femmenietzsche:

Greek vase painting is a major source for scholars seeking to understand attitudes and practices associated with paiderastia.^[62] Hundreds of pederastic scenes are depicted on Attic black-figure vases.^[63] In the early 20th century, John Beazley classified pederastic vases into three types:

- The erastês and erômenos stand facing each other; the erastês, knees bent, reaches with one hand for the beloved’s chin and with the other for his genitals.
- The erastês presents the erômenos with a small gift, sometimes an animal.
- The standing lovers engage in intercrural sex.^[64]

Certain gifts traditionally given by the eromenos become symbols that contribute to interpreting a given scene as pederastic. Animal gifts—most commonly hares and roosters, but also deer and felines—point toward hunting as an aristocratic pastime and as a metaphor for sexual pursuit.^[65] These animal gifts were commonly given to boys whereas women often received money as a gift for sex. This difference in gifts furthered the closeness of pederastic relations. Women received money as a product of the sexual exchange and boys were given culturally significant gifts. Gifts given to boys is commonly depicted in ancient Greek art, but money given to women for sex is not. ^[66]

The explicit nature of some images has led in particular to discussions of whether the eromenos took active pleasure in the sex act. The youthful beloved is never pictured with an erection; his penis “remains flaccid even in circumstances to which one would expect the penis of any healthy adolescent to respond willy-nilly”.^[67] Fondling the youth’s genitals was one of the most common images of pederastic courtship on vases, a gesture indicated also in Aristophanes’ comedy Birds (line 142). Some vases do show the younger partner as sexually responsive, prompting one scholar to wonder, “What can the point of this act have been unless lovers in fact derived some pleasure from feeling and watching the boy’s developing organ wake up and respond to their manual stimulation?”^[68]

Chronological study of the vase paintings also reveals a changing aesthetic in the depiction of the erômenos. In the 6th century BCE, he is a young beardless man with long hair, of adult height and physique, usually nude. As the 5th century begins, he has become smaller and slighter, “barely pubescent”, and often draped as a girl would be. No inferences about social customs should be based on this element of the courtship scene alone.^[69]

Here’s a series of paragraphs. Imagine how annoying it would be if you were a teenager and someone gave you a chicken as a prelude to sex.

A lot of the received notion of “The Fifties” being gray and sexless and repressed was really both the Boomers and the prior generation thinking the “Silent Generation” were lame and sucked, which is part of why if The Youth have sucked lately I’m sure it’ll turn around

micro-usb-deactivated20230625:

guerrillatech:

The railway infrastructure of fucking Chicago was designed and built when that was cutting edge technology and has been doing that ever since

discoursedrome:

dyatlovpasst4t:

gahdamnpunk:

A QUEEN

hey wait can someone discuss what the “stuffing” one means. hello

so is this some sort of gimmick where eventually she runs for local government and wins just because people know who she is, or is she just being extra randomly

what happens if you call her

kontextmaschine:

Like, that’s an important point w/r/t the ’50s (supposed) social conservatism it wasn’t a point on the straight- line continuum from Then to Now. The Sexual Revolution, if you count it as the spread of nonmarital sex, didn’t start in the ’60s with college and the Pill, it started in the 1910s with IUDs, diaphragms, and single girls living alone in the big cities doing clerical work.

National magazines , the equivalent of today’s Salon or Slate or Gawker or The Atlantic (maybe The Atlantic itself) wrote articles in the late 40s/early 50s worrying that contemporary teens were starting sexually exclusive relationships too young without playing the field for a while, and that this would stunt their personal development.

And think about it, the imagery of “going steady”, a boy giving a girl his class ring/letterman jacket/fraternity pin to signal they had exclusive claims on each other, a sort of Marriage Junior. But that’s something over and above “dating”, right? Today we think of two people dating as being exclusive, but if you look at what it meant back then - call a girl up on Wednesday to go out on Friday, more a verb than a relationship state, popular guys dating different girls each week, popular girls fielding multiple offers. And then going to drive-ins, to dark movie theaters, “parking” on Lover’s Lane.

