You can call me Bee | I post lots of stuff entirely disconnectedly | Put a book quote in my Ask Box and I'll (probably) calligraph it | GNU Terry Pratchett
i love you lab grown diamonds i love you slavery-free chocolate i love you community gardens i love you fact that the insulin patent was sold for $1 i love you locally produced meat and milk i love you streets turned into walkable parks i love you little reminders that Things Do Not Have To Be This Way and there are people working to build a better world!!
i love you smog tests for cars i love you clean air regulations i love you HEPA filters i love you dam removal i love you planting native gardens i love you monarch butterflies (up 64% in 2026!) i love you working for decades to bring the condors back from zero to 300+ in the wild i love you inventing little machines to pick up the plastic fishing nets and other trash in the sea i love you occupational health and safety regulations i love you environmental protection agencies i love you unions i love you social aid programs i love you food not bombs i love you sea shepherds i love you most countries stopping industrial whaling and more humpback whales now than ever before i love you saving the forests i love you little libraries i love you take what you need cupboards/fridges i love you secular food pantries i love you public bathrooms i love you all-ages playgrounds i love you museums i love you aquariums + zoos i love you restoring peregrine falcons to nyc i love you letting beavers fix the river i love you releasing wolves into the wild i love you bison recovery efforts i love you landback i love you reducing light pollution i love you freeway sound baffle walls i love you advertising bans i love you public outreach and education i love you maria montessori i love you queer clinics i love you people working really hard and succeeding at fixing the world and making it safer for all living beings!
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there are a NUMBER of folktale Woman-Creatures like selkies who exist to make the inherently coercive nature of heterosexual marriage explicit and to externalize male anxiety about how if your wife had actual autonomy she very well might disappear and you might never fucking hear from her again
which is a FASCINATING category of Woman-Creature imo
someone said it's also a cautionary tale about mistreating your wife and I think that's spot on especially for other related types of stories e.g. the crane wife. like I think these stories are very much Husband Anxiety Stories. the Woman-Creatures are black boxes whose interior experience it is impossible to know and who have strange and often seemingly arbitrary rules that you must follow or else they will disappear. idk. like. that's why I think that any empowering-to-women-ness qualities of these stories is incidental. I think they're externalized anxiety about coercive societal heterosexuality and the inability to truly Know one's wife in such circumstances.
you also see a variant of this formula a lot (generally at the more literary end of the fairy tale space) where it's not a creature you capture, but a magical lady who picks you for seemingly arbitrary reasons, bettering your fortune enormously with her magic and wealth and second-hand status.
and then, for reasons usually at least slightly less arbitrary, fucks off again.
the husbandly anxiety here is more about not having access to coercion as an option.
was just talking to Story about this and he told me about one folktale where a guy meets a beautiful woman at a lake and she brings a bountiful dowry of like one million fat cows and such and she is of course a fairy so she's like "my one requirement in our bargain is that if you strike me three times I will leave" and in many versions of the story the husband doesn't ""actually"" strike her -- each time it's something like, one 'strike' involves her forgetting her gloves inside and he walks out and taps her on the shoulder with her gloves, but she tells him that counts as striking her. this sort of thing. which is TRANSPARENTLY like "whoa wouldn't it be fucked up if your wife could enforce consequences for behavior she said was harmful, even if according to your cultural norms it was fine, and you didn't see it as a big deal?" like... lol. what if women could actually be the ones who decided whether or not any given action their husbands took against them was harmful? IMAGINE... PREDEY SCARY....
@creekfiend why would you totally brush over the fact that this is a lady of the lake story? "a guy meets a beautiful woman at a lake" no he didn't, he meets her in the lake. Specifically a lake called Llyn y Fan Fach in this folk tale's case. She's the same type of fairy*¹ that fished out Excalibur for King Arthur (but a different one obvs). That is to say that lake ladies are something of a trope in folk tales. People only tend to know about the excalibur one and I am here to say that there are so many of these soggy women. ANYWAY that isn't important to what I want to say, I just thought your phrasing was funny. What I am here to say though is that your anglo-centric attitudes are getting in the way of your perceptions of these folk tales!
