority? I see a problem in that.
Definition of
beauty has transformed over time in the modern history of Korea. The standard
prior to Western invasion was the round, flat nose and minimized eyes arranged in oblong face.
The Portrait Of A Beauty by Shin Yunbog (1758~?)
Photograph of a gisaeng in late Josun dynasty
As American consumer goods and Hollywood
movies started to bombard the Far Eastern world, Japan began its imperialist
agenda to take over the rest of the Asia. While ravaging the “primitive lands”
of its neighboring nations under the supremacist justification, Japan developed
a very unique standard of beauty.
It started as slavish replica of Western
commercial illustrations. The imitation gradually evolved to become very
distinctively “Japanese” ideal, such as Nakahara Junich’s depiction
of women with overly exaggerated highlights in the eyes, noses as a simple line
and a dot, and lips smaller than a fingertip. The ideal was passed down to
mangakas such as Takahashi Makoto in 60’s, further popularizing the typical
cosmic-eye look. The style has gradually matured to become an emblematic
particularity of manga, attracting the younger generations from all sides of
the globe.
Illustration of Singing by the Plum Garden by Toyohara Chikanobu, 1887
Notice the Japanese ladies are dressed in typical late Victorian dresses.
Nakahara Junichi (
1913-1988)
Takahashi Makoto
The change seems pretty dramatic, doesn’t it?
The modernization
process of Asia was ferocious and shameless. Behind the adorable sparkly eyes
lies an endless record of bloodthirsty savagery: Asia was kept busy killing
each other while the West exploited its resources; Japan, allegedly to
compensate for their recent defeat by the West, conducted uncountable forms of
systematic torture in the colonized territories. The Japanese rule is
remembered in many of the colonized Asian nations as equivalent to that of
Nazis: human-body experiments and sex slavery still remains in the collective
memory of the people.
There was much blame put on women who lost their virginity
to foreign soldiers, even when they were forced into sexual slavery, as if
their stolen virtue was symbolic of the nation’s soil and resource. In the
midst of such horror was the new set of standards for women. As a result, they
not only strived to look better than their neighbors, but also as good as the
Hollywood actresses with long, lustrous lashes and flaxen locks.
Asian women born and raised in Asia
still suffer from the ideal set by the “modernized” men of the early
20th century. Westerners tend to read it as an intrinsically Asian problem,
blaming the collectivist mindset rooted in Confucianism. Patricia Marx, in her
article About Face, goes on to interview
a few scholars in Korea to examine the origin of such craze over plastic
surgery.
A psychology professor at Yonsei University, one of the most
privileged educational institutions in Korea, assures that collectivism is the
main attribution to the popularization of cosmetic corrections.
“In Korea,
we don’t care what you think about yourself. Other people’s evaluations of you
matter more… It’s not that you’re trying to stand out and look good. It’s
that you’re trying not to look bad.” He continued, “This is a very competitive
society. In the old days, if your neighbor bought a new TV or new car you would
need to buy a new TV or car. Now we all have these basic things, so the
competition has moved up to comparing one’s looks, health, and spiritual things
as well.”
The rest of the
article is about Marx interviewing various people in Korea or simulating social
situations as an undercover journalist to revalidate Confucianism as the most
powerful motivation behind the plastic surgery.
Which must’ve been thrilling. I
wish I could visit a presumably less developed nation just to discover more
about their innate inferiority.
Let’s assume, although I’m about 99.8 percent
sure this is not the case, that all Asian girls want to reach the average
because of their fervent passion for Confucius.
Then where did the definition
of the average emerge? Who handed televisions and cars to Koreans in the first
place? How did the “competitive society” formulate and what are they
competing against? Are they really comparing themselves to each other, or the Western
standards barraged on their land through magazines and movies?
Isn’t the
psychology professor, serving in this article as a reliable resource for Marx’s
argument, also an individual who had been “cultured” with exclusively
Western ideas? Psychology didn’t exist in Asian scholarship until the West
brought it to the East. The West reassures its superiority by repeatedly labeling
Confucianism as the source of every Eastern vice. What brings Asian girls to
the operating table is not Confucius, it is the internalized racism: the belief
that everything white is inherently good. No one in Korea is fighting to get dread locks
and tan skin; it’s the eyelids, higher nose bridge, lighter skin and thinner
lips they want. Or they’ve been educated to want. While Korean girls pay a
fortune to recreate their looks closer to Caucasian, an expert in the Western psychology
objectifies them as submissive and vulnerable, so he can elevate in this Eurocentric world.
