Vaudevillain Girls and Violin Strings

“They’re not smarter or faster they’re buying up others’ lifetimes to do their chores”

I see this reaction a lot, and I gotta say, it always makes me a little sad. Whenever the conversation of exploitation of labor comes up, inevitably someone finds themselves struggling with the guilt of “It is so important to me not to contribute to exploitation but I cannot do this thing myself and need someone else to do it for me, so how do I even approach that?”

Exploitation isn’t in the hiring of a service worker. Exploitation is in the respect you show them for their ability to perform the service you need from them.

I have been on a cleaning service staff before, and also been someone who hired a cleaning service, and I can tell you for sure that a lot of cleaning crews (especially worker owned ones) absolutely LOVE their clients and are genuinely happy to be able to make their lives better. The clients they don’t like? Those are the ones who disrespect the workers.

When I was involved with a cleaning service, we had everything from little old ladies living alone to McMasions with five cars as clients, and I can assure you that whenever there was someone who clearly hired us because they were overwhelmed or unable to keep their space clean, those were the households where you put a little more elbow grease in and did a deep clean even when it wasn’t paid for, because you could see how much these people were trying and struggling, and they were always so kind and generous and often embarrassed when talking to you about the job.

I only hired a service a couple if times in my life, but whenever I did, I worked with the same people as often as I could, tipped as well as I could afford, and tried to be the kind of client I would want to have, and that’s how I often ended up with my baseboards cleaned too, or my fridge scrubbed and organized or a restorative clean done in a high use room even when that wasn’t what I had scheduled or paid for.

I’ve heard the same thing from all manner of service workers over the years. Many of us like our jobs! We enjoy the work. It’s the customers that can do a number on you.

There's a lot of confusion about different "poxes" in this post (which wasn't my intention, and now I feel bad), so here's a general overview (also, obligatory apology for messiness, this was written at like 1 AM):

Smallpox:

Smallpox, caused by variola virus, was a massive problem historically. It existed in the Western hemisphere for thousands of years (genetic evidence of smallpox has been found in Egyptian mummies from ≈1500 BCE, but it was probably around long before then), and it was introduced to the New World during the Columbian exchange, which had devastating consequences for indigenous populations (which were already suffering from colonialist violence, which made epidemics much worse than they already would've been). Historically, smallpox had a case fatality rate between 30-50%, and survivors were often left disfigured or permanently disabled (you've probably seen pictures of smallpox scars, but smallpox can also cause blindness and other complications). Importantly, smallpox only affects humans—it has no animal hosts—which is why it's one of the few infectious diseases to have been completely eradicated. As of May 8, 1980, it officially no longer exists outside of certain designated American and Russian laboratories. (There are, however, concerns that it could be used as a bioweapon, which is why the government still stockpiles smallpox vaccines and antivirals. I wrote my bioethics term paper on this exact issue, and incidentally, it's one of the major reasons why I believe that STEM majors should take ethics courses!)

There were two strains of variola virus: variola major and variola minor. Variola major was much more dangerous, with a much higher mortality rate; variola minor typically didn't cause severe disease. Fortunately, infection with one strain conferred immunity against the other. Both strains are now eradicated. (People sometimes confuse variola minor with other viruses like cowpox and horsepox, but they're different things.)

There were four clinical forms of smallpox: ordinary (classic smallpox, associated with the rash you usually see in pictures), modified (less severe, often occurred in vaccinated people who got infected anyway), malignant (caused a flat rash instead of the usual pustules, associated with immune dysfunction, almost always fatal), and hemorrhagic (caused severe bleeding, and also near-universally fatal.) All of the non-ordinary forms could be difficult to diagnose because they looked so different from typical smallpox. The less serious "modified" form was often confused with chickenpox, and the hemorrhagic form was sometimes assumed to be a completely different disease. Occasionally, historical sources will refer to hemorrhagic smallpox as "black pox," with or without an understanding that it's caused by the same virus as ordinary smallpox.

