#i don’t dress for women

[badgalazzie]

„i don’t dress for women” MF WHAT IS IT THEN???

[michaelaswift13]

Cincy N2

[erotetica]

Akasha, still mortal. Designing her was challenging given the lack of extant reference, but this is what I came up with:

Apparently she was turned in 4000 bce, so I based my research in the Uruk Period of Mesopotamia (which was named for the Sumerian city of Uruk, now Iraq, where Rice said Akasha is from). In 4000, Kaunakes we’re not yet in style for Sumerians, instead wearing more straight-fitting kilts/net-dresses. I believe those also conformed to the rule of higher status =ankle length, lower class = knee length, so that’s what I did

On the fabric color—I read a paper that posited the ‘net’ of the net dress shown on the cylinder seal linked above/attached below, was actually a dyed pattern. The cylinder seal is dated @ ~3000 bce, BUT there is evidence of ochre-dyed cloth from Çatalhöyük, in Anatolia, from at least 5700 bce, so I think fabric dyeing in a less complicated pattern sounds feasible for 4000 bce.

Given 4000 was also the Chalcolithic Age/Copper Age in Mesopotamia, I wanted to include something copper. While I couldn’t find extant copper jewelry-jewelry, I did find these pins, and iirc Sumerian wrap-clothing was held with pins anyway

Re: necklaces, Akasha’s is based on this one.

I went with Iraqi-Lebanese actress Zahraa Ghandour as (partial) facial reference

Some assorted refs I don’t think are included in the links:

[dozydawn]

Needlepoint embroidery (found works made from hobby kits, unpicked and reworked) by Matt Smith.

[black-queen-rising]

The people taking this dialogue as a legitimate “character flaw” or literally just at face value at all and not as a continuation of the blatant disrespect the writers have not just towards Rhaenyra as the heir of twenty years, but towards anything that could even vaguely be construed as “women’s work”, is the most perfect encapsulation of just how entrenched misogyny is into the very heart of our pop culture and how the popularization of fantasy has managed to worsen our societal view of soft power by painting it as not only weak, but frivolously feminine, unimportant, and a waste of time.

Since the beginning of the show the writers have almost exclusively portrayed Rhaenyra as disinterested if not opposed to her role as heir, as a politician, and a woman in power broadly all against the original canon and all glaringly, not to make her look worse or better or likable or incompetent (they do all those things, almost every episode, with however they need her to affect the plot in that given moment because they’re incapable of having the characters drive it organically) because it’s not truly about her at all. It’s simply because they cannot fathom a story where a woman is politically adept and as a result either 1. evil or 2. boring, and that is fundamentally because once again they are so biased and against portraying anything that could even vaguely be construed as women’s work or at all “feminine-coded” in an even neutral-but-interesting way they do for (stereotypically) masculine-coded activities like sword fighting, horse back riding, dragon riding, hunting, archery, not to mention just the concept of the political conversations that drive these stories, let alone an actually positive way.

They have taken a story that at its core was always an indictment of structural misogyny and how it will literally cause societies to tear themselves apart over nothing. But because they decided at the outset they wouldn’t and couldn’t portray the structural part of said misogyny without scaring away their intended audience, and decided instead to base this all around ultimately meaningless ~team discourse~ (because literally everyone meeting their downfall as a result of the consequences of systemic misogyny is the point) their alternate path has been to over-exaggerate and ultimately turn to spectacle every single woman involved’s individual suffering at the expense of everything else about their characters. It doesn’t matter if that was the intent or not the principle result of this adaptation has been the continual disempowerment and degradation of women and their agency combined with an almost impressively voyeuristic portrayal of their suffering.

