✨ Festive & Horrible✨

I can’t believe it

All that obsessive research into medieval dental hygiene actually paid off

I was spending all this time thinking “Literally no one cares about Thedosian dental hygiene, Amy, why are you wasting your time on this” but HERE IT IS

So yeah, this isn’t actually true! While the toothbrush itself is a fairly modern invention, there’s a well recorded history of people in medieval Europe using a combination of various sweet-smelling mouth rinses and scrubbing their teeth clean with a cloth and a mild abrasive herb paste of some sort. Some common rinses included mint and wine or mint and vinegar, and pastes included things like marjoram and mint, rosemary and charcoal, and vinegar, pickling alum, white salt and honey.

Someone even tested a bunch of historical remedies out and found out that they were mostly pretty effective.

With John Boyega, in a  blue Agbada, a robe traditionally worn by men in West Africa, with gold detailing. A Fila, a traditional Yoruba cap, finished the look:

Needed a clean graphic for a project, and figured while I was vectoring I would put sex and magic back in.

me: yeah whatever. i don’t feel shit.

5 minutes later: dude i swear i just saw cassandra clare post an incest fic

Snake: “He was at church when a bomb went off, got pierced by a crucifix, survived by drinking his family’s blood.”

Raiden: “So that’s why he’s called Vamp?”

And my dad and brothers? Were deeply disturbed by the movie Jennifer’s Body. I was flabbergasted. It’s not scary! It’s not even that gory. But they were horrified by it. These men who grew up on 70s slashers were legitimately shook by 90 minutes of Megan Fox eating a few teenage boys, mostly off-screen.

Similarly, my all-male reading panel for my thesis? Were so disturbed by my synopsis of the film Teeth that they couldn’t even talk about it. One of them said he couldn’t look at his wife for a week after reading it.

Again, grown-ass men who study and teach media for a living. Who definitely watch and enjoy horror movies. One of whom was a huge Tarantino buff. We watched and read worse in his intro to mass media class! But one movie about a girl whose vag could bite was enough to haunt him.

Then of course you have things like the Gone Girl backlash–men yelling that Amy Dunne is evil and women clamoring to assure everyone that they know she is not someone to emulate–the backlash against Carol Danvers, and, more recently, the griping from MRAs against the upcoming film Hustlers, which is about strippers scamming their Wall Street clients.

My conclusion? Most men–at least most straight, cisgender men, who are both my sample population and most of the ones whining that Carol is a “villain”–are perfectly fine with, and desensitized to, media where men do violence to women (horror movies), or men do violence to men (horror and action movies). They’re even sort of fine when women do violence to women (“ooooo cat fight!”).

But they get intensely uncomfortable when women are depicted doing any kind of violence to men, especially in films that tilt the balance of power to the other side of the m/f gender binary beyond a single moment or scene.

So woman as flesh-eating monster with men as her preferred cuisine? Woman who responds to unwanted sexual contact by biting it off? Woman who frames her cheating husband for murder? Woman whose response to harassment–behavior that many of the loudest whiners know is both creepy and reflective of their own thoughts/actions–is to break something?

Too scary. Unacceptable. Disturbing. These men hate being presented with the idea, even in fiction, that their position of power is socially constructed, that it could easily be flipped the other way. It terrifies them.

In feeling that terror, they experience a tiny modicum of what living, existing, moving, being perceived as a woman in the world is like.

in a series with multiple instances of men beating, humiliating, and occasionally killing female sex workers, including at least one main character and several sympathetic side characters. and two other main female characters being threatened with rape at various points

(link to tweet)

Renoir in Clair Obscur -

@MuseeOrsay Thursday, June 25, 7–10 p.m.

On June 25, the Musée d'Orsay is opening its doors to the world of Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, with references to the Belle Époque themes and the couple formed by Auguste Renoir and Aline Charigot.

You can expect to see a roundtable discussion with the game's artists, the game's original soundtrack performed live under the museum's nave, and an exclusive exhibition highlighting parallels between images from Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 and the Musée d'Orsay's collections.

Tickets will go live on June 9th at 11am CEST

More information: https://billetterie.musee-orsay.fr/concerts-du-soir-spectacles-et-performances-css5-museeorsay-pg1-rg28945.html

tell yourself things you do not believe. it feels stupid at first but I've done this for years and now I believe it when I say "I'm good at this" or "I love myself" or "I deserve good shit!"

make a note of every mundane good thing that happens to you. mental or literal notes! could be as little as "the sky is a nice shade of grey, it's calming" or "I ate a piece of fruit today, I'm looking after myself" or "I talked to a friend". again, feels stupid at first, but I genuinely believe this is part of why I have so many "good days". trick your brain into storing things in your long-term memory that you wouldn't otherwise remember.

they're coming from someone who had multiple daily panic attacks for half a decade. someone who genuinely felt like he did not deserve to live. someone who hated himself so much he convinced himself he was irredeemably evil. someone who loves being alive these days, even though it's difficult sometimes.