Icon by @ThatSpookyAgent. Call me Tir or Julian. 37. He/They. Queer. Twitter: @tirlaeyn. ao3: tirlaeyn. 18+ Only. Star Trek. The X-Files. Sandman. IwtV. OMFD. Definitionless in this Strict Atmosphere.
As someone who originally trained as a social historian of the Medieval Period, I have some things to add in support of the main point. Most people dramatically underestimate the economic importance of Medieval women and their level of agency. Part of the problem here is when modern people think of medieval people they are imagining the upper end of the nobility and not the rest of society.
Your average low end farming family could not survive without women’s labour. Yes, there was gender separation of labour. Yes, the men did the bulk of the grain farming, outside of peak times like planting and harvest, but unless you were very well off, you generally didn’t live on that. The women had primary responsibility for the chickens, ducks, or geese the family owned, and thus the eggs, feathers, and meat. (Egg money is nothing to sneeze at and was often the main source of protein unless you were very well off). They grew vegetables, and if she was lucky she might sell the excess. Her hands were always busy, and not just with the tasks you expect like cooking, mending, child care, etc.. As she walked, as she rested, as she went about her day, if her hands would have otherwise been free, she was spinning thread with a hand distaff. (You can see them tucked in the belts of peasant women in art of the era). Unless her husband was a weaver, most of that thread was for sale to the folks making clothe as men didn’t spin. Depending where she lived and the ages of her children, she might have primary responsibility for the families sheep and thus takes part in sheering and carding. (Sheep were important and there are plenty of court cases of women stealing loose wool or even shearing other people’s sheep.) She might gather firewood, nuts, fruit, or rushes, again depending on geography. She might own and harvest fruit trees and thus make things out of that fruit. She might keep bees and sell honey. She might make and sell cheese if they had cows, sheep, or goats. Just as her husband might have part time work as a carpenter or other skilled craft when the fields didn’t need him, she might do piece work for a craftsman or be a brewer of ale, cider, or perry (depending on geography). Ale doesn’t keep so women in a village took it in turn to brew batches, the water not being potable on it’s own, so everyone needed some form of alcohol they could water down to drink. The women’s labour and the money she bought in kept the family alive between the pay outs for the men as well as being utterly essential on a day to day survival level.
Something similar goes on in towns and cities. The husband might be a craftsman or merchant, but trust me, so is his wife and she has the right to carry on the trade after his death.
Also, unless there was a lot of money, goods, lands, and/or titles involved, people generally got a say in who they married. No really. Keep in mind that the average age of first marriage for a yeoman was late teens or early twenties (depending when and where), but the average age of first marriage for the working poor was more like 27-29. The average age of death for men in both those categories was 35. with women, if you survived your first few child births you might live to see grandchildren.
Do the math there. Odds are if your father was a small farmer, he’s been dead for some time before you gather enough goods to be marrying a man. For sure your mother (and grandmother and/or step father if you have them) likely has opinions, but you can have a valid marriage by having sex after saying yes to a proposal or exchanging vows in the present (I thee wed), unless you live in Italy, where you likely need a notary. You do not need clergy as church weddings don’t exist until the Reformation. For sure, it’s better if you publish banns three Sundays running in case someone remembers you are too closely related, but it’s not a legal requirement. Who exactly can stop you if you are both determined?
So the less money, goods, lands, and power your family has, the more likely you are to be choosing your partner. There is an exception in that unfree folk can be required to remarry, but they are give time and plenty of warning before a partner would be picked for them. It happened a lot less than you’d think. If you were born free and had enough money to hire help as needed whether for farm or shop or other business, there was no requirement of remarriage at all. You could pick a partner or choose to stay single. Do the math again on death rates. It’s pretty common to marry more than once. Maybe the first wife died in childbirth. The widower needs the work and income a wife brings in and that’s double if the baby survives. Maybe the second wife has wide hips, but he dies from a work related injury when she’s still young. She could sure use a man’s labour around the farm or shop. Let’s say he dies in a fight or drowns in a ditch. She’s been doing well. Her children are old enough to help with the farm or shop, she picks a pretty youth for his looks instead of his economic value. You get marriages for love and lust as well as economics just like you get now and May/December cuts both ways.
A lot of our ideas about how people lived in the past tends to get viewed through a Victorian or early Hollywood lens, but that tends to be particularly extreme as far was writing out women’s agency and contribution as well as white washing populations in our histories, films, and therefore our minds eyes.
Real life is more complicated than that.
BTW, there are plenty of women at the top end of the scale who showed plenty of agency and who wielded political and economic power. I’ve seen people argue that the were exceptions, but I think they were part of a whole society that had a tradition of strong women living on just as they always had sermons and homilies admonishing them to be otherwise to the contrary. There’s also a whole other thing going on with the Pope trying to centralized power from the thirteenth century on being vigorously resisted by powerful abbesses and other holy women. Yes, they eventually mostly lost, but it took so many centuries because there were such strong traditions of those women having political power.
Boss post! To add to that, many historians have theorised that modern gender roles evolved alongside industrialisation, when there was suddenly a conceptual division between work/public spaces, and home/private spaces. The factory became the place of work, where previously work happened at home. Gender became entangled in this division, with women becoming associated with the home, and men with public spaces. It might be assumable, therefore, that women had (have?) greater freedoms in agrarian societies; or, at least, had (have?) different demands placed on them with regard to their gender.
(Please note that the above historical reading is profoundly Eurocentric, and not universally applicable. At the same time, when I say that the factory became the place of work, I mean it in conceptual sense, not a literal sense. Not everyone worked in the factory, but there is a lot of literature about how the institution of the factory, as a symbol of industrialisation, reshaped the way people thought about labour.)
I am broadly of that opinion. You can see upper class women being encouraged to be less useful as the piecework system grows and spreads. You can see that spread to the middle class around when the early factory system gears up. By mid-19th century that domestic sphere vs, public sphere is full swing for everyone who can afford it and those who can’t are explicitly looked down on and treated as lesser. You can see the class system slowly calcify from the 17th century on.
Grain of salt that I get less accurate between 1605-French Revolution or thereabouts. I’ve periodically studied early modern stuff, but it’s more piecemeal.
