apricops:

apricops:

Ancient Romans buried curse tablets the size of credit cards, called defixiones, in graves and bodies of water, in the hope of bringing suffering on the unlucky soul of their choosing. These curse tablets are so uniform that historians assume that there was a cottage industry of scribes or magicians churning them out.

Whenever you want to make fun of crystal moms or teens in their Wicca phase, just remember that we’ve been reducing magic to cheap mass-produced tchotchkes for actual millennia.

even more fantastic is the phrase “cottage industry of magicians.” Like, imagine being a magician but instead of inspiring fear and respect among your neighbors you’re just, like, running an Etsy shop selling Fuck You Cards

thoodleoo:

there’s a scene in aristophanes’ clouds where socrates claims that the clouds effectively change shape based on your personality to reveal your fursona to you and i for one am glad to see that the ancients still had access to buzzfeed personality quizzes

Thinking about the 70s concept of open relationships

Or rather, open marriage, after the bestselling 1972 book

The term was lifted from anthropology where it meant a system where individuals freely chose their own partners, contrasted with “closed marriage” where partnering was determined by broader social structures, and only a small part of the book addressed nonmonogamy, but that’s the association that stuck.

(The term “free love” went through the same progression in the 19th century)

And thinking about 70s stuff on the poly spectrum – “swingers”, as an identity for full-swap couples (not that F/F was unwelcome, but M/M def. was); the “key party” as event (a couples’ cocktail party mixer where at the end women would blindly draw from a bowl of the men’s car keys and go home with the corresponding man)

Like, that's… that’s where the 70s were at right there. Totally willing to accept nonmonogamy, totally assuming patriarchal marriage anyway.

Or maybe I’m looking at it backwards, and sleeping around was such the expected condition of unmarried singlehood it was just assumed, facilitated by singles bars, singles cruises, singles resorts…

So I suppose maybe the novelty is our having meaningful primary relationships that aren’t marriages, or on the marriage track.

Of course, the “divorce crisis” of the 70s was people deciding that the fact they once had a meaningful primary relationship with someone was not a good reason to be married to them, so fair enough.

(Of course, a lot of those people had been teenagers in the 50s, in the age of “going steady”, class rings and fraternity pins and letterman jackets, when the adults fretted this early sexual-romantic exclusivity would leave them socially stunted, and that they should play the field and go to “petting parties” like in the good old days of the 20s, so fair enough.)

>tfw you notice the bards have started composing epics of national renewal

Before WWII, the “Classic Six” apartment layout of Manhattan’s Upper West and Upper East Sides might consist of 20% low-income residents, with the maid’s room opening directly onto the workplace.

Oh man, Rocky Horror. That’s a big part of why I roll my eyes at the admonitions that I must totally reorder my worldview in accordance with our new post-gender utopia or else Be Judged By History: I am aware of the 1970s, which did not in fact turn out to be the thin end of the wedge.

And I’m not just talking about Renée Richards and Wendy Carlos, like the two big 70s rock songs drawing on the exciting novelty of trans women, Lou Reed’s Walk On the Wild Side and The Kinks’ Lola, peaked on the US Billboard charts at #16 in 1973 and #9 in 1970, respectively.

Rocky Horror Picture Show was a 1975 cult classic (from a 1973 stage musical) with an intense decades-long fandom, where a “sweet transvestite from Transsexual, Transylvania” introduces a normie couple to the wonders of polymorphous perversity.

Not just that, Tim Curry’s Frank-N-Furter was clearly drawing on Liza Minnelli’s Sally Bowles AND Alan Cumming’s Emcee from gender-nonconformity-fest Cabaret, hit 1972 movie from a 1966 stage musical, set in the early 1930s.

Whenever I see something about hip young guys who declare themselves pansexual but then caveat it so they clearly mean “people who would be considered women in 2008″, I think of Velvet Goldmine, the 1998 film about the 1970s post-hetero glam rock scene.

And what’s that one line, in the context of all the boys calling themselves bisexual and snogging each other for female attention (I only now notice the gender-swap parallel to ‘90s-2000s lesbian chic Girls Gone Wild culture), something like “the problem with declaring yourself bisexual, is eventually someone is going to expect you to have sex with a man”

lesbiskammerat:

funny when europeans criticise african states for failing to create their own homogenous national identities, which would help their countries run more smoothly and become prosperous, but then those same europeans will turn around and condemn the repression, brutal civil wars and genocide as if that isn’t exactly how you create a homogenous national identity in the first place. not to mention that the european states they likely hold up as shining examples of good governance are the ones bankrolling all the violence in the first place

mszombi:

yesterdaysprint:

The Bakersfield Californian, California, October 25, 1925

They successfully predicted punk girls

“My fellow Americans, I’m pleased to tell you today that I’ve signed legislation that will outlaw Russia forever. We begin bombing in five minutes.”

