Woahhh he basically said everything I’m feeling in four mins.
I’ll be waiting for this guys revolution. I need it.
Who this
exactly
Oh man this guy has such a nice voice. I could listen to this guy talk forever, especially since he clearly knows what’s up.
As far as a system that could be better, check out this video. We’re already heading in that direction so all we need is some people like this young man to really make it happen. So you go, dude, you make that revolution happen, I am SO behind you on this.
This weekend I was told a story which, although I’m kind of ashamed to admit it, because holy shit is it ever obvious, is kind of blowing my mind.
A friend of a friend won a free consultation with Clinton Kelly of What Not To Wear, and she was very excited, because she has a plus-size body, and wanted some tips on how to make the most of her wardrobe in a fashion culture which deliberately puts her body at a disadvantage.
Her first question for him was this: how do celebrities make a plain white t-shirt and a pair of weekend jeans look chic? She always assumed it was because so many celebrities have, by nature or by design, very slender frames, and because they can afford very expensive clothing. But when she watched What Not To Wear, she noticed that women of all sizes ended up in cute clothes that really fit their bodies and looked great. She had tried to apply some guidelines from the show into her own wardrobe, but with only mixed success. So – what gives?
His answer was that everything you will ever see on a celebrity’s body, including their outfits when they’re out and about and they just get caught by a paparazzo, has been tailored, and the same goes for everything on What Not To Wear. Jeans, blazers, dresses – everything right down to plain t-shirts and camisoles. He pointed out that historically, up until the last few generations, the vast majority of people either made their own clothing or had their clothing made by tailors and seamstresses. You had your clothing made to accommodate the measurements of your individual body, and then you moved the fuck on. Nothing on the show or in People magazine is off the rack and unaltered. He said that what they do is ignore the actual size numbers on the tags, find something that fits an individual’s widest place, and then have it completely altered to fit. That’s how celebrities have jeans that magically fit them all over, and the rest of us chumps can’t ever find a pair that doesn’t gape here or ride up or slouch down or have about four yards of extra fabric here and there.
I knew that having dresses and blazers altered was probably something they were doing, but to me, having alterations done generally means having my jeans hemmed and then simply living with the fact that I will always be adjusting my clothing while I’m wearing it because I have curves from here to ya-ya, some things don’t fit right, and the world is just unfair that way. I didn’t think that having everything tailored was something that people did.
It’s so obvious, I can’t believe I didn’t know this. But no one ever told me. I was told about bikini season and dieting and targeting your “problem areas” and avoiding horizontal stripes. No one told me that Jennifer Aniston is out there wearing a bigger size of Ralph Lauren t-shirt and having it altered to fit her.
I sat there after I was told this story, and I really thought about how hard I have worked not to care about the number or the letter on the tag of my clothes, how hard I have tried to just love my body the way it is, and where I’ve succeeded and failed. I thought about all the times I’ve stood in a fitting room and stared up at the lights and bit my lip so hard it bled, just to keep myself from crying about how nothing fits the way it’s supposed to. No one told me that it wasn’t supposed to. I guess I just didn’t know. I was too busy thinking that I was the one that didn’t fit.
I thought about that, and about all the other girls and women out there whose proportions are “wrong,” who can’t find a good pair of work trousers, who can’t fill a sweater, who feel excluded and freakish and sad and frustrated because they have to go up a size, when really the size doesn’t mean anything and it never, ever did, and this is just another bullshit thing thrown in your path to make you feel shitty about yourself.
I thought about all of that, and then I thought that in elementary school, there should be a class for girls where they sit you down and tell you this stuff before you waste years of your life feeling like someone put you together wrong.
So, I have to take that and sit with it for a while. But in the meantime, I thought perhaps I should post this, because maybe my friend, her friend, and I are the only clueless people who did not realise this, but maybe we’re not. Maybe some of you have tried to embrace the arbitrary size you are, but still couldn’t find a cute pair of jeans, and didn’t know why.
This post is one of those things that I will reblog every time it appears on my dash. This is so important, and no one ever tells you about it.
I almost didn’t read this but then I did and I’m really glad that I did.
And like, I had fiber craft lessons all through my mandatory schooling (sewing, knitting, crochet etc). “Learn to modify a store-bought item to match your body” would fit in those classes just fine.
i think one of the biggest problems with tumblr is that it’s a blogging platform (personal) which people treat as a forum (public) and there is zero boundary between these two functions. as a result you get people readily and preparedly engaging in public debate with other people who are essentially talking to themselves.
it’s like sitting in your locked bedroom writing in your diary, only at any moment jeremy paxman can pop out and question you on international television
Okay, this is in incredibly petty nitpick, but: if you’re writing a fantasy setting with same-sex marriage, a same-sex noble or royal couple typically would not have titles of the same rank – e.g., a prince and a prince, or two queens.
