#anyway the modern cognitive dissonance of women to know is

[devilfruitdyke]

that post talking about like. 'the funniest ick youve ever gotten' is alright in like. yes we dhouldnt have weird arbitrary standards for men but 'women these days are so picky' is Not the hot take anyone thinks it is

[nobleelfwarrior]

If you’ve followed me for a while, you know that I’ve changed in the five years since I joined to blog about gun control. For example, I embraced gender critical theory and now am a radical feminist. Not to mention learning about the lgb history and reality.

I’ve said some weird shit that is still on my blog because I’m not going to hide my change.

Some of it was just ignorance, like claiming it was ok/normal for bi people to use gay as shorthand because former bisexuals did without realizing that it was harming lesbians and gay men.

Some of it was clinging. I am still technically a member of the church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and when I joined tumblr I was going to go on a mission someday. I still feel defensive when people call the church a cult - individual experiences may vary so it is no more a cult than Catholicism in that some localities and families are very strict and cruel about it - and my experience was not cult like. I wanted to believe in god so badly because then I wouldn’t have wasted the last 20 years of my life. But I don’t think I do anymore.

The god I believed in was “the same yesterday, today, and forever”, so why is the god of the Old Testament so violent when the modern god can’t seem bothered.

The god I believed in was no respecter of persons and would remove men from office, rather than allow them to lead people astray, so why is Paul considered canon? The book of numbers in general is also not reassuring. God doesn’t care if I’m a woman, but he will let people stay in position while saying we are to be bought and sold.

The god I believed in said that families can be adopted, but if there is a gay couple, it’s impossible.

The god I believed in said it was a sin to love women, but he made me this way and he doesn’t make mistakes.

A perfect god cannot contain all those contradictions. So god cannot exist. It’s hard to admit and I seem to find that others who disagree with Mormonism have difficulty with Joseph smith and other church history. That’s understandable, but it was never as big a deal to me as the fundamental contradictions of god.

So I guess I’m saying I came to a check point and I will see where my life goes from here as an atheist.

If any exmormons want to talk, I’m open. Current Mormons, please kindly keep your cognitive dissonance to yourself: I probably know the Book of Mormon better than you anyway.

[theeurekaproject]

So I’ve been thinking a lot about fictional royalty, and

you know what I think is a really underutilized character type? The High Queen trope. The regal, elegant, beautiful monarch who is always at the forefront of her nation’s court, who knows how to come across as unspeakably regal and eloquent while never appearing submissive or weak-willed, who runs her kingdom well and captures the hearts and minds of her people without ever making obvious mistakes or facing serious public criticism. I know this archetype appears a lot in fiction, especially in fantasy and anything else set in a vaguely medieval world, but these women are so rarely the protagonists—more often than not, they’re background characters who act more like aesthetic props than actual people, quest-dispensing machines who outsource everything to the resident band of actual heroes, or mentor types who only exist to educate the real MCs or serve as foils to Rebellious Princesses. And that really disappoints me, because The High Queen just has so much potential as a POV character. I mean, honestly, consider:

How does a monarch rule so well that they’re universally beloved by everyone in the kingdom, especially in times of widespread discontent? What must this woman do every day to ensure her people continue to adore her no matter what happens? Which strings does she have to pull to keep her approval ratings so high all the time? This isn’t a sarcastic criticism of these characters’ in-universe popularity—I genuinely think it’d be really interesting to explore what a monarch has to do in order to be beloved by literally everyone. After all, there’s no way to really please everybody at once; the laws that benefit the wealthy and powerful do not benefit the commoners and vise versa, and for anyone on the throne, keeping your keys to power happy while ensuring the poor are fed is a delicate balancing act. How does this woman keep herself in power and avoid upsetting the noble class, while ensuring that the peasantry still adore her?

How does The High Queen feel about monarchy in general? High Queens are often educated, benevolent, and well aware of the power they hold. It’s not too far-fetched to think that someone in this position might understand the issues inherent to absolute monarchies, especially if she has family members or peers who take advantage of their statuses and abuse their power. If The High Queen knows that autocratic monarchies are not ideal forms of government, how does she cope with the cognitive dissonance of acting as a monarch while knowing that it’s a bad system? Does she try to justify it in her own head, claiming that alternative forms of government like democracy are just too inefficient? Does she say that she’s a good ruler, and that’s all that matters? Does the thought of her children inheriting her power disturb her?

