@the-daughters-of-eve / the-daughters-of-eve.tumblr.com
dislike when ppl say to children things like "wait until you live in the real world" or "welcome to the real world" when something makes them unhappy or bad things happen to them. children are people. they live in the same world you do, and their experiences and reactions to their experiences are just as real as your own. comfort them instead of dismissing them
anyway children are real people and should be treated as such
Bonus:
It's working.
The BTS/TNG crossover we deserve
Twitter users, including fairly famous SFF authors NK Jemisin and Neon Yang, cyberbullied a trans woman into silence over the title she gave a short story that most of them did not even read thinking that they were defending trans people. Emily VanDerWerff talks to her about it a year later, as well as discussing the concepts of paranoid readings and Internet assumptions in general.
This article was CHILLING, and I consider it a must-read for pretty much everyone on social media. I had never encountered the idea of “paranoid readings” before but it explains SO MUCH about why social media and the current state of the Discourse is the way that it is. Absolutely fucking heartbreaking.
I had no idea about this and I admire Jemisin’s work - or I did. What the fucking hell.
I’m seeing several replies like this on this post and I want to point out… Just… hang on a sec and let’s think it over.
First: You are allowed to continue finding value and enjoyment someone’s work even if they do something IRL that you don’t like. You are not required to do it, but it is allowed. The Author Is Dead! They can be (and should be, imo) assessed separately from their work, and that is considered legit academic critical theory!
Second: There is so much bias going against marginalized authors already (and marginalized communities in general) that it is ALWAYS worth taking a second to think carefully in situations where a person from one marginalized community has apparently done something to harm someone from another marginalized community. Even if you come to the same conclusion as your instinctive snap judgement, taking the time to think about it and ask yourself questions about it is worth it. At the absolute minimum, it’s good practice in critical thinking. At more than the absolute minimum, though, you might discover contradictions, personal biases, or unexpected nuance that you hadn’t thought of before. Asking questions to deepen your own understanding is a GOOD thing.
Third: I was on twitter and in publishing industry circles during this fiasco, and I saw it happen, and I saw people who I KNOW to be caring and kind and fierce trans allies (I’m speaking as a NB person here, fyi) get caught up in the nonsense as it went down in real time. Let’s consider exactly how twitter (and all social media) functions and how it foments hysteria and mob rage: Someone tweets something critical (or paranoid, like that Fall’s story could only have been written by a troll). Many other people retweet that; some people add their brief, necessarily un-nuanced hot takes on it. People outside the affected community read these takes and retweet the ones that seem to be worth listening to. People feel a twinge of righteous anger, and they express it. They feel like they are standing up for justice! They do not think about the broader context of what they’re engaging in, because Twitter as a platform deliberately destroys your ability to do that. (So do all social media platforms, but Twitter is particularly bad about it.)
My cisgender friends and colleagues who jumped on the bandwagon to decry Fall’s story thought that they were standing up for justice. They thought they were doing Good. They thought they were listening to the voices from a marginalized community and condemning something that was causing harm. In many cases (that I saw), this was in the form one or two tweets they’d written themselves about the issue in support of the trans community who were apparently being hurt by the story, plus a handful of retweets from other people.
My trans friends and colleagues who jumped on the bandwagon were acting in (so they thought) solidarity with their own community – because I saw some of the tweets, I know for a fact that a few of them said, “I didn’t see anything wrong with the story when I first read it, but after reading others’ reactions, now I’m not sure,” which quickly evolved into, “I don’t know if the person who wrote this is a troll but I really think they could be,” which turned into… hurt. Anger. Hysteria. The longer the discourse went on, the more abrasive and ear-piercing the feedback loop got. Fall’s story was made into this scapegoat, this avatar – as if by defeating This One Specific “Bad Thing”, people felt like the entire Great Dragon of Systemic Bigotry And Transphobia could be symbolically vanquished.
Of all the discourse I personally saw, nobody was engaging in the kind of cyberbullying that looks like, “This person should die” or “Let’s doxx them and get them fired and threaten to stalk them.” It was all “thoughts and prayers for the community” bullshit, or mob hysteria, or supposedly-righteous frustration, or excessively paranoid bad-faith readings of the story – but that’s still cyberbullying, because of the sheer SCALE and VOLUME at which it was happening. When we were in kindergarten, all our moms taught us some version of “Sticks and stones will break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” right? But that turned out not to be true, because words are often much like stones: You can hurt someone by dropping one 1000-pound boulder on them; you can also hurt someone by dropping a thousand 1-pound rocks on them one after another. You can also hurt them by dropping a hundred thousand 0.01-pound pebbles on them all at once.
