north by northwest is not an actual direction

As someone who originally trained as a social historian of the Medieval Period, I have some things to add in support of the main point.  Most people dramatically underestimate the economic importance of Medieval women and their level of agency.  Part of the problem here is when modern people think of medieval people they are imagining the upper end of the nobility and not the rest of society. 

Your average low end farming family could not survive without women’s labour.  Yes, there was gender separation of labour.  Yes, the men did the bulk of the grain farming, outside of peak times like planting and harvest, but unless you were very well off, you generally didn’t live on that.  The women had primary responsibility for the chickens, ducks, or geese the family owned, and thus the eggs, feathers, and meat.  (Egg money is nothing to sneeze at and was often the main source of protein unless you were very well off).  They grew vegetables, and if she was lucky she might sell the excess.  Her hands were always busy, and not just with the tasks you expect like cooking, mending, child care, etc.. As she walked, as she rested, as she went about her day, if her hands would have otherwise been free, she was spinning thread with a hand distaff.  (You can see them tucked in the belts of peasant women in art of the era).  Unless her husband was a weaver, most of that thread was for sale to the folks making clothe as men didn’t spin.  Depending where she lived and the ages of her children, she might have primary responsibility for the families sheep and thus takes part in sheering and carding.  (Sheep were important and there are plenty of court cases of women stealing loose wool or even shearing other people’s sheep.)  She might gather firewood, nuts, fruit, or rushes, again depending on geography.  She might own and harvest fruit trees and thus make things out of that fruit.   She might keep bees and sell honey.  She might make and sell cheese if they had cows, sheep, or goats.  Just as her husband might have part time work as a carpenter or other skilled craft when the fields didn’t need him, she might do piece work for a craftsman or be a brewer of ale, cider, or perry (depending on geography).  Ale doesn’t keep so women in a village took it in turn to brew batches, the water not being potable on it’s own, so everyone needed some form of alcohol they could water down to drink.  The women’s labour and the money she bought in kept the family alive between the pay outs for the men as well as being utterly essential on a day to day survival level.

Something similar goes on in towns and cities.  The husband might be a craftsman or merchant, but trust me, so is his wife and she has the right to carry on the trade after his death.

Also, unless there was a lot of money, goods, lands, and/or titles involved, people generally got a say in who they married.  No really.  Keep in mind that the average age of first marriage for a yeoman was late teens or early twenties (depending when and where), but the average age of first marriage for the working poor was more like 27-29.  The average age of death for men in both those categories was 35.  with women, if you survived your first few child births you might live to see grandchildren.

Do the math there.  Odds are if your father was a small farmer, he’s been dead for some time before you gather enough goods to be marrying a man.  For sure your mother (and grandmother and/or step father if you have them) likely has opinions, but you can have a valid marriage by having sex after saying yes to a proposal or exchanging vows in the present (I thee wed), unless you live in Italy, where you likely need a notary.  You do not need clergy as church weddings don’t exist until the Reformation.  For sure, it’s better if you publish banns three Sundays running in case someone remembers you are too closely related, but it’s not a legal requirement.  Who exactly can stop you if you are both determined?

So the less money, goods, lands, and power your family has, the more likely you are to be choosing your partner.  There is an exception in that unfree folk can be required to remarry, but they are give time and plenty of warning before a partner would be picked for them.  It happened a lot less than you’d think.  If you were born free and had enough money to hire help as needed whether for farm or shop or other business, there was no requirement of remarriage at all.  You could pick a partner or choose to stay single.  Do the math again on death rates.  It’s pretty common to marry more than once.  Maybe the first wife died in childbirth.  The widower needs the work and income a wife brings in and that’s double if the baby survives.  Maybe the second wife has wide hips, but he dies from a work related injury when she’s still young.  She could sure use a man’s labour around the farm or shop.  Let’s say he dies in a fight or drowns in a ditch.  She’s been doing well.  Her children are old enough to help with the farm or shop, she picks a pretty youth for his looks instead of his economic value.  You get marriages for love and lust as well as economics just like you get now and May/December cuts both ways.

