I don’t think adding nonbinary to Victorian’s gender system would’ve fixed their weird sexism. If anything I think it would’ve made them weirder and sexismier
Of course, fashionable Honorables may be consternated by the proper open collar blouses as there is no way to tie a bow or cravat around it. In such cases a bow may be worn upon the top hat. Or a slim ribbon may be tied around the bare neck, however, given the salacious reputation some hold for such an accessory, that is best left to married Honorables.
YES. the way this hasn’t left my mind….Like okay they’re still Victorians. They’re still sexist and homophobic. My thought for this alternate history is third gender people are expected to only marry into already married couples. And they’d probably throw in a lot of Christian Holy Trinity and Mary Joseph God imagery to religiously validate triads.
Or three people (of all different genders of course bc again. They’re Victorian) could marry all at once but the courting situation would be a nightmare.
First thought: coverture. Coverture is the legal idea that a married couple is one entity, with the wife not having an actual legal identity of her own. This is why there’s the old-fashioned convention of women taking on their husband’s entire name (e.g. “Mrs. Robert Smith”), why men could control any inheritance or money their wives had, and also the origin of some now-obsolete laws (like making it impossible for a wife to sue her husband for damages, because it’s as if she was suing herself).
This is why it was so important for women to marry well: even if you worked as a married woman (and many women did), your money wasn’t actually yours. It’s one thing to have to live with a drunk asshole; it’s worse to have that drunk asshole be the sole person who decides if that paycheck goes towards rent or more booze.
So, having a trinity/three parts of one whole entity would totally fit Victorian ideas of coverture. I think you’d still have it be men > everyone else, because they’d expect some kind of hierarchy, and even within the Trinity, God is still the leader.
Second thought: separate spheres. The Victorian era was very heavily focused on men being involved in the “dirty” business of work/politics/etc., and women being more morally pure and better suited to the domestic sphere (the whole “angel of the house” thing). Obviously this wasn’t actually or practically true a lot of the time, but it was the aspired-to standard, the thing you’d measure people against to say if they were acting appropriately as members of their gender or not.
So you’d need a third sphere for Honorables to inhabit that is completely separate from the work/domestic dichotomy, or create an entirely different three-way dichotomy. Basically, you’d need a thing to point to, like “X is very ladylike” or “Y is not manly,” but for Honorables.
So, extrapolating:
You’d still have “Mr. and Mrs. Robert Smith,” it’d just be, “Mr., Mrs., and Mx. Robert Smith” (differentiating by title, not by first name). I could actually see there being a different title for unmarried vs. married Honorables, like Master vs. Mister or Miss vs. Madam/Missus. Mix vs. Max, maybe?
I think Honorables would definitely need to have some kind of dowry. It actually might be even more necessary, because unless the guy is insanely wealthy on his own, you’re going to need enough money to support three people, not just two.
I’m having trouble coming up with a third sphere, but whatever that third sphere was, you’d need to heavily police it. “You can’t do X, that’s for Honorables” has to be part of the culture. And you’d need to police it with as much weird pseudoscientific and/or religious justification as possible. Like, you need “women’s brains physically can’t handle the strain of learning math” but to explain why Honorables can’t swim, or whatever.
Non-leadership admin, teaching, and academia as the third sphere.
The idea of who should be in charge of household accounting has always waffled between a man’s job and a woman’s job. Is teaching the realm of governesses and school mistresses or lecturers and professors. Academics are too weak and frail to be masculine but too logical and rigorous to be feminine.
Clerks and accountants and secretaries and teachers and scholars.
I can see it becoming a Mind (Honorable) Heart (Woman) Soul (Man) kind of separation, all three together making up the body. Women are suited for feelings, nurturing, caring. Honorables are suited for the pursue of pure knowledge, but lack the Will to put it to any practical use. Finally men are the one leading force that brings all the parts together and leads it into an action.
Thus, men, even if they’re unqualified on whatever area of knowledge they’re dealing with, and even if they have no understanding of their or other people’s feelings whatsoever, still possess an inherent and intangible quality that makes them the only part truly suited for decision making.