I accidentally wrote a small essay, so I have hidden it below lmao. Genuinely surprised at how carried away I got here...
So I lied, one piece of that information WAS important, actually. The location: that being Llyn y Fan Fach. This specific lake is located in Wales. Something else which is important to know about this folk tale is the time; the first instance of the story being written down in English is 1861, however it had previously existed through the oral tradition before then. The tale even begins by stating that it takes place at the end of the twelfth century.
Coincidentally, the oldest written evidence for a Welsh 'lady of the lake' story is from the twelfth century as it so happens. Written in latin, though probably also sourced through prior oral tradition (which would have been in welsh), it is also set in the same geographic area and the lady also leaves her human husband after being struck, though she will only tolerate being struck once before she leaves.
Why is this important? Well, Wales was still independent from England during this time (but only just) and thusly had their own set of laws. Actually, they maintained having*² their own set of laws even under English rule, right up until Henry VIII put a stop to that. RIP Welsh law, me and my homies hate Henry VIII.
"Haha imagine if women could just leave, scary right?" They can. Under Welsh laws, either spouse is able to initiate a divorce and it must me mutually agreed upon in order to go through. There are even a few specific circumstances where you can ask for a divorce without having to finacially compensate the person you are divorcing - one of these is bad breath. "How can a woman divorce a husband if she is financially dependent on him?" 1. She isn't. 2. If she is broke and the man's breath stinks... oh baby, she is legally out of there!
"Omg, my actions have consequences, she left because I hit her!" Interesting, because welsh laws protected women against physical abuse. The folk tale is actually very specific in that they had to be three strikes "without cause." A man could hit his wife, but only for three things*³: 1. Giving something away which she was not entitled to. 2. Sleeping with another man. 3. Wishing a blemish on her husband's beard.*⁴ And if he hit her for adultery, then that counted as him getting even and he would not be allowed to ask for further compensation. If the wife was hit for any other reason, then she could claim compensation from him. A wife could also claim compensation from their husbands in the case of adultery, they could even divorce him if he did it three times.
"She took all the cattle with her when she left." Women had property rights in the case of divorce - she was entitled to a set amount of property upon their marriage,*⁵ equal to her social standing, and this increased as the marriage went on - if the marriage had lasted 7 years or more before the separation, then the couple's property was divided equally between the man and the woman (this is "moveable" property btw like furniture and livestock, women can't inherit land, that would be crazy*⁶). She gets half of their property if her husband dies as well, his children only inherit from the half that was his.
I feel that I should add as well, on the topic of marriage, that it was not considered to be a sacred act by Welsh law, rather it was just an agreement between two people (and their families). One of the consequences of this definition is that there basically aren't any bastard children. Children born inside or outside of a couple's marriage are treated equally by the law. In fact, children by another woman are also considered equal inheritors, as long as the father acknowledges the fact that those are his children.
Another law which is unrelated to the folk tale but which I think is neat is that the woman's account would take precedence in the case of a rape accusation.
So yeah, back on track! Your earliest examples with selkies and things still stand, because those stories are happening elswhere in different contexts. Scottish and Irish medieval laws and customs? I don't know them unfortunately. Maybe they can add even more fun context. But the welsh lake ladies? Incidental female empowerment? No, they have that power. And they won't care about the divorce, they have some 50 fat cows to their name, marrying again is not going to be a problem for them. These externalised male anxieties are very real and could happen to you 🫵
*¹ I won't lie to you guys, idk what terms get used for all these fairy tale/folk story creatures/figures.
*² Only difference is that they were now being decided by the King's eldest son and the Marcher Lords as a type of practice kingdom before he inherited the crown of England.
*³ Omg, almost as if... he would need a "cause" for doing it!!!
*⁴ I have no idea what exatly that last one means. Is she just not allowed to be mean about his beard? Maybe it's a euphemism? I could not tell you.
** lmao, in this economy!?!?
*⁵ Thus she is not financially dependent on her husband.
*⁶ That's a joke, women owning land is normal to want and possible to achieve.** They just couldn't back then.
