#discourse history

[the-mad-prince-of-denmark]

A Letter to Heterosexuals by Jenifer Camper

[dedusmuln]

yeah you support trans people but are you normal about trans men who choose to get pregnant

[bixels]

I'm not explaining why re-imagining characters as POC is not the same as white-washing, here of all places should fucking understand.

[infiniteglitterfall]

I do realize this is a real niche post but I cannot tell you how many damn times over the past 10 months I've seen gentiles tell Jews some version of, "Your own holy book SAYS God doesn't want you to have a country yet!"

And it's such an incredibly blatant and weirdly specific tell that they're not part of something that grew from progressive grassroots, but something based on right-wing astroturfing.

1. Staying in your own lane is a pretty huge progressive principle.

Telling people in another group that their deity said they couldn't do X is, I think, as far as you can get from your own lane.

2. It's also very clearly Not In Your Own Lane because I've never seen anyone actually be able to EITHER quote the passage they're thinking of, OR cite where it is.

It's purely, "I saw somebody else say this, and it seemed like it would make me win the debate I wasn't invited to."

3. It betrays a complete ignorance of Jewish culture and history.

Seriously? You don't know what you're referencing, its context, or even what it specifically says, but you're... coming to a community that reads and often discusses the entire Torah together each year, at weekly services... who have massive books holding generations of debate about it that it takes 7 years to read, at one page per day....

And saying, "YOUR book told you not to!"

I've been to services where we discussed just one word from the reading the whole time. The etymology. The connotations. The use of it in this passage versus in other passages.

And then there is the famous saying, "Ask two Jews, get three opinions." There is a culture of questioning and discussion and debate throughout Judaism.

You think maybe, in the decades and decades of public discussion about whether to buy land in Eretz Yisrael and move back there; whether it should keep being an individual thing, or keep shifting to intentional community projects; what the risks were; whether it should really be in Argentina or Canada or someplace instead; how this would be received by the Jews and gentiles already there, how to respect their boundaries, how to work with them before and during; and whether ending up with a fuckton of Jews in one place might not be exactly as dangerous for them as it had always been everywhere else....

You think NOBODY brought up anything scriptural? Nobody looked through the Torah, the Nevi'im, the Ketuvim, or the Talmud for any thoughts about any of this?? It took 200 years and some rando in the comments to blow everyone's minds???

4. It relies on an unspoken assumption that people can and should take very literal readings of religious texts and use them to control others.

And a sense of ownership and power over those texts, even without any accompanying knowledge about what they say.

It's kind of a supercessionist know-it-all vibe. It reads like, "I know what you should be doing. Because even if I'm not personally part of a fundamentalist branch of a related religion, the culture I'm rooted in is."

Bonus version I found when I was looking for an example. NOBODY should do this:

There are a lot of people who pull weird historical claims like "It SAYS Abraham came from Chaldea! That's Iraq!"

Like, first of all, a group is indigenous to a land if it arose as a people and culture there, before (not because of) colonization.

People aren't spontaneously spawning in groups, like "Boom! A new indigenous people just spawned!!"

People come from places. They go places. Sometimes, they gel as a new community and culture. Sometimes, they bop around for a while and eventually assimilate into another group.

Second: THE TORAH IS NOT A HISTORY TEXTBOOK OMFG.

It's an oral history, largely written centuries after the fact.

There is a TON of historical and archaeological research on when and where the Jewish culture originated, how it developed over time, etc. It's extremely well-established.

Nobody has to try to pull what they remember from Sunday school for this argument.

[whereserpentswalk]

Just saw a "feminist" video essay (by someone who just happens to only talk about feminism in relation to cishet white able bodied women) say that the Hays Code was good for women because it "prevented them from sexualizing women by preventing onscreen depictions of sex". Never before has a video said something that made me vocalize my disgust of it's takes, but this did it.