“Going steady” was what we’d call dating now because “dating” was what we’d call “hooking up” - going out with someone you didn’t necessarily love but could get along with and looked good, having fun, trading orgasms. Might develop into something more, might not.

You can pick up on this if you listen to goofy ’50s rock and roll, or movies about teens, and appreciate that “and we’re having sex” is the subtext. When Runaround Sue was running around, that’s to say she was sleeping around. That’s one of the reasons I dislike euphemisms - once the euphemism treadmill goes through a few cycles it can become difficult for different generations to properly understand history.

(and on that note I should specify that by “sleeping around” I mean having penetrative sexual intercourse with multiple nonexclusive partners)

kontextmaschine:

It’s like the COVID stuff was designed to abrade off Democrats whose loyalty to the team is weaker than their loyalty to expert-class moralizing safetyism, it’s perfect, unreal

Few things better than watching a doomed cause roll by and people who suck investing the entirety of their energy and identity on the losing side.

As recently as 2015 my historically informed sense that of course America was going to reflex from this was fighting with the fact I couldn’t possibly imagine how, but then the incarnated spirit of the 1980s came down an escalator and I realized it’s rubber-banded

Oh, southern polities withdrew support for newly integrated public schools in favor of nominally Christian “segregation academies”? You don’t say.

Now do how the Los Angeles Unified School District was hollowed out of its middle-class student base (this was the period right after Licorice Pizza) in the face of integration efforts and the demands of a Mexican immigration wave (the one that ended white hegemony, as seen in Falling Down, American History X, White Men Can’t Jump, Snow Crash and Cheech’s [not Chong’s] Born in East L.A.) by the rise of Jewish Day Schools

kontextmaschine:

Once again a reminder that a lot of the American post-Cold War “peace dividend” of reduced military spending was under Clinton and the Bushes put into healthcare and education funding, so when nurses and teachers wail that “what, are they expecting us to keep doing our jobs in the face of mass trauma and deadly threat in order to satisfy state imperatives to serve power blocs?!?” yes, that is traditionally how it goes

The meninists were correct that historically it was men bearing the weight of the expectation to give your life for the state. Equality!

Once again a reminder that a lot of the American post-Cold War “peace dividend” of reduced military spending was under Clinton and the Bushes put into healthcare and education funding, so when nurses and teachers wail that “what, are they expecting us to keep doing our jobs in the face of mass trauma and deadly threat in order to satisfy state imperatives to serve power blocs?!?” yes, that is traditionally how it goes

Honestly its good there are still people struggling against the culture turn, still trying to insist harder on the 2010s, they’re gonna be a source of cheap wins to elevate the next wave

kontextmaschine:

I fuckin’ heard of it, but I have no idea where it is, I learned my home territory by landmark not map, and the only place on the outskirts of Philly I ever went was my godfather’s motel in Bensalem, or are we talking Montgomery County?

Also, I suppose Philadelphia urban gentry scoffing towards country gentry is one of the most traditional class dynamics in America, but haha what?

argumate:

kontextmaschine:

All the left-wingers hyperventilating about crossing state lines with the Rittenhouse thing in for a big dose of awkward when Roe falls and that’s how you get an abortion

or a divorce!

This was substantially what Las Vegas, Nevada existed for for a while

With the West Side Story movie coming up prepare for Gee, Officer Krupke to become briefly invoked with relation to urban policing narratives again

Honestly, Portland disbanded its mounted police team a few years ago because they were really ceremonial/reward duty (and the PPB has never been made whole from late-2000s cuts let alone kept up with growth, though there’s a drive to correct that now). I remember as a kid Philly, which still had institutional memory of ‘60s riots, used them pretty well for (potentially hostile) crowd control, maybe they’ll get brought back for that.

