wordsmithic

I'm just gonna slide this on in here for anyone that is interested in preserving old games. They take it very seriously too, they want an archive of every single game. Like, they have lists of every game ever released for a system, and once that system gets old enough, they add it to their archive and start collecting. Their latest addition was the Xbox 360, they opened that vault up in September 2022, and proudly announced they'd finished their collection of games for it back in April.

Also, while their game archives are almost entirely complete, they've got another project of archiving the manuals that came with those games, and that is... considerably less well filled out. Their collection of Xbox 360 manuals is especially rough, they've only gotten manuals for three games. So if you've got some Xbox 360 games kicking around, and the manual's still with them, please consider scanning them and submitting them to the site!

That's why most of this books just go straight up to making every single man a rapist/sexual abuser except for their token "good male".

And don't get me wrong, yeah sexual assault was worse back then than it is now. But y'all also think is the only way in which woman were fucked over?

This books never center about other things like:

- Arranged marriages

- The pressure to have multiple children and how pregnancies could deteriorate the health of women

- Lack of education

- No hope for pursuing other thing but motherhood

Besides, in many such cases, the main protag of this books are princesses. Not lower class women.

Take Hippodamia for example, she was a princess. And while she experienced sexual abuse, thankfully, she never experienced rape itself. This because her status gave her a level of protection.

Princesses had guards (sometimes they were castrated, depends on what ancient civilization you're talking about), maids, protection of all kinds. It would be almost impossible for a lower class man such as a soldier to even try to sexually assault a princess without consecuences.

This doesn't mean a princess couldn't go through rape. But in that case it would be coming, usually, from someone close to her. Someone close to her in power. A family member or her husband, for example.

So they don't even explore the subject correctly, nor explore other types of pressure princesses could have on them for the simple fact of being women.

misogyny is not exclusively about sexual exploitation. there are plenty of men who do not sexually exploit women who are still misogynistic, or who still practice misogynistic behavior. examples include, but are in no way limited to:

- men who believe that women are inherently physically and/or mentally weaker than men

- men who believe that the primary goal of a woman always is or always should be to bear children

- men who believe that all women are innate caregivers or are more empathetic, kinder, more maternal, etc. than men

- men who constantly interrupt or talk over women even if they do not realize they are doing it, and do not do the same to other men

- men who will not do housework or childcare because it is a woman’s job

furthermore, rape culture and misogyny as a whole are systemic issues. beyond rape culture, systemic misogyny extends to the things op listed, among other things such as wedding culture, wage gaps, sex segregation in sports, poor health care, etc.

the problem with only representing misogyny through rape is not the representation of rape. it is, like op said, reductive; it erases the other, very real ways in which women have been and continue to be oppressed. it insinuates that rape is the only way that misogyny takes form, which in turn suggests that any man who is not a rapist or sexual abuser, such the token “good man” referenced by op, is automatically not misogynistic at all and a perfect love interest. always making this singular non-rapist man the love interest begins to allude to the idea that “good” men, men who do not take advantage of women, are owed romance and sex.

even if this is not the original intent of the author, and it often isn’t, it is both a noticeable pattern in contemporary lit and a sign of not being a very good writer. the overuse of rape as a way to show that women were oppressed in ancient greece is, quite frankly, lazy as hell.

> ask the people there whether their resources are international or just for americans

> they laugh and say "they're good resources sir"

Pssst! You know you can use the Greek names of the Greek gods, right? I'm not talking about ancient Greek. I'm talking about contemporary, spoken Greek. You know the names still exist in Greek. Right....?

Not only the ancient names for figures and terms have remained exactly the same for the most part, but also they're not worse, disrespectful, or "less formal". They are literally the Greek names of the gods/heroes/creatures/terminology today.

You don't have to address these figures the way our people did more than two thousand years ago. Millions of living Greeks today still speak the names of the Greek gods. In the Greek language.

I understand that the versions you use can depend on the resources available to you. And it's fine if you only know the ancient ones, or you only want to use those. But I'd like to make you aware that you don't have to be stuck in 300 BCE linguistically.

Not even the Greek language itself is stuck in 300 BCE! In fact, by 299 BCE, our language had already slightly changed from the year prior, and it continues to do so every year for... well, for a few thousand years at this point.

Ancient names make sense when one uses them in academic contexts, in the study of ancient Greek society and religion. But this religion and culture don't exist in a vacuum inside your history books. This linguistic stagnation in everyday life, though, is part of the centuries-long Western European / American obsession with seeing the Greek culture and language like something divorced from the real world.

There's no particular justification that demands you use the ancient versions in modern informal settings. On the contrary, why not address the Greek gods in the current form of the Greek language?