Other relevant viruses:

Cowpox, caused by cowpox virus (an orthopoxvirus similar to smallpox) causes mild disease in cows, humans, and several other animals. Infection with cowpox virus confers immunity to variola—Edward Jenner noticed this relationship and used material from cowpox lesions to inoculate people against smallpox.

Vaccinia virus, another orthopoxvirus, is the source of the modern smallpox vaccine. It's closely related to both cowpox and horsepox (weirdly, it's actually closer to horsepox), but it's distinct enough to be its own species. Infection usually causes mild symptoms, and, of course, confers immunity to smallpox.

Chickenpox is an entirely different thing. It's caused by the varicella-zoster virus, which is a herpesvirus, not a poxvirus at all! Infection with varicella-zoster does not confer immunity to smallpox or any other poxvirus—chickenpox is from a totally different family.

So why are the names so weird and confusing? Why is everything about all of this so weird and confusing?

There are multiple reasons for this, so bear with me.

Historically, a "pox" was any disease that caused a bumpy rash of pustles/blisters. Chickenpox, smallpox, and the other "poxes" all cause superficially similar rashes—thus the similar names. (Even though we know now that chickenpox comes from a completely different family, this wouldn't have been apparent before the dawn of modern medicine.)

Smallpox was given that name to differentiate it from syphilis, which was known as the "great pox" when it first appeared in Europe. (Fun[?] microbiology fact: There are debates about the origins of syphilis, but the most common theory holds that it originated in the New World, and Christopher Columbus brought it back to Spain. In that way, it's kind of the inverse of smallpox.) Historically, smallpox was also known by a variety of other names in different European, Asian, and African cultures. Again, this gets murky, because historical physicians sometimes struggled to distinguish between similar-looking-but-different diseases.

Other poxviruses are often named after the animals in which they were first identified. This is not a hard-and-fast rule, though, and it can sometimes be misleading (for example, monkeypox virus was first discovered in laboratory monkeys, but it more often affects rodents and other small mammals. The disease formerly known as "monkeypox" was recently renamed "mpox" because the name wasn't accurate.) Also, some poxviruses aren't named after animals at all! It's a weird and inconsistent system (but a lot of virus names are kinda weird and inconsistent).

Related to the above: We don't even know where the name "chickenpox" comes from. I mean, we know it was called a "pox" because it causes a pox-y rash, but we don't know where the "chicken" part originated. There are multiple theories about this, none of which are definitive. The disease itself has nothing to do with chickens.

Basically, a lot of the weirdness is a result of historical naming practices—people identified and named these diseases before modern virology existed, and those names stuck, so now we have similar names for superficially-similar-but-ultimately-different viruses, and names whose origins have been completely lost to time. Later, virologists muddied the waters further by naming newly-discovered poxviruses after the animals in which they were first seen, even when these animals aren't natural hosts or reservoirs of those viruses. It's a mess! And, again, all of this is complicated by the fact that some of these diseases were very hard to diagnose (or distinguish from one another) before modern medicine existed. Now, we can sequence viral DNA and figure out what's actually going on—which viruses caused which symptoms, whether those viruses were closely related, and whether being infected with one disease conferred immunity to another—but historical doctors and scientists didn't have those tools, so they were doing they best they could with very limited information, and that led to a lot of weirdness in terms of how these viruses were named and classified. Our current system inherited some of that weirdness, so here we are.

TL;DR: Poxvirus names are messy. Smallpox is caused by variola virus, which has two strains: variola major (the more severe one) and variola minor (less severe). Cowpox and vaccinia are different viruses in the same family, and being infected with one of them confers immunity to smallpox. Chickenpox isn't a poxvirus at all, but a herpesvirus—it just happens to cause a pockmark-y rash that looks superficially similar to smallpox pustules (and mild forms of smallpox were historically confused with chickenpox).

(P.S. none of this is super relevant to the average person, so don't feel bad if you didn't know any of it. Unless you are a history major inventing new conspiracies about smallpox, in which case you definitely should feel bad.)