I didn't think I would have to say this but if you defend the Hays code you are horrible and not in any way progressive. And if you don't know what it is please look it up because it's probably the most important piece of history when it comes to all media analysis in the western world.

[marzipanandminutiae]

"why do you keep bringing up the corset discourse?"

I don't. everyone else does

I am not joking when I say, as a museum worker specializing in 19th-century social history, that the general public brings up corsets in like 75% of conversations about fashion, women, daily life, and a host of other semi-related topics in this particular time period

want to talk about a dress? "wow, look how tiny it is! you'd have to lace down so tightly!" and now you're down the rabbit hole (whether the dress is actually tiny or not- survivorship bias is real, but so are optical illusions)

want to talk about a Romanesque couch? "for women to faint on, right? god, those horrible corsets!" and now you have to address that

a flight of stairs? "how could women walk up these in a corset?"

you wear something even vaguely historical to work? "oh, I love those dresses, but think of the corsets!"

undergarments or clothing in a completely different time period? "that's as bad as corsets" OR "at least it's not corsets!"

I got into a corset argument today on a Reddit post about high heels in the 1950s. someone just...brought them up unprompted. because EVERYONE loves dunking on corsets every chance they get, because the media has pushed All Corsets Are Awful and All Women Tightlaced If They Wore Corsets Whatsoever so hard

I would LOVE to have a conversation about 19th-century women's clothing with just a casual "so over your corset, you'd first put on-" and no more commentary on it than that. but I never get to

[weird-machine]

One of the funniest things about communism is that it rests on a premise that's basically like, "Hey, once everybody voluntarily gives up a specific set of strategies and advantages, everything will be wonderful. So, once we figure out how to coerce everybody into voluntarily giving those up, we'll be set."

[enlitment]

I don't want to sound like an apologist for anything but I feel like it should be acknowledged that the question of morality in different periods of history is complex and not easy to answer.

If you do say things like 'marrying an underaged person was totally okay back in the 1700s so what they did was totally fine actually' it definitely does ring alarm bells (as it should!)

That is not the exactly the same thing as saying 'considering the historical context of the era this person lived in, their behaviour would have likely not been considered too far out of the ordinary'. And I believe you can probably replace this with people's views of slavery or domestic violence and get to a pretty similar thing.

Is it dark and depressing? Sure. It's also, to the best of my knowledge, often fairly accurate.

I mean, I would have to do an actual research on this particular question to make any more definite statements. But just look at Ancient Greece's societal norms concerning relationships. That is definitely a challenge any historian needs to grapple with, but saying that every other man living at that time was a monster just isn't very useful, and doesn't feel like great academic work either.

Sometimes you would need to take a step back and try to look at these issues with more of a dispassionate curiosity to try and understand them. (As with Ancient Greece - what role did these relationships serve? How did they influence Greek culture? The structure of Greek society? etc.) That doesn't mean you renounce your own sense of right and wrong.

I feel like the best approach would be to acknowledge your modern perspective and clearly mark it in the text (something like 'by our modern standards, this would of course be seen as...' or even focus on writing articles from the perspective of the affected/opressed). But then also write about the way such behaviour would have been viewed in the time it took place. This does not, in my opinion, excuse the behaviour - it just helps to put it in the necessary context.

The bonus of this approach is that it allows the historian to highlight when someone's behaviour is genuinely considered morally reprehensible even by the standards of the time (something like 'even in a misogynistic society, his treatment of women was marked as particularly reprehensible' -> well better than that but it's also midnight, I'm tired and I'm sure you get my point).

There is also the possibility that some behaviour that is considered totally okay today will be seen as completely reprehensible by someone reporting on it hundreds of years from now. Something to keep in mind as a historian.

TL;DR definitely don't want to excuse any problematic behaviour but I think we should treat the question of moral norms in history as the complex and difficult issue it is, rather than jumping to conclusions

(also saying that someone's opinion is automatically unworthy because they haven't taken history classes at a university level just feels kind of elitist. Sure, an understanding of historiography and a critical approach are incredibly important, but it is not impossible to get at least the basic idea just from your own reading. And in any case, it is better to explain it rather than to dismiss the person's opinion altogether.)

