shancats - Tumblr blog

[shancats]

“you‘re so quiet” baby i’m not even here. i’m fantasizing about a book i read weeks ago. move on.

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I knew it the moment I read the name "declyn"

guys i am in TEARS

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Like, for a harmless example, I’m pretty confident all of the assertions in this post about the origin of the word “spinster” are bullshit.   I can find no evidence that wool  (hand) spinner was ever a profession that paid well or allowed anyone to own their own business.  Nor does it make any logical sense to me to refer to it as an “art” because it’s not like it’s hard or can be done multiple ways. 

But you can find plenty of references to spinning wool by hand as being the shitty, tedious job that hurts your hands, hurts your back,and damages your lungs.    It’s difficult, but it’s mostly tedious and awful and you can basically “master” it as a toddler.  There’s a new book that suggests, after actually speaking to women whose feet were bound as children, that foot-binding was done in no small part in order to cripple girl children to make them better able to sit still for hours on end spinning and carding wool.   

The image of “spinster” people were calling to mind in the 18th/19th centuries was of a “surplus” woman who had to rely on the charity of her nearest male relatives and therefore had to do the shittiest, most tedious job in the household because her only alternative is to starve on the street or get hanged as a witch.

I mean, I”m being weirdly nitpicky about an utterly harmless post that I’m not even some kind of confident expert in…but there’s something troubling to me about anachronistically finding examples of all these economically self-sufficient single ladies instead of the grim, horrifying reality of how fragile a woman’s life was and how terrible it was to be a woman without some man to give you social status.  I mean, if there were all these examples of free-wheeling spinsters (not window with sons) who made good money and (somehow) owned their own property  then what did we even need feminism for?  I mean, hell, a single woman in the US in 1971 would not be able to open her own textile business because a single woman in 1971 would have no access to credit! 

My justification for being a joyless pendant here is that I think it’s Not Helpful to create these myths that there were lots of happy alternatives for women or to downplay how brutal structural oppression was:   A very small amount of women in pre/semi Industrial Age Europe had any kind of genuine financial security and most of those women in a lot of places/times in Europe and America had to genuinely fear having someone call them a witch and take whatever resources they did have. 

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if he has abs he doesnt care about you

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“I wish I had the time to do that.”

- me, a person who definitely has the time to do that but also has terrible time management skills and most likely to just spend 4 hours getting absolutely nothing accomplished instead of the hundred other things I could and should be doing

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how Lil succulent Bulbasaurs are born <3

please do not repost on other sites

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can i get uh……..McDeath™

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“I was a star spilled in your arms.”

— Julia de Burgos, from Song of the Simple Truth; “Harmony of Word and Instinct,”

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#in this moment we are all terry

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i want realistic modern fantasy like

someone finding a dragon egg and livetweeting the process of trying to hatch it (with no prior knowledge on how a dragon egg should be hatched)

a guy selling an enchanted sword on craigslist

a tattoo artist who does spell runes but for really mundane stuff like conjuring a bound demonic pen or for summoning your keys

summoning a demon for the vine

selfies with mermaids

prank calling wizards

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@sarahmaclean

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Ciszak Dalmas & Matteo Ferrari . Malababa Flagship Store. Madrid. Spain. photos: Asier Rua

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some thoughts on self objectification 

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I hate it when people say technology is taking away kids’ childhoods If anything, it’s actually giving kids more of an opportunity to let their imagination out

A lot of times when I let kids play on my phone, they go for the drawing app. I watched a girl on the bus write a silly poem about her friends and then laugh as she made Siri read it I hear children say to their friends “hey, FaceTime me later” because they still want to talk face to face even when they’re far away. I see kids sitting, who would feel lonely and ignored if it weren’t for the fact that they’re texting their friends who are far away. Children still climb trees. They might just take a selfie from the top to show off how high they’ve gotten. They can immediately read the next book of their favorite series on their Kindles. Most kids would still be up for a game of cops and robbers. Or maybe they’d google rules to another game they haven’t played yet. When children wonder why the sky is blue, they don’t get an exasperated “I don’t know” from tired adults. They can go on Wikipedia and read about light waves and our atmosphere. They show off the elaborate buildings they created on Minecraft.

Technology isn’t ruining childhoods, it’s enhancing them.

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I’m tired of you fake hoes acting like you’ve always been ride or die for Thor when I specifically remember him being The Underrated Avenger for the last 4 years. Where were y’all??? Faaake. Hoooes.