As Neon Yang is quoted as saying in the article above: “And yes, it seems like an overreaction on the part of the trans people who responded this way, but being trans in this world is having to constantly justify your right to existence at all, and when you’re forced to be on the defensive all the time, everything starts to look like an attack.” I imagine that much the same thing might be said by people from other marginalized communities as well – that’s kind of the dictionary definition of “marginalization”, isn’t it? Living in this world which is constantly attacking us just for existing, we have to stand together to protect ourselves and each other, and thank goodness for our brothers and sisters and siblings from other marginalized communities who stand with us. Inter-community solidarity is the only way we’re going to make any progress in this fight when the deck is so stacked against all of us.
But. But.
Mob mentality is like a hive mind. When you are caught up in the mob, you literally stop being able to have your own individual thoughts and feelings; you just sort of enmesh yourself in the collective feelings of the group. That’s why mobs are TERRIFYING. They are not quite human anymore, even though they are comprised of humans. It is crucial for all of us to recognize that we are all are capable of being caught up in this, and that when we are, we won’t even notice it happening. The people who you admire are capable of being caught up in this. The smartest folks in the world are capable of being caught up in this.
So saying “I used to like [so-and-so author’s] work but now I won’t” is… still a symptom of mob mentality. You’re engaging in the exact same phenomenon that I literally just described.
The people who decried the story truly, genuinely, sincerely thought they were doing the right thing and standing in solidarity with The Trans Community (an abstract)… but each of them still added their own 0.01-pound pebble which contributed to hurting Isabel Fall (a living, breathing person).
And that’s the great tragedy of trying to be Good, isn’t it? Sometimes, even when you think you’re Doing Good, you hurt someone – sometimes you hurt them profoundly. You can’t ever be sure. You can’t just follow the Good Person Playbook and use the exact same script for every single situation. You can’t just climb on the bandwagon and be comforted that you’re being Good simply because you’re in agreement all these other people who you know are also good.
That’s not true goodness, my friends. That’s a mob. Even if it is in pursuit of a goal that seems Just and Right and Good, it’s still a fucking mob. Moral purity does not make it Not A Mob.
If, after reading all this, you sit with these thoughts for a few minutes and decide that you truly can’t in good conscience enjoy NK Jemisin’s work anymore, or Neon Yang’s, or whoever else was involved in the misguided hysteria that led to Twitter collectively causing harm to a living breathing person, then that’s a perfectly fine decision to make and I respect that you took the time to mull it over seriously. We don’t all have to have the same response or make the same decision about how to deal with this – my decision is almost certainly different from yours and that’s okay.
The only takeaway that I desperately beg you to remember going forward is that none of us are immune to being swept away in a mob, not without a lot of deliberate effort and hard work and conscious mental training and vigilance.
And because none of us are immune… Well, as the proverb says, let he who is without sin cast the first stone.
by the way, it’s a really good story, if you can find it
To stand against the Shadow so long as iron is hard and stone abides. To defend the Malkieri while one drop of blood remains. To avenge what cannot be defended.
Thom: no matter what happens, all the pain we face, the heartbreak ... the Wheel keeps turning.
I really hope they lean into the Red Ajah as being like a "Nuclear Deproliferation Unit"
colors, clockwise: blue, gray, white, yellow, red, green, brown
“A kiss may be grand, but it won’t pay the rental, on your humble flat, or help you at the automat.”
Like literally the most famous song about how much girls love jewellry is just explaining the importance of getting jewellry for when your partner leaves you penniless and alone.
The founder of Girl Scouting in the US, Juliette Gordon Low, funded her first troop by selling her pearl necklace, which was her only belonging after her husband died and left everything to his mistress.
She founded Girl Scouts to teach girls self-sufficiency so they wouldn’t have to go through what she went through when her husband died and she didn’t know how to take care of herself.
Well damn…
This is totally random and I can’t fully express what I’m trying to say but: “it’s okay to not want to do kinky stuff in the bedroom” is an important message, but it’s missing something and I’m not sure what.
I mean, for one thing, it’s okay not to want to do anything in the bedroom, and we DO talk about consent, but there’s still this...assumption that a certain set of acts are the Basic Package that constitutes Normal sex, and that all the “weird” stuff is in steps up from there or something, and that being an allosexual individual means you get the Basic Package.
