Quotulatiousness

December 11, 2021

Another front opens in the “War On Christmas”

Filed under: Cancon, Media, Politics, Religion, USA — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 05:00

In The Line, Jen Gerson looks at the latest offence against mainstream views of the Christmas season:

it was impossible not to get sucked into the blossoming horror of Santa Inc.

The eight-part television show made for HBO Max by comedians Sarah Silverman and Seth Rogen may soon attain the record of one of the most poorly rated television series of all time. And watching but a brief trailer, it’s not hard to see why.

I mean … Jesus. If you were trying to craft a perfect example of hate-bait for the reactionary right in a lab, this is pretty much what it would look like. It’s got woke politics, feminism, hatred of white guys and a pot shot in the War on Christmas neatly tied up in a claymation bow. The fact that the show is fronted by comedians who are Jewish has dug this mess into the very ugliest, muddiest trench of the culture war.

[…]

If you want to create an outrageous, bawdy Christmas movie that features a miserable and bored Mrs. Claus giving head to Santa, or a gag with a miner’s hat filled with dildos, there’s nothing wrong with that. But there’s a very specific audience for “sausage party” humour — lacrosse-playing young white men, and older white men who wish they were still young white men who could play lacrosse. In other words, people who look like Seth Rogen.

And do you know what that crowd doesn’t generally enjoy?

Thinly veiled manifestos on how awful white men are; the terribleness of corporate America, and a show featuring a lot of downtrodden women complaining about health insurance and lack of maternity leave.

On the other hand, if Santa Inc. was trying to appeal to the #resistence pussy hat and rainbow tattoo crowd, certainly a woke-appropriate message is here for them. But, does this crowd need to be so lectured? Meanwhile, the juvenile humour is off-putting. Is the feminist set going to keel over laughing because one of the female reindeer characters brags about having a threesome with Donner?

Lol. Thud.

There’s no sophistication here. No clever set up or punch line. It’s just a story about an angry female elf who wants to be Santa Claus that pretends to be funny by leaning on sex jokes.

Raunchiness is fine for a cheap laugh. It relies on the taboo of shock and sex to generate an emotional reaction. But, man, one of the most popular music videos of the last few years was Wet Ass Pussy. Who even notices swearing anymore? Who is shocked by a scene in which the main character’s mother bangs the Easter bunny?

This kind of lazy humour is old hat. It’s boring.

So, no, Santa Inc. is not good.

December 8, 2021

QotD: Self-bullying

Filed under: Health, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

On August 2nd, 2013, 14-year-old Hannah Smith of Leicestershire, England, took her own life. She had been receiving cruel messages on the social networking site Ask.fm for months, and her parents concluded that cyberbullying was the main cause of her suicide. But then evidence emerged that the hatred Hannah had been receiving came from … herself — 98 percent of the messages were posted from the IP address of the computer she was using.

This tragic event inspired a research project by Sameer Hinduja and colleagues at the Cyberbullying Research Center in Florida. Their analysis of around 5,500 teenagers produced some surprising results: “We knew we had to study this empirically,” Hinduja remarked, “and I was stunned to discover that about 1-in-20 middle- and high-school-age students have bullied themselves online. This finding was totally unexpected, even though I’ve been studying cyberbullying for almost 15 years.”

Boys reported digital self-harm more often (7.1 percent) than girls (5.3 percent). Asked why they participated in such behaviour, their replies included: “I already felt so bad with myself that I wanted to make myself feel even worse” and “I wanted to see if someone really was my friend.” However, there were also those who claimed that they did it to justify their aggressive behaviour towards others, or just for fun, to see how others would react.

If teenagers are prepared to harm themselves in cyberspace to attain the status of victim, it should not be especially surprising that some adults do so in the real world. In the most notorious example of this behaviour, actor Jussie Smollett told police he had been the victim of a racist and homophobic attack on January 20th, 2019. He immediately found himself at the centre of media attention and public opinion. But the subsequent investigation revealed that Smollett had paid two men to assault him and that he had sent himself the threatening letters he had received the week before.

This was not an isolated incident. In his book Hate Crime Hoax, political scientist Wilfred Reilly analysed 346 alleged hate crimes and found that fewer than a third were genuine. He provides detailed descriptions of almost a hundred high-profile cases that never actually happened, most of which were supposed to have taken place on university campuses. Reilly concludes that, contrary to popular belief, we are not experiencing an epidemic of hate crimes, but an epidemic of hate crime hoaxes perpetrated by people searching for public attention and sympathy.

