thejelliedfish:

“Glitter” D.Fodie - Retrospective  

themasterofawkwardness:

sexybritishllama:

sexybritishllama:

so there’s this board in our school showing a bunch of amazing answers people actually gave in exams. its like a hall of shame

A LOT OF PEOPLE HAVE BEEN ASKING TO SEE SOME MORE OF THESE SO HERE YOU GO

IT’S CALLED TEST TAKING NOT CARDS AGAINST HUMANITY

koilungfish:

persian-slipper:

x-cetra:

ceescedasticity:

quousque:

wacheypena:

deathcomes4u:

lady-willowrx:

dcfilms:

Wonder Woman exclusive: Meet the warrior women training Diana Prince

Once again; boob cups in female armour

Not to mention leaving open thighs and arms in critical areas with no armour.

Sure just go sword fight people with arteries available for them to stab it’s fine. So long as men get to see you’re women and you’re sexy it’s fine.

The only reason I can see to leave your legs exposed like that is to air out the privates since that island is probably hot af. I’d probably go around wearing a dress and sandals all day if I was told I couldn’t be naked.

Aren’t the Amazons based in Greek mythology? If so, weren’t there gladiatorial fights where women could be naked too? If so, technically they could all just be fighting naked. It’s only training and they’re friends/comrades in arms.

I do have a beef with them high heeled boots though. Fairly sure the didn’t have those in Greek times. So inaccurate.

(If anything and everything I’ve typed here is untrue, feel free to correct me politely or with funny af gifs XD)

OMG I’m a classicist this is my JAM

You aren’t the wrongest. (You are the rightest about the high-heeled boots. Those are a nope in terms of practicality and historicity). The Amazons were a semi-mythic group of warrior women who hailed from Thrace and/or Scythia (basically, “North-east ish”). Whether there actually were warrior women from that area is debatable. Greek depictions of Amazons varies quite a bit. In early art, they were depicted as female versions of Greek hoplites, with the same costume- think tunic-y thing with very short skirt, torso armor (but not with boob cups, and definitely covering the shoulders because how the hell else it it gonna stay up), greaves, helmets, big-ass shields, and knifesticks spears.Over time, elements of Thracian and Scythian costume made their way into depictions of Amazons- things like bows and javelins, a fuckton of horses, patterned tunics, boots, pointy hats, and stripey pants. And maybe tattoos (It’s kinda hard to tell if some craftsmen were trying to depict sleeves and sucked at it, or were genuinely trying to draw people with ink in their skin). The most common depiction of Amazons was as an archer on horseback, with a recurve bow, wearing long-sleeved tunic, belt, furry hat, trousers, and boots. Optional but popular is a half-moon shield. 

This one’s pants are boring, but you can see her quiver kinda behind her:

This one clearly shows the hat, pants, tunic, and sassy attitude:

On a horse, bomb-ass christmas tunic, fancy pants fancier than any fancy pants you will ever wear:

horse, half-moon shield, aerial knifestick javelin, complete lack of fucks:

pants and/or furry onesie, big hat, recurve bow, ancient speed-shooting techniques only recently rediscovered:

As for nudity, Amazons were rarely depicted naked (except for the odd stray boob) until the Hellenistic era (300′s BC), and on into the Roman Era, especially during it’s midlife crisis phase (the century surrounding 0 AD, roughly) and it’s post-midlife-crisis have-sex-with-everyone, kill-all-your-neighbor’s-chickens-and-eat-them-deep-fat-fried-all-at-once, act-surprised-when-you-contract-500-venereal-diseases-and-clog-your-arteries phase (Nero-ish onwards-ish. And yes, that is definitely the actual term used to refer to that period of Rome’s history, and not simply a sweeping generalization).

Gladiators were purely a Roman thing. You do get arenas and gladiators in Greece and Turkey and whatnot, but that’s only because the Romans invaded and put them there because bloodsport made them less homesick or something, I guess. Female gladiators were certainly a thing, and may have fought naked for entertainment value (TBH I’m too lazy to go look it up at the moment), but the thing is, gladiatorialism was a sport, just like modern taekwondo, judo, and fencing are sports. Yeah, people are going to get injured, but they didn’t die nearly as often as our modern popular image would have you think, and their fighting style wouldn’t really be all that useful on a battlefield, because they had rules to follow and their purpose was NOT to kill their opponent, but rather to provide an entertaining fight. Gladiators actually considered it a point of pride to never kill an opponent in the arena. 