Tell me that’s not the President of the United States shitposting

mitigatedchaos:

kontextmaschine:

Well, between the remnants of Moneycat’s salon and the LessWrong/SSC (post)rationalist diaspora and poaching from all sorts of other traditions (leftists! radfems! the fucking Axis of Evil!), we’ve congealed a good chunk of the best not-for-money writers in America into the most powerful literary circle in the country here, that’s nice.

Come for the poorly-managed site full of discourse, stay for the, uh, owl pics, I guess?

I mean in my lifetime it’s been 80s Manhattan, 00s Brooklyn, and 10s LF/Twitter, Tumblr seems as due for a turn as anything

The Algonquin Round Table was mostly shitposting

I suppose another take on Marianne Williamson and the neomystic turn generally is it’s a turn inward. It takes all the energy floating about that had been aimed at society and structure and turns it to self and sensibility. And that’s a thing that happens, and you’d kind of expect it to happen around now, and diverted into culture the energy can even get pretty golden-agey as the dialectic grinds towards synthesis.

That’s the social unrest of the 60s diverting into the “Me Decade” 70s and “Morning in America” 80s. That’s the revolutionary period of the 1910s being suppressed in the First Red Scare and yielding to the Roaring Twenties, the Jazz Age, the Harlem Renaissance.

That’s second-wave feminism falling to an ‘80s pincer move between cultural conservatives and S&M postmodernists – falling as a sociopolitical project. And then its themes got turned inward and coopted and reemerged in the 90s as Wicca, as Lilith Fair, as lesbian chic, as riot grrl, as Xena and Scully and Buffy, as the music I think of as VH1core chick-rock – Shawn Colvin, Natalie Merchant, Meredith Brooks, Paula Cole. As a sensibility, a subculture, a product, an aesthetic (that could be digested into more products, into Target collections and remodeling TV about shiplap and healthy relationships)

Like, attempts to drive a targeted group out in American history include

Hounding of Loyalists (Revolutionary War)

Indian Removal (1830s)

Mormon Exodus (1846-47)

Indian Wars (19th cen.)

West Coast Chinese Expulsions (1885-1886)

Palmer Raids and the Buford (1919-1920)

Operation Wetback (1954)

plus the colonization of Liberia in the 1820s-40s wasn’t really an expulsion, but it was an attempt to put the population of free blacks somewhere else

badgrapple:

Men will see any subculture and be like “I can use this to have sex with teenagers”.

Yeah what do you think the “spirit of rock & roll” was?

Men be groomin’

drethelin:

Lots of guys cheat on their wives but I don’t think the world runs on cabals of dudes dedicated to fucking their secretaries

You are backwards rediscovering the feminist concept of “the patriarchy”, here

argumate:

apricops:

to be tbh I think “normie” will go down in history as an important or at least noteworthy philosophical and sociological concept

what is the opposite of normie

“hip”, traditionally

Yeah it’s weird what a transparent displacement of “mass resistance against the government” into meme space the Area 51 thing is, but that’s how cooption works in reactionary periods, Rambo started off as a PTSD longhair killing cops

Also, even the idea of streamers as findommes or courtesans isn’t honestly all that novel in American culture

If you go back to the original noir period, you know how you have this figure of the nightclub torch singer, who cultivates a sultry look and demeanor, who put on performances of seductive singing and dancing with a stage patter to cultivate a sense of intimacy, for an audience of lonely men who might try to capture her attentions off the stage by doing things for her or buying her expensive gifts?

…well?

discoursedrome:

alexanderrm:

collapsedsquid:

Yes, imagine very deeply what it would be like if colleges had women majoring in sex work……  Picture it in your head…..

Hopefully the fact that actually doing sex work is a better way of learning it is what would prevent colleges from doing that, unless the government somehow required all prostitutes to get a $200,000 degree at a top university in order to get a job. (I guess if freelance prostitutes were banned and they could only work for large corporations that could theoretically happen, if respectability for brothels were really important and the demand were strangled somehow?)