Nor is it only hate crimes that are the subject of hoaxes and false accusations. A meta-analysis conducted by Australian scholars Claire E. Ferguson and John M. Malouff in 2015 revealed that as many as 5.2 percent of all reported rape cases are false. The authors note, however, that their analysis only accounts for accusations that were disproven in the course of investigations — many others were never confirmed or were withdrawn for reasons unknown.

Tomasz Witkowski, “The Victims’ Race”, Quillette, 2021-08-27.

December 7, 2021

QotD: The decline of class distinctions in Britain

Filed under: Britain, Economics, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

After 1918 there began to appear something that had never existed in England before: people of indeterminate social class. In 1910 every human being in these islands could be “placed” in an instant by his clothes, manners and accent. That is no longer the case. Above all, it is not the case in the new townships that have developed as a result of cheap motor cars and the southward shift of industry. The place to look for the germs of the future England is in the light-industry areas and along the arterial roads. In Slough, Dagenham, Barnet, Letchworth, Hayes – everywhere, indeed, on the outskirts of great towns – the old pattern is gradually changing into something new. In those vast new wildernesses of glass and brick the sharp distinctions of the older kind of town, with its slums and mansions, or of the country, with its manor-houses and squalid cottages, no longer exist. There are wide gradations of income, but it is the same kind of life that is being lived at different levels, in labour-saving flats or council houses, along the concrete roads and in the naked democracy of the swimming-pools. It is a rather restless, cultureless life, centring round tinned food, Picture Post, the radio and the internal combustion engine. It is a civilization in which children grow up with an intimate knowledge of magnetoes and in complete ignorance of the Bible. To that civilization belong the people who are most at home in and most definitely of the modern world, the technicians and the higher-paid skilled workers, the airmen and their mechanics, the radio experts, film producers, popular journalists and industrial chemists. They are the indeterminate stratum at which the older class distinctions are beginning to break down.

This war, unless we are defeated, will wipe out most of the existing class privileges. There are every day fewer people who wish them to continue. Nor need we fear that as the pattern changes life in England will lose its peculiar flavour. The new red cities of Greater London are crude enough, but these things are only the rash that accompanies a change. In whatever shape England emerges from the war it will be deeply tinged with the characteristics that I have spoken of earlier. The intellectuals who hope to see it Russianized or Germanized will be disappointed. The gentleness, the hypocrisy, the thoughtlessness, the reverence for law and the hatred of uniforms will remain, along with the suet puddings and the misty skies. It needs some very great disaster, such as prolonged subjugation by a foreign enemy, to destroy a national culture. The Stock Exchange will be pulled down, the horse plough will give way to the tractor, the country houses will be turned into children’s holiday camps, the Eton and Harrow match will be forgotten, but England will still be England, an everlasting animal stretching into the future and the past, and, like all living things, having the power to change out of recognition and yet remain the same.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

December 6, 2021

QotD: Modern “Canadian culture” is a vast vanity press operation funded with lots of government money

Filed under: Books, Cancon, Government, Media, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

From a distance, it is beginning to look as if Canada does not have a specific culture. No one is buying books, no one is watching television, no one is watching or listening to the CBC. People trail through galleries sometimes, and at the top of the investment tree, people buy art. But not because they love it, they buy it because it lends them status.

CanCon is a heavy lift at the best of times, being close neighbors to that hulking great monster south of us which is the most creative culture on earth. That is why we spend billions every year to prop up our creators, our artists, who we love.

Except we don’t.

Film salaries are funded up to 50%, books, 30%, news media 60%, and yet … no one is watching, reading, or listening. It is like a giant vanity project which various foreign appointees can brandish in foreign capitals.

Last month I traced the sales of this year’s Canadian literary award winners and I suppose “best-sellers”. Their sales on Amazon, hardcover, soft cover and digital ranged from 4 books to 33 books per month, incomes hovering in the three figures. (Amazon accounts for roughly 70% of sales.) This during summer reading months where Canadians are at their lake shacks from coast to coast reading one would hope about themselves, the world they live in, and well … just curiosity.

Equally looking at the viewer and listener stats for the CBC, our national behemoth, which eats up $1.5 billion annually, and which amounts to 50% of the media dollars spent, is equally disheartening. The state spends another $600 million supporting once-successful media because “internet”.

CBC television is watched by 3.9% of Canadians and only .8% watch CBC News. Again, half of all media dollars, half. Half is spent engaging less than 4% of Canadians.

CBC radio is considered reasonably good, and is listened to despite the almost vindictive calling out of anyone who disagrees with their hard socialist stance. Despite every conceivable advantage, advertising on the CBC dropped 20% during the pandemic.

