god, i am just so fucking tired.
circussoul reblogged
Women were burned with remarkable lack of compunction throughout the Middle Ages. If statistics were kept they have been very successfully concealed; but evidence indicates that the proportion of women to men who were burned alive from about 800 to 1800 was as much as ten thousand to one. Men were sometimes burned as heretics after having been mercifully strangled to death. But women were burned alive on countless pretexts: for threatening their husbands, for talking back to or refusing a priest, for stealing, for prostitution, for adultery, for bearing a child out of wedlock, for permitting sodomy, even though the priest or husband who committed the sodomy was forgiven, for masturbating, for lesbianism, for child-neglect, for scolding and nagging, and even for miscarrying, even though the miscarriage was caused by a kick or a blow from the husband. We read in the old chronicles of women in the last weeks of pregnancy being burned until the heat burst their bellies and propelled the fetus outward beyond the flames. The infant was then picked up and flung back into the fire at its mother's feet. We read of the little daughters of burnt women being forced to dance with bare feet one hundred times around the smoldering stake, through their mothers' ashes and through the still glowing embers in order to "impress upon them the memory of their mothers' sins." And all of this in an age when the only law of the land was the law of the church, when civil courts were merely the agents of the Christian hierarchy.
-Elizabeth Gould Davis, The First Sex
circussoul reblogged
btw if you live in the midwest (a region where a lot of the states are going to have trigger laws or ban abortion completely it looks like) and if it’s possible that you can leave ur state, get to illinois. Illinois isn’t just a state where abortion is permitted, in illinois abortion is strictly a protected right. illinois’ right to abortion is permanent and isn’t going to be changed anytime soon. in illinois your abortion rights are completely confidential. illinois is one of the easiest states to access abortion in and the process is fairly simple, and it’s going to always be legal to do so even as the right to abortion is overturned in other states. it’s very much a safe haven to anyone who needs to flee their state right now. if anyone can provide any resources and links that would be greatly appreciated.
it’s extremely in depth and shares a lot of very valuable info if coming here is in your best interest.
Just to mention it, as I’m sure others have, as of 6/1/2022 all minors can get an abortion in Illinois without parental consent or parental notification (previously, you had to get a court order to skip the notification). Also, Midwest Access Coalition is a group dedicated to providing funds to those who need to travel here to get an abortion. Please do pass this info on to anyone who may need it.
something like 80% of the chicago abortion fund’s funds were used for people coming in from out of state. that’s not a bad thing at all, it’s necessary medical work. please do come here. we’d love to have you in. everyone else: donate to the chicago abortion fund. https://chicagoabortionfund.salsalabs.org/makeadonation/index.html
circussoul reblogged
When Florence + the Machine said “is this how it is? Is this how it’s always been? To exist in the face of suffering and death and somehow still keep singing?” and when Andrea Gibson said “we have to create. It is the only thing louder than destruction” and when Maggie Smith said “this place could be beautiful, right? You could make this place beautiful.”
circussoul reblogged
starmaps
“The folklore among knitters is that everything handmade should have at least one mistake so an evil sprit will not become trapped in the maze of perfect stitches. A missed increase or decrease, a crooked seam, a place where the tension is uneven - the mistake is a crack left open to let in the light. The evil sprit I want to usher out of my knitting and my life is at once a spirit of laziness and of over-achieving. It’s that little voice in my head that says, I won’t even try this because it doesn’t come naturally to me and I won’t be very good at it.”
—
Kyoko Mori, ‘Yarn’
That last phrase especially - “I won’t even try this because it doesn’t come naturally to me and I won’t be very good at it.” It really is like some kind of all-encompassing evil spirit sometimes.
(via blancheparish)
circussoul reblogged
“Perhaps the greatest contradiction in our lives, the hardest to handle, is the knowledge ‘There was a time when I was not alive, and there will come a time when I am not alive.’ On one level, when you 'step out of yourself’ and see yourself as 'just another human being’, it makes complete sense. But on another level, perhaps a deeper level, personal nonexistence makes no sense at all. All that we know is embedded inside our minds, and for all that to be absent from the universe is not comprehensible. This is a basic undeniable problem of life…”
Douglas Hofstadter (via devilduck)
circussoul reblogged
Swallowtail, by Brenna Twohy, from Zig-Zag Girl.
circussoul reblogged
The funny thing about “classic“ horror fiction is that later folks attempt to add depth to the characters, but in doing so they actually kind of deviate from why the characters were effective movies and villains in the first place?
Like, having Victor Frankenstein motivated by purely good intentions instead of his own egomania, or having Henry Jekyll be a good person corrupted by his dark side rather than a Bad Person looking to do Bad Things without suffering the consequences, or claiming that Dracula was a good person driven to evil by fate and spending the intervening centuries looking for love rather than a literal baby-eating monster who literally treats women as things to possess or as things “belonging” to other men, for three of the most common reinterpretations I’ve seen.