A lot of our ideas about how people lived in the past tends to get viewed through a Victorian or early Hollywood lens, but that tends to be particularly extreme as far was writing out women’s agency and contribution as well as white washing populations in our histories, films, and therefore our minds eyes.

Real life is more complicated than that.

Grain of salt that I get less accurate between 1605-French Revolution or thereabouts.  I’ve periodically studied early modern stuff, but it’s more piecemeal.

I too was confining my remarks to Medieval Europe because 1. That was my specialty.  2. A lot of English language fantasy literature is based on Medieval Europe, often badly and more based on misapprehension than what real lives were like.

Adding that quite a bit of recent research suggests that a significant portion of European women in the Middle Ages never married at all, and they didn’t all become nuns. Plenty of “singlewomen” lived on their own, or in households with a few other women, or as domestic servants in larger households. If they lived on their own, they too might raise some chickens, spin, brew, take in laundry, or do other manual tasks for wages. In some places they could practice specific skilled crafts (often textile-related) and join guilds. Were a good number of these women lesbians, or ace? Quite probably.

If you want to really stretch your idea of who a medieval/renaissance woman was or what she could do, read Marie de France or Margery Kempe or Christine de Pizan–or any number of Norse sagas (ask me about Hallgerthr and Bergthóra!).  But even if you stick to the “mainstream” classics, your Canterbury Tales or your Gawain and the Green Knight or your Two Lives of Charlemagne, if you pay attention, you will notice a lot of women doing a lot of fascinating things that do not boil down to ‘being pretty’ and ‘being assaulted,’ which is what a lot of historical fiction and historical fantasy would like to boil us down to.

Also, let me be honest here, primary sources are just fun.  They can be slow going at first, but the thing that really sold me on history when I was in college was not sweeping descriptions of battles. It was this one bit in a history by Notker the Stammerer (and how can you beat that as an author’s name?) where Charlemagne was bitching and moaning about Kids These Days and their inadequate cloaks, which aren’t even long enough to keep you warm when you have to get down off your horse and pee.

It’s an YA book centered in the time of Frederick II Holy Roman Emperor and it centers around the family of Messer Rufo and his wife Madam Yvette, spanning through most of the life of their two elder daughters.

“Anne Bonny and Mary Read were pirates, as renowned for their ruthlessness as for their gender, and during their short careers challenged the sailors’ adage that a woman’s presence on shipboard invites bad luck.”

once upon a time there was a dude in Spain named Juan Pujol Garcia. Pujol was a chicken farmer. Pujol hated him some goddamn fascists.

See Spain had recently ended its civil war, with the fascists taking power. So when WWII broke out in Europe, Spain technically remained neutral but in practice was buddy buddy with the Nazis. Juan Pujol Garcia thought this was pretty bullshit

so soon after war breaks out Pujol travels to his local British embassy and goes “hey I wanna spy on the Nazis for you”

“who the fuck are you?” say the British, and kick him out

but Pujol is not deterred! He still wants to dunk on some fascists, so now he goes to his local German embassy instead. “hey” he says, “I wanna spy on the British for you, I sure do hate them”

“yeah okay” say the Germans “that seems pretty legit”

and just like that Pujol now officially works for the Abwehr, the German intelligence agency. They hand him some spy gear (invisible ink and such) and instruct him to travel to Lisbon, and from there make his way into the UK. So Pujol heads to Lisbon, and a little while later writes to his German handlers telling them he’s made it to England

Pujol had not made it to England. He had, in fact, made it to the Lisbon public library, where he checked out a number of English guide books and set about just wholesale making shit up

this is slightly complicated by the fact that, for example, he completely did not understand British currency and all his expense reports were basically gibberish. He also reported things like bribing Scotsmen, because the people of Glasgow would “do anything for a litre of wine” (an actual quote) because, hey, people in Spain like wine so that’s probably the same right?