Back to pants, because pants are interesting. To the Greeks and Romans, pants were just about the weirdest fucking thing they’d ever seen. Literally all of their clothes consisted of drapey rectangles. If they were feeling fancy, they’d stick a belt or a nice brooch on it. Pants are a complicated, relatively form-fitting garment and it just freaked those poor Greeks right out. Pants were a visual signal for “really fucking foreign”.  The furry-hat-and-pants depiction I mentioned above was also the exact same costume that male Scythian warriors were depicted in, and the androgyny also freaked out the poor androcentric Greeks. Often, in vase art and such, the only way to tell an Amazon from a male Scythian is that the women have white skin. They lack of visible gender differences screamed “foreign” to the Greeks. There are several mythic stories about the origins of pants, and they all attribute their invention to women. One story even has Medea (of “fuck you Jason, I’m going to murder our kids to get back at you you utter fuckpile” fame) inventing pants. 

Historically speaking, pants were invented because people found themselves needing to ride horses to get places, and not-pants are really inconvenient for that. Since both men and women rode horses, both men and women wore pants. (There’s also a fair bit of merit to the theory that the Amazon legend comes from actual Scythian female horse-archers, since once you put a person on a horse and give them a recurve bow, upper body strength advantages don’t mean shit). Pants were actually a key bit of military technology. Ancient China was having a hell of a time fighting off all these pants-wearing horse nomads (this was like 300-200 AD-ish) until the state of Qin finally decided to collectively put on pants and get on horses. They then preceded to kick the nomad’s pants-wearing asses and unify the warring states of China. Because pants. 

Of course, because of bullshit, pants came to symbolize femininity and barbarianism to the Greeks and Romans. They think you look very silly in your uncivilized female legsleeves. Funny sidenote, the Romans avoided pants whenever they could, but when they kept invading more northerly places, shit kept getting colder. Winters in Northern Gaul (modern day France) were cold enough that soldiers actually had to put on pants, and the Romans thought this was significant enough that they called the region “Gallia Bracata”, which translates to “Trousered Gaul”, or, if you’re slightly more imaginative, “Pants France”. 

(This is just the first image that came up when I googled “pants france”)

So, to bring this all back around to Wonder Woman, I’m really not a fan of those costumes. They aren’t practical and they aren’t accurate, and they’re also cliche and just like every other sexy STRONG female warrior in fantasy media (I will direct you to @bikiniarmorbattledamage for more details and feminist rants). They could have kept the definitely necessary to show thigh skin by dressing them as Greek hoplites, but then they’d have had to give them helmets and cover their precious hair, and give them actual for reals breastplates that protect above the breasts (seriously collarbones aren’t made of steel and PROTECT YOUR SHOULDERS did you see what happened to poor Bucky), and aren’t molded to the torso (seriously- if it’s stiff enough that you can’t stab through it, it’s stiff enough that you can’t move in something that tight). And even if it is only training, and for some reason they’re not hitting anywhere that’s exposed (maybe training to hit only really small target areas? IDK), the armor depicted wouldn’t work- there’s clearly no cushioning under it, and armor (any kind, really, plate, mail, scale, all of it) really doesn’t work unless you’ve got a layer of padding beneath it. Modern combat sports with limited target areas don’t have form-fitting breast-cupping gear, they have thick pads that protect. For instance, two women competing in Taekwondo: 

Not at all coincidentally, here’s some modern body armor worn by female soldiers: 

Incidentally, the Scythians also had similar armor, made of scales, woven leather, or some form of lamellar. 

Anyway, the movie makers could have their characters showing a bit of thigh (if it’s that important that they be sexy somehow) and maintain some sense of accuracy with thick torso armor, which at least protects the vitals, If they wanted to really get back to the idea of Amazons as terrifying warrior women who act as equals to men and fight as equals to men, and keep the Ancient Cultures motif, these ladies would be wearing stripey pants and furry hats. 

Basically, I think it would be awesome to put Wonder Woman in stripey pants. 