So we don’t often tell people that it’s okay not to want to do oral or to have penetrative sex. In particular, no one encourages people to evaluate whether it’s okay to “expect” that of their partners in the same way they do with “kinky” stuff.
So like, I keep seeing people criticizing the fact that “kinky” stuff is becoming Expected and Normal, but as an autistic person whose sensory experiences are very different from what’s “expected,” it’s like...nothing in particular should be Expected and Normal? “They might not be into that/enjoy that” is just as true of the most “basic, vanilla” sexual acts you can think of as the most out-there weird crap you can think of? There’s no single specific act that every single sexually active person should be presumed to enjoy?
Something I noticed from Pervocracy’s old Cosmopolitan reviews (and a few advice column things) is that people would ask “help, my partner asked me to do X in bed, what do I do?” And a lot of times the answer was that you should be a good sport and give it a try, unless the thing was judged to be obviously unreasonable and then of course it was wrong of your partner to bring it up and the column writer gets to be judgmental about this gross kink thing that no one would want to do.
It’s this weird “everything not mandatory is forbidden” thing where you’re supposed to do what your partner wants and it’s selfish to refuse, unless you can make the case that the thing they want is bad and gross and in that case they should be shamed for wanting it.
In a situation where you aren’t able to set boundaries, you resent other people for having desires. In a situation where you can only set boundaries around kinds of sex considered bad enough, then you end up making the case that the thing your partner wants is bad and gross and shameful and make them feel bad for bringing it up.
So when people are like “being kinky is ok! It’s not shameful and gross!” it gets taken like we’re trying to add additional items to the unspoken list of stuff that’s compulsory if your partner wants it. But the framework of compulsory “normal” sex is already fucked up! It needs to always be ok to say “not my thing” whether it’s “normal” sex that everyone else likes or something weird that grosses you out.
i’ve been on hold at my library for a book about asexuality for a few weeks and i just read an article about some concepts in the book re: consent. and holy shit. blew my mind. i’ve NEVER read about consent in the context of a relationship with an ace and an allo that resonated so strongly with me, and as a person in such a relationship!! it’s so!!! i’m even more excited for the book now.
for anyone interested, the article is How to Negotiate Better Consent: An Asexual Perspective and the book i’m waiting for is Ace: What Asexuality Reveals About Desire, Society and the Meaning of Sex.
god okay, just to gush about this more, the author suggests using the categories of enthusiastic, willing, unwilling and coerced consent (rather than just “enthusiastic consent” or “no means no”). i really recommend reading the whole article linked above, but what blew my mind is the distinction between enthusiastic and willing consent. it gets broken down like this:
Enthusiastic consent:
Willing consent:
and like!!! it made me realize i may have never actually enthusiastically consented in my life, but like, that doesn’t mean i have never or cannot consent! i almost always fall into the “willing consent” framework and i’ve never seen that….validated anywhere. anyway, it’s just given me this perspective about my sexuality and consent in general and better ways to relate to my partner and!!! idk!!! thank goodness for other ace people, is what i’m saying.
This is very useful and a lot of sex work can also be best understood as willing consent, where the indirect consequences of having sex (getting paid) are what is desired and the direct consequences (having probably-mediocre sex with someone you don’t actively desire) are not considered so negative that they outweigh the indirect consequences.
Which is a definition of consent that gives sex workers agency and sees their consent as a choice made again and again based on the pros and cons, not something that is coerced and also not something that always exists by default simply because they are sex workers.
Recognizing willing consent is probably validating for a lot of people who have consent to sex without meeting the definition of enthusiastic consent.
As someone with chronic pain in a long-term trust-based relationship (in my case, marriage), this distinction is also important. Desire/arousal, because I'm often in significant pain, doesn't usually come until after I've willingly consented and we've already started ... activities. It's taken a while in our relationship for both of us to understand that me being "willing" is 100% consenting and just because I'm not "enthusiastic" I'm not rejecting them.
TIL astronaut Jack Schmidt discovered he was allergic to moon dust, which is a thing millions of other people have probably gone their whole lives never knowing.
Imagine being one of only twelve guys ever to have the honour of walking on the moon and then when you get there you're allergic to it.
NASA scientist: you’re back early
Jack Schmidt: moon’s an allergen
NASA scientist: ...what?
Jack Schmidt, loading an epipen and climbing back into the shuttle: moon’s an allergen
if one in twelve humans who have been on the moon was allergic to moon dust, that’s either a one-in-a-million chance or a VERY common allergy
The fact that it’s such a statistically useless sample is DEFINITELY driving a handful of very specialized scientists absolutely crazy
It's Harrison "Jack" Schmitt, on Apollo 17.