Sources & further reading under the cut!

I'm going to hold your hand as I say this to you. Those same expectations are placed on trans men. Trans men are also expected to be mothers and wives. Trans men also face misogyny and are harmed by it, in the same ways cisgender women are.

It reads like a lot of people think of trans men as Cis Dudes With Pussies when the vast majority of trans men are living (or have lived) many of the same experiences as cis women, and should be included in these conversations.

These photos show the embryonic form of Limulus polyphemus, commonly known as the Atlantic horseshoe crab. The eggs of this species are initially opaque, with a grayish-blue, green, or pink coloration, but they become increasingly translucent as the embryos mature, providing a glimpse of the tiny horseshoe crabs developing within.

Above: several embryos twirling around in their eggs

The legs become visible roughly five days after fertilization, and the embryos begin to move shortly thereafter, eventually flexing their legs and twirling their bodies. They molt for the very first time just a few days later. Each embryo will shed its skin and grow a new one four times in total before it even hatches from the egg.

The color variations are likely related to the growth rate of each individual embryo, which can differ slightly based on the temperature, salinity, moisture, and oxygen levels around each egg. Certain colors can also arise from bacterial or fungal growth in the egg membrane.

Above: Limulus polyphemus embryos

The hatchlings finally emerge after 2-4 weeks. The freshly-hatched larvae measure less than 1cm long, and they look just like miniature versions of their adult form, except that they do not yet have tails (which are actually known as telsons) and their exoskeletons are still soft and translucent. These young horseshoe crabs are often described as "trilobite larvae."

Above: a young horseshoe crab discarding its egg

Atlantic horseshoe crabs generally spawn in May and June, with hundreds of thousands of individuals gathering along the coast on the night of the full moon and new moon. Each female lays up to 100,000 eggs per season, but very few of those offspring actually survive to adulthood. Most of the eggs are eaten or destroyed before they can even hatch, and many of the remaining larvae perish at some point during the 10 years that it takes for them to reach full maturity (i.e. the age at which they begin to reproduce).

Above: the freshly-hatched larvae

Wild horseshoe crabs can live to be more than 20 years old, and they can measure up to 60 centimeters (2 feet) long. They have 10 eyes in total, including two compound eyes that are specifically adapted for the purpose of finding a mate:

The most obvious eyes are the two lateral compound eyes. These are used for finding mates during the spawning season. Each compound eye has about 1,000 receptors or ommatidia. The cones and rods of the lateral eyes have a similar structure to those found in human eyes, but are around 100 times larger in size. At night, the lateral eyes are chemically stimulated to greatly increase the sensitivity of each receptor to light. This allows the horseshoe crab to identify other horseshoe crabs in the darkness.

Above: a close-up of a horseshoe crab's compound eye, which is covered in tiny hatchlings for some reason

Horseshoe crabs have been around for at least 445 million years, which means that these creatures are about 200 million years older than the dinosaurs and at least 50 million years older than trees, and yet their morphology has changed very little in that time. In fact, modern horseshoe crabs are frequently described as "living fossils," because they still look strikingly similar to their fossilized ancestors.

Above: the juvenile form of Tachypleus tridentatus, commonly known as the Chinese horseshoe crab

It's important to note that horseshoe crabs are not true crabs. In fact, they're not even crustaceans -- they belong to a completely different group of arthropods known as chelicerates, and they are more closely related to spiders and scorpions than they are to crabs.

Above: Tachypleus tridentatus and Limulus polyphemus

This is a revised/updated version of a post that I published about two years ago, with much more information, photos, and sources.

