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erathene · 30 days

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Sowing Seeds

Summary: Wound up by your mother’s incessant nagging, you reminisce over the ranger of the north you fell in love with. Aragorn helps in more ways than one.

Word count: 2k

Pairing: Aragorn x Female!Reader

Warnings: This fic is rated mature. LOTS of Spice, sexual themes (flirting, touching, kissing, teasing). Mentions of pregnancy and conceiving a child. Mentions of sexual intercourse, but it is not explicitly described.

AO3 Link: Sowing Seeds

Author's note: Thank you to @emmanuellececchi for being a wonderful Beta reader and taking time to provide feedback even when sick! You're the best 😘 Thank you also to @dancerinthestorm and @inkedmoth who cheered me on when I was documenting my creative process, you guys are awesome 🙂 This fic is also dedicated to anyone who has had the unsolicited question of “when are you having kids // when are you trying for baby #2”. Fertility and conceiving is a journey which looks different from person to person, and there are many versions of happiness that come with it. Enjoy ❤️

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"My love?"

At the distant sound of your husband's voice, you glance up, the letter from your mother still clutched in your hand. You rise quickly, tucking the parchment back into its envelope and stuffing it hastily into a drawer of the writing desk.

"In here," you call back to him. Even after all these months of living in the royal quarters, at times they still feel enormous to you.

He rounds the door to the study and your eyes take in the full sight of him. He's sporting a crisp linen shirt and lightweight moss-green tunic, both of which are generously covered in dirt. His sleeves have been rolled up to the elbows, the dirt even more pronounced around his exposed forearms, down to his hands and fingertips. His breeches and boots fare no better, and there are particularly large patches of mud clinging to his kneecaps where he must have been kneeling in the fresh earth. There's also a slight sheen on his forehead which speaks of his toil.

He looks far more ranger than king today, more than you've seen in a long time. He looks... delightful.

"Been in the gardens again?" you muse, taking in his form with one eyebrow raised and a twitch at your mouth.

"Aye," he says, brushing one elbow where a patch of drying mud seems to bother him. "Our head gardener believes we will have the most spectacular blooms in the palace gardens ere the start of summer," he gushes passionately.

"I don't doubt it," you smirk, still looking him up and down, "with all the work you're putting in."

He flashes a quick smile in your direction. There he is. Your ranger. The dirt-ridden Dúnedain who was always traipsing from one corner of Middle Earth to another, ragged and rough-looking from the wilds and the woodlands, the scent of which lingered on every part of his being. You suddenly wished you were close enough to smell him, just as a flash of a distant memory crosses your mind; one of the two of you buried in each other's arms, his calloused hands running gently through your hair, your lips pressing against his, fully consuming him yet wanting more. The temporary burst of imagery in your mind is intense.

You blame your mother for this, her and her persistent letters which usually centre around the royal heirs that need to come forth sooner rather than later. She was quick to approve your match with long-lost-heir-to-the-throne-of-Gondor Aragorn, but much less approving of Strider and his ranger ways. Indeed, if he had stepped over her threshold in his current state, she would likely throw him out and tell him to go bathe in a horse trough before showing his face at her doorstep again.

He somehow seems to partly read your mind. "I'll go change into something more--"

"Don't," you interrupt him quickly. The last thing you want him to do is change.

You slowly cross the room to where he is standing with a slightly bewildered look on his face, the light chiffon of your dress trailing behind you across the carpets. It's a loose-fitting gown, one of the more casual garments from your wardrobe, the colours well-suited to the warming spring weather. With no royal engagements today, you had deliberately chosen it over the tighter, more formal frocks that now seemed to be overflowing from every armoire in your chambers.

What happened to the simple leggings and cotton blouses you used to wear? What was ever wrong with them?

"What troubles you?" Aragorn's voice is calm and quiet as you approach, despite the crease in his brow. Ever the doting husband, he instinctively knows that something has irked you.

"Nothing of great significance... My mother and her nagging," you shrug shyly with a roll of your eyes.

"And what has she to say, pray tell?" He traces the backs of his knuckles along your upper arm, up to your shoulder and the strap of your dress, so gentle it barely touches your skin.

You look up into his deep, grey eyes. "Please, I do not want to think about my mother right now." Your voice is hovering somewhere between a whisper and a moan. He doesn't stop caressing your arm. "She's on about… that subject again."

His eyebrows lift in surprise. "Has she rescinded her opinion of me? To be posing the question to you so openly and so often?"

You snicker at the thought. "I don't think she will ever move past the fact that her only daughter went chasing after a ranger of the north. She missed out on the opportunity to play matchmaker." Yes, your mother would have loved to have been the one to set you up with some petty lord with the promise of new trade links for your homeland and a sizable dowry for your family's coffers.

Aragorn hummed to himself, his head tilting sideways as he considered this fact. "Is the King of Gondor not enough for her?" he says, stretching his arms wide in jest.

"Enough of that talk, Telcontar," you scoff, using his chosen house name against him. "You married a strong woman; unfortunately for you, she comes with an equally strong mother-in-law."

"Well," he breathes softly, wrapping his soiled hands around your own, "loathe as I am to do something to appease your mother, the idea of you, round and brimming with our child, does sound very appealing to me." He lifts your hands to his chest where your finely-crafted silver wedding band gleams in the bright sunlight. "A little Telcontari of our own," he murmurs, placing a kiss on your ring finger.

You cannot help your coy smile. "Only the one?"

His fingertips reach for a stray strand of your hair that dangles beside your cheek, and he carefully tucks it behind your ear. "However many you want, my love." His giant hand moves from your hair to your jawline, his thumb inching towards your mouth.

His words are deliberate and astute; many times you have mentioned your childhood spent amongst your large family, and there is little doubt he is not aware of your desire for a generous brood. Yet you cannot stop the flirtatious back talk that slips from your open mouth. "You may come to regret that," you say, before biting your lip and locking his gaze.

A smile quickens across his features. "I think I ought to be the judge of what I regret saying to my wife."

It almost sounds like a challenge.

Strong, muscular arms pull you in closer as he speaks, embracing you, his palms settling into the small of your back. He holds you regally, his touch firm yet gentle, as though you're the answer to every prayer he's ever spoken in tortured whispers to the divine. You are his queen, and he intends to treat you as such; he lays a tender, drawn-out kiss on your forehead where the Gondorian diadem would normally be resting on your brow. He is practically worshipping you.

Yes, it's good. But receiving the royal treatment is not on your agenda today. What you are looking for, what you need, is the ranger in him. You need Strider.

Your next move catches him somewhat off guard. You press your palms to his chest and push him backwards, driving him into the wall with a gentle thud. His eyes betray his curiosity, but he shouldn't be surprised; after all, it was he who trained you in hand-to-hand combat when you joined the northern rangers. You begin your assault, placing kisses along his collarbone and up his neck to where, eventually, you come to the skin beneath his ear where you know he is most sensitive. He confirms you have found his weakness with a low, gravelly moan that rumbles his throat. It gives you the confidence needed to push on, to be bolder. Your hands trail from his chest to the nape of his neck, up into his hair, your fingertips massaging his scalp before pulling his lengths taught. You smirk into his skin when he lets out a second moan.

You should have known better than to think your touch would disable him and this time, it's you who is caught off guard. He sweeps your legs out from under you and wraps them around his waist, spinning you around, lifting you up against the same wall he had his back to moments ago. The breath is driven out of your lungs as he pins you there. He gives you a look, his eyes holding a hunger like he's absolutely starved of you, and you know you're about to learn exactly what regret means.

His lips take to your mouth and he's a man on a mission; to satiate every whim, every desire, every need that you awoke within him and he will not allow himself to rest until he has achieved it. His kiss is wild, passionate, and his broad hands explore your body freely, taking in every contour and curve you have to offer him. You finally figure out how to draw breath again and you inhale his scent, the blissful smell of gardens and disturbed earth washing over you.

It's not hard for you to picture him the way you fell in love with him; a worn travelling cloak hanging from his well-built shoulders which also bear his pack, bow and bedroll, prepared and ready for whatever the world throws his way.

He breaks away momentarily, muttering something incomprehensible about how sweet you taste, before his lips meet your own once more. He consumes you as though you're the first proper meal he's had after weeks on the road. Your breath catches in your throat as he nips at your bottom lip in his frenzy, yet your reaction only encourages his mouth; further kisses are placed along your jawline, one after another like trailing footprints, inching their way to your neck, where his teeth sink into yet more of your flesh and begin to gently suck. He knows just as well as you do that it will leave a bruise. A claim to mark his territory.

His hands return to roaming about your thighs, tugging at the fabric of your dress, searching for his prize. You know exactly what he wants. However, your full-length gown is awkwardly caught around your knees, the chiffon unwilling to stretch, blocking his access. His fingers switch to tugging at the fastening at the back of the dress, impatient and restless.

Frustrating as it is to tell your husband to stop, your conscience knows you must. Breaking away from his touch, you hiss a command. "Not here, Aragorn.” You have been working hard to build a trusting relationship with your household staff in recent months, and goodness knows what would happen if one of them were to catch their king and queen in the act of procreation right here on the study floor. The poor elderly head housekeeper would likely faint with shock.

He tries to protest, the disappointment evident in his longing eyes, but you press your index finger to his lips. "And not with those filthy hands either. Wash them first, then meet me in the bed chamber." You pause, taking a moment to lean in to whisper in his ear, "and there, you can remove whatever you want." Your seductive tone makes the prospect sound even more inviting to him than it already is.

Aragorn sighs, allowing a curse to slip through his lips. He releases your thighs and they slowly drag against his soiled breeches until your feet return to the floor. You pull away and turn towards your chambers, but not before taking a moment to look back at your husband; he's gaping at you like a fool, completely caught in your trance, so you intentionally allow the strap of your dress to fall from your shoulder. You know it's all he can do to keep his feet planted where he stands and not curse you again for being such a tease. As a final provocation, you run your tongue across your bottom lip before sauntering away, your hips deliberately swinging from side to side as he watches you leave. The palace gardens are not the only place Aragorn will be sowing his seeds today, it would seem.

#aragorn x y/n #aragorn x reader #aragorn x you #aragorn #lord of the rings #lotr fanfic #fanfiction #tw: pregnancy #tw: conceiving

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amphibious-thing · 2 years

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In the 18th century the roles in anal intercourse were known as “pathic” or “patient” (bottom) and “agent” (top). We often assume that men on the receiving end of anal intercourse were always more stigmatised than their partners, however Rictor Norton suggests this wasn’t necessarily true in 18th century England. Looking at the records of the Old Bailey Norton observes that “the one who is stigmatised and hence given an identity is the one who expresses a homosexual desire, regardless of the sexual role or specific act,” while “the one who submits to the sexual request, even if it involves ‘passive’ sex, does not feel implicated in the desire, hence escapes the stigmatisation and the identity.” (Recovering Gay History from the Old Bailey, p20)

The language used by the Old Bailey is that of one man (the agent) “assaulting” another (the pathic), even in explicitly consensual cases.

For example Samuel Taylor was found guilty of “assaulting John Berry, and committing with him the horrid and detestable Crime of Buggery.” But John Berry was found guilty of “wickedly consenting with Taylor the said unnatural Crime”. Taylor was found with Berry “sitting in his Lap” with “both their Breeches being down”. (Trial of Samuel Taylor & John Berry, 22 February 1738)

William Hollywell was found guilty of “an Assault, with an Intent to commit the detestable Crime of Buggery” on William Huggins, who was found guilty “for consenting and submitting to the same.” A witness discovered them in the “upper part of the Cathedral of St. Paul's” and “surpriz'd them in the following Posture; Huggins's Breeches were down, he stooping very low, so that he could not see his Head, his Shirt was turn'd up on his Back, and his Back-side was bare; Hollywell was standing close by, with his fore Parts to the other's Posteriors, and his Body in Motion”. (Trial of William Hollywell & William Huggins, 4 December 1730)

Sodomy was often presented as an awful thing to do to another man, the agent doesn’t escape stigmatisation for acting the traditionally masculine role as he is seen as “assaulting” the pathic; even in consensual cases.

However we see push back against this view of sodomy as innately an “assault” in Jeremy Bentham’s defence of sodomy Offences Against One's Self. Bentham states plainly that “it is evident that it produces no pain in anyone. On the contrary it produces pleasure”. He clarifies “If either of them be unwilling, the act is not that which we have here in view: it is an offence totally different in its nature of effects: it is a personal injury; it is a kind of rape.”

In fact Bentham argues “it is not the pain that angers them but the pleasure.” He explains; “according to the notions of these moralists and these religionists, that is, of the bulk of moralists and religionists who write, pleasures that are allowed of, are never allowed of for their own sake”.

While Bentham’s defence of sodomy is quite academic and logical Thomas Cannon’s is somewhat more cheeky. Hal Gladfelder describes it as “veering in style from erotic rhapsody, to scholarly essay, to dirty joke.” (In Search of Lost Texts, p30)

Cannon acknowledges the homophobic preconception that people “commonly conceive the P-th-c’s (meaning Pathic’s) Part disagreeable” but counters that the pathic can share “in the accurst Rapture” and enjoy the “Lewdness.” (Hal Gladfelder, The Indictment of John Purser, p45)

Cannon portrays anal intercourse as pleasurable for both agent and pathic in the story of Amorio and Hyacinth. In this tale a “young and blooming Amorio” meets a Lady at a Masquerade, but when he gets her to bed he finds "a Body past Imagination delicate; but of Gender masculine.” Amorio is surprised but not deterred:

Penetrating Love takes the Meaning; and the most lib-d-nous (meaning libidinous) Fire ever felt by our wondring Glower, seizes his panting Frame. He is quickly piloted into a Streight whose potent Cling draws all the Man in cl-mmy (meaning clammy) streams away. Recovering, he perceives the deeper absorpt P-th-c (again meaning Pathic) quite motionless, and thus exclaims; then do you leave me? do you leave your passionate Lover? O ever beautiful Boy, did I taste the Joys, thou only cou’dst give, to know the Bitterness of their Eternal Absence?

Now he endeavours with a gluing Kiss to infuse his own Spirit into the strongly o’er powered Hyacinth; then renews the recalling Plaint; return, fairer Hephestion to the fonder Alexander. Open to Love’s Warmth, thou folded Rose; O let me no longer endure the Horror of existing without you. Hyacinth revives, ardently uttering himself; bounteous Deity, in what a Gulph of Pleasure have I been plung’d; They vie in Raptures, and after more and more Am-ro-s (meaning amorous) Embraces; drop asleep in one another’s Arms.

After they awake in the morning they “love away an Hour or two; then rise and recruit with a long Breakfast.” (Hal Gladfelder, The Indictment of John Purser, p47-50

It’s perhaps worth noting that John Cleland once called Cannon a "white-faced, rotten catamite” and referred to him as “Molly Cannon” so perhaps Cannon is speaking from experience when he mentions the pathic “sharing in the accurst Rapture” and “over and over enj-y’d (meaning enjoyed) urges on the detestable Lewdness.” Although Cleland also accused Cannon of poisoning him “five times with common arsenic” so who knows what went on between Cleland and Cannon. (Hal Gladfelder, In Search of Lost Texts, p25)

While John Cleland didn’t publish a defence of sodomy per se he did include a male-male sex scene in his erotic novel Fanny Hill Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure. In the book Fanny finds a peep-hole between her room and that next to it. Looking through she observes two “young sparks” having sex. Fanny at first doesn't believe anal sex is even possible based on “the disproportion of parts” but she is soon cured of this disbelief.

