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I’ve been contemplating for several days something, and I’ve been trying to distill it into meaning, and put nice little bullet points on how this relates to things that have been bugging me about some common Discourses I’ve been seeing, but at the end, I only really have a story. So here, have a story.

About ten years ago, sometime in the eventful 2006-2007 George W. Bush-ruled hellscape of my identity development, I was just starting to figure out how I felt about my conservative upbringing (not great) and whether I was some brand of queer (probably, but too scared to think about what brand for too long). I was working as a server at a popular Italian-inspired sit-down restaurant that was the closest thing my tiny South Carolinian town had to “fancy” at the time but isn’t really fancy at all.

The host brought a party of four men to one of my tables. It was hard to tell their ages, but my guess is they were teenagers or in their early 20s in the 1980s. Mid-40s, at the time. It was standard to ask if anyone at the table was celebrating anything, so I did. They said they were business partners celebrating a great business deal and would like a bottle of wine.

It was a fairly busy night so I didn’t have a LOT of time to spend at their table, but they were nice guys. They were polite and friendly to me, they didn’t hit on me (as most men were prone to do – sometimes even in front of their girlfriends, a story I’ll tell later if anyone wants me to), and they were racking up a hell of a tab that was going to make my managers happy, so I checked on them as often as I could.

Toward the end of their second bottle of wine, as they were finishing their entrees, I stopped at the table and asked if they wanted any more drinks or dessert or coffee. They were well and truly tipsy by now, giggling, leaning back in their chairs – but so, so careful not to touch each other when anyone was near the table.

They’re all on the fence about dessert, so being a good server, I offered to bring out the dessert menu so they could glance it over and make a decision, “Since you’re celebrating.”

“She’s right!” one of the men said, far too emphatically for a conversation on dessert. “It’s your anniversary! You should get dessert!”

It was like a movie. The whole table went absolutely silent. The clank of silverware at the next table sounded supernaturally loud. Dean Martin warbled “That’s Amore” in some distorted alternate universe where the rest of the restaurant went on acting like this one tipsy man hadn’t just shattered their carefully crafted cover story and blurted out in the middle of a tiny, South Carolina town, surrounded by conservatives and rednecks, that they were gay men celebrating a relationship milestone. 

And I didn’t know what I was yet, but I knew I wasn’t an asshole, and I knew these men were family, and I felt their panic like a monster breathing down all our necks. It’s impossible to emphasize how palpably terrified they were, and how justified their terror was, and how much I wanted them to be happy.

So I did the only thing I knew to do. I said, “Congratulations! How many years?”

The man who’d spoken up burst into tears. His partner stood up and wrapped me in the tightest, warmest hug I’ve ever had – and I’ve never liked being touched by strangers, but this was different, and I hugged him back.

“Thank you,” he whispered, halfway to crying himself. “Thank you so much.”

When he finally let go of me and sat back down, they finally got around to telling me they were, in fact, two couples on a double date, and both celebrating anniversaries. Fifteen years for one of them, I think, and a few years off for the other. It’s hard to remember. It was a jumble of tears and laughter and trembling relief for all of us. They got more relaxed. They started holding hands – under the table, out of sight of anyone but me, but happy.

They did get dessert, and I spent more time at their table, letting them tell me stories about how they met and how they started dating and their lives together, and feeling this odd sense of belonging, like I’d just discovered a missing branch of my family.

When they finally left, all four of them took turns standing up and hugging me, and all four of them reached into their wallets to tip me. I tried to wave them off but they insisted, and the first man who’d hugged me handed me forty dollars and said, “Please. You are an angel. Please take this.”

After they left I hid in the bathroom and cried because I couldn’t process all my thoughts and feelings.

Fast forward to three days ago, when my own partner and I showed up to a dinner reservation at a fancy-casual restaurant to celebrate our fifth anniversary. The whole time I was getting ready to leave, there was a worry in the back of my mind. The internet web form had asked if the reservation was celebrating anything in particular, and I’d selected “Anniversary.” I stood in the bathroom blow-drying my hair, wondering what I would do if we showed up, two women, and the host or the server took one look at us and the “Anniversary” designation on our reservation and refused to serve us. It’s not as ubiquitous anymore, but we’re still in the south, and these things still happen. Eight years of progressive leadership is over, and we’ve got another conservative despot in office who’s emboldening assholes everywhere.

