Rambles and Fandoms

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     omg. okay, so basically, I was a “gifted kid” which was code for fucken nerd ass bitch, so i would constantly just stare off into space during class while everyone else was tryna figure out what the fuck our teacher was tryna say. Anyway, I was learning about chemistry and biology outside of school(i know what a fucking nerd amirite ladies), and my dad got me a book that talked about all these famous psychological experiments.

    So chapter one was, would you have guessed it, Pavlov’s dog. I thought it my be fun to try something to that extent with my classmates. Now, keep in mind, being a nerdy ass brown kid in a school full of white ppl meant that I wasn’t exactly popular, and no one really talked to me in class or cared what I was doing.

   Everyday, at 9:45 am, our teacher would announce that it was snacktime, and everyone would fucking sprint to their cubbies to grab their lunchboxes like it was the goddamn hunger games. Kindergarten kids didn’t really have a concept of time, so i used this to my advantage. At 9:45 as my teacher would walk up to announce snacktime, I would knock on my desk really quickly three times. It was rly subtle, and I wasn’t sure that it would work.

   So after two or three weeks, I decided to have some fun. Thirty minutes after school began at like 8:30 or something, I tapped knocked on the desk. Half the class turned their heads and looked straight at the cubbies. 3 boys got up and were about to run to get their lunchbox. One girls stomach started growling REALLY loudly. The teacher had to take 5 minutes to get everyone to calm down and one kid started crying because he thought it was snacktime and he was so shocked and destroyed.

   Realizing that I had basically dog trained the whole class, I burst out laughing so hard I fell out of my chair and cut my head on the tile floor and got sent home early because I was laughing so hard they thought I had a concussion or something. When I explained what happened to my dad he left the room, but I could hear him losing it in the hallway. 

If you don't already know you have issues doing so, squat down real quick. Bend your knees all the way and touch the floor. Just make sure you can do it. Okay? For me? And then stand up all the way and make sure you can balance on one foot.

If there was ever a tumblr post worth sending to your mom, it's this one.

This is the very simple "starting from zero muscles" program I followed, highly recommend it or something similar:

Cool, so you want natural fiber costumes with no/nuanced corset slander, people wearing colors, historical hairstyles, people wearing hats or headcoverings and long sleeves outside during the day, no potatoes or pumpkins in pre-columbian Europe, actors with textured skin and wrinkles, minimal makeup, consulting HEMA groups and weapons scholars for all the weapons and fight scenes, a good soundtrack that includes traditional instruments?

At the same time, that rate of production is high enough that a household which found itself bereft of (male) farmers (for instance due to a draft or military mortality) might well be able to patch the temporary hole in the family finances by dropping its textile consumption down to that minimum and selling or trading away the excess, for which there seems to have always been demand. ...Consequently, the line between women spinning for their own household and women spinning for the market often must have been merely a function of the financial situation of the family and the balance of clothing requirements to spinners in the household unit (much the same way agricultural surplus functioned).

Moreover, spinning absolutely dominates production time (again, around 85% of all of the labor-time, a ratio that the spinning wheel and the horizontal loom together don’t really change). This is actually quite handy, in a way, as we’ll see, because spinning (at least with a distaff) could be a mobile activity; a spinner could carry their spindle and distaff with them and set up almost anywhere, making use of small scraps of time here or there.

On the flip side, the labor demands here are high enough prior to the advent of better spinning and weaving technology in the Late Middle Ages (read: the spinning wheel, which is the truly revolutionary labor-saving device here) that most women would be spinning functionally all of the time, a constant background activity begun and carried out whenever they weren’t required to be actively moving around in order to fulfill a very real subsistence need for clothing in climates that humans are not particularly well adapted to naturally. The work of the spinner was every bit as important for maintaining the household as the work of the farmer and frankly students of history ought to see the two jobs as necessary and equal mirrors of each other.

At the same time, just as all farmers were not free, so all spinners were not free. It is abundantly clear that among the many tasks assigned to enslaved women within ancient households. Xenophon lists training the enslaved women of the household in wool-working as one of the duties of a good wife (Xen. Oik. 7.41). ...Columella also emphasizes that the vilica ought to be continually rotating between the spinners, weavers, cooks, cowsheds, pens and sickrooms, making use of the mobility that the distaff offered while her enslaved husband was out in the fields supervising the agricultural labor (of course, as with the bit of Xenophon above, the same sort of behavior would have been expected of the free wife as mistress of her own household).

...Consequently spinning and weaving were tasks that might be shared between both relatively elite women and far poorer and even enslaved women, though we should be sure not to take this too far. Doubtless it was a rather more pleasant experience to be the wealthy woman supervising enslaved or hired hands working wool in a large household than it was to be one of those enslaved women, or the wife of a very poor farmer desperately spinning to keep the farm afloat and the family fed. The poor woman spinner – who spins because she lacks a male wage-earner to support her – is a fixture of late medieval and early modern European society and (as J.S. Lee’s wage data makes clear; spinners were not paid well) must have also had quite a rough time of things.