First, then, moistening well with spittle his instrument, obviously to make it glib, he pointed, he introduced it, as I could plainly discern, not only from its direction and my losing sight of it, but by the writhing, twisting and soft murmured complaints of the young sufferer; but at length, the first straits of entrance being pretty well go through, every thing seemed to move and go pretty currently on, as on a carpet road, without much rub or resistance; and now, passing one hand round his minions’ hips, he got hold of his red-topped ivory toy, that stood perfectly stiff, and shewed, that if he was like his mother behind, he was like his father before; this he diverted himself with, whilst, with the other he wantoned with his hair, and leaning forward over his back, drew his face, from which the boy shook the loose curls that fell over it, in the posture he stood him in, and brought him towards his, so as to receive a long breathed kiss; after which, renewing his driving, and thus continuing to harass his rear, the height of the fist came on with its usual symptoms, and dismissed the action.

Throughout the scene Fanny represents the perspective of the general public, at first disbelieving the possibility of it, then assuming the pathic to be a “sufferer”, but she soon observes that “every thing seemed to move and go pretty currently on, as on a carpet road, without much rub or resistance;” and that indeed while the pathic was “like his mother behind,” he “was like his father before” (i.e. he had an erection).

Of course the fact that the pathic could enjoy sodomy did not stop bigots from being bigots. Bentham hit the nail on the head when he wrote “it is not the pain that angers them but the pleasure.” William Pulteney in A Proper Reply to a Late Scurrilous Libel; Intitled, Sedition and Defamation Display’d, argues that the pathic and agent are “equally guilty” in cases where the pathic finds sodomy enjoyable:

but you seem, pretty Sir, to take the Word Corruption in a limited Sense and confine it to the Corrupter – Give me Leave to illustrate This by a parallel Case – There is a certain, unnatural, reigning Vice (indecent and almost shocking to mention) which hath of late, been severely punish'd in a neighbouring Nation. It is well known that there must be two Parties in this Crime; the Pathick and the Agent; both equally guilty. I need not explain These any farther. The Proof of the Crime hath been generally made by the Pathick; but I believe that Evidence will not be obtained quite so easily in the case of Corruption when a Man enjoys every Moment and Fruits of his Guilt.

Montesquieu argued that sodomy “ought to be proscribed were it only for its communicating to one sex the weaknesses of the other”. (The Spirit of Laws, b12, ch6) Bentham critics Montesquieu, pointing out that sodomy has a no greater “enervating” effect than that of “the regular way of gratifying the venereal appetite”. He argues that to justify sodomy laws for this reason there must be evidence that this is the case:

If the affirmative can be shewn it must be either by arguments a priori drawn from considerations of the nature of the human frame or from experience. Are there any such arguments from physiology? I have never heard of any: I can think of none.

However Montesquieu isn’t arguing that sodomy weakens both men equally but that it weakens the pathic specifically. “This distinction does not seem very satisfactory in any point of view” argues Bentham;

Is there any reason for supposing it to be a fixed one? Between persons of the same age actuated by the same incomprehensible desires would not the parts they took in the business be convertible? Would not the patient be the agent in his turn? If it were not so, the person on whom he supposes these effects to be the greatest is precisely the person with regard to whom it is most difficult to conceive whence those consequences should result. In the one case there is exhaustion which when carried to excess may be followed by debility: in the other case there is no such thing.

(Jeremy Bentham, Offences Against One's Self)

The parts were indeed as Bentham puts it “convertible”. In spite of the legal language of one man ‘assaulting’ another, in reality of molly sex had less strict roles. While one man may very well have had a preference for one role over the other, there were certainly men who enjoyed both roles. For example after meeting at the molly house Muff’s House in White-Chappel Isaac Milton and Jonathan Parrey went to the Three-Nuns where they “lay together”. Milton “would have had him [Parrey] committed Sodomy with him, but he refused it;” then Milton “offered to act the same Crime of Sodomy with him, but he would not suffer him.” (Trial of Isaac Milton, 16 October 1728)

Its also important to remember that anal sex was not the only kind of sex enjoyed by mollies. There are numerous references to fondling; William Brown took Thomas Newton “by the Hand, and (I shewing no dislike) he guides it to his Breeches, and puts his Privities into it.” (Trail of William Brown, 11 July 1726) Richard Challoner and John Branch Harris “put their Hands into each other's Breeches, after which they went out of the House into an Arbour in the Garden”. (Trial of Richard Challoner, 16 October 1728) Richard Manning and John Davis were caught “sitting facing one another with their knees jammed in together,” “kissing one another” with “Manning's hand in Davis's breeches” and “then Davis had his hand in Manning's breeches”, they “kissed one another for some time”. (Trial of Richard Manning and John Davis, 16 January 1745) Of course all of this could be precursory to anal sex but thats not necessarily the case.

There is one reference to fingering precursory to anal sex from the late 17th century. Preparing to “F—” William Minton, Capt Edward Rigby “pulled down Mintons Breeches, turn'd away his shirt, put his Finger to Mintons Fundament” (An Account of the Proceedings against Capt Edward Rigby, 1698)

Norton notes that “all of the available evidence, however, suggest that oral intercourse, fellatio, was rarely practised by the mollies.” However rarely is not never. In 1704 John Norton took hold of John Coyney’s privates “putting them into his mouth and sucking them” (Norton, Mother Clap’s Molly House, p107) In 1735 John Holloway testified that Henry Wolf “pull'd down his own Breeches and mine, and - in his Mouth”. (Trial of Henry Wolf, 22 May 1735)

In reviewing the proceedings of the Old Bailey Norton found “ample evidence that so-called ‘sodomites’ enjoyed an extended range of activities, including kissing, cuddling, love talk, fondling, sexual display, masturbation, oral intercourse, and reciprocal anal intercourse.” (Recovering Gay History from the Old Bailey, p15)

#queer history #mollies #jeremy bentham #thomas cannon #john cleland

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bogusfilth · 3 months

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i think one of the interesting features of Larkin is his vulgarity, which is sudden, and sharp, and more than anything else is part of what makes him feel so sad and cynical sometimes. the archetype of this for most people is of course "they fuck you up, your mum and dad" but that one is quite straightforward and not even that good an example. you read something like aubade, or the mower, which are mostly plain in speech but more straightforwardly 'poetic,' and then high windows: "when I see a couple of kids / and guess he's fucking her [...]" it isn't hidden so deep in the poem as to be a shock, in a gimmicky way, per se.

it's very casual, but catches you a little off guard, and sometimes feels uneasy - like he's using it to distance himself from the subject matter, to try to come across more casual than he actually is. and in particular high windows and love again have this vulgarity, this false directness about sex that masks his own discomfort or sense of unfamiliarity or inaccessibility about it (compare annus mirabilis "sexual intercourse began in 1963 [...] which was rather late for me") and then loses its words, explicitly states it loses its words - literally "rather than words comes the thought of high windows" and "...but why put it into words?" respectively - and goes into an almost wistful imagery, blue skies, something far away, something lost. (this trailing off mid poem, as if he's forgotten he's writing it, is also something he does in dockery and son)

this be the verse lacks the occasion for the break into vulnerability - it's almost 'not poetry' in this sense, just verse. compare aubade: about a deep fear, shot through with that vulnerability almost inevitably. the last lines aren't snappy or cute, but, like the two poems above, trails away into the imagery of something distant, someone down in the street.

#ur 7 am all nighter lit crit for today #local girl needs to find more poets

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msclaritea · 5 months

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Cate Blanchett named son after convicted child sex offender Roman Polanski | news.com.au — Australia’s leading news site

https://www.news.com.au/entertainment/celebrity-life/cate-blanchett-named-son-after-convicted-child-sex-offender-roman-polanski/news-story/7643a75ab10a08d35b781b1f07043c59#:~:text=Blanchett%20said%20Roman%20was%20named,famous%20American%20novelist)%20Dashiell%20Hammett.

https://ohnotheydidnt.livejournal.com/98319492.html

Blanchett said Roman was named after the disgraced director, who fled the United States in 1978 before he was due to be sentenced for having unlawful sexual intercourse with a minor.

“You run out of ideas by the time you get to number three,” she joked.

“Dashiell came from (famous American novelist) Dashiell Hammett.

“Roman, I don’t know... Polanski. But it’s also the French word for book.”

Polanski has been living in exile in France since 1978, despite multiple attempts by the United States to extradite him.

Blanchett previously came under fire in 2014 after starring in Woody Allen’s film Blue Jasmine.

Allen’s daughter Dylan Farrow wrote an open letter to Blanchett, criticising her for working with the director despite her claims of child sexual abuse.

Tough love ... Cate won an Oscar for Blue Jasmine despite being criticised for working with Woody Allen. Picture: Kevin Winter/Getty Images

“What if it had been your child, Cate Blanchett? Louis CK? Alec Baldwin? What if it had been you, Emma Stone? Or you, Scarlett Johansson? You knew me when I was a little girl, Diane Keaton. Have you forgotten me?” she wrote.

In response, Blanchett said it had “obviously been a long and painful situation for the family and I hope they find some resolution and peace”.

Roman Polanski

youtube

Ignatius, Captain Underpants

"According to the American Library Association, the Captain Underpants books were reported as some of the most banned and challenged books in the United States between 2000 and 2009 as well as between 2010 and 2019. The books were named one of the top ten most banned and challenged books in 2002, 2004, 2005, 2012, 2013 and 2018.

The Captain Underpants series was explicitly banned in some schools for "insensitivity, offensive language, encouraging disruptive behavior, LGBTQIA+ issues, violence, being unsuited to the age group, sexually explicit content, anti-family content, as well as encouraging children to disobey authority."

Dashiell Hammett....

Hammett devoted much of his life to left-wing activism. He was a strong antifascist throughout the 1930s, and in 1937 joined the Communist Party. On May 1, 1935, Hammett joined the League of American Writers (1935–1943), whose members included Lillian Hellman, Alexander Trachtenberg of International Publishers, Frank Folsom, Louis Untermeyer, I. F. Stone, Myra Page, Millen Brand, Clifford Odets, and Arthur Miller. (Members were largely either Communist Party members or fellow travelers. He suspended his anti-fascist activities when, as a member (and in 1941 president) of the League of American Writers, he served on its Keep America Out of War Committee in January 1940 during the period of the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact.

Especially in Red Harvest, literary scholars have seen a Marxist critique of the social system. One Hammett biographer, Richard Layman, calls such interpretations "imaginative", but he nonetheless objects to them, since, among other reasons, no "masses of politically dispossessed people" are in this novel. Herbert Ruhm found that contemporary left-wing media already viewed Hammett's writing with skepticism, "perhaps because his work suggests no solution: no mass-action... no individual salvation... no Emersonian reconciliation and transcendence".

In a letter of November 25, 1937, to his daughter Mary, Hammett referred to himself and others as "we reds". He confirmed, "in a democracy all men are supposed to have an equal say in their government", but added that "their equality need not go beyond that." He also found, "under socialism there is not necessarily... any leveling of incomes."

Hellman wrote that Hammett was "most certainly" a Marxist, though a "very critical Marxist" who was "often contemptuous of the Soviet Union" and "bitingly sharp about the American Communist Party", to which he was nevertheless loyal.

At the beginning of 1942, he wrote the screenplay of Watch on the Rhine, based on Hellman's successful play, which received a nomination for the Academy Award for Best Writing (Adapted Screenplay). But that year the Oscar went to Casablanca. In early 1942, following the attack on Pearl Harbor, Hammett again enlisted in the United States Army. Because he was 48 years old, had tuberculosis, and was a Communist, Hammett later stated he had "a hell of a time" being inducted into the Army. However, biographer Diane Johnson suggests that confusion over Hammett's forename was the reason he was able to re-enlist. He served as an enlisted man in the Aleutian Islands and initially worked on cryptanalysis on the island of Umnak. For fear of his radical tendencies, he was transferred to the Headquarters Company where he edited an Army newspaper entitled The Adakian. In 1943, while still a member of the military, he co-authored The Battle of the Aleutians with Cpl. Robert Colodny, under the direction of an infantry intelligence officer, Major Henry W. Hall. While in the Aleutians, he developed emphysema.

After the war, Hammett returned to political activism, "but he played that role with less fervour than before". He was elected president of the Civil Rights Congress (CRC) on June 5, 1946, at a meeting held at the Hotel Diplomat in New York City, and "devoted the largest portion of his working time to CRC activities".

In 1946, a bail fund was created by the CRC "to be used at the discretion of three trustees to gain the release of defendants arrested for political reasons." The trustees were Hammett, who was chairman, Robert W. Dunn, and Frederick Vanderbilt Field.

The CRC was designated a Communist front group by the US Attorney General. Hammett endorsed Henry A. Wallace in the 1948 United States presidential election..."

'Blanchett and Stewart joined fellow Cannes jury members, Ava DuVernay, Khadja Nin, and Léa Seydoux, in the South of France for the start of this year's festival earlier this week. Not only did we see both Blanchett and Stewart donning spring-inspired pantsuits we now need in our lives, but we were, more importantly, blessed with photos of Stewart staring tenderly at Blanchett. What a time to be alive."

#Cate Blanchett #Roman Polanski #Ignatius Captain Underpants #Dashiell Hammett Communist and Marxist #Marxism is Satanic #Hollywood #Satanic Cult of Scientology #Hard Leftism #Nihilism #Queer Politics #Transgender language was hidden in Captain Underpants #Youtube #Krusten Stewart #Cannes #Honestly I do like Cate Blanchett as an actor but can't admire her as a person outside of her Art

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deathlessathanasia · 2 years

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It is widely known among Greek mythology enthusiasts that Hera never actually wanted to marry Zeus and that she had to be tricked into marriage or forced via rape. One could be surprised to notice the popularity of this idea, seeing how no major Greek author, from Homer and Hesiod to Nonnos of Panopolis, seems to ever state such a thing. So where does it come from?

"The presence of a cuckoo seated on the sceptre (of Hera's statue in the Argive Heraion) they explain by the story that when Zeus was in love with Hera in her maidenhood he changed himself into this bird, and she caught it to be her pet.”., Pausanias, Description of Greece 2. 17. 4.

Despite this being a very particular, localised myth that is an idiosyncrasy of Hera's Argive cult, it somehow became the most popular version of how Hera ended up married to Zeus. Though this is by far the most accessible account of the story, what with it being even quoted on theoi.com and all, one can notice that it actually says nothing about marriage, or sex, or basically anything truly informative about what exactly took place there. For this reason, using Pausanias to argue whether or not Hera was raped or tricked or forced into marriage is pretty much useless. Still, on a first glance nothing here seems particularly rapey, or at least it wouldn't seem so if this weren’t Greek mythology and if we didn't know for what kind of purpose Zeus uses such disguises. To my knowledge, we have precisely one instance in surviving Greek literature of Zeus employing metamorphosis into an animal without a sexual purpose: when he changed himself into a serpent and his nurses into bears in order to escape Kronos. In any case, his purpose is already suggested here, but the following account spells it out explicitly.

In explanation to the passage in Theokritos’ Idyll according to which "women knew everything. They know all about Zeus marrying Hera.", a scholiast gives us the following account, based on a treatise on the sacred traditions of the city of Hermione (the author of which, incidentally, is not a woman): "He (Aristocles) reports that Zeus wished to unite/mix/mingle (μιγῆναι) with Hera from the time he saw her alone, apart from the other gods. Wanting to be invisible so that he was not seen by her, he changed himself into a cuckoo and perched on the mountain which then was called Thornax, but now is called Kokkyx, and that very day he caused a terrible storm to break out. Walking by herself, Hera arrived at the mountain and sat down there, where today is located the sanctuary of Hera Teleia. She saw the cuckoo flitting about, and it perched on her lap, trembling and frozen by the storm. Looking at it, Hera pitied it and took it under her mantle. Zeus suddenly changed his form again and grasped Hera. When she refused to copulate with him because of her mother, the god promised to make her his wife. Among the Argives, who honour this goddess more than any others of the Greeks, there is in a temple a statue of Hera seated on a throne, holding in her hand a sceptre on which is perched a cuckoo."

