#the once and future sex

[grison-in-space]

The “natural” and “evolutionary” preference for hourglass shapes would be news to medieval male Europeans, who as we have seen were much more interested in pear shapes. How do we explain medieval men’s desire for pot bellies if men analyze women’s bodies for signs that they may be pregnant and eschew them if they are? And what about today’s high fashion models who are tall, have small to medium-sized breasts, and slim hips yet are considered the epitome of the ideal body? All these designations of attractiveness leave out most women, even if they turn to a surgical option.

Further, our society does not praise most of the other medieval beauty preferences. We may still regard blond hair as a beauty ideal, but we are fickle on much else. In the last fifty years, we have lauded tanned skin and fair complexions—note that Black and brown women’s skin tones don’t even enter into Western beauty standards. Eyebrows go from pencil thin to bushy. And we don’t share the medieval penchant for “high free” foreheads. If standards are based on evolutionary processes, why do our current preferences differ from older ones, and why have ours changed even during different decades?

There is no single and consistent beauty ideal that has existed over time, even within Europe. Beauty is a social construct and has different characteristics in different ages. Justifying social beauty norms through scientific means is as much a social construction as Matthew of Vendôme’s effort was, and we can pay them exactly as much heed. Maybe less, because at least Matthew was giving us some poetry to read as well.

Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex. 2023.

[eccebitch]

We know [Medieval people found religious art sexy] from decidedly hostile witnesses: Protestants. In the early modern period, when a number of Christians broke from the Catholic Church, one of their myriad complaints was about religious images in churches. In 1520 one Protestant in Strasbourg complained, “I often had base thoughts when I looked upon the female saints on the altars. For no courtesan can dress or adorn herself more sumptuously and shamelessly than they nowadays fashion the Mother of God, Saint Barbara, Katherine, and the other saints.”

— Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society (2023)

[butchfalin]

the funniest meltdown ive ever had was in college when i got so overstimulated that i could Not speak, including over text. one of my friends was trying to talk me through it but i was solely using emojis because they were easier than trying to come up with words so he started using primarily emojis as well just to make things feel balanced. this was not the Most effective strategy... until. he tried to ask me "you okay?" but the way he chose to do that was by sending "👉🏼👌🏼❓" and i was so shocked by suddenly being asked if i was dtf that i was like WHAT???? WHAT DID YOU JUST SAY TO ME?????????? and thus was verbal again

[queerbauten]

Every woman had the possibility of attaining the apogee of femininity-being a cherished wife and mother, with a devoted husband who would compose poetry for her and write of her fondly years after her death. However, women like this were not born but made, through the timely intervention of their male family members and with examples from the past. It was men who knew what women should be, and men who were best able to understand and tame the nature of women to be exactly that. For a beloved daughter to become a cherished wife, men must break her worst feminine attributes, to tame her into a helpmeet, the ultimate status for any medieval woman. At least, that was the case if you asked medieval men (and sometimes even when you didn't).

“Back to Basics”, The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society, Eleanor Janega

[flowercrown-hobbit]

I am currently reading the once and future sex: going medieval on women's roles in society and I love it so much. It's the perfect introduction to medieval society and how men thought about women. Hildegard of Bingen is also mentioned.

[kamreadsandrecs]

Eleanor Janega’s lively book on medieval women situates itself firmly between historical fact and contemporary perspective, “once and future” indeed. It is provocative, colloquial and entertaining; the tone is (mostly) just on the right side of facetious. If you wince at Eve being described as a “certifiable babe” and the Virgin as a “perfect mommy”, it probably isn’t for you. There is much of interest in its approach, particularly in the evidence from Central Europe, but there are also oversimplifications and misrepresentations that will raise the hackles of medievalists, especially literary scholars.

Janega begins with some key medieval conceptions of women, drawing on the work of Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, and the medical theorization of women’s bodies, thoughtfully setting out the double binds to which women were subject: they were to be beautiful, but make no effort to achieve that beauty. She considers alarming-sounding recipes for cosmetics, such as quicklime used as a depilatory, and gives hair-raising accounts of the punishments to be endured in hell by the women who made use of such aids. The medieval ideal of beauty – blonde hair, grey eyes, high, round breasts and a curvaceous (pot) belly – is also outlined.

