These aren't love letters, they're classical exercises!

I'm getting so sick of major female characters in historical media being incredibly feisty, outspoken and public defenders of women's rights with little to no realistic repercussions. Yes it feels like pandering, yes it's unrealistic and takes me out of the story, yes the dialogue almost always rings false - but beyond all that I think it does such a disservice to the women who lived during those periods. I'm not embarrassed of the women in history who didn't use every chance they had to Stick It To The Man. I'm not ashamed of women who were resigned to or enjoyed their lot in life. They weren't letting the side down by not having and representing modern gender ideals. It says a lot about how you view average ordinary women if the idea of one of your main characters behaving like one makes them seem lame and uninteresting to you.

I'm really tired of the "woman sad about her arranged marriage" trope, especially if that woman is royalty.

I am sure that many women across time were sad about their arranged marriages, but I'm sure a lot of others were excited, ambivalent, or resigned. Again, especially if you were royalty! I am sure if you were born a princess, you were trained from birth that your whole purpose in life was to marry someone important to solidify the power of the person on the throne. And honestly, it's an important job, if it wasn't, they wouldn't have tried so hard to do it.

That woman isn't just marrying another king or prince, she's going to be an ambassador of her country. She's supposed to be there promoting good relations. She isn't just a woman being sold off, she has a job! Also, if she is marrying the reigning monarch (or the heir), she may well end up running the country if the king is off at war or he dies when the heir is really young. That happened a lot throughout history! (or maybe she marries the third son and helps him find his way to the throne. Good for her)

It just feels like a modern sentiment being projected back. In Romeo and Juliet, when Juliet's mother first brings up marrying her to Paris, Juliet's basically cool with it and says she'll try to like him. She would have known this was going to happen because that is what rich women do, they marry into another family so their two families can be buddies. What else would she even be expecting?

It wouldn't bother me so much except that it's all we see! Give me a story about a woman who is like, "Cool, I shall give it my all!" Or she's like rolling up her sleeves and planning how she's going to get the court on her side and rule France, power behind the throne style (these women are mostly portrayed as villains, but who is to say the king would do a better job?). And also, have a little faith in women's fathers? You think men in the past didn't occasionally consider the happiness of their daughters? Not even a little bit?

I always love young Alex🥹 your endless ambition

Reblog for a bigger sample size.

Say in the tags what you voted for and if you live in or outside of the US

Okay, this is pretty incredible. A 3D artist, consulting scholars and archaeologists, worked for a year and a half in Blender to create a reconstruction of pre-Columbian Tenochtitlán, complete with the surrounding landscape. It’s staggeringly beautiful, and—at least to me—gives a wonderful impression of the city as a place where people worked and lived and worshiped

HOLY SHIT CLICK THROUGH THIS IS INCREDIBLE

This is also a bit of revisionist history that I can’t blame people for, since the Bush administration was never upfront about their strategy. While absolutely some level of intervention was justified enough (probably most globally supported war in human history?) “trying to fix the country” wasn’t on our radar so much. We did it more in order have overwhelming firepower shock-and-awe terrorists worldwide. This quote during the planning stages kindof gets at it:

Note the idea of the just targeted strikes is specifically mentioned here, and then dismissed - not because it would be inhumane, but because it would not render the war in Afghanistan as *intimidating *enough. America needed to do more to show strength.

Which is why the opening conversations, right in September 2001, envisioned invasions of multiple countries. I love this memo in particular during that month by Rumsfeld:

Strike Iraq and *South America* specifically because they are not Al-Qaida in order to Send A Message. Afghanistan’s full-occupation was not driven by a “desire to help”, in fact we know the goals, Rumsfeld lays them out explicitly before the war:

You start to see how occupation was necessary - how else to send that message - but also unimportant on any metric outside of ending terorrist safe havens. Democracy and well-being is never mentioned.

In fact, far from having a reconstruction plan, the US was trying to keep as few ground troops in Afghanistan as possible, in order to demonstrate a new, technological mode of warfare that would make such commitments obsolete, permitting the multi-front war the Bush Admin was pursuing. And by 2002 reconstruction in Afghanistan was on the backburner, as we geared up for operations in Iraq. 

I think its underappreciated how bungled the occupation of Afghanistan was for the first almost decade. The Taliban took over 5 years to recover, and US forces allowed it to happen, because reconstruction had been allocated such a low priority that the US policy making apparatus barely noticed it happening, distracted and overstretched in Iraq as it was.