Jesus, leave his ass.
We learn fast to be very kind and attentive, tho.
My mom, who got her degree in Marriage and Family Counseling when she was 60, says studies show that women will sometimes sometimes leave a long term relationship to live on their own for a while before seeking a new relationship, but men will almost never leave a long term relationship without having a new relationship either in progress or just beginning. They don’t want to give up the caretaker they have without another one on deck or in the wings.
This is so sad
This isnt cute or quirky. This means hes a fucking hopeless user
Please date a man who actually acts like an adult.
Ok I lived with my ex for 2 years and he literally wouldn’t be able to get his own food if I wasn’t at home, I’d get home from work and he’d be angry at me for “making him starve”
My current partner has lived on his own for 8 years and the absolute most I have to help him with is maybe sending him $20 so he can make a bill payment on time
It made me realise for 2-4 years I wasn’t a girlfriend I was a fucking mother
Men who have been independent are capable of reverting if given the slightest excuse. When we married, my ex husband was 10 years older than me and had lived on his own for 8ish years. Yet (and I allowed this until I finally got fed up and took us to counseling) I did 80% of the cooking, because I was better at it. Same with the cleaning, shopping, social planning, etc.
After I left, in the first six months I got texts or calls asking me to please tell him:
I shit you not.
Then he had a heart attack (mild) and none of his family or friends were around to take him to the hospital. But instead of calling 911, he called me, who by then lived 45 minutes away. He lived 5 minutes from an EMS dispatch location. He called me, despite the fact that he didn’t believe me 8 months prior when I was feeling suicidal and I had to call a cab to go alone to check myself into the hospital for a 72-hour hold. I told him to call 911, hung up on him when he whined about “making a fuss”, called 911, called his siblings and then texted them “your brother is having a heart attack, I called 911 for him, come home,” and washed my hands of it.
Emotionally vacant men who won’t do household labor or emotional labor are not Nazis, but they aren’t good people, either, and you don’t have to put up with their shit.
Millennial women of Tumblr, please read this post.
And then please: make the decision for yourself to never stay with a man who expects you to be his mother and servant.
This is my grandma to a T. She has lived with the same man for a good 60+ years now and her literal words quoted: “When I’m not home for an extended period of time (week or more) I worry about him eating and then when I get home he’s been eating fish and potatoes for the whole time, even though I left heatable meals in the fridge for him” My grandma pays ALL THE BILLS. Yes ALL OF THEM. The only bills my grandpa puts any money into is car payements and some land-deed tax stuff. He refuses to cook, clean, wash his clothes, any of it.
The whole family is currently waiting for my grandpa to die so my grandma can finally go free, because she’s so stuck into her role as a caretaker that’s the only way to force her to let this shitbag go.
Tumblr, keep circulating this. This is not the 1960s, a dude’s gotta wash his own fucking clothes in our lord’s year of 2018.
Two weeks into my first boyfriend and I moving in together he enquired about his clean washing and was genuinely, horrifyingly confused when I replied, “Well, did you clean it?” He eventually figured out how to look after himself when it became apparent I wasn’t going to do it for him but even then it involved him taking his fucking dirty washing back to his mother a few times.
Women, this behaviour is super normalised but that doesn’t mean it’s right or fair. You don’t owe men shit, don’t let anyone convince you otherwise.
Dorothy just wanted something that she could believe in, A gray dustbowl girl in a life she was better off leavin’. She made her escape, went from gray into green, And she could have got clear, and she could have got clean, But she chose to be good and go back to the gray Kansas sky Where color’s a fable and freedom’s a fairy tale lie.
Alice got lost, and I guess that we really can’t blame her; They say she got tangled and tied in the lies that became her. They say she went mad, and she never complained, For there’s peace of a kind in a life unconstrained. She gives Cheshire kisses, she’s easy with white rabbit smiles, And she’ll never be free, but she’s won herself safe for a while.
Susan and Lucy were queens, and they ruled well and proudly. They honored their land and their lord, rang the bells long and loudly. They never once asked to return to their lives To be children and chattel and mothers and wives, But the land cast them out in a lesson that only one learned; And one queen said ‘I am not a toy’, and she never returned.
