A High Functioning Fangirl

Soldier, Poet, King

I mean it’s kinda the real life tragedy of love exaggerated, innit? Irl people die young or one person dies old and another person dies even older. At the end of it all someone gets left behind and has to learn how to move on after that. And for the one who dies you know you’re leaving them behind. You know you’re dooming them to moving on and if you believe in an afterlife god only knows how long you’ll be waiting for them on the other side. The tragedy of the immortal loving the mortal takes those feelings we all know about and rips your heart out about it.

Feminist fantasy is funny sometimes in how much it wants to shit on femininity for no goddamned reason. Like the whole “skirts are tools of the patriarchy made to cripple women into immobility, breeches are much better” thing.

(Let’s get it straight: Most societies over history have defaulted to skirts for everyone because you don’t have to take anything off to relieve yourself, you just have to squat down or lift your skirts and go. The main advantage of bifurcated garments is they make it easier to ride horses. But Western men wear pants so women wearing pants has become ~the universal symbol of gender equality~)

The book I’m reading literally just had its medievalesque heroine declare that peasant women wear breeches to work in the field because “You can’t swing a scythe in a skirt!”

Hm yes story checks out

peasant women definitely never did farm labour in skirts

skirts definitely mean you’re weak and fragile and can’t accomplish anything

skirts are definitely bad and will keep you from truly living life

no skirts for anyone, that’s definitely the moral of the story here

Now, a skirt that’s too long will be harder to work in–skirts brushing the floor may look elegant, but is also a tripping hazard–but that is not a problem with skirts in general, it’s a problem with that particular skirt not being suited to being worked in. Skirts are very practical. You can hike them up if you’re hot or need more freedom to maneuver (this is called “girding your loins”). If you need to carry something, you can lift up your hem and make a pouch just like the person in yellow in the bottom picture above. If you need to handle something hot, a skirt generally has enough material you can hold it out from your body to use as a hot pad. (Tight skirts were only used by people who didn’t need to work/move until the invention of elastic fabric.)

Long skirts were markers of class almost as much as gender. Both men and women in the European middle ages wore extravagantly long garments to indicate both “I’m so rich I can afford THIS MUCH fabric” and “I don’t walk in the mud, I pay servants to do that for me.”

Skirt hiking: Definitely a Thing. (Janet’s tied her kirtle green/above the knee and not below…)

Love this post, and want to add: another example of the “empowerment means shitting on feminity” is the bizarro way that this genre attacks basic survival skills like cooking and sewing as pointless, inferior or mutually exclusive with masculine pursuits (like your lady knight should probably know how to cook for herself and sew her own wounds and patch her clothes while she’s on her quest through the North to rescue her boyfriend, or this happy couple is in for a world of hurt!)

Or to quote one of my all favorite posts, “fuck women’s contribution to our survival.”

Historically, skirts have been the garment of choice for almost every culture, gender and class. Breeches, or pants, were created specifically for riding horses.

Meanwhile, men wearing skirts.

*bangs gavel* NEEDS MOAR SKIRT

(Seriously, the notes on this post are a goldmine for people mentioning their cultures where men wear skirts. I couldn’t fit them all in. This is missing toooons of cultures from every part of the globe, especially Asia, Africa, and the Americas.)

Ancient Rome

Modern Morocco

Medieval Europe

Traditional Saudi Arabia

16th century Russia

Traditional Papua New Guinea

16th century Turkey

Modern India

i deliver propane.  this means driving a large truck, then dragging a heavy hose up to one hundred and fifty feet through people’s yards, usually in deep snow and severe cold.  i was the first woman my company ever hired.

and when i showed up for work in a skirt, all the men went BALLISTIC.  they told me i’d trip, i’d get stuck, i’d freeze, i’d quit within the month when i found that i had underestimated how hard the work was.  i asked what they thought women wore to work outside before the mid twentieth century, and they told me “women didn’t work outside then.  they stayed in the house all the time.”  and that’s when i learned that hatred of the skirt is another way of erasing women’s history–if you can pretend that all women were too hobbled by their clothes to even function, you can pretend that they never contributed jack shit to society.

anyway i’ve been doing this job in a skirt for three years now, and all the men should be jealous of my complete range of movement and infinite layering potential.

Another thing to keep in mind is that often a garment can be cumbersome if you’re not used to it, but no problem at all if you’ve worn it everyday for years and years.