Woman: Caretaker
Honorable: Assistant/Advisor
Men: Leader
Tags:
#gender #story ideas I will never write #sexism cw #this post was queued because my to-reblog list is too long and I didn’t want to dump it on you all at once
#this happened to me once #I walk out of the pharmacy and out of the corner of my eye there’s a car trying to get my attention #statistically‚ someone trying to get my attention while I’m walking down the street is almost certainly wanting to insult my respirator #I studiously ignore him‚ and when I find that we’re going the same direction I deliberately take a left even though my home is to the right #once I’ve lost him‚ I turn around and I see him driving away #and it’s my dad’s license plate #turns out he was offering me a ride home #(and he was so caught up in the euphoria of this) #(that for like a minute he lived in a world where ableism didn’t exist) #tag rambles #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #sexism cw #embarrassment squick #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what
counterintuitive to me that, even with the high rates of immigration and the quality of translation technology, I’m so insulated from the Chinese internet. I don’t know what discourse they have. I read about crazy intense doxxing and harassment incidents in books about China (like Age of Ambition) but that’s like being a Chinese person who kinda knows what Twitter is like from the Justine Sacco incident. I want to… oh, get their jokes, be in some actually good Discord servers, know whatever arbitrary sexual acts or dynamics are taboo in their culture. (There was a really good tumblr thread on Chinese fandom is totally okay with… was it incest? Something that US fandom feels weird about? but is not okay with poly or even multi-shipping? I loved that thread.)
Would be so amazing if there was a blog run by a normal Terminally Online person in China who just happened to speak very good English and was willing to post 1 screenshot a day of something that was on their feed, translating and explaining everything to me. God, I’d fund that Patreon
My wishes are answered! The spouse of someone I share a Discord server with is running weibo.substack.com
Premise: just faithfully translate the first 1500 words of whatever shows up in the Weibo trending posts today. No cherry picking articles, no punditry or commentary. Come experience the Chinese internet!
I’ve enjoyed every single post. Just picking a random one:
A lot of parents are asking a blogger for advice about going to high school overseas, because Chinese high school is too stressful. But they’re concerned about their children not being patriotic anymore after leaving China. The blogger admits that this is a very valid concern, especially since lately, there’s been many incidents of very patriotic Chinese students going overseas and getting into violent physical conflicts with their classmates over political differences, and that this is illegal in a lot of countries. So therefore, his advice is to send their kids to Russia. There are a lot of great schools in Russia. Russia’s leading the world in tech, and is pretty good in the arts too, and their food is great. A lot of modern Chinese processed food actually comes from Russia, so it’s very easy to find things like cream popsicles and sausages that were a hallmark of Chinese people’s childhoods. And you don’t have to worry about war in Russia, because it’s such a big country that no invader can win. Also, lots of hot chicks in Russia. But if your child is a girl, you have to be a little careful going to Russia, because their food is high in calories so it’s very easy to get fat. And Russian men like to drink a lot, so it might be a little scary for girls.
Two recurring themes that make me go “oh wow, huh” are bride prices (major driver of social drama and economic action) and treatment of children.
Tags:
#reading a random selection of trending Chinese Twitter-analogue posts has immediately reminded me #of why I don’t read random selections of trending Twitter posts #I would like to listen to some chill Chinese nerds please #(I know I said I have issues with the concept of chill-ness) #(but in this case it would be a much more graceful failure mode than the reverse) #discourse cw #sexism cw #child abuse cw? #disordered eating? #alcohol mention #oh look an update #China
you’d think they would have been able to get more than 50 undergraduates to do. it doesn’t take a long time and requires answering no surveys
Also, psych researchers have a reputation for lying their asses off to the subjects regarding [what a study is actually about] until after it’s over. I would seriously consider pressing the button once or twice just to see if they were telling the truth about it being a shock button.
(Not sure if I’d *do* it, but I’d seriously consider it, and I would definitely wonder if it was some sort of covert test that I was failing by not pressing it.)
Tags:
#the first draft of this post only had commentary in the form of the tags #”basically what shacklesburst said” #”I’m not comfortable with the gender-focused framing here but I’m reblogging for Electroshocks Georg” #but–while I’m still primarily reblogging for Electroshocks Georg–I realised I did in fact have something to say #reply via reblog #the power of science #sexism cw #this probably deserves some other warning tag but I am not sure what #anything that makes me laugh this much deserves a reblog #Spiders Georg
thoughts on Justice League Animated, part two of god knows what:
* The Brave and the Bold: Story by Paul Dini, script by Dwayne McDuffie, who are both fucking great, but this one doesn’t really stand up for me. It’s the one where Gorilla Grodd, a telepathic talking gorilla mad scientist supervillain, attempts to nuke Gorilla City, the hidden African city of hyperintelligent talking gorillas. I think part of my distaste for this episode – it’s not strong enough to be dislike, it’s just not one of the ones I bother with – is just the fact that, you know, over in Marvel the hidden hyper-advanced society in Africa is Wakanda, home of never-conquered black people, and here it’s fucking *gorillas* and that has a very racist smell to me.