What does she feel about governing in the first place? Does she enjoy it, or does she view it as her duty—something she was born to do, even if she hates it? Does she take pleasure in commanding people around her, or does she secretly wish she could have a different life? Does she envy commoners for their perceived lack of responsibilities, or does she pity them because they don’t have wealth and power like her? Many High Queens have a certain humility to them—they don’t look down on the lower classes or make their power obvious, but it seems like everyone recognizes them as being noble anyway, no matter how little they actually try to cultivate that image. Is the High Queen really humble, or is she playing a game of humility, knowing that to be humble is to be popular and sympathetic? How does she maintain her image as a beautiful, ethereal royal without coming across as a snob?

How does she maintain her pristine image? Beauty takes time, effort, and work, and so does cultivating a perfect reputation. What maddeningly expensive and time-sucking routines does she have to complete in order to appear so perfect? What tricks does she use to ensure she’s never anything but gorgeous and graceful? In modern settings, I kind of love the idea of a woman who’s constantly surrounding herself with beautiful people, manipulating camera angles, and hiring entire teams to help her keep up appearances—not because she’s vain, but because she’s a role model for so many people, and she understands that image matters. If you want to be seen as a dainty, effervescent, delicate beauty, you have to put in an enormous amount of work and time so everything you do flatters you and contributes to that image. 

How does she cope with potentially having to break her own moral code? No matter how competent you are as a leader, you’ll probably have to face a problem where there are no good solutions at some point—especially if you’re ruling an entire country during a time of conflict. What does she do when every option is bad, and every decision she can make will wind up hurting someone? And autocracies are corrupt almost by nature, because if you want to stay on the throne, you have to convince your keys to power that you’re worth keeping there. In an absolute monarchy, the keys aren’t voting blocs, they’re important men and women who can stage rebellions against rulers they don’t like. How does The High Queen deal with having to pay off and favor influential people, sometimes at the expense of her own citizens? If she refuses to pay the keys, they’ll rebel, but every cent she gives them could have been spent on the innocent commoners she’s supposed to be protecting. 

How has her position affected her relationships with her family and loved ones? She probably has siblings and cousins who rank lower than her at court; are they envious of her? Is she envious of them? Does she even get along with anyone in her family on a personal level, or does the jealousy and awkwardness of having siblings and cousins that outrank one another mean that having positive relationships in the family is next to impossible? Does she have to watch her children develop rivalries over who will inherit the throne, and does it worry her when they squabble, because brotherly disagreements can spiral into all-out wars? Does she have to tell her younger children that they will simply never achieve the rank their eldest sibling will one day inherit? Does she see anything wrong with this? If she does, does she do anything to change it?

I don’t know, this post went on a lot longer than I expected and it’s kind of a wall of text by now. But I think it’d be really interesting to take a closer look at characters like The High Queen, because there are so many cool dynamics and personal struggles to explore here. I tried to do some of this with my Acidalia, but I still wish I saw characters like these more. Rebellious Princesses are fine, but they get kind of cliche after a while, you know?

[hellyeahheroes]

Rant on Ghost Spider annual

So I love Spider-Gwen. It took some time for the character the gel for me mainly because the first 5 issues just dropped you in the middle of her life with an ambiguous origin without properly explaining the characters. But around Spider-Gwen II I became a fan.

But this annual pissed me off. Maybe because it involved Murderworld and Arcade which to us on this blog is like taboo. And honestly, Gwen actively admitting that she belongs in E-65 and yet she is going to school in 616 didn’t help because the one thing I hate about this book consistently is her constant dimensional traveling when those pages can be better spent in her own universe with her own supporting cast.

But the main focus of my rage is this.

So for context, Arcade sets a trap for Gwen meaning it for Peter so there is a reason why he is indirectly making it personal for Gwen when it’s not meant for Gwen. So in essence, he made this Murderworld with the specific intention of taunting Spider-Man of his failures.

Arcade is a dick. We all knew this.

Anyways.

