Jolene Meghan

the path of wisdom is sometimes to hire a plumber.

aka I, an archeologist, am here to review the accuracy Penelope's loom in the 2024 movie 'The Return' because I want to avoid thinking about all my papers due next week. For context, I am currently writing my bachelor paper on Minoan textiles, and while I am definitely not an expert, I do know a thing or two about bronze age textile technology

So first point of pedantry: that is not at all a bronze ago loom.

I can't say exactly say what kind of loom this is, as I've only studied bronze ago looms. Whatever kind of horizontal/draw/treadle loom this is, I can confidently state that this would not have been used in Mycenaean times. I'd say that we only see these kinds of looms in Europe from the medieval period, somewhere around the 11th century.

In the bronze age, there are three types of looms in use (as far as we know). The horizontal ground loom, the two beam loom, and the warp-weighted loom. Most traditionally, we see iconography depict Penelope weaving on a warp-weighted loom, like this beautiful vase does.

We can clearly recognize this as a warp weighted loom, because we can see the weights: they're the little triangles at the ends of the vertical threads (the warp). The warp-weighted loom is also the only loom we can find archeological remains of, as the loom weights were often made of clay (sometimes pebbles), while the other types of looms were purely wooden.

Furthermore, I have genuinely no clue what she is supposed to be doing with her weaving in this short clip. There is no visible shed, which is the separation between the warp yarns, through which you pull the weft, so that you can actually weave something.

Here's a picture of the shed, as you can see, every other thread is pulled up, and the shed can then be switched around to create a woven pattern.

In the short clip we see, she seems to just be drawing some threads through the warp, which is more than a little nonsensical. If one was weaving a smaller fabric or a tapestry, one could perhaps use a pin or sword beater to pick up individual threads of the warp to pass your horizontal thread (the weft) under, and create patterns that way. That is still not what she is doing here. Additionally, she is weaving a solid red fabric, which would not make it a very interesting tapestry.

Perhaps she's undoing her weaving in this scene? It would make a little more sense if that was what she was doing, as no one would ever be actively weaving at night! It required a lot of light to be able to see what you were doing. Candle light just did not suffice. It still looks a little strange to me, as I don't actually see any woven fabric on the loom that she could be undoing. It's all just loose warp threads.

Honestly, it kind of looks like they picked up a loom from the nearest interactive history museum and plunked it into their movie without doing any research. I think it's a little sad that when adapting a work that centers weaving as much as the Odyssey does, the filmmakers did not do any research into bronze age weaving. You really don't need to be writing a paper on this stuff to find sources for this!

i do actually think it is offensive for an author to dismiss queer characters' concerns of homophobia as just internalized shame and selfishness and self-hatred and cowardice. i do actually think it is offensive for an author to bring up homophobic legistlation in russia as a major concern for an immigrant character only to then decide it doesn't matter to him at all, actually, because writing him as an immigrant and doing any research about immigration is somehow too much to ask of ~a romance novel~.

and frankly, i think people who go "oh my god it's just a romance novel!!! you guys are asking too much/reading too much into things!!! it's misogynistic to criticize the romance genre like this!!!" are actually far too comfortable insinuating that the entire romance genre is, by default, full of homophobia, racism, and lazy writing. i actually think it's entirely possible for romance novels to treat the subjects they invoke with care.

if reid didn't want to write about closeted queer people with any compassion, and instead wanted to accuse them of only being closeted because of shame, selfishness, and cowardice, she could have made up a fictional world in which homophobia is simply not as severe an issue as it is today. instead, she chose to invoke homophobia as it exists in the real world, and then simply victim-blamed her closeted characters for being impacted by it.

ultimately, she writes as though the closet is the ultimate sin. this is why she discards ilya's immigrant storyline and doesn't care about the impacts of russia on him as soon as it no longer plays into the ~forbidden romance~ trope in hr. the closet is evil, and wanting to stay closeted is shameful, and therefore ilya (her obvious favorite character) must want to come out. the long game follows the same exact formula as game changer, just with more cruelty in its ending. (it's like if game changer included two sentences about scott getting physically hatecrimed at the end, but glossed over it immediately because he was just sooooo happy to be out it didn't even matter.)

And if there is a demographic shift and that same job becomes male-dominated, then the average wage increases. Societal respect increases.

The converse is also true. If a job shifts from primarily male-dominated to primarily female-dominated, the average wage will drop. Societal respect decreases. A big example of this phenomenon is secretarial work. In the 1800s, being a secretary was actually considered a man’s job, and it was a very elite one at that. If you were a secretary, you were being groomed for leadership. It was a position of status.