* Fury: In which an adopted Amazon tries to kill all the men on Earth with a biowarfare deal. Somehow this works on Superman and J’onn also, despite alien physiology stuff. Also literally no one including Batman wears any PPE despite a worldwide pandemic raging, which hits different these days for sure. Script is again by Dwayne McDuffie, who was one of the greats, and it tries to point out that excluding men completely is not so very far from getting rid of the men, but it also tries to pull the #notallmen thing where one man’s good action in the past is supposed to redeem the whole category, and it’s just… many kinds of not great. One redeeming feature is that at least it does make Hawkgirl the one to set foot on Themiscyra, while in the previous Themiscyra episode Hawkgirl was *completely absent* so the heroes Wonder Woman brought to help were *all* male (for which she got banished).
Now I apparently have a therapy appointment, so more later.
>>Also literally no one including Batman wears any PPE despite a worldwide pandemic raging, which hits different these days for sure.
I watch CinemaSins videos while I’m jogging, because they’re reasonably entertaining and they have subtitles (I can’t hear the video very clearly over the sound of the treadmill). A few weeks ago I saw the one they did on The Happening.
I don’t think he even sinned it (the video was done in the 2010s), but it struck *me*, watching these clips, that I didn’t see *anybody* attempting any kind of air filtration in the face of this incredibly-deadly probably-airborne poison.
Nobody had a surgical mask. The Crazy Prepper People™ getting out their guns didn’t have respirators. Nobody so much as tied a fucking bandana around their face on the grounds that they had nothing to lose by trying.
It’s all-too-realistic, it seems, that *most* people wouldn’t. But there would be exceptions! And the thing is, you could write some really good, really horrifying horror about the exceptions!
Consider this alternate backbone plot for The Happening:
There’s a family. They live far enough from the epicentre to hear about the Happening before it reaches them, but near enough to be in acute danger.
They have one child. Let’s say she’s twelve. Old enough to comprehend the situation about as well as the adults do, old enough to wear PPE sized for adults, young enough to ping people’s Bad Things That Happen to Children Are Extra Bad wiring.
The dad’s a construction worker. He owns a respirator for work. As they’re preparing to evacuate, he gives it to his daughter. He figures, they say whatever this thing is seems to be airborne, maybe the respirator will protect her.
It *does* protect her. But the family only had one.
She watches her parents die by their own hands. She has to find a way to evacuate on her own, without being overwhelmed by the incredibly traumatic experience she just went through, while knowing that if she takes her respirator (Dad’s respirator) off for any reason–eating, drinking, blowing her nose after crying–she’ll die just like they did.
She takes a breath, acutely aware that two inches ago the air she’s breathing in was deadly. The filtered air is like a desert. The clock on dying of thirst is ticking.
Tags:
#I don’t like horror but I also don’t like missed opportunities #The Happening #reply via reblog #reactionblogging #fanfic #story ideas I will never write #illness tw #poison cw #death tw #suicide cw #covid19 #101 Uses for Infrastructureless Computers #sexism cw #racism cw? #Justice League
Because hell yeah – promotion via death (“Oh, our CMO bought it in that last attack? Looks like you’ve got the job now, McCoy” – what the hell, that’s not how the chain of command works!), acting captain (Spock) and ex-first officer (Kirk) get into punch-up on deck and not alone an ordinary fight, Spock is very nearly strangling him to death, and everyone just stands there and looks on? Where the hell were Security in that scene? Nobody called them? Nobody – not even McCoy – tries to pull Spock off Kirk?
We go from Spock not wanting to assign Uhura to the Enterprise in order to “avoid the appearance of favoritism” (translation: ‘everyone will think you only got the posting because we’re screwing’) to Carol Marcus and That Scene because while you do need to be good at your job, the unspoken addendum that everyone knows is that it does no harm to flash the goods for the guy in charge so he knows what’s on offer.
No rank badges on the women’s uniforms unless they’re wearing the long-sleeved version of the uniform – not that far from the midriff-baring uniforms of mirror!verse for the women.
No attempt to evacuate the people in San Francisco or even, as far as we can see, have a warning siren blaring as Enterprise and Vengeance scream through the atmosphere overhead – why, is this because screw them, they’re only dumb civilians?
The only way the scene in Starfleet Headquarters with ‘Harrison’ makes sense is if Admiral Marcus is string-pulling: “Oh my, we’re just having a top secret high security meeting with the ranking Starfleet officers after a terrorist attack on one of our facilities, so of course we’re having it in an unshielded room with ceiling-to-floor windows where the guy responsible for that bomb can fly up right up to the window and blow you all away, conveniently leaving me in sole charge to prosecute my plans”?