Here is where it starts to get really crazy, because the Abwehr loves this. “wow this dude is a great spy” they say, because apparently none of them had ever been the England either. In fact, they are so pumped about this new awesome spy that the British start to get worried

you see, by this time the British had cracked German’s supposedly unbreakable Enigma code and were totally dunking on the Nazis by reading basically all of their ~super top secret~ radio transmissions. And, crucially, they’d become so good at breaking and reading traffic that there were literally no German spies in England. The Germans would set up a spy drop (usually dropping dudes in by parachute in the middle of the night), the British would intercept the message and then just scoop the dudes up as soon as they landed in a move that must have been SUPER embarrassing to the spies

so there are no German spies in the UK because they’re all sitting in a prison run by MI5 (although some are being run under supervision as double agents, feeding Germany bullshit). But suddenly MI5 is picking up all this traffic from the Germans talking about their super great spy- a spy the British do not have in their jail

“oh shit” says MI5, and starts rereading all the transmissions they have to and from this mysterious super spy.

“hey wait” says MI5, upon actually reading the shit the spy was sending. “someone is playing silly buggers, pip pip cheerio”

At this point, Pujol, still in Lisbon, had actually been approaching the British embassy again, repeatedly, but apparently “I am literally an Abwehr agent and would like to offer you my services” wasn’t interesting enough, because he was repeatedly turned away, again. It wasn’t until MI5 started asking around that one of the embassy staff was like “oh yeah we know that guy”

so in 1942 the British finally make contact with Pujol and he officially becomes a spy for MI5. They move him to London and assign him a case officer so he can start making up even better bullshit

and he does. Once actually in London, Pujol reports to the Abwehr that he’d recruited a whole slew of informants- from a bunch of Welsh Aryans to disaffected army officers. He ends up with a network of 20+ sub-spies, all feeding him information from around the UK

none of these people actually exist

Pujol just straight up invented like 20 people, keeping careful track of their fake personalities, names, and activities. With the help of MI5, the information he sends becomes even better- a mix of true but ultimately useless facts and actually important intel timed to arrive in Germany just slightly too late to be of any use. He and his “spy network” become the Abwehr’s most trusted agents

Pujol, now codenamed Agent Garbo (for his acting skills), ends up playing a huge role in the run-up to D-Day, where the Allies mounted a huge intelligence campaign to convince Hitler that the planned site of attack was going to be Calais and not Normandy (this was Operation Fortitude and you should absolutely look it up for more Wacky WWII Adventures). Obviously you know how this ended

crazily enough, the Abwehr never figured out that Pujol was a double agent. After the war he received both the Iron Cross Second Class (which require personal authorization from Hitler), and a Member of the Order of the British Empire (from King George VI)

unable to resist being totally fucking ridiculous, Pujol turned down MI5’s post-war offer to continue spying, but this time against the USSR. “no,” he said “just help me fake my own death and then I’m moving to Venezuela”

Daughters of the horse-leech, thy tempest out-thunders me.

Wow, those first two are truly astonishingly terrible ideas. Or rather, the first three, since pushing our reps to demand that the EC break with the will of the voters is an entirely separate terrible idea.

I am all for pushing Congress as a whole and the House Oversight Committee in particular to push for information regarding Trump’s holdings and conflicts of interest; in fact I think they should start now, before 1/20/2017. I’m doubtful of its exact efficacy, since Chaffetz is the head of that committee (how he got so far so fast I can only attribute to his general awfulness) and his boner was strictly for dragging Clinton in for hearings - people have reported calling into HOC’s offices and getting a flat “no” from staffers there when asked whether or not Chaffetz is going to do anything. But it’s always worth pressuring.

But demanding an independent investigation… what does this even mean? The FBI, the CIA, the NSA are all already doing this work - whether or not they continue to do so after January 20th is very much up in the air, and again that could be a matter of concern and if that happens, then yes, public pressure should be brought to bear. But the idea that a congressional investigation would be seen as anything but a petty attempt by Democrats to whine about losing is silly. Regardless of what evidence is presented to warrant such an investigation - and I totally agree that more information can and may show up - this will be seen as the liberal version of what Trump was doing before the election: namely, showing the country and the world that we will only accept results as legitimate if they are in our favor. Plus I’m not comfortable with Congress demanding a public investigation of something this sensitive.