In fact, they are so disliked that CBC is hiring “close protection security” for the next two years. They are so disliked, they have turned off commenting on their various programs. They are so disliked that there is a brand of coffee called “Defund the CBC”. This isn’t passive ignoring, this is active dislike to the point of needing bodyguards.

Why?

Because our media show us Canadians as racist, stupid, sexist, stupid, stupid and more stupid. And while they are at it, shallow and violent.

That is the real reason, and the only reason CanCon is dying. They hate us.

Elizabeth Nickson, “Canadian Culture on the Ropes”, Elizabeth Nickson, 2021-09-01.

November 29, 2021

QotD: The law

Filed under: Britain, Law, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

Here one comes upon an all-important English trait: the respect for constitutionalism and legality, the belief in “the law” as something above the State and above the individual, something which is cruel and stupid, of course, but at any rate incorruptible.

It is not that anyone imagines the law to be just. Everyone knows that there is one law for the rich and another for the poor. But no one accepts the implications of this, everyone takes it for granted that the law, such as it is, will be respected, and feels a sense of outrage when it is not. Remarks like “They can’t run me in; I haven’t done anything wrong”, or “They can’t do that; it’s against the law”, are part of the atmosphere of England. The professed enemies of society have this feeling as strongly as anyone else. One sees it in prison-books like Wilfred Macartney’s Walls Have Mouths or Jim Phelan’s Jail Journey, in the solemn idiocies that take place at the trials of Conscientious Objectors, in letters to the papers from eminent Marxist professors, pointing out that this or that is a “miscarriage of British justice”. Everyone believes in his heart that the law can be, ought to be, and, on the whole, will be impartially administered. The totalitarian idea that there is no such thing as law, there is only power, has never taken root. Even the intelligentsia have only accepted it in theory.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

November 26, 2021

QotD: English working class culture

Filed under: Britain, History, Quotations, Religion — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… in all societies the common people must live to some extent against the existing order. The genuinely popular culture of England is something that goes on beneath the surface, unofficially and more or less frowned on by the authorities. One thing one notices if one looks directly at the common people, especially in the big towns, is that they are not puritanical. They are inveterate gamblers, drink as much beer as their wages will permit, are devoted to bawdy jokes, and use probably the foulest language in the world. They have to satisfy these tastes in the face of astonishing, hypocritical laws (licensing laws, lottery acts, etc., etc.) which are designed to interfere with everybody but in practice allow everything to happen. Also, the common people are without definite religious belief, and have been so for centuries. The Anglican Church never had a real hold on them, it was simply a preserve of the landed gentry, and the Nonconformist sects only influenced minorities. And yet they have retained a deep tinge of Christian feeling, while almost forgetting the name of Christ. The power-worship which is the new religion of Europe, and which has infected the English intelligentsia, has never touched the common people. They have never caught up with power politics. The “realism” which is preached in Japanese and Italian newspapers would horrify them. One can learn a good deal about the spirit of England from the comic coloured postcards that you see in the windows of cheap stationers’ shops. These things are a sort of diary upon which the English people have unconsciously recorded themselves. Their old-fashioned outlook, their graded snobberies, their mixture of bawdiness and hypocrisy, their extreme gentleness, their deeply moral attitude to life, are all mirrored there.

The gentleness of the English civilization is perhaps its most marked characteristic. You notice it the instant you set foot on English soil. It is a land where the bus conductors are good-tempered and the policemen carry no revolvers. In no country inhabited by white men is it easier to shove people off the pavement. And with this goes something that is always written off by European observers as “decadence” or hypocrisy, the English hatred of war and militarism. It is rooted deep in history, and it is strong in the lower-middle class as well as the working class. Successive wars have shaken it but not destroyed it. Well within living memory it was common for “the redcoats” to be booed at in the streets and for the landlords of respectable public-houses to refuse to allow soldiers on the premises. In peace-time, even when there are two million unemployed, it is difficult to fill the ranks of the tiny standing army, which is officered by the country gentry and a specialized stratum of the middle class, and manned by farm labourers and slum proletarians. The mass of the people are without military knowledge or tradition, and their attitude towards war is invariably defensive. No politician could rise to power by promising them conquests or military “glory”, no Hymn of Hate has ever made any appeal to them. In the last war the songs which the soldiers made up and sang of their own accord were not vengeful but humorous and mock-defeatist. The only enemy they ever named was the sergeant-major.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

November 24, 2021

Rousseau versus “original sin” in modern-day culture

Filed under: Books, Media, Politics, USA — Tags: , , , , , — Nicholas @ 03:00

In UnHerd, Mary Harrington ponders the two irreconcilable camps struggling for cultural supremacy in western countries, as most recently highlighted by the Kyle Rittenhouse trial in Kenosha, Wisconsin:

Portrait of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) by
Maurice Quentin de La Tour, circa 1753.
Wikimedia Commons.

