Aphrodite’s Muse

Oh, to be a little Moomin on a gently rocking boat, going with Snufkin to a lighthouse on a little island 🛶

Knowing you have a long summer ahead, full of adventures, beautiful sunsets, and magical nights 🌿

In the news it's always "girl raped in park" or "woman killed in home" which would make some sense if the perpetrator was unknown, but they often have already caught the culprit by the time the article comes out and it's always a man.

The amount of times I've seen a headline about a man murdering his entire family before killing himself being titled "man commits suicide after family is killed" with a nice little family photo of them is absolutely absurd.

Hell, just last night I saw an article titled, "3 kids killed after mom let ex-partner take them to get food." Her male ex took the kids to get food and murdered them before killing himself. Not only is the headline passive, but it also phrases it in a way that makes the mother somehow look guilty like she knew what he had planned or knew he was insane.

“A few things that people (fellas) seem to not understand about the bear vs man thing:

1. The scenario is, a woman is walking through the woods hiking alone.

Whilst hiking, would they rather come across a bear or a strange man?

The question is not:

Who would you rather get in a fight with?

It is not “A man you know vs a bear you don’t.”

They are not being asked to hug or provoke the bear or man.

They are just walking, in the woods, and come across either a bear or a random dude they do not know.

And most of the women in these comments, as well as the ones we have talked to, plenty of whom have gone hiking alone and who have come across both bears and men whilst doing so, choose the bear as a preference to run into.

Because the threat of the bear is a known quantity and thus a much more controllable one. A bear is more likely to just keep foraging and move on its way than outright attack you, unless under very specific circumstances.

The man is not a known quantity and whether he openly displays aggression or not, a woman cannot know for certain what his intentions are.”

Women fought tooth and nail for the right to vote! Voting means having a say, however small, in how your country is run. If you don't use your say, then you can count on being spoken over by the men who are getting out there and voting.

Carpathia received Titanic’s distress signal at 12:20am, April 15th, 1912. She was 58 miles away, a distance that absolutely could not be covered in less than four hours.

(Californian’s exact position at the time is…controversial. She was close enough to have helped. By all accounts she was close enough to see Titanic’s distress rockets. It’s uncertain to this day why her crew did not respond, or how many might not have been lost if she had been there. This is not the place for what-ifs. This is about what was done.)

Carpathia’s Captain Rostron had, yes, rolled out of bed instantly when woken by his radio operator, ordered his ship to Titanic’s aid and confirmed the signal before he was fully dressed. The man had never in his life responded to an emergency call. His goal tonight was to make sure nobody who heard that fact would ever believe it.

All of Carpathia’s lifeboats were swung out ready for deployment. Oil was set up to be poured off the side of the ship in case the sea turned choppy; oil would coat and calm the water near Carpathia if that happened, making it safer for lifeboats to draw up alongside her. He ordered lights to be rigged along the side of the ship so survivors could see it better, and had nets and ladders rigged along her sides ready to be dropped when they arrived, in order to let as many survivors as possible climb aboard at once.

I don’t know if his making provisions for there still being survivors in the water was optimism or not. I think he knew they were never going to get there in time for that. I think he did it anyway because, god, you have to hope.

Carpathia had three dining rooms, which were immediately converted into triage and first aid stations. Each had a doctor assigned to it. Hot soup, coffee, and tea were prepared in bulk in each dining room, and blankets and warm clothes were collected to be ready to hand out. By this time, many of the passengers were awake–prepping a ship for disaster relief isn’t quiet–and all of them stepped up to help, many donating their own clothes and blankets.

And then he did something I tend to refer to as diverting all power from life support.

Here’s the thing about steamships: They run on steam. Shocking, I know; but that steam powers everything on the ship, and right now, Carpathia needed power. So Rostron turned off hot water and central heating, which bled valuable steam power, to everywhere but the dining rooms–which, of course, were being used to make hot drinks and receive survivors. He woke up all the engineers, all the stokers and firemen, diverted all that steam back into the engines, and asked his ship to go as fast as she possibly could. And when she’d done that, he asked her to go faster.

I need you to understand that you simply can’t push a ship very far past its top speed. Pushing that much sheer tonnage through the water becomes harder with each extra knot past the speed it was designed for. Pushing a ship past its rated speed is not only reckless–it’s difficult to maneuver–but it puts an incredible amount of strain on the engines. Ships are not designed to exceed their top speed by even one knot. They can’t do it. It can’t be done.

Carpathia’s absolute do-or-die, the-engines-can’t-take-this-forever top speed was fourteen knots. Dodging icebergs, in the dark and the cold, surrounded by mist, she sustained a speed of almost seventeen and a half.

No one would have asked this of them. It wasn’t expected. They were almost sixty miles away, with icebergs in their path. They had a responsibility to respond; they did not have a responsibility to do the impossible and do it well. No one would have faulted them for taking more time to confirm the severity of the issue. No one would have blamed them for a slow and cautious approach. No one but themselves.