I don’t want to paint it as so black-and-white - Bush himself envisioned ‘democratic regime change’ as a goal. But he was probably the only one in his staff who did, it didn’t trickle down until well after the wars were underway and the consequences of that lack of planning were made manifest.

Realizing your attempt to brutalize the population of Afghanistan and Iraq in a display of your overwhelming might in order to scare far-flung dictatorial regimes into onboarding to your New World Order has gone tits-up and you need to actually spend resources on building a stable government because if you don’t everything is going to crumble to dust around you, and then failing absolutely at doing that for two decades, maybe goes a little bit beyond “well we tried our best” on the moral front.

(h/t Scholar’s Stage for most of these quotes)

[some other states] indeed! taking the long route to Tehran via South America (!) and South East Asia (???)

personally, i think we should stop having stupid corset discourse on this website and talk more about fashion from the ancient minoan civilization

Can’t NOT include the Minoan snake goddess with this line up!

suppressing unbecoming fantasies of making everyone who blithely talks like this spend a couple seasons spinning/weaving all their family's clothing and chopping their own firewood

Good news: it’s growing season right now so you only need to work in the fields for a few hours a week, leaving plenty of time for you to spend hours doing the tasks that now take us minutes

Bad news: harvest season is coming soon and you and the spouse are both about to work 60 hour weeks bent over in the dirt, plus your “chores”

Uhmm, unless harvest season worked significantly different than in modern times, we are talking about a free weeks, in the low single digits, per year.

And the tasks that takes now minutes... Well, if you take a family with kids, yeah, those tasks usually take easily 5-6 hours per day, at least. Letting you with a significantly shorter leisure time than what was normal in any pre-industrial society.

And that without even start considering that lots of those tasks were doing communally, so on one side, some of those wouldn't even need to be done by you more than a handful of times per month, and others were social activities.

So yeah, in the scientific advancements we are gold, but in the labor distribution... Yeah, no, what we have now is incredibly bad.

Harvest season did work differently in the past than it does now! That's the point! It is because of modern technology that it now takes far less time than it once did, as is the case with virtually every other aspect of our lives! This romantic idea that the past was filled with tons of free leisure time and a good quality of life until industrialization messed everything up by inventing the traction engine is complete nonsense.

It’s worth noting there are other kinds of labor besides just food production that are vital to survival. The labor necessary to keep people clothed alone in ancient and medieval Europe was tremendous. Cf. Bret Devereaux:

So until the spinning wheel was invented and spread to Europe in ca. the 13th century, near the end of the Middle Ages, clothing alone (not food, not shelter, not harvesting fuel for a fire) consumed a massive amount of labor, and the nature of this labor substantially shaped gender relations. Because, as Devereaux points out elsewhere, spinning thread is one of the few kinds of labor you can do while also caring for and nursing children--thus, the needs of keeping a family clothed and children cared for also contributed to keeping women at home and isolated from public life. They had to be spinning thread constantly, and when not spinning thread, weaving, sewing, mending, and doing other kinds of labor. This would keep their families in one or two sets of clothing each.

By comparison, being able to walk into a store, fork over a small amount of cash, and leave with a complete outfit--or even multiple outfits--is a phenomenal degree of luxury that makes it extremely difficult to appreciate just how much damn work used to have to go into making clothes. The transition between the two was gradual--the spinning wheel spreading to Europe helped a lot, but it’s not a coincidence that the Industrial Revolution kicked off with the mechanization of textile production in Britain. Premodern textile production took a huge quantity of human labor! Women specifically being freed from that labor was a huge contributor to subsequent developments like women’s suffrage and the growth of feminism.

Civilization was not developed to produce food for people. It is specifically the organizational processes of limiting access to abundance as a means of social and ecological hegemonic dominance. Hope this helps :)

This serves fairly well as an example with the errors common in discussion of more modern technology, by showing them at their root, where they are the most clearly wrong. It is an idealist error, one which almost directly reverses cause and effect.

In reality, of course, the development of agriculture *did* facilitate social control - precisely *because* it produced food for people better than the previous mode of production did. The specific fact that agriculture produced food more reliably than hunter-gathering is why it afforded a measure of social control. If it did not, then it would not afford any social control, as it could simply be ignored - if there really *was* abundant food, then a new method of producing food would not be socially relevant. Social power does not spring out of thin air, it is not simply the result of Greedy People. It can only be brought about by material imbalance. New modes of production, new technologies, can create social power - but only insofar as they are materially useful enough to grant those who control them social power.