It was on my mind the whole fifteen minutes it took to drive there. I didn’t mention it to my partner because I didn’t want to cast a shadow over the occasion. More than that, I didn’t want to jinx us, superstitious bastard that I am.

We walked into the restaurant. I told the hostess we had a reservation, gave her my last name.

She looked at her screen, then looked back at us. She smiled, broadly and genuinely, and said, “Happy anniversary! Your table is right this way.”

Our server greeted us, said, “I heard you were celebrating!”

“It’s our anniversary,” Kellie said, and our server gasped, beaming.

“That’s great! Congratulations! How many years?”

And I finally breathed a sigh of relief, and I thought about those men at that restaurant ten years ago. I hope they’re still safe and happy, and I hope we all get the satisfaction of helping the world keep blooming into something that’s not so unrelentingly terrible all the time.

every time i see this post i cry a little just out of sheer overwhelming emotion. gosh. but so I have a bit of a story that started as a tag ramble but got too long, and it’s… not similar, exactly, except for how it is, I think, because it’s about keeping the world blooming into something better.

so i was realizing i was queer and not actually a fan of the conservative party about the same time OP was. i’d been raised conservative and evangelical, in the southwest and also in florida, and everyone i knew for most of my life was that way.

so in early 2005, I hadn’t really followed anything about gay rights or anything like that until extremely recently. I didn’t know much about gay rights, but I knew gay people had gotten AIDS in the 80s and 90s, and I knew that they weren’t able to get married or join the army, and I knew my favorite character in First Wives Club was Annie’s adult daughter who was a lesbian college student and was complete #stylegoals for me in the early aughts.

In fall of 2004, I’d met some other kids who were about a grade behind me at a NaNoWriMo event, and I’d ended up going to see the tour of RENT that came through with one of them. They became, quite quickly, my very best friends, and all three of them were queer (two of them even started dating around when I met them, I think). They weren’t religious the way i was, they were liberal (as much as you generally got in high school in 2005), and they were newish friends but they were kinder and more supportive than anyone i’d ever met through church. They were the ones who’d reach out to me when i was having a rough time to make sure i was okay, they were the ones concerned about my wellbeing when i wasn’t sleeping or something. They were queer but… they were good people and i could recognize that in them. I thought that maybe they shouldn’t be doing gay stuff, but I was also starting to wonder why that was a bad thing in the first place. Literally could not figure out what harm could come from two girls or two boys loving each other.

I remember a month or two before i finally came out to those friends and kissed the girl who is now my wife, my mom and i got in a fight about me being friends with them because they weren’t “appropriate friends”. and i was mostly just tired and annoyed and prepared to go ‘okay mom’ until she was done rather than it being a fight, because I’d heard this before about my friend Willow and done the same thing.

but then she said “people LIKE THAT won’t be there for you when you need them. they will abandon you at the first sign of trouble.” To this day i’m not 100% sure if she meant non-christian or if she meant ~QUEER~ (or both), but either way i went from ‘just wait it out and pretend to agree’ to absolutely incandescently angry in the time it took me to parse what she’d said.

I lost my temper completely and for once I didn’t and still don’t feel bad about it. I screamed at her at the top of my lungs over this: about how they were the only ones who’d BEEN there for me, about how they didn’t need me to be perfect to be acceptable, about how they loved me even when i screwed up and had never ONCE made me feel like i was unworthy of love because I didn’t live up to some standard I could never quite reach. Unlike everyone i’d ever met through church and ESPECIALLY unlike her and my dad.

and in retrospect while i turned my sexuality over in my head a bit longer to be sure, i think that’s when i knew i was queer and that I wasn’t ashamed of it and was in fact proud of it. I parsed it at the time as pride in my friends, but looking back? It was pride in me. Because i didn’t want to be part of any family that would talk so cruelly about people who’d been so kind, just because of who those people loved and who they did or didn’t pray to. And I knew I DID want to be part of a family of misfits and outcasts who refused to sit down and shut up while people treated others like that.