As for the demand that Congress pressure electors not to vote for Trump - gross. Gross gross gross, I absolutely hate this movement and think it’s one of the dumbest, most ill-informed, short-sighted trash ideas I’ve ever heard. (And if you support it, via con Dios and I love you dearly, but that won’t change my opinion.) Again you are advocating the overthrow of the government. I don’t care that you think Trump wasn’t legitimately elected; he was legally elected, and the process that’s been used since our founding to select the president selected a president. I don’t like the result any more than you do; but our solution has always been and must always be either voting him out in four years, or waiting for him to break the law or act in a matter so antithetical to the moral office which he will hold that Congress will have no choice but to impeach him. That’s how it works; I’m sorry, I’m not willing to burn down the house just because the guy inside it is holding my family hostage.

The Garland appointment idea is also bad for similar reasons: it’s not how we do things. The norms of the Presidency are about to be under wholesale assault, with Trump giving precedent to pretty much every shitty president that comes after him in terms of abuse of power. If another justice dies while he’s in office and the Senate doesn’t want to confirm Trump’s choice for a replacement, he is already going to do exactly what you’re suggesting Obama should do. So what’s the harm in Obama doing it in the first place?

Because I want every single precedent Trump sets while in office to be pure unadulterated poison. I want any president who follows him to shy away at even the thought of flouting a law or a regulation or a tradition or even a habit that Trump flouted. The best way we survive Trump is by keeping him toxic. He can’t just do what Obama did before him, or Bush or Bill Clinton or whoever. Trump’s sycophants are already trying to use FDR’s horrifying concentration camps as precedent for their own purposes. And the more things that Obama does in the next two months that are outside the norm for a president handing over the power, the more excuses Trump - or any truly terrible president after him - has to make things even worse.

In the spirit of making things easier for everyone who wants to know who represents them, how about this: if you cannot do the research yourself, send me your:

street address

city

state

zip code 

–and I will get you the following information:

Name

Position

Phone numbers for all offices

Fax number for main office

Mailing address for main office

Party affiliation

Time in office

Subcommittees (if they’re in legislature; * will be if they chair the subcommittee)

Date of last election/appointment

–for all of the following:

Senators

Congressperson (incl. what district you are in)

State senator (incl. what district you are in)

State representative (incl. what district you are in)

City council representative (incl. what district you are in)

Governor

Lt. Governor

State Attorney General (& if they’re elected or appointed)

County/District Attorney General (incl. what county/district you are in & if they’re elected or appointed)

Mayor

County Sheriff (& if they’re elected or appointed)

Chief of Police (& if they’re elected or appointed)

School Board representative (& if they’re elected or appointed)

State Supreme Court Judge (& if they’re elected or appointed)

I will also let you know the address, main phone number and next scheduled meeting of your:

City Council

School Board

State Legislature

State supreme court

County court

–should you ever want to attend these; you as a resident of these places have every right to (although some courts may not be open tbf), and if you can, I’d highly recommend it for the hilarity value alone.

Note that these are not all the people you vote for. In Texas for example, we have elected Commissioners of various stripes, and all of our judges are elected, and we have county clerks and district clerks and a dozen others who I have no idea what their job title even means, much less what they do. 

But knowing the people I’ve listed above should give you a good start, and as you feel more and more passionate about being involved, you can do things on your own, such as looking up all the people you vote for (ballotpedia might be a good place for some of this) and pestering them in turn.

So if you for whatever reason cannot get this information yourself, you can message me* and I will message you back** within a few days. You can then copy down the information in any way you see fit, and I’ll also keep hold of the info (unless you specifically ask me not to) so that if you ever lose it, I can send it to you again with no problem.

That’s my offer - if you don’t need this, please reblog anyway, because my dream is that for the next few months I’m busy for at least a couple hours a day getting information to people who need it. So if you reblog this, YOU ARE HELPING ME ACHIEVE MY DREAMS.

Remember that.

*Yes, you will have to trust me with your address, but if you want, 99.9% of districts go block-by-block, so you can give me a nearby address (say, someone who lives three doors down) and I’ll never know. Just don’t use the addy of anyone across a street, since it’s possible you live on a border. 