The women in this show are not allowed to have interests or hobbies unless it’s to serve to make them seem “bad” in someway, whether that be the discomfort around Helaena’s bugs, the total lack of any positive representation of Alicent’s religiosity, or how the women dragon riders are broadly painted as aggressive, violent, and unnatural. I don’t even have specific examples to list from the other “team” because in order to be portrayed as “likable” to the general audience the women of Team Black are barely allowed to have personalities, let alone distinguishing interests or characterizing hobbies. The agency and autonomy they have been stripped of, collectively, from both historical precedent and actual ASoIaF, is almost entirely in their refusal to allow women’s work to be portrayed positively. There are no balls, no sewing circles, no garden parties, no trappings of power and contests of will in the jewels and gowns Rhaenyra must now loathe to be (their deeply narrow and biased view of) “likable”, there are no female mentorships, and no female friendships, and at every chance they have had to portray these things at both a societal and personal level they have chosen to veer away and instead reinforce their suffering. They have removed women’s avenues and halls of power from this story, while making it very clear there are no others that exist in this world, and they cannot participate in the men’s; if they could this story wouldn’t exist. So we are left with a group of people who are supposedly driving this story, who this story is supposedly about, but they are internally and externally isolated, largely removed from the public eye, angry or distressed to be there on the rare occasions they’re present, disempowered, stripped of personal agency and will, and we’re still told they have power. But if we search for it the only logical conclusion is that any power which does not center on how much suffering they have been through, or how much more they may be dealt, is not only gone, it was never there in the first place.

I don’t enjoy Rhaenyra’s quasi domestic abuse any more than Alicent’s visceral sexual shame and I don’t enjoy the infantilization of Helaena’s character any more than the erasure of Rhaena’s and it is deeply concerning how many people look at these decisions, and nod their heads and say “yes, this is realistic, and not only is it realistic it’s, GOOD, because without horrific psychological and physical abuse and ultimately a complete reduction to every female character as peace loving victims of powerful men’s cruel machinations we could never even SEE how misogyny is so damaging.” And the mindset that drives people to claim that those of us who call out how this is, the definition of benevolent misogyny and say we’re crazy, that we can’t see the complexity, that actually we’re the ones somehow falling back into sexist tropes, or asking for a black and white story when instead the black and white has simply become an insultingly reductive view of evil men versus helpless women and when all else fails, accusing us of wanting a boring story because it’s either not focused on gratuitous individual female suffering, or is focused on the kind of political power every single featured female character on both sides of this conflict wielded in the original book instead of evil man conversations and eviler man dragon-battles, is at its heart why we have come to a place in pop culture where one of its most marquee properties displays and embodies these problems so glaringly in the fucking first place.

[thepromisedbride]

i don’t talk about bridgerton on here but just to clarify. i will not be having ANY eloise hate on this account. i will bite.

[lemongrass77777-moved]

Sirius wearing a skirt when he’s staying at school for Christmas holidays and nobody cares because the wizarding world doesn’t have gendered clothing.

[selfship-nyx]

Didn’t @/prxship say they aren’t anti para? What they did is SUPER fucked up especially with the situation with @/notadivinebeing but lying about stuff won’t make it better.

- 🐍anon I guess!

Hi you can say you aren’t anti-[x] and also blatantly be anti-[x]

Saying paraphiles need therapy inherently because it’s unavoidable that they will abuse someone if they don’t get Fixed by a professional is anti para. There’s no getting around that. Calling people who acknowledge and love themselves including their paras “anti-recovery” because you view paraphilia as a Sickness that needs to be cured is anti para whether you like it or not.

[gothra]