This is the key point that been a consistent issue with opponents of historical materialism - the material basis of specific social systems is in the fact that, despite resigning their oppressed classes to worse *relative* lives, they do improve their *objective* lives. The conflation of relative social standing with objective prosperity leads to absurd positions, like the idea that hunter-gatherer production was relaxed and abundant, or that subsistence farming was some cottagecore fantasy, or a hundred misunderstandings of what 'progressive' implies in a historical sense. It also leads to luddism; to attempts to fight against new technologies themselves due to their facilitation of deepening exploitation, while ignoring the ways they objectively improve standards of living. Fundamentally: any political program that *explicitly aims to reduce the objective standards of living of the people* is working against the people's interests, and will not receive their support. This is as true of luddism as it is primitivism, accelerationism, or any other 'some of you may die, but that's a risk that I am willing to take' tendency.

Fundamentally, historical materialism is the analytical framework that corresponds to real-world practice - it is the only one that actually *works*. And historical materialism is clear - it is methods of production that principally lead to the development of social systems, not the reverse. I'd say it's putting the cart before the horse, but maybe that's too high-tech.

This hairy lady is supposed to be Mary Magdalene. In the 15th and 16th centuries, Mary Magdalene was frequently depicted covered in body hair. You probably have Questions about this, starting with "why" and ending with "wtf". We'll try our best to answer them.

Posts that I'm cranky about but am not going to hunt down to argue with specifically, #381whatevernumber: that stupid post about Lol There Were No Things To Get Overstimulated About Before Capitalism.

I realize the person making that post is probably young, likely ignorant of literally every part of history they didn't learn in high school, and also lacks imagination, but like. "Lol none of the things that overwhelm me existed before modern times" like ok honey, there's a SLIM chance this is true, but first off I doubt it and second off ok you're statistically unusual because here are some Nearly Guaranteed Autistic Hells of the pre-industrial age:

Let me add, for those among us who are also Animal Autistics who tend to imagine that we would simply find a social place that lets us spend nearly all our time around Insert Nonhuman Species Here: okay, let's assume that you

You get attached to specific individuals? Oooh, that's gonna be hard when it comes time to eat them (most livestock) or they can't continue to earn their keep via working (draft animals like horses) and your small community can't afford to keep them fed through the winter. If you're a dogs autistic, everything there about coercive techniques for child rearing also goes for dog management, and if you're lucky enough to find a niche where you're primarily dealing with dogs, have fun managing and controlling large scale pack dynamics without much in the way of behavioral tools or even any way to control and manage your environment. If you're doing the bulk of the animal handling, you also almost certainly don't get to make the decisions about which individuals get to stay and which ones get dispersed as gifts or traded on--that kind of thing goes to people with social authority, and if you want to have a say you'd better cultivate a connection to the local human hierarchy.

Also, if you are working very closely with animals, congratulations! You have even less control over the Textures you get to be immersed in than someone doing any other kinds of tasks. Hope you like whatever is cheap, easily grown, and readily available for animal bedding; in Europe, it's likely to be rough straw, and everywhere it's generally the stuff that your allistic human counterparts think is uncomfortable or itchy. Speaking of itchy, if you're an Animals Specialist, better not mind itching: you are now the first point of call for any and all zoonotic diseases from your species of focus, and that means you are probably rather famously crawling with ectoparasites even above what your counterparts in other corners of society are dealing with.

Yes this. Population control for dogs and cats in "the old days" was literally drowning excess litters.

not that lefties were ever entirely immune to this kind of false society type nostalgia, but for a group that goes hard in on (correctly) criticizing conservatives for an abundance of just world fallacy 'society was better during my childhood' bullshit, there sure are a ton of lefties who really seem to think if you just go back far *enough* (pre-industrial, pre-colonial, pre-capitalism natch, pre-"feudal" whatever they mean by the word, pre-"civilization" whatever they mean by the word) that utopia will be there. Part of me feels like the lefty version is maybe based on environmental anxiety rather than the conservative 'the wrong people have rights' kind, but who knows. It's a fascinating little strain of virulent hypocrisy, but I guess as a species we're all at least a little prone to nostalgia. But seriously, there were things deeply wrong and bad and dangerous and just plain unpleasant at every point and in every human group organization style, and at least in the present we have vaccines, soft warm clothes, and many food options.

The first chapter of The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity by Graebert and Wengrow has a really fascinating deep dive into where the idea of a simple, perfect, pre-"civilization" world where everything was awesome comes from.

While a fascinating and ambitious book with a lot of utility, I also offer a solid caution about that one.

