Checking the water temp. (via)
My cat Slippery watched this video in ABSOLUTE FASCINATION and even tried to TALK TO THE CAT.
me messaging a casual acquaintance: hello, how are you?
me messaging a best friend w/zero lead-in:
Me, spouting off armchair theory: You know, it’s far more common throughout history and among many cultures for people to live in large extended families. Where there’s no expectation that children will attain adulthood by moving out and living alone or in nuclear families, the burdens of homemaking and childrearing and eldercare are lessened, and cultural ties are strengthened. Perhaps modern Westerners are foolish for embracing a lifestyle that isn’t centered on this kind of interdependence.
Me, interacting with my actual family: I FUCKING LOVE ATOMIZED INDIVIDUALISM
I see your call and raise you, a proper extended family has developed a close relationship through a lifetime of constant daily interactions and comes with social cues and a social culture built from thousands of years of embodying the solutions to the problems caused by living together in tight knit groups. We’ve lost and forgotten these things and no longer understand how to structure the family and interact with each other using the social tools that make such a lifestyle quality.
Atomized individualism allows us the flexibility to live like uncultured swine without the constrains that would make living together viable and without killing each other.
@missing-found I raise you, as someone who actually still lives in a culture where an extended family is still the norm, it was always actually this terrible but women and servants (who were underpaid and treated terribly) were expected to take the burden of smoothing things over emotionally and physically too.
Maybe it’s different elsewhere but that hasn’t been my experience. And I’m saying this as someone who prefers to live with other people.
Again breaking my own ‘cation but this is A Thing For Me:
I’ll raise all of you: there has never actually been a point in human history where we all lived in magical healthy harmony of perfection and fulfillment. This is not something humans have ever had.
Atomized individualism is absolutely potentially isolating, creating loneliness, mental health problems based in isolation, alone in the burdens of homemaking, etc, etc etc!
and! at the same time!
Large extended families living in integrated groups have always been potentially toxic, coercive, and deeply unhappy, and always contained at least one subclass of people (if not multiple) who ended up doing unrecognized and unescapable emotional, psychological and physical labour.
These things are both true at the same time. Neither one of them cancels the other out.
The flat bench-line of human history is not happiness. It’s not fulfillment. It’s not widespread mental health and actualization.
It’s just survival. So people don’t need to have been happy and fulfilled and deeply healthy in their groups in the past - it just has to have balanced out on the side of survival, more or less, most of the time.
Humans are absolutely social creatures: we need other people, and there’s absolutely nothing about us intended to be Alone and Solitary. In fact overwhelmingly through history, “all alone” was more or less synonymous with “you’re gonna die horribly soon.”
That does not mean that the networks of other humans we lived in were naturally harmonious, healthy, supportive, emotionally functional, etc, etc, etc. In fact if you take five seconds to look at most history and folklore and stories and life-experiences, we almost always weren’t! Globally!
It was just better than being all alone, where you died and your life fell apart.
Were SOME communities more or less supportive and healthy for more or less the majority of the people? Sure. That still leaves times when they weren’t, and people for whom they were poison, because “more or less” and “the majority” still leaves people who just didn’t fit, or weren’t like the rest of the community, or had wildly competing needs. And that’s WITHOUT getting into anything one might actually recognize as “right” or “wrong” - that’s just about stuff where there’s no moral value attached.
Like loud people in groups of quiet people, or vice versa.
There is a fundamental challenge to being human that involves trying to create, maintain and nurture networks of support and connectedness and help that are at the same time strong enough to be supportive - to offer adequate hands to all the burdens of human life - while at the same time aren’t restrictive, rigid and mismatched enough to be absolutely toxic.
In order to rise to that challenge one of the things I think it is absolutely critically important to realize is:
Yes! Atomized isolation/individualism can be a pretty crappy way to live!
So can integrated “traditional” societies based around extended obligate networks!
Both options often suck and have huge potential downfalls and failure modes. Neither one is inherently and automatically going to produce Correctly Adjusted Humans because absolutely nothing about how humans came to exist is predicated on us ever being Correctly Socially Optimized and Emotionally Adjusted Humans. All it had to be was good enough for there to be another generation of humans who a) survived and b) perpetuated the cultural norms into the future and the generation after that.
Whether leaning more on the individual or collective side is going to be better for any one given person is gonna depend hardcore on their context:
- is the collective context they have available a good fit for them?
- is the collective context safe for them?
- are they in a position and life situation where they NEED continual contributions from other humans in their lives, or no?
- what’s their personality like? what do they find easier or harder?
And that’s gonna end up with a whole lot of cost-benefit analysis going on.
But there was never a time when Everyone Was Totally Happy With The Big Integrated Families And Things Were Perfect (but then we BROKE IT!!!). There absolutely have been MANY times when your choices were “figure out how to fit into a big integrated network OR DIE” so people sucked it up and figured out how to live. But that’s not the same as “we were all ~*perfectly happy and adjusted*~”.
On the other hand there’s DEFINITELY been historical contexts where being able to Get The Fuck Away From That Toxic Hellpit You Were Born Into was way, way better! … that at the same time doesn’t mean that humans aren’t massively wired as social animals and that there aren’t huge detriments to being isolated.
[Now ideally, right: we figure out how to both skillfully interact and create support networks that ALSO AREN’T harmful to the people involved, and reflect the needs of those in them for both company and autonomy. This is gonna take a hell of a lot of careful behaviour, careful thought, and flat out work, though, cuz humans are fucking messes at the best of times. *palms up shrug*]
/disappears back into Sitka and work
Elderly women are an extremely important demographic for feminism. If a woman cannot be childless and then live comfortably taken care of in her old age, then there is still coercive incentive for children. Social security and elderly womens programs are very important.
Anonymous asked:
Hello! I think you might enjoy the Merry Cemetery in Romania!
manywinged answered:
oh my god it’s beautiful??? you’re right, i love this so much
the tsa stops me because my carryon had too much liquid and they open it and its just full of blood
hi, frequent flyer here. they'll actually let you carry on up to 5 liters of blood as long as its in your vascular system
i don't have a vascular system this is the best i can do
sometimes I see things that are so absurdly horny that it circles back around to being sexless you know what I mean
like when I see really horny art of female characters where the sexiness is so generic -- their boobs are cartoonishly large and they have a waist the size of an atom and some vacant ahegao stare etc -- I'm just like hmmmm this is so uninteresting and kinda repulsive I think I'd be more aroused by a tin can
Here’s a bit of fun folklore.
The largest rock in Denmark is nothing much to look at if you come from an area with mountains but Denmark is mainly made of sand and dirt that was pushed down from Sweden and Norway during the ice age and they gifted us a few big rocks in the process.
The biggest rock came to rest on Funen and became the focus of much lore. People couldn’t figure out how such a huge rock ended up in the middle of a field and eventually named it Damestenen which means The Lady’s Rock (or very directly and literally translated to LadyStone)
It was named so because people believed it had been thrown by a woman. Sometimes a human woman, sometimes a magical witch and sometimes a troll woman, but either way she supposedly got angry at Svindinge Church and threw the rock at it but missed.
It’s not uncommon to explain large or weird rocks near churches as someone wanting to destroy it. Roskilde Church where all the Danish royals are buried has this stone nearby
It’s said to look like that because the devil or a troll threw it and his fingers dug into the stone.
But The Lady’s Rock is the only one believed to have been thrown by a woman which is pretty fun.