No one, and I mean no one, thinks of 616 Gwen Stacy this way that actually read ASM. And that is one of reasons Spider-Gwen set me off. Just because Gwen Stacy was the first woman love interest to die tragically in superhero comics doesn’t mean this is how fans view her. And to make Spider-Gwen as some sort of half assed redemption for that character assumes a lot and shows that you don’t really know who Gwen Stacy was.

616 Gwen Stacy would not have been anything like Spider-Gwen. The characteristics that make her interesting in modern adaptations are taken from Mary Jane and yes, even Emma Stone’s portrayal of the character doesn’t actually reflect any of the personality of 616 Gwen.

She was a bad character who first appeared to be part of the group taunting Peter Parker when she debuted. She wasn’t a damsel and rarely had to be or needed to be saved. She was mean spirited and a bit of an asshole. And that was because Ditko was on this huge Objectivist kick which I think is the reason he left Marvel in the first place. Anyways, as soon as MJ debuted, male writers tried to prop Gwen up as the ideal wife and lover to Peter in comparison to MJ who was seen by several writers as, and I paraphrase, “the girl you just had sex with and throwaway afterwards.” And it wasn’t because MJ was easy or easier than Gwen as Gwen in her debut literally thought Peter was weird for not trying to tumble with her like other guys. It was the fact that MJ was using her beauty as a way to empower herself. MJ was a reflection of the late 60s and early 70s sex revolution in which women openly flaunted that they dated multiple men for fun, material, or sex. Note that Gwen pretty much dated multiple men at some point as well but was discreet about her paramours(she is also the one who took Peter’s virginity).

And while this doesn’t warrant her death in a sense, it doesn’t do Spider-Gwen any justice to try to tie her 616 death as some narrative mistake when it wasn’t. The Death of Gwen Stacy was the pinnacle of comic book superhero writing quality. Yes, other writers followed suit and thought killing off love Interests was a good idea(and you can look at Batman’s literal graveyard of dead love interests and see how little that worked), but none of those deaths weren’t as pivotal. And to sit there and revise the story to make it out as just another superhero love interest getting killed for manpain pisses me off. It wasn’t just Peter that grieved. Her friends grieved. Mary Jane til this day grieved. JJJ fucking grieved. It was a sad thing that some vindictive maniacal rich white guy threw some college aged girl off some bridge for seemingly no reason other than she was at the wrong place at the wrong time. The story was not just about her death. It was about the aftereffects. The grief that one loss can have on everybody, not just Peter.

And it showed that Peter really didn’t know much about her. Because it was young love. The reality of who she was and how Peter perceived her was in cognitive dissonance. He viewed her as a pure soul and a saint and he was wrong prior to her death and is proven wrong afterwards but it doesn’t taint her worth and value as a human being.

Today we are in an age where more women are writing comic books than ever and thank fuck for that because these dudes can’t write women without making it about men. But any writer who writes Spider-Gwen, Ghost Spider, or whatever should stop using 616 Gwen Stacy as some poorly thought out example of fridging women because that is not what it was. You’re kicking what you think is a dead horse when it is not the point you are trying to make at all.

Fuck.

@ubernegro

[thelearningcat]

You know what’s a movie that should be redone in this new feminist movement year: Mona Lisa Smile

There’s a lot of problematic elements to this film, but there’s also a whole bunch of potential. I love 1950s feminist films. What could possibly be more empowering then a woman being empowered in a time when women were vastly being pushed back into the home (at least in the States, though I think it is true elsewhere).

Here’s some aspects I would love to highlight in my 2019 Mona Lisa Smile.

Female artists, both in the film and taught in Katherine’s class. In the 2003 movie, we never see any of the women actually making art in any way. Nor do we see her feature female artists. In a film supposedly about female empowerment, there are very few women doing any kind of real work that shows they aren’t just housewives. There are women in the administration and we get what some of the female professors teach. However, even Katherine, we know she does “research” but we never know what she does research on. As someone in academia, I can say, there’s no way it would never come up what she specialized in, even if all she had is a Masters. I want some female artists. I don’t know many but I know Georgia O’Keeffe was probably already painting by then, and in a conversation about modern art at an all girl’s school, it feels like a missed opportunity for the writers to really get some lesser known female artists of the time’s name out  through Katherine’s teaching. 