Part of it is, flatly, the ambition: the authors are attempting huge scope over multiple fields and that is extremely risky. Partly is also that it’s clearly written with a popular audience in mind, and this results in a lot of flattening of nuance and a lot of vague summaries of “previous thought” that a) imply consensus where there hasn’t been any for decades and b) strawman a lot of the things they want to counter. (I say this even as someone who agrees with many of the positions they take, to one extent or another).

I also note that while it has this discussion, it also doesn’t actually succeed at failing to contribute to the problem; because a lot of what it (correctly!) wants to do is present a much more likely alternative to the idea that prehistory was a certain way, where all was a Mad Max like hellscape etc, it ends up leaning very hard on “ACTUALLY it was all peaceful coming together—!” And often leaves people with wrong impressions in the other direction.

(as with much of human history the honest answer is: we traded AND made war; we built amazing feats of cooperation and social complexity and alliance and then also often used them to do Kinda Shitty Stuff to stone sets of our neighbours. We are vast and contain both everything good and everything bad about us and have since the eponymous dawn.)

It’s a useful and valuable book! But it’s also, like most works of this kind, imperfect. It’s good as a starting point, but not as a final authority.

I wonder how much of this romanticizing of the past is because we need to think there was some time, any time, that things were good in order to believe it's possible things could *become* good in the future. How much harder is it to imagine actually creating a world that is comfortable to live in if we know we've literally *never* managed it before? Returning to a state that previously existed feels much more reachable than attaining a state that we don't definitively know can be reached at all.

Not that I think history should be misrepresented, but it's at least *understandable* that people would use a falsified version of the past on which to build a hopeful future, if the alternative is having no foundation on which to build at all.

Oh yeah I think that has a LOT to do with the emotional attraction of such things. It's the idea that there exists a Known, or at least Potentially Known, Perfect Ideal State of Humaning and that if we could just get it right - identify what it is and make everyone go back to doing things right! - then everything would be okay.

It gives a very, very nice illusion of the possibility of control, too! It's like a super seductive offer: IF you just manage this One Neat Trick, then everything will be okay!!

But like most times that happens, as far as I can tell, it also does the usual job of actually doing the opposite: people then obsessively chase or frame things in reference to this One Theoretical Neat Trick and get really obsessed with the Neat Trick that will supposedly fix the world . . . .building this IDEA of the Fixed World that's built on a misunderstanding, a fundamental lie, and as a result tends to collapse, or to have unexpected areas of serious harm, and then additionally have this absolute FIXATION on ignoring those harms, or explaining why they're not REALLY harms, why people are only harmed that way if there's something WRONG with them, because it threatens that Ideal and if the Ideal is false then Everything is Terrible . . . .etc.

So yes, absolutely: it is a very comforting seductive fantasy, as witness its prevalence. And it's super easy to fall into if/when you stop thinking (or never really started thinking) of the people who came before us as complex, twisty, tangled up people Just Like Us and turn it into a Narrative that has neat lessons and structure.

And THAT'S really easy to do when the immediately available generations of people before us are our parents and our grandparents and maybe our great-grandparents, who we are on the one hand often intimately involved with but at the same time who almost certainly have spent our entire lives hiding huge parts of their interiority from us because, well, they were being our parents and our grandparents. So it's very EASY for them to be simplified, in our minds, and to become people who have Stories that have Narrative, instead of being aware that they lived lives that were just as random and narratively-unbalanced and unsatisfying and REAL as our own.

And then you use the narrative to tell the story that makes most sense to you (emotionally) . . . and bob's your uncle.

But by this point in history we also have alllllllllll kinds of examples of why that eventually leads to Bad Shit. And while I do absolutely grasp that it can be a new skill to learn, I also don't think you need that Perfect Ideal Past to have hope to build something better than we currently have. We as a species have created New Things that Never Existed Before all the time - often by looking around at things that are, currently, or even at things that were and worked but can be adapted or improved.

Instead of going "the TRUE happiness of humans requires us all living in connected and integrated communes" or "the TRUE actualization of humans means INDEPENDENCE and INDIVIDUAL ACTUALIZATION!!!" we can stop and do things like go, okay huh. So it seems to turn out that humans both have this genuine need to be in human connection and social integration, but ALSO we are super complicated and our needs often don't MATCH and there's huge variation on when that integration/connection becomes harmful and coercive vs when people start feeling attenuated and isolated, so maybe we should treat this as a complex issue that requires thought and care to balance up, and may end up with a variety of solutions across the board, for the variety of needs."