In 2005 it was scary sometimes even just to openly be an ally of queer people, let alone openly queer yourself. Things had improved in a lot of ways, but it was still scary. You still couldn’t get married, which meant that if something happened to you, your spouse had no legal rights to make medical decisions, keep custody of your kids, keep your possessions, plan your funeral. You still couldn’t come out if you were in the military. There weren’t feel good queer stories that were easy to find - even the well written stories were almost exclusively tragic. (I discovered To Wong Foo, Thanks for Everything! Julie Newmar in late 2005 or early 2006, and it was the only story I had for YEARS where there were queer characters and they got a happy ending. I relished it. I still do.)

The point of all this is that I was proud, I wanted to be queer and to not sit quietly and assimilate but be loud and proud and unapologetic, but by fucking god it was scary and not always safe, so sometimes I did end up hiding it. And then things got better. Not everything, but… I was able to get legally married to my wife. I was able to get a testosterone prescription without needing to be psychologically pathologized. I was able to find a job in the midwest of all places where I can have “he/him” in my email signature but still wear skirts and not have any of the people I work with (at one point they’d all been 40+) question it or push back. We were helping the world keep blooming into someplace that doesn’t suck so much all the time!

But it’s starting to get worse again. My state’s passed legislation trying to dictate public bathroom use based on genitals. The supreme court is overturning many landmark decisions, and I know the moment they can, they’re coming for Obergefell v. Hodges, the legislation that made my legal marriage valid in all states (including the one I currently live in), not just the state I was married in (which is not the state I currently live in).

So we need to keep fighting. We need to get incandescently angry and we need to be there for each other. We need to scream at the top of our lungs at cruelty and injustice, and we need to be kind and support each other, especially when times are rough. We need to BE a family of misfits and outcasts who refuse to sit down and shut up while people treat our siblings and ourselves like this. Because that’s what they want. And we can not give it to them.

I’ve got a good one for this thread.

When I was in high school in the late 90s, I had a teacher whom we shall call, for the sake of anonymity, Mr. Broccoli. This was at a public high school in a very conservative suburb of a very, very progressive city. He taught science, wore hipster Buddy Holly glasses in an era when rimless lenses were the trend, and had an epic collection of hundreds of bow ties. He wore won every day and never wore the same one twice in a year. I took to him immediately. I was new in town, had a bad history of being bullied in my prior hometown, I was struggling with an invisible chronic illness… the chip on my shoulder was more of a boulder and that’s a lot of weight to carry around when you’re as exhausted as I was all the time. But I adored Mr. Broccoli as a teacher and he took to me too. I think he recognized me for the curious, thoughtful kid that I was, and he nurtured that in me to the extent that he could. Mr. Broccoli was also, incidentally, ex-military. Idk what branch but he’d taken what he’d learned and gotten involved in the boy scouts. Some of the boys in my classes talked about how cool he was as a pack leader. He could turn CARTWHEELS carrying a FULL 60-LB PACK. He knew everything about orienteering and wilderness survival. Mr. Broccoli was just the best. Fast forward to 2002. I was home from university for the summer and I hadn’t seen Mr. Broccoli since I graduated from high school a couple of years earlier. I got a summer job in the center of that progressive city doing street canvassing for an environmental organization. (Yes, I was one of those annoying people with a binder asking you if you have a few minutes to save the whales. It’s the only job I’ve ever been fired from because I was So Bad At It… There are other queer stories to tell about that, but I digress.)

One morning, our manager told us the Human Rights Campaign was looking for volunteers to canvas at Pride. No fundraising, just getting people to sign up for a mailing list. I signed up. I’d never been to Pride and was still a couple of years from really figuring out I was queer, but I figured human rights were a good thing to canvas for (lol), I wasn’t a homophobe, and I liked not having to fundraise.

So a few days later, I headed off to Pride. I had a freaking blast even though several strangers gave me flak about how the HRC is not radical enough—which was absolutely true btw. I regret canvassing for them in every respect except for the fact that had I not signed up, I wouldn’t have been there to experience what happened next. Which is that I heard my name. From off to the side, and slightly behind, just loud enough to be heard, with a question mark after it—like the speaker was afraid to be wrong.

But he wasn’t wrong.