Mandy’s a pirate, and Mia weaves silk shrouds for faeries, And Deborah will pour you red wine pressed from sweet poisoned berries. Kate poses riddles and Mary plays tricks, While Kaia builds towers from brambles and sticks, And the rules that we live by are simple and clear: Be wicked and lovely and don’t live in fear
Dorothy, Alice and Wendy and Jane, Susan and Lucy, we’re calling your names, All the Lost Girls who came out of the rain And chose to go back on the shelf. Tinker Bell says, and I find I agree You have to break rules if you want to break free. So do as you like — we’re determined to be Wicked girls saving ourselves.
For we will be wicked and we will be fair And they’ll call us such names, and we really won’t care, So go, tell your Wendys, your Susans, your Janes, There’s a place they can go if they’re tired of chains, And our roads may be golden, or broken, or lost, But we’ll walk on them willingly, knowing the cost — We won’t take our place on the shelves. It’s better to fly and it’s better to die Say the wicked girls saving ourselves.
(Seanan McGuire)
This is breathtaking.
I heard this poem once a million years ago, I have been looking for it ever since, and had now found it.
I love it so much more then I remember.
You might be interested to know that she set it to music and it’s also a song.
@darkmagyk And people have made fanvids set to it! (The CD is out of print right now - I have it and I love it so much, but I she’s re-printing a different one … soonish?)
the water warriors fighting for access to clean water for all
the teenagers imprisoned for fighting back against oppressive regimes
those fighting for access to education for all
for the future of the planet
for gender equality
for safety and protection from gun violence
for governmental representation and engagement for youths
for the rights of immigrants
for syria and the rights of refugees
for literacy and the representation of WOC in books
for trans and queer rights
for protection of girls against forced marriage and child slavery
i hope that one day we live in a world where children are allowed to just be children, where they dont have to fight tooth and nail for their rights and their futures, but i could not be prouder of this generation
(from top to bottom: Autumn Peltier, Amariyanna “Mari” Copeny, Ahed Tamimi, Malala, Greta Thunberg, Melati and Isabel Wijsen, Artemisa Xakriabá, Ridhima Pandey, Jamie Margolin, Rowan Blanchard, Jaclyn Corin and Emma Gonzalez, Shamma bint Suhail Faris Mazrui, Sophie Cruz, Bana al-Abed, Marley Dias, Jazz Jennings, Sonita Alizadeh, Payal Jangid)
I periodically feel so fucking sad for women in history. I feel like birth control in countries where it is widely used has made women forget an aspect of male cruelty and sociopathy that is now less apparent (giving the illusion that men have improved when only women’s defences against men have)—the fact that for most of history men could live with a woman for decades and not care that they were slowly killing her with endless back-to-back pregnancies which not only resulted in early death more often than not, but also in a total smothering of the woman’s spirit and talents. I saw a quote by Anne Boyer the other day that called straight relationships for women “not only deadly, but deadening”—as I was reading Jill Lepore’s Book of Ages, a biography of Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane, who was bright and loved reading and wrote some poetry, but had little time to make anything of her life in between her 12 pregnancies. Benjamin Franklin’s mother had 10 sons and 7 daughters. What could they possibly accomplish when their husbands kept impregnating them year after year after year throughout their entire adult life?
Charlotte Brontë eschewed marriage longer than most (writing to Ellen Nussey that she wished they could just set up a little cottage and live together) but she finally married at 38, became pregnant, and died before her 39th birthday. If she had married younger would Jane Eyre exist? I was reading that biography of Charity & Sylvia last month and comparing their life together in their little cottage to the life of their married female relatives, which was honestly hell on earth. One of Charity’s sisters had 18 children. Charity’s mother had 10 living ones, and probably some additional stillbirths. She gave birth to her first child age 19, in 1758, then to a pair of twins in 1760, then another child in 1761, another in 1763, another in 1765, another in 1767, another in 1769, another in 1771, another in 1774, another in 1777. Charity was the last child and her mother had been sick with tuberculosis for months when she became pregnant with her, and she died soon after giving birth.
I wish people would call this murder—this woman was murdered by her husband, like countless other women who do not ‘count’ as victims of male violence because straight sex is natural, pregnancy is natural, childbirth is natural. But when after 20 years of nonstop pregnancies this woman had tuberculosis and suffered from severe respiratory distress, severe weight loss, fever and exhaustion, and her husband impregnated her again, her death was expected. He must have known; he just didn’t care. This woman’s sister—Charity’s aunt—remained a spinster and outlived all of her married sisters by several decades, living well into her eighties. (Ironically, male doctors in her century asserted that sex with men was necessary for women’s health. The biographer quoted from a popular home health guide which said that old maids incurred grievous physical harm from a lack of sex with men.) And this aunt had the time and liberty to develop her skill for embroidery to such an extent that two museums still preserve her embroidered bed drapes. She accomplished something, she nurtured her talent and self. Her name was also Charity, and I find it interesting that Charity’s mother named her last daughter, whose pregnancy & birth killed her, after her childless, unmarried sister.