The Rittenhouse argument is just such a case. It’s powered by a profound disagreement about human nature: one that fuels many of the most intractable modern culture wars, from Mumsnet bunfights about babycare to arguments about classroom discipline and what the police force is for.

Are humans naturally good given the right circumstances? Or are we flawed and in need of threats and guidelines to keep us on the straight and narrow? The split is a legacy of radical ideas stretching back to the revolutionary 18th century.

Perhaps the most famous proponent of intrinsic human goodness is Rousseau, who claimed in Emile (1762) that children are born virtuous. As Rousseau sees it, we only need freedom, love and the right environment to spontaneously come to an understanding of what’s right.

When Emile was first published, it stood in stark challenge to the then-dominant view, emerging from the Christian tradition, that humans are tainted by “original sin”. From this vantage point, we’re naturally flawed, and must always struggle against our less virtuous instincts. Rousseau’s claim so appalled adherents of this then-dominant view that copies of his book were burned in the street.

Today, though, the boot is on the other foot. The high-status view among contemporary elites is unmistakeably Team Rousseau.

At the tiniest scale, it’s expressed in the school of parenting that believes it’s wrong or even cruel to teach children how to live. I’ve written before about the currently popular ideas of “attachment parenting” and “gentle parenting”, which emphasise self-discovery in a loving environment over routine, authority or punishment — and about how these views skew wealthy and liberal.

In education settings, the same idea appears as “child-centred pedagogy”, an approach that emphasises individual pathways and discovery over rote learning and teachers as authority figures. And at the biggest scale, it crops up as the claim that all the root causes of crime are external to humans: poverty, trauma, discrimination and so on. From this perspective, if we could only replace policing with tailored community services that eliminated these root causes, there would no longer be any crime.

Even outbreaks of mass public disorder are treated by Team Rousseau as an unfortunate-yet-understandable response to bad governance: when BLM protesters in Baltimore toppled a statue of Christopher Columbus last year, the Democrat politician Nancy Pelosi responded by shrugging it off as a natural expression of that community’s wishes. If the community doesn’t want the statue, she said, “the statue shouldn’t be there”. From this vantage point, public unrest is something akin to the weather: a naturally-occurring phenomenon in which leaders must strive to create the conditions for goodness, or else “people will do what they do”.

November 23, 2021

QotD: Generation X and the 1990s

Filed under: Humour, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

When I retired, a retro 1990s fad was just gearing up on campus. It was an Uncanny Valley kind of experience. There they were, dressing like day-glo lumberjacks and listening to knockoff BritPop, but still plodding around campus with that peculiarly late-Millennial affect. You know the one — half secret policeman, half cringing mouse. Unpleasant, but it got me thinking about my own college years back at the dawn of the Clinton Era. We really screwed the pooch, didn’t we?

I’m referring, of course, to Gen X’s patented brand of “irony”. We’ve talked about this before, but here’s a quick recap: Every middle-class kid born after about 1965 was raised to believe that Authenticity was the thing, the only thing. Just do what you feel. Question authority. Don’t listen to The Man!

The problem, of course, is that we were told this by The Man.

It had a weird, telescoping effect. On campus, you were surrounded by people who actually were hippies, plus a whole bunch of wild-eyed fanatics who were sure they would’ve made truly excellent hippies if they hadn’t been in elementary school at the time, plus a bunch of kids — these would be your classmates — who thought of “Woodstock” as a brand name, a kind of backpacking-through-Europe, taking-a-year-off-to-find-myself experience that everyone has as a matter of course before settling down to the serious business of making partner at the law firm.

In short: Our parents were stuck in adolescence, and, being adolescents ourselves, we didn’t understand that “Rebellion” wasn’t something the hippies invented. We wanted to experience sex, drugs, and rock’n’roll, too, but since the Baby Boomers treated those as their exclusive property instead of what they actually are — i.e. the natural impulses of teenagers in all times and places — we had to be all, like, you know, whatever about it. […]

That was the 1990s. Faced with a paradox that everything your parents say, do, and believe is lame — according to your parents! — the only safe way is to make sure nobody can figure out exactly what your attitude is at any given instant. You might end up working 90 hour weeks at the office to pay the nut on the McMansion and the Volvo the same way they did, but at least you’d be, you know, ironic about it. The ketman of the suburbs.