🌟 if you want to read more on this topic and do some fact checking (I encourage it because I have a tendency toward hyperbole), then the laws are refered to as 'the Laws of Hywel Dda.' (Hywel being the first king who decided to codify them - he did not neccessarily make them up and they were also edited/added to by subsequent kings). They are super neat and way better than the yucky Norman (English) laws of the time (haha wdym I'm biased?)
And then you're like "fuck it, I'll make my own" and once you've done that you toss it into the goodwill bin to be someone else's prada or container of human teeth
today my wisdom is: the ecological crisis of our planet is not a thing that will Suddenly destroy us sometime in the next century—it has taken decades of continuous work for our biosphere to be preserved thus far, and it will take decades more of continuous work to continue preserving it.
The apocalypse is not a single event hovering in the future bearing down on us while we sit helplessly. We are at least 150 years into an ongoing "apocalypse."
Things will continue to steadily get worse without steady action, but "augh! it's already too late to stop climate change and mass extinctions!" is specifically the worst response
what I mean is, there is a persistent fallacy that the present situation of a thing is always worse than the past, even if there have been fluctuations in badness.
This is not true. There is a great wealth of specific cases where ecosystems/species/a specific anthropogenic impact on the environment is CURRENTLY, RIGHT NOW, better than it has been at any point in the past 100 years
I've been researching the history of conservation in the USA...and I think current doomers would benefit from knowing just how bad things got throughout the 20th century.
The eastern USA's natural environments were fucking razed. We went scorched earth on everything.
In the 1930's, DEER and WILD TURKEYS were almost eliminated from my state. Deer. Wild turkeys. Common animals that you can see all the time.
I've seen animals close to my home that a person in the 1970's would not have been able to see. I saw river otters and a bald eagle a couple months ago! Farmer family friend remembers when a bald eagle sighting here made the news. There is a thriving population of elk (16,000 animals) in the Appalachian Mountains, for the first time since before 1850!
We actively tried to exterminate so many species. Bison. Wolves. Mountain lions. The US GOVERNMENT PAID PEOPLE TO KILL CARNIVORES. They're still here. They're reclaiming their old territories. All is not lost
There was a time most American cities almost never saw a blue sky. Brown and yellow smog was the norm and rivers were garbage sludge that are now teeming with fish. People don't know that government environmental regulation actually did succeed, that the EPA really worked as intended. Now it gets eroded because people think it isn't making a big difference, and they think that because they haven't seen what it's still holding back.
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"haha they look like two kids scared of being in trouble" yeah because they look like they got CAUGHT. doing something WRONG. they look GUILTY. it's not cute it's fucking heartbreaking
I bought "Network Effect" in Japanese because of who I am as a person.
Anyway, I will be sharing things, but the first thing is that upon meeting Three,
Ratthi calls Three kimi きみ
（バリッシューエストランザ社には、きみは死んだと伝いる）
Amena calls Three anata あなた
（あなた、名前はあるの？）
And ART calls Three omae おまえ
（この人間たちに害意を待っているなら、おまえを分解して）＊
That's like...
You (friendly!)
You (textbook)
(FUCK) You
*Also that threat is SO MUCH MORE SICK (to me) IN JAPANESE. Also just... so rude. I love that Japanese has so many levels of politeness so ART can use none of them.
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Im grading the final exams for the class I TA for and I'm checking the name of the one I've just graded so I can enter it in the gradebook when I notice that after the name it says in parentheses "just visiting ! =)". And that I do not know this student, they are not enrolled in this class, and they just showed up on the last day to take the final . Innovative use of free will
some people are responding to this like its a joke and im going to assume u are the type of people to say "its only a 3 minute walk" when i tell them the nearest bench is too far away
Someone is eating a fresh orange in this McDonald's. I smelled it and my head snapped up like a hunting dog. That smell doesn't belong in this wicked place
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the idea that predators and abusers are an ontological category of person, rather than everyone having the capacity to be predatory and abusive, leads to people having no regard for boundaries because they think that predation only comes from evil people ™