Women choosing to not be in a relationships. We have a lot of women finding out their men lied and choosing, but that’s not really a choice. Katherine isn’t even really a chosen single woman. Instead, we have women trying to be in relationships and them failing, and somehow we are supposed to believe they can be happy without a man. You cannot convince me that there are not some happy single ladies as professors. It would have been one of the few professions available to higher income women that might pay decently. 

Some happy lesbians. We have one lesbian, who nicely supported the kill your gay trope by killing one off screen prior to the start of the film and the other getting fired early to get her off screen for the rest of the film. I had a split moment in the beginning where I expected two of the female students to turn out to be lesbians, but that was quickly squashed.

More historical discussions. We get a brief discussion of war veterans and contraception, but there is so many rich discussions that could have really played into this movie’s female empowerment. If the point is to show this feminist professors breaking the mold in this conservative school, then really developing all the ways she subverts the ideas of womanhood other than through her dating habits (and lack of marriage) would have really have enriched the character development. Sure, I like the notion that it seemed like the administration was nitpicking stuff to be offended by, but I was left with female characters who felt out of history in a historical context.

Better female characters. All the characters felt just a baby step outside of a stereotype. We have the goody good who did everything right only to have it thrown in her face(Betty), we have the insecure woman falling in love(Constance), the traditional woman who had the intelligence to go far in a career but chose family instead(Joan), and the “whore” who slept around with older, sometimes married men(Giselle). Honestly, the second to last (Joan- intelligent woman who chose family) really highlights the shortcomings of the overall characters in this film. If you’re going to have a movie about female characters in the 50s running up against a feminist, then play with that. None of the women actually chose a career, so while Joan could have really pushed up against the idea that all feminists have to be career women, it instead felt like they were instead supporting the very ideals that their movie appeared to be trying (and failing) to subvert.  Here’s the characters I would have liked to see developed.

Katherine: the feminist professor, who was the epitome of what would become 70s feminism. Free-love woman who wasn’t looking for one man to satisfy her. Make her bisexual for some lbtq representation (absolutely no student-teacher relations though!). Not only is she not super into monogamy, but have her really encouraging women to get jobs, push off having children, and learn about orgasm. Encouraging women that they can be tough and men can (and should) be kind. Maybe this would be too far ahead of her time for a 50s movie, but I think really leaning into this idea that the conservatives at this school would be scandalized by her would be really great. I don’t know enough about 50s feminism, so I would even take her being tamer than 70s free-love. But I think she really has to be a progressive feminist to have the narrative really work well.

Betty: A smart woman who believed she always just wanted a husband and family, because she’d never been given another option. She is a great person for a stay-at-home wife gone career woman arch. You don’t need to have the husband have an affair. Instead, just show that she’s unhappy with the wifely tasks. Show her loving to learn or have a passion for a specific subject. We could really dig our teeth into a woman who just never realized what cage she’d been placed in. It’s how many of us feel when we begin reading about socialization of little girls anyway. How many of us became feminist when we realized that our tendency to say “I’m sorry” before a question in class came from gendered socialization lessons of our childhood? I want to see that woman evolve. I want to watch her deal with the cognitive dissonance, and that’s why she’s such a dick in class to Katherine. I want to see her begin to see the cracks in the facade she convinced herself of as she was encouraged by this professor she hated to see the other options she had. 

Joan: Honestly other than giving her a husband who didn’t come off as a prick, I like her arch. This intelligent woman who thought about law school but decided to instead stay and be a wife, I love it because that’s what feminism is all about- women being able to choose. However, the whole movie we get this dick of a husband who says things that imply he wouldn’t be supportive and even if we give some credit that they were trying to stay true to what men would say then, it just left a bad taste in my mouth. Even when Joan proclaimed it was her choice, I didn’t have enough grounding to believe that she wasn’t pressured indirectly into it by her husband. He didn’t have to be progressive or feminine, but something further to show that he was entirely devoted to her happiness and would have in fact supported her would have made her arch more palatable.