I too was confining my remarks to Medieval Europe because 1. That was my specialty. 2. A lot of English language fantasy literature is based on Medieval Europe, often badly and more based on misapprehension than what real lives were like.
I am very grateful that progress is occurring and more traditions are influencing people’s writing. I hate that so much of the fantasy writing of my childhood was so narrow.
It’s actually impossible to measure how many fucks a corvid give because there is no device sensitive enough to register such a tiny amount.
science/animal side of tumblr… explain to me the birb thing
Tail Pulling is a behavior noted in many corvids. The practical application is to create a distraction that will allow the birb to make off with the target’s food. Imagine being in the lunch room and a large fellow has a Twinkie you covet. You can’t just take it from him because he’ll defend his Twinkie. But if you thwap him on the back of his neck and then dash around to snag the Twinkie while he investigates, you stand a decent chance of enjoying spongey goodness. This is basically that in birb form.
Except corvids don’t only do this as a distraction. Sometimes they seem to just being doing it to mess with other animals/birbs. But to use my lunch room analogy, there are times you might thwap someone sneakily on the back of the neck just for amusement. Primates exhibit behavior that appears to be just be annoying other animals for amusement. Given how intelligent crows are, its not unlikely that this is a manifestation of an innate desire to just fuck with someone else for the fun of it. Such as this from the link above:
THANK YOU FOR THE BIRB KNOWLEDGE
BECAUSE IT IS FUN
This speaks to me on a molecular level.
birbs just wanna have fun
Sorry to hijack a little, but to put it bluntly, corvids are also pretty BALSY. They are more than prepared to harass other huge birds of prey which could deal them a lot of damage. There’s plenty of cases of corvids ‘riding’ other birds as well. It’s often to harass the larger bird out of the area, but as @red3blog said, they quite often (in layman’s terms) enjoy fucking shit up for fun.
‘Where the hell is the seatbelt on this thing?’
I mean they deserve a medal for having such huge bird balls imo
Literally no fucks are given by corvids. Ever.
linacreated: Hey, may I ask you a question? Do you honestly believe that every child should be vaccinated despite the many contaminates including mercury and artificial chemical compounds with unknown side effects that they are being found to be contained in them. It's a valid concern that some parents have. Another question I have is how is it logical that a person who has been vaccinated can catch virus from an unvaccinated person? Isn't it more logical to assume that vaccinations aren't quite as effective
You can ask it but I’m from a generation that got our vaccinations and never caught any of the diseases above or got mercury poisoning. So isn’t it more logical to assume it’s safer to vaccinate children instead of putting people with lowered immune systems at risk because you saw something on Dateline?
From what I understand, if enough people are not vaccinated, herd immunity disappears. So yes, it would likely start with the unvaccinated, including people who can’t have vaccines for other health reasons. But this also allows the bacteria to mutate and form new versions of the disease that the vaccines aren’t effective against. Then you run the risk of the vaccinated getting the disease and the cycle will repeat. Herd immunity is super fucking important.
First, unless there is a medical reason a child should not be vaccinated (such as an allergy to a compound in the vaccine), yes I think every child should be vaccinated!
Mutation of the pathogen can and has occurred, that is not the main reason for the vaccinated becoming sick.
So WHY do the vaccinated get sick?
An EXCELLENT question with a variety of answers.
Some vaccines wear off with time. That is why you are supposed to get your tetanus (and pertussis aka whooping cough!) shot every 10 years or so. Think of it as a shirt, some shirts wear out quickly and have to be replaced over and over. Then there is that one shirt that you’ve had since like middle school and 14 years later it’s still going strong.
Different vaccine formulation have different effectiveness. In the mid 1990s the USA switched from using whole cell pertussis vaccine to aceullar pertussis vaccines over concerns about safety. Though the safety improvements are pretty much negligible from what I’ve seen.Those who had the whole cell vaccine are less likely to develop pertussis then those who had the acellular vaccine.
Vaccines are designed to do different things. Some vaccines work so that should the person be infected the disease is milder/survivable (Those with the aceullar pertussis vaccine for example may still get sick but their illness won’t be nearly as bad as if they were unvaccinated) or protect the child long enough to be strong enough to survive it
The Bacille de Calmette et Guérin (BCG) vaccine is a very good example of this. BCG vaccine is given to children to prevent tuberculosis. The BCG vaccine is really ineffective in adults and its effectiveness in children can be a crapshoot. HOWEVER it is very good at preventing miliary TB. And this gives children a chance to survive so that they may fight off the infection. (I’m not going to go into the pathogenesis of TB though it’s really interesting! Umm to me…)
But the BIGGEST reason is
It’s a numbers game.
What the fuck does that even mean pvivax?
It means you have to take into account
The effectiveness of a vaccine, none of them 100%
How many people around you are vaccinated? If everyone is vaccinated and you are one of the people where the vaccine didn’t ‘take’ your chances of getting sick are really low. Contrariwise if a LOT of people aren’t vaccinated then your chances increase.
An imperfect analogy: think of it as being shot at. Someone shoots at you once and your bulletproof vest doesn’t work, you have a pretty good chance that the bullet will miss you and you’re good. But if you are shot at over and over and over, pretty soon there is good chance that you’re gonna get hit.
Now for an example!
Herd immunity (the percentage of people that are vaccinated in order to for the disease to not spread and protect the vulnerable) is 98%.
The MMR is about 97% effective, right? Let’s begin!
You have a school in Mississippi of 2000. Mississippi has very strict vaccination laws. Only medical exemptions are allowed. Therefore of the 2000 students, 1994 are vaccinated, a rate of 99.7%.
All of these students are equally exposed. If you are exposed to measles you have about 90% chance of getting measles. It is VERY infectious.
Rounded down, since you can’t have a fraction of a person: 5 of the unvaccinated children will get measles.
54 of the vaccinated children will be sick.
OMG VACCINES SUCK THE FUCK SCIENCE!
Wait, wait, wait a moment!
Look at the numbers again! 5 of the 6 unvaccinated children developed measles, that’s a 83%.
54 of 1994 children developed measles, that’s 2.7%
But when you look at that, what do more people see? The fact that 91% of measles cases were in the vaccinated, not that 1940 children were spared measles while only 1 non vaccinated person was spared infection.
Same scenario in Colorado where the MMR vaccination rate is 81.7%
366 vulnerable children
1634 covered.
