[Image Description: Tags reading “lmao I should really title my chapters BUT WHAT, I’m so bad at titling I’ll probably name my first born Chapter One”]
The AO3 Tag of the Day is: Please take this opportunity to ask me about Roman naming practices
A more furious figure than the gentle (John) Woolman was Benjamin Lay, who lived in a natural cave on the York Road above what is now Branchtown(now the Ogontz neighborhood). Water and vegetables were his only food and he refused to wear any garment or eat anything involving the loss of animal life or slave labour.
” Only four and a half feet high, hunch-backed, with projecting chest, legs small and uneven, arms longer than his legs, a huge head, showing only beneath the enormous white hat, large, solemn eyes and a prominent nose; the rest of his face covered with a snowy semi-circle of beard falling low on his breast, this fierce and prophetical brownie or kobold made unexpected dashes into the calm precincts of the Friends’ Meeting House, and was a gad-fly of every assembly.“ At one time, during Yearly Meeting, he suddenly appeared marching up the aisle in his long, white overcoat, regardless of the solemn silence prevailing. He stopped suddenly when midway and exclaiming, “You Slave-holders! Why don’t you throw off your Quaker coats as I do mine, and shew yourselves as you are?” At the same moment he threw off his coat. Underneath was a military coat and a sword dangling against his heels. Holding in one hand a large book, he drew his sword with the other. “In the sight of God,” he cried, “you are as guilty as if you stabbed your slaves to the heart, as I do this book!” Suiting the action to the word, and piercing a small bladder filled with the juice of the poke-weed which he had concealed between the covers, and sprinkling as with fresh blood those who sat near him. Though offensive and peculiar, he was one of the active forces which paved the way to decisive action and was the forerunner of many less rational agitators.
Okay this is a very half-formed thought and I’m not sure where I’m going with it yet, but the fact that the teen girls we’re meant to root for in so many Teen Girl Stories are the ones who are bad at or uncomfortable with performing femininity probably isn’t a coincidence.
And it’s mostly not because the people who create media about teen girls want to shatter gender roles; it’s more likely because even though femininity is the prescribed way for female-identified people to behave it’s also seen as something largely unpleasant.
Um. I’m going somewhere with this, maybe after I finish my homework. But I want to hang onto this thought.
ex: the proof of Regina George’s redemption is giving up her hyper-femininity in favor of aggressive, masculine-coded sports
ex 2: in High School Musical Gabriella and Taylor have a bonding moment over their nail beds being “history”, contrasting themselves with the more conventionally feminine cheerleaders. Gabriella is hardly butch but her femininity is portrayed in a more soft, natural way to contrast with Sharpay’s louder, more eye-catching and implicitly unpleasant outfits. Sharpay is not the bad guy because she’s girly, but she’s maybe more girly because she’s the bad guy.
Because caring about your appearance is BAD, that’s a character trait that we associate with Bad Characters, and most especially Bad Women Characters. Sharpay and Regina care so much about their looks because they’re shallow, and that means they’ve unpleasant.
All teenage girls are told, one way or another, that they should care about their looks and put effort into being attractive. But in the stories about teen girls, the only ones visibly caring about their looks are the bitches.
If a Nice Girl ™ wants to make an effort to look good she better have an excuse, like prom or a date or finding out she’s a princess.
Princess Diaries makes such a good point about this, actually. Mia is supposed to be attractive, because she’s the protagonist, but she also can’t do it herself, because that will make her look like just another Vapid Teen Girl. So she gets a makeover handed to her. Pretty is something that Just Happens to nice girls, because if you work at it you’re a bitch.
(Not to mention pretty isn’t compatible with frizzy hair or glasses.)
God, fucking Harry Potter isn’t exempt from this. Hermione gets contrasted with Lavender and it’s so obvious that Lavender is Wrong, because she’s goofy and sentimental and clingy and girly girly girly, in sharp contrast with Hermione “I only do my hair for the Yule Ball, I’ve got shit to do” Granger over here. And that’s not shitting on Hermione! It’s just clear that there’s a very particular sort of teenage girl we’re supposed to like in HP and she doesn’t care about Girl Things.
