I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.
What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.
What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.
What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.
The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.
And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.
But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.
I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.
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Response to your reblog before I peace out.
The argument of the immorality of abortion is built on the assumption that life inherently has value. Lives do not have any inherent value, because they are the result of millions of years of naturally occurring processes. These natural processes do not have any inherent moral value; attempting to assign one would involve invoking some sort of "god" that exists beyond the material, observable, provable world we live in, rather than some logical, clear, and distinct notion such as the one attempted to be shown. For these reasons, abortion is morally neutral.
On that note, the morality and legality of abortion are thereby a human notion, with a logically valid -though not logically sound- argument in either direction. The argument presented says that "no human life should be purposefully ended by another human being. Because that's murder." In short, they believe that murder is necessarily and inherently immoral. That's all it is though, a belief: There is no wholly logical ground to stand on with regards to murder being universally bad in all scenarios, because of its' moral neutrality as I proved above. In other words, the morality and legality of aborting a fetus is wholly subjective.
"Do you actually have an issue with my argument that a fetus is a human being with the right to life, and ending their life is murder[?]"
Yes I do. A fetus is not survivable beyond the confines of the womb for quite some time; in fact, not until right before the fetus is due to become a baby and be born, that ever-reliable 8 month mark after insemination. As such, considering the fetus is unable to survive without constant connection to the pregnant person, it stands to reason that this is an extension of their body at this point, rather than a separate entity. If one intended to claim it still was at the stages before a fetus can survive independently, then consider this implication: Parasites rely on being attached to living beings in order to survive. This includes humans. Therefore, following the earlier claim that "a fetus is a human being with the right to life, and ending their life is murder," a parasite attached to a human is also a human being with the right to life, and ending their life is murder. Therefore, it is more reasonable to claim that for most of the pregnancy cycle, a fetus is not a separate entity from the pregnant person, and by extension, "ending its' life" is not murder.
"Babies are people, too, and have the same right to life as an adult."
This is true! Because babies are not fetuses.
Just thought you would want to read this, because anti-choice rhetoric can be very harmful in shutting down the agency of pregnant people and their ability to dictate their own lives. Knowing the direction that restrictions of this kind have gone in the past, those restrictions will not stop after the illegalization of abortion. Please consider who this harms and who this helps before spreading closed-minded rhetoric of that kind.
Either morality (God-given or otherwise, because there are many secular arguments against abortion) exists or it doesn't. There is a line in the sand or there is not. If you truly intend to argue that lives have no inherent value beyond what we assign them, then not only are the two of us operating in completely irreconcilable ethical frameworks, but yours collapses under its own weight; harm, agency, all these things mattering hinges on the idea that humans and (to a lesser extent) other forms of life have inherent worth, inherent dignity, that causing the former and undermining the latter are wrong in and of themselves.
If there is no objective standard on which to hang our arguments, then everything becomes subjective; all that matters is what we value on a social and individual level. And if that's the case, why would I ever bother to value the opinions of you, a stranger on the internet, over my own? It would be unfair and wrong of me not to consider other positions, to try to see things from another person's point of view, but why should I care about fairness or rightness?
Equating an embryo or fetus to a parasite is fallacious and incorrect. Ignoring that by the scientific definition parasites have to be a different species from the host, and that a pregnancy is a two-way street that also provides benefits for the mother, embryos and fetuses are simply living out the natural development cycle that literally every other human being on the planet has gone through. The biological principles at play in parasitism and human reproduction are fundamentally different.
I could keep going. I could match your arguments with my own about how anti-life rhetoric is a slippery slope to eugenics, about how I could just as easily twist your arguments around to make social parasites out of the elderly and disabled; but in this case it's pointless, because I can't even get you to sit down and agree upon simple principles like "human lives have value" and "murder is bad" or even "there is such a thing as objective morality."
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Fandom Gripe #23: I know that fandom is in some deep denial about its treatment of female characters that are canonically involved with fan favorite m/m ships, but do y’all realize that when you disappear female characters from the narrative wholesale to push the idea that your canonically straight fav was “secretly gay all along!” you’re making several bad implications? That 1) bi men don’t exist, 2) bi men do exist, but those who have genuinely loved a woman before cannot genuinely love a man after that (therefore bi men don’t exist in practice), 3) women cannot inspire genuine love and devotion in men, therefore any relationship with a woman is “lesser” than the one they later have a man (see previous parenthesis), or 4) to acknowledge the existence of a lovable woman who isn’t a terrible person, where if a relationship previously existed, it did not end because of “incompatibility,” is enough to destabilize the present relationship between two queer men?
Because why is the tgcf fandom allergic to acknowledging that He Xuan had a whole ass fiancée that he loved? Why does no one ever seem to remember that the kidnappings and murders of He Xuan’s sister and fiancée were the final straws that sent him on his rampage, and he still keeps a shrine to them in the present-day of the story? Why is her entire existence and significance to He Xuan as a man, character, and to his character arc disappeared in favor of pushing Shi Qingxuan—the brother of the man responsible for his fiancée’s death—into that same role, as if to say that her impact on He Xuan is significant... just not when it's from her? Why does He Xuan’s life in fandom essentially begin not just after her death but because of it?
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