Reminder that my take is we should take the Cold War Soviet Union/Warsaw Pact as just one more example in a multi-millennial history of “if someone manages to unite the eastern plains tribes into a coherent federation they’ll be able to use massed cavalry to take over Central Europe and threaten west until they collapse from internal tensions”

So like I say if you can feel the zeitgeist it’s like we’ve been rebooting from the Seventies for a few years, I think now we’re somewhere around 1991-3 right now. It’s still a bit more tense than I remember but that’s probably my favored quarter suburban Pilotwings music obliviousness speaking. I am looking forward to doing the 90s again with foreknowledge, and curious what happens when we hit 2010 or so, I have a suspicion we’re rebooting for the purpose of routing around the 2010s, like how there was a little Fifties boomlet in the 80s because we were rebooting (from WWII) to loop around the 70s

kontext’s back

Been feeling up and down and unsteady in a foundational way lately but distinct from either the post-April 2020 crazy or classic bipolar stuff

But I keep connecting it to trends and I realized it’s my reverse pathetic fallacy returning, after like 2 years of putting in the clutch and peacing out, a little rough like jumping off a running treadmill and then jumping back on while it’s still going

For one it makes me realize that my connection to like, “American culture” and my physical neighborhood are of a kind, maybe that’s not that uncommon. And that maybe I should reevaluate NIMBY politics and white “there goes the neighborhood” post-segregation experiences in that light

For two, I may have been saying we’d already passed the tipping point, but I went clutch-in before the election. In my own city mobs roamed the streets and the mayor’s hamhanded #Resistance-fanning not only made it worse it left him politically constrained amidst a runoff with this smug professional glib shitlib problem glasses tweeter I had had my worried eye on for years

In the big important cities, a decade of troubling rumbles come to a head in something of a selective-college NCOs’ coup with the university students on-side

Like, you remember fluff at the New York Times over running a Tom Cotton editorial laying down the foundation that if unruly mobs take the streets of major cities and demand the suspension of the democratically legitimate force of law the government can suppress them with direct force, that apparently came from pressure from the technical staff

And like, “production staff of major newspaper use labor power to try to control editorial line” is well precedented! A lot of Warsaw Pact regimes bootstrapped that way, the LA Times had a guns-and-bombs war with its printing staff over this once. For it to happen at America’s major newspaper in support of challenges to government control of the streets was really a big deal!

The most irritating SJW I knew personally was like, a Drupal programmer who played pinball. And Drupal was apparently something for running web pages, except more than utility at some function “Drupal programming” seemed to be defined as a culture, a kind of tediously shitlib one, maybe in part because their employers seemed to regularly pay to fly them out to these conferences that weren’t even about programming, just shitlib stuff, and that was a foundation of the culture

And I heard at one point they all scorned and ran some guy off (from like, his career) for being a Gorean, and were rumbling about how they could use their ideological solidarity and upstream role in web hosting to control content using their webdev tools

And I mean Goreans lol, but if you weren’t paying attention in the 90s “we must use our technical knowledge of internet infrastructure to constrain human communication to facile mainstream morality while rigorously patrolling the subculture to keep out dorky SFF fetishes” was… pretty much the opposite of the promise of tech culture, to the point this was really kinda worrying.

And now I wake up and look out of my burrow again in November 2021 and that’s in the rearview mirror, on the national and civic levels alike, politics and media, the spirit is “2011 as if we hadn’t lost the spirit of 1995 (which was an embrace of 1969 but rejection of 1978)”.

Biden’s doing “What If Clinton But Also Maybe Turn Presidentialism Down A Notch And Let The Senate Be A Steering Force Of The Republic In Its Own Right”, there’s a tangible desire to go back to the 90s and a dawning realization that yes, that involves punching hippies, at least enough that you can ignore the rest.