Of course people who rarely/never wear skirts are going to have a harder time working in them than people who wear them every day! I wear shirts with big puffy sleeves everyday, and I never have any trouble with them, but someone who’s used to t shirts probably would.

I have to strongly disagree with the assertion that bifurcated garments are only useful for riding horses though. Plenty of cultures wore some form of pants, wether they had horses or not. Often you’ll see bifurcated garments with skirts layered on top of them.

Try and tell me that traditional Inuit women’s clothing includes trousers because they were riding horses they didn’t have and not because it’s sometimes -40 there. Skirts without anything underneath are very practical in some parts of the world, but in others you would quite literally freeze your junk off.

Bifurcated garments are useful for keeping cold drafts out! Or for keeping bugs from biting you, or just showing off your legs! And probably good for keeping sand out too, but I’ve never encountered a sand storm. None of this goes against all the other stuff about skirts being practical of course, but you can make a pro-skirt post without minimizing the usefulness or ubiquity of bifurcated things.

I wear below-knee skirts and dresses exclusively* and have for a number of years. The one thing I have to say about What People Say About Skirts is:

When someone tells you that you “can’t do X in a skirt”, they are wrong.

Specifically, they are leaving out some critical modifiers. It’s not true that you physically cannot do various things - ride horse, climb tree, run hard - in a loose skirt such as normal people have historically worn. What they may not be aware that they mean is: you cannot do those things in a socially acceptable fashion, which generally means without a chance of anyone seeing your underwear/lack of underwear. If you are in serious danger, or are alone, or simply choose not to care about this, I promise you can do those things just fine.

(Personally, in my life I find that I can also shovel snow in a skirt, because my scandinavian heritage makes me get warm VERY fast when I’m exercising. Obviously snow is not Super Cold Weather, but: you can do it. It will kind of suck if it goes over the tops of your shoes, though. Get good shoes.)

*It’s not a religion thing or anything, I just hate shopping for pants and wearing pants that don’t fit right or have bad texture so much that I quit forever. If it sucks, hit the bricks!

This is about skirts, but I want to add another thing to the truly EXCELLENT “if you can pretend women were too hobbled by their clothes” thing above.

I run a corseting panel at anime conventions. I always start it with my feet up on the table, chatting with the audience until start time. Then I say “so, who believes I’m corseted right now?” WITHOUT FAIL the people who raise their hands are all veteran cosplayers, often wearing a corset of their own. Then I say “you’re right, I am. How many of you believe I’m tightlaced?”

The hands go down. My shirt comes off. I turn around to show them my laces and tell them tightlacing is defined as a waist reduction of over 4”, and I’m at slightly over 6”.

Then I turn back around and say “also, I’ve pushed a stalled car across eight lanes of intersection like this” and you should see the faces. They’re gobsmacked. They’re HOOKED. They never quite know what to say after that revelation. I never bother telling them I wasn’t even breathing hard because I know they wouldn’t believe me.

Women were not nearly as hobbled by their clothing as you think.

not to mention that corsets are actually incredibly helpful if you’re a farmer, or you’re someone who has to be on their hands and knees a lot. they provide excellent back support. the history writer Ruth Goodman has written a lot about it. also, if you genuinely believe no one can do work in a skirt, watch literally any history re-enactors with women. you’ll see the kind of freedom of movement a skirt offers.

I was once asked to include a literal “takes off her corset and discovers freedom” scene*, and I should have known right then that the editor and I were going to disagree on feminism, but, ever the optimist, I wrote a heroine whose major contribution to the rebellion was sewing the uniforms (while wearing a corset). I was asked to make her “more feminist”. I explained the facts and functions. The editor didn’t give a flying eff, and wouldn’t budge on their preconceived notions. The book got canceled. I regret nothing.

*i did include a “switches to working stays and realizes that she can have support because SOME PEOPLE NEED A BRA and going from years of tight lacing to nothing is Not Comfortable” scene to hit the emotional beat

On the topic of how garments are designed to let people pee, women’s skirts absolutely just let you squat down where you are. But trousers for men were originally two separate legs tied onto your belt, with an open crotch. Genitals were covered with the undershirt and the skirt of the tunic, both of which could be raised so the man could pee standing up. It’s only recently that trousers have become one garment rather than two separate legs - which is why you have ‘a pair of trousers’ and not ‘a trouser.’

amvs hard all you 2012 amv warriors are so strong

Actually I'm an editing god

Yo I feel like the idea that the only historical women who counted are the ones who defied society and took on the traditionally male roles is… not actually that feminist. It IS important that women throughout history were warriors and strategists and politicians and businesswomen, but so many of us were “lowly” weavers and bakers and wives and mothers and I feel like dismissing THOSE roles dismisses so many of our mothers and grandmothers and great-grandmothers and the shit they did to support our civilization with so little thanks or recognition.