Fashion is sympathetically explored. Women had to negotiate their way through complicated codes that meant dressing according to social rank while not giving rise to accusations of vanity, and balancing the pleasure of choosing outfits with the constraints of cost and practicality, especially for those who had to work outdoors. This chapter’s most engaging section challenges the popular idea that medieval people did not wash, detailing the effort involved in filling up a tub and heating the water. Janega describes the sophisticated bath-house cultures of Budapest and Paris, and gives us a fascinating history of soap, from the luxury products of the Mediterranean to the less attractive cleansers manufactured further north.

She then moves on to sex and love, and the tensions between the Christian ideal of virginity and the practical demand for women to be available as mothers and sexual partners. Procreation was seen as the main valid reason for having sex, along with the complicated idea of the payment of the marriage debt, and there were a large number of prohibitions surrounding sexual activity. Theologians argued against sex in Lent and Advent, on Wednesdays, Fridays, Sundays and possibly Saturdays, and during menstruation, pregnancy and breast-feeding. All positions except missionary were regarded as illicit. Women were perceived by clerical writers as eternally sexually desiring, fickle and promiscuous, while the nature of their sexual pleasure remained mysterious. To become pregnant, it was thought, they had to achieve orgasm, otherwise they would not emit the seed necessary to produce the foetus. Conception was held to prove that rape victims had ended up enjoying the encounter. This is familiar enough material, which Janega pulls together with wit and humour.

In this section, however – as occasionally in earlier chapters – there are crude and sometimes inaccurate readings of literary texts. Chaucer’s women are uniformly characterized as unfaithful and sexually predatory: the Wife of Bath is “greedy and sex-crazed”, Criseyde strings Troilus along before abandoning him for Diomede, while Alison in “The Miller’s Tale” is said to have sex with her lover in a washtub before farting in another man’s face. (She does neither.) Janega’s readings of Marie de France, Tristan and Isolde and Arthurian romance are similarly simplistic, reducing their complex themes of love, suffering, ennoblement and conflicting loyalties to mere markers of their authors’ misogyny.

The final chapter on women and work leans largely on more straightforwardly historical documentation, though Janega does not always probe her sources deeply. It is unlikely that the sex workers of Southwark were stripped to the waist, as she claims, and marched back to the stews when they were found on the wrong side of the river; public female nakedness was taboo. Rather, their cloaks and hoods, their most valuable items of clothing, were confiscated by way of a fine. She shows clearly how economically productive women were, even if their work often remained invisible. Women worked in fields and with livestock, and practised skilled crafts as silk-weavers, embroiderers, illustrators, copyists and medical practitioners. Noblewomen were administrators, diplomats and advisers; the role of lady-in-waiting was surprisingly onerous.

The conclusion reflects thoughtfully on the similarities and differences between the lives of medieval and contemporary women, and demonstrates the value of thinking about the past to shape our vision of the future. As The Once and Future Sex makes clear, misogyny, oppression and conflicted ideas about sexuality and desire have not vanished, they just now take different forms.

[kammartinez]

By Carolyne Larrington 

Eleanor Janega’s lively book on medieval women situates itself firmly between historical fact and contemporary perspective, “once and future” indeed. It is provocative, colloquial and entertaining; the tone is (mostly) just on the right side of facetious. If you wince at Eve being described as a “certifiable babe” and the Virgin as a “perfect mommy”, it probably isn’t for you. There is much of interest in its approach, particularly in the evidence from Central Europe, but there are also oversimplifications and misrepresentations that will raise the hackles of medievalists, especially literary scholars.

