#Decorative Containers

[vintagehomecollection]

Garrett Eckbo, a landscape architect from Berkeley, California, converted his detached garage into an office. He took up the existing driveway and installed a brick patio and a container garden. To gain privacy from the road, as well as lost storage space, Eckbo designed an attractive tool shed made of recycled materials.

Home Landscaping: Ideas, Styles, and Designs for Creative Outdoor Spaces, 1988

[gentlemanmotorslifestyle]

[arc-hus]

Sawmill Treehouse, Victoria, Australia - Robbie Walker

[departmentofinteriors]

[shiftythrifting]

Some recent-ish finds from Admin BT. Boise area, Idaho.

[dreamysummer03]

I’m this old

[minart-was-taken]

The joy which I get when I see aesthetically pleasing medical tools and/or disability aids cannot be overstated.

[retrogamingblog2]

Legend of Zelda Stained Glass made by Arjan Jelle Boeve

[304wv66]

friendship ENDED with tarnished, now calico critters are her best friends

(listen... they hang out on my desk together... you must understand my vision.)

[amaisondepasse]

HOUSE

www.amaisondepasse.tumblr.com

[magicalshopping]

♡ Strawberry Milk Carton Vase ♡

[vintagehomecollection]

The Los Angeles House: Decoration and Design in America's 20th-Century City, 1995

[gentlemanmotorslifestyle]

[silverskye13]

Hello everyone today I am nitpicking a book.

Recently I joined a local book club [very excited to be going to an in-person one!] and their monthly reading was Red Rising by Pierce Brown, a book published back in 2014. This is a book that's been recommended to me a thousand times now by the various reading apps I've collected, but I have shied away from committing to it because it's marketed as a Hunger Games style Dystopia, except in space. And, as someone who wasn't a big fan of The Hunger Games when I read them, I didn't feel like opening the can of worms.

Now, Red Rising surprised me by how much I ended up liking it -- though I did spend 90% of the book screaming I'm sorry these kids are all 16?! They do not act like 16 year olds, but by the end of the book the world building for their actions made sense, so I've since disregarded that [though every time someone does murder like a hardened soldier I do still clutch my pearls a little. Like yeah I'm sure child serial killers exist but not everyone here is a serial killer, goodness.]

Anyway! That's not what I'm critiquing. I'm critiquing the use of "girl" and "woman-ish" as an insult in this dystopian world.

Context for my critique, and spoilers for the plot of Red Rising:

Darrow is a Red, in a world where your birth color influences your caste in a heavily stratified society. The Society keeps Reds enslaved under the surface of Mars, toiling away for H3, the valuable resource needed to terraform worlds [and also, it is later revealed, to power space ships for war]. They are a very Appalachian / Irish style mining community, with a patriarchal culture. Women do not work in the mines because men are stronger and needed for the brutal work. In the first book it's implied it's very rare for a woman to want to work in mining, in the second book it's revealed to be flat-out illegal. The women in the deep Red mines are often victims of assault and violence because the families are so poor, they have to sell their bodies and services for food and medicine. It's a great shame to their husbands, and many a blood feud has been started over this.

Darrow's wife, Io, by contrast to this patriarchal society, is strong willed and powerful. Darrow describes her as having a "spark for life", the desire to have more than what they're given. Unfortunately, this leads to her death, jump-starting Darrow's rage and revenge arc against those who killed her -- the Golds.

The Golds are the ruling class. Genetically modified to be the perfect incarnations of humanity, when you first meet a Gold, they are described by Darrow as looking like gods on earth. They fly with hover boots, regard the castes below them as animals akin to dogs and horses, and generally sip from the cup of prosperity. Through plot convention, Darrow is given the chance to become a Gold to try and take down The Society from inside, and so spends the rest of the story in a Lord of the Flies style school for war-like Golds, trying to prove he's the best of them, so he can get command of a fleet and come back to raze Mars.