See what happens when you listen to your elders, kids?

Severian, “The Virtue of Hypocrisy”, Rotten Chestnuts, 2019-01-19.

November 22, 2021

History of Wine: Ancient Rome

Filed under: Europe, History, Wine — Tags: , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

History of Wine
Published 20 Apr 2014

How was wine was made in Ancient Rome?
What did wine taste like in Ancient Rome?
Convivium and customs of drinking.
Wine Tasting.

November 21, 2021

QotD: Britain’s middle class after WW1

Filed under: Britain, Bureaucracy, Business, History, Quotations — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

One of the most important developments in England during the past twenty years has been the upward and downward extension of the middle class. It has happened on such a scale as to make the old classification of society into capitalists, proletarians and petit bourgeois (small property-owners) almost obsolete.

England is a country in which property and financial power are concentrated in very few hands. Few people in modern England own anything at all, except clothes, furniture and possibly a house. The peasantry have long since disappeared, the independent shopkeeper is being destroyed, the small business-man is diminishing in numbers. But at the same time modern industry is so complicated that it cannot get along without great numbers of managers, salesmen, engineers, chemists and technicians of all kinds, drawing fairly large salaries. And these in turn call into being a professional class of doctors, lawyers, teachers, artists, etc., etc. The tendency of advanced capitalism has therefore been to enlarge the middle class and not to wipe it out as it once seemed likely to do.

But much more important than this is the spread of middle-class ideas and habits among the working class. The British working class are now better off in almost all ways than they were thirty years ago. This is partly due to the efforts of the Trade Unions, but partly to the mere advance of physical science. It is not always realized that within rather narrow limits the standard of life of a country can rise without a corresponding rise in real-wages. Up to a point, civilization can lift itself up by its boot-tags. However unjustly society is organized, certain technical advances are bound to benefit the whole community, because certain kinds of goods are necessarily held in common. A millionaire cannot, for example, light the streets for himself while darkening them for other people. Nearly all citizens of civilized countries now enjoy the use of good roads, germ-free water, police protection, free libraries and probably free education of a kind. Public education in England has been meanly starved of money, but it has nevertheless improved, largely owing to the devoted efforts of the teachers, and the habit of reading has become enormously more widespread. To an increasing extent the rich and the poor read the same books, and they also see the same films and listen to the same radio programmes. And the differences in their way of life have been diminished by the mass-production of cheap clothes and improvements in housing. So far as outward appearance goes, the clothes of rich and poor, especially in the case of women, differ far less than they did thirty or even fifteen years ago. As to housing, England still has slums which are a blot on civilization, but much building has been done during the past ten years, largely by the local authorities. The modern council house, with its bathroom and electric light, is smaller than the stockbroker’s villa, but it is recognizably the same kind of house, which the farm labourer’s cottage is not. A person who has grown up in a council housing estate is likely to be – indeed, visibly is – more middle class in outlook than a person who has grown up in a slum.

George Orwell, “The Lion And The Unicorn: Socialism and the English Genius”, 1941-02-19.

November 19, 2021

I Wore 18th-Century Clothing *Every Day for 5 YEARS & This Is What I Learned (Corsets Aren’t Bad!)

Filed under: History — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Abby Cox
Published 10 May 2020

I wore 18th-century women’s clothing, all day, 5 days a week, for 5 years of my life. Over those 5 years, I learned *a lot* about my body, fashion in the 1700s — the good and the not so good, and how we can take these lessons and improve modern fashion.

***Trigger Warning: I do talk about body image in this video (as a reflection of my own, long, long journey with my own body & how wearing historical clothing has given me a different perspective on body image) which may or may not be upsetting for some. ***

*Ok, so not “every day” but you get the idea…😉

💌Business Inquiries *ONLY* abbycox@semaphorebrands.com
(This email goes directly to my management and not to me.)