These two accounts seem to differ quite a bit in the way Hera came across the metamorphosed Zeus and what happened afterwards (no pet keeping in this variant, it seems), but they obviously refer to the same Argive tradition. It is evident that deception is involved, and the situation is clearly reminiscent of similar tricks Zeus employs in other stories. I have occasionally seen attempts to interpret what he does in this myth in a less odious manner, mostly by trying to pretend that his intentions towards Hera are not necessarily sexual in nature. That is, of course, absurd and naive (read: deliberately obtuse) in the extreme even in the very lowkey account of Pausanias, but here it is easily refutable by simply looking at the text. The verb μίγνυμι doesn't necessarily refer to sexual intercourse (though this is definitely one of its meanings), but the context really doesn't leave much to interpretation. It is clear at least that we aren’t dealing here with an act of rape in animal form, since Zeus does abandon the disguise before taking hold of Hera. What is most significant here is that the text makes it explicit that she refuses to have sex with him, though it’s worth noting that the reason she gives has nothing to do with her wanting to remain a virgin forever as it is commonly claimed (nor with his propensity to sleep around as it is also commonly claimed lol). For some reason her concern is her mother, which is certainly odd because what on earth does Rhea have to do with any of this? Karl Kerényi and Robin Hard interpret the mention of the mother and Hera's reluctance to sleep with Zeus as a reference to the fact that they are full siblings, children of the same mother. That has never stopped Greek deities before, but in lack of anything else I suppose this explanation is as good as any, though Nicole Loraux points out that this passage “may allude only to a young girl's modesty in the presence of her mother.” Now whether the promise of marriage is meant to be a sort of compensation for the rape or a way of reassuring Hera and persuading her to accept Zeus's sexual advances the text doesn't say and is something I can't even begin to guess. I suppose one could be charitable (the way people would doubtlessly be if such a myth was told about Hades and Persephone) and choose to believe that she accepted to sleep with him once she received the guarantee of a socially sanctioned and official union, just as one can choose to read it in a more unpleasant manner.

A third version of the myth appears in Pseudo-Plutarch’s “About Rivers and Mountains and Things Found in Them”, and though it makes no mention of marriage, I think this one is most clear about rape taking place: “But the mountain was denominated Coccygium for a reason of this sort. When he had fallen in love with Hera his sister and bedazzled his beloved, Zeus produced from her a male (alternative translation: and having vanquished her by his importunity, begat a male child). Then the very mountain called Lyrceium from the occasion was named Coccygium, as Agathonymus records in Persis.). I am not very happy with the English translations I’ve found, so here is the Greek text describing what Zeus did: "Ζεὺς Ἥρας τῆς ἀδελφῆς ἐρασθεὶς καὶ δυσωπούμενος τὴν ἀγαπωμένην ἐγέννησιν ἐξ αὐτῆς Ἄρη". All possible meanings and connotations of the word δυσωπέω are negative (to put out of countenance, importunate, abash, disturb etc), all the more so in the context we have here, and this variant is unique in mentioning a child (Ares) being conceived, which makes it beyond any doubt that sex did take place. Add to this the fact that virtually all sexual unions used to explain the names of rivers and mountains in this work are rapes, and I’m convinced that this one definitely involves sexual assault.

In short, it is safe to say that, as with most events in Greek mythology, different versions of this particular story existed and that some were more rapey than others, though I must add that just because rape isn’t explicitly and unambiguously described in an ancient Greek text doesn’t mean that the text in question does not involve rape. Also, anyone with common sense and without an agenda can doubtlessly come to the logical conclusion that when a male deceitfully approaches a female for the purpose of sex, her consent is, to say the least, not of primary importance to him.

Next, there is this late and odd story from Ptolemy Hephaestion. Or rather, we have a summary of it related in the Myriobiblon of Photius and, though no one seems to ever use it as a source, I'm putting it here for the sake of thoroughness: "The author (Hephaestion) speaks of the Achilles son of the earth and of all the Achilles who have been celebrated since Trojan times; it is this son of the earth who, when Hera fled from the union with Zeus, received her in his cave and persuaded her to marry Zeus, and it is said that this was the first marriage of Zeus and Hera, and Zeus promised Achilles that he would make famous all who bore his name. It is for that reason that Achilles son of Thetis is famous.".

Not much I can add here. I know of no other source that mentions this Achilles son of Earth (in all probability the author invented him and the entire story), nor of any other source according to which Hera needed to be persuaded to marry Zeus by a third party. That aside, I don't see any allusion to rape or forced marriage here, though Hera's initial unwillingness is not up to debate.

Now my question is this: why should any of these stories take precedence over others that don't include rapey elements? It should be mentioned that half of the accounts given above are rather questionable; the authority of the writings of both Pseudo-Plutarch and Ptolemy Hephaestion is flimsy at best, since both of them are generally thought to have essentially made up many of the sources they cited in support of their various stories. We still have the Argive tradition attested by Pausanias and in the scholion to Theokritos, but it is certainly interesting that the idea of violence, trickery and unwillingness in the context of this particular relationship is so eagerly emphasised by so many, to the point that different traditions are hardly ever mentioned, considering how the much more blatant violence, trickery and unwillingness in the abduction of Persephone myth are constantly glossed over and rewritten into love and consent. To be clear, I don’t like this kind of revisionistic whitewashing when it is done with that myth and I wouldn’t like it done with this one either. I have absolutely no interest in the erasure of the uncomfortable aspects of this myth or cutesifying a story which, at its least disturbing, is about a man approaching a woman for sex on false pretenses and naturally I have nothing against those who want to explore Zeus and Hera's relationship or Hera's character from this angle (not my thing, I must admit, and personally I find it a bit overdone). What irks me about the almost exclusive focus on the cuckoo myth is twofold: it overshadows all other traditions, making people get the impression that no other narratives exist, and it makes those who don't want to deal with rapey elements in the relationship of Zeus and Hera try to sanitise this particular story which is a personal pet peeve of mine but, more importantly, is a complete waste of time when there ARE other traditions that do not (seem to) involve rape and are in no way less authoritative than those that do.

As a first example there is Homer, who has little occasion to say anything about how Hera and Zeus got married, but who does instead allude to "that time they first went to bed together and lay in love, and their dear parents knew nothing of it". In all fairness there is no way to know with any certainty that the sexual union invoked here was consensual, but there is also no indication that it wasn’t... and I mean, if someone wants to read rape in such an innocent-sounding description, there really isn’t much to say other than I hope they are equally exigent when analysing situations involving those mythological characters they do like. Anyway what Homer describes here could have been a pre-existing tradition or it might be an Homeric innovation, no way to tell and ultimately it matters little, since the idea of a secret premarital tryst between Hera and Zeus is attested in several local traditions as well which means that if it was an ad hoc invention of the poet of the Iliad, it sure became influential for such a small reference.

back to local traditions then, there is this Boeotian one related by Plutarch and quoted by the Christian Eusebios of Caesarea: "they relate that Hera, being brought up in Euboea. was stolen away while yet a virgin by Zeus, and was carried across and hidden in this region, where Cithaeron afforded them a shady recess, nature's own bridal-chamber. And when Macris----she was Hera's nurse----came to seek her, and wished to make a search, Cithaeron would not let her pry about, or approach the spot, on pretence that Zeus was there resting and passing the time in company with Leto. And as Macris went away, Hera thus escaped discovery on that occasion, and afterwards calling to mind her debt of gratitude to Leto she adopted her as partner in a common altar and common temple, so that sacrifices are first offered to Leto Μυχία, that is, 'of the inner shrine'; but some call her Νυχία, 'goddess of night.' In each of the names, however, there is the signification of secrecy and escape. Some say that Hera had secret intercourse there with Zeus, and, being undiscovered, was thus herself denominated Leto of the night: but when her marriage became openly known, and their intercourse first here in the neighbourhood of Citliaeron and of Plataea had been revealed, she was called Hera Τελεία and Γαμήλιος, goddess of the perfect life, and of marriage."

In this instance we have abduction followed by sexual intercourse, which I would normally find a HIGHLY dubious situation, to put it mildly. However, seeing how Hera is described as grateful for not being discovered by her nurse, it doesn't look like she was an unwilling participant here.

Samos was one of Hera's main centres of worship, so naturally The Samians just like the Argives had their own traditions concerning the goddess. As well as claiming Samos to be the place where Hera was born and brought up, "She is also said to have been deflowered by Zeus on Samos, as reported by certain scholia to Book 14 of the Iliad, which comment on the premarital union of the two and connect it with a local ritual which took this form: for the sake of Hera, it was said, the Samians assembled all their marriageable daughters in secret, but then the nuptial sacrifices were carried out in public view before all the world." - Vinciane Pirenne-Delforge and Gabriella Pironti, The Hera of Zeus: Intimate Enemy, Ultimate Spouse. The Iliad scholia (to which I don't have access so I must resort to the writings of modern scholars) also relates that "after Kronos had been sent down to Tartaros, Hera was betrothed (as a presumed virgin) to Zeus by Okeanos and Tethys but promptly gave birth to Hephaistos, having anticipated her marriage by lying with Zeus in secret on the island of Samos; to cover the deed, she claimed that the birth was without benefit of intercourse" - Timothy Gantz, Early Greek Myth: A Guide to Literary and Artistic Sources (compare and contrast with the story of Ares' conception from De fluviis of Pseudo-Plutarch above). It also seems that Zeus and Hera were said, again in the Iliad scholia, to have slept together in secret on Samos for three hundred years: "Most of the local legends and rites that are recorded in connection with the divine union refer to the first prenuptial intercourse between Zeus and Hera rather than to their wedding. It was claimed, indeed, on Samos that the pair had first slept together on that island in utter secrecy for three hundred years." - Robin Hard, The Routledge Handbook of Greek Mythology.

This premarital intercourse of Hera and Zeus might also be alluded to by Kallimachos in the following fragment (this is how, as far as I know, most scholars interpret the text, though differing opinions do exist) regarding a Naxian prenuptial custom: "And already the maid had been bedded with the boy, even as ritual ordered that the bride should sleep her prenuptial sleep with a male child both whose parents were alive. Yea, for they say that once on a time Hera - thou dog, thou dog, refrain, my shameless soul! thou would sing of that which it is not lawful to tell".

Nonnos has Aphrodite claim that she had "joined Zeus in wedlock with Hera his sister, after he had felt the pangs of long-lasting desire and desired her for three hundred years". This tells us nothing about how Hera felt about it all, but, well, she did keep the robe she wore "when she came to her brother a virgin in that secret union.". She seems so weirdly nostalgic about it, too: "the embroidered robe she wore was her oldest, still bearing the blood marks of maidenhead left from her bridal" (wtf Hera?) and when preparing to sleep with Zeus she decides to wear it in order to "remind her bedfellow of their first love". I don't know what to make of this (other than Nonnos being a weirdo as usual) but it doesn't seem like her first sexual experience was traumatic or unhappy, since she keeps such an... unusual memento of it.

There are quite a few other texts that mention the marriage of Zeus and Hera, though they give little to no detail about it and, as one comes to expect from Greek mythology, don't provide any insight into how she felt about it and whether she was willing or not. For example, we learn from Hesiod that "Last of all he (Zeus) made Hera his fertile wife, and she bore Hebe and Ares and Eileithyia, sharing intimacy with the king of gods and men.", and from Pseudo-Apollodoros that "Zeus married Hera and fathered Hebe, Eileithuia, and Ares". The very simplistic and unfanciful nature of these accounts may or may not be significant, but contrast them with how even Hesiod mentions the abduction of Persephone by Hades, and Apollodoros does not shy away from mentioning instances of rape: he does specify, for example, that Porphyrion tried to rape Hera, that Asteria and Metis did not want to have sex with Zeus, and that Hades kidnapped Persephone. Absence of evidence is not evidence of absence, but if Hera's forced marriage were as common a fact as people make it out to be, it is at least a bit surprising that not even the Bibliotheke says anything about it. Diodoros of Sicily relates that "Men say that the marriage of Zeus and Hera was held in the territory of the Knossians at a place near the river Theren, where now a temple stands in which the natives of the place annually offer holy sacrifices and imitate the ceremony of the marriage, in the manner in which tradition tells it was originally performed.", but again this doesn’t tell us much, nor does the story according to which Gaia brought golden apples at the time of their wedding. In Aristophanes' Birds it is said that "the Moirai formerly united Olympian Hera to the King who governs the gods from the summit of his inaccessible throne." and that "Rosy Eros with the golden wings held the reins and guided the chariot; 'twas he, who presided over the union of Zeus and the fortunate Hera.” which, if nothing else, is a nice (if conventional) image.

In any case, Hera's behaviour in the myths hardly looks like that of a woman who hates her marriage and wants nothing to do with her husband, so those who argue that, actually, Hera persecutes Zeus’s mistresses and children not because she is angry about him sleeping with other women but because she is upset about having been “blackmailed” into marriage (I’ve actually seen this claim) or the like are objectively wrong. Even when she is so angry with Zeus that she leaves Olympos and refuses to return, she still can't stand the idea that he might take another wife. As Pausanias relates it: "Hera, they say, was for some reason or other angry with Zeus, and had retreated to Euboia. Zeus, failing to make her change her mind, visited Kithaeron, at that time despot in Plataia who surpassed all men for his cleverness. So he ordered Zeus to make an image of wood, and to carry it, wrapped up, in a bullock wagon, and to say that he was celebrating his marriage with Plataia, the daughter of Asopos. So Zeus followed the advice of Kithairon. Hera heard the news at once, and at once appeared on the scene. But when she came near the wagon and tore away the dress from the image, she was pleased at the deceit, on finding it a wooden image and not a bride, and was reconciled to Zeus. ", to which Plutarch adds the detail that "with joy and laughter (Hera) herself led the bridal procession, and gave additional honour to the statue, and called the festival Daedala, and nevertheless from jealousy burnt the thing, lifeless though it was.". More relevant is the fact that Argive Hera can regain the status of parthenos and does so annually through her bath in the Kanathos spring, which can easily be interpreted as her willingly choosing to renew her marriage over and over again.

#ok this is the final iteration of this post #at least until I inevitably come across other relevant sources that will need to be added #hera #zeus #greek mythology #rape #ramblings

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benjaminthewolf · 2 years

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hey! I hope you are doing well, I wanted to send this ask because I noticed something worrying about your blog, and while it’s not a condemnation of you, I wanted to warn you for your own safety

from the looks of it you have been writing a lot of requested stories for people that have incurred a bit of backlash, which you did not intend for

while I trust that you had good intentions, I think it is definitely in your best interest to STOP taking requests ENTIRELY

this is because you are being taken advantage of by people who want you to write their fetish material. While I trust and agree that there are people who are exclusively into SFW vore, there are also plenty of people who are aroused by the mere act of vore, even if there is no explicitly stated intercourse happening

for example, your FNF vore story featuring two siblings, while written with good intentions, definitely qualifies as pornographic material because there are a lot of people who are aroused by that and there is a good chance that whoever requested it was also aroused and just refused to tell you

one thing that a lot of people with niche, specific, not-inherently-intercourse-related fetishes will do is request art, writing, or other content regarding their fetish from people who either do not know what it is or don’t see it as sexual. For example, a lot of people on deviantart would commission fetish pieces from minors who did not know any better. Plenty of kids were asked to draw inflation or other fetish pieces without realizing that they were drawing something for sexual gratification.