For structural vulnerabilities well – not much has changed in public. It doesn’t usually, that’s what happens when capital wakes up, it works behind the scenes. I will say that from history this no longer looks like you’d expect from a narrative that ends with sleepwalking into disaster or ineffectually flailing, it looks like one you expect is going to have a crisis point in a few years that the insurgents are going to be completely unprepared for capital to be prepared for and fall on their faces after having exhausted themselves for maximum visibility

There’s that one CEO who was like “yeah, this company is for achieving our business purpose, if you want to leverage it for some shitlib stuff please find another” and a chunk of the staff left and the Medium huffers huffed but the company went on to sparkle at the metrics VCs love, adding to the question of why companies staff hufferchum in the first place

Substack is hardened two ways, one thing is they have a solid enough understanding with their VC that nothing Anil fucking Dash says could ever matter; the second is like everyone I mostly read free ones online but being e-mailed to subscribers means writing is shielded against any technical or political interference with webhosting, that archived copies survive any attack on or rejection from the platform and that it can be forwarded and shared with contacts discreetly for samizdat or paywall-gatecrashing purposes

It’s morning in America. And they’re playing The Tick on FOX. Spoon!

kontextmaschine:

fruityyamenrunner:

kontextmaschine:

You know, “suffering is a choice, just don’t choose to” gets dismissed as juvenile pretty often for like, the central pillar of Buddhism.

insufferable ancient rationalist cult for the artisan and merchant classes of second urbanisation india arises (“turns out religion and the gods are fake and you can just live in communes governed by sensible rules and think your way out of suffering!”).

edgy unhindu ratphyg grows hinduoid religions around it to the delight of millions of asians for millennia.

Euro-American rationalist discovers delightful asian religions, uncovers rationalist cult at the core. laughs at Asians. now believes “suffering is irrational” and “just think yourself happy” are the deep truths of asia. many such cases!

“Wandering princeling” is like failson Lv. 99

Wait til you realize that Jesus was a privileged kid (carpenter’s son in a culture of shepherds and fishermen!) who wandered around edgy as hell telling people to abandon their families as a distraction

posts-from-2520ad:

okay i really wanted to like the new trump-clinton movie because !!! period dramas!! but the costumes are so bad if you know anything about the era like—

• i get that they gave melania trump an older look to emphasize her seriousness but her dresses are way too fifties and not twenty tens enough, corsets had actually pretty much fallen out of favor a few decades before the twenty tens

• hillary clinton was a politican so her makeup shouldn’t have been that neon. that wouldn’t be a thing for like three more decades.

• donald AND bill literally look like they could be from the modern day. people had sleeves back then, guys. even MEN wore clothes with sleeves and no one thought it made them look less manly (also side note if anyone knows anything about history they know that trump and clinton were both like seventy years old when he ran for president. but the actors they used were hot so i don’t really care l o l)

• seriously this upsets me so much when is a costumer gonna be brave enough to put a man in sleeves in a period drama?????? it was a weird time for fashion but that’s just how it was

• (and in the same way, men wore very little makeup until like a hundred years ago WHY do all movies insist on putting all the men in full makeup when that’s not how they looked back then? like yes it looks weird but that’s the past!)

• ugghhh apparently no one told the costume department that strapless floor length gowns were only a formal thing for women. so many background characters are just wearing them all the time. look in the scene in the coffee shop and the barista is wearing a floor length strapless gown. they were actually called “evening gowns” back then because they were only worn in the evening!

• by the way midriff tops were a peasant thing you wouldn’t see anyone in the upper class wearing them of either gender so idk what all of those were doing there

• hillary’s gown at the inauguration ball scene was LITERALLY copied from the wedding dress of an english princess from the eighties. i read somewhere it was because they wanted it to look regal and it was beautiful but like……if you know the era that’s actually a couple decades off, and stuff like big sleeves (at least the women had sleeves in this movie lol) had actually not been fashionable for a while when the movie is set

anyway the acting was good and Donald/Hillary are my historical OTP so that was cute but the costumes really took me out of it :/