Mermaids are popular lately. I guess that makes now as good a time as any to talk about Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid.

Which desperately needs to be talked about. Seriously, the situation is dire.

Everyone knows the Disney version, which I happen to like very much, but it’s a different story, about different things. Starting with the Disney version, we’re all sort of trained to see Prince Charming as the only possible happy ending.

Most people also know that in Andersen’s version, the mermaid dies in the end. And this is where things get difficult. First, there are a lot of picture books that end with her dying, and they have Andersen’s name on the front, and naturally everyone assumes they’re telling the original story.  If you read a twenty page picture book that was just the Disney story condensed, until suddenly it ended with death, you did not read the original.

Also, there’s this idea going around that she committed suicide because the prince didn’t love her. That is not what happened at all, and I don’t know how the rumor got started, but it really bugs me.

So I’ve got a collection of Andersen’s fairy tales in front of me right now, and I’m actually really frustrated because the title page doesn’t name a translator, but it’s got 47 of his stories in it, and my dad bought it in Germany. The Little Mermaid is 35 pages without illustrations, I have done my research, and I’m completely sure it’s the real, full story.

The mermaid’s got a bunch of sisters. They’re all kind of interested in our world, because they’re not allowed to go to the surface until they reach a certain age. But the novelty wears off for the others. Our mermaid, much like Ariel, is a little obsessed. Already, this is about more than a cute boy. The mortal world is something that fascinated her long before she met the cute boy.

And then she saves his life. And she’s got a crush on him. It’s bad. She spies on him a lot. Her sisters help her find his house. But she doesn’t actually do anything. Days pass. Maybe weeks. Probably weeks. And then she talks to her grandma, and finds out that although they have much shorter lifespans, humans have immortal souls.

This is important.  The Little Mermaid is part of a large group of folk and fairy tales with this same basic idea. Humanoid creatures that are not human have human rationality, but lack immortal souls. It’s terrible, because they have the ability to understand exactly what they’re missing. So these creatures—fairies, elves, trolls, assorted sea beings—have one shot at a soul. Some stories say you only have to marry a human, others say you have to bear his children (sucks to be a merman, I guess).

She’s been obsessed with humanity forever, and she’s totally in love with this guy. But it’s not until she learns about the soul that she does anything. This is about the boy, yeah, but it’s also about the soul, and in the long run the soul is more important.

So she goes to the sea witch—who, by the way, warns her that this is stupid. And the deal is that she can become a human (which will be intensely painful), in exchange for her tongue (she cuts it out), and if he marries her, she gets the soul. If he marries no one, presumably she lives a normal human life, and dies in thirty or forty years with no soul. (The text really isn’t clear here.) But if he marries someone else, then she dies and turns into sea foam (which sounds weird but apparently it’s what all mermaids do when they die). Really, it’s a pretty generous deadline for a witch.

The prince finds her naked on the beach and takes her home, like a stray dog or something. A lot like a stray dog. Seriously. Let’s look at this relationship.

Everyone was enchanted by her, especially the prince, who called her his little foundling…The prince said she was to stay with him forever, and she was allowed to sleep outside his door on a velvet cushion.

A velvet cushion. Wow. Talk about your healthy romantic relationships. Not a bedroom. Not a bed. She is allowed to sleep on a cushion in the hallway.

What a privilege. I am so jealous.

Next, he has some boys’ clothes made for her so they can ride horses together.

Is she his pet? Is she is little brother? I have no idea. When I told my mom the story, she said, “So basically what he wants is a pet friend.” I think that sums up the situation pretty nicely.

But wait, there’s more.

Day by day the prince grew fonder of her. He loved her the way one loves a dear, good child, but to make her his wife did not occur to him at all.

’Of course I love you best,’ said the prince, ‘for…You are devoted to me, and you resemble  a young girl I once saw but will certainly never find again…She was the only one I could love in this world. But you look like her…and so good fortune has sent you to me. We shall never be parted!’