THIS IS SEXUAL ABUSE. it doesn’t matter how you slice it. asking someone to create fetish content without disclosing that you intend to get sexual gratification from it, and subsequently using the benefit of the doubt, is abuse.

From the looks of it, as an outsider, you and probably others in your community are being taken abused by people who see your content as inherently sexual.

I do not mean to shame you for this or imply anything negative about you—I am saying this because I am worried for you. It is clear that you get a lot of nasty comments already and are going through a lot in your personal life. While you aren’t at fault for either of these, a big part of why people are upset is because they recognize the problematic sexual nature of the requests you are getting and are aware that people are getting off on it. It’s not your fault for failing to realize that these requests are sexual, but it is still important for you to know about it because you are being taken advantage of and are being criticized for something you didn’t realize you were doing

I’m sorry for reaching out in this way, I hope everything I said was cohesive, I would explain in more detail but I wanted to send this ask because I noticed something really troubling in a lot of your posts and felt obligated to say something

tl;dr: even though you do sfw vore your requesters are taking advantage of you to write their fetish content without disclosure or consent. I would strongly advise you stop taking requests because it has already led to a lot of backlash from people recognizing the bad intentions of your requesters/pointing out the dogwhistles

Okay everyone, I think its time I come clean.

I like vore in BOTH a non-sexual AND sexual manner.

Does anybody remember that old story from last year "A Nostalgia Trip With A Twist?" I was only 16 at the time, and yet I still outright used the word "vorniness" in that story, because that was indeed what I was feeling back then.

Since then I decided that because of my age, it was most likely in my best interest to not write stories like that anymore. I know that there is nothing technically wrong with what I wrote, but the fact of the matter is that my character in the story was 16, while the pred was an adult. Obviously in non-sexual vore contexts, this isn't necessarily a problem. But...a swf context wasn't quite my intention while writing it. I haven't written a story for myself like that since. And I promised my blog in my now-established rules that I would only post swf vore.

That being said, it hasn't been a perfect record.

You brought up the Big Brother story as an example of someone trying to get me to write fetish content while I am a minor, but I know the requester well enough to know that unless they are just a master manipulator, that just is not the case. One story that I DO believe was requested by someone who just wanted me to write fetish content was the "Little Red Robin Hood" vore story, which is ESPECIALLY problematic considering one of the prey is a child.

But...the thing is...I recognized that some people would get aroused by it. I knew that some people would. And yet, I wrote it anyway. I chose, willingly chose, to write a vore story that many people would get off to...that has a child in it. That is completely my fault, and I apologize deeply for it. There is a very real possibility that I directly caused a pedo to get off to what essentially boils down to cp, which is not only morally wrong, but illegal. It is for this reason that I will be privating that story for the foreseeable future. I wasn’t intending to write cp, I wasn’t aroused by it myself, but I still wrote a vore story that many people could see as sexual that features a child.

I do not take guilt very well, and I know that many of you, especially those who read my vent story, know that I suffer from past trauma. I'm unsure if I'll be able to get my trauma voice to stop screaming at me over basically writing cp, but I really don't know. Hopefully I can get it to stop before I do anything stupid to myself.

But, as I'm sure many of you know, there is one more layer to this, LoveForSkekShod. I KNEW from the very start that Skek liked vore in a sexual manner. In fact there was one unreleased story where they asked me to pair vore with mpreg. From a writing perspective that wasn't too hard to do so I did it, but...in all honesty, the fact that Skek liked vore sexually, really didn't bother me. Like, really it didn't. Skek asked me if we could do a trade, I wrote my part, and they drew their part, and everything was fine. I was okay with it, completely and utterly. As such, I can't really say that I felt taken advantage of by them, and I really, REALLY do not want people going over to their blog and going "YOU MANIPULATED A MINOR INTO WRITING FETISH CONTENT FOR YOU!" because truth be told, they didn't. I was totally okay with what I was writing.

This is also why I allow NSFW blogs to like/read/reblog my stuff, even if the story in question WAS intended to be swf. It really doesn't bother me. I put the content out for the world to read, what a person does with that content is their business and their business only, and I do not want to be policing how people can enjoy my content. Doing something like that just...does not sit right with me.

Plus, as soon as I turn 18, all those NSFW blogs who look at my content, I can start catering to more overtly, and quite possibly make some money off of them, too. Horny people are a lot more likely to shill out money for things they want than non-horny people after all. Plus, if I get cut off by my parents in college, having an extra source of money besides just McDonalds is always a help.

So...in conclusion, my relationship with NSFW vore is...trickly as I am still legally a minor. But, you have to understand. I both broke my promise to my blog to not post NSFW vore multiple times, and pretty much wrote cp, so, please don't try to defend me. I am the one at fault and me being a minor doesn't change any of that. I only hope that I can make up for all I've done.

Thank you.

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thetwstwildcard · 3 years

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Can we learn more about Lovette?

"Big sister..." Eirlys spoke softly as she sat on her sister's bed, watching her put on her makeup "Yes Eir?" Lovette glanced back at her through the mirror "Is this another date.." "Of course it is." Lovette giggled a bit, putting on lipstick "Lovi... That won't bring back Ambr-" "DON'T YOU DARE SAY HIS NAME!!!" Lovette snapped back, slamming the tube of lipstick on the vanity, breaking the lipstick along with leaving a hole. Eirlys jumped, ears laying flat against her head. She couldn't meet Lovette's gaze, the aura off of her was too dark. Lovette growled before she looked down. With a sigh she began to clean off the ruined lipstick from her hand.

Her eyes softened as she turned back "I'm sorry... I... Just don't like hearing his name." She walked towards her sister, reaching out to pat her head "You all turned away, but I saw it. The flames eating away his body, his pleading eyes.. " Lovette began to tear up before stopping "I.. I have to go, won't want to keep him waiting" she forced a giggle and like that the fox was gone.

-------------------------------------------------------

'Ah, there he is' Lovette smiled as the man approached her "I saw that the movie-" she was shut up by the man forcing a kiss upon her, pulling her body into his desperately. She cursed in her head as she let him take control "Maybe we should skip to the fun part?" He smirked, breathlessly.

Nsfw ahead (non con)

'No...no...no...no...' "Of course ~" despite her silent pleas to herself she went against her desires as the man forced her to follow him back to his place.

'How disgusting...' She thought to herself as he forced himself upon her 'it feels disgusting, I want to throw up...' The man continued to have his way with the fox, using her to fufil himself 'heh... Crying out someone else's name.. Of course I'm a stand in...' She winced as he left more marks on her, bites and hickeys, more memories for her to be disgusted by. Time passed as Lovette mentally checked out of the situation, watching her own body move along with him acting like he wanted, not how she actually felt.

-------------------------------------------------------

When all was done Lovette sighed. The man was asleep next to her, leaving her alone to her thoughts yet again. She pulled the blanket over herself, covering her shame. The woman glanced at the clock and slowly slipped out of the bed. Silently she got dressed and left his house. As soon as Lovette was away she started to cry, digging her claws into her own arm "Disgusting... Disgusting.... I can still feel his touches... " she covered her mouth, not wanting to throw up "Ambrose..." She looked up at the stars in the sky "I'm so sorry... Please... It's my fault you're dead.. It should have been me... WHY COULDN'T IT HAVE BEEN ME?!!!?"

#twst oc #twisted wonderland oc #oc #twstoc #tw noncon #non con #cw noncon #not explicitly stated that its intercourse but it is #just Lovette not being mentally involved in it #as long as she's wanted #lovette sieglinde

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cumfort-cumfort-cumfort · 3 years

Text

Shikamaru Nara

Hey, I am Rae! Below is an +18 headcannon piece I wrote. Please let me know if you enjoy. The Trigger Warnings are written below along with the song I listen to while writing. Appreciate you!

🔞: Explicitly described Peeping tom/ugly bastard fetish, Voyeuristim, and Exhibitionism

🚫TW: Female bodied/AFAB reader insert, reader described as 'slutty' and 'perverted,' Exhibitionist reader. Let me know if any triggers need to be added. I would love to add anything you deem necessary, your safety is priority!

💽After Dark (baseboost/reverb) by Mr. Kitty

♟Shikamaru is the worrying type. You this side of him often, when he walks you home, or puts half his meal on your plate, sometimes waking up in the middle of the night to look over at your side of the bed- then getting up to double check the locks on the front and back door- and make sure he turned the kettle off- then slipping socks on your feet, before getting back in bed and holding you close. When you stur in your sleep and ask what's wrong, he is quick to admit, "It's nothing, I was just thinkin' let's g'back to sleep-"

♟it can't be helped, it is just part of who he is, he is so good at it that he managed to make a career out of it in being Hukage Uzumaki's advisor, so it is no surprise he would be worried now.

♟Your heart nearly pounds out of your chest when Ino rushes into tell you that Shikamaru, your fiancé, is at the door- and he looks rough. She promises to kill him should he attempt to call off your wedding litteral hours before the ceremony. His pony tail is looser than usual, his arm and shoulder muscles lax, his eyes half lidded, and he has a faint blush over his cheeks. His Batchelor party was going as planed you could assume, except clearly it wasn't, as he was at your door and no longer at the bar.

♟"I'm not having second thoughts." He confesses, "I just never told you- I should have but- I want you to know, the Nara Clan, " he leans into you, almost falling over in his drunken state, "The whole clan is full of perverts, baby." He raises his eyebrows like you would know what he is referring to, but you're in a relationshipwith him- so you already know of one Nara pervert. "No, like a whole bunch'a Peeping'Toms!" He scowls grabbing both your hands.

♟It's then that he tells you about the wedding ceremony, rather the post-wedding ceremony. The Nara Clan is famous for its special brand of shadow jutsu, pased down through the generations. A legacy that you are expected to continue with your own children. The ceremony was a way to insure that efforts where being made to do just that.

♟Shikamaru was to be Clanhead as soon as you were wed, only then did he reach all of the requirements. Of age, social standing, and able to produce a proper heir, and with all of the necessary strings attached. The marriage would have to be consummated, and said intercourse would have to be witnessed by the Nara Council. Four dusty, crusty old men who are distantly related to your new husband would watch you fuck him for the first time as his wife... "I didn't tell you because I thought I could weasel my way out of it-" He sighed, "but the damn ceremony is tomorrow and nothing in the clan has changed yet."

♟He is surprised that you still agreed to go through with the ceremony, so quickly to. Maybe you were ment to be a Nara Clan member you seemed perverted enough. You hardly took anytime to even think about it. He wondered of you really understood the implications... you and him, newly wed, as four of his relatives(now your relatives to) watched him fuck you till his semin was planted in you womb and eventually leaking out of spread legs for the old geezers to see.

♟ You were surprised to, even now, You sit on your knees, your feet tucked under you. Waiting. He would be back any minute from a visit with his father he strategically planned so he wouldn't have to watch the clan heads file through the sliding doors and into your shared bedroom. You bounced your scantily clad pussy on your ankles in an attempt to creative some friction and alleviate your building arousal, you hoped the four men wouldn't notice.

♟They bowed politely, but Shikamaru was right in calling them perverts. Some of them were clearly giddy, slightly drunk, and not ashamed to be looking forward to the evenings entertainment. You were instructed not to move from your spot on the freshly prepared bed matt until he arrived. As soon as the clan heads found their spots, one on each wall of the room. They dressed entirely in black complete with masks and gloves, with their hands on their thighs, waiting as a shadow would.

♟Shikamaru finally appears and sighs in a defeated and exhausted manner, but his eyes lock on you and he cocks an eyebrow and smirks at your appearance. His blushing bride, surrounded by old pervs, wearing a robe and nothing underneath. It is a real shame his isn't into sharing, especially not in sharing you. "What a drag."

♟He slides his arms out of his kimono, and let's the top fall around his waste, leaving his chest, shoulders, and arms exposed. When he sees your face flush he has to hold in a chuckle, you can't look away, there is too much of a chance that you'll see one of the spectators so you have to keep your cool when looking at him. He whispers low as he makes his way to you, "What's that look for? I only said I didn't want them to see you; don't be surprised if I can't help but enjoy myself- I am a member of the same clan as them remember?" The is on his knees infront of you and grabs you behind the neck to pull you in and kiss you. The lights dim and long shadows are cast over everything. He kissed you deep and shamelessly, and you wonder if his eyes are open, he kisses you again on the cheek then just below the ear.

♟"Did you do as I instructed?" His voice is husky in the shell of your ear. You shake you head no, and he "Tsks, tsks, tsks" in an effort to embarrass you. "I thought I made it very clear, I told you to touch yourself before we started so you would be ready and we could be done with this quickly and painlessly as possible?" He sighs again but there is something cheeky about it. "Now this is going to last so much longer than it needs to."

♟ He nips at your eatlobe and begins to pull you onto his lap. "We just can't skip foreplay- he kisses lower down your neck and pulls on the robe covering you, it slips down your shoulders only enough for you to feel exposed, thin stips of shadows hold it there. You want to slap him for exposing more of you and thank him for covering what he deemed to be for his eyes only. He brings your hands to his chest.

♟his hands slip down the middle of your robe, skin to skin, as he reaches lower and slips a hand into your underwear. There is a creak in the floor on the opposite side of the room and Shikamaru's squint at the man who caused it. They flick back to you seconds later, "Well, maybe you didn't need to prep- you're already sloppy, shaking, soaked and I've just got here. Don't tell me you're enjoying this." You squeak when he presses in his long middle finger. "Awe my slutty little wife wants to be watched, is that it?" You deny it until he adds a second finger and spreads you wide, then you can only moan.

♟Your mouth is covered by a slick black shadow that almost feels like satin, and Shikamaru's hand wraps around your neck to keep you balanced staddling his hips as he moves to lay back on the mat.

♟"Go ahead and ride me" His left hand, not occupied by your mouth or clothes is free to find yours still shakily pressed to his chest. Your wedding rings clink together when he places his over yours. "Just stay quiet, that is for me to hear and for them to fantasize about."

By: Cumfort-Cumfort-Cumfort

#cumfort cumfort cumfort #naruto smut #naruto x you #naruto #naruto imagines #naruto x reader #shikamaru #shikamaru smut #shikamaru x you #shikamaru imagine #shikamaruedit #shikamaru x y/n #shikamaru nara #shikamaru naruto #90s anime

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elamarth-calmagol · 3 years

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What actually is LACE? (an informal essay)

What’s LACE?

Laws and Customs among the Eldar, or LACE, is the most popular section of the History of Middle Earth books. It's available online as a PDF here: http://faculty.smu.edu/bwheeler/tolkien/online_reader/T-LawsandCustoms.pdf . There’s a lot of LACE analysis in the fandom, Silmarillion smut fics are usually labeled “LACE compliant” or “not LACE compliant”, and I’ve been seeing the document itself show up in actual fics, meaning that the characters themselves are discussing it.

LACE is an unfinished, non-canonical essay split into several parts. It covers the sexuality of elves, which is mostly what people talk about. It also covers elvish naming (which I want to make a whole different post about), the speed at which elves grow up, changes that happen throughout their lives, their death and rebirth, and finally the legal and moral issues of Finwe remarrying after Miriel’s death. The discussion about rebirth conflicts with Tolkien’s later writings about Glorfindel’s re-embodiment, but to the best of my knowledge, LACE is the best or only source for most of the topics it covers.