Giselle: Oh boy, this is just such a problematic character. She’s repeatedly been told she’s a whore, but we are never given a reason that she is friends with Betty, because while we see her being supportive, we see Betty just constantly shitting on her (and Constance for that matter). I think a free-love student isn’t a bad idea for the contexts, but that idea that she would be friends with these other female characters is just hard to stomach. You need to give me a reason to believe they would all be friends, which given the contrasting character Katherine could be, I think they all need to relatively start in the same place of conservative traditionalism. I think instead of just having the “whore” character, Giselle would be better off as a lgbtq representative. Maybe everyone thinks she’s a whore because she sneaks around a lot and no one knows where to (turns out she’s sneaking around with a female professor or student). Maybe she’s dates a lot and sleeps with one man before the end of the movie, but she declares that she’s gay or asexual after the encounter. Her friends could still make comments about her tendency with men, without it being so unlikely that they’d remain friends with her. Her progressive teacher introduces them to the lgbtq world, and that makes her start questioning herself. I’m all fine with a woman who likes sex as a character, but she just doesn’t fit with the group of friends and it shows. 

Constance: Oh boy. Her arch is so boring. It makes no sense in the context of the overall plot. It felt especially jarring considering her character’s only development seemed to be this boy she liked. Here’s the thing, there was something to her character that was tossed aside for this romance that could have made for a good feminist narrative: her confidence. Betty constantly puts her down about this boy she likes, and that’s shitty, but honestly, it is clear that her character is very insecure. She believes every time Betty says something that a guy couldn’t possibly like her. That right there could be really well developed into an arch that spoke to women in the audience. Develop the fact she’s an insecure woman who feels more secure when a guy likes her (and is easily convinced he doesn’t). Have Katherine teach a whole lesson about the male gaze in art. Have Katherine shows pictures of woman throughout the ages who were considered beautiful and discuss how beauty changes (and thus what is good art also changes). Have there be a real resolve to the interactions between Betty and Constance that are such toxic interactions. Betty needs to learn that what she says is harmful and Constance needs to learn that other people don’t define her self worth. This doesn’t even touch on all the other characters who need a ton of tweaking/overhalls to make this movie better. 

This movie has so many nuggets of potential but end up with a female empowerment movie where at best only one woman is really empowered, the rest are right where they were at the start of the film, or worse off. 

[nobodysuspectsthebutterfly]

do I want to do this? do I really want to do this? oh god, I’m doing it.

@gameofthronesrenlyxlorasforever replied to your post “I got a question about Daenerys and Irri...”

GRRM definitely meant the consent between Dany and Irri to be iffy.

Considering GRRM’s words about things like the iffy consent of the book version of the Jaime/Cersei altar sex scene, not to mention the many issues with F&B, I do not believe we have any guaranteed understanding of what GRRM meant regarding the consent in these scenes. Based on the conversation Irri has with Dany, it’s possible that he may consider it fully consensual and not iffy in any way. He hasn’t said, we don’t know. But either way, I was analyzing the actual text, not the author’s intent.

I think it’s super realistic that Dany, that almost anyone, would have a sexual relationship with someone who has a handmaid-type role in her life.

Is it? You think? Although the realism of the relationship wasn’t the question, there are many bedmaids in ASOIAF and other ladies-in-waiting where the relationships are entirely platonic. The example of Princess Rhaena Targaryen and her favorites is somewhat of a notable exception in what has been related so far.

(Also, distinction of terms in ASOIAF: a handmaid or handmaiden is a servant; a bedmaid or lady in waiting or companion is generally nobleborn. Westeros doesn’t appear to have roles like a “gentlewoman of the stool” -- emptying chamberpots is a role for lowborn servants only.)

I haven’t researched this but I’m sure many highborn ladies in the past had sex with their handmaids. They probably didn’t think of it as real sex, though.

If you haven’t researched this, how are you sure? There are rumors and more than rumors about some historical ladies’ companions and favorites (see the recent movie The Favourite for an example), of course, and with the erasure of  women’s history and sexuality (and non-het sexuality in particular) it’s hard to be certain, but “many” in the sense of “almost anyone would” is very probably an exaggeration. But they did think of same-sex sexual relationships as “real sex”; not necessarily consequential or always taboo, though.

I think if the consent wasn’t a bit iffy, the situation would feel too saccharine, too unrealistic.

😬 I... um. Um. There are many ways to write realistic and consensual sex scenes that are not saccharine.

Knowing the world she lives in, looking at her own marriage, Dany can’t really have a nuanced concept of consent anyway.

