db cooper went up

I invite you to walk down any street in the usa at least and observe how people interact with pregnant Black people, especially if they already have a child with them, or truly anyone who isn't a well dressed white woman accompanied by her presumed husband.

The Costco employee was very understanding when I had to go find a seat midway through signing up for a membership, and sped through as much of the process as possible so she could do the parts that didn't require me to answer questions, but I was only in that situation in the first place because the desk was designed so that you had to stand to interact with the person there

My parents were happy to drive me wherever I needed to go once driving got uncomfortable for me, but they had to do that because there aren't nearly enough public transit options in my area for that to have been a valid option for me to get anywhere. When my parents couldn't drive me places, I couldn't leave the house

When I went to public events with my own food, people were understanding of the fact that I usually couldn't eat the deli meat sandwiches that are standard fare at food counters or events, but that didn't change the fact that I would be stuck surviving off of however many granola bars I was able to cram into my purse while other people were able to get larger meals

I’m sorry but that’s thinking way too small, hear me out:

We need to have Miss Piggy as Odysseus, and Kermit as Penelope.

Think about it… who’s the more fickle, prideful, warlike one in that relationship? Who is absolutely ready to go ham, at a moment’s notice?

Because when you think about it, the problem isn't that you can go to your chosen bookseller and find a story where Sparklia Special gets semi-forced to have babies for Broody McDarkenfay (it's okay, she's into it). The problem is that it is unnecessarily difficult to look a little further down the shelf and find a vampire princess domming the hell out of the hunter who knows he shouldn't love her. Reducing people's choices always serves the reactionary agenda one way or another. Expanding choices. That's where it's at.

Like imagine you spend most if not all of your childhood hearing "don't feed the bears" and all the reasons why that's a terrible idea. So okay you agree, while life might sometimes present the temptation to feed some bears it's a bad idea and you'll never do it. Still plenty of ways to enjoy nature, after all!

Then one morning you wake up and all the adults and organizations who spent so much time and energy on hammering home that you never, ever, ever feed the bears, are enthusing over this new Bear Feeding Park! Where all you do all day long is go feed bears! And absolutely you must get to the Bear Feeding Park and start hanging out there and throwing parties there and feeding bears, making sure all the important milestones of your life or even just mundane things feature, to some extent, a visit to Bear Feeding Park. Where you feed bears.

And you're like... well, if nothing else, is it somehow less dangerous to feed bears now? The answer to which is no. Not at all. Bear attacks skyrocket to an all-time high and stay there. Somehow this does not actually seem to deter anyone. You suggest that maybe this is a sign that Bear Feeding Park is a bad idea and people are like, oh no, we just need to find other ways to stay Bear Aware. We can't give up going to Bear Feeding Park, after all! You can't get hired unless you've got a good reputation at Bear Feeding Park!

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.”

You can't change anything with your actions so don't bother. You going vegetarian won't shut down a factory farm so don't bother. You buying something in sustainable packaging won't make a dent in the landfill so don't bother. You donating five bucks to a charity won't solve poverty so don't bother. You buying ethically-made clothing won't stop sweatshops from operating so don't bother.

I agree that the only way these problems are going to get solved is if the government enacts regulations to do so, but the key point here is that the government is not going to spontaneously do that. Everybody says they want to protect the environment and for people to make a living wage in the abstract but as soon as regulations start being passed people start throwing fits about how it's impacting their lives.

If the government banned factory farms, meat would suddenly be priced like a luxury item and people would throw fits about how poor people can't afford protein anymore, if they banned plastic packaging people would throw fits about how we're expected to bear the increased production costs, if they banned imports of items made in sweatshops or by slave labor people would throw fits about how they can't get their coffee and chocolate and electronics anymore.

There's a post on here about how community river clean-ups don't actually make much of an impact on water pollution, because the major cause of water pollution isn't random trash but industrial and agricultural run-off. But the clean-ups are still extremely valuable because they get the community invested in the cause of water pollution, the community starts taking pride in their local environment and start actually caring about environmental regulations on a personal level, and that grants activists the buy-in to push for changes that actually can reduce water pollution.

We absolutely must get individual buy-in before we can expect systemic change. You can't solve systemic problems with individual action, but you can't solve them without it either. Making small changes to your consumption habits isn't going to fix the world, but it gets people invested in and connected to the cause, it makes them feel like they're part of a larger movement, and it primes them to think of these regulations as wins for that movement rather than a sacrifice being forced upon them by the government.

before you say "4% isn't that big of a difference between the US and China"

Men make up 93% of the US prison population, but despite this, the US accounts for 30% of the GLOBAL population of incarcerated women.

Housing insecurity is the most significant predictor of incarceration with 22% of state prisoners experiencing it shortly before incarceration.

12% of state prisoners in the US were unhoused before their 16th birthday.

68% of US state prisoners were first incarcerated before their 16th birthday.

More than half of people in prisons and jails in the US have a mental illness.

Cognitive learning disabilities occur in state prisons at nearly 500% the national rate.