However, LACE is not canon since it doesn’t show up in the Silmarillion. Counting all of the History of Middle Earth as canon is literally impossible, considering Tolkien contradicts himself all over the place. It is only useful because it has so much information that is never discussed in the actual canon. Many people consider it canon out of convenience.

Another important thing to remember is that, other than presumably the discussion of the growth of elvish children, the information is only supposed to apply to the Eldar (meaning the Vanyar, Noldor, Teleri, and Sindar) and not the dark-elves such as the Silvan elves and Avari.

The rest is behind the cut to avoid clogging your feeds.

Problems with LACE interpretations

But because it’s hidden in the History of Middle Earth (volume 10, Morgoth’s Ring), barely anyone actually gets the opportunity to read it. I don’t think most people are aware that you can get it online, so it doesn't get read much.

I feel like this leads to a handful of people saying something about LACE and everyone else going along with it. I definitely did this. I was amazed by all the things that were in the actual essay that nobody had ever told me about, or had told me incorrectly. For example, most people seem to believe that elves become married at the completion of sexual intercourse (whatever that means to the fic author). In fact, LACE explicitly says that elves must take an oath using the name of Eru in order to be legally married. Specifically:

It was the act of bodily union that achieved marriage, and after which the indissoluble bond was complete… [I]t was at all times lawful for any of the Eldar, being both unwed, to marry thus of free consent one to another without ceremony or witness (save blessings exchanged and the naming of the Name); and the union so joined was alike indissoluble.

I’ve seen a marriage oath being included in a few stories recently, but most writers leave out the oath entirely and just have sex be automatically equivalent to marriage. What would happen if elves had sex without swearing an oath? I don’t know, but I’d love to see it explored.

Then there’s a footnote that might explicitly deny the existence of transgender elves... or not, but I’ve literally only seen it mentioned once or twice. Overall, I feel like all of LACE is filtered through the handful of people who read it, and we’re missing out on a lot of metanalysis and interpretations that we could have because most fans never see the actual document.

Who wrote LACE?

I mean within the mythology of Middle Earth, of course. Since LACE appears in the History of Middle Earth and not the Silmarillion, we can be pretty sure that J.R.R. Tolkien himself wrote it and it wasn’t added to by Christopher Tolkien. But that’s not the question here. Remember that Tolkien’s frame narrative for all of his Middle Earth work is that he is a scholar of ancient times and is translating documents from Westron and Sindarin for modern audiences to read and understand. The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings come from the Red Book of Westmarch, and I believe The Silmarillion is meant to be Tolkien’s own writings based on his research (though it might also be an adaption of Bilbo’s “Translations from the Elvish”, but I haven't looked into that). So what does LACE come from?

Christopher Tolkien admits in his notes that he doesn’t know. He says, “It is clear in any case that this is presented as the work, not of one of the Eldar, but of a Man,” and I agree, because of the way it seems to be written as an ethnographic study rather than by someone who lives in the culture. Honestly, it talks too much about how elves are seen by Men (e.g. speculating that elf-children might look like the children of Men) to be written by an elf. This changes once it gets to the Doom of Finwe and Miriel, but that could be, and probably is, a story told to the writer by an elf who was there at the time.

Tolkien actually references Aelfwine in the second version of the text. The original story behind The Lost Tales, which was the abandoned first version of the Silmarillion, was that a man from the Viking period named Aelfwine/Eriol stumbled onto the Straight Road and found himself on Tol Eressea. He spoke to the elves and brought back their stories to England with him. So it makes a lot of sense that Aelfwine would also write about the lives and customs of the elves for an audience of his own people.

Does LACE exist in Middle Earth?

I keep finding fics where first age elves discuss “the Laws and Customs” openly, as if it’s a text in their own world. I usually get the impression that it was brought by the Noldor from Valinor. But did the document actually exist in that time period? For me, the answer is definitely not.

First of all, LACE was probably written by a Man, meaning it could not have dated back to Valinor in the years of the Trees, because Men hadn’t awaked yet. In fact, the closest thing to an established frame narrative for it is that it was written by Aelfwine, who comes from the time period around 1000 CE (though Tolkien doesn’t seem to have pinned him down). This is at least the fifth age, if not later.

But what if you don’t believe that it was written by a Man? It still couldn’t have been written in the First Age, because it discusses the way the relationship between elves’ bodies and souls changes as ages go by. For example:

As ages passed the dominance of their fear ever increased, ‘consuming’ their bodies... The end of this process is their ‘fading’, as Men have called it.

A lot of time has to go by in order for elves to get to the point of fading. As a bonus, here’s another reference to the perspective of Men. LACE also discusses the dangers that “houseless feas”, which are souls of elves who do not go to Mandos after their bodies died, pose to Men. How would they have known about that in the First Age? It further says that “more than one rebirth is seldom recorded” (which isn’t contradicted anywhere I know of), and that’s not something you would know during your life of joy in Valinor, where almost nobody dies. That’s something you learn after millennia of war. This has to be a document written well after the Silmarillion ends.

So what about the sex part? That’s all we care about, right? Well, it is entirely possible that this was written down by the elves and Aelfwine translated it (though my impression is that he mostly recorded stories told orally to him and that elves were not very much into writing, at least in Valinor where you could get stories directly from someone who experienced them). However, why would the elves write this down? They know how quickly their children grow up. They’ve seen actual marriages. They don’t need that described to them. And if they did have a specific document or story explaining the expectations of them when it comes to sex and marriage, why would they call it “Laws and Customs”? That’s a very strange name for a set of rules for conduct. I’m sure they had a list of laws written out somewhere in great detail, like our own state or national laws (that seems very in character for the Noldor, at least). But I seriously doubt that those laws are what we’ve been given to read. LACE is not an elvish or Valinoran document.

Is LACE prescriptive or descriptive?

Here’s the other big question I’m interested in. Prescriptive means that the document describes the way people should behave. Descriptive means that it describes how people do behave. And the more I worldbuild for Middle Earth and the culture of elves, the more I want to say that LACE is prescriptive in its discussion of sex, marriage, and gender roles.

But wait. I’ve been saying for paragraphs that I think LACE is Aelfwine or another Man’s ethnographic study of elvish culture. Then it has to be descriptive, right?

Does it? How long do we think Aelfwine stayed with the elves? Did he wait fifty years to see a child grow up? Did he get to witness a wedding ceremony? Did he meet houseless fea? I don’t think he could have done all of that. Maybe a different Man who spent his entire life with the elves could, but then when was this written? When the elves were still marrying and having children in Middle Earth or when so much time had gone by that they had begun to fade already?

Whoever wrote this was told a lot of information by elves instead of experiencing it firsthand, the same way he heard the stories from the First Age from the elves instead of being there. Maybe it was one elf who talked to him, maybe several different ones. But did those elves accurately describe their society the way it was, give him the easiest description, or explain the way it was supposed to be? If I was describing modern-day America, would I discuss premarital sex or just our dating and marriage customs? Maybe people would come away from a talk with me thinking that moving in together equated to marriage for Americans in the early 21st century. And I don’t even have an agenda to show America in a certain way, I'm just bad at explaining. Did the elves talking to what may have been the first Man they had seen in millennia have an agenda in the way they presented themselves?

Or did the writer himself have an agenda? Imagine going to see these beautiful, mythical, perfect beings, and you find out that they behave in the same immoral ways Men do. Do you want to share the truth back home? Or do you leave out things that don't match your worldview? Did Aelfwine come back wanting to tell people what elves were really like? Or did he want to say “this is how you can be holy and perfect like an elf”?

Anyone studying the Age of Exploration will tell you that Europeans neber wrote about new cultures objectively, and often things were made up to fit the writer’s idea of what savages looked like. For example, my Native American history teacher in college told a story of how explorers described one tribe who (sensibly) didn't wear clothes as cannibals, because cannibalism and going around naked went together in their minds and not because of any actual incident. Unbiased scholarship barely existed yet. Even Tolkien was extremely biased and tended to be imperialistic, as we all know. There’s absolutely no reason to think that Aelfwine wasn’t biased in his own way. (Of course, now we have to consider what biases a Danish or English man from the centuries around 1000 would have when it comes to things like gender roles. I assume he would have been more into divorce and female warriors than the elves are said to be.)

But is that what Tolkien intended? Probably not. He probably wanted LACE to be descriptive. But he also never got much of a chance to analyse the essay after the fact, which might have led to him discussing its accuracy and even the exact issues I just pointed out about explorers. Anyway, we know he's biased, and honestly, what he intended has never slowed down the fandom before.

Conclusion

In short, I take LACE to be a prescriptive document describing the way elvish culture is supposed to be, not a blueprint I have to stick to in order to correctly portray elves. I also don’t believe the document that’s available for us to read existed even in the early Fourth Age, where The Lord of the Rings leaves off. There maybe have been some document outlining the moral behavior of elves, as a set of laws, but thats not the Laws and Customs we have.

Of course, canon is up to you to interpret. If you want Feanor discussing LACE with someone back in Valinor, go ahead. If you want to throw out LACE entirely, go ahead. It’s not even a canonical essay. All of this analysis is honestly useless when you consider the fact that no part of LACE exists in any canonical book.

But that’s Tolkien analysis for you.

#lotr #silmarillion #tolkien #laws and customs of the eldar #history of middle earth #silm #analysis #meta #headcanon #long post #mine

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angstbotfic · 2 years

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it literally is Don’t Say Gay, y’all

“there is nothing in the legislative text to prevent a teacher from describing to first graders the act of masturbation, human genitalia, or potentially even sexual intercourse. However, teachers might well be prohibited from reading a book about an LGBTQ+ character.

This is clearly the bill’s intent. How do we know? First, because its sponsors have told us so. Republican State Sen. Dennis Baxley, who sponsored the bill in the Florida senate, explicitly confirmed that HB 1557 was designed to keep assignments with details like “Sally has two moms or Johnny has two dads” out of the classroom. And second, because every time somebody offered alternative language, the bill’s supporters shot them down. For instance, one state senator proposed an amendment to replace the phrase “sexual orientation or gender identity” with “human sexuality or sexual activity.” Sen. Baxley rejected his proposal, explaining that such a change would “significantly gut” the bill’s intent.”

(source)

there could be good faith debate about what young kids should learn about sex, but don’t let anybody tell you that’s what this bill is about. it’s discrimination, plain and simple.

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trelldraws · 3 years

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The other night I was searching JSTOR for papers on 16th- and 17th-century German witch trials, as one does, when I came across this absolute showstopper of an abstract:

For 250 years insects and rodents accused of committing property crimes were tried as legal persons in French, Italian, and Swiss ecclesiastic courts under the same laws and according to the same procedures used to try actual persons. I argue that the Catholic Church used vermin trials to increase tithe revenues where tithe evasion threatened to erode them. Vermin trials achieved this by bolstering citizens' belief in the validity of Church punishments for tithe evasion: estrangement from God through sin, excommunication, and anathema. Vermin trials permitted ecclesiastics to evidence their supernatural sanctions' legitimacy by producing outcomes that supported those sanctions' validity. These outcomes strengthened citizens' belief that the Church's imprecation were real, which allowed ecclesiastics to reclaim jeopardized tithe revenue.

ME: THEY WHAT?

Needless to say, I had to click this paper, whereupon I passed in the course of several pages from wondering whether this was a really elaborate joke published in Chicago University's Journal of Law and Economics to literally crying with laughter:

Everyone has heard of a kangaroo court. But how about a court for kangaroos? What about a court for caterpillars? Impossible though it seems, for 250 years French, Italian, and Swiss legal systems had just that. Their ecclesiastic courts tried insects and rodents for property crimes according to the same procedures used to try legal persons. These courts summoned snails to answer charges of trespass, appointed legal counselors to locusts, and considered defenses for grasshoppers on the grounds that they were God's creatures. They convinced cockchafers of cozening crops, fulminated against field mice for filching from farmers, and exiled weevils under pain of excommunication and anathema.

Vermin trials were not the province of Dark Age ignorance or impoverished primitivism. They were of a much later, more enlightened vintage—a Renaissance one. Further, they occurred in the wealthiest countries in the world.

One interpretation of vermin trials is that the judicial officials who conducted them were mad. In examining these trials' records, it is tempting to conclude as much. In the records, we find distinguished judges ordering crickets to follow legal instructions, dignified jurists negotiating a settlement between farmers and beetles, and a decorous court granting a horde of rat defendants a continuance on the grounds that some cats prevented them from attending their trial.

[3] This paper considers ecclesiastic trials of vermin only. It does not consider the prosecution of domestic animals, such as dogs in pigs, in secular courts. For information on trials of domestic animals, which is often mixed with discussions of vermin trials, see Evans (1906) and Finkelstein (1981). For information on trials of inanimate objects, which is also occasionally mixed with discussions of animal trials, see Hyde (1916, 1917a, 1917b) and Pietz (1997). For information on animal trials under Roman law, see Jackson (1978).

This is so much absurdist litigation.

Early modern citizens' knowledge of pests and how to control them was poor. A perusal of pest control manuals used by professional farmers reveals just how poor. State-of-the-art Renaissance pesticides included sprinkling weasel ashes or water in which a cat had been bathed over fields to drive away mice; capturing a rodent, castrating it, and releasing it among other rodents to deter them; putting castor oil plants in afflicted fields to drive away moles; and hanging garlic around flock leaders' necks to protect sheep from wolves.[4]

[...]

Thus, it is unsurprising that, together with the other impressive remedies noted above, early modern farmers considered the ecclesiastical trial of vermin as a possible pesticide. Indeed, early modern pest control manuals explicitly advised farmers to use divine pesticide when confronted with difficult-to-resolve infestations. As one manual put it, "When all of these remedies are unsuccessful, one must turn to the ban of the Church" (Dannenfeldt 1982, p. 555).

Early modern citizens' divine-pesticide superstition is still less surprising when one considers the superstitions held by Europe's intellectual elite during the same period. These individuals held, for example, that the continent was infested by witches who had intercourse with demons and sole men's genitals while the men slept. When compared with this belief, simple farmers' belief that god might be able to exterminate pests is unremarkable.

[4] Early modern manuals contain a few pest control methods that are more sensible, for example, poison. But even these display incredible ignorance. One suggests using butter to poison rats.

Multiple communities beset by the same pests sometimes sued vermin collectively. For instance, in 1659 the Italian communes of Chiavenna, Mese, Gordona, Prada, and Samolico banded together to prosecute caterpillars they charge with trespassing on and damaging their fields.

A class action against caterpillars!!!

Ecclesiastic courts appointed defense attorneys to represent accused insects and rodents. Thus, when in 1519 the inhabitants of Glurns, Italy, sued some field mice for property damage, the court appointed legal counsel for the mice "to the end that they may have nothing to complain of in these proceedings" (Evans 1906, p. 112). Similarly, later that century, when the inhabitant of Saint-Jean-de-Maurienne, France, sued some weevils, the court appointed the creatures two legal representatives, a procurator and an advocate, "lest the animals against whom the action lies should remain defenseless" (Cohen 1993, p. 120).

Ecclesiastic judges showed impressive fairness towards vermin in such trials. Consider a fourteenth-century lawsuit brought against some flies by the inhabitants of Mainz, Germany. To the court's consternation, the flies refused to appear before the bench after being summonsed. The court concluded that "in consideration of their small size and the fact that they had not yet reached their majority," it would overlook the flies' failure to appear and would appoint them adequate defense counsel to prevent it from happening again (Evans 1906, pp. 110-11).