I turned. It was Mr. Broccoli.

It may sound dumb now–OF COURSE the guy with the bottomless bin of bow ties and the giant nerd glasses was gay. I’d clock it in a second now. But I’d known him in the 90s. That kind of goofy flamboyance wasn’t necessarily read as coded then. I was so shocked, I think my jaw actually dropped.

But I recovered well. “Hey,” I said, grinning and holding up my clipboard. “Are you interested in signing up to learn more about the Human Rights Campaign?” He stared at me like he couldn’t believe his eyes. Then he hugged me. We talked for probably 20 minutes, standing there. He told me he’d been with his partner for 15 years. He told me how he’d been forced to be closeted at work—he’d told one person, who then told him to keep it to himself.

“The Scouts lost me,” he said, with a shrug like it didn’t matter but a waver in his voice like he was trying not to cry. The BSA’s anti-gay ban had been upheld by the Supreme Court a year or two earlier. I doubt he was out to them, but he quit just the same, on principle. I didn’t say much. I just listened, nodded at the appropriate times, congratulated him on the length of his relationship and shared his frustration about work and the Scouts. But he just… it was like a valve had been opened. He just talked and talked and talked, and finally said something to the effect of, “I never thought I’d see someone from there [our ultra-conservative suburban, voraciously homophobic high school] here. I just can’t believe it.”

After awhile, my boss started making eyes at me because I was basically not doing my job. We parted ways, and I have never seen him since. I wonder, sometimes, if he saw in me—either as a 14 year old in his classroom, or as a 20 year old at that festival—what I would take a few more years to see in myself. But I remembered how he had given me, a sick, lonely, formerly-bullied kid, a place to belong in his classroom, and helped me hope that I had a place to belong in the world, too. And just five or six years later—an eternity to me at that age, but probably an eye-blink to him—I gave him hope that the world was becoming a place where he, too, would belong.

What vibe do I give off?

Brb I’m just gonna go cry🥺💖

Here is the NYTimes article. (I think it’s behind a paywall, sorry)

“A lot of Jewish tradition — a lot of Jewish wisdom — is part of ‘Star Trek,’ and ‘Star Trek’ drew on a lot of things that were in the Old Testament and the Talmud,” [David] Gerrold [a writer for TOS] said in an interview. “Anyone who is very literate in Jewish tradition is going to recognize a lot of wisdom that ‘Star Trek’ encompassed.”

[...] Jessie Kornberg, the president of Skirball, said ...“We actually think the common values in the ‘Star Trek’ universe and Jewish belief are more powerful than that symbolism. That’s this idea of a more liberal, inclusive people, where ‘other’ and ‘difference’ is an embraced strength as opposed to a divisive weakness.”

[ID: A tweet by Adam Nimoy (@adam_nimoy) that reads: "The son of Jewish immigrants who spoke no English when they arrived in Boston, my dad related to Spock as "the only alien on the bridge of the Enterprise." In case you missed it, @nytimes explored the Jewish roots of #StarTrek: (link to an NYTimes article) #YoungLeonard." Attached is a black and white image of a smiling Leonard Nimoy as a child. End ID]

the kids are alright.

This is kinda perfect.

if anyone ever tries to tell u that racism/sexism/ableism/etc. are “natural” just show them this video

Those two that just could not come up with any differences! They were like “we both got glasses, both got these red sweaters, maybe we’re different heigh- nope we’re the same height… well shit we’re perfectly the same!”

Those kids were perfect

Whenever I see this video I’m always struck that the kids are so quick to say what their friends are GOOD AT or what their friends enjoy. They’re so quick to build each other up!

I love this ad so much.  I watch it several times every time it comes over my dash.

“I used to not like lettuce but now I like lettuce.”  That’s ALWAYS the cutest thing I’ve heard in like a month.

What’s also really interesting to me is listening to the kids’ VERY adult thinking noises.

This is adorable

“Do you have anything else to say?”

“No.”

I love this so much djdjj

This is ridiculously sweet 🥺

Shout out to that one kid whose parents are almost DEFINITELY lying to him about the squirrels in their roof as a way to limit TV time

One of the things that made Captain America: The Winter Soldier so good was that it really went out of its way to establish character’s competence before they fought the big climax of the story, so you really feel the stakes. 

