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Did you hear that? That's the story I just wrote. Yes, yes, I know we had a bargain. I just said I'd write it, I didn't say I wouldn't tear it up! It's all in little pieces now, Walter, and I hope to do the same for you some day!

I am your worst fear//I am your best fantasy. After Donna Gottschalk.

Franz von Stuck Sensuality 1891 oil on canvas

1) the U.S. entertainment industry (especially animation) is run by older conservative types who make up offensive terms and get really mad about them.

2) the people who run Disney would be the first to fall in line with a fascist regime.

3) most of the media we consume is tailor-made and watered-down to appeal to the tastes of older, deeply religious conservative audiences.

And published it in Penthouse, to force those same censors to buy a skin mag. The editor there asked, why Penthouse?

That one is from his autobiography, Becoming Superman. See also:

When he was making Pulp Fiction, he was worried that the MPAA would object to the high level of violence in the film, so he shot a bunch of extra-gory stuff that he didn’t actually want in the film, and added it in before submitting it to the MPAA. Predictibly, they asked him to cut most of it (without even commenting on some of the things that had him worried, like the bits of Marvin’s skull that lodge in Samuel L. Jackson’s hairpiece). The resultant cuts were actually more permissive than he’d expected, so he cut a little more and submitted it, and it got passed with an R.

The second story is about that artist on Morrowind whose name escapes me (I’m not a big ES fan tbh) who figured out that if he made two creature designs, one weird and what he wanted, and one even weirder, he could get Todd Howard to agree to just about anything by showing him the whopper first, then going back and “working” for another few hours on a second, “toned-down” version, and it worked every time.

The reason I bring these up is that the thing that drives censors isn’t some extant physical rubrick of what is and isn’t acceptable, it’s the idea that they can have absolute power over someone else’s creative work. It’s about the social dominance of the interaction.

There is nothing so innocent, so clean, that a censor will not find some fault with it. Because they must find something wrong with it to justify their existence, and because it makes them feel powerful.

Einstürzende Neubauten in New York, Dancetaria, 1984/02/23

tumblr user 2: actually you can drink whatever you want all the time

tumblr user 3: yee and water is icky :(

tumblr user 4: I literally can't drink plain water as I'll instantly start throwing up, some people's bodies simply can't process it, you can't make blanket statements about what's good or not good for someone else's digestive system

-medieval and early modern knitting guilds were full of men learning and perfecting fancy knitting techniques to impress rich clients

-in cold, wet climates like the scottish highlands knitting was done by the whole family, in fact it was the perfect activity to do while a man was out on a fishing boat or in the pasture with his sheep and cattle

Once the knitting guilds dissolved as economic powers (partially due to the advent of semi-mechanised knitting machines, which outsourced knitting to "unskilled" croft and cottage-dwelling families rather than restricting the industry to select trained guildsmen), knitting throughout Europe was more likely to be an activity relegated to socio-economic classes than to gender roles, especially prior to the mid-19th century when it was slowly embraced as a leisure activity by wealthy women (in much the same way that embroidery had been embraced in earlier centuries).

And sure, there's an entire conversation to be had about how patriarchal structures have forced women to be more economically vulnerable than men throughout Western history, which therefore meant that once knitting was spread beyond the guilds' tight regulation, a lot of women began knitting because they were poor and it was a relatively portable form of work to earn an income.

Just as there's a conversation to be had about why various occupations and activities are devalued once enough women begin practising them - and especially once the activities are practised by "ladies of leisure", who were seen as being especially frivolous - and why we then collectively develop amnesia about the respect our society held for that occupation or activity just a few generations earlier (think also about teaching, nursing, secretarial and administrative occupations - all previously male-dominated careers that were paid well and seen as respectable, but have been steadily devalued as more women entered the field).