Sources & More Info:

iNaturalist: Horseshoe Crab Eggs

Maryland Department of Natural Resources: Horseshoe Crab Life History

Current Zoology: Developmental Ecology of the American Horseshoe Crab

PBS: Once a Spawn a Time: Horseshoe Crabs Mob the Beach

Smithsonian National Zoo and Conservation Biology Institute: Limulus polyphemus

National Wildlife Federation: Horseshoe Crabs

Ideas I've had so far:

A gold plated wine opener with her name engraved on it

some kind of classy-but-cunty Christmas decor. Something chi-chi and sparkly that's giving "oh, it's Christmas, bitch"

one of those instax mini cameras in a color like "blossom pink" because you know this diva scrapbooks

those little bone china Tiffany's cups that are made to look like cheap disposable paper cups but they're Tiffany blue and they say "Tiffany's" on them (because you know this diva is obsessed with Tiffany's)

a Swarovski birthstone bracelet because you know this diva actually gives a shit about her birthstone

It's going to have the gold plated wine opener with her name on it. It's going to have a scented candle. It's going to have a Lush bath bomb. It's going to have the pinkest loofah you can find. It's going to have a moisturizing face mask. It's going to have a little sign for her to hang on the bathroom door that says "Don't interrupt my ✨Diva Time✨" in glittery writing. It's going to have a sand-etched wine glass that says "Live, Laugh, Love, Drink Wine In The Bath". It's going to have some Lindt chocolate truffles. It's going to also have a sparkly christmas ornament and i trust you to pick one that fits the general theme here. If you still need to fill it in, you're going to add a gift card to Sephora or, if you would like bonding opportunities, a little envelope with a hand-written "gift card" for "[Spa day/mani-pedis/whatever] with your Favorite Sister-in-Law, you choose the day <3". Maybe also some cute scrapbook stickers.

What a red flag actually means: something here is an indicator of a potential problem (but might be fine with a reasonable explanation)

What people have now decided it means: abuse

I've lost count of the number of times I've now had to read variants of "My partner takes all my money and gives me back an allowance because he says it's a man's job to control finances, but he's racking up gambling debts" being met with "Wow this man is a walking red flag" no Becky that is abuse. That is not an indicator. He is an abuser. Call the police. We have lost the concept of a proxy: a thing that indicates a more important thing. And it's relevant to this conversation because I'm actually going to go out on a limb here:

With the obvious exception of paedophilia, age gaps themselves aren't a problem at all - they are a proxy for the actual harmful phenomenon. Hea me out, let me explain

The reason we don't like age gaps is because of the implied power dynamic. If one partner, usually male, is older than other - particularly if the other is still quite young - the risk is that what we're seeing is a worldly wise predator who is exploiting the lack of life experience of a young beautiful woman by mentally abusing her until she's no longer young and pretty enough to satisfy, at which point he'll move on to the next. There have been enough examples of this in human history. It's unfortunately not an uncommon pattern. Genders can also be diverse in this scenario

We can't necessarily see that dynamic from the outside. But we CAN see an inherent element of it: the ages of the people involved. So age becomes a proxy for the abuse. And, hey, it's often correct.

But here's the thing: the ages themselves are not causing harm.

The power dynamic is. The abuse is.

Plenty of age gap relationships are loving, healthy and steadfast. Two people met and genuinely fell in love regardless of the outer packaging, and have a relationship with all the highs and lows and challenges and rewards as any more traditional pairing. This happens all the time

Is the age gap a red flag? Sure! It indicates a potential issue.

Is it inherently abusive? Absolutely fucking not.

OP is right - we need to stop focusing just on the numbers and twisting the facts to fit by infantilising the younger partners, and start focusing on the actual harms. The DiCaprio Pattern of only dating under 24s repeatedly is itself a proxy, too, actually - but a much stronger one than the simple presence of an age gap.

(Even so, in DiCaprio's case, until any of his former partners come forward and describe him as abusive, actually, even that is up in the air - my personal interpretation, given how strong a pattern it is, is that he's a loser who views women as trophies (consciously or not). If any have come forward and I don't know about it, of course, fair enough. But those women were adults capable of making their own decisions, even if they might later come to regret it. And regretting poor decisions is part of life! That's how it goes, particularly with relationships. As long as they weren't abused, there's no biggie. And just as he was looking for young-and-beautiful, there's no way they weren't, on some level, looking for rich-and-famous; it goes both ways.)