Even Sky High, the greatest teen movie of all time, falls into this. The women on the good guys’ side are Layla – soft femme, a little tomboyish, has strong opinions – and Magenta – vaguely punkish, v snarky – neither of whom do feminity “right”.
On the bad side there’s Penny, who’s a LITERAL evil cheerleader hivemind, and Gwen, who’s both the most popular girl in school and the actual super villain behind everything. These things are not coincidences.
Tbh as a parent I didn’t realise the baggage about this I carried until my kid got into MLP and I watched it with them and encountered the character of Rarity
She’s a character who is extremely feminine but her positive character trait is generosity she wants everyone she encounters to look as good as they can because she knows looking your best can make you feel good and she wants to share it
And for the first time I saw fashion and make up and all that stuff as self expression and artistry and something that, like almost all things, can be good or bad depending on the person
and I was and am really fucking ashamed that it took a fucking children’s cartoon about magical ponies to help me recognise that
This trope needs to die.
Give me more characters who are stereotypically girly and kind and generous and soft and strong and REAL
“[Katniss]
is supposed to be attractive, because she’s the protagonist, but she
also can’t do it herself, because that will make her look like just
another Vapid Teen Girl. So she gets a makeover handed to her. Pretty is
something that Just Happens to nice girls ”
wonder how many other teenage girl protagonist we can swap that name for
IVE BEEN SAYING THIS FOR FUCKING YEARS
princess amber from sofia the first is also a Good Girl with girly interests!
yeah she starts out mean but thats just in the movie, in the show she’s considered a lil vapid but altogether a kind and loving older sister. she even becomes heir to the throne, as diplomacy is one of the many aspects that lend well to her ‘girly’ interests.
webby vanderquack isnt what you’d call a girly girl but she doesnt outright reject femininity (her favourite colour is pink and she loves glitter and seems to be more of a learned tomboy than out of rejecting girly shit)
fancy nancy is the latest disney channel junior series about a girl who loves ‘fancy’ things, aka wearing lots of sparkly shit and having tea parties, and sharing the joy of those things with people who dont necessarily get it
the loud house features all manner of feminine expression, (10 female leads after all) and all of them save for perhaps lynn and lana have girly interests outside their obvious gimmick
Is part of the appeal of Legally Blonde that the heroine is hyper-feminine, smart and a kind person (and her knowledge of hair-care ultimately helps her catch the real murderer?)
the notion that a larger phallus is more masculine* is part of the entire patriarchal western construction of gender and designation of physical sex. It’s the reason that doctors mutilate intersex babies, and it’s a huge part of transphobia and violence against trans people. If you are a feminist and you insult people by talking about how small their dick is, you are fighting against your own cause.
*or really that any characteristic of the genitals but we’re talking about a particular issue right now
Been seeing jokes about certain egotistical scorn-worthy politicians again lately, so here’s another reminder. No matter who you’re targeting with the comments, they’re not the ones you’re harming—just like jokes about homophobes being secretly gay, or drawing/photoshopping transphobes in drag.
and now it’s going around again because of that “big dick energy” meme
I didn’t know this, but if people from other countries visits Northern Europe/Scandinavia for too long they can’t drink the water in their home countries.
This is a problem Northern Europeans and Scandinavians always have when going on vacations to pretty much anywhere else because our water has been filtered to hell and back, but I foolishly believed that if you grew up with less filtered water you’d be able to drink it forever. Not so. My housemate told me her dad’s wife had to learn that the hard way when she went to visit some family in Colombia a year after moving to Denmark. She was sick for days.
But yeah, convential wisdom around here says that you shouldn’t drink water from a tap if you go any further south than Germany. I had to drink bottled water when I lived in England for christs sake because it had too much chlorine in it. We would be fucked if the post-apocalyptic scenario happened tomorrow.
This is anecdata, but I know of two personal acquaintances
who *died* from illnesses picked up while visiting their/their family’s
country of origin; possibly due to their having lost any resistance to it from
years of living in Canada.
Oh man. Sleepless in Seattle. A BLAST FROM THE PAST.