YES. This is such an important point. Those ‘girly’ girls doing their embroidery and quilting bees and grass braiding were vital parts of every domestic economy that has ever existed.

This is precisely what chaps my hide so badly about the misuse of the quote “Well-behaved women seldom make history,” because this is precisely what the author was actually trying to say.

Laurel Thatcher Ulrich is a domestic historian who developed new methodologies to study well-behaved women because they were

1) so vital, and

2) their lives were rarely recorded in the usual old sources.

“Hoping for an eternal crown, they never asked to be remembered on earth. And they haven’t been. Well-behaved women seldom make history; against Antinomians and witches, these pious matrons have had little chance at all. Most historians, considering the domestic by definition irrelevant, have simply assumed the pervasiveness of similar attitudes in the seventeenth century.”

Original article: “Vertuous Women Found: New England Ministerial Literature, 1668-1735” (pdf download from Harvard)

If you didn’t know: Abagail Adams (John Adams’ wife) led a very successful effort to fund the American Revolution. How did she and her tiny army of women do it?

They made lace, and sold it to the aristocrats. Real lace (the stuff you see on old outfits in museums, not the machine-made stuff you might be familiar with from today) is stupidly difficult to make, takes a lot of time and skill, and, well:

If you watch this through, you’ll hear her say this is DOMESTIC lace. This is not fancy, this is for household objects. You can imagine what it would take to make some of the elaborate pieces you see on old aristocratic clothing, and see why it was so expensive and valuable. (Incidentally, if you’ve ever heard the music from the musical 1776, in the song where Abagail and John are trading letters and he’s like “ma’am we need saltpeter” and she’s like “dude we need pins,” THIS IS WHAT THEY NEEDED THE PINS FOR. That song was based on real letters between the two.)

And this is all those revolutionary Revolutionary women did, every free moment of every day. They pulled out their pins and their bobbins and they made lace until they couldn’t see straight, and they sold it to revolutionaries and royalists alike, anyone who would pay. Yard upon yard upon yard of lace to earn cash to translate into rations and bullets.

The war was won by a women’s craft. Not even a “vital” women’s craft like cooking or cleaning. It was won by making a luxury item whose entire purpose was to say “look how wealthy I am, I can afford all this lace.”

Lace was not the only source of income for the Revolution. But it was a major one, and it is extremely fair to say it turned the tide.

And until this post, I bet you didn’t know.

If you know Discworld, you know the observations about “ladies who organize”?

That’s not something Pterry made up. That is reality. Ladies Who Organize have been a major driving force of history - usually unremembered b/c everyone remembers the guy who was officially involved and not, eg, his wife who organized a massive letter writing campaign and seven soirées that funded Mr Historical’s entire enterprise.

Ladies Who Organize both started and ended Prohibition, as noted above funded American Independence, and were the ONLY people who got their shit together with regards to eg the 1918 Flu in a lot of cities (Philadelphia is a really great example).

Ladies Who Organize is just ONE area of history where that’s the case. It’s just they did things in mostly socially accepted ways and when they pushed the envelope they did it strategically and tactically, leveraging whatever else they had to offset that.

Now, we get to know about them because they were not only nearly universally literate but MASSIVELY WORKED VIA LETTERS so as we started actually paying attention we had sources. Imagine how many of these we’ve lost because the record ONLY contained the other stuff.

For the record, this is what the phrase “Well-behaved women seldom make history” actually means.

That’s not me just saying that, that’s what the author of the book by that name meant by it:

Person who really wants to be dominated by a strong-armed authoritarian in a snappy uniform, but also they want to keep their kinks ideologically pure, so they split the difference and fantasise about getting their ass beat by the inspector-general of the US Postal Service.

#get spanked by a starfleet officer like the rest of us (via @theragnarokd)

In the previous Tom Cardy post I said “If I could animate I’d do this” but then I remembered that I used to illustrate songs with comics all the time! So please, start the song and read along.

I decided to go with original characters because there are some things being implied here that I don’t feel comfortable implying about Tom and Brian. I was heavily inspired by them though because Tom already looks like pure chaos.