That position shifted to a female-dominated field after the invent of the typewriter. Women were hired for the role as typists, and the position was quickly stripped of its respect, mobility, and high wages. As it was feminized, it was devalued. The work was perceived as less because it was performed by a woman. It is yet another microcosm of misogyny.

The inherent devaluation of what is perceived as feminine is blatant in many aspects of life, but I think it has been achingly apparent in how the heated rivalry fandom has treated romance as a genre.

Romance is a genre that is often perceived as being written for women, by women. It is a feminine genre. And so it is devalued.

This devaluation is another well documented phenomenon. Romance as a genre has long been treated as low-brow. It is the empty calories of literature. There is a pervasive mindset that you read it as a guilty indulgence, not because it’s really good.

But it can be.

This idea that the romance genre is lesser or low brow is a fundamentally false one. I had another post here about what genre is and what the romance genre in particular is, so I won’t get into that here. Romance is just a type of story. It in no way dictates how that story is executed. And any story can be executed well.

We are still studying Pride & Prejudice centuries later because from a mechanical perspective, it is a masterclass. It is a serious and complex work of literature. And it is a romance novel. And Pride & Prejudice is not unique in its excellence. There have been many excellent works of literature over the centuries that can be classified as romantic in nature. Some of Shakespeare’s finest works were his romances. The mere fact that a work is romantic does not demand that it is executed with any less skill. But we still act as if you should expect less from a story because it is “just a romance.”

This mindset is rooted in misogyny. There is no genre out there where every artist on the planet got together and decided that it would be the place where they shuffled off the literary duds. That’s fucking bonkers. And there is no other genre where we act like we did that, because there is no other genre as feminized as romance. It is treated as lesser because it is perceived as being for and by women.

Any story can be written well. And the fact that a story focuses centrally on romance does not exclude it from tackling societal issues in a nuanced and complete manner. A romance novel does not need to be a sociopolitical thesis because no book needs to be anything. But it can be.

I think it is telling that one of the most common defenses of these books is not “no, they handled that topic well” but is instead “you can’t expect them to be well executed because it’s just a romance novel, aka the place where dumb fucks go to die.” There is nothing about the fact that these books are romantic that makes them inherently less. And we need to seriously inspect this communal instinct to act like it does. Because the devaluation inherent in that is based in misogyny.

Authors have the freedom to decide what topics they try to tackle in their books, and the audience expects them to do it well. If they do not do it well, then they open themselves up to criticism about that fact. That has been an understood and expected facet of literature since we invented fucking books. Literary criticism has always been a part of society’s experience of literature. We have spent centuries tearing apart each other’s writings and pointing out what we think was done well or poorly. And we have never rushed to the defense of other works with “no no no no no don’t criticize it like that—it’s supposed to be bad, you’re just taking it too seriously.” Authors pick their own conflict. It is not too much to demand that they handle that conflict well.

Polysyndetons are a rhetorical device where you repeat coordinating conjunctions in a sentence, i.e., “He ran and jumped and laughed and sang.” The repetition of the coordinating conjunction, in this case “and,” makes a polysyndeton.

For me today, those circumstances were: Several days of being underslept. Over-stressed. Forgot to take my ADHD meds this morning. Already dealing with the harried mental state of day-before-travel stress. A personal panic trigger of missing appointments because I forgot about them.

We all know by now that the IRS will not call you on the phone. The jury duty people also will not call you on the phone, and this was the crucial piece of information that I did not have cold hard confirmation of today. Here is what happened, so that you can be equipped in case these fuckers call you:

Man with an American accent tells me he's from my city's courthouse. He tells me I missed jury duty summons yesterday and that now I'm in Trouble for contempt of court and failure to appear for jury duty. I protested that I hadn't gotten a notification for jury duty, he talked over me and said scary things about getting law enforcement involved unless I went to pay some fines and talk to the judge Right Now Today. He told me that I legally wasn't allowed to hang up the phone or put it on mute. He told me that I was under a "gag order" and I couldn't tell anyone about this except law enforcement or immediate family members. He already knew my address. He had official-sounding case numbers which he made me write down and repeat back to him. He had official addresses of where I needed to go and what I needed to do: Take the cash for my "fines" to a kiosk where I would pay them and receive a "voucher" that i would then take to the courthouse where I would supposedly speak to a judge. He told me again that if I hung up the phone before I got to the courthouse, it would be taken as obstruction or failure to comply or intent to flee and he would notify the police. He told me that if I went to sort it out with the judge, it might be waived and my money would be refunded.

I have not gotten jury duty summons for a WHILE -- since before the pandemic -- and I had been idly thinking recently that maybe I was due for one. So I heard all this and my panic button about Forgetting/Missing An Appointment got hit dead-on.

I panicked, I was upset and frantic, I was not thinking clearly. This is how they fucking get you.