All exposed and 329 of unvaccinated children will be sick (90% infection rate) and 45 of the covered children will be sick, again a 2.7% infection rate. In this case however, only 12% of the sick children were vaccinated.
The more unvaccinated people walking around, the more reservoirs there are for disease and for the disease to linger and expose more people. If very few people are unvaccinated, the disease dies out quickly, there is nowhere for it to go. The more people that are unvaccinated, the more places there are for the disease to go, exposing more people to the virus.
Footnotes: 54 came from. Multiplying 1994 by .97 (the effectiveness of the MMR). 1-(1994*.97)=60. 60*.90(likelihood of getting measles once exposed)=54.
45 came from: 1634 by .997 (the effectiveness of the MMR). 1634-(1634*.97)=49 49*.90(likelihood of getting measles once exposed)=44.118 (round to 45)
Oh wow instant follow cause facts
Honest to god you have MORE CONTAMINANTS IN YOUR BREAKFAST EVERY DAY. No I am not kidding. Industrialized society baby.
You also eat a lot more of other people’s spit over the dinner table than most people realize. Which makes vaccines like, triple important.
But seriously, the contaminants most people complain about aren’t actually contaminants. And they most certainly aren’t in doses large enough to do all that much of anything. I get more mercury in my morning corn flakes. And that’s real mercury, not a derivative that has been driven out of vaccines because of over reactive parents who don’t understand how the scientific method works.
vibraniumandbulletmarks-deactiv: Hello! 'm loving your How To Brooklyn Series, and I was wondering: What about the slang. Often in fics, there's a lot of 'ain't' and 'ya' and that kinda stuff, but is that right? (Also, what the hell's up with the Dodgers?)
Oh man, how did you know to ask about two things so near and dear to my heart? Is it my birthday? Is this a gift?
God, I love accents, and the Brooklyn accent is one of my favorites, definitely the best American accent. I pay very close attention to the way people speak - I mean, in general yeah as a writer I make it a habit to absorb as much as possible from the world around me, but I also just like listening to people, and for some reason the Brooklyn accent in particular hits me right in the feels.
The Brooklyn accent is musical. It dips up and down, it’s rhythmic. It’s too fast to really be a drawl, but I can see why some fics refer to it as such. It’s quintessential American, and it’s also the best way to sound super fucking pissed at someone. New Yorkers are the nicest people ever, and I will fight people over that, but we will also fight people instantly, which I guess proves my point? I’m defending kindness and good manners here okay.
It’s got a couple different key distinctive features: it’s non-rhotic, meaning it drops R’s from the end of words. It blurs up T’s and Th’s, making T’s sound more like D’s, and Th’s more like T’s. There’s not really a lot of words that are allowed to end in G’s: -ing verb’s are gonna come out like you forgot the end off it. There’s a particularly lovely quality to A sounds - the difference between cwafee (like a Boston accent) and caaawfee (ahh, Brooklyn) - which for my ear is what differentiates it from the Long Island and Jersey accents, who all share common roots. There’s a looseness to the mouth, in Brooklyn.
The other part of the Brooklyn accent is the manner that people speak, not just how it sounds when the words come out. You know how New Yorkers have a reputation for being pushy? I mean, look, we got shit to do, so maybe - but actually that impression comes across in how to listen like a polite New Yorker: by constantly interrupting:
In a really good New York conversation, more than one person is talking a lot of the time. Throughout the conversations I have taped and analyzed, New York listeners punctuate a speaker’s talk with comments, reactions, questions (often asking for the very information that is obviously about to come). None of this makes the New York speaker stop. On the contrary, he talks even more—louder, faster—and has even more fun, because he doesn’t feel he’s in the conversation alone. When a non-New Yorker stops talking at the first sign of participation from the New Yorker, he’s the one who’s creating the interruption, making a conversational bully out of a perfectly well-intentioned cooperative overlapper.
That rapid fire questions; the “Yeah, uh huh”s to show we get you; a visible, audible reaction to whatever you’re telling us: New Yorkers are active listeners in a very literal sense.
I also want to direct you over to Jimmy Cagney, because I’ll bet you real money that Sebastian Stan watched Cagney’s entire oeuvre for the thirty seconds he was allowed to have a Brooklyn accent in the Cap films:
Haha my favorite part is listening to Cagney grimly cling to his R’s, that the scene that starts from 1:52. Come on buddy, you can do it, I believe in you.
If anyone knows a hosting site that can handle 900mgs, I have a copy of Angels with Dirty Faces I can upload, for anyone who’s interested. It’s got all the greatest hits that should be required viewing for your pre-war Brooklyn street urchin fics, especially if they’re mob boss AUs. It’s got scrappy street punks sassing priests and smoking cigarettes, there’s a neighborhood tough who made good, the settings are nice and tenement-y looking, the accents are out of fucking control, and Cagney even rents a room on motherfucking Dock Street. (Side note: Cagney was also fluent in Yiddish, having learned it while he was growing up in the Lower East Side.)
Here’s a fun website to listen to a bunch of New Yorkers talk. I like this guy, who was born in 1946 and has a nice, softer version of the shouty videos posted above.
So I’m gonna make a separate post to answer your question about the Dodgers, because this one’s getting long and baseball’s sort of a New York animal in itself. Also I uh might have a few feelings about baseball such as I FUCKING LOVE BASEBALL so.
Can I just add in that while it is non-rhotic, the Brooklyn accent also adds an r to the end of a word that ends in an a.
My grandmother, a contemporary of Steve Rogers, would have said, “Here’s a soder for your friend Marther; she’s down in the front of the theatah.”
I can tell when my mother has been talking to New Yorkers based on those rs that creep in at the end of words.
Other fun fact, I was in middle school before I learned what I had was eczema and not egszimmer.
Yes!! Hah, actually when I was writing up this post I was trying to figure out an example sentence to capture the beauty, but the best I could come up with was something convoluted like,
“I wenna da bodega on Toity Toid Street t’ get a quadda wadda, but dey wuz out so I hadda wait on line fer a soder.”
Also if anyone reads the Fraction Hawkeye comics, the accent is why they call him Hawgguy.
Not that anyone asked but Chicago accent is similar, except with flatter ahs (not aws, ahs. Their are 2
very different sounds. Cot and caught sound fucking different ok??) and ours Rs are there.