More Videos:

🎉🎉 Answering YOUR FAQs from THIS Video: https://youtu.be/SN3agbKZVP0
“Becoming an 18th-Century MEME LORD” https://youtu.be/a0pRE3uXWu8
“Historical Costumers and Their Hogwarts Houses” https://youtu.be/vxmRsc9Qj8M
Rachel Maksy – “Born in the Wrong Era” – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r5GAJ…

A lot of these photos of me were taken by the lovely Fred Blystone. You can see more of his photography here: https://www.facebook.com/groups/13664…

Also, @Edwardian Tailor (https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCBSf…)

We like to assume that the people in the past are “stupid” (it’s normal human behavior), and one of the ways that we, as a modern society, do this is by judging the past for their fashion trends and practices. We’ve been taught to demonize corsetry (or in this case, stays) for being restrictive and a tool of oppression towards women, and take pride in our culture of diet and exercise, without considering the issues that can be found in our body-obsessed culture. We praise jeans and a t-shirt, as being “comfortable” but the insecurities that so many of us have about our bodies are put on display in our 21st-century uniforms. We take for granted our modern homes, and how that has made us lazy in dressing for the seasons, resulting (in part) the loss of various types of textiles and weaving technology. I learned a lot over those 5 years, including how to indulge in an Indian Buffet while wearing my 18th-century stays, and I’m excited to share my insights with you. Also, can we just discuss how stupid modern underwear is?? 😉

Images Used:

*Summer Dresses, 1783, Object Number – J,5.139, Asset Number – 79588001 © The Trustees of the British Museum. https://www.britishmuseum.org/collect…

*Sheer Cottton Mull Italian Gown, 1780s, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 17.107.6a, b, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect…

*Kofta, 1760s-90s, Nordiska Museet, NM.0186311, https://digitaltmuseum.se/01102369100…

*Women 1790-1799, Plate 052, Fashion Plate from August 1796, The Metropolitan Museum of Art Library Costume Institute Fashion Plate Collection, https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/dig…

*Robe a l’anglais c. 1780, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1982.291a, b, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect…

*Attributed to Isaac Cruikshank, Cestina Warehouse or Belly Piece Shop
April 16, 1793, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 59.533.475 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect…

*Stays, The Metropolitan Museum of Art,
2009.300.3330a–d
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect…

*The Bum Shop, Attributed to R. Rushworth (British, active 1785–86), July 11 1785, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1970.541.12, https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect…

*Chemise, 1780-1800s, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2005.368 https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect…

*Corset, 1880s, The Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2009.300.3497a–c
https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collect…

——-

Music from Epidemic Sound:

“Gold Among the Sand”- Trevor Kowalski
“To Clarity” – Airae
“The Path to Innovation” – Airae
“Caffeinated and Motivated” – Airae
“Alice is on her Way” – Airae
“Cafe Laurent” – Medite
“In a Jiffy” – Moins Le Quartet
“Moonlight Night” – Gabriel Lucas

———

Instagrams: https://www.instagram.com/abbyelyn

From the comments:

Abby Cox
1 year ago (edited)

Hey Everyone! 👋🏻

Thank you all so much for taking the time to watch this video about my experience! I’ve noticed a lot of the same questions in the comments, so I want to take a minute to answer them here –
🎉UPDATE (Sept 27, 2020) – I’ve answered your questions about menstruation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iV2TgwjjhOE
🎉UPDATE (June 7, 2020) – I’ve taken the most commonly asked questions from the comments and have done a video to answer them! You can watch it here: https://youtu.be/SN3agbKZVP0

– My stays (18th-century term for a corset) are from https://redthreaded.com/ – they’re a fantastic historical corset company that I adore. (and for the couple of you trying to call me out – my 100% hand-sewn, me-made, reproduction stays are so worn out that they’re in retirement, and just because I can make stays by hand doesn’t mean I have the time. I’d also rather support a small business that I believe in.❤️Finally, the gown I’m wearing in this video was cut to go over those stays, but if you’d like to see my hand-sewn reproduction stays in action you can buy the book I co-wrote here: https://www.american-duchess.com/book/american-duchess-guide) ☺️

– While I haven’t gone down the menstruation research rabbit hole (cause it is its own subject of study) I am going to do my best with limited access to primary source documentation (which is what I really need to be able to answer this question) to produce a video about what 18th-century women would do. I don’t know when this will be, but I will do my absolute best to answer this question, and if I can do some experimental archeology in the process, I will. 😎 (ravenclaws gotta ravenclaw…)

– Thigh chafing – so I think that varies from person to person. I never really had a lot of issues with it (and my narrow hips mean that I will never have a thigh gap) because my linen shift would always kind of end up between my leg and absorb the sweat. However, I know a lot of costumers who will wear split-crotched drawers because they find it more comfortable, even though drawers weren’t a thing in the 18th-century.

Ok! I hope this helps answer some of your questions! Thank you all so much for watching and engaging in this video. I really can’t tell you all how much I appreciate it! ❤️

November 18, 2021

QotD: Hormones, puberty, and menopause

Filed under: Health, Quotations — Tags: , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… in the early twentieth century, women that made it to positions of prominence, where they became known for professional excellence, had to be GOOD at it. Amazing, in fact.