Janega begins with some key medieval conceptions of women, drawing on the work of Aristotle, Augustine and Aquinas, and the medical theorization of women’s bodies, thoughtfully setting out the double binds to which women were subject: they were to be beautiful, but make no effort to achieve that beauty. She considers alarming-sounding recipes for cosmetics, such as quicklime used as a depilatory, and gives hair-raising accounts of the punishments to be endured in hell by the women who made use of such aids. The medieval ideal of beauty – blonde hair, grey eyes, high, round breasts and a curvaceous (pot) belly – is also outlined.

Fashion is sympathetically explored. Women had to negotiate their way through complicated codes that meant dressing according to social rank while not giving rise to accusations of vanity, and balancing the pleasure of choosing outfits with the constraints of cost and practicality, especially for those who had to work outdoors. This chapter’s most engaging section challenges the popular idea that medieval people did not wash, detailing the effort involved in filling up a tub and heating the water. Janega describes the sophisticated bath-house cultures of Budapest and Paris, and gives us a fascinating history of soap, from the luxury products of the Mediterranean to the less attractive cleansers manufactured further north.

She then moves on to sex and love, and the tensions between the Christian ideal of virginity and the practical demand for women to be available as mothers and sexual partners. Procreation was seen as the main valid reason for having sex, along with the complicated idea of the payment of the marriage debt, and there were a large number of prohibitions surrounding sexual activity. Theologians argued against sex in Lent and Advent, on Wednesdays, Fridays, Sundays and possibly Saturdays, and during menstruation, pregnancy and breast-feeding. All positions except missionary were regarded as illicit. Women were perceived by clerical writers as eternally sexually desiring, fickle and promiscuous, while the nature of their sexual pleasure remained mysterious. To become pregnant, it was thought, they had to achieve orgasm, otherwise they would not emit the seed necessary to produce the foetus. Conception was held to prove that rape victims had ended up enjoying the encounter. This is familiar enough material, which Janega pulls together with wit and humour.

In this section, however – as occasionally in earlier chapters – there are crude and sometimes inaccurate readings of literary texts. Chaucer’s women are uniformly characterized as unfaithful and sexually predatory: the Wife of Bath is “greedy and sex-crazed”, Criseyde strings Troilus along before abandoning him for Diomede, while Alison in “The Miller’s Tale” is said to have sex with her lover in a washtub before farting in another man’s face. (She does neither.) Janega’s readings of Marie de France, Tristan and Isolde and Arthurian romance are similarly simplistic, reducing their complex themes of love, suffering, ennoblement and conflicting loyalties to mere markers of their authors’ misogyny.

The final chapter on women and work leans largely on more straightforwardly historical documentation, though Janega does not always probe her sources deeply. It is unlikely that the sex workers of Southwark were stripped to the waist, as she claims, and marched back to the stews when they were found on the wrong side of the river; public female nakedness was taboo. Rather, their cloaks and hoods, their most valuable items of clothing, were confiscated by way of a fine. She shows clearly how economically productive women were, even if their work often remained invisible. Women worked in fields and with livestock, and practised skilled crafts as silk-weavers, embroiderers, illustrators, copyists and medical practitioners. Noblewomen were administrators, diplomats and advisers; the role of lady-in-waiting was surprisingly onerous.

The conclusion reflects thoughtfully on the similarities and differences between the lives of medieval and contemporary women, and demonstrates the value of thinking about the past to shape our vision of the future. As The Once and Future Sex makes clear, misogyny, oppression and conflicted ideas about sexuality and desire have not vanished, they just now take different forms.

[ash-and-starlight]

“im glad that at least one of us has maternal instincts” zhu when i fucking get you >:(((

[coochiequeens]

This is why we still need Women’s History Month.

By Martha Gill

What was life like for women in medieval times? “Awful” is the vague if definite answer that tends to spring to mind – but this is an assumption, and authors have been tackling it with new vigour.

The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society by Eleanor Janega, and The Wife of Bath: A Biography by Marion Turner both contend that women were not only bawdier but busier than we thought: they were brewers, blacksmiths, court poets, teachers, merchants, and master craftsmen, and they owned land too. A woman’s dowry, Janega writes, was often accompanied with firm instructions that property stay with her, regardless of what her husband wanted.