Fury escaped a whole set of police cars and weaponized teams and being shot at from all sides, but then comes the Winter Soldier and bam just like that he’s down. Steve took out a set of pirates and Batroc at the start of the movie, then an entire elevator full of STRIKE agents, brought down a plane with his bare hands, but then bam the Winter Soldier slams into him like nothing else before. 

And with Winter Soldier we see him take out Fury twice, go toe to toe with Steve, hurl Natasha around, yank a guy from a car, jump from a bridge, he’s restrained in a room filled with people with huge guns and he slams a guy halfway across the room, and then Pierce goes ahead and slaps him, because he can.

I remember watching that movie in theatres back in 2014 (2015?) when it first came out, and gasping in shock when Pierce slaps the Winter Soldier across the face. This guy has super-serum, and Pierce is an old man. The Winter Soldier could have killed Pierce with his pinky finger. I was expecting him to react violently to being slapped, and for Pierce to end up as a red smear on the nearest wall.

When the Soldier just accepted his punishment, I was deeply creeped out. That’s when it really hit me that he is a victim. He’s been brainwashed so thoroughly Pierce has zero hesitation in getting violent with him. Pierce KNOWS he’s the one in control, and the Soldier would never dare to fight back.

Pierce can hit him with impunity, and the Soldier being a supersoldier is irrelevant. Yeah, he’s physically extraordinarily strong, but he’s not a person, he’s a tool. Pierce expects unquestioning obedience from him, and he always gets it. The Soldier’s mind is not his own, and he’s been enslaved.

P.S. Now I’m nostalgic for the days when Marvel used to make movies that didn’t suck. Yeah, there were some turkeys back in the day, but there were also some movies that were really GOOD. In Captain America: The Winter Soldier, they convinced Robert fucking Redford to appear in a superhero movie, and he was amazing. Pierce wasn’t your average supervillain.

He was much scarier than that, because he was just a charming, genial, unscrupulous human being who had accumulated far too much power. He had no superpowers at all, but he was a terrifying villain because he didn’t NEED superpowers. He had his brain and his position, and he had a bureaucracy to ensure his decisions get implemented. Plus, the Winter Soldier programmed to carry out Pierce’s every order and treat him like he was God. Pierce didn’t need to get his hands dirty.

Also, that movie is an interesting outlier compared with other MCU movies. Captain America: The Winter Soldier is barely a superhero movie. Yes, it features 2 characters with superserum, and it has plenty of action scenes. But at its core, it’s really a spy thriller.

#the greatest trick marvel ever pulled was convincing us mcu movies could be good

bro, the me inside your head is kind to you, right? haha? 🤨

bro, you wouldn't use my memory to represent your own self-doubt and loathing... right bro?

Robert Mapplethorpe, “Roger in Fishnets”,  1983

I’ll see you Roger in Fishnets and raise you Andrew in Drag.

Sidewalks of Portland

sometimes redditors post from the year 2050

Air Himbo

Water Himbo

Earth Himbo

Fire Himbo

@crvggio​ I’ve been laughing at this for 47 years

And the Avatar

Reblogging again because that last addition is IMPORTANT

But when the world needed him most, he pulled the wrong lever...

Why do they even have that lever?

i think stand up is the most autism form of comedy (complimentary)

oh, your job is to go around, repeating the same anecdotes with the exact same cadence and pacing and delivery in the hopes of getting a consistent reaction from groups of strangers? damn and here i was doing it for free like a chump

we have to stop moralizing the human condition and start jerking each other off while making out

I have had so many bad takes on this post and not only is this a breath of fresh air, I’m gonna kiss you for it, you get me

every person can feel freddie’s presence in their souls when they sing MAMAAAAAA UUHHHH, I DONT WANNA DIE, I SOMETIMES I WISH I’VE NEVER BEEN BORN AT ALL with all the air in their lungs i’m not joking

it’s fucking crazy to think about the amount of people who have sung bohemian rhapsody? like it’s such a unifying song, by nature of the fact that so many people know it. it holds so many good memories for me and other people. it’s a song you scream in the car with your friends while you drive around your boring hometown, it’s a song you drunkenly sing with your arm around your best friend, or a song you sing along to with strangers when it’s on in public. it’s bittersweet to think about freddie’s legacy carrying on like that through his masterpiece. freddie carries on because he’s a part of so many people’s good memories and bohemian rhapsody is a huge part of that.