Wanting to put your own spin on works is great, it’s just weird when the work portrays assholes as assholes, and then other writers spending the next couple of hundred or so years trying to rehabilitate said assholes.
I mean, if you wanted characters in the text to expand upon to make them more fleshed out, folk like Frankenstein’s Elizabeth Lavenza and Dracula’s Lucy Westernra are right there! Heck, the… questionable film Mary Reilly at least took the idea of adapting the Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and telling it from the perspective of Jekyll’s servants (whose perspective of the events of the book aren’t covered in the novel despite their being present in the background of a lot of the action)… Admittedly they decided to do it in the trite way of making the titular Mary Reilly (an Irish maid in Jekyll’s household) end up in a kind of romantic relationship with the doctor (romantic subplots being another addition to the story many writers make), but the idea is sound.
Heck, even without getting into the EXTENSIVE notes Bram Stoker left behind about the production of Dracula which included a lot of characters that didn’t make it into the final drafts (such as journalist Kate Reed, a friend of Mina Murray and Lucy Westernra who later was used by Kim Newman in his Anno Dracula books), you could easily tell an effective horror story from the perspective of, say, those poor London kids that vampirised Lucy is eating prior to van Helsing and Co. realising what she’s up to.
Could probably get some kind of class commentary about the rich coming to eat the poor, for example.
There are ways to fleshing out and expanding up on the material in ways that don’t diminish the horror the characters are going through, if that makes sense? Plus a lot of the time, the attempts at addiing sympathetic elements to the story are kind of at odd with the scary parts, such as the Francis Ford Coppola adaptation which portrayed Dracula as both a sensitive romantic… and a man who both feeds babies to his wives and ate Mina’s best friend to make himself young and hot enough to seduce her (Mina).
circussoul reblogged
nipplethief-deactivated20150404
seduce me with film references
Seventh Heaven by Patti Smith
Oh Raphael. Guardian angel. In love and crime all things move in sevens. seven compartments in the heart. the seven elaborate temptations. seven devils cast from Mary Magdalene whore of Christ. the seven marvelous voyages of Sinbad. sin/bad. And the number seven branded forever on the forehead of Cain. The first inspired man. The father of desire and murder. But his was not the first ecstasy. Consider his mother. Eve's was the crime of curiosity. As the saying goes: it killed the pussy. One bad apple spoiled the whole shot. But be sure it was no apple. An apple looks like an ass. It's fags' fruit. It must have been a tomato. Or better yet. A mango. She bit. Must we blame her. abuse her. poor sweet bitch. perhaps there's more to the story. think of Satan as some stud. maybe her knees were open. satan snakes between them. they open wider snakes up her thighs rubs against her for a while more than the tree of knowledge was about to be eaten...she shudders her first shudder pleasure pleasure garden was she sorry are we ever girls was she a good lay god only knows
circussoul reblogged
Why are so many men so determined to stop women from assembling in spaces without them? What are they so afraid of? Perhaps it’s the idea that there might be spaces in which their input and opinions aren’t only considered unnecessary but also are not missed. Is it just sheer hostility towards women thinking they are entitled to operate for even a moment in the world without a man present to qualify their existence? Perhaps it’s much simpler than that. Perhaps these men, so used to being coddled and listened to and flattered with attention, just cannot tolerate the indignation of being left out of something by the women they’re so used to considering themselves better than.
circussoul reblogged
Thinking about the countless times art and music and cinema and literature have saved and comforted me during difficult times i really owe my happiness to everyone dedicated to their craft
circussoul reblogged
Voted most likely to have been given a lobotomy in the 1940s
circussoul reblogged
sometimes I wonder
if Mary breastfed Jesus.
if she cried out when he bit her
or if she sobbed when he would not latch.
and sometimes I wonder
if this is all too vulgar
to ask in a church
full of men
without milk stains on their shirts
or coconut oil on their breasts
preaching from pulpits off limits to the Mother of God.
but then i think of feeding Jesus,
birthing Jesus,
the expulsion of blood
and smell of sweat,
the salt of a mother’s tears
onto the soft head of the Salt of the Earth,
feeling lonely
and tired
hungry
annoyed
overwhelmed
loving
and i think,
if the vulgarity of birth is not
honestly preached
by men who carry power but not burden,
who carry privilege but not labor,
who carry authority but not submission,
then it should not be preached at all.
because the real scandal of the Birth of God
lies in the cracked nipples of a
14 year old
and not in the sermons of ministers
who say women
are too delicate
to lead.
circussoul reblogged
Not Woolf’s imagined sister of Shakespeare, she would have written you differently,
perhaps her Gertrude would have soiled her robes to pull you out of the brook.
Would have risked her life to revive yours. Would have given you a knife, led you
into her husband’s bedroom, and together like Judith and her handmaiden—
you would have taken his head.
— Anita Olivia Koester, from “Constellation for Ophelia,” published in Tupelo Quarterly
Source: tupeloquarterly.com
circussoul reblogged
From The Female Man by Joanna Russ (1975).