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~ The Health Guide, Edwin D. Babbitt, 1874

what the people want, the people get

you see

my professor’s take is that mary shelley is feminizing victor throughout the novel, as a way of flipping gender roles and putting a male character through female experiences.

evidence as explained:

victor is creating life. he is putting his health at risk (spends two years with little sleep or socialization) to bring life forth into this world

his illness after he is shocked by the creature coming to life is akin to both ‘hysteria’ and postpartum depression

he pretty much swoons, let’s be honest

henry clerval, a man who has been characterized as manly and heroic, has to chase after damsel-in-distress victor and care for him as he convalesces 

afterward, he hides what he did and went through, for fear that others will label him crazy and emotional and not believe him. sound familiar?

Victor in general is more emotional than the other characters and is constantly tempering his reactions to not be seen as irrational 

the book does not otherwise have central female characters 

Also, Shelley’s mother died in childbirth. It’s interesting, then, that Shelley presents the creation of life as something horrific and damaging. She parallels Victor with her mother.

As if Mary Wollstonecraft never wrote about her life or her own political views. Wollstonecraft was sometimes still used as a public example of how radical views would destroy a woman's life during her daughter's time, but her own words and life become nothing in the above analysis, just her death.

But, most critically for this post, the fucking fact that Mary Shelley (then still Mary Godwin) had birthed two children herself before she wrote Frankenstein, one of which had by that point already died. If you're going to view this as an allegory for pregnancy/post-partum, it absolutely matters that she had children, and one of those children was with her on the trip when she began writing Frankenstein. She had her own experiences of pregnancy and motherhood, including socially disapproved of pregnancy and motherhood (both children were illegitimate, the suicide of Harriet Shelley occurred after their birth and the beginning of writing Frankenstein).

And also, you know, stop pretending like men are never dramatic or ridiculous. Percy Shelley abandoned his pregnant wife and their children when he ran off with Mary. Maybe, you know, that a man who would do things like abandoning his children yet celebrating the birth of his son in the company of his pregnant mistress isn't inconceivable as male behavior because that was how Percy Shelley just actually behaved.

Lord Byron and John Polidori were also on that trip where the initial story was written, and were also incredibly dramatic men.

I stared at them through the dawning realization that they lived in a world where that was remotely possible. “My phone is on do not disturb if I’m sleeping. Why would I let random texts wake me up? My sleep is important.”

Equally baffled they replied, “What if someone at work needs you?”

“I am not a manager. No one at work will ever need me badly enough to interrupt my sleep. If I’m not working then there’s no reason to be calling me.”

“Not even if you need to cover?”

I laughed, “I don’t need to cover. They could ask me to cover but good luck getting ahold of me if I’m sleeping.”

They looked distressed at this idea.

To console them I added, “I have important people like my mom and my wife set to override. If they call they get through no matter what.”

There was a small pause before they asked, “You can do that…?”

Using suffering people struggling to stay alive or, frequently, suicidal people, as a spectacle for building "gratitude" of people with more money is fucking repulsive.

It makes you feel good to see people society is treating like shit desperately trying to get food? What the fuck? Seeing the horrors society inflicts on people is supposed to make people feel better about the state of the world?

(alt included)

fucking lmao

you saw her reading a chat message that said "wasn't this debunked?" referring to Ethan Klein stating that the woman in a clip was sexually assaulted, which she never claimed to be. Ethan then proceeded to call her a disgusting nasty bitch 7 times in a row live on air for something HE got wrong in his poorly sourced hitpiece against someone he's deeply psychosexually obsessed with.

Ethan Klein has a heavily documented pattern of sexually harassing (both directly while hiding behind ig stories and by proxy with his deranged subreddit) the absolute shit out of anyone he feels threatened by, men and women alike, but particularly young women. in one case Ethan came close to making someone kill himself.

Currently he's enabling and emboldening journalist Taylor Lorenz's stalker, who has made multiple credible physical threats against her.

Ethan Klein first sexually harasses people to attempt to intimidate them with a torrent of incel replyguys at his beck and call now that he's aligned with Dan Saltman (the guy who made 'tinychat' enabling Diddy to prey on children, and the guy who made 'redact.dev' the service that wipes your online footprint in exchange for being blackmailed with the information), then attempts to silence them with lawsuits and demands for retraction, which go nowhere because he's a delusional moron who believes talking about how "Hasan Piker is basically Grand Mufti al Husseini, who loved Hitler By The Way" in a copyright filing against Denims will win him any points with a judge.

Meanwhile, there is evidence of systemic rape and torture of Palestinian prisoners/hostages/kidnapping victims (the majority are not charged or given trials, ever). When, in an extremely rare case, there was an investigation of soldiers committing a gang rape, Israelis rioted, including members of the government, and politicians gave speeches defending the right to rape Palestinians.