Hatred
Lara Adams-Miller shared some anti-suffrage images yesterday. It’s always unnerving to see how very venomous they were.
“Shut up, terf” and “punch a terf” rhetoric is nearly indistinguishable from anti-suffrage rhetoric.
Those go way beyond just shut up – they urge torture.
Suffer, bitch!
More:
A man’s foot on her breasts, a hundred-twelve*-pound concrete block on her abdomen and crotch, while she is choked and drowned by a great vat of soup. Clear enough?
*correction
I’m not saying this makes it much better, but I think the last one is force-feeding a suffragette who was on a hunger strike.
And, yes, that was done:
https://slate.com/human-interest/2013/07/sylvia-pankhurst-the-suffragette-s-first-person-account-of-force-feeding.html
Meanwhile, I have a play that traces the history of women through stories based on real stories, and people who have heard parts of it think I exaggerate.
It’s revolting isn’t it? Not that long ago either. Maybe not surprising that people are still trying to force women back into the box they broke out of. To be unnecessarily pedantic, 1cwt is 112 pounds. I totally understand why the metric system has been adopted in most places. The 56 pound weight in the first cartoon is oddly specific. 4 stone. Can anyone think why!
Oh, whoops, thanks.
Rob,
A bushel of corn weighs 56 lbs, so any North American farm that grew corn would be likely to have a 56lb weight around for the harvest, once mass-produced metal became cheap after 1865. That would be the vast majority of farms, at least for feed purposes. Weights that look sort of like that are still not hard to find.
For similar reasons, the ‘weight throw’ events of the early Olympics used that weight.
Naïf, thanks. Sounds like a plausible explanation.
Your audiences must be very sheltered.
The depravity which some humans are capable of inflicting on those under their power (both human and non-human) is depressingly common in my reading of history over the years. It’s not like a big secret or anything. More like outright denial, wishful thinking and whistling past the graveyard all rolled into one. Women, who have tended to be lower down in most human hierarchies pretty much since humans started creating hierarchies, have probably had it worse than almost everyone else for longer than most anyone else. Which is what makes the whole Johnny-come-lately, “We’re more opressed than you, and if you don’t agree, we’ll punch you until you do” trans “rights” movement so galling.
Okay, then what’s the explanation for the 16 ton weight used in Monty Python? How many bushels of corn would that be?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=o13glRURgTE
They are. They also struggled with a play I wrote in which God threw a temper tantrum and started a storm that threatened to destroy the earth. One of the members of my group, who had read the part of Jesus, said he was struggling to wrap his mind around the idea of a vengeful God. I thought he was kidding, because, I mean seriously, if you haven’t heard of Westboro Baptist Church and their god, where the hell have you been? But…he wasn’t kidding. He goes to the Unitarian Church, and apparently never walks outside that or the gated community (not quite gated, but definitely upper middle class) in which he lives. A number of them in the group are like that. Because they travel in liberal circles, and never step into the world of red America (they are a blue island in a deep red state), they don’t realize that the “deplorables” are really deplorable. They think it’s all about Jeff Foxworthy and Willie Nelson out here.
They also assume community college students are just like the ivy league schools and their students; they have the same goals, the same abilities, the same tendency to dress up snazzy for interviews. Another one of the playwrights was given grief over his play because he showed life like it is for a community college student, and the group found it unbelievable. I wrote a play about our mayor, based on our actual mayor and loosely based on an actual incident, and they were sure mayors would never act like that. They have no clue that small town mayors are a much different animal than big city mayors.
This is what we have to deal with politically and socially. These are our so-called allies, the ones who are supposedly on our side, but they have no clue what our side actually experiences, because they never leave the warmth of their own world long enough to find out.
It’s possible that the 56 lbs is some sort of reference to Muriel Matters:
https://murielmatterssociety.com.au/home-page/who-was-muriel-matters/
Rob, to add to Naif’s comment, 56lb weights were used everywhere that had imperial weighting because 56lb is a 1/2 cwt, or a sack of spuds in UK currency.
iknklast:
They’ve never heard of Noah around your parts, I take it?
