The Rabbit in the Roots

Many more women dressed as men to fight.

Long before female nurses were officially considered to be a part of the military, they were already on the battlefield. They merely didn’t get written into official reports because they were “invisible women”, “not supposed to be there”. Usually they would be local women running a makeshift care center out of their homes.

Movies involving ancient societies? Guess how many had female fighters?

Spies? Mostly female. Yeah, only the men were caught, usually (because nobody suspected the servant woman), but historians believe most cases had more women spies than men. Most cases meaning across time and continents.

Giving me a movie on samurai? Women were trained as well to avoid being captured and raped, and often fought just as hard as men. One woman notably survived multiple battles, and became a hero alongside her sisters after taking out 7 men before dying in her last fight (usually in sword fighting you’d be lucky to take out 2 enemy soldiers. 7 is fucking insane, but because she was a woman it was shoved under the records how the lord managed to survive).

Women have ALWAYS been on battlefields. Women have an intense history in driving victories and losses alike. They were supply runners, fighters, spies, assassins, prostitutes (look up how prostitutes essentially ran the western world, or even the social status of harem members. They literally fucking ruled), even underground activists.

dada was a largely european art movement that took place after wwi. this time and place is not a coincidence. let me explain. 

dada art made no sense. the artists who made dada lived in a world in which nothing made sense - in which conventional logic led to the senselessness of a world war. so, making art that made no sense, making - well, you can’t really call it art, so making ANTI-art that rejected the conventions that brought about that atrocity in the first place - it made total sense. (if that makes any sense.)

so the artists did weird things. new things! putting things that were already made together and calling it sculpture, cutting up bits of pictures and putting them together and calling that something to frame - this site has some nice examples.

but from my perspective - there’s serious intellectual continuity between the absurdity of attaching a bunch of tacks to the bottom of an iron, rendering it useless, and say…. bath bomb posts. Put a fucking macbook in a bath. it’s useless now. Nobody fucking cares anymore. you want something funny? you want a punchline? gun. that’s your punchline. Take it. I am laughing

in a way it could be a method of venting some of the frustration and hopelessness and dissatisfaction that tumblr’s userbase (largely, disenfranchised millennials) feels in the modern day. I can’t really speak for anyone else, but… at least from a US perspective, there’s plenty to be disillusioned about. growing up in a constant state of questionably justified war, income inequality, an economic recession caused by the actions of a handful of wealthy fucks who didn’t even get properly punished, growing awareness of police brutality, being called lazy and self-absorbed by the generations that gave us these problems in the first place… I can’t help but think that these factors (and more) could produce a similar mindset to the one that precipitated the first dada movement. 

so of COURSE we make nonsense jokes. it’s a coping mechanism for a world which doesn’t make any sense.

related: this isn’t by tumblr but I have to plug UCLA’s atrocity of a virtual gallery once more. it really needs to be experienced, but… it’s definitely also millennial neo dada. from the presentation (like an unplayable video game) to the content (THE DOGS HAVE ARRIVED), it is exactly what I am talking about. it is a fucking shitpost. and it’s high art, too! I love this

you see this? this is exactly what I’m fucking talking about. the thing that I’m talking about is:

and turns them into these mindlessly patriotic broken automatons chanting rote phrases:

x

There were 140 kids in my graduating class; of that number, 5 went on to universities. 25 joined the military, myself included. It was the only way that a lot of us could get out of town, and it was definitely the only way that most of us could pay for college. 44% of America’s military recruits are from rural America, and two-thirds of them came from households with incomes below the national median.

THIS IS WHAT FUCKING HAPPENS WHEN YOU FORGET TO RINSE THE TUB OUT AFTER USING A LUSH INTERGALATIC BATHBOMB!

He’s fine. He got a bath.

“They look nothing li—”

baby ducks act a lot like baby chickens so in the beginning it wasn’t so bad

the main problem is that baby ducks  LOVE water, but baby chickens get very very dead from it,

so you can imagine the mother hens surprise and horror the first time they go by the farm pond and ALL THE BABIES RUN TO THE WATER AND JUMP IN

my grandmother had to come out of the house to investigate all the noise the hen was making

The mother hen was clucking and screeching in distress and running circles around the pond while the duckies were having the time of their lives.

This happened a few more times before Momma hen was like FUCK IT YOU WANNA SWIM SEE WHAT I CARE , and would sit a distance away watching them in the pond.