The Gold Society is not patriarchal. They value strength, and might makes right. Their leader, Peerless Scarred Octavia, is a woman, and she is greatly feared and admired. The school Darrow is taken to is filled with just as many ruthless women as men. Both are expected to hunt and kill and survive in equal measure. One of the leaders of one of the other war bands is a woman who goes by Mustang, and she out-wits and out-fights Darrow several times before the plot eventually allows them to be friends/lovers. One of Darrow's biggest rivals in his own war band is Antonia, a cut-throat woman who betrays him twice, and eventually kills someone trying to blackmail him into giving himself up -- something heavily frowned upon in the weird little Lord of the Flies war school. And equal number of the Peerless Scarred proctors for this school are women as they are men. Women are featured almost calculatedly 50/50 in battle scenes as proficient fighters -- namely when theyre coming from other warbands, not Darrow's, but that seems like authoral preference for writing male characters so I'll let that slide. The point here is: The Golds don't care about gender. Women are allowed to be and are encouraged to be just as ruthless as men, and the most terrifying leader of them all is a woman.

The most popular insult in this book is "woman-ish". It happens a lot. And Darrow is far from the only character that does it, and that's the problem I have with this book.

It makes sense for Darrow to insult other men by calling them girls, or girlish. He was raised in a patriarchal society, where women have expected and enforced roles. They get married, they have children, they try not to shame their husbands. They are strong in the way a homemaker is strong, sacrificing virtuously for their male children and husbands so someone can work the mines and bring them food. Io, Darrow's wife, is an outlier to this caste of stereotypical home makers, but she still performs her wifely duties of loving her husband wholeheartedly well. It is only her desire for more that dooms her, and the fact that, when the story begins, her resolve and conviction makes her a stronger character than Darrow. It's something he openly admits many times. But it's reiterated again and again that she is an outlier. Normal women aren't like this.

However, the Golds live in a world where women are equal to men. The greatest goal is strength and might, the largest sin weakness. To be weak is to be damned. You're not worth following as a leader, if you're weak. Worse than that, you deserve misfortunes if you're perceived as weak. Darrow's "weakness" as a character is hammered out of him by cruel people with zero concern for the wreckage they leave in their paths. A common insult is to be called a "Pixie", that is, a gold who is resting on their family lineage to move up in the world instead of actually getting their hands dirty. Insults about weakness, and softness, are the ones that matter.

But the author chooses to freight those insults with references to women. There are so many times when a character is called out for "being a girl." That they need to "be a man, you soft little baby." "What are you, a woman?" Characters are proved to be flawed because "He was a giant warrior of a man, who had a girlish laugh". "He was tall and thin, with womanish hair and eyelashes." "He had a soft, womanish voice." And some of this is definitely Darrow, yes. It makes sense for Darrow to attribute some female traits to softness and weakness. But there are Golds, raised from day 1 in The Society who do this too! Who talk about being scornful because a man was too girly. Who view women as inherently weak. There's an entire arc early on where a male Gold assaults a bunch of women, and the raining consensus is not "How could you rape someone you monster!" But instead "How could you rape a woman, you monster!" A statement which implies women are weaker and can't be expected to defend themselves, and this character is worse for taking advantage of the inherently weak.

It makes absolutely no sense to me! And I'm sure it's author bias, right? The book was published in 2014, and popular media even then was still waffling over how to portray female equality without taking on artifacts of the 80s and 90s. But, I don't know man. There is so much good world building in this book? How the society works. How something as small as the slang you use can identify you as a traitor. How the genetic grafts and enhancements work -- how the labor is decided and why. There is a lot of intentional word choice to do with the Romans, because the Golds are very obviously ripping off Roman war culture. And you're telling me you were intentional about all of that, and still couldn't figure out how to insult someone without calling them a girl?

Author?? Help??

[gardeningacreativejourney]

[sanrioblr]

★。＼｜／。★