”
quotes
-
“Perfectly respectable Victorian women wrote to each other in terms such as these: ‘I hope for you so much, and feel so eager for you… that the expectation once more to see your face again, makes me feel hot and feverish.’ They recorded the ‘furnace blast’ of their ‘passionate attachments’ to each other… They carved their initials into trees, set flowers in front of one another’s portraits, danced together, kissed, held hands, and endured intense jealousies over rivals or small slights… Today if a woman died and her son or husband found such diaries or letters in her effects, he would probably destroy them in rage or humiliation. In the nineteenth century, these sentiments were so respectable that surviving relatives often published them in elegies…. [In the 1920s] people’s interpretation of physical contact became extraordinarily ‘privatized and sexualized,’ so that all types of touching, kissing, and holding were seen as sexual foreplay rather than accepted as ordinary means of communication that carried different meanings in different contexts… It is not that homosexuality was acceptable before; but now a wider range of behavior opened a person up to being branded as a homosexual… The romantic friendships that had existed among many unmarried men in the nineteenth century were no longer compatible with heterosexual identity.” —Stephanie Coontz (via crookedceremonies)
Men may not have been quite this effusive, but as she alludes to at the end of the paragraph, their friendships were also much more overtly emotional - and put in what we’d today consider “romantic” terminology - in the nineteenth century. This leads to all sorts of confused misreading of texts from that period now: I once went to a talk with Doris Kearns Goodwin about Team of Rivals when she had to explain (rather wearily) to somebody that Lincoln ALMOST CERTAINLY WAS NOT A HOMOSEXUAL just because he wrote very emotional letters to his friends.
The way sex and sexuality functioned in the Victorian era is (obviously) totally fascinating because people were not nearly as clueless as we like to think they were about all of these things, but sex was just never up for discussion. So if you read highbrow novels from the period (the Brontës, George Eliot, etc), they can’t actually explicitly discuss sex, but the authors use language that would have said very clearly to any reader with two brain cells to rub together that sex was happening, or had happened, or whatever. But even though people did know about sex, I think it was very much outside the sphere of friendship - or even romance, hence something like Jane Eyre being considered extremely “coarse” and scandalous - and so it would never have occurred to people that two women or men who were extremely close and overtly affectionate were sexually involved in any way. And there was no sense of certain traits that we would today associate with homosexuality being connected to sexuality at all: so Oscar Wilde, who basically created the stereotype of the flamboyant gay man, was enormously popular everywhere until it came out that he was having sex with a man. Then, all of the sudden, all of the characteristics that people had found charming years before became associated with homosexuality - most queer theorists would say that “homosexuality” as such actually has its genesis as an idea/identity in the direct aftermath of the Wilde trial - and therefore become utterly taboo.
I’m not an expert in this stuff (grad school: probably in my future, sigh), but I think it’s fascinating that one event, even one as significant as the Wilde trial, can have such a massive impact not only on the culture but on the fundamental way people interact with each other. It’s a startlingly fast shift - one that you might argue corresponds in a way with the rapid and radical acceptance of gay people in society in the past twenty years or so (in the developed Western world), although that wasn’t sparked by a single event on the scale of the Wilde trial. Obviously homophobia and prejudice are still very real and pervasive, but when you think about what was broadly considered acceptable public speech/debate in the early- to mid-nineties, even amongst the more liberal half of the population, as compared to now, it’s pretty astonishing.
(via morgan-leigh)
absolutely. when it comes to the way men behaved with each other in england, the wilde trial was like a switch being flipped. just look at all those holmeses and watsons strolling around arm-in-arm right up until the 1890s hit.
(via hellotailor)
(via czarinna)
-
Perfect blog is perfect.
That first answer is just perfect.
(via myfirstpubichair)
-
To Hecate
Pre-Christian, pre-Olympian, pre-Titanic Hecate world-tree planted in Asia Minor,
gate-guard of the worlds,
keyholder to the three realms,
gross seated Mother, lions at your sides, fostering nurse of all that’s young, female heap of big fat attributes,cruel, non-rational mistress
of slain corn-kings, sacrificed children, castrated temple-males;you glid into Greece after Troy’s fall, Hecate-Enodia riding down from Thessaly, leading the angry horde of ghosts,
planted yourself at the crossroads;
your torch began to smoke, then flared up, making night noon —
world-tree Hecate, your roots reached Hell’s downmost altitude to suck the power
of the buried dead. Eater of filth,
goddess of darkness, grimly silently munching corpses, Hecate,
regaled with incense of goat-fat, baboon-shit, garlic; honored with gutted puppies
and rubbish rites;Hecate, in your oakleaf crown shaking reptile dreadlocks, around you hellhounds yowling sharp and shrill,
so meadows tremble, river-nymphs scream,
their waters rush backwards up the stream-bed
and dive affrighted down their own fountains;with the witches I dance around you,
naked, snake-necklaced,
hair in the wind, gashing blood from arms: sex-crazed hags with false teeth and hair,
young girls, gloriously pornographic,
stir the cauldron of ugly oddities,
throw in magic salads gathered in the graveyard— a brew with power to draw babes screaming
into existence, or hurl them howling hence.