AAAAA

The lawyers representing vermin argued strenuously for their clients at trial. A common defense was that the defendants were God's creations. Thus, they had as much right to enjoy the fruit of His earth as the plaintiffs. Another common defense was that the case was invalid. Thus, the plaintiffs should be nonsuited.

One argument that vermin defense attorneys made towards this end was that their clients were vermin (Evans 1906, pp.98-99). This would have been a sensible argument against treating pests as legal persons—presumably the most sensible one—were it not offered by way of elaborate judicial proceedings that presumed the legitimacy of treating grasshoppers and moles as legal persons ipso facto.[6]

Procurators on both sides "took their job very seriously, devoting a great deal of time, knowledge, and legal expertise to the defense of their clients" (Cohen 1993, p.120). Vermin trials involved much legal wrangling. And judges at least pretended to be at great pains to decide cases justly.

[6] According to Chassenée (1531), another legal manuever [sic] attorneys for vermin resorted to was to argue that their clients were clerics, which entitled the vermin to the benefit of clergy. This would have permitted insects and rodents to have an ecclesiastic judge decide their case when the bishop granted jurisdiction to a secular magistrate (Evans 1906, pp.32-33). No vermin counselor ever used this argument. Still, the possibility that caterpillars or field mice might be men of the cloth was an argument the courts were willing to entertain.

By this point I was actually wheezing. Quoth a friend, accurately, upon being sent this excerpt: "???????????????? / The biggest, longest question mark of my life" ME FUCKING TOO

[7] Vermin often lost their case by default. Judges summoned vermin to appear in court to answer the charges against them three times. "The summoners were . . . served in the usual way by an officer of the court, reading them at the places most frequented by the animals" (Jamieson 1988, p. 51). If the vermin failed to respond to the third and final summons, the court could convict them.

To ensure that all members of the convicted species were aware of their sentence, the court announced the its verdict publictly and nailed broadsheets declaring its judgement to trees in the affected area. Alternatively, the court might bright some specimens before the bench to inform them of its decision, remitting the creatures to the afflicted area to share the decision with their colleagues (Dinzelbacher 2002, p. 410).

PLEASE!!!

TL;DR this whole paper was just such an experience, thank you god and the University of Chicago, I've never laughed so much in the course of reading an academic publication in my life, well-researched this is not but imagine submitting this paper with a straight face, this man has won academia

#not art #tbd

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dwellordream · 3 years

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“Plenty of women spoke out against rape in the Middle Ages, though just like now, they had to struggle to be heard. Medieval courts often let rapists go with little explanation and placed the burden of proof on the victim, as demonstrated by several cases in this register from 14th century Paris. In one instance, chambermaid Eudelot la Picarde accused her employer Guillaume Damours of raping her, and the court tasked her with producing witnesses, to which she responded that there were none. La Picarde failed to appear in court at the next date (perhaps because she knew she had no proof) and Damours was absolved. In another case, Jacqueline la Cyrière was accused of luring ten-year-old Jeannette Bille-heuse into her home and then aiding a Lombard soldier in raping the child. The court does not explain what happens to the soldier who actually committed the crime of rape, and focuses all its attention on La Cyrière, who is sentenced to burn at the stake.

A few cases stand out as exceptions. In 1385, Perrote Turelure was pardoned via a letter of remission by the king’s court for killing a squire named Brunet. Brunet had been pursuing her relentlessly, and eventually broke into her home and tried to rape her. Turelure killed him in order to avoid being raped. It is stated that Turelure “refused for fear of the harm done to her body and rape” and “feared the dishonor, shame and corruption of the virginity of her body and to be dishonored or dead.” At first, Turelure’s case looks like a success story. But why was she pardoned, and why was her use of physical force against her attacker such a crucial factor?

The clearest rape law that we have from medieval France stresses the importance of a woman forcefully resisting rape: “To force a woman is when someone has carnal intercourse by force with a woman against the will of said woman and when she does everything in her power to defend herself.” (This definition bears startling similarity to the one used by the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting system prior to 2013). By this medieval definition, if a victim did not resist verbally and physically, there was little way to prove she had been raped. In court, a victim would be questioned repeatedly to gain a sense of how physical and verbal her resistance was. Turelure’s resistance was considered so valiant that the king’s court pardoned her for the murder of her attacker and attempted to clear away any of the damage done to her reputation by the attempted rape (underscoring how suffering sexual violence could ruin a woman’s life).

Some women found their reputations so damaged by having been raped that they were forced into prostitution; there was little other space for them in society. If they could not get married due to the loss of their virginity, then they had to find the means to support themselves elsewhere. Turlure’s response to the rape was perhaps only acceptable because of who she was—a woman with an honest reputation who in the court’s eyes understood the value of her virginity and took steps to protect it.

Similarly, in 1386, Marguerite de Thibouville spoke of her lengthy resistance to rape to the Paris Parlement court. She testified that she repeatedly cried out, beat her attacker Jacques le Gris with her fists, and barricaded herself in another room. She is said to have “continued to scream” throughout the attack and Le Gris is quoted as saying that he “never met a stronger woman.” Her strong resistance, and the fact that the attacker broke into her home, is likely why the court granted her husband’s wish for a trial by combat, during which he executed Le Gris. De Thibouville’s forceful resistance was also a marker of her good, honest character, and her chastity as a married woman. Turelure’s case demonstrates something similar, for there is hardly a stronger sign of resistance than killing one’s attacker.

These two cases reveal an apparent contradiction in medieval French society, and, I think, in our own as well. If it is acceptable for a woman to kill the man who has attempted to rape her, then it follows that the rapist has committed an egregious wrong-doing, justifying his murder. So far, so good (more or less). Brunet bears the guilt for what occurs, not Turelure—despite the fact that he is the one who ends up dead. One would think this relationship could be true in the reverse: since Brunet, or any rapist, bears the blame for the violent crime, then the victim shoulders none of it. In other words, victim blaming shouldn’t be possible when the rapist is explicitly held accountable both by the would-be victim and the court. But we know that Turelure’s and De Thibouville’s cases are the exception rather than the rule, and more often than not medieval women were blamed for the crime committed against them.

Although these women may sound heroic (and in some ways they certainly are), there is a darker side to female self-defense. Rapist seek to subjugate their victims, making them relinquish control over their bodies and wills. Medieval courts demanded that the victims be active enough participants in the rape to not only resist it thoroughly but to stop it from happening at all. Then, as now, women were expected to be good rape victims. Turelure was only pardoned because she proved, within a shadow of a doubt, her desire to protect her virginity, and thus her status as an honorable woman.

But what happened to women whose resistance wasn’t as successful or forceful? And what happens to them now? In asking women to resist rape forcefully, we acknowledge it as a heinous crime or violent action that should thus be met with equal violence from its victims. And yet, we do not treat rape like a heinous crime. We have simultaneously classified rape as something terrible—the worst thing that can happen to a woman—and then we continuously fail to treat it as such.”

- Lucia Akard, “A Medieval #MeToo.”

#history #medieval #cw: rape #cw: csa #lucia akard

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frankendeers · 3 years

Text

I am Made of Love and It’s Stronger Than You: Steven Universe and Models of Queer Resistance in Science-Fiction

Chapter 1. Science-Fiction and Resistance in Queer Subjectivity

“In other words, queer resistances emerge when the mechanisms of heteronormativity are exposed, when the concepts of gender and sexuality are being rearticulated in ways that defy the exclusion of subjects whose identities, desires, and practices are considered contradictory and unintelligible, and when ‘the presumption of heterosexuality’ no longer holds.” (Dhaenens, Articulations of Queer Resistance 4).

In order to articulate how Steven Universe makes use of Science-fiction conventions to explore models of queer resistance, it is first necessary to examine how queerness is woven into the fabric of its setting. Although Gems as a species are distinctly queer, their society serves as a metaphor for the various ways the centre seeks to regulate categories of identity and desire. This section will not only demonstrate how the show utilises its speculative elements to express different modes of queerness, but also argue that herein lies a possibility for resistance. In the world of Steven Universe, queerness is not merely a vector for non-normative forms of desire and expression but also a powerful tool to dismantle systems of oppression. Refusing to assimilate to the hegemonic discourse means exposing the artificial processes with which these are constructed and denaturalising them in the process. These forms of denaturalisation function simultaneously as a legitimising force for queer subjectivities. It will, furthermore become clearer, how Steven Universe sees queerness in itself as a force of positivity.

1.1. Gender and Performativity

One of the most notable aspects of the show is the fact that all members of its alien race, the Gems, are presenting as female. Due to his hybrid nature, Steven is the only alien character to exhibit a male gender identity. This immediately separates Steven Universe from the values of hegemonic society which usually sees the masculine as representative of universality: “[…] the female body is marked within masculine discourse, whereby the masculine body, in its conception with the universe, remains unmarked.” (Butler, Gender Trouble 17). The show subverts the expectation of maleness being an unquestioned neutral, by never fully explaining why the gems refer to themselves using female pronouns and to what extent they actually identify with womanhood. Instead, Steven Universe asks the viewer to accept this premise and, in the process, turn the feminine into the new “unmarked” position.

While the idea of single gender alien societies is not new, it is indicative of science-fiction’s power of questioning “heteronormative implications of progress” by “reimagining […] gender, sexuality, and identity.” (Thibodeau 263). In other words, while the Gems are repeatedly shown to be a highly advanced species, their singular gender separates them from the concept of heterosexuality. In fact, the heterosexual matrix cannot operate in Gem society, as it relies on both the existence of a rigid gender binary and the stability of the two genders it represents (cp. Butler, Gender Trouble 184).

Steven Universe’s Gem race adhere to neither standard. Thomas adds that the Gems themselves have no biological sex or gender identity, in a way that humans might understand, therefore inviting queer analysis (cp. Thomas 4). Seeing as Gems are “outside of human conceptualisations of sex and gender” (cp. Férnandez 64), it only follows that their means of reproduction must also differentiate itself from human ideas about birth and sexual intercourse. In its place, the show offers an alternative model that shows Gems as artificially grown in gigantic plantations referred to as “kindergardens” (“On the Run”). The inorganic nature of Gem production completely subverts the heterosexual narrative around the importance of birth and family making. Such an analysis harkens back to Lee Edelman’s polemic No Future: Queer Theory and The Death Drive. Here, Edelman famously argues that the centring of the Child as the symbol for heterosexual reproduction stands in direct opposition to queerness. The Child is used to always deflect political action onto the future, stalling meaningful change (cp. Edelman 3). For Gems, neither children nor heterosexual reproduction are of any concern. The show establishes that they “burst out of the earth’s crust already knowing what they’re supposed to be” (“Greg the Babysitter” 06:50— 06:59). By utilising the genre of science-fiction, Steven Universe thus suggests to the audience that a separation of creating life and heterosexuality is possible, which broadens the perspectives about queer possibilities.

The possibilities configured in the show’s alien species also expand to the realms of more profound matters of queer identity. The episode “Steven the Sword Fighter” reveals that Gem bodies are not material. A Gem’s consciousness is merely stored within her gem which in turn projects the body to the outside world. Therefore, a Gem’s appearance is merely “a conscious manifestation of light” (“Last One Out Of Beach City” 09:46—09:50). This feature of alien biology relates to Judith Butler’s theory on the performativity of gender. According to her work Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity, gender is not essential nor innate, but produced through repeated performative acts. These behaviours are regulated by cultural norms which then are projected onto the body: “[…] [A]cts, gestures, and desire produce the effect of an internal core or substance, but produce this on the surface of the body, through play of signifying absences that suggest, but not reveal, the organizing principle of identity as a cause. Such acts, gestures, enactments, generally construed, are to express fabrications manufactured and sustained through corporeal signs and other discursive means.” (Butler, Gender Trouble 188). True to this notion, the Gems reflect their identity onto their bodies, proving that, at least for them “gender is always a doing” (Butler, Gender Trouble 34). Steven Universe successfully shows by means of alien biology how femininity is a performance that can be presented by anyone or anything (cp. Thomas 6). This is a notion that is conform with queer theory’s aim of rendering essentialist notions of identity obsolete (cp. Hall 93) and contributes to the larger goal of achieving queer liberation.

The ways the different characters make use of their abilities to play with gender are manifold and reflective of their progression as characters. Valentín rightfully states that one of the more interesting aspects of the show is the unique ways in which all characters straddle the lines between masculinity and femininity (cp. Valentín 203).

Amethyst in particular promises deeper insights into the potential of different configurations of gender and identity. As Gem bodies are essentially illusions, Gems have the explicit power to shapeshift, stressing the usefulness of speculative elements for queer explorations. Here, Amethyst stands out as she makes use of this power the most, constantly shifting between different appearances. She impersonates people, turns into animals, and even embodies inanimate objects for her own amusement. The casualness with which she regards shapeshifting show cases a fluid stance towards identity that is explicitly revelling in the act of imitation and queers her abilities. Moreover, it could even be said that Amethyst constantly parodies the notion of identity itself and mocks those with a more rigid mindset. Thomas implies that her experimentation with different gender expressions suggests a complicated relationship to identity, while still remaining open and playful (cp. Thomas 6). When Steven’s father, Greg, tells her, he is uncomfortable with shapeshifting, she transforms into him and replies: “Oh, I forgot. You’re so sensitive.” (“Maximum Capacity” 09:00—09:10). For Eli Dunn, these instances can force the viewer to recognise the implications of gender as a construct in ways that hold meaning for making a queer worldview more accessible: “The ability of the Gems to change their gender representation at will is a type of magic that fundamentally disconnects notions of gender from gender identity in the mind of the viewer. When the viewer is told that the Gems bodies are constructed and unreal, the viewer is forced to reconsider the implications of the female coded body traits […]” (Dunn 47).

Regardless, Amethyst’s queer approach towards identity does not mean a complete disconnection to the concept itself. On the contrary, the effects of internalised self-hatred are most visible in Amethyst’s expressions of body variance. A later episode shows Amethyst’s physical body being repeatedly destroyed, forcing her to retreat into her Gem and regenerate (“Reformed”). Due to her impatience, she does not undergo the process as intended and returns in a deformed state. As the episode continues, her teammates chastise her to do it properly, leading to her spitefully taking on more and more ridiculous forms. While doing so, she mocks the notions of what constitutes a “proper” body at all: “Just as bodily surfaces are enacted as the natural, so these surfaces can become the site of a dissonant and denaturalizes performance that reveals the performative status of the natural itself.” (Butler, Gender Trouble 200). In this way, Amethyst’s alien abilities function as a tool of critique, revealing how the body can act as performance. The interesting part is, that Amethyst’s questioning of bodily norms does not only read as decisively queer, but also thematises how repressive norms can affect an individual.

As Gem society is extraordinarily normative, Amethysts are expected to attain a certain standard of height. Even though shapeshifting is a possibility for Gems, the ability requires conscious effort and is therefore not sustainable. It is because of this reason that Amethyst’s lack of height is considered a defect on Homeworld. Melzer states that identity performance always acts within a “highly regulative set of norms” which dictate what is considered a valid representative of any given category (cp. Melzer 43). Amethyst moves between gendered positions by means of coping with Gem society finding her to be insufficient. As height is often associated with strength and masculinity, Amethyst occasionally takes on the wrestling persona of “Purple Puma” (“Tiger Millionaire”). While in this form, she towers over ordinary people, exhibiting a flat, hairy chest and uses masculine pronouns for herself (cp. Valentín 204). Jack Halberstam recognises that some forms of female masculinity are a form of “social rebellion” or “the place of pathology” wherein women use masculine signifiers to escape restrictive expectations (cp. Halberstam, Female Masculinity 9). These observations are in accordance with Butler’s assertion that gender as a performance is “open to splitting, self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of “the natural” that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmic status.” (Butler, Gender Trouble 200).

