#2 week

TWO WEEKS!

In just 2 weeks Louis Rare Pair Fest 2025 begins on Oct 6!

🪐 Info & Rules

🪐 Schedule

🪐 Prompts

🪐 Pairings

🪐 AO3

SKINCARE VLOG | 2 week trial with Wildmint + long chats and new years resolutions | AD

I’m really excited to share this 2 week testing video using Wildmint’s skincare range – which has been kindly sponsored by them. source

I’ve been home for almost an entire week… And I’m ready to go back. Hey Susan, count me in on the Fall 2020 trip just because I need to go back and see the city while studying Women’s studies. My two current loves, London and Feminism - as my URL correctly identifies. The two weeks we spent walking around an ancient city with more history in a road stone than I could fathom. Just last night, I walked up to my roommate, who was sitting at the table doing homework and I must have made some type of noise that made her look up in worry. “I miss London,” I cried and with as much support as she could give me, she pouted in empathy because she’s been dealing with my post-London depression this entire week. 

The entire trip was like a dissociative dream - I felt like I was floating through the tours, the sights, the conversations. I ACTUALLY MISS THE TUBE! How severe is my post-London depression when I miss the hottest, sweatest, and time-consuming activity that is taking the underground?  

I miss the buildings - built hundreds of years ago but now house a Starbucks or McDonalds.

I miss Oxford Circus, the shopping was worth the hassling from non-profit initiatives on the streets.

I miss walking from Primark in Oxford Circus, through alleys to Picadilly Circus, to Chinatown, and just wondering around for a bit. 

My favorite game was pretending I wasn’t a tourist and just going about my day like your average Londoner. I think I was genuinely good at this game because of my attention to detail when it came to studying fellow English people (and my history of binging any and all British content from all media platforms).

From day one, I could tell that this city was more socially advanced than the American cities I have been in. Though that’s small (Portland and Seattle), the others in the group who had traveled farther than me agreed: London has it’s sh*t much more together than your average big city in the states. The outward acceptance to all minorities from pride flags in Soho to advertisements in the underground that featured the same number of people of color as they did white folks - and not just for “progressive” brands, but your everyday brands.

That note that Bruce Cherry told us on the London Rock Tour about the housing in London. How if one side of the street had expensive flats and townhouses, the opposite houses were more inclined to be affordable housing. Putting public housing next to private housing to avoid ghettos and “breed tolerance”. This idea that the city has but into reality - of creating a more tolerant environment for people. Even our driver from the airport to the dorms said there wasn’t one place in London that he would tell us to avoid - that the city didn’t have an “unsafe” area for women and young adults tells a lot about a city. In my own small town of 20,000, we have several areas that would be considered “unsafe” and my mom would tell me to avoid. Hell, all of Pearl District in Portland is considered an “unsafe” area for women and young lgbtqia+ people to be. 

That is not to ignore the areas of work London is still working on. Their history may be deeper than the United States, but it still has small bleeding wounds that need fixing. But what makes London a place I so desperately want to go back to is that they have people willing to put forward the effort to fix these wounds - their political agenda of socialism says enough when it compares to where they are in terms of acknowledging their past problems. 

This is starting to come off a little rose-colored-glasses, but I just love London so damn much for how little I spent in it. Ten million people in the city, and it shows with how little people react to someone dressed a little unusual on the tube. I feel insignificant in one of the biggest cities in the world but I’m okay with that if it makes me feel safer and respected. 

I know next to nothing about the royal family. I get them all confused! Why do they all share the same five names - Charles, Edward, Anne, Victoria, Elizabeth no. 78! Having serious conversations about the royals where I’m nodding my head, hoping to the gods above I can keep their names and history straight is extremely difficult.

That’s not to say I wasn’t moved when I walked into Queen Victoria’s old childhood rooms and felt like a princess myself. Yes, I realize that being royalty back then sucked (and still sucks to this day) but a shallow part of me just wants to be fancy for one second. I come from a life where one of Victoria’s rooms equaled my entire apartment! Does that fact balance out her inability to have a normal childhood? No, just let me be a little jealous of her cute dollhouse and portraits.

Walking through the life of Victoria, I can’t help but be in awe of her strength. The notes on the walls throughout the palace talked about her childhood in the rooms she was born and raised in, her fight to have freedom as a teen, to falling in love with her forever “love” her husband, Prince Albert, to raising their nine children, to her years of mourning after he died. The quotes from Queen Victoria throughout the exhibit to the artwork she had commissioned to show her and her family to the people she governed showed a strong character who, while having the power to get everything, still had to fight for her own life and respect. 

When Queen Victoria became queen at 18, she symbolized a fresh start for the monarchy - she was more “liberal” in a sense and showed an open mind compared to those who ruled before.

“Natives and colored races should be treated with every kindness and affection as brothers not - as alas! Englishmen too often do - as totally different to ourselves, fit only to be crushed and shot down!” - Queen Victoria, 1842 (five years into being queen).

It’s interesting to look at royalty in the spectrum of feminism. A lot of British royalty features strong women in the background or on the main stage. Women live(d) longer than men and it shows in the royal family as the current Queen of Great Britain is 93 and not quite done yet. I’d want to look more into how royalty differentiated throughout the royal kingdoms that are still in power to this day. We learned about the fact that if a woman of royal blood married, her husband would be named “Prince of…” instead of “King of…” because that would take power from the (future) Queen. Examples include “Queen Victoria and Prince Albert” and “Queen Elizabeth II and Prince Charles”. Why is King still more powerful than Queen? Shouldn’t it be based on blood or merit and not gender/sex?

Outside of these questions, I have to say the royal family dynamics (not just the British empire, but other royal families in the world) are an interesting thing to study through the eyes of feminism.

Throughout our trip visiting the most important parts of English history, we are hit in the face with gender inequality involving same-sex relationships. England’s LGBTQIA+ history mainly affected men in same-sex relationships. Men were tried and killed throughout time for even being seen with a man in any compromising positions. 

“Two years with hard labor” is a repeated sentence throughout all our tours.

A popular punishment for committing sodomy was two years of “hard labor”, which was basically torture. Oscar Wilde*, an iconic queer man known worldwide for his provocative writing, was imprisoned for 2 years because of his relationship with his then-boyfriend, Lord Alfred Douglas under the Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1885, which stated that “any male person who, in public or private, commits, or is a party to the commission of, or procures, or attempts to procure the commission by any male person of, any act of gross indecency, shall be guilty of a misdemeanor, and being convicted thereof, shall be liable at the discretion of the Court to be imprisoned for any term not exceeding two years, with or without hard labour.” Fun times… 

This all only affected men at the time, as women were seen as having no sexual drive (women only had sex to produce a child for the man of the house). That didn’t mean women weren’t having sex nor enjoying it, but no one in their right mind would acknowledge that! I’m clutching my pearls in aghast! WOMEN ENJOYING SEX!? Women enjoying sex with other women! Good heavens! Women in power like Queen Anne and Sarah Churchill (who had a famously ignored affair) could perform same-sex relationships in secret because of the public’s ignorance of a women’s sex drive during this time in history. Heterosexual women were treated with the same sexual respect as homosexual women, but because they were more closely pushed together, same-sex relationships between women were more often created. A woman could probably go up to a policeman and tell him of her indiscretions only to be dismissed because the general population acted like it didn’t exist. Sucky for gaining the right to marry your lover, but great to avoid two years of “hard labor”.