Okay, this made me laugh so hard! My real life accent (not a Brooklyn accent) is vowel shifty as a motherfucker, so tbh I can’t even hear the difference between caught and cot, much less pronounce it. I think I was literally 25 before someone told me most of the country doesn’t pronounce those two words (and pen and pin, etc etc) like they’re homophones.
We’ve all seen a beehive in the wild, yes? If you have not, it’s a small paper thing with very limited space for honey and brood. The bees spend days of labor to build this entire hive with not so much space, which leaves less time to collect precious honey for the winter. “We must hurry!” Say the wild bees. “Soon winter will come and we need to stock up on food!!”
Now let’s move on to the beekeeper’s hive. It’s nice and big, with lots of space and a grid that makes it easy to build honeycomb and fill it with nice sweet honey. “We have lots of space and spare time with this nice big new home!” The bees say, and they fill the whole thing up with food storage and nurseries.
“HA!” Laugh the wild bees. “Your hive is full, and now you have nothing to do!”
“No matter” say the honeybees. “Our beekeeper has added a whole new room to our hive! Now we can collect and store even more honey and brood!” The honeybees and wild bees continue to collect pollen and nectar, when suddenly, an epidemic of mites comes to bee meadow!
“These mites are awful!” Says one wild bee to another.
“They sure are!” The honeybee colony agrees.
The wild worker scoffs and says with a smug tone “Where is your beekeeper now? Surely they cannot save you from this terrible sickness!”
“Our beekeeper came by yesterday, and cured us of our mites!” The honeybee happily replied. “And they’re putting up a fence tomorrow because they heard there are predators in the area!”
Spring and summer passed by as usual. All of the bees collected pollen and nectar at their own pace.
Then, one autumn afternoon, the hive of wild bees discovers that the honeybees had been ROBBED! Robbed by their own beekeeper!
“HA HA!” Laughed the wild bees. “Your beekeeper betrayed you! And now you will never survive the winter! All of that protection and safety for naught!”
“Actually, we have plenty of honey.” The honeybees say. “We have even more than you do!”
It was true. The wild bees were stunned to see that their neighboring hive had plenty of honey to get by on, while their own honey stores would just barely get them through the winter.
“Well I’ll be!” the wild bees exclaim. “Maybe this beekeeping business isn’t as bad as I thought!”
In short, if you buy from a kind local beekeeper, the honey that comes to your kitchen is always going to be EXTRA honey. Honey the bees made way too much of because they had the recourses to do so. When we take honey, we carefully brush each bee off of each frame and take extra special care that nobody gets hurt.
I hope you can understand what I’m trying to say. Also, commercial beekeepers tend to not be quite so good. They take all the bee’s winter supply and feed them sugar water, they have too many hives in one place and exhaust their recourses, etc etc.
In the shortest of short; Support local beekeepers. More safe hives means more safe bees. Plant bee flowers. Be kind. (Bee kind, heehee.)
Sorry for the long post, and please enjoy the rest of your day.
have you considered publishing this as a children’s story promoting beekeeping
because i would buy it for every child i know
This is a super important post. For all of those apposed to eating honey for the sake of the bees just buy local. besides, eating honey made from your native flora is much much better for you and can be fed to a sick baby or a sick dog (in very very small amounts and after consulting your pediatrician or vet of course)
YO! My allergy suffering peeps! Get local honey! It’s made with the pollen that you’re allergic too, so the more you ingest, the more your immune system gets used to it, and the less allergies you’ll have! I’m not shitting you. Mix a tablespoon in your tea a day (I take it beat bc I’m hardcore like that), and boom! little to no more allergies!
and to my bros with blood sugar issues, honey won’t spike you hard and dump you fast like cane sugar; even raw cane sugar spikes more than honey. so you can have some sweet stuff without whiteknuckling the blood sugar coaster afterwards.
Yes to all of the above about beekeeping and blood sugar and allergies, but GAAHHH NO NO NOto the comment a few reblogs up about feeding honey to sick babies! Honey, even happy cruelty-free local native honey, often contains botulism spores that are harmless to people toddler-age and up, but dangerous and sometimes fatal to babies under the age of 1. Infant botulism is no joke, people. It’s just about the only thing that pediatricians tell you absolutely not to feed your kid until they’re older than a year. Don’t do it.
a good point, reblogging for important info
Other fun fact about honey, you can spread it on yourself for just about any reason and it helps. Heat rash? Boom, honey and turmeric. Dry skin AND pimples on your face? Boom, honey followed by ice cubes. Eczema? Boom, honey. Scars that won’t shift? Boom, Honey and olive oil.
Don’t have a skin complaint? Got a cough instead? Boom, honey and lemon. Tonsillitis? Boom, honey and rock salt. Mouth ulcer too bad to eat right? Boom, honey.
Seriously, look up honey on any reputable home remedy site and it’s down for just about every minor complaint there is. Local honey is ridiculously good for you and seriously useful. Even if you live in a city, I guarantee you most likely have local beekeepers. Google “[your town] + beekeepers” to find your local society and load up on whatever they’ve got. If you happen to have clover honey in your area, get that because it’s damn delicious.
I have a lot of knowledge and feelings about honey ok.
What a good. I think there was a way to check whether the honey is good or bad (i.e. sugar water), but sources seem to disagree with each other on that topic. Anybody know about this?
My first jujutsu sensei was a very weird man (an excellent martial artist and human being, but very strange), and I still remember one of the first off-mat conversations I had with him. Years ago, he had had some kind of weird infection in an open wound on his shoulder, and it was not responding well to antibiotics. The doc was making noises about just cutting out a lot of tissue. So Sensei apparently decided the solution to this was to take just a crapload of raw honey and dump it into the wound.
Apparently it worked really well. That said, I do not endorse packing injuries with honey as some kind of go-to home first aid remedy. But the list of honey home remedies reminded me of it.
In regards to the local honey/allergies thing…it isn’t actually going to help most people that much. A lot of people with local plant allergies are allergic to trees, not just (or even primarily) wildflowers. Local honey will still be tasty and is unlikely to do you any harm, so I still endorse picking some up.