When I see women reblog my post about Sophia Tolstoy’s misery with her 13 children, adding comments like “thank god marriage is no longer synonymous with this”, I wonder if they realise that men have not magically become any kinder or more concerned about their female partner’s health and fulfillment, it’s just that women now have access to better ways of protecting themselves from their male partner’s indifference to their health and fulfillment.
Now I’m thinking of that tweet by some right-wing tool mocking a couple calling their dog their “baby” that was like
“Your grandmother: 10 kids
Your mother: 2 kids
You: three abortions and a dog”
Like you really thought your grandmother had 10 children because she wanted to, huh? And how dare modern women use the resources (if they can) to avoid the horrors of pregnancy and/or numerous pregnancies. It makes me sick too, the feeling of dread they must have felt as their husband climbed atop them for the umpteenth time, how they must have prayed that this time they wouldn’t get pregnant… and then showing signs that they were and just feeling so. Resigned and helpless. Because what can they do? Maybe try to induce a miscarriage that could potentially injure or kill them, or have them socially ostracized if they were caught. Another year trapped in the cage of their own bodies.
The scope of what men have done to women is unimaginable.
I watch Midwives (awesome show btw) and it takes place in Britain right before the widespread availability of The Pill. In one episode, a lady had 8 kids and was pregnant with the 9th and desperately wanted an abortion because they couldn’t afford the 8 they already had but abortion was illegal and getting her tubes tied was too expensive. So she did a back alley abortion and died from the complications.
The show clearly indicted the government and NHS specifically for not providing poor women with access to birth control and abortion.
But, the whole time I thought how evil is her husband? He didn’t need to get her pregnant. And it’s not even about sexual release because there’s plenty other things they could do. It’s a level of sociopathic selfishness that we don’t think a lot about today but the same stuff would be happening if we didn’t have birth control because men have not changed.
I forever feel fortunate that upon my third and final child being born (after two back to back extremely high risk pregnancies) my husband told me flat out “no more, i’m getting a vasectomy”, booked it and got it done before I was even fully recovered from childbirth.
Likewise my father, after my mother’s god knows how many miscarriages said “listen, this is killing you. Maybe not physically but emotionally. It has to stop.” and he went and got the snip so that my mother didn’t have to rely on birth control that made her sick and never had to endure the crushing awful of yet another loss.
THAT is what real decent men do. These days there’s literally no excuse beyond so many men being big fucking babies about sterilisation or thinking it’s the “woman’s job”. If you’re in a relationship and you don’t want more kids and he wont’ even consider the snip, he’s a prick and doesn’t deserve you.
But yeah, fucking glad I wasn’t born 100 years ago. I’d have been dead. Child 1 might have killed me, kid 2 definitely would have. I nearly died even with modern medicine.
But I can’t take birth control, it makes me SUPER sick. Thank goodness for condoms and male sterilisation.
More men should get the snip, seriously. What’s wrong with these guys? Fucking cowards.
I’ve read a lot of scholarly articles on Much Ado About Nothing that dismiss Don John as a terrible villain, or criticise Shakespeare for the lack of finesse in constructing him, but honestly, I’ve always felt like that’s the point.
Don John is no sly, silver-tongued Iago – he is crude, brash and malicious. He makes statements like “I am a plain-dealing villain,” goes about attended by idiot henchmen, and takes advice and inspiration for his plots from others around him.
But even so, this weak caricature of a villain nearly brings ruin upon all of Messina.
How?
Because, even before he had made plans to trick Claudio into thinking Hero was unfaithful, the culture of Messina had already done most of the work for him. Don John is not the true villain of this play; he is merely an agent. The real villain of Much Ado About Nothing is the culture of misogyny in Messina.
From the moment Benedick and the soldiers return to Messina, they engage in lewd sexual banter and joke about horns, adultery and cuckoldry. Leonato’s first instinct upon greeting them is to make such a joke, for when Don Pedro politely inquires if Hero is his daughter the old gentleman immediately quips, “Her mother hath many times told me so.” This banter speaks volumes about the underlying misogyny and anxieties about female sexuality that the men share, and it works to create an atmosphere that is ripe for Hero’s shocking rejection.