This feels like a new discovery. It isn’t, of course. Chaucer depicted many such cheerfully domineering women. The vellum letter-books of the City of London, in which the doings of the capital from 1275 to 1509 were scribbled, detail female barbers, apothecaries, armourers, shipwrights and tailors as a matter of course. While it is true that aristocratic women were considered drastically inferior to their male equivalents – traded as property and kept as ornaments – women of the lower orders lived, relatively, in a sort of rough and ready empowerment.

It was the Renaissance that vastly rolled back the rights of women. As economic power shifted, the emerging middle classes began aping their betters. They confined their women to the home, putting them at the financial mercy of men. Female religious power also dwindled. In the 13th century seeing visions and hearing voices might get a woman sainted; a hundred years later she’d more likely be burned at the stake.

“When it comes to the history of gender relations, storytellers portray women as more oppressed than they actually were”

Why does this feel like new information? Much of what we think we know about medieval times was invented by the Victorians, who had an artistic obsession with the period, and through poetry and endless retellings of the myth of King Arthur managed somehow to permanently infuse their own sexual politics into it. (Victorian women were in many respects more socially repressed than their 12th-century forebears.)

But modern storytellers are also guilty of sexist revisionism. We endlessly retread the lives of oppressed noblewomen, and ignore their secretly empowered lower-order sisters. Where poorer women are mentioned, glancingly, they are pitied as prostitutes or rape victims. Even writers who seem desperate for a “feminist take” on the period tend to ignore the angle staring them right in the face. In her 2022 cinematic romp, Catherine called Birdy, for example, Lena Dunham puts Sylvia Pankhurst-esque speeches into the mouth of her 13th-century protagonist, while portraying her impending marriage – at 14 – as normal for the period. (In fact the average 13th-century woman got married somewhere between the ages of 22 and 25.)

But we cling tight to these ideas. It is often those who push back against them who get accused of “historical revisionism”. This applies particularly to the fantasy genre, which aside from the odd preternaturally “feisty” female character, tends to portray the period as, well, a misogynistic fantasy. The Game of Thrones author George RR Martin once defended the TV series’ burlesque maltreatment of women on the grounds of realism. “I wanted my books to be strongly grounded in history and to show what medieval society was like.” Oddly enough, this didn’t apply to female body hair (or the dragons).

This is interesting. Most of our historical biases tend to run in the other direction: we assume the past was like the present. But when it comes to the history of gender relations, the opposite is true: storytellers insist on portraying women as more oppressed than they actually were.

“The history of gender relations might be more accurately painted as a tug of war between the sexes”

The casual reader of history is left with the dim impression that between the Palaeolithic era and the 19th century women suffered a sort of dark age of oppression. This is assumed to have ended some time around the invention of the lightbulb, when the idea of “gender equality” sprang into our heads and right-thinking societies set about “discovering” female competencies: women – astonishingly – could do 

things men could do!

In fact the history of gender relations might be more accurately painted as a tug of war between the sexes, with women sometimes gaining and sometimes losing power – and the stronger sex opportunistically seizing control whenever it had the means.

In Minoan Crete, for example, women had similar rights and freedoms to men, taking equal part in hunting, competitions, and celebrations.

But that era ushered in one of the most patriarchal societies the planet has ever known – classical Greece, where women had no political rights and were considered “minors”.

Or take hunter-gatherer societies, the source of endless cod-evolutionary theories about female inferiority. The discovery of female skeletons with hunting paraphernalia has disproved the idea that men only hunted and women only gathered – and more recently anthropologists have challenged the idea that men had higher status too: women, studies contend, had equal sway over group decisions.

This general bias has had two unfortunate consequences. One is to impress upon us the idea that inequality is “natural”. The other is to give us a certain complacency about our own age: that feminist progress is an inevitable consequence of passing time. “She was ahead of her time,” we say, when a woman seems unusually empowered. Not necessarily.

