I periodically feel so fucking sad for women in history. I feel like birth control in countries where it is widely used has made women forget an aspect of male cruelty and sociopathy that is now less apparent (giving the illusion that men have improved when only women’s defences against men have)—the fact that for most of history men could live with a woman for decades and not care that they were slowly killing her with endless back-to-back pregnancies which not only resulted in early death more often than not, but also in a total smothering of the woman’s spirit and talents. I saw a quote by Anne Boyer the other day that called straight relationships for women “not only deadly, but deadening”—as I was reading Jill Lepore’s Book of Ages, a biography of Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane, who was bright and loved reading and wrote some poetry, but had little time to make anything of her life in between her 12 pregnancies. Benjamin Franklin’s mother had 10 sons and 7 daughters. What could they possibly accomplish when their husbands kept impregnating them year after year after year throughout their entire adult life?
Charlotte Brontë eschewed marriage longer than most (writing to Ellen Nussey that she wished they could just set up a little cottage and live together) but she finally married at 38, became pregnant, and died before her 39th birthday. If she had married younger would Jane Eyre exist? I was reading that biography of Charity & Sylvia last month and comparing their life together in their little cottage to the life of their married female relatives, which was honestly hell on earth. One of Charity’s sisters had 18 children. Charity’s mother had 10 living ones, and probably some additional stillbirths. She gave birth to her first child age 19, in 1758, then to a pair of twins in 1760, then another child in 1761, another in 1763, another in 1765, another in 1767, another in 1769, another in 1771, another in 1774, another in 1777. Charity was the last child and her mother had been sick with tuberculosis for months when she became pregnant with her, and she died soon after giving birth.
I wish people would call this murder—this woman was murdered by her husband, like countless other women who do not ‘count’ as victims of male violence because straight sex is natural, pregnancy is natural, childbirth is natural. But when after 20 years of nonstop pregnancies this woman had tuberculosis and suffered from severe respiratory distress, severe weight loss, fever and exhaustion, and her husband impregnated her again, her death was expected. He must have known; he just didn’t care. This woman’s sister—Charity’s aunt—remained a spinster and outlived all of her married sisters by several decades, living well into her eighties. (Ironically, male doctors in her century asserted that sex with men was necessary for women’s health. The biographer quoted from a popular home health guide which said that old maids incurred grievous physical harm from a lack of sex with men.) And this aunt had the time and liberty to develop her skill for embroidery to such an extent that two museums still preserve her embroidered bed drapes. She accomplished something, she nurtured her talent and self. Her name was also Charity, and I find it interesting that Charity’s mother named her last daughter, whose pregnancy & birth killed her, after her childless, unmarried sister.
When I see women reblog my post about Sophia Tolstoy’s misery with her 13 children, adding comments like “thank god marriage is no longer synonymous with this”, I wonder if they realise that men have not magically become any kinder or more concerned about their female partner’s health and fulfillment, it’s just that women now have access to better ways of protecting themselves from their male partner’s indifference to their health and fulfillment.
I keep thinking about an article I read several years ago about how activists got a coal plant shut down when the corporation wanted it to have its license extended for another 20 years. No-one knew who should take credit for the win – the lawyers suing for health reasons, the lawyers suing for worker protections, the activists protesting politicians and corporate offices, the activists who chained themselves to the plant gates, the group who pressured banks to refuse loans for the plant, etc. A while later someone read the company’s annual report and it more or less said they’d cancelled the plant, not because of any single reason, but because all the difficulties across so many aspects of the project made it more trouble than it was worth. They could win on one or two problems, but not a dozen attacks at once, especially when they were all weary from fighting the last battle. I wish I could find the article again, it was much more interesting than I make it sound!
But in the same way that people here keep reminding us all that this is a marathon and not a sprint, I think it’s important to attack Trump and the Republicans on all fronts rather than try to find the one perfect sniper shot to take them down. There should not be a single aspect of their working life where they can escape protests and delays and being overruled by courts and new lawsuits and bad publicity and stupid jokes about them and investigations into their affairs. Washington? Investigators and lawsuits. Home town on recess? Angry locals. Media? Questions about what they knew and when. Internet? Demands for healthcare and video compilations of them saying daft things.
It’s not that one of those tactics is a silver bullet, it’s that this is a war of attrition and every little bit of hassle is worth it. Every individual Republican congressperson should be dreading the sound of a phone or notification because it will be yet another fire they have to put out. They shouldn’t have time to provide assistance to their colleagues or cover for Trump, or time out to refresh and regroup. There are more citizens than there are politicians – tag team until they break ranks.
This Metafilter comment is good and smart and makes me feel better about the work ahead of us.
The Addams family was, in fact, both magical and supernatural for its depiction of a healthy, loving, supportive, and fun married m/f couple.
This is now officially an Addams family appreciation post
In order to depict such purity and love in a m/f relationship, one must first set the foundation that these people are odd and not the norm. (per media standards)
They cared about their children, their children’s interests, and wanted the kids to always be true to themselves. How peculiar!
Gomez and Morticia never showed negative jealousy towards each other’s past love interests. Even going to far as complimenting them for being special to their true love. How bizarre!
They could forgive almost any character flaw in a friend or relative. The only thing that could not be forgiven was betrayals and pastels. Weird amirite?
Morticia is a woman’s woman. She allies herself with other women instead of competing with them. She even seeks to understand women different from herself and her beliefs. Strange.
Gomez wants Morticia to have whatever Morticia wants. He doesn’t give her permission, he actively supports her and motivates her. Fa-reaky.
I seem to recall once reading a review that said that Gomez and Morticia were the only couple on television in the 1960s whom you could actually imagine producing children.
It used to be that prosthetic limbs and style had little to do with one another. Prosthetic limbs have typically had as much style as
orthopedic shoes, sheathed in beige fabric to cover the metal and
plastic parts within. They lacked originality, they lacked flair and they certainly didn’t reflect the wearer’s personality. Now, that couldn’t further from the truth.
Tumblr was deemed too full of inappropriate content to be allowed to be downloaded from the app store.
It has this “inappropriate” problem because of rampant porn ad bot accounts. The old solutions were bots to detect image sets with nsfw content, the automatically enabled safe mode, tag filtering for mobile, and wide takedowns of nsfw bots based on words used (that’s why their messages are full of numbers and symbols, to evade this)
Tumblr released their own bot supposedly capable of wiping the ad bots, but it’s taking down many popular blogs, possibly due to sheer amounts of posting or sheer amounts of ad bots in their notes. This bot was likely rushed to be put out.
You are more likely to be accidentally flagged if you post external links, as well. If your acct is taken down you CAN get it back, but it’s a pain. E-mail tumblr support for help with this. It takes down side blogs with the main ones.
I’ll be halting posts for about a week or until this problem is fixed.
Donate if you can, and even if you can’t, spend some time this November educating yourself about the history of the very-much-still-alive tribe that sat down with the pilgrims, the continued history of colonization in America, and about the tribe/s whose land you are occupying.
funeral-biscuit 