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Thought this could fit in well here
Ok I don’t mean to be doing this too often but I literally just wrote a paper about this so I thought I would comment! The English translation is The Cursed Woman but the original French is La Femme Damnée. “Femmes Damnées” was the title of a Baudelaire poem from his acclaimed 1857 book Fleurs du mal, which was known, among other things, to be a collection that famously dealt with the subject of lesbians. The poem tells the story of the desires and passionate love between two lesbians: Delphine and Hippolyte. As a result of this poem and of the book as a whole, the terms “fleurs du mal” and “femme damnée” became lesbian monikers of the turn of the century. Though some have deemed the term “damned women” to be accusatory of some moral dissonance, the poem it is derived from is actually quite sympathetic to the condition of lesbian love as it is a love which is unable to fully flourish in that time. Regardless, the translated title of Tassaert’s painting is misleading, as the original French is less accusatory and more identifying. The title is more accurately “the lesbian.”
And she’s doing fine
That’s not the quiet part.
There’s something else, something they might not even be fully aware of themselves. The real quiet part is that if it was *their* child or *their* ectopic pregnancy they’d pull out all the stops to save their life or get their grandchild aborted. Planned Parenthood sees reactionaries and regressives all the time, and they are every bit the nightmare patients you’d imagine them to be. But the one thing all those patients have in common is that *their* abortion is *justified*, and the next week they’ll be outside the clinic again, rejoining the protestors for “killing their baby”.
It’d be one thing to have ghoulish principles, but the far-right have none at all.
When I was younger and had more time to waste on the internet, and spent a lot of time in various online forums getting into arguments -- on purpose -- I made up a game I called Six Degrees of Slut.
The game (which is a variation on the well known Six Degrees of Bacon) was very simple. In any discussion of abortion, see whether you could get the other side to articulate, within six back-and-forth exchanges, some variation of The Filthy Sluts Must Be Punished. Regardless of where their argument started, the goal of the game was to get them to admit that.
I never once lost a game of Six Degrees of Slut. On a few occasions the match was inconclusive - the other person left off arguing before we reached round six - but I never lost; I never once reached six rounds of debate with a prolifer without them expressing some variation on this sentiment. But what was really remarkable to me was, a lot of times, that there was no effort involved at all -- they would blurt it out themselves, with effectively no provocation.
Scratch a prolifer, and you'll find right under the surface the conviction that The Filthy Sluts Must Be Punished. I have never once yet found an exception. Sometimes you don't even have to scratch.
Learning this was an intentional genocide changed me.
I know most of those following me know this, but just to make it super clear. An Gorta Mór (The Great Hunger/the Great Famine) was a deliberate genocide of the Irish people. There was enough food grown in Ireland to make sure everyone was alive and healthy and survived. Instead it was exported, sent to England and elsewhere for profit while men, women, and children starved in the streets. While the English landlords fucked off and evicted starving families who couldn’t afford rent. While babies were too weak to cry and died at the side of the road.
They tried to kill us, but they did not succeed. And we owe so much thanks to the other oppressed peoples, in particular the Choctaw Nation and the Masai, who sent money and grain to us.
Let me repeat that. The Choctaw Nation who had just gone through the Trail of Tears sent us money to try save Irish lives. It’s led to an understanding between Irish people and Native American tribes, most recently when we donated to the Navajo and Hopi fundraisers for COVID-19 relief, because while it may be a different tribe, Irish people will never forget those who helped us and we’ll help back.
The entire population of the island is less than seven million people. We’re still a million less on this island than pre famine. And it’s not that long ago. My grandmother’s grandparents lived through it. We’ve told the stories, it literally changed the DNA of the country. We have a national fear of renting, because so many people were evicted. People joke about Irish people always offering loads of food, but it’s because there’s that cultural memory of not being able to.
They tried to kill us, but they did not succeed. We will not let them take our lives, we will not let them take our language. We lost so much, but we will not lose it all.
Always nice when math helps make it all the more clear how ridiculously reasonable the worker demands are.
This is what the studios have brought everything to a grinding halt for.