Two years ago, remember, sprang up one of the most vicious patriarchies in history – women were removed from their schools and places of work and battoned into homes and hijabs. And last year in the US many women lost one of their fundamental rights: abortion. (Turns out it was pro-lifers, not feminists, who were ahead of their time there.)

Both these events were greeted with shock from liberal quarters: how could women’s rights be going backwards? But that only shows we should brush up on our history. Another look at medieval women is as good a place to start as any.

 Martha Gill is a political journalist and former lobby correspondent

[grison-in-space]

On medieval notions of maidenly beauty:

These images were objects of religious devotion and veneration; people would pray with them, focusing their minds on them, or being reminded of what they had lost with the Fall of Man. While the women had to be beautiful to make the religious point that they were holy, these images were also considered sexy.

We know that from decidedly hostile witnesses: Protestants. In the early modern period, when a number of Christians broke from the Catholic Church, one of their myriad complaints was about religious images in churches. In 1520 one Protestant in Strasbourg complained, “I often had base thoughts when I looked upon the female saints on the altars. For no courtesan can dress or adorn herself more sumptuously and shamelessly than they nowadays fashion the Mother of God, Saint Barbara, Katherine, and the other saints.”

The fact that this unnamed man was turned on by church statues is not only a testament to the human erotic imagination but also funny and instructive. As we have seen, the medieval concept of beauty was painstakingly constructed and repeated ad nauseam down through the centuries, which can make it difficult to ascertain whether the average medieval individual agreed with it. Did most people think small-breasted women with big thighs and pot bellies were beautiful, or was this was just a literary and artistic conceit? This unnamed Protestant’s religious complaint shows that not only did individual men agree with the artistic beauty ideal, but it also turned them on in church.

To be fair, this particular reminiscence does come, as stated, from an antagonistic source. The gentleman in question was trying to make a point about the Catholic Church and the sins that it inspired with its excesses. Protestants were extremely fond of painting churches white and removing all statues. Implying that you used to get distracted and even turned on by images of saints during Mass was a great way to make a point about why it was time to break out the whitewash. However, if he had said he found the church frescos sexy in a social climate that disagreed, it would have been tantamount to admitting a strange fetish to his congregation. As a result, we can take this gentleman at his word and assume that the religious art was, indeed, titillating.

Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex (2023).

I am both giggling my way through this book with great delight and also contemplating the extent to which my body resembles the medieval aesthetic ideal of the almighty golden pear.

[eccebitch]

The fact that [Medieval people found religious art sexually arousing] is not only a testament to the human erotic imagination but also funny and instructive. As we have seen, the medieval concept of beauty was painstakingly constructed and repeated ad nauseam down through the centuries, which can make it difficult to ascertain whether the average medieval individual agreed with it. Did most people think small-breasted women with big thighs and pot bellies were beautiful, or was this was just a literary and artistic conceit? This unnamed Protestant’s religious complaint shows that not only did individual men agree with the artistic beauty ideal, but it also turned them on in church.

— Eleanor Janega, The Once and Future Sex: Going Medieval on Women’s Roles in Society (2023)

[rathag]

Demon OC of mine ♥

Her name is Wynghonna

bonus doodles under the cut

She's a fucking menace

[hankco]

I finished the whole show + movie in a week. Definitely rewatching again soon to catch any small details I missed. Everything about this series is making me lose my mind. Easily one of my most favorite shows ever. It's really one of a kind. I don't think there's gonna be anything else quite like it. The lore and the characters are just so great. Perfect balance of comedy and tragedy. I could go on and on and on forever. Idk how I didn't watch venture bros sooner. That's enough rambling for now.

[witchwhaat]

*a girl that is going to be okay.jpg*

[horrorshow]

"when did destiel sex happen for the first time?" i love that i'm living so far in my own obscure deluded doomed by the narrative canon-compliant version of surprisingly wholesome but tragic destiel that the only right answer isn't even an option on polls: stanford era.

[muchisutes-geta-strap]

Made a meme from something I saw on twitter recently