Not only does Amethyst’s repeated mockery of body and gender norms expose them as illusions, but the show itself hints at experimentation with identity possibly alleviating feelings of inadequacy. Amethyst confesses later that she does not need the figure of Purple Puma anymore, as she now accepts herself the way she is: “I needed it when I felt like I wasn’t good enough. But I don’t feel that way anymore” (“Tiger Philanthropist” 07:10—07:16). Nevertheless, the show manages to avoid pathologizing queerness. The end of the episode shows Amethyst return to her alter ego, not in search for validation but because her time as a wrestler “meant everything (to her)” (“Tiger Philanthropist” 09:03—09:06). Without disregarding the play on parodic masculinity as a coping mechanism, Steven Universe attests a healing quality to the experimentation with gender. The alien body is presented as the site of social criticism, as well as positive connotations to queerness itself. These positive feelings towards queerness are depicted as harbouring an immense power for resisting further oppression.

How an acceptance of one’s own status as a queered entity can be harvested for resistance, is perfectly encapsulated in Amethyst’s confrontation with the enemy Gem Jasper. The parallels between these two opposing factions are clear: Jasper, similarly to Amethyst, was created to be a Homeworld soldier. Contrary to Amethyst, however, Jasper is described as the perfect example of what her specific Gem type should be (cp. “Beta”). Jasper herself asserts her superiority and makes clear the consequences of not fulfilling Homeworld’s demands: “Every Gem is made for a purpose: to serve the order of the Diamonds. Those who cannot fit inside this order must be purged!” (“Earthlings” 02:00— 02:06). In this sense, Jasper functions as the embodiment of Homeworld’s hegemonic discourse that excludes undesirable bodies and identities. She looks down on queerness and explicitly connects her abilities to serve the rigid system to her own worth: “Fighting is my life! It’s what I was made for! It is what you were made for too, runt.” (“Crack the Whip” 07:35—07:42). As Jasper repeatedly judges Amethyst according to normative standards of body and identity, Amethyst’s desire for victory over Jasper is framed as Amethyst complying to Homeworld’s demands. Instead of accepting her difference and alignment to queered identities, Amethyst attempts to meet Jasper on her terms which can only result in failure: “Steven... I can't win. No matter what I do, no matter how hard I work, she came out right, and I came out... wrong...” (“Earthlings” 03:54—04:05). It is when Steven redirects her focus onto the strength of their shared status as queer subjectivities, that they decide to team up: “That's just what Jasper thinks. She's the only one who thinks you should be like her! Stop trying to be like Jasper. You're nothing like Jasper! You're like me! Because we're both not like anybody.” (“Earthlings” 04:05— 04:18). In this way, Amethyst’s acceptance of her queered body leads to a connection to Steven as an ally in shared marginalisation. Their subsequent fusion defeats Jasper with ease where both of them alone where unable to do so.

Although fusion will be examined in detail later, its role in this encounter is particularly meaningful. Fusion, as the process of merging bodies, revolves around the feminine realms of emotional connection and the queer concept of blurring the boundaries of body and mind, turning it into the perfect metaphor for the strength of acceptance and unity for queer liberation purposes. In contrast to Jasper, Amethyst’s closeness to fluid identities and queerness makes it easier for her to engage in fusion and find strength. While it is true that Steven Universe does not negate physical limitations, the show proposes queer solidarity and self-acceptance as means of liberation.

The theme of gender expression standing in direct correlation to healing is also explored from a different angle in the character of Pearl. Pearl’s relationship to gender fluidity and performative identity is best understood when analysed through the lenses of lesbianism and female masculinity. Naturally, this beckons the question of how technically genderless aliens can be regarded lesbian. This is deeply connected to the nature of the category woman itself. Jack Halberstam criticises the mindset of restricting the boundaries of womanhood while leaving the lines of masculinity open: “[…] why is it [….] that one finds the limits of femininity so quickly whereas the limits of masculinity [….] seem fairly expansive?” (Halberstam, Female Masculinity 28). The policing of womanhood can be traced back to the masculine as unquestioned neutral territory when the feminine is only allowed to be represented by a highly specific set of features. When we return to Butler, the problem starts to dissolve in her theory of performativity. Womanhood is a set of behaviours and not dictated by biology: “The very subject of women is no longer understood in stable or abiding terms.” (Butler, Gender Trouble 2). The category of woman is henceforth rendered queer, as it is unstable and subject to change.

To regard Pearl as a woman and lesbian is therefore to view her identity not in terms of heteronormative discourses of biology, but allowing for the possibility to extrapolate valuable insights about gendered positions in society: “However, in an exploration of the fundamental instability of the category “women” does not find against feminism but, in resisting the urge to foreclose prematurely that category, licenses new possibilities for a feminism that constitutes “women” as the effect of, not the prerequisite for, its inquiries.” (Jagose, Way Out 273). With regards to the popular definition of lesbians as women cultivating romantic relationship with other women, identifying Pearl as a lesbian is a valid point of analysis. Steven Universe takes great care to repeatedly emphasise and explore the relationship between Pearl and Steven’s mother, Rose. The romantic attraction Pearl harbours for Rose defines her character and affects most of her actions throughout the course of the show. Interestingly, her progression in terms of lesbian affiliations and resistance towards Homeworld’s demands are reflected onto her body in increasingly explicit ways. Pearl embodies a progression into female masculinity where her gender performance changes with her widening understanding of liberation. This harkens back to Halberstam’s identification of female masculinity as a tool to subvert masculine power by turning a “blind eye to conventional masculinities and refusing to engage” (Halberstam, Female Masculinity 9).

To understand this better, one needs to examine the role Pearl is meant to fulfil in the social hierarchy of her home planet. Pearls, as a category of Gems, are made to serve and entertain elite Gems: “[…] Pearls aren’t made for this. They are meant for looking nice and holding your stuff for you […]” (“Back to the Barn” 03:02—03:12). Pearls are therefore, more than other Gem categories, marked with femininity and womanhood. Simone de Beauvoir remarks upon women’s role as subservient to masculine powers, always forced to obey as the perpetual Other (cp. de Beauvoir 29). Pearls are not only meant for the purpose of servitude, but also reduced to their appearance which usually mirrors that of her master: Upon examining Pearl, a Homeworld Gem remarks: “It looks like a fancy one, too. Who do you belong to anyway?” (“Back to the Barn” 03:38—03:42). Pearl herself disturbs these lines and expresses liberation through a refusal of participation in the hegemony of Homeworld, going as far as to openly rebel against it.

The progression becomes ever so clearer when the programme offers a flashback to show how Pearl conducted herself on Homeworld. Her dress is designed to be decidedly feminine while she defaults to a subservient body position. As Homeworld demands conformity to the role of a “Pearl”, the parallels to earth’s gender discourse become highly visible. Despite the Gem at the core of their being serving as the only material reality behind their existence, Homeworld society expects a certain set of presentation and behaviours from each Gem. Deviation from the norm is not allowed and can be met with punishment. With regards to her latter transformation, Pearl’s position on Homeworld recalls Butler: “Femininity is taken on by a woman who ‘wishes for masculinity,’ but fears the retributive consequences of taking on the public appearance of masculinity.” (Butler, Gender Trouble 70). After Pearl flees to earth and joins a rebellion against Homeworld’s regime, her presentation and performance become masculinised. She takes up sword fighting, fully knowing that this is not acceptable for a Pearl (“Sworn to the Sword”), and her subsequent regenerations take on more masculine aspects with each iteration: “The lesbian body, then, (like every body) is discursively constructed, a cultural text, on the surface of which the constantly changing, and contradictory possible meanings of “lesbian” are inscribed and resisted.” (Jagose, Way out 280).

First, Pearl’s dress is exchanged for a pair of leggings with a tule skirt serving as a layer (“Gem Glow”), the second transformation shows her abandoning the skirt while still suggesting a feminine alignment by incorporating a large bow into her outfit (“Steven The Sword Fighter”). Meanwhile, the colour pink becomes less apparent in her design with time. The show suggests Pearl’s move from the feminine towards the masculine end of the spectrum that is used to embody resistance to Homeworld’s demands of femininity. In other words, Pearl’s female masculinity is constructed in the same way, even conceived through the same discursive means, as the hegemonic identity she inhabited before (cp. Jagose, Way out 278). Pearl’s identity becomes queered as her body proves to be signifier of gender fluidity that always changes within contexts (cp. Butler, Gender Trouble 188). This can be seen as a typical articulation of queer resistance, as it not only exposes the artificiality of gendered categories but also refuses to replicate them (cp. Butler, Gender Trouble 201). Steven Universe implies a connection between queer desires and the ways they are reflected on the body. Halberstam himself states that this mixture can be particularly dangerous to heteronormative society: “[…] when and where female masculinity conjoins with possibly queer identities, it is far less likely to meet with approval. Because female masculinity seems to be at its most threatening when coupled with lesbian desire.” (Halberstam, Female Masculinity 28).

The programme outright states that the moment of awakening for Pearl is directly incited by her love for Rose to whom she was gifted as a servant: “I was supposed to make her happy. I just never could” (“Now We’re Only Falling Apart” 03:06—03:10). Seeing how Rose is uncomfortable with the restrictions on Homeworld, Pearl incites the first sparks of rebellion in an effort to make her happy. She suggests tricking the authorities and spending a day on earth when it was explicitly forbidden for Rose to do so (“Now We’re Only Falling Apart”). This slight misdemeanour quickly spirals out of control, as both Pearl and Rose grow endeared by Earth and develop a desire to live there freely. The liberational implications of their actions are hard to miss. They harken back to the building of queer utopia which proves how queerness itself “is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling of the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” (Muñoz 1).

However, Pearl’s freedom from authorities may be paradoxically stifled because of her connections to Rose. The programme grapples with the fact that Pearl’s wish to follow Rose may be interpreted as her remaining subservient to her former master instead of breaking free. To counter that, it can be said that Pearl’s love for Rose is completely inappropriate to Homeworld society. When Pearl attempts to fuse with Rose, she exclaims: “This is very not allowed.” (“Now We’re Only Falling Apart” 09:58—10:01). This means that their lesbian relationship is a societal taboo that gives room to further transgression and ultimately, rebellion. How exactly queer love and the war against oppression are cause and effect of one another within the show will be examined at a later point. For now, it is important to note that Pearl’s inability to let Rose go is presented as a failure to completely liberate herself. While the relationship is still queer, it is not equal and remains tenuously connected to the hierarchy out of which it was born. Various scenes suggest that even after Rose’s death, Pearl is unable to let go of their relationship: “Everything I ever did, I did for her. Now she’s gone. But I’m still here.” (“Rose’s Scabbard” 09:30—09:35). It is when Pearl accepts Rose’s death and experiences attraction to a human woman that her arch is completed. The episode “Last One Out Of Beach City” shows Pearl trying to flirt with a mysterious girl and breaking various rules in the process: “I am done thinking about the past. Tonight, I am all about the future.” (“Last One Out Of Beach City” 04:50—05:00). The symbol for overcoming the boundaries of her past and freeing herself from the last constraints of Homeworld’s oppression are encapsulated in her wearing a jacket. As a Gem’s attire is normally an inseparable part of her body, wearing clothes overstep Gem conventions and signify human territory. Here, she crosses lines between cultures to fulfil a romantic desire. Even her interest in the girl itself is significantly queered as an example of interspecies romance.

The importance of this experience can be observed with Pearl’s last regeneration. Her new form reflects the change towards a more queer, liberated identity onto her body. The colour pink is entirely absent from her design, signifying her removal from symbolic femininity as well as her freedom from Rose. The ways the design incorporates pants and a jacket recall the events of “Last One Out Of Beach City” while suggesting a close alignment to the classical butch identity (“Change Your Mind”). (Fig. 1. Pearl in her jacket. “Last One Out Of Beach City.” 02:52) Amethyst shrugs off masculinist notions about strength and overcomes her desire to fit into hegemonic society by questioning the nature of normativity itself. Pearl, on the other hand, escapes demands of femininity and her fate as a servant with the transformative power of queer desire. Consequently, Steven Universe uses the alien biological components of shapeshifting and the fantastical element of alternative societies to subvert expectations of hegemonic gender and reveal the artificiality of identity as a construct. While doing so, the programme also refers to Butler’s theories in ways that renegotiate queer subjectivities along the lines of political change: “The critical task is, rather, to locate strategies of subversive repetition enabled by those constructions, to affirm the local possibilities of intervention […]” (Butler, Gender Trouble 200). Both Amethyst and Pearl gain the strength to overcome the hegemonic oppression put upon them by their home planet through means of performativity. The queer reality of Pearl’s and Amethyst’s victories negate hegemonic assumptions about identity in ways that threaten oppressive forces. Queering one’s own identity is deeply connected to envisioning a future where categories break down. By engaging in performative practices, one is already in the process of building this exact world: “Performativity and Utopia both call into question what is epistemologically there and signal a highly ephemeral ontological field that can be characterized as a doing in futurity.” (Muñoz 26).

Works Cited:

Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books 1989, c1952. Print.

Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. New York: Routledge, 2004.

--. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. 1990.

Dhaenens, Frederik: “Articulations of queer resistance on the small screen”, Continuum 28.4, 2014. Pp. 520-531.

-- “The Fantastic Queer: Reading Gay Representations in Torchwood and True Blood as Articulations of Queer Resistance”, Critical Studies in Media Communication, 30.2, 2013. Pp. 102-116.

Dunn, Eli: “Steven Universe, Fusion Magic, and the Queer Cartoon Carnivalesque.” Gender Forum: An Internet Journal of Gender Studies 56, 2016. Pp. 44–57.

Edelman, Lee. No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive. 2004.

Halberstam, Jack. Female Masculinity. Durham: Duke University Press, 1998.

Hall, Donald E. Queer Theories. Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Hollinger, Veronica.: “(Re)Reading Queerly: Science Fiction, Feminism, and the Defamiliarization of Gender.” Science Fiction Studies 26.1, 1999. Pp. 23–40.

Jagose, Annamarie. Queer Theory: An Introduction. New York: New York University Press, 1996. Print.

--: “Way Out: The Category ‘Lesbian’ and the Fantasy of the Utopic Space.” Journal of the History of Sexuality, 4.2, 1993. Pp. 264–287.

--: “The Trouble with Antinormativity” Differences 1 26.1, 2015. Pp. 26–47.

Jameson, Fredric. Archaeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions. London: Verso, 2005.

Melzer, Patricia. Alien Constructions: Science Fiction and Feminist Thought. University of Texas Press, 2006.

Merrick, Helen: “Gender in Science Fiction.” The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, Cambridge University Press, 2003, pp. 241–252.

Moore, Mandy Elizabeth: "Future Visions: Queer Utopia in Steven Universe," Research on Diversity in Youth Literature 2.1, 2019. Pp. 1-17.

Muñoz, José E. Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, 2009.

Pawlak, Wendy Sue: “The Spaces between: Non-Binary Representations of Gender in Twentieth-Century American Film.” Dissertation Abstracts International, 73.11, U of ArizonaProQuest, 2013.

Pearson, Wendy Gay: “Alien Cryptographies: The View from Queer.” Science Fiction Studies 26.1, 1999. Pp. 1-22.

--: “Science Fiction and Queer Theory” Published as a book chapter in: The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction. Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn. (Eds.), 2003. Pp. 149-160.