Reblog if you have sung bohemian rhapsody with your friends

every time i see this post i’m reminded of the video of 65,000 people singing bohemian rhapsody in near-perfect harmony

like, what other song can make that claim?

Some of the highlights of that video include:

Only days before my state went into lockdown, “Bohemian Rhapsody” came on in the restaurant kitchen I’d just been hired at and, no shit, every single worker in that little diner started singing along. Me (the only queer afaik), the manager, all the other kitchen workers, the dishwasher up front, the two people on the counter, all but two of the men over 30. Just belting out Freddie Mercury at the top of their lungs. And you can bet when “sometimes I wish I’d never been born at all” came around, we every single one of us ramped up the intensity and basically made sure Freddie could hear us in the afterlife.

One of the things that struck me, listening to the video, is that you cannot distinguish the original vocals from the crowd, and sometimes you can barely hear the music. And the POV is on the stage the speakers are playing the song from!

There’s good reason why, nearly fifty years after the height of their career, Queen is still considered one of the best bands of all time ever.

(And how albums left lying about in cars will eventually metamorphose into Best of Queen albums.)

Something else that’s rather incredible about this is, Bohemian Rhapsody is a very difficult song from a technical standpoint. Like–humor me, okay, go flip it on and try to sing the whole thing at the top of your voice without falling off-key, out of breath, or cracking at least once. Then come back.

Okay. You’re back? Welcome back. Unless you’re a trained singer, you probably can’t do it. There are too many long notes, too many key changes, and too many places where–if you’re singing all the parts–you’re just up and down the scale too damned fast. I’m saying this as a trained singer and I can’t do it. I always crack on “magnifico” and “leave me to die,” and I have a pretty decent range, but I know I sound ugly as hell on that final coda.

Okay. Now that we’ve established that, I want to talk a little about singing as a chorus. One of the things a lot of people learned during the pandemic is how hard it is to take twenty people, all in different places, and stitch them together to make a single coherent song with perfect pitch and timing. You’re all practicing on slightly your own tempo, slightly your own key, even if you’re all working from the same base track. (You can see this in a lot of the Wellerman compilations from Tiktok, where someone always says “Soon” a moment before everyone else on “soon may the Wellerman come.”) When you have a chorus comprised of many smaller choruses that are all traveling to be together, this is what dress rehearsal is for–to get all of you onto the same tempo so you’re starting and finishing at exactly the same time. This is a thing that normally only happens after at least several days of practice, and it is an important skill that must be taught. You’re not just born knowing how to do this.

I do not know how many people at that Green Day concert were trained singers. But I do know there is no way in hell all few thousand of them were a single group–they showed up a few at a time, maybe even flying solo for the night. Now go and listen to the video again. Listen to the ends of verses and the pickups. They’re fucking crisp as hell. Everyone is starting and ending at the same place. Not even a single note off. (And yes, you can hear when it’s a single note off, even in a crowd that big. A handful of people would be enough to throw it off.) And while a few in the crowd may be off-key, so many more are on-key that the cumulative effect is of the song being on-key. This isn’t even the band they’re there to see.

They don’t just know this song, this technically-difficult song, this long and complex song by a completely different band. They know it perfectly. They know it down to the fucking note. They know it so well that they did it in perfect synchrony, without a single chance to practice.

Do you know how insane that is?

well I was trying to just message you the link but here @thesylverlining happy birthday!!

And that was the last time anybody on the team attempted polite small talk with Beard.

I’ve been working on this since eurovision and got it done just in time for the s3 finale 🥲 speaking of eurovision, if you look really really closely at the interval show you might just be able peep Beard in the background…

ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

ᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷᘛ⁐̤ᕐᐷ

@apolleo

The Victorian Era was shite compared to now obsiously but also titty piercings were popular everyone was on heroin and they thought bad sex made your kids ugly so the zeitgeist must have been wild

I wish I could remember the source, but I once read a sociologist's take that the Victorian era was a complete abberation of human development. It was uniquely weird, never existed before, will likely never exist again.