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

Wei Wuxian eats a watermelon. Yep!

[a-frog-in-a-bog]

I keep seeing posts about how damaging ace discourse was to aces and while I’m glad we’re talking about tumblr’s bullying problem I think some of you have selective amnesia bc the war was DEFINITELY being fought from both sides. For every post calling asexuals cringe or lonely turbo virgins there was at least one reply or comment or post saying shit like “ok have fun dying of aids” or “I’m a bi ace which is exactly the same as being bisexual except I’m not a slut” or “ace culture is not having to worry about spreading STDs”.

Nearly every post made by a trans woman discussing transphobia was derailed by someone making it about asexuality instead (unfortunately this is still common on tumblr) and posts about gay sex or attraction were flooded with comments about those nasty dirty allos. Lesbians who expressed frustration about not being able to talk about their sexual attraction to women without aces “fixing” their posts to make them pure and wholesome were characterized as mean dykes and aphobic. And the shit that people posted after the pulse shooting was thinly veiled homophobia— do you know how many posts I saw that were along the lines of “well maybe if you gays were nicer to aces we’d donate blood” or “ace culture is hearing about the pulse shooting and wondering who would want to go dancing at a sweaty club when you could be home reading”.

And idk if people realize this but kink at pride discourse was born from ace discourse. The sheer amount of posts that were like “stop sucking face at pride I’m ace and it grosses me out get a room” or “pride is supposed to be a safe space for aces too nobody cares that you like to get tied up and fucked in the ass” or “as an aroace it makes me uncomfortable to see people wear nothing but leather harnesses stop making pride sexual”.

We absolutely should be calling out the people who posted graphic porn in the ace tag or harassed aces by calling them broken and unloveable bc that’s fucking horrendous and unacceptable but don’t act like every asexual on tumblr was an innocent smol bean posting garlic bread memes and minding their business bc the shit thrown at lgbt people in the name of ace discourse was awful and damaging to see, especially as a teen coming to terms with my sexuality

[myfandomrealitea]

okay, so- this is coming from someone who really hasn't engaged in fandom discourse, especially regarding shipping and such. I dearly hope this doesn't come across as bait or troll, I'm genuinely curious and want to learn. apologies for the possibly-dumb question, but I really just need to ask-

what is proshipping? and what are 'antis'?

you know how it is, when you ask around you always get a biased answer one way or another. "proshippers are pedos" "proshippers all condone incest" "proship Bad and if you interact You Are Bad" (i think these are 'anti' points of view? am i using that term right? that's the rhetoric ive mainly heard). but despite all of that, i don't know if ive ever actually gotten a straight answer as to just.. what it factually is. because it doesn't feel like the sort of thing that you can boil down to insults or accusations or whatnot. it's all just very confusing to me, especially because i come from a place that essentially just told me to avoid like the plague and never look back. sorry, this became a bit of a ramble, lol. thank you so much in advance, i hope i'm not being a bother or insulting with this ^^;

The modern term; 'proship' (s.a; 'proshipping' and 'profiction') is an evolution of an earlier fandom acronym known as: 'SALS.'

Ship And Let Ship

SALS was one of the earliest fandom adoptions and interpretations of the concept of not bullying others for what they shipped or their fandom interests, and not trying to control or dictate what was "allowed" to be shipped or enjoyed. The most notable origin of SALS was during the early years of accessible fandom via Star Trek, and the present homophobia and misogyny in a largely male-dominated community.

As woman became more involved in fandom spaces, the presence of 'other' ships and pairings began to increase. M/M, F/F that wasn't purely for sexual gratification, and M/O and F/O (where 'O' is Other) pairings were popular amongst women, much as they still are today.

