girljanitor:

and sociopathic asshats like Lisa Wade who feel the PRESSING FEMINIST ISSUE is sticking up for mothers who murder their disabled children

NOT DISABLED WOMEN, WHO IF THEY MAKE IT TO ADULTHOOD WITHOUT BEING MURDERED, ENDURE A RATE OF VIOLENCE, RAPE, AND ABUSE THAT IS FUCKING UNREAL.

70%-83% of developmentally disabled women have been, are, or will be raped.

Countless women with disabilities have been, are or will be forcibly sterilized in order to conceal evidence of their current or future rape. INCLUDING SMALL CHILDREN.

Countless women with disabilities are pressured to abort their pregnancies or given misinformation about their ability to have children.

Countless women have been denied basic accessibility tools in order to report their abuse or rape.

Women with disabilities who live in institutions are up to ten times more likely to be abused than women without disabilities.

Shit like this is why Linda Cornelison, a 19-year old woman, was tortured to death by medical staff at the Judge Rotenburg Center, receiving more than 57 applications of “aversives” in the last four hours preceding her death from a perforated ulcer,  such as bruising muscle pinches and ammonia pellets broken directly under her nose. NO ONE WAS HELD RESPONSIBLE FOR HER DEATH.

This misplaced “sympathy” is why children like 3-year-old Amelia Rivera are denied lifesaving organ transplants and doctors fell comfortable telling their parents their lives aren’t worth saving.

“FEMINISTS” LIKE THESE ARE MORE CONCERNED ABOUT SYMPATHY FOR WENDY GARLAND’S MURDERERS THAN HER. More concerned about the two women who let her die covered in her own filth in a room over 100 degrees, where she lay bedridden and without medical attention for more than two years.

The media is more concerned about DOMESTIC ABUSER’S STRESS LEVEL then the fact that they’re BEATING THE SHIT OUT OF THEIR WIVES.

When 87% of women with severe disabilities are beaten by their partners, they are told they should “just leave”.

When young disabled women are burned to death by their mother, Lisa Wade asks, but what about that poor murderer???

And THE FUCKING MEDIA LOVES stories like this one that tell a sympathetic tale of a “poor mother” who drowned her disabled 4-year-old daughter in the bathtub, who has been released and plans to have more children, and has been ruled “not a threat” to children.

Laura Cummings, raped and tortured to death by her mother and other family members, and Lisa Wade would like us to sympathize with these “poor mothers”.

Zahra Baker, a disabled 10-year-old girl, was raped, murdered, dismembered and fed to wild animals, and Elisa Baker, her stepmother, was sentenced to 15-18 years for second degree murder…SHE FACES MORE TIME ON UNRELATED DRUG CHARGES THAN SHE DOES FOR THE MURDER. Her father received a 30-day suspended sentence for unrelated misdemeanors.

Betty Ann Gagnon, 48, lived most of her life on her own until she was beaten to death by her family after spending the previous FIVE YEARS IN A CHICKEN WIRE CAGE AND TENT SMEARED WITH HER OWN FECES. HER FAMILY WAS *NOT* CHARGED WITH MURDER.

THESE ARE NOT ISOLATED EVENTS.

THIS IS SYSTEMATIC VIOLENCE IN A WORLD THAT TELLS PEOPLE IT’S A-OK TO TORTURE, RAPE, AND MURDER DISABLED WOMEN AND ACTIVELY FACILITATES THEIR ABUSE, RAPE, AND MURDER.

“FEMINISTS” WHO DON’T UNDERSTAND THAT PRO-CHOICE WORKS BOTH WAYS

WHERE OPENLY EUGENICIST “FEMINISTS” LIKE THESE ARE HAPPY TO TELL ME I SHOULD NEVER HAVE EXISTED BECAUSE I’M A BURDEN TO WOMEN WHO “COUNT” AS WOMEN.

I AM SILENCED AND SPOKEN OVER

WHY WOULD I SUPPORT A MOVEMENT THAT WOULD BE GLAD TO SEE ME DEAD?

Reblogging for the link round-up. I cannot read all of them at once. It is too triggering. But it is still a very good resource to come back to. Thanks for doing all the work to put this together.

girljanitor:

asukaskerian:

celynbrum:

Historically Authentic Sexism in Fantasy. Let’s Unpack That.

gwydionmisha:

writeroost:

gwydionmisha:

As someone who originally trained as a social historian of the Medieval Period, I have some things to add in support of the main point.  Most people dramatically underestimate the economic importance of Medieval women and their level of agency.  Part of the problem here is when modern people think of medieval people they are imagining the upper end of the nobility and not the rest of society. 