And even then, they might hit a glass ceiling, because they were the nail that stuck up. Everything conspired to bring them down.

Female liberation was played against this. People looked at these women, knew what they’d achieved against what obstacles, and dreamed that “if only women were allowed to be on an even footing with men, they’d be the best at everything. Every woman would be a leader.”

[…]

Having gone the full ride on the hormonal roller coaster, being a woman built mostly by nature to make more humans, let me tell you, it ain’t easy. The hormonal ramp up of puberty is probably worse for boys, but the monthly ride of women is … interesting. I had years of having really bad pains, which meant if I had a test on one of those days I had to work DESPITE it. How bad? well, neither of my giving-birth experiences were worse, and in fact the second was much milder, until they gave me pitosin (the second started out with pitosin) and then with the ramping up of pain of pitosin, and giving birth in one and a half hours (long story. Let’s say they believed the report on the first birth, which had been doctored (ah!) and should never have given me the d*mn thing) was about the same as I used to endure for two or three days straight. And yes, I studied and took finals under that kind of pain, with no pain killers because most of them just make me more ill and woozy.

Then there were my middle years where I’d get unreasonably angry and borderline-violent for about a week before. It took a lot of engineering my own brain and knowing “this isn’t real, it’s hormonal” to stop myself being hell to live with. And sometimes I didn’t manage it. I’d be in the back of my brain, watching the rest of me rage and go “what the heck? Why am I doing that.”

And then there were various dysfunctions. We won’t go there, because most women don’t get those. But menopause … well … it’s special. I seem to have elided most of it, because I went into it surgically and with a hammer, having everything removed and having to cope, which at least was over in a few months. But I’ve seen relatives and friends go through it: it can stretch to five years of having NO discernible mind. You forget everything, lose everything, can’t sleep, can’t keep commitments, etc. And we still haven’t come up with a replacement that has no bad effects and makes actual sense. We’re trying.

Anyway, so yeah, women are running with their feet in a sack. But most of them are about average for normal human beings. So, yeah, they can do jobs and perform well, despite all of that. What you’re never going to get is “every woman excels”. Even if you stop the hormonal side effects, most women will lack the drive, the brain or the NEED to excel.

Men’s testosterone makes them more competitive, and so in a way gives them a bit more drive, but most of them are still unfocused/not ambitious enough to SACRIFICE to be the best. Because, guess what, success always requires sacrifice. And human beings don’t like to sacrifice.

So, women entered the workforce and most of them became … average. Which of course they would.

But feminist insanity required every woman to be exceptional. And so theories to explain it came up, including seeing patriarchy and oppression in ever-smaller things, including “she’s bossy” and “boys will be boys.”

Sarah Hoyt, “Bad Crazy”, Libertarian Enterprise, 2019-01-20.

November 17, 2021

QotD: From Theda Bara to Lady Gaga

Filed under: Germany, History, Media, Quotations, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 01:00

… despite showing acres of pallid flesh in the fetish-bondage garb of urban prostitution, Lady Gaga is far less sexy than Stefani Germanotta used to be. In fact, Gaga isn’t sexy at all — she’s like a gangly marionette or plasticised android. How could a figure so calculated and artificial, so clinical and strangely antiseptic, so stripped of genuine eroticism have become the icon of her generation? Can it be that Gaga represents the exhausted end of the sexual revolution? In Gaga’s manic miming of persona after persona, over-conceptualised and claustrophobic, we may have reached the limit of an era.

In 1933, the critic I.A. Richards, writing about “The Waste Land”, spoke of T.S. Eliot’s “persistent concern with sex, the problem of our generation, as religion was a problem of the last.” After the first world war, sexual experimentation and titillating smart talk became the hallmark of the emancipated new woman, who smoked, drank, bobbed her hair and danced the antic Charleston. Hollywood discovered that sex was great box office — leading to pressure from civic and religious groups for a production code, which movie-makers found ingenious ways to evade.

We are approaching the 100-year anniversary of Hollywood sex: Theda Bara’s incarnation as The Vamp in A Fool There Was (1915), a lurid femme fatale who slew overnight the lingering Victorian ideal of the pure, saintly woman-child, portrayed on screen by Mary Pickford and Dorothy and Lilian Gish. Theda Bara, like Lady Gaga, was a manufactured personality; although the studio publicity department claimed she was born in the Sahara to a French artist and Arabian princess, she was actually Theodosia Goodman, the daughter of a Jewish tailor in Cincinnati.