It depends on which system of ranking you use, of course (there are several), but in most systems there’s actually a rule covering this scenario: in the event that a consort’s courtesy title being of the same rank as their spouse’s would potentially create confusion over who holds the title by right and who by courtesy, the consort instead receives the next-highest title on the ladder.
So the husband of a prince would be a duke; the wife of a queen, a princess; and so forth.
(You actually see this rule in practice in the United Kingdom, albeit not in the context of a same-sex marriage; the Queen’s husband is styled a prince because if he were a king, folks might get confused about which of them was the reigning monarch.)
The only common situation where you’d expect to see, for example, two queens in the same marriage is if the reigning monarchs of two different realms married each other – and even then, you’d more likely end up with a complicated arrangement where each party is technically a princess of the other’s realm in addition to being queen of her own.
You’ve gotta keep it nice and unambiguous who’s actually in charge!
Okay, I’ve received a whole lot of asks about this post, so I’m going to cover all of the responses in one go:
1. The system described above is, admittedly, merely one of the most common. Other historically popular alternatives include:
The consort’s courtesy title is of the same rank as their spouse’s, with “-consort” appended to it: prince and prince-consort, queen and queen-consort, etc. This is how, e.g., present-day Monaco does it.
The consort is simply styled Lord or Lady So-and-so, and receives no specific title. I can’t think of any country that still does it this way, off the top of my head, but historically it was a thing.
(Naturally, your setting needn’t adhere to any of these, but it would be highly irregular for it to lack some mechanism for clarifying the chain of command.)
2. The reason why the consort of a prince is historically a princess even though those titles are the same rank is basically sexism. This can go a couple of ways:
In many realms, there was no such thing as being a princess by right; the daughter of a monarch would be styled Lady So-and-so and receive no specific title, so the only way to be a princess was to marry a prince.
In realms where women could hold titles by right, typically a masculine title was informally presumed to outrank its feminine counterpart. So, e.g., kings outrank queens, princes outrank princesses, etc.
In either case, no ambiguity exists.
(Interestingly, this suggests that in a more egalitarian setting where masculine titles are not presumed to outrank their feminine counterparts, or vice versa, you’d need to explicitly disambiguate rankings even outside the context of same-sex marriages. Food for thought!)
3. It would also be possible to have two kings or two queens in the same marriage without multiple realms being involved in the case of a true co-monarchy. However, true co-monarchies are highly irregular and, from a political standpoint, immensely complicated affairs. If you’re planning on writing one of those, be prepared to do your research!
4. The next rank down from “countess” is either “viscountess” or “baroness”, depending on which peerage system you’re using.
(Yes, that last one actually came up multiple times. Apparently there are a lot of stories about gay countesses out there!)
To quote Sense8 “Science is another language we use to talk about the same miracles faith talks about.”
I actually see a lot of people who express concern over becoming religious because they “don’t want to give up science” and that’s really sad to me. I think my favorite post I’ve ever seen was someone explaining the science behind fairy rings and how rings of mushrooms will grow in nutrient dense soil–like where trees once stood. They apologized for “ruining” the post talking about fairy circles, and someone responded by saying basically, “But doesn’t that mean fairy rings are basically tree graves? Like, if they mark where the tree had been when it lived, then it’s like a tree grave, and you wouldn’t walk on a human grave, so this actually makes it cooler!”
Yes, I believe in the theoi. I believe they exist and are real. I believe that stories of them moving mountains and pulling the sun in a chariot are more poetic metaphors to describe the natural occurrences of our world, than literal occurrences. In my mind, yes, Helios is responsible for the movement of the sun. We know the science for why the sun rises and sets; so that means (for me) that the scientific phenomena that results in the sun appearing to move across the sky is the work of Helios. Sure, it’s not a chariot in a literal sense, but the poetry of calling it a chariot sounds awfully nice. Science, poetry, and religion are not mutually exclusive.
As our understanding of the universe grows and changes, I think it’s important to let our understanding of religion grow. When we look at religious writings from hundreds or thousands of years ago, we’re looking at how people understood and explained the world at that time too. Look at sickness! The ancient Greeks thought that miasma caused sickness. Is miasma related to sickness? Sure, but I think it’s more the other way around. Sickness generates miasma in my opinion and experience. Can miasma generate sickness? Sure. You ever worry yourself sick? Worry and stress (things related to miasma) can lower your immune system, which can make it easier for you to get sick. We know germs cause illness, there’s no if-ands-or buts about it. But that doesn’t mean I have to dismiss the idea of miasma in order to acknowledge that, or that I have to disbelieve in germs in order to accept miasma. Knowing that actions which generate miasma have a documentable affect on my health only serves (in my mind) to enforce the idea that miasma should be cleaned and avoided. The science strengthens my religious opinion here.