They damn near broke the laws of physics, galloping north headlong into the dark in the desperate hope that if they could shave an hour, half an hour, five minutes off their arrival time, maybe for one more person those five minutes would make the difference. I say: three people had died by the time they were lifted from the lifeboats. For all we know, in another hour it might have been more. I say they made all the difference in the world.

This ship and her crew received a message from a location they could not hope to reach in under four hours. Just barely over three hours later, they arrived at Titanic’s last known coordinates. Half an hour after that, at 4am, they would finally find the first of the lifeboats. it would take until 8:30 in the morning for the last survivor to be brought onboard. Passengers from Carpathia universally gave up their berths, staterooms, and clothing to the survivors, assisting the crew at every turn and sitting with the sobbing rescuees to offer whatever comfort they could.

In total, 705 people of Titanic’s original 2208 were brought onto Carpathia alive. No other ship would find survivors.

At 12:20am April 15th, 1912, there was a miracle on the North Atlantic. And it happened because a group of humans, some of them strangers, many of them only passengers on a small and unimpressive steam liner, looked at each other and decided: I cannot live with myself if I do anything less.

    Men were, not surprisingly, most often the bewitched. Subject to women’s evil designs, they were terrified victims. Those men who were convicted of witchcraft were often family of convicted women witches, or were in positions of civil power, or had political ambitions which conflicted with those of the Church, a monarch, or a local dignitary. Men were protected from becoming witches not only by virtue of superior intellect and faith, but because Jesus Christ, phallic divinity, died “to preserve the male sex from so great a crime: since He was willing to be born and to die for us, therefore He has granted to men this privilege. ” Christ died literally for men and left women to fend with the Devil themselves.” (pg 129-130) Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin 

“The witches used drugs like belladonna and aconite, organic amphetamines, and hallucinogenics. They also pioneered the development of analgesics. They performed abortions, provided all medical help for births, were consulted in cases of impotence which they treated with herbs and hypnotism, and were the first practitioners of euthanasia. Since the Church enforced the curse of Eve by refusing to permit any alleviation of the pain of childbirth, it was left to the witches to lessen pain and mortality as best they could. It was especially as midwives that these learned women offended the Church, for, as Sprenger and Kramer wrote, “No one does more harm to the Catholic Faith than mid wives. ” The Catholic objection to abortion centered specifically on the biblical curse which made childbearing a painful punishment —it did not have to do with the “right to life” of the unborn fetus. It was also said that midwives were able to remove labor pains from the woman and transfer those pains to her husband—clearly in violation of divine injunction and intention both.” (pg 139-140) Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin 

“The magic of the witches was an imposing catalogue of medical skills concerning reproductive and psychological processes, a sophisticated knowledge of telepathy, auto- and hetero-suggestion, hypnotism, and mood-controlling drugs. Women knew the medicinal nature of herbs and developed formulae for using them. The women who were faithful to the pagan cults developed the science of organic medicine, using vegetation, before there was any notion of the profession of medicine. Paracelsus, the most famous physician of the Middle Ages, claimed that everything he knew he had learned from “the good women.” (pg 140)  Woman Hating, Andrea Dworkin

****************get the PDF here *********************

Bolded sections are by me. Honestly I don’t think I need to explain much. We lost some of the most important women in the world, who were the pioneers of medicine for a “curse of eve”.  Basically saying if you relieve another woman’s pain we’re going to call you a witch and kill you “in the name of god” because having a child is punishment upon women and relieving their pain is illegal because this book written by men told me so.

You know, this book that is written in a language that nobody has been able to read for 600 years, but nobody, and I mean NO MAN has ever even thought about the simple reality of WOMEN having written it. 

I found one blog post by a woman about how this text is very clearly written by women, and the knowledge within it has been completely annihilated or co-opted by men who now don’t even consider the possibility that a woman, or multiple women, could have written something like this.

Seriously, look it up. Naked women. Fat, short, in baths, all of it. And the entire academic world is absolutely convinced this must have been written by a man. In the wikipedia article, only male linguists and historians are mentioned, because only they matter. And every single one of their theories is laughingly phallocentric and simply wrong.  

They go so far as say that aliens wrote it before they consider that women actually had herbal and medicinal knowledge and passed that knowledge on, in secret, written in languages only they knew, so that no priest or holy man or inquisitor could read it and kill them. 

It’s true.

In “Att uppfinna världen” (“Inventing the World”) by Katrine Marçal there is a chapter dedicated to the process of inventing the modern automobile, where I read that there were multiple ways of constructing a car when the invention was relatively recent, as the field was still open to experimentation. Petrol wasn’t an obvious choice for fuelling the engine – in fact, around the year 1900 a third of all cars in Europe were electric cars, and the percentage was even bigger in America. Electrically powered cars were superior to petrol-fuelled ones in many ways: they were quieter, didn’t expel smelly gas, much safer and more reliable, and easy to start and control from the driver’s seat. Cars fuelled by petrol, on the other hand, were loud, more unreliable and required a lot more maintenance, and to start the engine one had to do some serious manual labour involving a crank – which would often leave you sweaty and with oil stains on your clothes, plus a constant risk of causing an explosion if you weren’t careful enough. Naturally, women preferred the former, being more convenient and comfortable and thus more suited to their travel needs, whereas the petrol-fuelled car was marketed as the more adventurous, macho choice for men.