Not only did the presence of women in a "male space" receive a not insignificantly negative reaction, so too did them filling the fandom space with their shipping content. Now; sexism and misogyny and homophobia were not entirely to blame. Again as is still very much present today, people simply Did Not Like Certain Ships or Characters. And as they still do today, they'd spread hate about them and to the people who did enjoy them.

Thus: the birth of SALS.

(In other words: I like what I like and it has fuck all to do with you. Shut up and move on.)

Back then, SALS was mostly contained to just that. Ships and characters. Since back in that era 'taboo topics' and 'sexual content' were still pretty covert, people weren't exactly arguing the merits of incest in public forums and at conventions.

However, as all things do, the internet evolved. Society evolved. Media evolved. And so too did 'SALS' evolve in keeping with the new culture and subjects present in fandom spaces.

Suddenly it wasn't just ships and characters to be advocated for. It was themes. Subjects. Kinks. Plots. The more things people found to enjoy, so too did the more things people found to hate.

'Proship' is actually grammatically pro-ship. As in; in support of shipping. This is why I always state that the modern conceptions of proshipping would more accurately be coined profiction. It is no longer just about ships, but fiction as a whole.

However; the core value and sole inherent point of being proship, SALS, profiction and so forth remains exactly the same:

[I/We] believe you have no right to harm others over the [ship/content] they create or consume and [I/we] do not have the right to dictate what is or is not allowed in fandom spaces.

That's it. Don't harass people for what they enjoy fictionally. Don't try to force them into not enjoying or being able to enjoy it.

Of course, the modern adaption varies wildly in terms of 'additional values' thanks to the evolution of the term and what it can encompass. However, there is certainly no obligation to:

Create or consume content you are uncomfortable with.

Create or consume content regarded as 'taboo' or 'triggering.' Such as incest.

Be involved with any aforementioned content beyond turning a blind eye if its not your thing.

Inherently, anyone who says they're 'neutral' on the matter but firmly believes in minding their own business is just a proshipper refusing to use the label if you're taking the term solely at its core value.

In terms of 'antis' they're just the antithesis of the above. Antis are people who generally believe that fiction is irrevocably tied in with who you are, what you believe/condone, and that real-life limitations and values should also apply to fiction.

Although, its is heavy debated and it wildly varies per individual to the degree this is taken.

(E.g: some 'antis' believe you should only write rape fic if you are a victim using it as catharsis or education. Other 'antis' believe there's absolutely no excuse or reason to write rape fic at all.)

Antis typically believe that enjoyment or being invested in content which is regarded as harmful or illegal in real life is morally unsound and reflects that you're a bad or morally unsound person.

Although I disagree, I can honestly say in some aspects I do understand this reasoning. I don't agree, but I do understand why people may come to that conclusion.

As with proshippers, antis vary from people who simply ignore and block content they don't agree with to radicals.

'Anti' is again a prefix. Although modern adoption of the term uses it as a singular signifier, it would grammatically be anti-[fandom], anti-[character], ect. As was commonly used in the past.

The rhetoric that all proshippers are pedophiles or support incest is common-spread and effective 'anti' propaganda. Similar to how so many people believe 'proship' inherently signifies that you must create and/or consume taboo or darker content.

It doesn't.

¹ Proship may also be accurately termed as simply: 'anti-harassment.' ² Its important to note the 'definition' of these terms may vary wildly depending on the individual. However, detailed above is the most historical use and evolution of the terms and their definitions.

[repost-this-image]

I just want to say it again for the teens out there:

The “groomer” rhetoric is not new.

I remember when all LGBT people were generally considered to be pedophiles. By most other people. I was y’all’s age.

When my parents were teens, two men holding hands in public could be arrested just for that, because it was “lewd and lascivious behavior.” Having gay sex was a crime. Dressing as the “wrong” gender was a crime. These things were considered pornographic by nature.

Leather and kink were featured in the first Prides, to flout society’s rules. To say, we’re here, we’re queer, and you cannot destroy us.

