We Can't Rewind, We've Gone Too Far

I was going to post a link to quilt pictures here and then I thought I should post pictures of the other quilts I've done and then I realized I didn't really have any good pictures of them and then it was two months later.

So here are pictures of a quilt I finished in March! (Tumblr) (Twitter)

And here are some of the other things I did in the past two months that didn't make it here:

Learned more programming

A bunch of unrelated thoughts about The Old Guard on Tumblr: one, two, three

Listened to some French podcasts

Signed up for my local city councillor's mailing list, which I recommend if you are that kind of person and have a decent city councillor

Had meta-thoughts on omegaverse (Tumblr) (Twitter)

Provided a blood sample for the Ontario Health Study's COVID antibody study (Tumblr) (Twitter)

Was moderately snide about "accessible design" by non-disabled people (Tumblr) (Twitter)

Lots and lots of interesting case studies, not the best prose style.

From a letter to the editor of the Portland News, 1912: "This old story about more wages because she wears men's clothes is not the main part of the drama at all. There is many a good man who would marry such a woman as Nell Pickerell [aka Harry Allen], but she will not have it that way." (p 30) Would there actually be that many men happy to marry a woman who had served multiple prison sentences and given birth to an illegitimate child? I mean, maybe, there was a heavy gender imbalance in the American west.

"A quick search through this newspaper [the Idaho Statesman] reveals no fewer than forty stories related to cross-dressing appearing between 1890 and [1908]." (p 205 n33)

"Often western women sex-workers wore men's clothing as by custom it provided an indication to others of the wearer's occupation. Among such women were the nine prostitutes of the Williams Creek district of western Canada's Cariboo gold rush who, according to an 1862 news item, put on "great airs" when they would "dress in male attire and swagger through the saloons and mining camps with cigars or huge quids of tobacco in their mouths, cursing and swearing, and look like anything but the angels in petticoats heaven intended them to be."" (p 35) [emphasis mine] Note how class and gender are conflated here--the suggestion is not just that they should dress like women but that all women are naturally the innocent middle-class angel in the house.

M, an MTF case study in "Transvestism: A Contribution to the Study of the Psychology of Sex" by Bernard S. Talmey: "When "so dressed [as a woman], I can always think more logically, feel less encumbered, solve difficult problems in a manner next to impossible under any other conditions."" (p 61)

"By the turn of the twentieth century Americans had gained an international reputation for, as the German sexologist Magnus Hirschfeld put it, blaming "one or the other ethnic group for homosexuality."" (p 147) This is in the course of a discussion of how the Chinese Exclusion Act and various laws prohibiting interracial marriage prevented Chinese-American men from forming heterosexual families. (Canada was doing the exact same thing, incidentally.)

Chapter 5 spends a lot of time talking about "the apparent spread of prostitution, public indecency, and other transgressive sexual activities as the nineteenth century advanced" (p 168). Which, I assume, had a lot to do with the spread of literacy, urbanization, and the popular press, and makes an interesting comparison to how mass media, social media, and population growth now is making it look like the world is getting worse and worse, whatever your definition of "worse" is.

Also, wow, you don't realize how quickly Lamarckism was wrapped up into evolutionary theory to help out eugenics.
... In other words, we have reached the "fucking assholes" part of any history of sexuality. I may not have much to say about the rest of this book except swearing.

That said, "Viraginity and Effemination" should be the name of a queer bookstore. Or a zine.

(Part One) (Part Two)

Okay, the last few chapters have a lot of eugenics and also a lot of unethical medical and corporate behaviour in general, which I’m not talking about because they just make me want to stab people. (If you thought eugenics was over with after WWII, well. I’m so sorry.) The US was totally happy to fund international birth control as long as it was being sold as population control rather than women’s liberation.

A lot of population control proponents thought that the major problem with the Pill was that it was being taken by white suburban middle class women, instead of the women who “most needed” it - but they didn’t actually trust that poor uneducated women could follow the complicated procedure of taking one pill every day. In context with their support of IUDs it mostly looks like they objected to birth control methods which required women to take them voluntarily.

Anyway, her argument is that the Pill created a new idea of non-sick women seeing doctors and taking regular medications, and being viewed by the medical profession as patients, even though they were technically healthy. Which probably had effects well beyond birth control.

The Pill was approved in May 1960 and became the most popular form of birth control in America by 1965, used by over 6.5 million married women … and some number of unmarried women whom the official statistics ignored.

It was originally tested in Puerto Rico, because the scientists involved wanted to be away from the American press. Then the Puerto Rican press wrote articles accusing them of using poor people of colour as guinea pigs for a medication they wouldn’t test on white people, which was true.

And apparently in 2001 when she was writing the most popular form of birth control was female sterilization. Which, unlike the Pill, was usually covered by insurance, and meant you didn’t have to worry about losing your insurance later. ...I am trying to find a polite way of saying “Your country is a barbaric hellscape.”

She’s writing a history of the market, rather than really a social history. She does point out that most capitalist historians focus on the success stories rather than the millions of entrepreneurs who went out of business for whatever reason, and she in contrast gives cases on both sides.

I got less interested as the book got closer to the present, and I am dubious about some of Tone’s conclusions based on the information she herself provides. But in general excellent, glad I read it.

Pied Beauty

Gerald Manley Hopkins

Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.


In Bohemia

Arthur Symons

Drawn blinds and flaring gas within,
And wine, and women, and cigars;
Without, the city’s heedless din;
Above, the white unheeding stars.

And we, alike from each remote,
The world that works, the heaven that waits,
Con our brief pleasures o’er by rote,
The favourite pastime of the Fates.

We smoke, to fancy that we dream,
And drink, a moment’s joy to prove,
And fain would love, and only seem
To love because we cannot love.

Draw back the blinds, put out the light:
'Tis morning, let the daylight come.
God! how the women’s checks are white,
And how the sunlight strikes us dumb!


From the Dark Tower

Countee Cullen

We shall not always plant while others reap
The golden increment of bursting fruit,
Not always countenance, abject and mute,
That lesser men should hold their brothers cheap;
Not everlastingly while others sleep
Shall we beguile their limbs with mellow flute,
Not always bend to some more subtle brute;
We were not made eternally to weep.

The night whose sable breast relieves the stark,
White stars is no less lovely being dark,
And there are buds that cannot bloom at all
In light, but crumple, piteous, and fall;
So in the dark we hide the heart that bleeds,
And wait, and tend our agonizing seeds.

Today is the 180th anniversary of the incorporation of my city <3<3.

March is Bisexual Health Awareness Month.

And from james_davis_nicoll, the CRTC has notified two pornography channels that they don't have sufficient Canadian Content, and may have their licenses revoked.

And in other news, I know that it's perfectly normal Canadian weather for March and other people have it much worse, but THIS IS ENOUGH SNOW STOP IT.

So on most days I am mostly female. The amount of "mostly" varies. ( Read more... )
Discussion of gender identity and body dysphoria above.

That's about as far as I've got, here.

I had completely forgotten about "The Christians and the Pagans" until Slacktivist linked to it. It's a good song.

The days are getting longer! *\o/*

janice_lester says Give Sexy Actors Sexy Wheelchairs! I say, wow, those are some damn awesome machines. Go look!

And! people in wheelchairs going up stairs! so cool!

via kate_nepveu

Regarding The Blind Banker.

Been trying to remember where this was, and then I just accidentally stumbled on it.