Also, another element of this: I think a lot of modern extreme puritan discourse on this is actually ironically down to the age of those taking part. Up until your late 20s, ten years is actually a huge span of time to you, because in your own life you were in a completely different developmental phase ten years ago (teenager), and a completely different phase again ten years before that (child). That skews your sense of what a ten-year gap means. Whereas once you're in your 30s and beyond, ten years is like. Yeah I was an adult ten years ago, and I still am now. That's two adults. Who cares.

There are two great problems with what happened to Margaret (and that her parents are trying to do to Juliet). One is easy for modern people to spot (but was also a common response back in her own day). And that’s the moral implications of what was done to her. She was too young to be married, and it was horrifying that she was forced into it so young. Every one of the adults around her either acted immorally or failed to protect her. They were wrong. This is what modern people see, and it’s important to remember that people back in her day mostly agreed with it. You’re supposed to think it’s fucked up! When girls were married that young (and it didn’t happen often!) it was a formality 99% of the time. It was for dynastic or financial reasons (the girl has lots of money and/or land and/or a title that her husband wants), but the “couple” don’t consummate their marriage for years. And it’s not just that they would have separate bedrooms. They might not even live in the same country until the girl was in her late teens and physically and mentally mature enough to bear and raise kids. Hell, a lot of times they didn’t even meet until the girl was older! They had this thing called “proxy marriage” where you would have two separate ceremonies, in two separate places, with each party saying their vows separately, one in one city and the other in a different one. So, yeah, sure, the girl was technically married at 12, but she didn’t actually meet her “husband” in person until she was 17 and they didn’t start sleeping together until she was 20. That was a thing they did.

The other problem, the one that modern people don’t notice, is dynastic. See, marriage wasn’t generally because you loved someone. It was because you had the resources to support a family, and you or your family wanted to pool those resources with someone. It’s about “our family has these resources, and we want that to continue.” It’s about continuity across generations. It’s about making sure that your children and grandchildren have the best possible resources to survive and thrive, whether those resources are land or a trade or a title or money or whatever. In order for this to work, you have to have kids! The family and the family’s resources depend on the married couple having children. If the couple doesn’t have children, the marriage is a failure. And that failure affects not only the couple, but both families. This is a really big problem. And you can’t have just one kid to pass on the family name, because half of all kids die in early childhood. If you want to be safe, you need several kids, to be sure at least one will survive to adulthood (when they can marry and pass on the family name and resources.

You know what happens when a girl has her first pregnancy too young? She is very likely to either die in childbirth, or have complications that destroy her future fertility. Just like Margaret Beaufort. Just like Juliet’s mother. In other words, the marriage is a failure, not just for her, but also for her family, and her husband (who can’t divorce her, it’s not allowed except in extremely rare circumstances), and her husband’s family. So even the people who didn’t have a moral problem with adult men having sex with pubescent girls had a practical problem with girls married too young because you are very likely to destroy the entire purpose of the marriage by doing it. As Shakespeare reminds us in the play through Juliet’s mother having been married too young and only having one child.

another thing i noticed, the year my local community shakespeare theater did r&j, and i made the costumes so i got to watch the show every night: part of why capulet is telling paris, take your time, get to know each other, no rush, is that he still has his nephew tybalt as his heir. as long as tybalt is in the picture, there is no pressure on juliet to go further with paris, than get acquainted. once tybalt is killed, then suddenly capulet needs an heir, he needs a husband for juliet, now, this week. (the role of capulet is best given to the actor in the company that can do over the top apoplexy, you need to believe his urgency comes at least in part by how clearly he could drop dead any moment from giving himself a stroke)

i feel like this play is often taught in middle schools as if it was somehow relevant to, or about, teen hormone storms. really it's got more to do with the social structures around family and inheritance. leaving that context out makes it confusing, why is capulet suddenly flipping from nice dad to evil dad?