I’m so tired of all of the stupid, bad-faith defenses of corsetry, honestly. “It’s like wearing a bra! Corsets were the bras of their time!” They were underwear, but they weren’t the “bras” of their time, because bras are the bras of their time and corsets wrap around your entire torso. And bras TODAY are uncomfortable and they only go on the top half, so how much fun do you think wearing a bra for your stomach and breasts were? Women today are taking off their uncomfortable bras in protest, I imagine that the anti-corset women of the time were probably onto something and not just being weird about it. “Women were able to work comfortably in them for hours!” Okay, I’m sure there were plenty of women who felt more comfortable wearing stomach binding fabric than speaking up about the misogynistic standards of appearance and losing friends or their job. And how do you KNOW they were comfortable? Because they didn’t complain? You’re saying that, because they didn’t do the thing that women are notoriously afraid of doing in an age where the standards for the things that women should say and do were harsher, that means that “most” of them actually liked it? Could it be possible that most of them didn’t want to make trouble? Could it be possible that they simply forced themselves to adapt, much like women do today? There are women who work in stilettos for 8-10 hours a day, gritting their teeth through the pain and pretending it doesn’t hurt, or writing it off as no big deal. Are we going to wave it all away as not really an issue because ‘her shoes were just too tight!’ Or are we going to acknowledge the fact that, like corsets, some things are inherently not designed for comfort and that comfort is a privilege when it comes to these things? Are we going to ignore the fact that there is an issue at the very heart of the design of the product? How could it POSSIBLY be comfortable to have a stiff garment wrapping around your stomach and chest and ribs that you have to wear under layers and layers of clothing? How could it POSSIBLY be comfortable for a woman to walk around all day in a pair of shoes that shorten her calves and numb her toes? If a garment restricts even ONE important facet of a woman’s life (eating, drinking, running, BREATHING DEEPLY, laying down, etc.) then it’s not sustainable as a source of comfort. “All of the fainting and stuff, that’s just from lacing it too tight!” First of all, ignoring the implications of defending a garment that could possibly injure or kill someone if misused, just because the instances where women were mutilating their bodies by wearing their clothes too tight were few, doesn’t mean that suddenly it’s fine to overwrite the other, smaller discomforts. Saying “well, they didn’t always kill people” is a shit defense that begs the question: “why were people designing clothes that even could?”

I don’t understand why it’s so difficult to just admit that some stuff of certain eras SUCKED and were bad for women? Why are the women who point out the subjugation of women shunned and called close-minded? Furthermore, do you not trust the words of the women who LIVED in those eras and spoke up against those practices? Why not? Because they were in the minority in an era when being openly disobedient to the social norms resulted in severe backlash? Of course the anti-corset resistance was small, these were a chosen few women who weren’t afraid of the consequences of resistance! Of course every other woman was smiling and working through their suffering. Do you think the ones who weren’t were all crazy crybabies? You trust the words of the women who say what YOU want them to say to defend you so you don’t have to face being misguided or even flat-out wrong! I’m so tired of the idea that pretending that women weren’t victims somehow equals them having actually been more free than we thought.

Saying “women have had to live under unfair and oppressive standards that have severely impacted their health and personhood all throughout history” is not the same as saying “women are weak because they allowed themselves to be subjected to oppression!” You people wonder why feminism doesn’t have teeth or claws, it’s because you disarm and nullify it a bit more every time you uncritically agree with Bernadette Banner. Women shouldn’t even have to wear JEANS THAT ARE TOO FUCKING TIGHT!!!!!

[chryblossomjjk]

it sucks how everything has been tainted by patriarchy and as women we cannot do literally anything without it being linked back to patriarchy. like wearing makeup or pink or whatever has been determined feminine by the patriarchal definition feminity, so doing those things means you’re playing into the patriarchy. not doing those things means you’re also playing into patriarchy because it’s a rejection of the idea of femininity, and thus, reaffirms that identifying with feminity in any way is inherently inferior. likeeeee we really cannot win lol… i think a big part of reclamation includes allowing space for people who identify as women to find out what that means to them.

[alpinelogy]

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[ranger-danger]

Hi

[modernsleepingbeauty]

clowns

[shame-kink]

chimera falin as analogy for compulsory femininity

[chillingandtoxic]

she can go here too, new fuzzy octoling oc

[ace-and-the-rpg-horrors]

i've headcanoned Rouge as a transgender woman for a while, and today, i had a thought that it would be really sweet if Noel's current outfit used to be hers before she transitioned...