Heading for the mirror!verse makes a scary amount of sense. Vulcan (the voice of reason as most everyone accepts, the one planet which had a restraining effect on Terra because come on, the Tellarians and the Andorians aren’t even at the races in reboot) is gone. Starfleet is on a war footing, whether that’s admitted or not (they actively went out looking for potential threats after Nero which is how they found the Botany Bay and Khan), there’s not a word about the civilian government of the Federation – the President and Council – which makes it seem like Starfleet is the one body making decisions on a grand scale.
Nearly thirty years of paranoia after Nero (the destruction of the Kelvin may have had a huge effect on skewing the development of both Starfleet’s approach and civilian politics) resulting in militarisation, seeing enemies and potential enemies everywhere, an attitude of “you could be killed in the morning through no fault of your own”, ‘dead men’s shoes’ being acceptable as a career ladder, casual sexism and trading sexual favours for promotion/better opportunities being accepted within Starfleet, casual and routine lying on reports (see how outraged Kirk is that Spock told the truth about what happened on Nibiru!) leading to blatant ditching of the Prime Directive, the perception that the only way Terra will be truly safe is to get them before they can get us – it’s easy to see it happening.
Maybe the reason we don’t hear about Tarsus IV and how it affected reboot Kirk (because a traumatic event like that would certainly explain why he turned out to be “the Mid-West’s only genius-level repeat offender”) is that in this universe, the Governor is not regarded as Kodos the Executioner, but Kodos the Saviour – after all, he kept half the population alive until the relief ships could arrive, and without his forward thinking, determination and leadership, a lot more people would have died for no good reason (instead of being sacrificed as ‘useless mouths’ for the fit to survive).
I mean the mirrorverse has its own backstory but “most worlds converge on mirrorverse-ish stuff” is also cool!
Do they produce haploid gametes (either sperm or ovum) that can fuse to ultimately form an embryo? No.
Do they transport gametes? No.
Do they house the fetus during pregnancy? No.
Are they involved in the reproductive system of mammals? No.
Well what do you know, looks like they aren’t fucking sexual organs.
I know that a few of you might need to read this, just for clarification.
omg can you imagine a baby growing in a boob
twins
Milk creation isn’t involved in reproduction?
(That’s not even getting into the assumption that “sexual organ” means “reproductive organ”, when the people this is aimed at are probably using it to mean something more like “erogenous zone”.)
#puns #what timing #I’m taking introductory Java and I *just* learned about object creation a day or two ago #I very nearly didn’t have the necessary background information to understand this joke
thanks to mainstream media and being unable to show breasts on TV, way too few people know about female signs of cardiac distress, and impending heart attacks. they only know about the “pain in the left arm” male symptom.
Please, please, PLEASE, reblog this. i don’t know if I did save or called false alarm, with my boss’ life tonight. I felt I was being a bit paranoid, overreacting, but I told Mirage my thoughts and he, after reading over the article I showed him, immediately sprung into action and then shooed her off to the hospital. I don’t know if I did or not, but I knew she’d been super stressed. She’d off-handedly commented on her arm tingling and I asked her if she felt queasy on a hunch. I went to look at the symptoms and we went from there.
Holy shit, I didn’t even think the symptoms would be different between men and women. This is so hugely important and I don’t understand why we aren’t taught this.
One of the other symptoms that doesn’t get talked about , especially in women, is a “feeling of impending doom”. I am not even kidding, that is a legitimate diagnostic criteria.
Please – if you are feeling any of these symptoms and a sudden onset of “Holy shit the world is ending” do not let anyone tell you it’s “just nerves” or “just heartburn” or something.
Buddy of mine having a minor cardiac episode DID get eventual left arm pain—but she got jaw pain first and shortness of breath. Pay attention!
Worth noting that even if you focus on cis people, heart attack symptoms don’t divide up neatly into “male” and “female”. These are symptoms disproportionately experienced by women, but be wary of them no matter what your reproductive phenotype. Conversely, be wary of the “male” symptoms regardless of phenotype.
The website listed on the infographic acknowledges this, using phrases like “women are more likely than men to” and “women are twice as likely as men to”, but I figure not everyone will look at the website.
(Does anyone else think they shouldn’t have said “any one of these symptoms” about a list including nausea? It seems like a pretty bad idea to treat every bout of nausea like it could be a heart attack.)
if you don’t think some of the hate Taylor Swift receives is unnecessary and sexist let me just remind you that she once wore a black turtle neck, jeans and boots and this was a result
scandalous wow cover your eyes
So…the same outfit Steve Jobs wore for years….
“Steve Jobs sexes up the WWDC stage with figure-hugging black turtleneck”
…is it even possible to “sex up” a stage while wearing a remembrance poppy? Don’t symbols of the horrors of war kind of kill the mood?
Brinens and Things 