Vulpixgirl

Me, the second my alarm goes off:

Since the 1960s, the number of babies available for adoption has steadily declined. The model many people prize as “ideal” is to adopt an infant as early as possible, so that it remembers no other parents, has no connections to any other culture or religious heritage, and can be raised, as much as possible, as though the child were a couple’s own biological child.

This has been an unspoken factor in a lot of conservative political decisions that don’t make sense on the surface, like restricting birth control and abortion while making raising a child as difficult and expensive as possible, or separating parents from children without even keeping track of which child belongs to which family.

You can see this agenda working in a lot of responses to “crises”, like the Sixties Scoop of Indigenous, Aboriginal, and Native American children, Operation Babylift in Vietnam in 1975, or people swarming Haiti in 2010 looking for orphans.

In all these cases, the “solution” to the “crisis” is to “save” children from unhappy lives in terrible conditions by giving them to, primarily, rich white Christian families, to be raised as conservative middle-class Christians. 

It looks altruistic, but don’t assume it actually is; so long as a child has living family members, it’s often better for them to be with their families in a refugee camp in a warzone than to be separated, no matter how nice their new homes and new families are. (And the adoption industry has scrupulously avoided, whenever possible, gathering evidence on what it’s like to give up a child for adoption, much less having your children taken from you.)

That’s one of the things I’m actually really surprised and amazed hasn’t been pushed as a solution more often; it used to be such a huge narrative in the past, but the more we know about childhood trauma, the more resistance there is to  babyscoop tactics. 

work to build as much of a relationship with a child’s first family as possible

strongly encourage others to build relationships with their fostered/adopted kids’ first families

in foster care, support first families or other kin in working towards reunification

find ways to provide socialization and relationships in the child’s culture of origin

support alternatives to foster care, such as kinship care, residential family treatment, prevention programs (e.g. home visiting, parenting classes) for families at risk of child removal, policy to remove substance use without abuse or neglect from child maltreatment criteria, etc etc.

support programs that remove obstacles to first families completing case plans and reuniting with children, e.g. bailout programs and legislation to end money bail

educate your support networks on why this matters

Many many kids in care don’t need new families, they need foster care. They need people willing to take care of them for whatever period of limbo necessary for their parents to get out of jail or complete mental health or addictions treatment, or for another relative to come back from a military deployment, or for someone else in their family to have the capacity to take care of them.

Like: if you are an able bodied white woman, especially in the USA, you will almost certainly have to fight TOOTH, NAIL AND BOTH HANDS to get access to sterilization before you’ve had at least two kids. Even if you’re poor, even if you hate kids, even if you KNOW you never want kids and even if you know kids would potentially kill you - as long as it’s not of something recognized by the general zeitgeist as a congenial “handicap” (word used deliberately to give the sense of the kind of understanding I’m talking about), it will be DIFFICULT to get yourself sterilized.

Women with physical disabilities, Indigenous women and in some areas Black women? May very well find it PUSHED ON THEM to the point where “consent” is violated as a matter of course (and in some cases straight up illegally performed) even to this day.

Susanna and the Elders, Restored (Left)

Susanna and the Elders, Restored with X-ray (Right)

For those who don’t know about this painting, the artist was the Baroque artist Artemisia Gentileschi.

Gentileschi was a female painter in a time when it was very largely unheard of for a woman to be an artist. She managed to get the opportunity for training and eventual employment because her father, Orazio, was already a well established master painter who was very adamant that she get artistic training. He apparently saw a high degree of skill in some artwork she did as a hobby in childhood. He was very supportive of her and encouraged her to resist the “traditional attitude and psychological submission to brainwashing and the jealousy of her obvious talents.”  

Gentileschi became extremely well known in her time for painting female figures from the Bible and their suffering. For example, the one seen above depicts the story from the Book of Daniel. Susanna is bathing in her garden when two elders began to spy on her in the nude. As she finishes they stop her and tell her that they will tell everyone that they saw her have an affair with a young man (she’s married so this is an offense punishable by death) unless she has sex with them. She refuses, they tell their tale, and she is going to be put to death when the protagonist of the book (Daniel) stops them.

So that painting above? That was her first major painting. She was SEVENTEEN-YEARS-OLD. For context, here is a painting of the same story by Alessandro Allori made just four years earlier in 1606: 

Wowwwww. That does not look like a woman being threatened with a choice between death or rape. So imagine 17 year old Artemisia trying to approach painting the scene of a woman being assaulted. And she paints what is seen in the x-ray above. A woman in horrifying, grotesque anguish with what appears to be a knife poised in her clenched hand. Damn that shit is real. Who wants to guess that she was advised by, perhaps her father or others, to tone it down. Women can’t look that grotesque. Sexual assault can’t be depicted as that horrifying. And women definitely can’t be seen as having the potential to fight back. Certainly not in artwork. Women need to be soft. They need to wilt from their captors but still look pretty and be a damsel in distress. So she changed it. 