I... um. No. This is not necessarily true. Also it’s not Dany’s concept of consent that’s being considered, it’s the reader’s view of the situation.

I’m not sure if you’re trying to defend Dany here or defend GRRM or what, but it’s irrelevant to the content of my post. Did you read it? Or did you only read the question and then go off on your own mental journey?

Btw, I’m so tired of applying 2019 “woke” attitudes to a work that’s depicting a medieval-type world. It’s ridiculous, being bothered things in a medieval-ish story that people wouldn’t have questioned in the real world until very recently. If Dany was a character in a book that takes place in our world in 2019, that would be a completely different thing. She’s not. The world of ASOIAF is more brutal than ours. Yet, in our world, marital rape wasn’t a question of legality until practically now.

Seriously, I’m as liberal as it gets, but I wouldn’t like these books if the characters had our modern views. It wouldn’t make any sense for any of them to have our ideas about relationships and power dynamics.

ffs.

(a) Fuck moral relativism. I do not give a flying good goddamn whether marital rape was illegal or not in history. It was still rape, whether legally recognized as such or not. Just like slavery was evil and a crime even before it was made illegal. If you disagree with me on this point, you should probably get the fuck off my blog.

(b) This isn’t a discussion of history; this is a discussion of fiction written by a modern author within the past 20 years. ASOIAF is not history. It’s not even our world. It doesn’t exist in a vacuum, it’s a text that was created by a man born in the US in 1948 and whose modern-day views are thoroughly infused in the work as well as his understandings and misunderstandings of history.

(c) The morals and views of consent are ours. The reader’s. Analysis of the text, our concerns about and critiques of the text, are not required to remain solely within the world of the story. We can use the mores of the fictional world to inform our understanding and analysis and critiques, but they are not dependent on them. (for example: Targaryens do not have a problem with incest and understanding that is important to our understanding of character interactions, but if a reader’s mores result in their inability to accept such relationships, that is a perfectly acceptable form of analysis. See also underage relationships, dubious consent, marital rape, slavery, etc. Note also that the reader does not have to necessarily conform to their society’s or their own personal mores, preferring to view fiction as fiction, or choosing to hold inconsistent standards, or whatever they prefer, and those are also perfectly acceptable forms of analysis.)

(d) “I’m as liberal as it gets” and “those SJWs shouldn’t shove their ‘woke’ attitudes into my books!” is um, just a bit of cognitive dissonance, just sayin’.

Again, I don’t know if you’re trying to defend Dany (I think I did a pretty darn good job of it myself) or what, or defend GRRM (nobody was saying he was a bad person for including this plot point) or what. But... seriously. 😒 Seriously.

[handsingsweapon]

you may blame aphrodite;

the sequel to in a future time; is now underway thanks to a charitable donation made by @sunnydisposish​! 

After a mythical summer on the coast of Thessaly, Greece, brings Yuuri Katsuki into Victor's life, it's up to Victor to find a way to keep him. The Midas touch which allowed him to so swiftly sail through his research while a student is proving a burden now; even Yuuri sometimes seems to think there's nothing he can't turn into gold. A story about how two people who've put each other on a pedestal become mortal again, and in so doing, find the sort of love that the gods used to inscribe into the stars.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/19390903/chapters/46142590

see below the cut for some thoughts re: a neat quirk of Victor’s resume in this chapter.

So, when I started writing in a future time I knew I was going to make Yuuri a graduate of Oxford and Victor a graduate of Cambridge, with the idea being (at least for Victor) that his research is a bit ahead of the mainstream where lots of people consume narratives about art and history (typically famous national museums like the Louvre or the British Museum, for instance). Because the piece was for Born to Make Art History, I needed Victor to have a bit of an ax to grind about art history in general for all the references to work and as it turns out I got to graft my love/hate relationship with The British Museum and with a lot of the art collections of the Catholic church / Catholic cardinals onto him. Because these are some of my favorite pieces of art and my favorite museums but they’ve also rendered incredible damage onto the public, either by refusing to return artifacts or simply by being the product of either A) stodgy British Victorians being puritanical about sex or B) closeted Catholics being puritanical about sex in the public sphere and gay as fuck in the private sphere.