Your average low end farming family could not survive without women’s labour.  Yes, there was gender separation of labour.  Yes, the men did the bulk of the grain farming, outside of peak times like planting and harvest, but unless you were very well off, you generally didn’t live on that.  The women had primary responsibility for the chickens, ducks, or geese the family owned, and thus the eggs, feathers, and meat.  (Egg money is nothing to sneeze at and was often the main source of protein unless you were very well off).  They grew vegetables, and if she was lucky she might sell the excess.  Her hands were always busy, and not just with the tasks you expect like cooking, mending, child care, etc.. As she walked, as she rested, as she went about her day, if her hands would have otherwise been free, she was spinning thread with a hand distaff.  (You can see them tucked in the belts of peasant women in art of the era).  Unless her husband was a weaver, most of that thread was for sale to the folks making clothe as men didn’t spin.  Depending where she lived and the ages of her children, she might have primary responsibility for the families sheep and thus takes part in sheering and carding.  (Sheep were important and there are plenty of court cases of women stealing loose wool or even shearing other people’s sheep.)  She might gather firewood, nuts, fruit, or rushes, again depending on geography.  She might own and harvest fruit trees and thus make things out of that fruit.   She might keep bees and sell honey.  She might make and sell cheese if they had cows, sheep, or goats.  Just as her husband might have part time work as a carpenter or other skilled craft when the fields didn’t need him, she might do piece work for a craftsman or be a brewer of ale, cider, or perry (depending on geography).  Ale doesn’t keep so women in a village took it in turn to brew batches, the water not being potable on it’s own, so everyone needed some form of alcohol they could water down to drink.  The women’s labour and the money she bought in kept the family alive between the pay outs for the men as well as being utterly essential on a day to day survival level.

Something similar goes on in towns and cities.  The husband might be a craftsman or merchant, but trust me, so is his wife and she has the right to carry on the trade after his death.

Also, unless there was a lot of money, goods, lands, and/or titles involved, people generally got a say in who they married.  No really.  Keep in mind that the average age of first marriage for a yeoman was late teens or early twenties (depending when and where), but the average age of first marriage for the working poor was more like 27-29.  The average age of death for men in both those categories was 35.  with women, if you survived your first few child births you might live to see grandchildren.

Do the math there.  Odds are if your father was a small farmer, he’s been dead for some time before you gather enough goods to be marrying a man.  For sure your mother (and grandmother and/or step father if you have them) likely has opinions, but you can have a valid marriage by having sex after saying yes to a proposal or exchanging vows in the present (I thee wed), unless you live in Italy, where you likely need a notary.  You do not need clergy as church weddings don’t exist until the Reformation.  For sure, it’s better if you publish banns three Sundays running in case someone remembers you are too closely related, but it’s not a legal requirement.  Who exactly can stop you if you are both determined?

So the less money, goods, lands, and power your family has, the more likely you are to be choosing your partner.  There is an exception in that unfree folk can be required to remarry, but they are give time and plenty of warning before a partner would be picked for them.  It happened a lot less than you’d think.  If you were born free and had enough money to hire help as needed whether for farm or shop or other business, there was no requirement of remarriage at all.  You could pick a partner or choose to stay single.  Do the math again on death rates.  It’s pretty common to marry more than once.  Maybe the first wife died in childbirth.  The widower needs the work and income a wife brings in and that’s double if the baby survives.  Maybe the second wife has wide hips, but he dies from a work related injury when she’s still young.  She could sure use a man’s labour around the farm or shop.  Let’s say he dies in a fight or drowns in a ditch.  She’s been doing well.  Her children are old enough to help with the farm or shop, she picks a pretty youth for his looks instead of his economic value.  You get marriages for love and lust as well as economics just like you get now and May/December cuts both ways.

A lot of our ideas about how people lived in the past tends to get viewed through a Victorian or early Hollywood lens, but that tends to be particularly extreme as far was writing out women’s agency and contribution as well as white washing populations in our histories, films, and therefore our minds eyes.

Real life is more complicated than that.