It would for sure have worked better if I had already illustrated High Five and Flirt (With your dad) to really drive home what a pest Tom is in Michael’s life but oh well.

It was a lot of fun to return to a more loose cartoony style and it gave me the confidence I think I needed to start a bigger project.

Insomnia hit hard last night and I fell down a rabbit hole of those super realistic posable animal dolls/stuffed toys. Now I keep thinking about how funny it would be if an instagram influencer bought one of those things and sometimes had it posing in the background of photos as if it was moving around the house and how long it would take for people to catch on that something was wrong with it and eventually it would turn into an inconsequential conspiracy theory that it wasn’t a real animal while others insisted it had to be real because who would do something like that? (Me. I would do that)

These are by JessieWhoolCrafts, villaParadisoC and DollToysWorldShop on Etsy.

Idea for a relaxing 2D scrolling game.

I went to a natural beach with my elderly mom and my chihuahua where we constantly had to traverse small mud slides, climb over or under fallen trees and at times around them where we had to time it to the small waves from the sea to avoid getting wet shoes. Most of the trip my dog could take care of herself by walking under logs we had to climb over but at times we had to pick her up to place her on a recent mud slide at which point she could take it from there or we had to help her down from an edge. A few times I had to pick her up to carry her over a small steam or around a tree so she wouldn’t get wet in the sea. At one point she got a drink of water from a tiny waterfall and regained some energy.

I mean come on. How is a slightly challenging walk down a natural beach on a sunny day with a chubby woman, a tiny dog and an elderly woman where you have to time your way forward to the waves of the beach not perfect for the most relaxing game ever? We even ended at a small traditional hut where we took a rest before driving home. The only game over would be wet shoes.

In Japanese, they don’t say “moon,” they say “tsuki,” which literally translates to “moon,” and I think that’s how language works.

Hey its been at least 9 years anything changed?

nope! all quiet on the linguistic front. i am a girl now though

guess who made a wargame with thirteen thousand seven hundred and ninety-nine unit statblocks

trying to format it but it keeps crashing the word processor

hey uh. thirteen thousand? three zeroes?

seven hundred and ninety-nine yeah

two questions real quick:

hey you know how there's a lot of funko pops

i do, yes

it's here.

I thought this was a bit and

I'm here for this. Incredible.

I keep trying to type up some funny comment about this but I'm simply dumbfounded. Good job on the game design @rathayibacter this rules so much

Assuming my text editor's metrics are accurate, this game is 878 921 words in length. Exactly eight hundred of those words comprise the rules in their entirety; the other 878 121 words are the stat blocks.

you guys are not going to fucking believe who Chilchuck shares an English voice actor with

If people were too mean to you when you were growing up, a newborn animal will materialize inside your brain and it’s so so scared and shivering and it will stay there for years. Decades, even. And whenever you say something kind of weird but true to your heart the animal will tell you “Noo! You can’t say that! If you say that, everyone will hate you!”. The animal means well. It’s so so small and everything is so scary for them and it’s just trying to protect you. But listen to me. Listen to me. Whenever this happens, you can’t do what the animal says. You can’t. If you do, you’ll become as scared as the animal. You have to keep saying weird shit. You have to keep doing things the animal wouldn’t approve of. If you do enough things that scare the animal, maybe one day it’ll go to sleep.

Just the complete opposite of satisfying anime food.

Wait is this true?? We’ve just been actively lied to by anatomical diagrams this whole time?

this is true of pretty much all internal anatomy, because the real situation is sort of like if you stuffed a bunch of water balloons of different shapes, connected by tubes, into a bag, itd be really hard to tell whats going on! so you make things more orderly when you represent them, and the connections and lengths and stuff are correct. like the former image is what you get if you cut it out of someone's body and arrange it neatly (and also, if their system wasnt aberrant somehow, but most people's bodies are aberrant somehow. so what they show you is more of like an average of everyone's weird aberrations)

Reblog to change someone's perception

my ancestors talking about candles in 1424: I wish we could afford but one beeswax candle so that I may see while delivering ministrations to our sick and dying son. I hold him in my arms in the oppressive darkness of our windowless stone hovel knowing if I take him outside the chill will kill him. If I keep him in here I fear I will not remember his face when he departs. Oh woe, the church tithing has left us destitute and miserable beyond all reason.

me talking about candles in 2024: I love the smell but the scent throw on this one sucks! I need to see if Yankee candle has a similar smell, their candles have great throw. Omg. Buy one get one 50% off sale. Yayyyy.