Last year, I went to a con in Chicago. On Saturday morning, I took the elevator from my room (fourth floor) to the con suite (second floor). Also on that elevator: a dude taking it to the first floor. As soon as I pressed the button, he said chidingly, “Two floors! Should’ve walked it.” And then he literally, actually tutted at me. “Tut tut tut” went the arbiter of everyone else’s body and abilities. Just so I’d know for sure that I’d been bad and been judged for it.
Now. There were a couple of conversations we could have had at this point. I could have told elevator dude the truth: that I have lupus (please please don’t make the House joke; you have no idea how many times I’ve heard the House joke, and I promise you that sometimes it is in fact lupus), so I keep an eye on my energy and pain levels and try to save some of whatever ability I have for later. That I’m especially careful to do that when I’m at an event or traveling, because I don’t want to be in my room exhausted or in pain when a thing I really wanted to do is happening two floors away, and I really don’t want to be in pain and out of energy while traveling in modern American airports (apparent motto: “If you can’t stand for four hours and run two miles full-tilt while carrying two weeks’ supplies, lol no go fuck yourself”). So I’m careful. I don’t push it. In the mornings, I might take the elevator, which the hotel did, after all, install for people to use.
I could also have told elevator dude to go fuck himself, which is the other honest conversation we could have had at that point. It is seriously none of his business whether I use the stairs, or the elevator, or rappel down the outside of the building, or maybe just dissolve into primordial ooze and drip down the walls.
But, you know, confrontation is another energy burner. I wanted to save my energy for having fun with my friends, the people I came to see. So I said something non-committal. Elevator dude wasn’t done, though. “You should always find the stairs, first thing when you check into a hotel,” this dude who was maybe ten years older than me and in no way my father said. “Did you know you’re not allowed to use the elevator during a fire? Whenever you check into a hotel, you should think: what if there’s a fire?”
Indeed, elevator dude. What if? What if, in my second decade of staying alone in hotels, you had not come along to tell me how to do it? I might have done it wrong, and then I would surely have burned to death in a fiery inferno, just as I have at least once a year throughout my adulthood, despite my mother giving me pretty much exactly those instructions back when I was seven and actually needed them.
Fortunately, at that point, we arrived at the second floor. I headed to the con suite and settled in. Some minutes later, I mentioned the mansplainer in the elevator and his profound concern for my well-being in case of fire. I didn’t complain about the “should’ve walked” comment, largely because I didn’t expect any support for it; I know an apparently able-bodied (and fat!) woman taking the elevator is cause for judgment in this world. (In some places, going by the general response, it’s borderline actionable.) And most people at that particular table didn’t know the details of my medical status, since in general, when given the choice between talking with my friends about lupus or talking with them about people banging, or being unicorn space eagles, or both, I tend to choose the pointy space birds and their sexytimes.
“Why would anyone say that to you?” one of the women at the table asked, in that mystified dudes-why-are-you? tone. “How does that even come up?”
So I explained about how we got on the topic of elevators. As soon as I said, “He said I should’ve taken the stairs,” ten women around the table looked up and angry cat hissed in unison. It was like they’d rehearsed it for weeks after months of watching angry cats and studying their motivations. Truly a beautiful moment.
From this experience I learned some things:
Support matters. Those women and their instinctive and audible anger didn’t just make me feel better; they actually changed the way I remember the event. They became what was important about it rather than elevator dude. His judgment has become small and insignificant to me, and in fact I smile when I think about him, because he’s inextricably linked to that moment ten people became Team Angry Cat for me.
A lot of times, I don’t reach for support because I don’t expect it. I don’t talk about the random elevator dude type aggravations of life, because I assume there’s a good chance most people will side with the elevator dudes of the world. It’s worth it to find the places where that isn’t true. And it’s worth it to reach for support when I can.
I need to look for more chances to be on other people’s Team Angry Cat. I don’t need to know about that person’s life or judge their worthiness; if they’ve experienced harassment or microaggressions, I’m gonna try to support them.
I’d pay significant money for a YouTube series that was just ten women angry cat hissing at ability enforcers and mansplainers and dudes shouting “smile, baby!” at random ladies and so on.
Oh, yeah, and to the ten members of that particular Team Angry Cat: thank you. You’re the best, and I will hiss for you anytime.
In fairy tales and fantasy, two types of people go in towers: princesses and wizards.
Princesses are placed there against their will or with the intention of ‘keeping them safe.’
This is very different from wizards, who seek out towers to hone their sorcery in solitude.
I would like a story where a princess is placed in an abandoned tower that used to belong to a wizard, and so she spends long years learning the craft of wizardry from the scraps left behind and becomes the most powerful magic wielder the world has seen in centuries, busts out of the tower and wreaks glorious, bloody vengeance on the fools that imprisoned her.
That would be my kind of story.
When
Princess Talia was fourteen, her eldest sister was placed in a tower.
Princess
Adina was eighteen by then, and so of a marriageable age. She had grown quite
beautiful, though she was more willful than winsome, and she did not care for
the notion of the tower very much at all. Their mother did her best to persuade
her on the subject. After all, the queen herself had been eighteen when her own
parents had sent her to live in that very same tower, to be safely tucked away
until her husband could be chosen, and then ride out to claim her. A tradition
going back ages and ages.
“It was
such a sight,” their mother said, wistfully. “I had been alone for so
long. Reflecting upon the nature of the world, and my place in it, and what it
would mean to serve my kingdom. And the solitude was difficult. But then one
bright morning I saw a vision of a gallant knight riding towards me; and I knew
I would never feel lonely again.”
“Then
you had best make certain you pick a strong man to be my husband,” Princess
Adina had replied. “For if I go to that tower you can bet I will spend my
time honing my skills with a blade, rather than staring wistfully out of
windows. And any man who thinks to claim me for a bride by anyone’s leave save
my own will need to defend himself.”
Their
mother had tutted, and their father had rolled his eyes; and when Princess Adina’s
belongings were packed with a very pointed dearth of swords or spears or
knives, it was Talia who slipped a wrapped sabre into the travel wagons, and it
was their middle sister, Devorah, who tied another to the underside of the
first food cart to leave for the tower.