Thus, all Don John has to do is suggest to Claudio that Hero is unfaithful, offer him a sliver of proof, and the prince and Claudio, made susceptible by popular myths of female inconstancy, find the rest of the proof themselves. Claudio starts to see certain cues as evidence of Hero’s guilt where before they were badges of honour. He declares, “Her blush is guiltiness, not modesty.” And so Hero, by the simple machinations of a cardboard cutout villain, is publicly disgraced, left for dead, and threatened with death by her own father, showcasing how quickly those seemingly harmless jokes about women can escalate to actual violence.
What’s more, this culture of misogyny is what keeps Benedick and Beatrice apart. These two dorks start the play madly in love with each other, but their shared fear of horns and cuckoldry divides them. Beatrice is also repelled by Benedick’s attitude as a self-confessed “tyrant” to her sex, and patriarchal culture has convinced her that no marriage could ever be happy, and no man faithful. Both of them (but especially Benedick) must thus overcome and abandon patriarchal values and the culture of misogyny they are entrenched in. Again, the culture of Messina is the antagonist, not Don John.
Beatrice has the advantage of being resentful and rebellious towards patriarchal culture from the very beginning, and so it is Benedick’s conquering of his sexist attitude that becomes the axis on which the rest of the play turns. He starts off entrenched in a culture of toxic masculinity, but once he acknowledges his love for Beatrice, and after he sees Hero disgraced and left for dead, he becomes sickened by the views he once held. Beatrice flies into a rage at her cousin’s treatment, and in no uncertain terms rails against misogyny and the patriarchy and the culture that nearly killed Hero. She wishes she “were a man for his [Claudio’s] sake,” telling us that, were she a man, she would use her position of privilege and power to protect women rather than abuse them. Her next wish, “that I had any friend would be a man for my sake” is a challenge to Benedick to do what she, as a woman, cannot: defend her cousin with action, not words, and publicly oppose the culture of misogyny in Messina.
This makes her initial request, “Kill Claudio,” less a demand that Benedick murder his friend and more a plea that he break with the toxic culture of male camaraderie. And Benedick agrees. In the midst of a play saturated with jokes about women’s volubility and defined by the rejection of a supposedly unfaithful woman, he then makes the monumental decision to trust Beatrice. He listens to her when she grieves and finally asks her a single question: “Think you, in your soul that Count Claudio hath wronged Hero?” When she replies in the affirmative, her word is all the proof he needs to part with the prince and challenge his best friend.
When he meets with Don Pedro and Claudio, they are keen for him to validate their treatment of Hero with his witticisms, plainly desiring to hear the japes about cuckoldry he had trotted out at the start of the play. But with Hero almost “done to death by slanderous tongues,” Benedick knows tongues are as deadly as swords in Messina, and so leaves his wit in his scabbard. He challenges Claudio and informs the prince he intends to discontinue his company, officially cutting his ties with their little boys’ club.
Speaking to Margaret shortly after, Benedick claims he has “a most manly wit… it will not hurt a woman.” He no longer uses his tongue to scorn or denigrate women. Instead, he uses it to delight them, turning his efforts to poetry and song, and courting Beatrice with the jokes and witticisms he once reserved for his male friends. Shakespeare uses Beatrice to convince Benedick, and by extension the audience, of the shortcomings of masculine culture and shows us that true valour comes from men using their strength to protect women rather than hurt them: for this alone may Benedick call his wit “manly.”
Through their love, Benedick and Beatrice conquer the true villain of the play: misogyny. Don John, who is merely the agent, is instead undone by Dogberry and his idiot watchmen, who discover the plot and bring the truth to light. With all put right, the end of the play provides the denouement where Benedick, having proved his valour and cast off misogyny, is at last free to marry the woman he adores. He makes a speech where he mocks the old views about women and marriage he held, gaily advises the prince the marry, and tells Claudio “love my cousin,” the implication being that the only way Claudio and Hero will live happy is if Claudio follows Benedick’s example, throws off misogyny and loves and trusts his new wife as Benedick does Beatrice.
Much Ado About Nothing, quite simply, mocks the hypocrisy of patriarchal society at every turn. It questions why men should demand chastity in women when they display none themselves, and why women are thought of as sexually insatiable when experience generally showed the opposite. The play’s accompanying song Sigh No More is even about the unfaithfulness of men. The lyrics declare “Men were deceivers ever… to one thing constant never,” and the men of Much Ado tend to live up to this, being generally lusty and faithless while the women are constant and faithful. Shakespeare disproves common myths about female inconstancy by making Hero the blameless victim of men’s obsession with female chastity, a scapegoat onto whom all their repressed fears are projected. And Don John, the active agent of the culture of misogyny, is a bastard, living proof of men’s infidelity and unfaithfulness.
