featherlesswings

[featherlesswings]

> read library book

> it's good

Thank you library

[featherlesswings]

Our Flag Means Death ends, fandom thrives, fanfiction and art continue to flow, drag shows inspired by it continue to be put on, literally 2 years later.

The Righteous Gemstones ends, the fanfiction and art spikes briefly and then poots out 😭

Where did y’all go???

[featherlesswings]

would you?

[featherlesswings]

honestly fucking fascinating that people will pretty universally understand that thin people can be naturally predisposed to thinness regardless of what they eat or their activity level, but that so many of the same people cannot possibly fathom that fat people could have similar dispositions or that there could be any factors more complex than a "lack of self control."

[featherlesswings]

odysseus absolutely does present a threat to penelope if he perceives her as at all unfaithful, and i feel the unfairness of this, and i think people tend to undersell how much tension at least potentially exists between odysseus and penelope. but i'm also like. his reaction, all speculation aside, his actual reaction in the odyssey to her flirting with the suitors is delight, because he immediately ascertains that she is running a con. sorry that they're so in-sync in spite of the forces that try to drive a wedge between them, including their own misgiving hearts. sorry that they invented homophrosyne ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[featherlesswings]

you have to stay alive. you're going to be such a beautiful middle aged freak. young freaks will see you in the street and know that things can be okay.

[featherlesswings]

lest this be lost in the bellicose noise of the day

[featherlesswings]

gays ruined the word hole for eternity

[featherlesswings]

This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.

The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.

For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.

German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.

The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.

I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.

So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).

ask historicity-was-already-taken a question

[featherlesswings]

"Bodily autonomy for all, by any means necessary"

[featherlesswings]

📢📢📢

[featherlesswings]

my silly little jester costume for the play I’m in is so fire you all wish you were me

[featherlesswings]

I took my little brother (autistic, mostly non verbal) out and he was using his voice keyboard to tell me something, and this little boy (maybe 4 or 5?) heard him and asked me "Is he a robot??" I tried to explain to him that no, he isn't a robot, he just communicates differently, but my darling brother was in the background max volume "I am robot I am robot I am robot I am robot"

[featherlesswings]

Saddest thing ever is reading an academic paper about a threatened or declining species where you can tell the author is really trying to come up with ways the animal could hypothetically be useful to humans in a desperate attempt to get someone to care. Nobody gives a shit about the animals that “don’t affect” us and it seriously breaks my heart

[featherlesswings]

this might sound stupid but I can’t help but believe that the new wave of “birth control is actually horrible for your body, you need to get off it immediately” misinformation from influencers and the ‘natural cycle tracking’ apps suddenly being advertised is a sneaky underhanded way of causing more unplanned pregnancies that people now cannot abort. now is possibly the worst time ever to turn towards ‘natural family planning’

[featherlesswings]

that was your boyfriend? oh haha oopsies...