I don’t know how old you are so I don’t know if you were around for Sleepless in Seattle in the cinemas in 1993 but it was, culturally, a massive hit. It was one of those movies you had to see just so that you’d get the jokes on late night television.
I haven’t seen it since probably the late 90s, and I’m sure it hasn’t aged well. But I think one of the reasons it was so popular, especially among women, was exactly the things you’re talking about. Because all you would need to do is swap the pronouns for this to be almost any other romcom like…ever.
Tom Hanks doesn’t want any of what is happening to be happening. It’s not that he’s not doing anything; he’s trying to raise his child and recover from a shattering loss, he’s doing internal work, emotional work. But he is the passive half of the main romantic couple for the majority of the film. He doesn’t want to talk to a radio therapist about his dead wife, he FOR SURE doesn’t want the national attention it brings him, he doesn’t want a new relationship, he just wants to sulk on his houseboat forever. In the rain.
Meg Ryan is the aggressor, which is very rarely ever the woman’s role in these films. She’s the one who follows him around, who imperils her relationships for him, who JUST KNOWS that if she can convince him, he’ll be hers forever. For a woman to be in that role TODAY, let alone 25 years ago, is generally 100% unacceptable to Hollywood – you only see women doing what she does in horror films or as the “funny” B-story about the pathetic man-hungry best friend.
But Sleepless in Seattle pulled it off – they put the woman in the male role. And that was so rare, and done so charmingly, that people lost their shit over it without even realizing that was why.
Now, don’t get me wrong, Sleepless In Seattle is not a work of feminist grace nor is it necessarily a depiction of a healthier relationship than any other romcom. Romantic comedies very rarely give us healthy relationships, so I’m not saying like, it’s a great movie. But at the very least it took the same unhealthy tropes Hollywood has been recirculating since film was invented and did something interesting with them without turning into Fatal Attraction.
Sam, are you safe? Any news on this? Anywhere near you?
Jesus Christ, fucking Chicago cops, my hand to god.
No, this is southeast of me, so I’m not near it (streets are numbered in order north to south, so think of me as being around 1st street, while this is at 71st). It’s only a mile or two from where I work but also a world away, in terms of the bullshit where cops shoot people in the back. What the fuck.
Petition to sit down all the people who make coma theories about Adventure Time and tell them “listen, this fucking show is about the last human living in a post-apocalyptic world where deadly magic has been reawakened following a global thermonuclear war that wiped out the rest of the human species, how much fucking darker do you want it to be”
Even though I thought my first Creative Writing professor was kind of a douche, he made a good point about this. One of our first assignments was to write in this eerie, otherworldly style (we were mimicking a specific author whose name escapes me), so we had to write about eerie otherworldly things happening. It’s no exaggeration to say that more than half the class had a “big reveal” where we find out that the story’s strange events and themes are all in the mind of some person in an insane asylum, or someone having a drug trip.
My professor said something like, “you just successfully wrote a world that feels separate from our own, but got frightened last minute and shoe-horned in normalcy. You showed that you were afraid to commit to something different and interesting.” Though I’m typically a contrarian and a piece of garbage, I am inclined to agree with my professor. I feel like people who write coma theories and the like are afraid to accept that the world of the story is separate from our own. They like everything wrapped up in this crazy little realism box where nothing out of the ordinary happens in fiction.
you win the Best Addition to a Post prize
Thank you 🙂
This pretty well hits the nail on the head as to why I generally hate coma/dream theories and people who think they’re so fucking deep for coming up with it. In my book it’s LAZY, plain and simple.
I think the only times I can think of where “It was all a dream” really works are in pieces like Over the Garden Wall, Ink, Coraline, and Mirrormask. In all of those, the characters ‘wake up’ again in their ‘normal’ world, but there’s a very strong implication that the dream world is as real, if not more so, than the ‘real’ world, and the things they did in the dream world had a very direct impact on the waking world– not in an “I’m gonna be a better person” sense, but literally who lives and who dies at the end of the story.
Notably, in most of those, it’s stated flat-out within the first couple of minutes that the character in question is dreaming. It’s not a big reveal, it’s a fundamental detail of the setting.
If you’re gonna do a dreamworld, actually commit to doing a dreamworld.
Mooncustafer 