18th century trash

I love reading 18th century newspaper articles because it’ll just be like: what is the world coming to men are fastening their shoes with strings and using umbrellas #bring back masculine men

The amount of slavery in Ancient Rome was legitimately terrifying tbh

Y’all know that I’m into ancient Roman history and I do a lot of research on it but even though I should be used to it by now sometimes I read an anecdote about how an individual slave was treated and I’m hit with the realization that like a third of the population was living like that and I just need to put my head in my hands for a second

When you study ancient history you’re reminded that slavery has never once been kind or justified. It just takes on different forms of evil in every time and place that it infects.

We can never really know d'Eon's true gender identity. Sure. But? You'll still make sure to deadname her. You'll still use masculine pronouns for her. You'll still describe her as a man. You'll still ignore any of the ways she expressed her gender identity in her lifetime. Because why? Because if we can never really know we should assume d'Eon was cis right? Because "we shouldn't assume" is always code for we should assume cisgender.

It can be useful to bring how different cultures produce different gendered norms to resist any kind of “naturalistic” arguments, but also sometimes I wanna shake my fellow leftists by the shoulders and tell them that “normalized homosexuality only via widespread pederasty” or “third genders only allowed to exist as cultic prostitutes” are just as reactionary as “Western Homophobia”, they’re just operating under a different system.

History is so good for nosy people

Its actually so fucked up that people will use d'Eon talking about her experiences with misogyny as evidence that she wasn't actually a woman. I'm sorry I forgot that women must love misogyny. Must love being treated as less than. Trans women doubly so apparently.

There's a weird 3 star movie out there ready to change your life forever

it's always funny to see 19th century people torn between their appreciation for Our History and just how crass and embarrassing they find a good deal of written material from the past to be... preface to heroards diaries where the author is clearly consternated bc oh so fashionable early modern courts keep making dick ass shit and piss jokes

tired of cannibalism as a metaphor for love or sex. can we get into cannibalism as a metaphor for colonization.

an interesting thing about clothing in late medieval and early modern europe is that, while lower class people generally did wear brightly colored clothing instead of muddy brown clothes, there were very distinct differences in the color of clothing people of different classes wore. clothing was done with all natural dyes, of course, but they were either dyed locally with cheap and easily accessible ingredients, or they were dyed in holland, italy, the ottoman empire, or even further afield using a jealously guarded secret combination of difficult-to-access ingredients, including (crucially) better-quality fixatives. this means that not only did expensive imported fabrics maintain a dark, rich tone much longer than a locally dyed one, which would get a washed out look after a couple of years, but there were also certain colors that a working class farmer literally couldn’t afford to wear, and even though the difference between a cheap local lincoln green and an expensive imported popingay green might seem subtle to us people then seem to have been very sensitive to those differences. that’s also why the colors puritans tended to wear seem uncharacteristically bright to our modern eye—black was such a rich and expensive color that it would be inappropriate to wear to anything other than a portrait sitting, but the colors orange and kendall green were deeply humble in their origins

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