It is difficult to overstate the importance of household textile production in the shaping of pre-modern gender roles. It infiltrates our language even today; a matrilineal line in a family is sometimes called a ‘distaff line,’ the female half of a male-female gendered pair is sometimes the ‘distaff counterpart’ for the same reason. Women who do not marry are sometimes still called ‘spinsters’ on the assumption that an unmarried woman would have to support herself by spinning and selling yarn (I’m not endorsing these usages, merely noting they exist).

E.W. Barber (Women’s Work, 29-41) suggests that this division of labor, which holds across a wide variety of societies was a product of the demands of the one necessarily gendered task in pre-modern societies: child-rearing. Barber notes that tasks compatible with the demands of keeping track of small children are those which do not require total attention (at least when full proficiency is reached; spinning is not exactly an easy task, but a skilled spinner can very easily spin while watching someone else and talking to a third person), can easily be interrupted, is not dangerous, can be easily moved, but do not require travel far from home; as Barber is quick to note, producing textiles (and spinning in particular) fill all of these requirements perfectly and that “the only other occupation that fits the criteria even half so well is that of preparing the daily food” which of course was also a female-gendered activity in most ancient societies. Barber thus essentially argues that it was the close coincidence of the demands of textile-production and child-rearing which led to the dominant paradigm where this work was ‘women’s work’ as per her title.

(There is some irony that while the men of patriarchal societies of antiquity – which is to say effectively all of the societies of antiquity – tended to see the gendered division of labor as a consequence of male superiority, it is in fact male incapability, particularly the male inability to nurse an infant, which structured the gendered division of labor in pre-modern societies, until the steady march of technology rendered the division itself obsolete. Also, and Barber points this out, citing Judith Brown, we should see this is a question about ability rather than reliance, just as some men did spin, weave and sew (again, often in a commercial capacity), so too did some women farm, gather or hunt. It is only the very rare and quite stupid person who will starve or freeze merely to adhere to gender roles and even then gender roles were often much more plastic in practice than stereotypes make them seem.)

Spinning became a central motif in many societies for ideal womanhood. Of course one foot of the fundament of Greek literature stands on the Odyssey, where Penelope’s defining act of arete is the clever weaving and unweaving of a burial shroud to deceive the suitors, but examples do not stop there. Lucretia, one of the key figures in the Roman legends concerning the foundation of the Republic, is marked out as outstanding among women because, when a group of aristocrats sneak home to try to settle a bet over who has the best wife, she is patiently spinning late into the night (with the enslaved women of her house working around her; often they get translated as ‘maids’ in a bit of bowdlerization. Any time you see ‘maids’ in the translation of a Greek or Roman text referring to household workers, it is usually quite safe to assume they are enslaved women) while the other women are out drinking (Liv. 1.57). This display of virtue causes the prince Sextus Tarquinius to form designs on Lucretia (which, being virtuous, she refuses), setting in motion the chain of crime and vengeance which will overthrow Rome’s monarchy. The purpose of Lucretia’s wool-working in the story is to establish her supreme virtue as the perfect aristocratic wife.

...For myself, I find that students can fairly readily understand the centrality of farming in everyday life in the pre-modern world, but are slower to grasp spinning and weaving (often tacitly assuming that women were effectively idle, or generically ‘homemaking’ in ways that precluded production). And students cannot be faulted for this – they generally aren’t confronted with this reality in classes or in popular culture. ...Even more than farming or blacksmithing, this is an economic and household activity that is rendered invisible in the popular imagination of the past, even as (as you can see from the artwork in this post) it was a dominant visual motif for representing the work of women for centuries.”

In the lead up to the American Revolution, you see newspapers talking about women – many if not most of whom had never spun a day in their lives, either because they were wealthy and didn't have to or because they were poor but didn't have time to among all of the other things they had to do for their families or their jobs, and professional spinster's existed, so why would they? -Getting together "spinning bees" to try and make homespun thread for homespun fabric so they could boycott textiles coming from England. These women were hailed as paragons of patriotic womanhood (never mind the fact that we have no evidence they ever produced scalable amounts of textiles, or even like… High-quality anything. Most of these bees seem to have been one-off events that were almost more about performing femininity and patriotism than actually producing threads/fabric)

And moving into the 19th century, the image of the spinning wheel became ubiquitous here in the US when talking about women in earlier American history. Longfellow's poem about his Mayflower ancestors features the female protagonist at her spinning wheel, even though textile production wasn't really a thing in the new colony at the time when the events he wrote about took place. Popular illustrations showed colonial women spinning at home. In the early 20th century, an art photographer named Wallace Nutting and his wife Mariet Griswold staged images of imaginary colonial interiors that almost always involved some type of antique spinning wheel as set dressing (to the great annoyance of later museum workers, who are forever having to debunk his photos in various ways)

the new season has been out since mid-April and we are already halfway through it. i know the WTNV team has been posting about it on their social channels for months leading up to it. i dont think we are doing anything differently, promotion-wise, than we did with the first three seasons which seemed to find their audience much more quickly.

personally i find it rather frustating given the amount of work we put into this show, but im not really sure what to do about it. i know part of it is down to the fact that audiofiction is a far more competitive field than it used to be, and there's also so much noise and chaos in the world these days that its hard to find anything, and so many terrible problems that fiction feels less important.