The witches lay hold of you, Hecate, World-tree, shake, make tremble on your branches
the planets suspended
like rare and fragile fruit.-Ellipsis Marx (x)
-
“The question why I would LET Willow cut her hair. First the LET must be challenged. This is a world where women, girls are constantly reminded that they don’t belong to themselves; that their bodies are not their own, nor their power or self determination. I made a promise to endow my little girl with the power to always know that her body, spirit and her mind are HER domain. Willow cut her hair because her beauty, her value, her worth is not measured by the length of her hair. It’s also a statement that claims that even little girls have the RIGHT to own themselves and should not be a slave to even their mother’s deepest insecurities, hopes and desires. Even little girls should not be a slave to the preconceived ideas of what a culture believes a little girl should be.” — Jada Pinkett Smith (via princesslilitu)(via myfirstpubichair)
-
"Hannibal" And The Consequences Of Violence “But if one concern of those who criticize violence in entertainment is that it’s done thoughtlessly and exploitatively — as in The Following — that should not apply to Hannibal. Nor to Fuller, who has considered all of these questions. Hannibal, in fact, is so heavy with dread and sadness and the consequences violent deaths have on everyone, including and perhaps especially on law enforcement, as manifested in the tormented Graham, that it can be challenging to watch for that reason.”
-
Hermione the Black: fuckyeahcracker: fuckyeahcracker: Effects Of Thinking White People Are... Effects Of Thinking White People Are “All Like That”:
- Literally nothing other than white people having their feelings hurt on the internet
- I’m not joking there is no real world consequence of this
Effects Of Thinking People of Color Are “All Like That”:
- Saudi student is literally surrounded by FBI for cooking rice under terrorist suspicions
- White people literally can not associate positive words with Black faces because of racism
- More white people use drugs but Black people are sent to jail for drugs at 10 times the rate that white people are
- Black people who “sound Black” earn less money than those who don’t because of associations with stereotypes. Black people who “sound Black” are less likely to get called back for jobs
- Black children grow up literally associating being Black with being bad and ugly
- White people when tested shot more unarmed Black subjects than armed and unarmed white subjects
- Hate crimes increase after Boston tragedy
- Moroccan High School Student is linked to Boston tragedy for being Brown
- Bangladeshi man is beaten by people out of racism
- NYPD Commissioner wants Black and Latino men to fear him after the police targeted literally 90 percent Black and Latino men in New York and humiliating them by frisking them in public under the assumption that they had weapons. Studies found that white men were the ones who overwhelmingly had weapons while Black and Latino men didn’t
- White people blaming and convicting Black men for crimes they never committed and everyone believing them because of racism
- Stop and Frisk, ruled unconstitutional was practiced by New York police disproportionately and unfairly affecting 90% Black and Latino men because of racism
- Universities throwing racist ‘Fiesta Party’ homogenizing culture with extreme racism
- Here are some of the numbers on hate crimes against People of Color and btw, Neo Naziism is increasing!
- Every 28 Hours an African American is Extrajudicially Murdered in the U.S.
- Black people 3 times more likely to be arrested for Marijuana
- Black people receive much harsher sentencing than white people for the same crimes do I need to go on?
But yeah, white people’s feelings :*(
I actually changed my mind, I’m adding more
- Deaf Black man is stabbed out of racism when his sign language is mistaken for a GANG SIGN
- Anti-Islam posters run free on the train to reinforce racism anti-Islamic sentiments and Islamaphobia
- Oops! Chicago police raids the wrong house, holds an 11 month old at gunpoint to raise their hand, kills their dog all because of racism and assuming it was a crackhouse! Oopsies
- Let’s take it overseas! Black people in England and Wales are 7 times more likely to be stopped by police than white people. Asian people are twice as likely
- People assuming Native american baby names are actually Native and have any meaning to any ethnic group when they don’t
- Here’s a whole collection of people saying racist stereotyping homogenizing disgusting stuff about Natives
- People protesting (Idle No More) defending Native people’s humanity are attacked with violence
- White kids think it’s totally okay and normal to photograph themselves lynching a Black baby doll like an effigy
- Member of the most glorified band in the world Paul McCartney made a racist white supremacist song called ‘No Pakistanis’ and everyone still glorifies him as a good person
- Racism in actual political campaign in Massachusetts against a Native runner portraying her name and image in a racist stereotypical inappropriate manner
- Indian Sikh school students protest for students who are banned from wearing their turbans in public schools in France
- Here’s a graph of the statistic that approx every 28 hours an African American is extrajudicially executed in the US
- NYPD profiling and targeting LGBT*Q People of Color
- Black students (especially boys and children with disabilities) face more and harsher punishments in public schools and are being pushed out of schools into the criminal justice system.
- Black male incarceration has jumped 500% from 1986 to 2004
- Albany police: SWAT literally uses a poor Black neighborhood to train in because they say it’s ‘realistic’
- The audio recording from a young man of color of a NYPD stop and frisking him based solely how he looks calling him a “FUCKING MUTT”
- Incarceration rates by ethnicity
- All of this fucking cultural appropriation
-
THE TWELVE DANCING PRINCESSES.
There was a king who had twelve beautiful daughters. They slept in twelve beds all in one room and when they went to bed, the doors were shut and locked up. However, every morning their shoes were found to be quite worn through as if they had been danced in all night. Nobody could find out how it happened, or where the princesses had been. (x)
(via notbecauseofvictories)
-
I feel like this is reminiscent of some painting, but I can’t place it.
oh man, now that you mention it, yes. if there’s a similarly composed painting actually in existence, I can’t think of it, but looking at this now — it’s kind of like if a maxfield parrish painting had a one night stand with a magritte and they had a baby and it wanted to be eldritch andrew wyeth?
-
Archetypes | THE STARS
We look to the twinkling lights that hang in the darkness, drawing us out of ourselves and up into a higher place with their peculiar glow. We turn our eyes heavenward, no longer feeling the distress of earth. A weight instantly lifted by their calming presence. All the harshness and density of this life is refined away, leaving only the purest essence in its wake. And, in this moment, we learn we are not the sum of earthly bounds. We find a humbled sense of who we are, what we are, in contrast to the world outside our delicate atmosphere — beyond the thin gas separating us. We were born of those lights. Their essence is ours. And for a few moments, as our gaze falls on theirs, we are blessed.(via neverfeedthesarcophagi)
-