Why do Asians compare themselves to others instead of being themselves? Because the West made us the perpetual Other. Because Asians had to kill and rape each other in order to prove their worth in the eyes of the West. Because the world keeps telling you that no matter how good you are if you’re not white you’re not good enough.
Also the Vikings were known to be complete dandies. They sought bright colors, jewelry, imported Persian silks. Ribbons. Little mirrors sewn onto clothing, in Sweden. The men had long hair that was scandalous to Christians, and they carried combs and earspoons and such things with them. I recall seeing documents where the eastern Norse were big on baths and one of their demands in a particular negotiation was “we get to have baths drawn for us whenever we want”, which was often.
They used soap with agents designed to bleach hair to try to make themselves blonder.
I’m sorry longhaired prettyboy viking men in gaudy clothing and jewelry, bleaching and combing their hair, doesn’t match with your Conan-the-Barbarian manlyman aesthetic.
…or the fact that a significant portion of the Norse were traders, fishermen, farmers, and herders, and weren’t raiding, pillaging warriors or hired Byzantine thug-bodyguards.
I also like the parts about how maybe women didn’t dress as modestly as some interpretations of the evidence suggest. And, like, putting BIG METAL CLIPS and STRANDS OF BEADS right across the breasts … kind of draws the eyes right there.
beatsandblades considering that you just posted something Viking related – thought you might be interested in this.
Oh my god, I LOVE THIS.
It also should be noted that they had tweezers and ladies used them to shape their eyebrows and keep their faces neat. It should also be noted that they had the most civilized laws toward women pre christian era in europe. Women were allowed to fight, allowed to inherit or acquire wealth, allowed to have bastard children or be raped without it being a mark against their honor and virtue. In fact, if the family of a raped woman wanted justice, they were free to kill the rapist under the law. Women were also free to divorce their husbands.
Viking men also composed POETRY as a sign of their virility and reciting poetry to a woman without her father’s permission was considered unseemly, because that was part of courtship and the young man had to take care that he wasn’t challenged or killed for doing so.
The men also had magnificent purses as status symbols, as demonstrated by the find of amazing purse cover in the Sutton Hoo burial ship, which was generally a fancy fancy archaeological windfall. And why not? This suggests most anything made of fine quality materials and made with painstaking craftsmanship could be a status symbol, with little evidence of modern gender panic about the function of ornamentation.
BONUS: after their colonization of Britian, the native menfolk thought they were unfair because they took all the women folk by being handsomely groomed and BAthiNG regularly HOW DARE THEY. There’s a post about that floating around on tumblr you could probably find if you believe in yourself hard enough.
The modern interpretation of vikings, as with most distorted views of the barbarism of previous ages, was pretty much invented by British Victorians as a combination of a sort of sensational hyper-masculine nostalgia (”remember when we were like being constantly invaded by those barbarians? That’s because they were brutes, but damn it those MEN were MEN*. I mean, they have to had been. They invaded us.”) and as a sort of self-congratulatory “well at least we aren’t like THAT any more” cultural asspat. It’s similar thing that happened with Renaissance scholars about the so-called “medieval period”, lots of facts were distorted or outright invented to make the current age and location look better. Which is not to say the Victorians also provided their own more romantic and chivalric idea of that period, too, which further distorts things. IN ANY CASE Here’s a summary and extract of a book about Victorian ideas of Vikings, in lieu of me being too lazy to find a more comprehensive or succinct paper.
*see also Weimar Republic-era German fascination and cultural connection with their own idea of “Viking”. But that had a more vengeful edge and was informed by social discontent and near-destroyed national pride. And of course NOTHING BAD EVER CAME OF THIS PROPAGANDIC VIEW OF HISTORY.
Vikings actually didn’t sexualise the breasts, but the hips. Breasts are for feeding babies, hips are for making babies. So the flashy necklaces drawing the eyes to the breasts is really not a sexuality thing, sorry. It was more a diamond grille thing, they were big on overt displays of wealth and status. But it was no big deal if a viking woman bared her breasts, eg to feed her babies, because the modern idea of modesty w/re the depravity of a female nipple didn’t exist. So the modern idea of modest dress where they’re covered from neck to ankle because everyone in the past was prudes is just so wrong forever. Viking women’s dresses had necklines that you could literally flop a boob out of at any time.
ugh 