Again, until I was about 10 years old, there were still sodomy laws on the books in the United States.

And when I was a teenager, when Matthew Shepard was murdered (look it up, but be warned, it is gruesome), most adults still believed that gay men were pedophiles by nature.

The far right doesn’t just hate us. They want to go back to the days when children did not know about us, when adults could go for years without knowingly encountering a queer person.

They want every last one of us dead or in prison. Every single LGBT person in existence. Because to them, saying “some kids have two mommies or two daddies” is pornography. To them, saying “I’m not the gender I was assigned at birth” is pornography. You may as well be giving them a play-by-play of How To Have Anal Sex With Another Dude.

So when you act like the leather pride flag “isn’t a real pride flag,” when you say “no kink at Pride,” you are telling the far-right: “You were right. We are a bunch of filthy degenerate horndogs who shouldn’t exist in front of children.” You are playing directly into their hands.

Fuck that. I don’t need other queer folks doing our oppressors’ work for us.

If you are not for the LGBT community, warts and all, “freaks” and all, then you are against us.

[luckthebard]

It’s interesting that the cast being in a really down place after losing a party member in C2 and then Matt bringing their fave NPC from C1 to cheer them up and the cast going wild for it (C2E80) was received as a huge positive by the fandom

While

The cast being in a really down place after losing a part member in C3 and then Matt bringing in their fave NPC from C2 to cheer them up and the cast going wild for it (C3E94) was received as a weird divisive moment by the fandom because a minority of people think that NPC is a real person trying to ruin their enjoyment of the show 🤷🏻‍♀️

[infiniteglitterfall]

I guess this might be why the UK seemed to go so antisemitic so quickly

I'm researching the 1947 pogroms in the UK. (Actually, I'm researching all the pogroms and massacres of Jews in the past 200 years. Which today led me to discover that there were pogroms in the UK in 1947.)

From an article on "The Postwar Revival of British Fascism," all emphasis mine:

Given the rising antisemitism and widespread ignorance about Zionism [in the UK in 1947], fascists were easily able to conflate Zionist paramilitary attacks with Judaism in their speeches, meaning British Jews came to be seen as complicit in violence in Palestine.

Bertrand Duke Pile, a key member of Hamm’s League, informed a cheering crowd that “the Jews have no right to Palestine and the Jews have no right to the power which they hold in this country of ours.” Denouncing Zionism as a way to introduce a wider domestic antisemitic stance was common to many speakers at fascist events and rallies. Fascists hid their ideology and ideological antisemitism behind the rhetorical facade of preaching against paramilitary violence in Palestine.

One of the league’s speakers called for retribution against “the Jews” for the death of British soldiers in Palestine. This was, he told his audience, hardly an antisemitic expression. “Is it antisemitism to denounce the murderers of your own flesh and blood in Palestine?” he asked his audience. Many audience members, fascist or not, may well have felt the speaker had a point. ...[The photo of two British sergeants hanged by the Irgun in retaliation for the Brits hanging three of their members] promptly made numerous appearances at fascist meetings, often attached to the speaker’s platform. In at least one meeting, several British soldiers on leave from serving in Palestine attended Hamm’s speech, giving further legitimacy to his remarks. And with soldiers and policemen in Palestine showing increasing signs of overt antisemitism as a result of their experiences, the director of public prosecutions warned that the fascists might receive a steady stream of new recruits.

MI5, the U.K. domestic security service, noted with some alarm that “as a general rule, the crowd is now sympathetic and even spontaneously enthusiastic.” Opposition, it was noted in the same Home Office Bulletin of 1947, “is only met when there is an organized group of Jews or Communists in the audience.”