Barely
a few weeks had passed since Adina left the castle, however, before word began
to spread of dragon sightings in the south. The king and queen, of course, saw
this is a good sign; and they let it be known that any lord bold enough to slay
the dragon would be granted leave to rescue Princess Adina from her tower. It
seemed all too fortuitous, for surely any man who could defeat a dragon could
handle a willful princess; and Adina could hardly deny
the bravery or skill of any such person.
“It is
perfect,” their mother had said.
That
was before the dragon reached the tower.
Talia
had been present when the messenger had arrived, bursting hastily into the
hall, and speaking in broken tones about barricades destroyed, and mountains
crossed, and ancient enchantments broken as the dragon had forged its way
straight to the hidden princess. Rumours abounded of the dragon absconding with
Adina; though some varied as to whether she had been seen clutched, terrified,
in the menace’s claws, or riding on its back, whooping loudly. (Calling for
help, the court agreed - if anything; the confused descriptions of startled
shepherds were unlikely to be too reliable, under the circumstances, of
course).
The
matter of rewards changed, of course, and so it became that any brave soul -
lord or no - who could rescue Adina from the dragon could claim the princess
for their bride. Talia worried, but she didn’t worry too much. She was of a
mind that if the dragon was still alive, then it was likely because Adina
wanted it that way; and her sister was, at least, out of the tower she had held
such contempt for.
Not six
months after the incident, a story came back, too, of a renowned hero who had
nearly slain the dragon at its caves in the west; only to be disarmed by
Princess Adina herself, who, by his report, made a very rude and anatomically
improbable suggestion, before knocking him down a mountainside.
The
king and queen seemed convinced the report was nothing but slander; but Talia
was inclined to give it far more credence than tales of her sister weeping
whole rivers of tears or cowering beneath the dragon’s glare.
It was
around that time that Princess Devorah began sneaking out of the palace at
night.
Talia
discovered this one evening while in the midst of her stargazing. If her eldest
sister could be said to be beautiful and headstrong, then it would be easy to
claim that the middle sister was plainer, and yet more charming. She owned a
pale blue cloak, that suited her quite well; but that stood out, too, in the
moonlight, as she slipped away through the palace gardens.
This
went on for quite some time before Talia at last confronted her sister, who
blushed most tellingly at being discovered.
“I have
found my knight,” she admitted. “There is a doorway in the gardens, and it
opens to the fairy forest. I did not mean to go, the first night. It was only
that I saw the doorway, and I wondered where it went. And I could not help but
think that my own time to be locked away in a tower is coming swiftly, and what
a thing it might be to escape, and that perhaps fate had given me a chance. But
then I got lost in the fairy forest. It was strange and dangerous, and I feared
I had been too foolish for words, until my knight found me.”
Talia
saw the lovestruck look on her sister’s face, and felt a great well of sympathy
for her.
“Fairy
folk are strange and dangerous, but Mother and Father are not without pity. If
your knight is as noble as he sounds, perhaps they will understand,” she suggested.
But
Devorah only sighed, and shook her head.
“Perhaps
they would, if my knight were a man. But she is a maiden, as fair as moonlight.
And I would have her no other way.”
Talia’s
sympathy increased tenfold, at that, for she knew as well that their parents
might make some concessions, but that would be a bridge too far for either of
them. As she began to offer comfort, however, Devorah turned it back towards
her.
Her
sister told her, then, of the plan she and her fairy knight had concocted; that
when Devorah was taken to her tower, her knight would come, and open a door
there; and then Talia’s sister would away with her to the fairy realm for good.
The tower would sit empty. The suitor their parents at last settled upon would
ride out to find no one waiting for him.
“I
planned to tell you,” Devorah assured her, and then offered her a single silver
bell. “When it is your time to go to the tower, stand on the highest point
and ring that bell. A door will open, and you can come away with us. The fairy
realm can be frightening, but my beloved will help us, and as well-read as you
are, I am certain you will have more of an idea of what to expect than I ever
did.”
Talia took
the bell, and hugged her sister, and thanked her; though she admitted that she
did not know what she would feel, when it came her own time to go to the tower.
But Devorah only said it would be her choice, whichever she made.
And
indeed, after a year had passed, her sister went to the tower with none of the
fuss nor complaint that Princess Adina had put up. Being as charming as she
was, there were no lack of suitors for their parents to choose from; and it was
not long at all before the king and queen made an advantageous match with the
eldest son of a neighbouring kingdom, just beyond the western mountains where Adina
and her dragon still roamed.
When
the son came back empty-handed, accusations of trickery abounded. The western
kingdom accused the king and queen of withholding their daughter; and the king
and queen accused the western kingdom of stealing her to some unknown fate. In
the end matters were only settled once a scryer confirmed that Princess Devorah
had not been in the tower when her suitor arrived; and then, the dispute was
settled with the consolation offer of Talia in Devorah’s place.
The
rulers of the western kingdom demanded their princess at once; but Talia’s
parents insisted that she was still too young. A compromise was reached. Since
the tradition of the family was to ensconce their princesses in towers, and
since twice these towers had been breached and the princesses lost, the king of
the western lands offered a tower in his own domain. There Talia would stay
until she turned eighteen, and was of age to marry the prince.
Even
so, the king and queen would not have agreed, but for the fact that the western
rulers were renowned for their masterful sorcery and spellwork. Should conflict
break out, the armies they could amass would be formidable indeed.
“Sometimes
princesses must think of their kingdoms first,” Talia’s mother told her.
And so
Talia did think of her kingdom.
She
thought of it as she rode with her accompaniment through the mountains, and
when a great dragon’s roar split the air; and when her guards scattered in
fright, or else were pinned down by the claws of a great, emerald beast, with
eyes like flames and wings that sounded of lightning when they clapped. She
thought of it when her eldest sister slid down from the dragon’s neck, and
rushed to hold her, and begged her not to be afraid.
“You
come with us,” said Princess Adina. “The western prince is a monster, and
the rest of his family no better. I would not let a pig marry him, nevermind my
little sister.”
Talia
marvelled at how well-informed her dragon-riding sister seemed to be, but Adina
only waved off such questions.
“I go
into town all the time,” she said. “No expects to see a princess who was
kidnapped by a dragon wandering around a market square.”
“And
you spend enough of my coin for them to overlook it, even if they were
suspicious,” rumbled the dragon, though it sounded more amused than anything
else.
“You
are the one who demanded expensive company,” Adina returned.