Alrighty, so I just spent an hour looking up stuff about ancient pants. You don’t have to dislike DC’s costumes just because I do, though- they’re just not very accurate to either ancient Greek culture, or to ancient Greek depictions of Amazons. And there’s no pants.

TBH now I kinda want to redesign Wonder Woman to be a Scythian Amazon. Lemme know if you want me to tag you or whatever if I end up posting a drawing of Wonder Woman in stripey pants.

Reblogging for pants as military technology.

Re the fighting naked thing, the person who brought that up may have been thinking of Greek athletic competitions, including wrestling, which were done nude by men. There were a few women’s competitions and I don’t know whether they were nude. But those were sports, not actual combat.

Here’s a few more images of women warriors/athletes in ancient Greece. All clothed. Warriors have hats/helmets, not boob cups (which after all direct enemy blows right into your sternum/heart). 

Famous Penthesilea vase by Exekias, (540-530 BCE) showing myth of Achilles falling in love with Queen of Amazons just as he kills her in Trojan War. 

Here’s another Penthesilea vase where she’s fully clothed in a typical Amazon getup (Achilles is nude). In literature, I seem to recall a lot of mention of spotted hides and spotted garments suggesting animal skins, leopard skins, exotic clothing. The Exekias vase shows some kind of wildcat skin.

Athena in armor, Brygos Painter (490-480BCE) in British Museum (my photo) 

Artemis with bow and hood, Cyprus, c. 450 BCE (my photo) British Museum

Women in footrace at the Heraia Games held at Olympia (not sure of date, but it’s black-figure so it’s early, 6th century BCE)

Cyniska, first woman to win Olympic chariot race (396/392BCE)

Not 100% sure this one’s Cyniska, but 99% sure female. [Source]

All of this just makes me think of my fave Classics professor, who liked to go around proclaiming loudly, “Real men don’t wear pants!”

He was talking about Greek attitudes towards pants, but that didn’t stop it from being hilarious. Even more so when he was dressed as Apollo.

Pants for the War God!

micdotcom:

British men troll The Sun over its cleavage contest

The Sun announced a contest Wednesday asking women to send in their cleavage self-portraits — the plan backfired completely, of course. British men especially showed the paper the error of their ways. But if you think asking for cleavage selfies is bad on its own, wait till you see the other requirements the Sun had.

lesserjoke:

Bruce Banner in Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015): It’s a word in an African dialect meaning ‘thief’… in a much less friendly way.

Phil Coulson in Thor (2011): Get somebody from linguistics down here.

———-

As excited as I was back in 2011 to learn that S.H.I.E.L.D. has a linguistics division, I was equally upset in 2015 to learn that Marvel does not. So here we go: Wakandan may be fictional, but it is not an “African dialect.” That’s because there’s no such thing as an African dialect! Dialects are minor variations of a common language, and as Africa is a huge continent with many diverse peoples, nations, and cultures, there is no single African language that they all share. Rather, there are thousands of different African languages that are not mutually intelligible with one another.

Africa is home to six or more language families, and each of those families contains as much linguistic diversity as the Indo-European family that English, Spanish, Russian, Sanskrit, and Greek (among many others) are all a part of. Based on Wakanda’s supposed location in the Marvel Cinematic Universe near real-life Ethiopia, Somalia, and Kenya, the Wakandan language is probably in the Afroasiatic language family. But that’s still a family with over 300 distinct languages in it.

Some Afro-Asiatic languages have multiple dialects, but Age of Ultron didn’t call Wakandan a dialect of a real language like Oromo (a plausible candidate, given the region). It didn’t even call it Afroasiatic. Instead, this line in a blockbuster with a budget of over two-hundred-million dollars called Wakandan “an African dialect.”

Why does this matter? Because referring to a dialect of a continent implies that that continent is home to a single common language, as Africa is most certainly not. Because Africa is not monolithic, although it’s often treated that way in Western cinema. Because Marvel is owned by Disney, who spent hundreds of millions of dollars perfecting this film, but didn’t think it was a priority to spend any of that money on a consultant who knew anything about Africa. Because Africa itself was so obviously not a priority here.

This was a small line in a major motion picture, mainly included to set up the connection to the fictional country of Wakanda for future Marvel projects like Captain America: Civil War (2016) and Black Panther (2018). But I really hope that Marvel is taking more care with how it discusses Africa in those properties than it did here.