If sex work were fully legalized you’d totally see some kind of Juillard for Courtesans but the graduates from would make eight figures so who cares

You might see some sort of lower-key credentialist gatekeeping as the industry professionalized, like with cosmetology, but I can’t imagine it’d go too far given how entrenched sex work is as DIY employment. I could see that happening for prodommes and other sorts of “complex/risky” sex work, though, like after a scandal hits the news about someone who gave a handjob wrong and made someone’s dick explode

Charm school. You are reinventing charm school.

garmbreak1:

argumate:

the idea that even people from the other tribe deserve to flourish and live happy lives has taken a very long time to catch on.

buddy, they won’t even let my tribe flourish and live happy

>  [same “less anger toward the left” anon] Even more speculatively, it seems like you’re less sympathetic toward the Right than you were, set, a year or so ago, less in the sense that you now back the actual agenda of the Left than that you briefly expected that the Right’s pushback would take a form more compatible with your own preferences than it has. Any of this onto something? [2/2]

You’re seeing something real but you’re not seeing it right.

If I’m more sanguine about the culture wars lately it’s because the wave already broke. In 2015 I was saying the other side walked off a cliff and just hadn’t looked down yet, well by now they’ve looked down.

And on the one hand meep meep, motherfucker, on the other hand this means the dumbest and gone-too-far stuff is gonna be coming in the other direction now as the backlash sets in.

Like, what’s the last time the cultural “left” tried to sieze new territory, and not just struggle to hold the line? MeToo? At the time I called it as feminism biting the hand that fed/off more than it could chew, and yeah, by all reports the “targets” there are being welcomed back and people notice that they were still viable all along, meanwhile the supporters are getting blackballed as risks.

(Meanwhile, the Republican supremes are expected to rule that no, protections against sex discrimination do not just imply protections for sexual/gender minorities, and wouldn’t you know it most “sexual harassment” law is leveraged out from similar implications.)

The next step in the culture war is just to make people realize this is already happening, the woke order’s plummeting, and all the stuff that’s been growing underground poised to benefit from their fall is going the other way.

I point out Stupidpol stuff to draw attention to how the new young avant garde in pretty much every subculture - even explicitly leftist ones - is increasingly anti-woke, and the invention of a typology - “radlib”, “wokescold” – by which their rivals don’t even have to be refuted, just identified, mocked, and dismissed.

I point out how all the woke take factories are exhausting their funders’ patience, pivoting to video and selling out to Bryan Goldberg (who made his name by founding a women’s vertical that wasn’t shrill feminist, an online Cosmo when everyone was trying to build an online Sassy), and how meanwhile the hot rising thing is a bro site with an editorial line somewhere between rape culture-tolerant and -positive.

I point out how not so much opposed but underneath consent culture there’s a flourishing ecosystem of Fsub kink as lifestyle (which was the other side in the ‘80s feminist sex wars, after all) and the rising smartphone generation grew up with “catering to the male pornographic gaze” as a popular hobby.

And I’m not just wishcasting here, even the perceptive people on the “other side” have noticed this – Sady Doyle’s looking back over ’00-’10s internet feminism and wondering if it even changed anything deeper than superficial fashion that will cycle back before too long (subtext here is she was a half-step behind the Marcotte/Valenti/McEwan coterie and tbh a better writer/thinker/intersectionalist but now she’s in upstate New York scrambling for enough child care to crank out work for lower-and-lower-profile outlets; if you’ve read her work long enough you know she’s acutely aware of how in the 80s second-wave feminism and radical feminists weren’t so much defeated as just… gave up on and left to wither.)

Like, “this too shall pass”, y’know? It’s passing. Which doesn’t mean the stuff that takes it down or replaces it won’t be dumb and fucked up. To the extent I had identified with the “cultural left” to begin with it was cause I came of age in the 90s after the ‘80s backlash had run through and the reigning “cultural right” was pretty dumb and fucked up. Weirdly sour in a sunny time, in retrospect I realize they were trying to drive a stake through the ‘70s so hard it never got up again and that excess probably did buy me some more time of comfort, but could get counterproductive too, you know if these are the guys trying to maintain their hegemony through suppressing left voices…

Plus honestly yeah I was invested in the fun-for-all ideal of Horny 90s Secular Culture as it portrayed itself, and if more modern revelations are that it was premised on hierarchies of power… Well, at some level I’m “ohhh, hierarchies of power, so THAT’S how you create the good times, they should’ve told us, no wonder we’ve been fucking it up”. But I’m still eagerly receptive to plans to bring things closer to the ideal, or at least avoid some of the worst failure modes and rig the hierarchies right by going in eyes-open.