I wonder how much of that was on the back of the industrial revolution. Maybe humanity had a similar "weird" moment in the Fertile Crescent when we figured out farming.

But yeah. Victorians were an odd bunch. Delightfully contradictory.

I feel like the wild combination of Suddenly Having So Much New Technology We Barely Understand and Suddenly Using So Much New Technology We Barely Understand *May* have resulted in such new and novel situations as:

hi hello it is me Professional Stuff-Knower About Victorians. here to both debunk and Make It Weirder, by turns:

1. Nipple piercings were probably not common. The main “source” on that is a series of borderline fetishistic anonymous letters to like one scientific journal in the 1880s, and while one letter does contain a description of nipple-piercing at a Paris jewelry store, it’s functionally identical to professional ear-percing at the time (just, you know. with nipples). So we really have no idea if the letter was true, or from the same skeezeballs who wrote to the Englishwoman’s Domestic Magazine pretending to be 17-year-old girls tightlaced by Cruel Headmistresses at boarding school. A few newpapers reported on the alleged trend, but they also claimed like every five years that the Hot New Thing For Ladies in Paris was dyeing one’s hair green. And it never was. Also I have never heard of surviving extant nipple rings, or any known erotic photos showing pierced nipples. So...

2. The baby will stop crying if you give it opiate-laced patent medicines. Your toothache will stop if you take cocaine. Big difference. (Also doctors knew of the dangers of both those things, but like. In the case of cocaine, they just didn’t have anything better in terms of painkillers, so they had to do the best they could. In terms of sketchy patent medicines- you know how hard it is to crack down on Flat Tummy Tea and activated charcoal everything nowadays? Yeah.)

3. The arsenic isn’t on your face. It’s in your stomach. Because one would usually eat arsenical wafers for the complexion rather than applying it externally, as far as I’ve seen. Yep: this one is actually worse than most people think. The saving grace is it was usually a tiny bit of arsenic only- though a mistake in compounding could prove fatal, and also why the fuck are you eating arsenic in the first place oh my god. A lot of people at the time thought this was stupid, too.

3b. The actual answer to Why is fucking bonkers: a medical article written in 1851 by one Johann von Tschudi claimed that the girls in some Alpine town had perfect skin because there was a weird local tradition of eating small quantities of arsenic and gradually building up an immunity. I am not joking. So the Gwyneth Paltrows of the day got hold of that information and went nuts.

4. Yeah no early electricity was the wild west and here is a video about Victorian fabric combustion by dress historian Nicole Rudolph (the latter was less of a risk while wearing a garment and more when the fabric was being stored, though. and if it caught fire, obviously). And to be clear, though, they did know about some of these risks and scramble to mitigate them. “They did in fact know and consider it a problem” is a running theme here.

5. Including lead toxicity. Yeah- they knew about that! I was uncertain, but I dug into it and there are a lot of articles from the Victorian era like Wow It Sure Sucks That We’re So Reliant On Something Deeply Toxic Literally All Around Us. Scientists Are Working On It But [shrug]

6. No notes on the asbestos thing either. That’s. Yep, that’s pretty accurate. The ill effects of asbestos were first noted in 1899, but it took ages for it to actually get taken seriously. As with many things.

7. Food adulteration was considered bad. Food adulteration was also difficult to avoid. People tried, but with regulations still in their infancy and few ways to test things (especially for the poor)... : D

8. Doctors: “hey maybe don’t leave your baby’s bottle nipple unwashed for three weeks like Mrs. Beeton says is okay?” Consumers: “[read 11:30 AM]”

9. Really my final takeaway is that they were aware of a lot more dangers of their world than we give them credit for. They just didn’t often have alternatives, so they had to do their best with what they did have. And sometimes they could avoid things but ignored warnings, because Humans Can Be Illogical.

We wouldn’t know anything about those ideas, now would we?

[cough]microplastics[cough]sketchycelebritydietsupplements[cough]

would highly recommend that people watch the "Hidden Killers" doc series all about this shit

Reblog if you’re over 20 and still read/write fan fiction.

I’m curious!