Ali

[inert GIF of someone flipping the bird here]

I’ve noticed that a hell of a lot of people feel actively threatened by the existence of highly introverted people, who don’t have problems with being alone and who might actually prefer that state of being. Even when all we’re doing is existing and minding our own lives, with little to no fuss.

It occurs to me that while I may know what the red flags are when it comes to identifying when an online acquaintance may be a personality to keep at arm’s length, it isn’t general knowledge.

A person looking for a victim to abuse emotionally and mentally will typically go for the newest names and faces in the community - people who don’t have a network, who might be afraid to initiate contact with better known names and faces; people who will not be confident that they will be taken seriously if they were to talk about this often uncomfortable and sometimes deeply harmful experience inflicted on them. In short, people who are easily isolated.

So here is a brief suggestion of things that are red flags, especially when taken together. It is just my thoughts, and it is in no way exhaustive.

They are instantly your best friend

Yes, we all want to be friendly and warm to people we meet online. But someone who is looking for a victim, not a friend, will be your best friend. They’ll warn you about people you haven’t spoken to but might be peripherally aware of - there won’t often be any details, but you’ll be left with a nebulous feeling that this person is a bad person, or that person is mean for the hell of it. These people rely on you being so grateful to have someone to warn them about the potential trouble all around you online that you won’t question the fact that they are your only friend in this online community.

They have some tragedy they have to share with you straight away

Be it a personal tragedy, an intense family situation, or even their side of an online argument, they are the victim. Always the victim, they never did anything wrong. As before, they won’t produce links you can follow to see for yourself, or give many details about it. It’s all about creating an emotional connection they can manipulate later.

They are your biggest fan …

Everything you create is gold, there’s nothing you need to improve on, you’re the best writer/artist/creator they have ever come across and the fandom community is so lucky to have you, but …

… they need you to be theirs

Conversations turn often to them degrading themselves, their work, everything they create. They’re hungry for your praise, and you find yourself giving them praise and advice every single day. As you increase this level of warmth and encouragement, their own contribution fades to almost nothing. It is all about them, and because you are isolated, you feel stuck with them.

Suddenly, every little disagreement becomes an all out fight …

Even the smallest difference of opinion is met with furious hostility, and you find yourself scrambling to placate them, to reassure them that they are right, to keep your friend. You have to take all the blame, the full responsibility for whatever they have decided is wrong, and even then, you will end up logging off angry or in tears because of the language they have used.

… but everything is fine the next day

At least, it seems so on their end. You, on the other hand, are now edgy, walking on eggshells, unable to relax in conversation with them, wondering what will set them off next. At this point, you might start to branch out, to get to know other creators, but it soon becomes clear that if you want to continue doing this, you can never mention it to your “special friend”. It sets them off into that violently hostile temper all over again, every single time.

These are the behavioral markers that I have experienced, both in real life and online. People who display these will draw you in, isolate you from as many others as they can, and then will proceed to emotionally and mentally abuse you. Abuse includes threats of self-harm or suicide if they don’t get their way, subtle degradation of your own confidence in your abilities, even attempts to use personal details about your life to throw you off-balance (one example, that I experienced years ago - my nephew had just got his first girlfriend; this person did her damnedest to convince me that his girlfriend was only using him and that I should intervene, an action which, had I done it, would have resulted in isolating me from my own family).

If you notice more than one of these happening in conversations with people online, please don’t suffer it in silence. At the very least, tell someone else in the community what is happening. The only way to keep these things from continuing to happen is to be open and communicative about it. The more we talk to each other, the less these predators can pick and choose their victims. The damage they do is harsh and it lasts far longer than any of us want to believe.

Female figurine from the Hohle Fels cave near Stuttgart, about 35,000 years old. Interpreted as a pornographic pin-up.

“The Earliest Pornography” says Science Now, describing the 35,000 year old ivory figurine that’s been dug up in a cave near Stuttgart. The tiny statuette is of a female with exaggerated breasts and vulva. According to Paul Mellars, one of the archaeologist twits who commented on the find for Nature, this makes the figurine “pornographic.” Nature is even titling its article, “Prehistoric Pin Up.” It’s the Venus of Willendorf double standard all over again. Ancient figures of naked pregnant women are interpreted by smirking male archaeologists as pornography, while equally sexualized images of men are assumed to depict gods or shamans. Or even hunters or warriors. Funny, huh?

Consider: phallic images from the Paleolithic are at least 28,000 years old. Neolithic cultures all over the world seemed to have a thing for sculptures with enormous erect phalluses. Ancient civilizations were awash in images of male genitalia, from the Indian lingam to the Egyptian benben to the Greek herm. The Romans even painted phalluses on their doors and wore phallic charms around their necks.

Ithyphallic figure from Lascaux, about 17,000 years old. Interpreted as a shaman.

But nobody ever interprets this ancient phallic imagery as pornography. Instead, it’s understood to indicate reverence for male sexual potency. No one, for example, has ever suggested that the Lascaux cave dude was a pin-up; he’s assumed to be a shaman. The ithyphallic figurines from the Neolithic — and there are many — are interpreted as gods. And everyone knows that the phalluses of ancient India and Egypt and Greece and Rome represented awesome divine powers of fertility and protection. Yet an ancient figurine of a nude woman — a life-giving woman, with her vulva ready to bring forth a new human being, and her milk-filled breasts ready to nourish that being — is interpreted as pornography. Just something for a man to whack off to. It’s not as if there’s no other context in which to interpret the figure. After all, the European Paleolithic is chock full of pregnant-looking female statuettes that are quite similar to this one. By the time we get to the Neolithic, the naked pregnant female is enthroned with lions at her feet, and it’s clear that people are worshipping some kind of female god.