BTW, there are plenty of women at the top end of the scale who showed plenty of agency and who wielded political and economic power.  I’ve seen people argue that the were exceptions, but I think they were part of a whole society that had a tradition of strong women living on just as they always had sermons and homilies admonishing them to be otherwise to the contrary.  There’s also a whole other thing going on with the Pope trying to centralized power from the thirteenth century on being vigorously resisted by powerful abbesses and other holy women.  Yes, they eventually mostly lost, but it took so many centuries because there were such strong traditions of those women having political power.

Boss post! To add to that, many historians have theorised that modern gender roles evolved alongside industrialisation, when there was suddenly a conceptual division between work/public spaces, and home/private spaces. The factory became the place of work, where previously work happened at home. Gender became entangled in this division, with women becoming associated with the home, and men with public spaces. It might be assumable, therefore, that women had (have?) greater freedoms in agrarian societies; or, at least, had (have?) different demands placed on them with regard to their gender.

(Please note that the above historical reading is profoundly Eurocentric, and not universally applicable. At the same time, when I say that the factory became the place of work, I mean it in conceptual sense, not a literal sense. Not everyone worked in the factory, but there is a lot of literature about how the institution of the factory, as a symbol of industrialisation, reshaped the way people thought about labour.)

I am broadly of that opinion.  You can see upper class women being encouraged to be less useful as the piecework system grows and spreads.  You can see that spread to the middle class around when the early factory system gears up.  By mid-19th century that domestic sphere vs, public sphere is full swing for everyone who can afford it and those who can’t are explicitly looked down on and treated as lesser.  You can see the class system slowly calcify from the 17th century on.

Grain of salt that I get less accurate between 1605-French Revolution or thereabouts.  I’ve periodically studied early modern stuff, but it’s more piecemeal.

I too was confining my remarks to Medieval Europe because 1. That was my specialty.  2. A lot of English language fantasy literature is based on Medieval Europe, often badly and more based on misapprehension than what real lives were like.

I am very grateful that progress is occurring and more traditions are influencing people’s writing.  I hate that so much of the fantasy writing of my childhood was so narrow.

Wanna reblog this because for a long time I’ve had this vague knowledge in my head that society in the past wasn’t how people are always assuming it was (SERIOUSLY VICTORIANS, THANKS FOR DICKING WITH HOW WE VIEW EVERYTHING HISTORICAL). I get fed up with people who complain about fantasy stuff, claiming “historical accuracy” to whine about ethnic diversity and gender equality and other cool stuff that lets everyone join in the fun, and then I get sad because the first defence is always “it’s fantasy, so that doesn’t matter.”

I mean, that’s a good and valid defence, but here you have it; proof fucking positive that historical accuracy shows that equality and diversity are not new ideas and if anything BELONG in historical fiction. As far as I can tell, most people in the past were too bloody busy to get all ruffled up about that stuff; they had prejudices, but from what little I know the lines historically drawn in the sand were in slightly different places and for different reasons. (You can’t trust them furrigners. It’s all pixies and devil-worship over there).

So next time someone tells you that something isn’t “historically accurate” because it’s not racist/sexist/any other form of bigotry for that matter-ist enough for their liking, tell them to shut the hell up because they clearly know far less about history than they do about being an asshole.

Awesome.

THIS POST LIFTS ME UP

IT GIVES ME LIFE

MORE LIFE THAN I’VE EVER HAD

IT’S ALL I’VE GOT

IT’S ALL I’VE GOT IN THIS WORLD

AND IT’S ALL THE POST I NEED

Read, read, read, everybody. You’ll be wiser for having read all of the above!

Every time someone lays out some historical facts like this I think of the monastery ruins I visited in Sweden this summer. Nuns lived there in the middle ages. That’s not unusual in itself, of course, but one of the saints revered in their Church was Katarina (St. Catherine) of Alexandria, an Egyptian Princess who suffered martyrdom and became a Saint. She was very popular across large parts of Europe, and many of the nuns in this monastery (Gudhem) actually took her name. For those who do not know, upon becoming a nun a woman will shed her secular name and take the name of a saint. And we’re talking about Northern Europe, people. Katarina of Alexandria, being an Egyptian princess before she became a saint, must necessarily have been a woman of colour. So that whole shit thing about white peeps in Northern Europe never having heard of nor seen POC in the middle ages is just so utterly absurd.

madamethursday:

missturdle:

How exciting! Fantasy is so fun! You can do anything you want to your universe, because it’s fantasy - which is really great, because you’ve always wanted cats to talk and everyone else to share your distaste of squash. Plus you could have magic! Or not, you…

Every time I read something lie this it makes me wanna get working on my own book idea. So much in agreement!