What’s interesting to note is that she eventually painted and stuck with some of her own, less traditional depictions of women. However, that is more interesting with some context.  

(Warning for reference to rape, torture, and images of paintings which show violence and blood.)

So, Gentileschi’s story continues in the very next year, 1611, when her father hires Agostino Tassi, an artist, to privately tutor her. It was in this time when Tassi raped her. He then proceeded to promise that he would marry her. He pointed out that if it got out that she had lost her virginity to a man she wasn’t going to marry then it would ruin her. Using this, he emotionally manipulated her into continuing a sexual relationship with him. However, he then proceeded to marry someone else. Horrified at this turn of events she went to her father. Orazio was having none of this shit and took Tassi to court. At that time, rape wasn’t technically an offense to warrant a trial, but the fact that he had taken her virginity (and therefore technically “damaged Orazio’s property”. ugh.) meant that the trial went along. It lasted for 7 months. During this time, to prove the truth of her words, Artemisia was given invasive gynecological examinations and was even questioned while being subjected to torture via thumb screws. It was also discovered during the trial that Tassi was planning to kill his current wife, have an affair with her sister, and steal a number of Orazio’s paintings. Tassi was found guilty and was given a prison sentence of…. ONE. YEAR……. Which he never even served because the verdict was annulled.

During this time and a bit after (1611-1612), Artemisia painted her most famous work of Judith Slaying Holofernes. This bible story involved Holofernes, an Assyrian general, leading troops to invade and destroy Bethulia, the home of Judith. Judith decides to deal with this issue by coming to him, flirting with him to get his guard down, and then plying him with food and lots of wine. When he passed out, Judith and her handmaiden took his sword and cut his head off. Issue averted. The subject was a very popular one for art at the time. Here is a version of the scene painted in 1598-99 by Carivaggio, whom was a great stylistic influence on Artemisia:

This depiction is a pretty good example of how this scene was typically depicted. Artists usually went out of their way to show Judith committing the act (or having committed it) while trying to detach her from the actual violence of it. In this way, they could avoid her losing the morality of her character and also avoid showing a woman committing such aggression. So here we see a young, rather delicate looking Judith in a pure white dress. She is daintily holding down this massive man and looks rather disgusted and upset at having to do this. Now, here is Artemisia’s:

Damn. Thats a whole different scene. Here Holofernes looks less like he’s simply surprised by the goings ons and more like a man choking on his own blood and struggling fruitlessly against his captors. The blood here is less of a bright red than in Carrivaggio’s but is somehow more sickening. It feels more real, and gushes in a much less stylized way than Carrivaggio’s. Not to mention, Judith here is far from removed from the violence. She is putting her physical weight into this act. Her hands (much stronger looking than most depictions of women’s hands in early artwork) are working hard. Her face, as well, is completely different. She doesn’t look upset, necessarily, but more determined. 

It’s also worth note that the handmaiden is now involved in the action. It’s worth note because, during her rape trial, Artemisia stated that she had cried for help during the initial rape. Specifically she had called for Tassi’s female tenant in the building, Tuzia. Tuzia not only ignored her cries for help, but she also denied the whole happening. Tuzia had been a friend of Artemisia’s and in fact was one of her only female friends. Artemisia felt extremely betrayed, but rather than turning her against her own gender, this event instilled in her the deep importance of female relationships and solidarity among women. This can be seen in some of her artwork, and I believe in the one above, as well, with the inclusion of the handmaiden in the act.

So, I just added a million words worth of information dump on a post when no one asked me, but there we go. I could talk for ages about Artemisia as a person and her depictions of women (even beyond what I wrote above. Don’t get me started on her depictions of female nudes in comparison to how male artists painted nude women at the time.) 

To sum up: Artemisia Gentileschi is rad as hell. This x-ray is also rad as hell and makes her even radder.

I mean the ob gyn bot is all like ‘dunno why she died dudes’, because it legit shouldn’t be happening. All scans normal, etc.

There is a lot of interesting meta out there about the whole “lost her will to live” thing, like how that is a thing that happens, how Padme’s just as or perhaps even more then, emotionally immature then Anakin and really kind of can’t. 

A BEAR MADE FROM ROSES 😍😍😍

Found this company the other day on Facebook. According to their site, each Rose Bear is made by hand and takes almost an entire day to complete. There’s no denying that if someone got me this for Valentine’s Day, I’d love them forever! ❤️❤️

me: bae are you mad?

bae: no, I’m fine

me: so can you smile?