Enter the sequel. Like in a future time, I want you may blame aphrodite to have artifacts in each chapter. They won’t be poems because Victor isn’t a poet, but in this chapter he’s applying for jobs in the background because he knows he can’t stay with Yakov forever and he’s not getting very far. I decided to include his CV, which meant looking up some of the kinds of things he would’ve been getting up to at Cambridge, which brought me to this page: https://www.classics.cam.ac.uk/museum/things-to-do/things-to-do-1/lgbtq-tours

I quote: 

The story of why we do not have a statue of a hermaphrodite in our collection

And as soon as I saw this I blinked because in chapter one of in a future time (Victor’s prologue) he goes on a rant about the exact piece of art this page is referencing - 

“.... Maybe you get close with The Sleeping Hermaphroditus, until you realize that the first person to snatch it up after rediscovery was Cardinal Borghese, and if you think too long about that while you walk around the Villa to take in the rest of its collection, you’ll realize many of the highlights are romanticized rapes, and you’ll see no mention of the fact that Scipione was probably gay and that Pignatelli wasn’t his close friend ...”

Now, I haven’t attended Cambridge’s tour, so I have no idea why they have a story about why they don’t have a copy of the Sleeping Hermaphroditus. I've seen this piece, or its copies, everywhere except for the Hermitage, but I was first introduced to it at Villa Borghese, which is another institution I have a love/hate relationship with. I love it because the collection is legitimately gorgeous; you will find two Bernini masterpieces there along with a number of incredible Caravaggios, among other things. It’s a breathtaking place. But Villa Borghese was the first place where I actually began to experience sharp, sharp cognitive dissonance in regards to the art collections of the Catholic church. First and foremost, Cardinal Borghese was almost certainly gay. You may feel about this however you like, but for me, I feel 1) frustrated about the way the Catholic church has, for years, insisted on vows of celibacy from the clergy who have proven at all levels of the church ever since its inception that these vows are unattainable and often unenforced at the highest levels; 2) deeply upset because the Catholic church continues, to do this day, to do incredible harm to LGBTQ+ people and they’ve got a long, long legacy of gay-as-fuck cardinals that somehow gets totally glossed over in the process so the hypocrisy is truly astonishing.  ANYWAY. Back to the Galleria Borghese. The two Bernini masterworks are of Daphne & Apollo and The Rape of Prosperine*, both stories of women being pursued by gods unwillingly (*or possibly willingly depending on your view of Persephone mythology which again, has had its variants totally messed with by early historians in a number of cases). And this was the place that two things struck me: 1) wow, this Cardinal sure was into a lot of weird sex stuff* 2) that the two Bernini pieces (some of my favorite works of art) were both about the bad experiences of women, which A) still persists, thousands of years later B) were beautifully and maybe arguably harmfully romanticized by this brilliant male sculptor.  Once you see that you can’t unsee it. You’ll find it all over the Vatican Museums, too, even with the artfully-placed leaves placed as the pieces were uncovered, decorating ancient genitalia to protect everyone’s purity (I find this practice a little humorous since Adam & Eve were naked in the garden and therefore one could argue that the leaves are, themselves, markers of sin). I saw it in the houses and castles of nobles all over Europe, where paintings and statues loomed over people’s dining tables. I asterisked 'weird sex stuff’ because, at least in Renaissance art, a lot of the reuse of Greco-Roman mythology was meant to be allegorical, and because when you look on a piece of art today and you think about things like trans rights or these masterpeices that deify the rapes of women, you’re doing so with a modern lens from a modern context, and it’s highly unlikely the original authors or artists experienced anything like the same thoughts. And truth be told you won’t ever really get to know what those people were thinking at that time. But it does remind me of a friend of mine who once asked a group in Beijing what the weirdest food they’ve ever eaten was as an ice breaker while we spent time getting to know each other. They replied “things you think are weird we don’t think are weird” which remains in my mind as the most obvious demonstration of cultural norms that I’ve ever experienced.

Anyway, I grew up in the evangelical church listening to a lot of narratives about how bad sex is for everyone, especially women, but it seems to me that centuries of keeping it in the closet has done us all more harm than good and by reading a bit about how Victor feels about the Sleeping Hermaphroditus and lots of the other things he was writing about hinted at in the excerpts from Beloved you were, in fact, learning a little bit about me.