So yes, Don John is a terrible villain – but that’s precisely the point. His weak characterisation feeds neatly into the play’s subversive agenda. For what could this bitter, scheming man have accomplished had the culture of misogyny not predisposed Don Pedro and Claudio to suspect unfaithfulness? What power did he have over Benedick and Beatrice, and how did he serve as their antagonist?
Don John is not the true villain. Misogyny is. Hero’s shocking rejection and near-death proves how dangerous misogyny is, and how easily violent words lead to violent actions. Meanwhile, the witty, sparkling lovers journey together to overcome their internalised prejudices, and provide vivid proof of what happiness a marriage based on trust and true equality can bring.
Much Ado About Nothing is play about a battle of the sexes – and only once the two sides call a truce and join forces to overcome the real villain, misogyny, may the happy ending be achieved.
Why did we not talk about this when we studied Much Ado at university???
*standing ovation*
Reblogging because it’s still good
I feel like a lot of people think a one time incident of someone saying, “That didn’t happen” is the same as gaslighting because the liar may want you to doubt your perception or your ability to remember that event, but the key aspect of gaslighting is that it’s an ongoing campaign of emotional abuse.
It’s a very personal kind of emotional abuse that can’t be carried out by, say, a distant politician making false statements etc - you may draw comparisons with propaganda etc but it’s fundamentally a different thing.
Gaslighting is a way to gain power over someone close to you by routinely setting up situations where the truth is in question, then making them feel like they have to take your word over theirs. The lying part is almost incidental - the key aspect is that the abuser gets to define reality. If there’s a situation where your perceptions actually were mistaken, they’ll use that as fodder just as easily.
But since most people have pretty accurate perceptions/memory, abusers have to go out of their way to set up situations where the truth is in question, and then they’ll emotionally abuse you into accepting their version of events. Again and again and again, until it’s just easier to look to them for the truth instead of believing your own memory. Which is their entire goal.
That’s gaslighting. And it’s a lot more intense than just lying, or even habitual lying, even where the liar knows you know the truth and wants to convince you differently. (Think about a kid habitually lying to his teacher when the teacher knows the truth. The kid isn’t gaslighting the teacher - bc there’s no abusive power dynamic, he’s just lying.)
If there’s no pattern, if there’s no habit of emotionally abusing someone into accepting their story, if there’s no interpersonal relationship at all (like in propaganda), it may be evil, but it’s not specifically gaslighting.
The idea that sexual orientation should be decided based on what “feels right” is a… problematic one.
“The word bisexual makes me cringe at times, but saying I’m heterosexual or a lesbian feels inaccurate - regardless of who I am in a relationship with. So, cringing all the while, I use the label. Because of my relationship to the term feminist, I have learned that cringing is often a sign of unfinished political business: the label bi sounds bad because, at least in some ways, bisexuals are an unliberated, invisible, and disparaged social group.” — Look both ways : bisexual politics, Jennifer Baumgardner, 2007
By encouraging this idea that a word can “just not sound right” or “makes me cringe”, we encourage internalised biphobia, internalised homophobia, and other internalised prejudices.
Making new identity labels can be an elaborate system of avoiding using words based on internalised prejudices. Are people basing their sense of self on what makes them unique rather than what unifies them with a marginalised group they hold prejudices towards? Those prejudices are going unexamined.
I’ve found that people who avoid the word bisexual generally know nothing about it. They’ve never read a book on bisexuality, they don’t know anything about the history, about bisexual political activists, about existing organisations or conferences, about whether in reality bisexuals date nonbinary people or not (we do). People don’t reject the word based on educated opinion, although there are people online who do their best to create false definitions to discourage people from using it, which I suppose is in their best interest if they want to avoid analysing their own prejudices.
Back in the day, many thousands of years ago, when I was young, we had to work through our prejudices to be comfortable with who we were. I hated the word bisexual. I didn’t want to call myself that, I didn’t like how it sounded coming out of my mouth. But in the end I realised that was purely because my culture saw bisexuals as a joke, as cheaters, as nonexistent. I worked through that. But if I was coming out now, someone online would tell me that work was unnecessary and I should just pick a word which sounds nice to me.