The sexual icon of 1920s Hollywood was Clara Bow, a madcap flapper who was probably falsely rumoured to have bedded the entire University of Southern California football team. Lithe Louise Brooks, with her signature bobbed hair, made landmark films of decadent eroticism in Germany. Wicked Mae West and lushly buxom Jean Harlow began the tradition of the sex bomb, which continued through Hedy Lamarr to Jane Russell and Marilyn Monroe, whose influence endures around the globe. But the cardinal sexual pioneer was Marlene Dietrich, who exploded on the international scene in 1930 as the heartless cabaret singer of The Blue Angel. In her subsequent films with the director Josef von Sternberg, Marlene toyed with transvestism (based on the drag balls of Weimar Berlin) and created the sophisticated look of hard glamour that remains a staple of fashion magazines.

Marlene was Madonna Louise Ciccione’s idol; the seductive, commanding Marlene permeates Madonna’s brilliant videos of the 1980s and the early ’90s, with their dominatrix, transvestite and bisexual motifs. Madonna wanted to play Marlene on film, but the idea was overruled by Marlene herself, who (as the proud daughter of a Prussian officer) decreed Madonna “too vulgar”.

Weimar cabaret was recreated in the 1972 film Cabaret, based on Christopher Isherwood’s Berlin stories. Bob Fosse’s dazzlingly aggressive choreography in that blockbuster film was adopted by Madonna for her videos and stage shows — all of which have been doggedly imitated by Lady Gaga. Gaga has borrowed so heavily from Madonna (as in her latest “Alejandro” video) that it must be asked, at what point does homage become theft? But the main point is that the young Madonna was on fire. She was indeed the imperious Marlene Dietrich’s true heir. Madonna’s incandescence is still on view in videos like “Open Your Heart”, “Vogue” and “Express Yourself”. However, for Gaga, sex is mainly decor and surface; she’s like a laminated piece of ersatz rococo furniture. Alarmingly, Generation Gaga can’t tell the difference. Is it the death of sex? Perhaps the symbolic status that sex had for a century has gone kaput; that blazing trajectory is over.

Camille Paglia, “Lady Gaga: The Death of Sex”, Sunday Times, 2010-09-12.

November 16, 2021

Pineapple: the King of Fruits

Filed under: Americas, Food, History, Pacific, USA — Tags: , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 04:00

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered
Published 15 Nov 2021

Pineapples are so culturally significant that pineapples adorn the tops of cathedrals, and serve as the domicile of one of the world’s most popular cartoon characters. An estimated 300 billion pineapples are farmed each year, and a 2021 YouGov poll lists pineapples as the sixth most favorite fruit, ahead of all varieties of apples and oranges.

This is original content based on research by The History Guy. Images in the Public Domain are carefully selected and provide illustration. As very few images of the actual event are available in the Public Domain, images of similar objects and events are used for illustration.

You can purchase the bow tie worn in this episode at The Tie Bar:
https://www.thetiebar.com/?utm_campai…

All events are portrayed in historical context and for educational purposes. No images or content are primarily intended to shock and disgust. Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it. Non censuram.

Find The History Guy at:

Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/TheHistoryGuy
Please send suggestions for future episodes: Suggestions@TheHistoryGuy.net

The History Guy: History Deserves to Be Remembered is the place to find short snippets of forgotten history from five to fifteen minutes long. If you like history too, this is the channel for you.

Awesome The History Guy merchandise is available at:
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Script by THG

#history #thehistoryguy #Pineapple

Bettie Page: The Queen of Pinup

Filed under: History, Media, USA — Tags: , , , , , , , — Nicholas @ 02:00

Biographics
Published 4 Mar 2019

Visit our companion website for more: http://biographics.org

Credits:
Host – Simon Whistler
Author – Shannon Quinn
Producer – Jennifer Da Silva
Executive Producer – Shell Harris

Business inquiries to biographics.email@gmail.com

Source/Further reading:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MJhop…
https://www.pbs.org/video/history-det…
https://nces.ed.gov/pubs93/93442.pdf
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7…
https://www.biography.com/news/bettie…
https://www.celebritynetworth.com/ric…
https://www.forbes.com/sites/zackomal…

Secondary Sources/Photos/Videos:

(Hey guys- You technically can’t see any of her private parts in these videos, so it’s not really porn, but I still would not call this safe for work. Your wives, co-workers, or people on public transportation may give you really dirty looks if they see these over your shoulder. You have been warned.)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bettie_…

Dancing video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Pndr…
The “Striporama” scenes with Bettie Page
https://youtu.be/ZDypKx8c1TM

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