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#Tell you that you're a horrible person while you are living in a disturbingly similar situation
backpackingspace · 5 days
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I am once again thinking about how odysseus who witnessed the horrors that the captured women went through (one of his main duties in the iliad was taking the women back home and making sure they were as comfortable as possible and safe because he was the only one trusted not to violate them further due to his devotion to penelope. And in the odyssey part of the reason circe sent him to the underworld was so that he'd have to listen to all these women's stories (before he could talk to the prophet) ). Who was one of the few that saw women as people and respected their space and opinions. And was then put in those exact same situations. I don't have the motivation right now to do a full literary analysis of this (I'll site the sources too) but oh man one day I'm going to write a full essay on this.
#The odyssey#iliad#Odysseus#Tw: rape#Tw: sex slaves#Tw: camp slaves#Tw: That one time Calypso kept odysseus as a sex slave for 7 years#circe#Something about the inherent trauma of witnessing how your friends treat women#Watching them keep sex slaves#Then having to bring these girls home hearing about their stories seeing the aftermath#Then living in a situation where you have to let a powerful witch use you as she pleases half in payment for lives/food/medicine#Half because she has the equivalent of a gun to your best friends head and if you don't keep her happy then youre all dead#And then that witch sends you on a quest to the underworld where granted you'll benefit too but first#You have to listen to every single captured women from the Trojan war that you didn't Shepard home tell you their stories#Tell you that you're a horrible person while you are living in a disturbingly similar situation#And then later finding yourself trapped as a sex slave for seven years to an immortal nymph#And then being labeled as a horrible cheater for the rest of history#And none of this well historically everybody cheated or it's up to interpretation bullshit#Because it fucking isn't and granted a lot of abridged versions skip this shit#But if you read the full original stories and still think odysseus cheated then you just have an issue with men being victims#Or weren't paying attention i guess#Where's that meme where's it like the text was up to interpretation cut to the text where it very bluntly states what's happening#And I'm not saying odysseus was a good person or that he didn't have slaves because he did. And he wasnt#But first off nobody deserves to suffer that violation#Second they weren't sex slaves they were all nurses/maids/spys and I'm not getting into the ancient culture slavery issues rn#Third there's a lot you can pick to hate odysseus for but cheating/disrespecting women wasn't one of them#They literally invented a new word to describe his and penelopes love and it means to be so in love that you think the exact same way#Also forcing this narrative of odysseus cheating and penelope leaving to be a single girl boss is#Just the fake feminist mindset that stay at home moms are weak and wrong and live awful lives
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