Talia
watched them with fascination, and wondered if they might not be able to fight
an army themselves. But her sister was forced to sadly admit that her dragon
was nearly more show than substance, and that any well-armed force would take
them down with relative ease. Particularly when they could bring magic to bear.
And so
Talia thought of her kingdom, as she declined her sister’s offer, and sadly
sent both she and her dragon on their way. Then she set about encouraging her
guards to come back, and help gather the horses, so they could head out again.
She
thought of her kingdom all the way up to the tower itself. It was a bleak
spire. Once a sorcerer’s lookout and secluded place of study, according to
their guide; who then helped set up the wards and enchantments. Talia thought
of her kingdom as she bid everyone goodbye. As she made her way inside with her
things, and found that though the place had clearly been cleaned and dusted, it
was sparse and severe and cold. Dark stone twisted up the walls, and drafts
blew through the ragged edges of the window frames. The lights were magic, at
least, but only half of them worked, and there was little in the way of artwork
or decoration.
Talia
thought of her kingdom as she selected a room on the highest floor, and
unpacked her things.
But
when at last it was dark, and she was alone, she did not think of her kingdom.
She thought of herself, instead, and she wished she had flown away with Adina
and her dragon. She wished she could climb to the top of the tower, and ring
her silver bell, and escape with Devorah and her knight. She thought of the
unfairness of being sent to her tower too soon, and even vindictively imagined
having told her parents of Devorah’s escapades, and being spared this fate by
forcing her sister to do her duty instead.
And
then she felt an awful wretch, for thinking such a thing; and she cried herself
ragged until she fell into a deep sleep.
In the
morning, her mood was grim.
She
woke to the discovery that the usual enchantments were in place, which was
something of a relief. Princess Talia was educated in matters of diplomacy,
finance, tactics, mathematics, literature, history, geography, and many more
besides, but she had no idea of how to boil an egg. The tower gave her meals in
the kitchens, and warmed the hearth against the cold; and she spent her first
day mostly in that room, with one of the books she’d brought clutched firmly in
her hand, wondering how she was supposed to survive years of this without
going mad.
Or if,
perhaps, the intent of all this business with towers was precisely to drive a
princess mad. It would explain a good deal about her mother.
The
second night, she cried again, and the one after was much the same; but on the
fourth day, she woke to the grey dawn, and the cawing of ravens outside her
window; and she decided that if she was going to live in this tower for many
days yet to come, then she may as well explore it. She made a point of mapping
out all the floors, and figuring out how to reach the highest part, if it ever
came to it. And she found that the attic was full of old boxes of clothes.
Robes and hats and gloves and scarves, worn things and shimmery things, and a
very impressive collection of walking sticks.
That
was all well and good, and sorting through it gave her a diversion, at least.
She aired out some of the clothes. They were much too big for her, of course,
and the tower wardrobe could provide her with some very nice dresses. But she
imagined she might tire of very nice dresses, after a while, and some of the
robes looked very comfortable.
The
real find, however, came the next day, when she discovered the door to the
basement.
She had
thought that the spareness of the tower was owed to its lack of usual
occupancy; but when she found the basement, another answer made itself clear -
someone had taken practically everything out of the main rooms, and shoved it
all haphazardly into the basement, and closed the door on it.
Talia
supposed she could see, on one level, why someone might have deemed the objects
in the basement unsuitable for a princess. Though she could not fathom why they
assumed a bored princess would not simply go downstairs at some point. She felt
inexplicably insulted at the lack of locks on the door; though this feeling
swiftly gave way to curiosity, instead.
The
rooms contents had not been kindly handled. She tsk’d over books that had been
dumped in piles, their pages crinkled and their spines twisted. Some heavy
tomes on stands had been left to accumulate dust and cobwebs, and boxes full of
glass bottles had been ungently handled, leaving some to crack and leak
suspicious liquids that stained the floor. Several rune-marked skulls lined a
shelf in the room, and looked to be the only things that had not been touched
much. There was strange furniture, and jars of things like powdered unicorn’s horn, which
told her plenty about the ignorance of the people who had cleaned up this
place, because even she knew that was valuable stuff.
At
length, she rolled up her sleeves, and set about organizing it, just as she had
done the attic. Though, in this case, the task was much larger. She broke down
into its simplest steps. Step One - the books. Going through the mess, she
picked out all the books she could find, and did what she could for them. Some
were in languages she did not recognize. Even the ones she recognized had
uncommon titles, like A
Beginner’s Guide to Necromancy, and The
Lost Art of Summoning, and A Comprehensive Bestiary of the
Northern Wilds.
The
books proved not only to be the first step in cleaning up the basement, but
also the world’s most sufficient distraction. Talia found herself paging
through them out of sheer fascination with the volume of subjects available,
and the fact that she knew next to nothing of these topics. Soon enough she had
gathered up every book for beginners she could find, and before long she
discovered that one of the largest tomes was a dictionary, and she unearthed
also a translation guide for one of the unfamiliar languages that seemed common
to the texts.
It was,
then, slower going for the tasks of dealing with the broken bottles in the
crates - in the end she found a pair of thick gloves in the attic, and picked
out the ones that were not broken, and shoved the rest - crates and all - into
one of the empty closets.
After a
reading a bit more, she then barricaded the closet.
She
left the skulls be until she opened up the book on Necromancy, and then she
carried them up to a room where the moonlight could hit them. That evening she
had her first proper conversation inweeks as she took a chair into
the room, and waited for nightfall, and then spoke to some quite interesting
and helpful spirits. They were transparent of course, and not all of them were
very coherent. But they seemed happy to be out of the basement, and keen enough
to help her get a better understanding of some concepts from the books that had
been tricky for her.
She
organized the jars of ingredients, and discovered several discarded cauldrons,
and after some more reading, she went back up to the attic and fetched down the
wizard staffs that she had taken for walking sticks, and put them where they’d
be closer to hand. In a box under an overturned table she discovered a smashed
crystal ball, with a tiny pixie’s skeleton in it; and an unbroken crystal ball
which gleamed and glowed only faintly when she held it up to the stars.
It made
her think of Devorah and her knight. So that evening she did at last go up to
the highest point of her tower, and ring her silver bell.