And so on. And I think tbh when we've done that, it's tended to work better. And obviously I won't manage to reach or convince Everyone of these things, but I can harp on it a lot and hope to have SOME reach to manage it. XD

cr: 百变花央

I’m out here buying tshirts and pants like a chump while some people are just wearing the world’s best rectangles

Never underestimate a big rectangle and a belt.

I… wow. I need to show my wife

— Laura Mills (The Golden Orchid)

I think a some of the confusion in regards to 18th century sexuality labels comes from a misunderstanding of the linguistics. While its true that homosexual is something that you are and sodomy is something that you do, this is a sort of odd comparison as sodomite is something that you are. Molly, tommy, sapphist, lesbian, tribade are all things that you are. It would be more accurate to compare homosexuality to sodomy. Homosexuality is something you experience something thats innate while sodomy is something you do. This is the key distinction with how sexuality was labeled in the 18th century in comparison to how its labeled now. Our labels are attraction based while 18th century labels were action based. But this myth that sodomy was just an action and that it didn’t define you in society eyes is inaccurate. The court had no problem labelling you a sodomite as they sentenced you to death.

Foucault famously wrote:

(Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality)

Foucault dates this shift to 1870. Foucault is objectively wrong. In fact in 1734 Dutch sodomites were described as “hermaphrodites in their minds”. (Rictor Norton, A Critique of Social Constructionism and Postmodern Queer Theory)  The effeminate Lord Hervey was perceived by contemporaries as being of a “Third Sex”. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu observed that the world “consists of men, women, and Harveys”. (Rictor Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House, p146) And in 1750 George Arnaud characterises “τριβzδεσ” (τριβάδες I assume?) such as Sappho and Bassa in Martial’s epigram as a “species” of “hermaphrodites” who could pass “for virtuous for some time, because she had never ventured her chastity with the men.” (A Dissertation on Hermaphrodites, p18)

Sodomites and tribades were conceptualised as “hermaphrodites in their minds” a “Third Sex” and a “species” more than a 100 years before the coining of the word homosexual.

Just because the 18th century labels were action based rather than attraction based doesn’t mean that 18th century people didn’t understand sexual attraction. When Church commented that Alexander Hamilton had “weaknesses not confined to the female sex” he was implying that Hamilton was sexually attracted to both men and women. (Charles Adams to John Adams, 31 January 1799) When Madame d’Orleans said of the men at the court of Louis XIV “some prefer women, some like both men and women, some prefer men,” is she not talking of sexual attraction? She even seemingly acknowledges asexuality commenting that “some have little interest in sex at all”. (Rictor Norton, A Critique of Social Constructionism and Postmodern Queer Theory)

And there are examples of pre-1870 queer people themselves understanding their sexuality as something innate, inborn and natural to them. Gerrit van Amerongen stated at his 1776 sodomy trial that men who had sex with men were “born with it and they can be as amorous to each other as man and wife can be.” Anne Lister in 1823 told her female lover “my conduct & feelings being surely natural to me inasmuch as they were not taught, not fictitious but instinctive”. (Anna Clark, The Chevalier d’Eon, Rousseau, and New Ideas of Gender, Sex and the Self in the Late Eighteenth Century) And the Chevalière d’Eon in 1771 talks of “the natural lack of passion in my temperament, which has prevented my engaging in amorous intrigues”. (D’Eon to the Comte de Broglie, 7 May 1771. Translated by Alfred Rieu, D'Eon de Beaumont, His Life and Times, p141)

Sorry but my view on applying labels to historical queer people that it's still incredibly goddamn stupid to act like terms such as 'asexual' are concepts which are so widespread and integral to modern day people that we actively need to challenge our assumption that people like that exist instead of THE EXACT OPPOSITE.

Also 'people aren't queer, acts are queer' is ALSO a modern-day understanding of queerness which was literally the most popular understanding in the late 20th century and still to this day in many conservative communities now. So when are we supposed to question our innate assumption of this framework, as fed to us (often deliberately, for political purposes) by authorities and religious figures since we were young?

Like sorry but anyone who thinks that dropping labels like 'homosexual' will somehow lead to a freer, more widely accepting and tolerant framework NEEDS to spend ten minutes talking to a fundamentalist Christian who will 100% agree that those terms are dangerously harmful because there exist only 'normal people' and 'unfortunates corrupted by degenerate sexual acts.'

Like nah sometimes the labels exist not to constrain people's identities but to say 'hey here is an equally valid sort of way people might theoretically be. There are probably many more!'