Honestly, thank god he wanted me to take cash to a different location instead of giving him any financial information over the phone. Thank GOD for that, because it gave my nervous system 30 minutes or so to calm down and my higher brain functions to come back online so that I could notice that there were simply too many red flags in one interaction. I did go to my bank, I did withdraw quite a lot of money in cash.

The address he gave me to go to next was for a gas station. When I expressed confusion, the scammer had smooth explanations, and before I'd even parked, he'd texted me some glossy "official" looking infographics on how to use the kiosk and why the """government""" had started doing payments this way (supposedly a COVID measure, and because the funds were 'safer' or something). The kiosk, these infographic images said, was run by a company called BTC Tech, which they claimed was "Bailing Institute & Technologies". You will notice that that does not match the acronym. The infographic was full of grammatical errors, and thank god he had me sit there in my car and read the whole thing out loud "to make sure i understood it" so that I could hear myself vocally trip over every single one of those grammatical errors and think "Wow, this is weird, it wasn't proofread?"

He sent me a QR code for the ""kiosk"" which had a familiar logo on it. He had persistently asked me for my ETA to the next location, and he was pressuring me to get out of the car and go inside to the kiosk, and it was at this point that I started lying and said, "Sure, hang on one second, i have a pebble in my shoe or something I need to fix first" while I was googling "Bitcoin logo" to verify.

Didn't really need to verify because when I went inside, the only "kiosk" looking thing was an ATM looking thing that had "BITCOIN" written on it in very loud letters. Which brings us to one of two admittedly hilarious interactions, wherein i was standing there in front of the fucking bitcoin machine with my eyes narrowed going, "This is for Bitcoin" several times while he said "No no no no it's not, it's not bitcoin, it's BTC tech" and I kept saying "Well but it says Bitcoin on it in big letters." "No no, it's just a multi-currency system, it's for the courthouse, you have to get the voucher." "Ok but it's fucking BITCOIN, this feels like a scam, I don't think the government uses BITCOIN."

I walked out. I went back to my car. I told him that I wasn't comfortable, and that I needed to call the courthouse to verify with them what the charges were, or I needed to go in person to the courthouse to check what was up. He told me if I hung up, I'd be arrested, and if I stepped foot on government property, I'd be arrested.

It was at this point that I utilized a weapon which in many cases is very dangerous and unethical to use but hey, it's perfect for situations like this: White Lady* Tears. This is exactly the situation they're MEANT for -- buying yourself time to think when a man is strongarming you into meek obedience and fear. (* I am nonbinary but he didn't need to know that.)

Anyway I pretended to cry and told him i felt nauseous and that i was going to be sick and i was just uwu so fwightened and upset and uwu uwu uwu sob sob i felt like he was getting mad at me and it was so scawy oh woe oh no -- while this happened he texted me an arrest warrant that had one of my old roommates' names on it instead of mine, but that EPIC FUMBLE didn't even matter because the whole time I am frantically googling on my phone "jury duty scam" and finding a Reddit page from a guy who posted about the exact same thing happening to him.

I hung up. I called the courthouse, got patched through to the jury pool department, and as soon as the guy picked up, I said, "Hi, my name is Alex, I just got a call saying that I missed jury duty--" and before I could even finish the sentence, the guy said, "That was a scam, we will NEVER call you." I said thank god thank god oh fuck thank god, which brings me to the second hilarious moment of this escapade, where the jury duty guy cheerfully said, "But if you have a couple thousand dollars on you, you can come over and give them to me if you want!" which did make me burst out laughing. Thank you, jury duty guy, for that much-needed moment of levity. I hope you're having a good day.

You are not immune to social engineering. I am 36 years old, highly intelligent, educated, and VERY tech-savvy, and those fuckers STILL caught me at just the right moment and with just the right hook that it triggered panic and desperation and shame and guilt and overrode my critical thinking skills for a solid 30 minutes. If it happened to me, it could happen to you. BE FUCKING VIGILANT. THE IRS WILL NEVER CALL YOU, AND JURY DUTY WILL NEVER CALL YOU.

In hindsight, I'm actually glad that it played out the way it did. For one thing, as a life lesson, that was a pretty cheap one -- all that it cost me was about an hour of my life (including the time it took to go back to the bank and deposit the money I'd withdrawn, gossip extensively to the bank teller about what happened, and get home) and some grey hairs.

For another thing, that fucker spent all that time on the phone with me and didn't get my money. I snatched his smug asshole victory right out of his mouth at the last second and wasted his time -- time that he otherwise ould have spent scamming someone who might not have gotten over their panic in time.

I actually wish that I'd kept him on the phone longer, tbh. If I'd been less rattled, I bet I could have strung him along for another hour or two. Better he spend it with me than with someone else.