so don’t get me wrong because a lot of arthurian stuff is super misogynistic. but it’s never really in the damsel in distress way you expect. like the most helpless damsel is lancelot trapped and crying in a tower, completely useless, until this random girl who made him behead a guy in front of her fifty pages ago rolls up with a pickax and rope and is like “ok I’m minecrafting you out of here.” and this works.
Another direction you’ll see this go is, like… okay, so in Arthurian texts, violence is very much The Province of Men. But women often want violence done for one reason or another, so they’re out there asking knights to fight such-and-such for them & the knights are of course honor-bound to accept under certain conditions, which by genre convention are easy to engineer.
All of this means that one of the standard female roles in Arthurian romance is “quest-giver”. And in some texts, this can drift from “these are damsels in distress and the knights must help them in various ways” to “it kind of seems like the women are the ones who actually know what’s going on & the knights are just being led along to wherever they’re supposed to be”.
It’s still ultimately an example of misogyny and strict gender roles, but it ends up often looking pretty different from the stock “damsel in distress” scenario people expect.
…Is the woman in Arthurian myth who Wants Violence Done but must conscript a man to actually do it the literary ancestress of the modern Femme Fatale? Discuss.
She slipped into my office that night like a demon into the mind of a pious monk, seductive and dripping with heresies. Her gown and headress were of rich silk befitting a maiden, but her eyes were cold and sharp as the executioner’s sword, and her lips as red as the apple that tempted Eve. Her legs, presumably, went all the way up, but the aforementioned gown was floor-length, so it’s hard to say. Also she’d ridden a horse into the building for some reason, which was quite distracting.
“Sir Knight,” she said, dismounting and retrieving something from her saddlebag, “I have a job for you.” She tossed a severed head onto my desk.
I peered at the severed head. It had noble features, and had managed to land exactly on top of one of the stains left by previous severed heads. “How did you find me?” I asked. “I swapped my red shield for a blue one; the disguise should be impenetrable.”
“The hermit told me where you’d be”, she answered in a voice like the bells on a horse’s harness before battle.
That tracks. Those hermits are always poking their noses into my business. “How may I serve you, fair lady?” I asked. “I’d kneel, but my armor’s gone a bit rusty in the legs.”
“The Baron D’Iverjoure has slain my lover,” she said, gesturing at the head, the rings on her fingers clinking like manacles in a wicked king’s dungeon. “I need you to avenge him.”
“I have no quarrel with the Baron D’Iverjoure,” I said, knowing as the words echoed in my helmet that I was saying them just for the form of it and I’d end up taking this quest regardless. “I have heard he is an honorable man.”
“That may be,” said the damsel, in tones as lovely as a reliquary and just as filled with death, “but you took an oath to obey the next lady to ask you a favor, and I’m calling it in.”
I silently cursed my habit of swearing rash vows. They always get me in trouble. But you know how that goes. “Your wish is my command, milady.”
She nodded and remounted her horse with the help of her two servants who I hadn’t bothered to mention before now. “I will listen for news of your success,” she said as she left.
That’s the way it is with damsels; they always know about the oaths. Even the ones you spoke into a dented chalice, empty of wine, after everyone else had left the feast. And now I’ve got another quest I can’t turn down without losing my honor.
I’m glad you appreciate it. I was wracking my brain trying to come up with enough “beautiful but dangerous” similes to fill this out in the over-the-top way I wanted – the reliquary one was the only case where I stopped and thought “that’s actually not bad; i should remember it.” Probably needs workshopping, but I like it in concept.
Occasionally as an Australian you’ll be talking to someone from overseas, and you’ll discover a common phrase you took for granted is, in fact, not universally known outside of our country.
Turns out casually dropping “fuck me dead” into conversation will give unsuspecting Americans an aneurism.
The more you know.
Imagine being on a work call with an Aussie and they suddenly announce they’re gonna blow a load in response to a problem.
Not Aussie but I asked an American once if she was taking the piss ( i.e. pulling my leg, joking. Perfectly cromulent and friendly english expression)
and she got really upset because she thought I was threatening to piss ON her
This is killing me
Rifling through the tags, here’s some other terms which are apparently causing mass carnage whenever they escape our borders:
Having a goon (i.e. Sipping on a delightful wine)
Having a gaytime (Eating an icecream)
Having a sticky beak (Investigating)
Take a squiz (To have a sticky beak)
Get stuffed (To express a revelation is most frightful)
Chuck a sickie (Take a day off work due to the humours being misaligned)
Chuck a wobbly (When one’s temperament becomes visibly upset)
Carry on like a pork chop (Acting most silly indeed)
Thongs (flip flops)
Hot chook (Pre-cooked supermarket rotisserie chicken, otherwise known as the Bachelor’s Handbag)
Fair suck of the sauce bottle (Let’s be real)
Shits me to tears (Something is mildly annoying)
Not here to fuck spiders (Expressing a situation is serious)
Having a piss-up (A social gathering)
I’ll shout you (offering to goon an old chum)
A cruisy place (a relaxed atmosphere, where one might shout and goon the night away while enjoying many a gaytime in your favourite thongs)
“White flight is a term that describes how white people move out of neighborhoods when more people of color move in.