The generic balance-scale weight in Russia was the ‘pood.’ Which has been decimalized into 16 kilos.
That was old testament, and it never really happened!
Actually, for some people I know, the Noah story is a story of God’s beneficence, because he spared the Noah family and some of every animal (what about the dinosaurs? The trilobites?). They see the story not as one of destruction but salvation.
But salvation from exactly what? They don’t read the bits where God actually unleashes the omnicidal disaster from which he mercifully spares Noah and his family (along with whatever number of pairs of animals he had managed to stuff in the gopherwood boat)? I’ve always wondered about the wisdom (from the point of view of the faithful) of turning this horrific story into versions aimed at children, complete with pastel-tinted illustrations of big-eyed animals and humans, with the parts of Noah and his family perversely portrayed by children, like kiddies dressed up for a Sunday-school pageant. What better way to get kids to ask embarassing and dangerous questions about the benificence, morality and sanity of the god portrayed in it. All those cute, cuddly, innocent animals destroyed in the psychopathic rage of an allegedly omniscient diety who couldn’t see the corruption of his creation coming, and who can’t be bothered to target only those who are actually wicked, but obliterates the whole world with the blunt instrument of a global flood? (Like violence against women, this is apparently a given, it “just happens.” Gods will be gods.) Of course, if you want to teach your kids that they better watch out, because God is a capricious, spiteful, vindictive bastard who commands unquestioning obedience (like your father), then you’re good to go.
The “It’s just the Old Testament” dodge doesn’t work either. The Christians’ Jesus protection racket wouldn’t work nearly as well without Bad Cop God lurking in the background as the enforcer. However loving he may be portrayed as, Jesus threatens those who don’t believe him with eternal damnation and hellfire. A meme I came across that puts this realy well uses a traditional (19th C?) devotional painting of Jesus knocking on a closed door. Jesus is saying “Let me in so I can save you!” “Save me from what?” comes the reply through the door. “From what I’ll do to you if you don’t let me in!”
Here it is: https://imgur.com/gallery/oOP4jDB
not Bruce:
Not only that; the entire Jesus-as-Messiah story is rooted in OT prophesies, and JC himself was supposed to be a direct descendant of the OT’s King David (which kind of rules God out as his dad).
No, they’re both dad. Don’t worry about how that could work, just believe it; it’s a matter of
magicFaith.I’ve got a niggly feeling that wi’ve been hearing versions of the don’t worry about how, just believe it explanation quite a lot these days. Now if only I could remember in relation to what……
not Bruce, that’s one of the things that always bothered me. “You can’t destroy people’s faith; it’s helps them overcome their fears”. Yeah. Fears that “God” instilled in them in the first place. Fear of God. Fear of Hell. Fear of fire.
There are plenty of legitimate things in the world to fear, and it seems likely the god idea rose as a response to fear of a world that couldn’t be controlled. The problem is, the fears of the gods became a higher priority than fixing or dealing with the very real problems of the very real world. Countless man hours and genius have been wasted on debating useless theological concepts and trying to discover the mind of god – plus trying to force everyone else to worship your god – that could have been better spent on more useful pursuits, all the real world problems god promised to solve, if you just had faith. Since he never solves those problems, it becomes obvious to people who believe that they just don’t have enough faith. So rather than rolling up their sleeves and trying to solve the problems themselves, they turn to their neighbors and begin to bludgeon them about their lack of faith.
More problems have been solved in the lab than in the church, mosque, synagogue, or temple. This in spite of all the religious efforts to prevent them from being solved, including such important things as lightning rods, antibiotics, safe childbirth, vaccines, and for all I know, numbing the mouth when one goes to the dentist (I haven’t actually heard of any protests against that. I just threw it in).
This “faith” allows people to see angels, Jesus, demons, and other things that do not exist. It is the same faith that allows people to believe that a woman can have a penis and a man can menstruate. And that menstruation is unclean, because the bible says so. The women should not teach, because the bible says so. Faith puts chains on people; science is figuring out how to remove those chains (with the help of philosophy, history, arts, and other important pursuits. I do not accept the scientistic explanation that science is all we need, only that we need it).