Then his parents want him to go meet a princess. He tells the mermaid:

‘I cannot love her. She doesn’t look like the beautiful girl in the temple, whom you resemble. If I should ever choose a bride, you would be the more likely one, my mute little foundling with the sparkling eyes!’

And this is where it gets really interesting:

And he kissed her rosy mouth, played with her long hair, and rested his head upon her heart, which dreamed of mortal happiness and an immortal soul.

Which she’s never gonna get. Why? Because this guy’s a loser.

You give a girl a nice little doggy bed. You treat her like a boy. You talk to her like a child. You tell her you love someone else. And what do you do next? You kiss her.

This is not Prince Eric. This is not Disney. Reading this story, I don’t want her to end up with this prince. That’s not a happy ending at all. He doesn’t even treat her like a person, and she deserves so much better.

So the prince goes and meets this princess. And the princess ends up being the girl that he loves from the temple. (He thinks she saved his life. Actually it was the mermaid. I’m really curious about what would have happened if he’d learned the truth.)

He’s going to marry her immediately. The deal with the witch says our mermaid dies the first morning after the wedding. She holds the bride’s train. She participates in the wedding that’s going to kill her, because she’s a sweet person who really loves this guy who treats her like a pet, and it is devastating.

Her sisters are also really sweet. They made a deal with the sea witch, too. In exchange for all of their hair, they get a knife, and they tell our mermaid:

Before the sun rises, you must plunge it into the prince’s heart! And when his warm blood spatters your feet, they will grow together into a fishtail, and you will become a mermaid again and can sink down into the water to us, and live your three hundred years before you turn into the lifeless, salty sea foam.

His life for a do over. I’d totally take that deal.

Maybe not. But I have a long list of fictional people I would like to slap, stab, or strangle, and he is definitely on it.

Anyway, the little mermaid is a much better person than me, and she’s not gonna kill this guy. She jumps into the sea. I think this is where people get the suicide idea, but the sun is just coming up now. She’s about to turn into sea foam, and being a very considerate sort of person, she’s going to do it in the water, so no one has to clean her up. She is literally seconds away from a natural death. She’s not killing herself. Knowing that she’s going to die regardless, she is choosing a place to die in.

And it’s quote time.

Once more she gazed at the prince with dimming eyes, then plunged from the ship down into the sea. And she felt her body dissolving into foam.

Now the sun rose out of the sea. The mild, warm rays fell on the deathly cold sea foam, and the little mermaid did not feel death…she saw the clear sun, and up above her floated hundreds of lovely transparent creatures…The little mermaid saw that she had a body like theirs. It rose higher and higher out of the foam.

So she becomes a Daughter of the Air. Daughters of the Air create their own souls with good deeds. It takes about three hundred years. So basically she gets to hang around for the length of her normal mermaid lifespan, and then she’ll have a soul and she can go to Heaven. Also she gets to talk again. This is not actually a tragic ending. She wins. She gets the soul. She doesn’t get the prince, but I have a feeling the Daughters of the Air are gonna treat her a lot better than he did, so who cares? She’s going to Heaven.

Now at the very end Andersen mentions that if the Daughters fly past a naughty child, they’ll get another year added to their 300, but mostly this seems to be a scare tactic for young readers, so let’s just focus on the happy part where the little mermaid does technically die, but also gets eternal life.

Also, if you want to read more of this type of story, where marriage=soul, you should totally check out Undine, by Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. It was written before The Little Mermaid, it also involves a sea person, it’s much more painful, it’s a little more explicitly religious, and it is absolutely beautiful. Also it’s free online, and George MacDonald Approved:

stomach: empty

spiders: ready

Speaker Paul Ryan’s office is conducting a brief yes/no phone survey– the only question is “do you support President Obama’s Health Care Bill?” 

You will have to listen to a somewhat biased history of the bill, but at the end, you can press a button (and NOT TALK TO A PERSON– perfect for people like me with phone anxiety) and register your opinion about ACA.  There is also an option to leave a message but as of tonight the mailbox was full.  

so apparently they took this off soundcloud but it’s still AMAZING taylorswift