Roqueta Fernandez, Marta: “Posthumanism and the creation of racialised, queer identities and sexualities: An analysis of ‘Steven Universe’” Monográfico: Nuevas Amazonas, 2.7, 2019. Pp. 48-84. 78 Shelley,

Valentin, Al: “Using the Animator’s Tools to Dismantle the Master’s House? Gender, Race, Sexuality and Disability in Cartoon Network’s Adventure Time and Steven Universe.” Buffy to Batgirl: Essays on Female Power, Evolving Femininity and Gender Roles in Science Fiction and Fantasy, edited by Julie M. Still et al., McFarland & Company Publishing, 2019, pp. 175–215.

Vasques Vital, André: “Water, gender, and modern science in the Steven Universe animation”, Feminist Media Studies, 2019. Ward, Pendleton, creator. Adventure Time. Cartoon Network Studios, 2010.

Wälivaara, Josefine. Dreams of a Subversive Future: Sexuality, (Hetero)normativity, and Queer Potential in Science Fiction Film and Television. Umeå, 2016

#Steven Universe #Steven Universe meta #Steven Universe analysis #SU analysis #SU meta #SU #Queer Studies #Academia #Media analysis #Long text #Rebecca Sugar #LGBT media #My M.A thesis #at least part of

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mihrunnisasultans · 3 years

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Not the spanish princess making me, an Irish history nerd who dislikes henry Viii, pity henry viii 👁️👄👁️

Frost can always do the unbelievable, right? Like I’m sure that in that time period Henry still cared about his appearance to create positive image on the ladies and whole kingdom, not that of a dishevelled lunatic that is incapable of doing anything than having sex and throwing fits actually.

However, I don’t feel sorry (and I can bet neither you Anon) when he keeps crying and complaining how CoA the wanton whore cast him in Hell and made him a sinner. Frost legit made him believe in what he said because he’d lost his mind and I’m here sitting like what does she want to achieve by that? Maybe not to make him sympathetic, but IDK preserve her “grand love story” - Henry loved Catherine, but then he lost his mind after Francis beat him up & I suppose also Wolsey made use of poor Henry for his schemes (replace beating up with joust and Wolsey with Cromwell and we get a too-well-known narrative spread in some circles. Henry was okay until he got hit in the head and targeted Anne).

EF did not even make him hot and made him absolutely unshippable and yet some people still ship Anne x Henry in TSP when we see him clearly abusing his wife both physically and mentally at the same time? And what if she lied, Henry lied too about having slept with Juana, and CoA was actually informed by her father about this and warned about marrying this man based on that. Catherine simply decided that Juana was lying on purpose to destroy her life. It’s weird how this lie was not mentioned again, of course not by Henry because he’s a self-righteous hypocrite, but by CoA herself, or reminded in any flashback? And NGL even this Anne does not look happy to me to be told by her Dad to court this pig, she has to smile and laugh in front of him, but I don’t see her happy at the prospect at all... There is this idea here that Thomas Boleyn is doing everything to keep his family safe precisely because he knows about Henry’s “humours” and it’s not only ambition, but also fear that makes them want to be in the king’s favour. Same with Maggie. He is so visibly crazy everyone just ass kisses him out of fear. It’s... actually really sad? Like I can’t comprehend how people can ship it, especially in TSP, sorry.

Despite Frost’s boyfriend’s comments how “witch” Anne destroyed CoA’s happiness with Henry, there was nothing of this in the show because it was clear all the marital mess had nothing to do with Anne. He turned vile before becoming interested in Anne and yet people still want this gross man, who treats his wife so abominably, for their fave??? I feel sorry for her because she clearly feels obligated to please this asshole for her family’s sake, and if anything we should have all prayed CoA actually killed him in this crazy show when she got the chance and did herself and Anne a favour lol.

CoA was also Henry VIII’s victim and some people (who mostly care about their ship, not fans of AB in general) gloss over the fact that this man dragged through the mud a woman who was a good queen and wife for so many years, conspired behind her back with Great Matter, made a huge drama around her virginity, divulged private information about her and his brother’s private (intimate) lives, humiliated her multiple times, spread rumours about her being “diseased” and being of doubtful reputation etc. etc. and only wake up when he begins to use similar tactics to the other half of their ship (and yes it ended differenly simply because he could not just execute a woman with such powerful connections in Europe). But he got hit in the head and evil Cromwell appeared, I forgot. Poor Henry truly believed in his accusations against Anne and suffered until the end of his days 😭 😭 😭.

IDK some people behave like he just came and politely asked her for a divorce so that he might sire a son with another woman and she simply refused him out of sheer spite because she didn’t want him happy with another. And I won’t even mention people who apparently believe falling out of love with your spouse was enough for divorce in 16th century and I’ve seen takes based on that as well.

And sorry, but I do believe he was well aware of CoA’s virginity or lack thereof when they married and it simply never bothered him until he decided to use this to make himself 100% right and the wronged party in divorce proceedings. He was historically sly enough to do so, unlike his show counterpart. The dispensation definitely covered for such possibility and the English were the party that wanted to have that assurance:

Both sides agreed that a papal dispensation was needed. The couple had become, at least in theory, related in the first degree of affinity when Catherine married Arthur. The issue of Catherine’s sex life raised its head again for, if she had stayed a virgin, there was no real affinity. The marriage treaty explicitly states that a dispensation was required because ‘her marriage to Prince Arthur was solemnised according to the rites of the Catholic Church and afterwards consummated’. Two months later, however, Ferdinand was telling his ambassador at the Vatican, who had orders to seek the dispensation, that it was all a lie. ‘The truth is that the marriage was not consummated and that the princess our daughter remained as whole as she was before she married,’ he wrote. ‘Even though this is true and known to be so where she is, the mad English ... [believe] that the dispensation should say that the marriage was consummated.’ This, he explained with startling prescience, was ‘in order to get rid of any future doubt over the [rights of] succession of the children that, God willing, will be born of this new matrimony’. The English, he meant, wanted the pope to state clearly he had taken into account the idea of consummation with Arthur when giving Catherine a dispensation to marry and have legitimate children with Henry. Popes in the sixteenth century were, however, smooth political operators. Julius II knew how to hedge his bets. The dispensation he eventually sent to England stated that the marriage had ‘perhaps’ been consummated. That single word meant the matter would be argued over for centuries.

Taken from: Giles Tremlett, Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen

Moreover Isabella of Castile asked to make the case even clearer:

Henry and his council, meanwhile, became increasingly obsessed by the brief – a copy of which had already been presented in Rome. Henry’s representative there, Gregorio Casale, confirmed that it seemed to close any loopholes left by the original bull. It widened the reasons Julius gave for allowing her to marry Henry, adding to the primary cause of fostering peace the words ‘certain other reasons’. As these last reasons were not explicit, they were impossible to argue against – even if, confusingly, the document also stated that she and Arthur had consummated their marriage.

Taken from: Giles Tremlett, Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen

Even if we assume Henry wanted to contest the validity of actual papal dispensation & papal authority and just stick to Scripture literally:

In both cases, after all, ‘carnal knowledge’ existed. Henry was also worried. In this respect extramarital sex was, indeed, legally considered as important as marriage itself. It meant that Anne was related to Henry ‘by affinity’. Henry’s ambassadors in Rome, then, were given a double task. Not only did he want his and Catherine’s marriage annulled, he also needed to clear the way for her rival. That would require a papal dispensation allowing him to marry Anne, despite his previous sexual relationship with her sister. The dispensation, it was suggested, should allow him to marry a woman who might ‘be related ... in the first degree of affinity, arising from whatever licit or illicit intercourse’. The double standard was remarkable. On the one hand the pope was being told it had been wrong for Catherine to win a dispensation to marry her former husband’s brother. On the other hand, he was being asked to write a dispensation for Henry to marry his former lover’s sister.

Taken from: Giles Tremlett, Catherine of Aragon: Henry’s Spanish Queen

#Anonymous #haha sorry Anon I just got some issues off my chest later #I know what you meant :)#the spanish princess #tsp #tsp spoilers #catheriine of aragon #henry VIII

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wisdomrays · 3 years

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TAFAKKUR: Part 376

THE QUR'AN AND ESTABLISHED SCIENTIFIC FACTS: Part 1

It is another argument for the Divine authorship of the Qur’an that it refers to certain facts of creation recently established by modern scientific methods. How, except on account of its Divine authorship, is it possible for the Qur’an to be literally true on matters of which people had not the least inkling at the time when it was revealed? For example, if the Qu’ran were not a Divine Revelation, would it have been possible for it to contain such a verse as this: Do not the unbelievers realize that the heavens and the earth were one unit of creation before we split them asunder? (21.20).

Whether the Qur’an really does refer, explicitly or implicitly, to the kinds of facts the sciences deal with, and the relationship between the Qur’an and modern sciences, are matters of considerable controversy among Muslim intellectuals. We should therefore treat the subject at length.

SCIENCE AND RELIGION

THE CIVILIZATION ISLAM CREATED

The conflict of science and religion in the West dates back as far as the thirteenth century. Due to the essential character of the corrupted Christianity represented by the Catholic Church, which condemns nature as a veil separating man from God and curses the knowledge of nature, any scientific advances were not seen in the West during the middle ages, which are called dark ages in European history. However, during the same period a magnificent civilization was flourishing in the Muslim East. Muslims, obeying the injunctions of the holy Qur’an, studied both the Book of Divine Revelation, that is, the Qur’an, and the Book of Creation, that is, the universe, and founded the most magnificent civilization of human history. Scholars from all over the old world benefited from the centers of higher learning at Damascus, Bukhara, Baghdad, Cairo, Fez, Qairwan, Zeitona, Cordoba, Sicily, Isathan, Delhi, and other great centres throughout the Muslim world. Historians liken the Muslim world of the Middle Ages, dark for the West but bright for Muslims, to a beehive. Roads were full of students, scientists and scholas travelling from one center of learning to another. Many world-renowned figures such as al-Kindi, al-Khwarizrni, alFarabi, Ibn Sina, al-Mas’udi, lbn al-Haytham, al-Biruni, al-Ghazzali, Nasir al-Din al-Tusi, al-Razi and many others shone like stars in the firmament of the sciences. In his multivolume History of Science, George Sarton divided his work into fifty- year periods, naming each chapter after the most eminent scientist of the period in question. For the years from the middle of eighth century (second century after Hijra) to the twelfth century, each of seven fifty- year periods carries the name of a Muslim scientist. Thus we have ‘the Time of al-Khwarizmi, the Time of al-Biruni’, etc. Within these chapters Sarton lists one hundred important Muslim scientists and their principal works.

John Davenport, a leading scientist, observed:

It must be owned that all the knowledge whether of Physics, Astronomy, Philosophy or Mathematics, which flourished in Europe from the 10th century was originally derived from the Arabian schools, and the Spanish Saracen may be looked upon as the father of European philosophy (Quoted by A. Karim in Islamic Contribution to Science and Civilization).

Bertrand Russell, the famous British philosopher, wrote (Pakistan Quarterly, Vol.A, No.3):

The supremacy of the East was not only military. Science, philosophy, poetry, and the arts, all flourished in the Muhammadan world at a time when Europe was sunk in barbarism. Europeans, with unpardonable insularity, call this period ‘the Dark Ages’: but it was only in Europe that it was dark---indeed only in Christian Europe, for Spain, which was Mohammedan, had a brilliant culture.

Robert Briffault, the renowned historian, acknowledges in his book The Making of Humanity:

It is highly probable that but for the Arabs, modem European civilization would have never assumed that character which has enabled it to transcend all previous phases of evolution. For although there is not a single aspect of human growth in which the decisive influence of Islamic culture is not traceable, nowhere is it so clear and momentous as in the genesis of that power which constitutes the paramount distinctive force of the modern world and the supreme course of its victory- natural sciences and the scientific spirit... What we call sciences arose in Europe as a result of a new spirit of inquiry; of new methods of investigation, of the method of experiment, observation, measurement, of the development of Mathematics in a form unknown to the Greeks. That spirit and those methods were introduced into the European world by the Arabs.

For the first five centuries of its existence, the realm of Islam was the most civilized and progressive portion of the world. Studded with splendid cities, gracious mosques and quiet universities, the Muslim East offered a striking contrast to the Christian West, which was sunk in the night of the Dark Ages (L. Stoddard, The New World of Islam).

This bright civilization progressed until it suffered the terrible disasters which came like huge overlapping waves, from the West and Far East one after the other in the form of the Crusades and Mongol invasion. The disasters lasted centuries until the Muslim government in Baghdad collapsed and the history of Islam entered, from the beginning of the fourteenth century, a new phase with the Ottoman Turks. Islamic civilization was still vigorous and remained far ahead of the Christian West in economic and military fields until the eighteenth century, despite (from the sixteenth century onwards) losing ground to it in the sciences.

Cordoba in the tenth century under Muslim rule was the most civilized city in Europe, the wonder and admiration of the world. Travellers from the north heard with something like fear of the city which contained 70 libraries with hundreds of thousands of volumes, and 900 public baths, yet whenever the rulers of Leon Navarre of Barcelona needed a surgeon, an architect, a dressmaker or a musician, it was to Cordoba that they applied (T. Arnold, The Legacy of Islam, p.9). Muslim literary prestige was so great that in Spain, for example, it was found necessary to translate the Bible and liturgy into Arabic for the use of the Christian community. The account given by Alvaro, the Christian zealot and writer, shows vividly how even the non- Muslim Spaniards were attracted to Arab/Muslim literature:

My fellow-Christians delight in the poems and romances of the Arabs.They study the works of Muhammadan theologians and philosophers, not in order to refute them, but to acquire a correct and elegant Arabic style. Where today can a layman be found who reads the Latin commentaries on holy Scriptures? Who is there that studies the Gospels, the Prophets, the Apostles? Alas, the young Christians who are the most conspicuous for their talents have no knowledge of any literature or language save the Arabic; they read and study with avidity Arabian books; they amass whole libraries of them at a vast cost, and they everywhere sing the praises of the Arabian world (Indiculus Luminosus, translated by Dozy).

If the purpose of education and worth of civilization is to raise the sense of pride, dignity, honour in individuals so that they improve their state and consequently the state of society, Islamic civilization is proven to have been a worthy one. There is ample evidence quoted by various writers showing how Islam has succeeded in doing this to various peoples of various regions, e.g. Isaac Taylor, in his speech delivered at the Church Congress of England about the effects and influence of Islam on people, said:

When Muhammadanism is embraced, paganism, fetishism, infanticide and which craft disappear. Filth is replaced by cleanliness and the new convert acquires personal dignity and self-respect. Immodest dances and promiscuous intercourse of the sewes cease; female chastity is rewarded as a virtue; industry replaces idleness; licence gives place to law; order and sobriety prevail; blood feuds, cruelty to animals and slaves are eradicated. Islam swept away corruption and superstitions. Islam was a revolt against empty polemics.. It gave hope to the slave, brotherhood to mankind, and recognition to the fundamental facts of human nature. The virtues which Islam inculcates are temperance, cleanliness, chastity, justice, fortitude, courage, benevolence, hospitality, veracity and resignation.. Islam preaches a practical brotherhood, the social equality of all Muslims. Slavery is not part of the creed of Islam. Polygamy is a more difficult question. Moses did not prohibit it. It was practised by David and it is not directly forbidden in the New Testament. Muhammad limited the unbounded license of polygamy. It is the exception rather than the rule... In resignation to God’s Will, temperance, chastity, veracity and in brotherhood of believers they (the Muslims) set us a pattern which we should well to follow. Islam has abolished drunkenness, gambling and prostitution, the three curses of the Christian lands. Islam has done more for civilization than Christianity. The conquest of one-third of the earth to his (Muhammad’s) creed was a miracle.

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