Sure
enough, a door appeared in the basement. She wrapped the pixie skeleton in a
piece of black velvet, and tucked the crystal ball under her arm, and opened
the door.
Her
sister was delighted to see her, though confused as well. It was too soon for
Talia to be in her tower. So it was that Talia had to explain what had
transpired, and when she did, Devorah was overcome. It made her feel triply
awful for her uncharitable thoughts that first evening, to see her sister cry
and offer to go back and take her place.
“You
have to stay here with your knight,” Talia insisted. “It isn’t all bad.
There are some interesting things in the tower. And if I can talk to you
sometimes, as well as the skulls, I probably won’t go mad.”
Devorah
blinked back her tears.
“The
skulls?” she asked, in a voice that said she was worried her sister’s mental
state had already faltered.
So then
Talia found herself explaining about the tower, and its basement, and the
crystal ball she had brought, and the little skeleton, too. That made Devorah
cry a bit more, because she was a kind heart, and she had grown fond of the
little pixies in the fairy realm - even the vicious ones. She called for her
knight to come, then, and Talia watched as a silvery figure rode up on a white
horse that looked more like a ghost than a proper steed, however solid it may
have been to the eye.
Devorah’s
love looked like moonlight made flesh; slender but sharp as the blade of a
knife, and she bowed with courtly grace. She showed less grief over the pixies
than the princesses did. But then, her expression seemed to reveal very little
at all, until it turned to Devorah. At which point it would soften, and stars
would seem to dance in the dark pools of her eyes.
“Who is
this prince, who is so perilous a betrothal?” the fairy knight asked.
“I do
not know him. I know only his reputation, which had seemed fine enough, until Adina
spoke to me,” Talia explained.
“I know
a little more of him,” Devorah admitted, frowning. “Adina and I went to
one of his sister’s weddings, years ago. You were too young to come along. He
was a horrible brat, but then, he was a child. His father wasn’t much better,
though.”
The
fairy knight looked at the tiny pixie skeletons, and then at once broke the
crystal ball. The wisp of a sprite which escaped was small and quick, barely
there before it was gone again. But Talia didn’t mourn the loss of the crystal
ball. And after a moment, her sister’s knight tilted her head towards her, and
went and drew a small vial from her saddlebags.
“This
is a poison of sleep,” said the knight. “If you drink of it, you will fall
into a trance, and will not wake but for true love’s kiss. In dreams you may
find freedom. I would have offered it to Devorah, had she refused me, and her
suitor proven cruel. I will offer it to you, now. Should the worst come to
pass, drink it.”
The
tiny vial was silver and elegant. Pretty enough, even by the reckoning of
princesses. Talia took it, with gratitude. And when she left through the fairy
door before dawn, and came back into her tower, she felt lighter than she had
since leaving home.
For
several months, then, the little silver vial rested in her pockets, as she wore
dresses but also sometimes robes. Talia learned the few benefits of a life
primarily alone, in an empty and unoccupied tower that was locked up tight -
though even her mostly-indoor spirit began to long for the feeling of wind in
her hair, and grass between her toes, she could also parade around the rooms
naked as she pleased. Or clad only in a long robe which railed behind her, as
she sang songs with no one to care that they might be off-key, or that they
were ones she had overheard drunken servants singing.
She
poured through her new books and consulted with spirits, cavorted with her
sister and the fairies by night, and one morning she woke up and snapped her
fingers in a moment of grand epiphany; and flames darted up at the gesture.
And
alone, in the long and quiet days, she learned.
Four
months into her stay, Talia discovered how to unlock the tower door. It was a
simple spell, in fact. More a matter of tricking the tower into doing as she
wished. She strolled the grounds, well away from any guard posts, and found
wild vines and strange plants growing in the tower gardens. There was a book of
plants inside, and so she dragged it out with her the next day, and set about
identifying all the growing things she could not recognize; which, apart from
the dandelions, was nearly everything.
She
dusted off the cauldron, then, and must have burned herself sixteen different
times in attempting to master the various magical recipes involving the garden
plants. And plants from the fairy realm, as well. In one of the big, heavy
tomes, which always seemed to fight her every time she turned the pages, she
discovered a recipe for the sleeping draught which Devorah’s fairy knight had
given her; and by the gleam of a full moon, she gathered ingredients from both
worlds, and set about trying to recreate it.
Success
was difficult to gauge without tasting the end results, though. She was very
sure to label her own attempts accordingly, and dared not drink any of them.
It was
not a bad life. Not at all. It was lonely, at times, but with Devorah and the
spirits, not terribly so. And the freedoms she found were beginning to seem
more and more appealing. As time went on, Talia found herself thinking she
would much rather stay in her tower than see any shining prince approach from
the horizon.
But
when at last he came, she was ready for him.
The
time almost snuck up on her, but the terrain visible up from the tower window
was wide and barren, and one night as she went to bed she chanced to see a
campfire burning. And she counted the days in her head, and then fell into a
flurry of activity. She readied a fine dress, and packed up her things. She
slipped the best staff in amongst her chest of clothes, and packed the skulls
in with her jewellery. She slipped the sleeping potion into her pocket, and
emptied out the bottom of the crate containing her shoes and slippers; and she
did away with half of them, and fit as many of the most important books she
could manage in their place. She hid potions ingredients in among her make up,
and her own notes were kept safely in her diary. And every spare nook or cranny
she could find, she stuffed something she deemed worthy; until the things she
had first arrived with had become like a veil for the things she had uncovered
since.
“You
find yourself in that tower,” her mother had once told her.
And her
mother had found her place as queen; and Adina had found a dragon; and Devorah
had found her doorway out. As the sound of hoofbeats grew closer, Talia stared
towards the horizon of the western kingdom. Her fingers toyed with the stopper
of the sleeping draught.
She
wondered what she had really found.
Why
drink it yourself? one of the spirits had asked her, the first night she had
come back from visiting her sister, with the tiny vial in hand. It seems to me that the logical
thing to do, in an unhappy marriage, is poison the other person. Especially
when that opens a door to you taking his kingdom out from under him.
Such
interesting things, her skulls had to say.
And of
course, the kingdom she would marry into was one ruled by magic. Sometimes
princesses must think of their kingdoms first.
With a
wry little twist of her lips, Talia practised her best expression of swooning
relief, and waited for her prince.
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.