White flight is especially common when minority populations become the majority. That neighborhood then declines in value.
Male flight describes a similar phenomenon when large numbers of females enter a profession, group, hobby or industry—the men leave. That industry is then devalued.
Take veterinary school for example:
In 1969 almost all veterinary students were male at 89%.
By 1987, male enrollment was equal to female at 50%.
By 2009, male enrollment in veterinary schools had plummeted to 22.4%
A sociologist studying gender in veterinary schools, Dr. Anne Lincoln says that in an attempt to describe this drastic drop in male enrollment, many keep pointing to financial reasons like the debt-to-income ratio or the high cost of schooling.
But Lincoln’s research found that “men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.”
Her research shows that the reason fewer men are enrolling in veterinary school boils down to one factor: the number of women in the classroom.
For every 1% increase in the proportion of women in the student body, 1.7 fewer men applied.
One more woman applying was a greater deterrent than $1000 in extra tuition! (…)
Since males had dominated these professions for centuries, you would think they would leave slowly, hesitantly or maybe linger at 40%, 35%, 30%, but that’s not what happens.
Once the tipping point reaches majority female- the men flee. And boy do they flee!
It’s a slippery slope. When the number of women hits 60% the men who are there make a swift exit and other men stop joining.
Morty Schapiro, economist and former president of Northwestern University has noticed this trend when studying college enrollment numbers across universities:
“There’s a cliff you fall off once you become 60/40 female/male. It then becomes exponentially more difficult to recruit men.”
Now we’ve reached that 60% point of no return for colleges.
As we’ve seen with teachers, nurses and interior design, once an institution is majority female, the public perception of its value plummets.
Scanning through Reddit and Quora threads, many men seem to be in agreement – college is stupid and unnecessary.
A waste of time and money. You’re much better off going into the trades, a tech boot camp or becoming an entrepreneur. No need for college. (…)
When mostly men went to college? Prestigious. Aspirational. Important.
Now that mostly women go to college? Unnecessary. De-valued. A bad choice. (…)
School is now feminine. College is feminine. And rule #1 if you want to safely navigate this world as a man? Avoid the feminine.
The whole tradwife “i don’t want to work women aren’t supposed to work, feminism ruined our leisure 😩” nonsense is utterly baffling to me. Historically unless you were lucky enough to be a member of the wealthy upper class, women have always always always worked. Throughout the entirety of human history. Often backbreaking labor, often unpaid. Idiots cosplaying a farm wife like that didn’t entail working from sunup to sundown every day without fail because cows don’t care if you’re sick while simultaneously having baby after baby after baby and the invisible labor of housework, until you very likely died young. The TV housewives of the fifties, like they didn’t all explicitly have hired help (AKA A WOMAN WHO WORKS). Even in their vision of the future, the fricken Jetsons have female-coded robot Rosie as their domestic servant!
Women have always worked, with the very rare exception of the wealthy, who employed them. Washerwomen and laundresses and seamstresses and maids and ladies maids and cooks and nurses and governesses and teachers and farm laborers and spinsters and weavers and and and and. Sex work literally is the oldest profession. Women who had the good fortune to marry well were also supposed to be able to manage the household workforce and keep the budget (omg 🤪 girl math). Brenda in Accounting has some very marriageable skills!
And none of these women, the laborer or the housewife, had much recourse at all if their husband or employer abused them or their kids. They had no security in their future if the men running the show squandered the (his.) money or they could not depend on their children to care for them in old age, should they even reach it.
It’s a horrifying mix of calculated evil from conservatives who want to be able to freely beat their wives again and ignorant twaddle from women who are so ill-educated or just so eager for male attention that they cosplay that shit fully confident that they’d be the exception, it would be okay for them because they’re different and Good enough that they wouldn’t be harmed.
Yeah, work sucks, we all know it. But women have never been able to escape it and in every case I’ll take a steady paycheck, my own bank account, and a 401k match over what was most likely to be my lot in every other period of human history. Yeah being idle rich would probably be nicer, but chances of that are vanishingly slim so you gotta make the best of what you do have, yaknow?
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amhrancas 