melannen | (no subject)

Things I am not posting about this week:

1. Brexit
2. Guardian fandom, slash as an abstract concept, and the difference between queercoding, queerbaiting, representation and tokenism, and how that has played out across media and cultures in the last twenty-five years
3. The difficulty inherent in switching constantly between Guardian liveblogs and Guardian episode recaps ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
4. How it looks like I'm going to end up having to dig out my old Mike Gravel for President merch ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
5. The difference between historical fashion and historical clothing and why it gets my goat when people erase the difference
6. My current project, inspired by the search tips post, of going through my entire 600 pages of logged-in AO3 history to bookmark and tag stuff I want to hang on to

I am not writing posts about them, but feel free to ask me anyway, the rants are on tap.

I did, however, post to

fictional_fans about what types of fanfic are good for readers who don't know the canon, so you should go there to talk about that.

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

Honestly, I could probably adapt it to any number of popular historical narratives on the theme "the way people did things in the past was inherently worse than the way we do things now". The historical marriage rant is a classic though!

(Even something like slavery - yeah, the way the slaveholders did things was inherently worse, obvs., but, like, the enslaved people - of whom there were many, many more than the slave owners - actually did pretty amazing stuff within the constraints they had, and I'd rather treat them as the default people ....)

I think my favorite by which I mean most hated running theme here is, "...poor women [who are anywhere up to ninety-nine point nine percent of women depending on period] were not subject to these restrictions, but are not within the scope of this work."

Like, if non-elite women don't veil in your period, women in general mostly don't veil. Likewise picking their own spouses, working for a living, leaving the house by themselves, traveling alone, and whatever else it is Women Don't Do.

(Like, Melania Trump's life probably resembles Random Medieval Noblewoman's life waaaay more than either resembles mine, and that's not a coincidence!)

Ugh, yes.

I also like the ones that run along the lines of "five different laws forbidding this were passed in ten years, so clearly, nobody ever did it and it was taboo in the culture." Uh... that's not how that works. If people aren't doing it en masse, you don't have to constantly pass new laws about it.

As we all know, cultures which frequently prosecuted people for gay sex had no gay people because of their strong taboo; cultures which rarely enforced their laws against gay sex had no gay people because if they did they'd have been arresting them; and cultures without laws against gay sex had no gay people because if they did, SOMEONE would have objected, right?