Yet in the Science Now article, the archaeologist who found the figurine is talking about pornographic pin-ups: “I showed it to a male colleague, and his response was, ‘Nothing’s changed in 40,000 years.’” That sentence needs to be bronzed and hung up on a plaque somewhere, because you couldn’t ask for a better demonstration of the classic fallacy of reading the present into the past. The archaeologist assumes the artist who created the figurine was male; why? He assumes the motive was lust; why? Because that’s all he knows. To his mind, the image of a naked woman with big breasts and exposed vulva can only mean one thing: porn! Porn made by men, for men! And so he assumes, without questioning his assumptions, that the image must have meant the same thing 35,000 years ago. No other mental categories for “naked woman” are available to him. His mind is a closed box. This has been the central flaw of anthropology for as long there’s been anthropology. And even before: the English invaders of North America thought the Iroquois chiefs had concubines who accompanied them everywhere, because they had no other mental categories to account for well-dressed, important-looking women sitting in a council house. It’s the same fallacy that bedevils archaeologists who dig up male skeletons with fancy beads and conclude that the society was male dominant (because powerful people wear jewelry!), and at another site dig up female skeletons with fancy beads and conclude that this society, too, was male dominant (because women have to dress up as sex objects and trophy wives!). Male dominance is all they can imagine. And so no matter what they dig up, they interpret it to fit their mental model. It’s the fallacy that also drives evolutionary psychology, the central premise of which is that human beings in the African Pleistocene had exactly the same values, beliefs, prejudices, power struggles, goals, and needs as the middle-class white professors and students in a graduate psychology lab in modern-day Santa Barbara, California. And that these same factors are universal and unchanged and true for all time.

Hohle Fels phallus, about 28,000 years old. Interpreted as a symbolic object and …flint knapper. Yes.

That’s not science; it’s circular, self-serving propaganda. This little figurine from Hohle Fels, for example, is going to be used as “proof” that pornography is ancient and natural. I guarantee it. Having been interpreted by pornsick male archaeologists as pornography because that’s all they know, the statuette will now be trotted out by every every psycho and male supremacist on the planet as “proof” that pornography is eternal, that male dominance is how it’s supposed to be, and that feminists are crazy so shut the fuck up. Look for it in Steven Pinker’s next book. ***

P.S. My own completely speculative guess on the figurine is that it might be connected to childbirth rituals. Notice the engraved marks and slashes; that’s a motif that continues for thousands of years on these little female figurines. No one knows what they mean, but they meant something. They’re not just random cut marks. Someone put a great deal of work into this sculpture. Given that childbirth was incredibly risky for Paleolithic women, they must have prayed their hearts out for help and protection in that time. I can imagine an elder female shaman or artist carving this potent little figure, and propping it up somewhere as a focus for those prayers.

On the other hand, it is possible that it has nothing to do with childbearing or sexual behavior at all. The breasts and vulva may simply indicate who the figure is: the female god. Think of how Christ is always depicted with a beard, which is a male sexual characteristic, even though Christ isn’t about male sexuality. The beard is just a marker. Or, given the figurine’s exaggerated breasts, it may have something to do with sustenance: milk, food, nourishment.

When looked at from above, as a woman observes herself, the breasts of PKG-style figurines assume the natural proportions of the average modern woman of childbearing age. For example, the dimensions of the breasts of the off-illustrated Venus of Willendorf are comparable to those of a 26-year-old mother-to-be with a 34C bust (see fig. 5). When foreshortened from above, even the apparent hypertrophic dimensions of the Venus of Lespugue and the best-preserved figurine from Dolní Vestonice enter into a reasonably normal, albeit buxom, range.

McDermott goes on to theorise that the reason most of these hyper-female statues are missing a head and hands is that the head, obviously, can’t be viewed by the sculptor without access to a reflection of some kind. As the hands are in a constant state of motion making the figurine, it would also be difficult to have a fixed reference to work from.

The whole thing reminds me of that oft-quoted Sandi Toksvig article:

When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. “This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar” she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. “My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.”

It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions? How often had I sped past them as I learned of male achievement and men’s place in the history books?

This is a blessing post in hopes that good money comes your way.

Ma-ia ho

Ma-ia ha

Alo?

sunt eu

BEKKATHYST SPRING 2018 GIVEAWAY

~This giveaway is in no way affiliated with Tumblr.~

Please read thoroughly before entering!

Hello lovely Tumblr folk! It’s that time again- I have a giveaway for you all. My last giveaway was a huge collection of crystals, but this time I wanted to try something new and have two smaller (but super nice) items! :) 

I sell my jewelry and crystals in my shop.

What you get:

The pictured labradorite and black opal (natural Australian Lightning Ridge black opal) skull necklace. It’s pictured in shiny copper with a 14k rose gold filled chain, however if the winner wishes, I can darken it and use a darkened copper chain. 

A high quality, super detailed carved labradorite seahorse. 

Together, these have a retail value of about $300 

Rules:

You must be 16 or older. (If under 18 you MUST have parent’s permission)

You don’t have to live in the US to join!

You must be following me, so you can get updates if anything about the giveaway changes.

Please check out my shop.

DO NOT tag this post as giveaway. That will risk the notes getting messed up, and this will be ruined for everyone.

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Each entry will be assigned a number and the winner will be chosen by a random number generator.

The giveaway ends Saturday, April 28th, at 6 pm Pacific time.

The winner will be messaged and must respond with their full name and address within 24 hours, or a new winner will be chosen.