But, like OP said, foreigners using the ancient versions is not considered an offense. Sometimes this is what's most accessible. And of course, one can have other words for the names of the Greek gods in their language. It would be ridiculous to hold such a thing against them.

this statement and bias is something non-greek hellenic polytheists (like myself) must always keep in mind. we are far, far from interacting with a “dead” culture. it is vibrant and deserving of our attention and respect.

The first one is how the article neglects to mention that αί/αι is not an AY sound but an EH sound. Which is pretty odd because this has been in effect for more than two thousand years now.

Examples: Aristaios - (Aristaeus; Gr. Ἀρισταῖος, ΑΡΙΣΤΑΙΟΣ) is not pronounced ah-rees-TAY-ohs, but as ah-rees-TEH-ohs.

&

Daimôn is not pronounced DAY-mohn, but DEH-mon. (Same logic as the English word "Demon" which came from Greek)

Demeter is not Δημήτηρ today but Δήμητρα (THEE-meet-rah) , and it's not uncommon to find Greek people with that name, either feminine or masculine.

Moerae should not be this, but Mοίρες (MEE-rehs). Mousai should be Mouses and pronounced MOO-sehs, and Nýmphai (NEEM-fay) should be Νύμφες - NEEM-fehs. No feminine word in plural ends in -αι nowadays.

Also no one says Orphéfs for the last few centuries. It should be Oρφέας - or-FEH-ahs

Phýsis should be actually Phýsi (FEE-see)

Poseidóhn/Poseidôn is not wrong but it still has that archaic vibe. If you want to go full contemporary, try Poseidóhnas/Poseidônas (Ποσειδώνας - poh-see-DOHN-ahs)

Lastly, I would not suggest the ee-HEE-ah pronunciation for Hygeia/Yyeia/Υγεία. I would suggest ee-YEE-ah, since English has this specific γ sound (same as in "yeeeet!").

On a final note, I saw this blogger uses the word "Hellenismos" to describe the Greek ancient religion (like many other non-Greeks). That's not advisable, as Greeks have been using it for centuries to describe our nation/ethnicity. "Hellenismos" in Greek describes our people, in our land and abroad. Anyone who wants to learn more can read this comprehensive post about it.

Now, as the Greek saying goes, "opinions are like assholes: everyone's got one". So I'm going to briefly give mine.

The site says: Julian (332-364 CE) was the last Roman emperor who loved the Gods. He endeavored to rule as a philosopher-king and attempted to revive philosophy and the worship of the Gods. It was Julian who used the word Hellenismos to identify the ancient Greek religion in contrast to the new religion, Christianity. This use of the word eventually became commonplace.

My commentary: No Greek for the last thousand years or so would ever use "Hellenismos" for our ancient religion, because our reference point is the will of our people, and not the action of an emperor and a brief popularization of the term. We choose wether to give it importance or not in naming our people's ancient religion. I cannot emphasize enough how absurd is for an outsider to come and claim the name of our nation as the name of their religion because one emperor more than a thousand years ago popularized that name for a while. If we wanted to, we Greeks would have used the term for the religion.

(Besides, if I'm not mistaken, the specific Hellenismos as practiced in the days of Julian was not what the ancient Greek religion was at its height, and not what today's polytheists are practicing. But people can look this up.)

I'll add smth here cos I learned after posting this on IG that people still aren't entirely understanding how scary and dangerous this is. Ppl kept saying to me 'I can still buy your book in shops though' or 'Its okay, I'll order your book into my library!'

I dont give af about my book lol No one outside of Ace ppl ever read it, its yearly sales don't even cover a month of expenses for me.

The thing you should all be concerned about is that a totally benign unheard of book about someone's every day life is being banned. And those laws listed above are passing through US government right now. One of those laws would make it so that any teacher/librarian in the US could lose their job/go to prison for simply sharing 'ideology'- and I don't mean only lgbtq folk, these laws are attacking black history, civil rights history, disability rep in books. Just talking about these things will now legally be considered a 'dangerous ideology'.

And once that's set into law, the US government has backing via law to go ahead and say 'if these books aren't legally allowed in schools, then they shouldn't be allowed in shops, either.' And from there it sets up a great argument for 'The dangerous content in these books is lawfully being removed from public, shouldn't we be lawfully removing the people living out/promoting this ideology too?'

I can see why ppl don't fully understand how dangerous book bannings are, if they're not familiar with the history of fascism. If you're interested, there are plenty of graphic novels that share this history via first hand accounts- Maus, Persepolis, Banned Book Club.

But guess what? You're on limited time to get these via libraries...cos all three of these books are on banned lists too, and they got nothing to do with lgbtq rep, and everything to do with warning ppl about fascism.

And the US government knows it can get away with this, because they are passing these laws as we speak and barely anyone is doing anything about it or talking about it. I've been trying to talk about it for years and no one does anything except say to me 'don't worry, I'll buy your book!' or say its a badge of honour that I have a banned book.