The one downside to electric cars was that the battery didn’t last for longer journeys, which in the case for women wasn’t that much of a problem since the majority mainly just made trips within the city or town. This was also an issue that could’ve been fixed, and there were many plans to do so, mainly infrastructure-related ones like battery-switching stations and developing better battery solutions. There were even plans for a net of rentable electric cars for anyone to use, and electric trains, trams, and taxis for public transport (seems very ahead of its time, doesn’t it? A much more environmentally conscious system than our good ol’ “everyone has one or multiple cars that individually expel copious amounts of greenhouse gasses” method). However, investments were too few since the male-dominated society deemed these “women’s cars”. After all, a real man isn’t soft, safe and comfortable – he cranks his own car to life and makes a lot of noise as he travels. A report from 1916 by the magazine Electric Vehicle stated that “The thing that is effeminate, or that has that reputation, does not find favor with the American man. Whether or not he is ‘red-blooded’ or ‘virile’ in the ordinary physical sense, at least his ideals are. The fact that anything from a car to a color is the delight of the ladies is enough to change his interest to mere amused tolerance.”

Like, it’s insane that values such as comfort, safety and convenience were seen as “feminine” and thus dismissed, leading to petrol-fuelled cars completely taking over the market in the end. Imagine what the world would’ve looked like if women were the standard instead of men. It really pains me to think how much damage we’ve done to the planet just because of men’s stubborn macho ideals.

!!!

Say a woman is playing a video game in a team full of men. If she gets the lowest score at the end, men will think: this is further proof that women are inferior to men. And the next time a woman finds herself in their team she will be kicked out. Because one woman is all women. We are not individuals. If she gets the best score though, she will be seen as exceptional "not like other girls". It's a lose-lose situation. All women know this. You know that if you mess up you will make all women look bad. That's an incredible amount of pressure. Women in STEM fields are especially impacted by this.

For men it's literally the opposite. When men do bad things we are immediately told not to make any sort of generalization. It's "not all men are like that". Even when billions of men make misogynistic jokes, you are still not allowed to say men are misogynists. Even when men commit most horrendous crimes, you are still not allowed to talk about male violence. If a man does something stupid no one says: this is men. If a man loses a game against a woman no one will claim it's proof that men are inferior. It's just one man. However if he wins it proves that men are better than women and that women should stop playing.

Furthermore, the only time you are allowed to generalize about men is to excuse their behaviour. As in "boys will be boys", "oh darling, all men are like that", "it's in men's nature so we need to work with it."

It's the only social class that benefits from this, as far as I'm aware. The only social class for which people will immediately become angry and jump to the defense, not allowing any form of general observation let alone criticism and discrimination, stressing that men are all different individuals.

No other group is treated this favorably. We have people living their lives trying desperately not to feed the stereotypes. Black women trying never to appear angry, fat people not eating in public, gay people not talking about sex, women not talking at all.

The Misogyny Archive is online!

Misogyny Archive is a website where you can report any man who is known to indulge in misogynistic behaviour. You can choose multiple categories, from verbal, online, sexual, violent, spiritual. There’s currently 25 categories listed, with descriptions of what all of them entail. You’re also able to contribute information, that would help other women recognize the misogynist, and give them an option to make informed decision regarding this individual.

Our hope is that, by reporting the men we know to be dangerous, misogynistic, potentially violent and sexually predatory, by linking their locations, we could start drawing the lines between the anonymous assaults, anonymous stalkers and attackers, and figure out which men are most likely to be behind them. Women are encouraged to report and describe anonymous predators as well, and it’s possible some of their descriptions will match with those whose names are already reported!

The website is meant to be a resource and a database used for women to be able to make informed decisions, stay safe, be protected from the known predators, and aware of what men in their life are capable of doing, behind their backs. We also hope it will help us catalogue, track, analyze and keep track of the number of misogynistic crimes, and their severity, and give more detailed picture of the dangers we currently live in. This is up to the reporters, and depends on how used and utilized this website is!

This project is created by Inna, the developer, who worked for months to create the database from just an idea. We worked together on figuring out the fine spots, covering the questions of backups, security, functionality. We’re both excited to have it finally up and running, and we hope you’ll go and report everyone you can, everyone you feel you are safe from. Because as much as we’d love to, we can’t make a website only women can access, so if someone you’re reporting could guess it’s you, and try to take revenge, don’t mention him by name, or wait until you’re completely safe! The site is only working to protect women, for as long as it brings no women in danger.