The major opposition came from the 43 Group, formed by the British-Jewish ex-paratrooper Gerry Flamberg and his friends in September 1946 to fight the fascists using the only language they felt fascists understood — violence. The group disrupted fascist meetings for two purposes: to get them shut down by the police for disorder, and to discourage attendance in the future by doling out beatings with fists and blunt instruments. By the summer of 1947, the group had around 500 active members who took part in such activities. Among these was a young hairdresser by the name of Vidal Sassoon, who would often turn up armed with his hairdressing scissors.

The 43 Group had considerable success with these actions, but public anger was spreading faster than they could counter the hate that accompanied it. The deaths of Martin and Paice had touched a nerve with the populace. On Aug. 1, 1947, the beginning of the bank holiday weekend and two days after the deaths of the sergeants, anti-Jewish rioting began in Liverpool. The violence lasted for five days. Across the country, the scene was repeated: London, Manchester, Hull, Brighton and Glasgow all saw widespread violence. Isolated instances were also recorded in Plymouth, Birmingham, Cardiff, Swansea, Newcastle and Davenport. Elsewhere, antisemitic graffiti and threatening phone calls to Jewish places of worship stood in for physical violence. Jewish-owned shops had their windows smashed, Jewish homes were targeted, an attempt was made to burn down Liverpool Crown Street Synagogue while a wooden synagogue in Glasgow was set alight. In a handful of cases, individuals were personally intimidated or assaulted. A Jewish man was threatened with a pistol in Northampton and an empty mine was placed in a Jewish-owned tailor shop in Davenport.

And an important addendum:

I've read a whole bunch of articles about the pogroms in Liverpool, Manchester, Salford, Eccles, Glasgow, etc.

Not one of them has mentioned that the Irgun, though clearly a terrorist group, was formed in response to 18 years of openly antisemitic terrorism, including multiple incredibly violent massacres. Or that it consistently acted in response to the murders of Jewish civilians, not on the offensive. Or that at this point, militant Arab Nationalist groups with volunteers and arms from the Arab League countries had been attacking Jewish and mixed Arab-Jewish neighborhoods for months.

I just think the "Jewish militants had been attacking the British occupiers" angle is incredibly Anglocentric.

Yeah, they were attacking the British occupiers. But also, that's barely the tip of the iceberg.

Everyone involved hated the Brits at this point. If only al-Husseini and his ilk had hated the Brits more than they hated the Jews, Britain could at least have united them by giving them a common enemy.

[owoatmilk]

if I had the privilige of being part of a messy friend group in a dark academia story, I would simply live my best life and not pick fights and also not commit murder.

I'd drink tea and wear sweaters and read books and hang out in expensive country houses and be unproblematic. sorry but I'm built different. richard could never be me.

[marzipanandminutiae]

most clothing historians: hey so corsets weren't actually the unilateral torture devices they get portrayed as in fiction. most women wore them in a comfortable, or at least tolerable, manner on an everyday basis and it's kind of messed up that we're ignoring their lived experiences to promote a false narrative

too many people online: UM BUT THEY WEREN'T ALL GOOD THEY WEREN'T PERFECT AND WONDERFUL FOREVER. THAT'S DEFINITELY WHAT YOU JUST SAID. YOU LOVE CORSETS SO SO MUCH AND THINK THEY COULD NEVER BE HARMFUL AND I JUST THINK IT'S IMPORTANT TO KEEP IN MIND THAT THEY WERE ACTUALLY TORTURE DEVICES SOMETIMES. WE'RE LOSING SIGHT OF THAT. WE NEED TO REMEMBER THAT THEY WERE BAD SOMETIMES. AND UNCOMFORTABLE. AND PATRIARCHAL. DON'T FORGET THAT!!! DID YOU FORGET IT? I WILL REMIND YOU SINCE YOU SEEM TO WORSHIP CORSETS OR SOMETHING

Edit: while I appreciate people weighing in on their corset thoughts in the notes, this isn’t really meant to be about whether corsets are good or bad, or comfortable or not. It’s about people inventing this mostly-strawman character of “historical costumer who thinks corsets are the best thing ever with no nuance“ and responding to it