I don’t know how to say it more than this, but I will say it as many times as I need to. Religion and science are not diametrically opposed. You never need to give up one in order to accept the other.
I agree. It’s like people who think they’re explaining away mystical experience by pointing to elevated temporal lobe activity and going, well, it’s “just” neurobiological. Why is it this huge big surprising gotcha that a real mental experience might leave real observable physical traces behind? The word “just” is a red flag for questionable premises and assumptions and category structures.
Yes.
The literal does not exclude the metaphorical.
Science only opposes religious beliefs which cling to literalism and ignore the complex and multi-faceted nature of truth. For instance, the notion that the Earth is literally 6′000 years old, or was literally carved out of the body of an ice giant. Ignoring the potency of mythic and emotional truth, or meta-truth.
And the idea that a spiritual phenomenon can be described in scientific terms invalidates the spiritual perspective on said phenomenon, can be filed away with the notion that because we can describe the release of oxytocin the experience of love is not “real”.
Filed also with the concept of “consensus reality” as anything more meaningful than a regression to the mean. [Pardon the pun.]
u kno how when u were a kid u could ride in the car and be totally unaware of anything goin on around the car and just be chill
but then u took driver’s ed and u started learning all the rules and now even if ur just in the passenger seat u can’t help noticing all the shitty things ppl do on the road?
I keep seeing stuff about Lord of the Flies going around
Obviously, the individual experiences of the people making the posts – re: teachers, lessons, the way they were forced to study the book – aren’t up for debate
but like, I feel that people might not have the whole story here and as someone who knows far too much about literature, I wanted to talk about it a little
Sir William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in response to an earlier novel called The Coral Island. In The Coral Island, a small group of upper-class British boys from a boarding school get stranded on an island and have an absolutely wonderful time. They look back on it as a fond adventure, where they had a little vacation, invented things, and generally made their well-bred high society English parents proud.
Sir William Golding read that novel and was disgusted by the way that R. M. Ballantyne used the plot as a huge essay on the superior intellect and higher morality of English folk (read: white people). The boys in The Coral Island eventually have to seek the aid of Christian missionaries (who are there to convert the local Polynesian populace) to save them from the natives who are written as raping pillaging amoral cannibals.
Sir William Golding set out to write a more realistic novel, by the way, using the same names for his main characters as Ballantyne did (although Golding’s characters are slightly younger). So, all the posts about Lord of the Flies showing the “human condition” insofar as it pertains to young middle-class British boys who grew up in a boarding house in the middle of the Cold War are correct. But I get the feeling that most people don’t realize that was the point of the novel.
Lord of the Flies was meant as a huge “fuck you” to the ingrained belief that English people are the most noble and wise of all people and thus incapable of descending into savagery. I doubt it was ever meant to be a sweeping generalized metaphor for the universal savage nature of humanity, and shame on the teachers who force that interpretation on their students.
I wish that the information in this post were told to students reading Lord of the Flies more often, considering that this context is necessary for understanding the book.
I used to study Golding and I’m so happy to see a post about this! Basically all the good Golding scholars agree that Lord of the Flies is intended as a condemnation specifically of western positivism and superiority, not a condemnation of human nature. Golding believed that good societies were possible, but that he was not living in one. (Relevant side facts for the curious: Golding was a sailor and teacher who based some of the boys’ behavior on the behaviors of his male students and fellow sailors. He also drew on Ancient Greco-Roman mythology and literature, which is both rife with examples of horrific, inhumane behavior AND considered the foundation of western society.) When white/western/imperialist/etc. people read Golding’s books and decide he means all societies are evil, it shows that they are incapable of not conceiving of themselves as the best society – “If he believes OUR society is evil, he must think ALL societies are evil, because of course we’re the BEST society, and the others must be worse than ours” even though the other societies are not seen in most of his books and may be doing just fine.
As a sidenote, Golding was a really interesting literary figure in that he would actually publicly argue with critics who gave what he thought were unacceptably wrong interpretations of his novels. He refused to agree that death of the author had limitless application. So there are actually quotes from Golding about how most people read Lord of the Flies (and some of his other books) wrong and it’s pissing him off/making him sad and please just stop already.
… aaahaa. Lord of the Flies was a Darker And Edgier AU spitefic.
I heartily approve of this. good on you, Sir Golding.
queerhomestuck 