Not every villain, not every time, and certainly not to everyone at once, but there should be moments. We should, occasionally, be able to see ourselves in the bad guys, be able to understand how they got there.
Because it reminds us not to fucking go there.
Antis who get upset about villains having relatable qualities (often couched as being “romanticized” or “woobified”) are people who cannot bear to ever think of themselves as having the capability of being wrong.
Every human alive is capable of being a horrible person. Relatable villains remind us to keep an eye on that shit.
My favorite thing about this is that Dottie is getting fucking object concealment tips from these genius food-stealing women and she’s probably using that knowledge to hide idek small thermonuclear devices in her bra or something. Probably went back to the Red Room afterward like “omg girls let me teach you what I learned in America. It’s vital we teach our tiny assassins to knit, I met a woman who successfully concealed a whole chicken in her sweater, they’ll need this kind of ingenuity in the field.”
I also really love that this is a large group of women who unabashedly like food and eating. None of them are going “oh no my diet, what if I get fat?”, they’re like “I CAN FIT A CHICKEN IN MY SWEATER AND THEN LATER, I HAVE A WHOLE CHICKEN FOR ME.”
I’ve reblogged this before and seen it at least a dozen times, but every time I see “AND THEN LATER, I HAVE A WHOLE CHICKEN FOR ME.” I start ugly laughing and can’t stop and frighten the dog.
Remember that these women grew up during the depression. A lot of them probably learned food hoarding tactics because they never knew when their next meal was going to be. So yeah, if you have the chance to shove an entire chicken in your sweater so later, when there is suddenly *no food*? You’re gonna take it.
Also, Peggy is British. She’s shocked and a little appalled at these food-stealing women, because Britain had such heavy rationing during the war.
British rationing did not end until 1954 (that’s still 8 years away from the time this scene takes place). Rations applied to all food staples, soap, clothing, fuel, and paper. In some cases, they became worse or more stringent after the war. In 1946, when this story takes place, Britain instituted bread rationing for the first time, food packages weighing more than 5lbs from foreign countries sent to private citizens were subtracted from that citizen’s ration book (so decreasing the amount of food they could buy), and gas was rationed again. While America also rationed during the War, the rations were never as severe as the ones in the UK and were lifted immediately after peace was declared.
Peggy’s reaction is “I would never betray my country by stealing food.”
Reblogging for history lesson. I feel like a lot of people don’t know just how bad things got in the UK for a while. Sugar, eggs and fat were so heavily rationed that there were recipes for cakes made with paraffin – in other words, mineral oil.
Rationing of meat actually continued until 1954, when my father was two years old. So there’s some food for thought, pun not intended.
This weekend I was schmoozing at an event when some guy asked me what kind of history I study. I said “I’m currently researching the role of gender in Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich,” and he replied “oh you just threw gender in there for fun, huh?” and shot me what he clearly thought to be a charming smile.
The reality is that most of our understandings of history revolve around what men were doing. But by paying attention to the other half of humanity our understanding of history can be radically altered.
For example, with Jewish emigration out of the Third Reich it is just kind of assumed that it was a decision made by a man, and the rest of his family just followed him out of danger. But that is completely inaccurate. Women, constrained to the private social sphere to varying extents, were the first to notice the rise in social anti-Semitism in the beginning of Hitler’s rule. They were the ones to notice their friends pulling away and their social networks coming apart. They were the first to sense the danger.
German Jewish men tended to work in industries which were historically heavily Jewish, thus keeping them from directly experiencing this “social death.” These women would warn their husbands and urge them to begin the emigration process, and often their husbands would overlook or undervalue their concerns (“you’re just being hysterical” etc). After the Nuremberg Laws were passed, and after even more so after Kristallnacht, it fell to women to free their husbands from concentration camps, to run businesses, and to wade through the emigration process.
The fact that the Nazis initially focused their efforts on Jewish men meant that it fell to Jewish women to take charge of the family and plan their escape. In one case, a woman had her husband freed from a camp (to do so, she had to present emigration papers which were not easy to procure), and casually informed him that she had arranged their transport to Shanghai. Her husband—so traumatized from the camp—made no argument. Just by looking at what women were doing, our understanding of this era of Jewish history is changed.
I have read an article arguing that the Renaissance only existed for men, and that women did not undergo this cultural change. The writings of female loyalists in the American Revolutionary period add much needed nuance to our understanding of this period. The character of Jewish liberalism in the first half of the twentieth century is a direct result of the education and socialization of Jewish women. I can give you more examples, but I think you get the point.
So, you wanna understand history? Then you gotta remember the ladies (and not just the privileged ones).
Holy fuck. I was raised Jewish— with female Rabbis, even!— and I did not hear about any of this. Gender studies are important.
“so you just threw gender in there for fun” ffs i hope you poured his drink down his pants
I actually studied this in one of my classes last semester. It was beyond fascinating.
There was one woman who begged her husband for months to leave Germany. When he refused to listen to her, she refused to get into bed with him at night, instead kneeling down in front of him and begging him to listen to her, or if he wouldn’t listen to her, to at least tell her who he would listen to. He gave her the name of a close, trusted male friend. She went and found that friend, convinced him of the need to get the hell out of Europe, and then brought him home. Thankfully, her husband finally saw sense and moved their family to Palestine.
Another woman had a bit more control over her own situation (she was a lawyer). She had read Mein Kampf when it was first published and saw the writing on the wall. She asked her husband to leave Europe, but he didn’t want to leave his (very good) job and told her that he had faith in his countrymen not to allow an evil man to have his way. She sent their children to a boarding school in England, but stayed in Germany by her husband’s side. Once it was clear that if they stayed in Germany they were going to die, he fled to France but was quickly captured and killed. His wife, however, joined the French Resistance and was active for over a year before being captured and sent to Auschwitz.
(This is probably my favorite of these stories) The third story is about a young woman who saved her fiance and his father after Kristallnacht. She was at home when the soldiers came, but her fiance was working late in his shop. Worried for him, she snuck out (in the middle of all the chaos) to make sure he was alright. She found him cowering (quite understandably) in the back of his shop and then dragged him out, hoping to escape the violence. Unfortunately, they were stopped and he, along with hundreds of other men, was taken to a concentration camp. She was eventually told that she would have to go to the camp in person to free him, and so she did. Unfortunately, the only way she could get there was on a bus that was filled with SS men; she spent the entire trip smiling and flirting with them so that they would never suspect that she wasn’t supposed to be there. When she got to the camp, she convinced whoever was in charge to release her fiance. She then took him to another camp and managed to get her father-in-law to be released. Her father-in-law was a rabbi, so she grabbed a couple or witnesses and made him perform their marriage ceremony right then and there so that it would be easier for her to get her now-husband out of the country, which she did withing a few months. This woman was so bad ass that not only was her story passed around resistance circles, even the SS men told it to each other and honoured her courage.
The moral of these stories is that men tend to trust their governments to take care of them because they always have; women know that our governments will screw us over because they always have.
Another interesting tidbit is that there is sufficient evidence to suggest that Kristallnacht is a term that historians came up with after the fact, and was not what the event was actually called at the time. It’s likely that the event was actually called was (I’m sorry that I can’t remember the German word for it but it translates to) night of the feathers, because that, instead of broken glass, is the image that stuck in people’s minds because the soldiers also went into people’s homes and destroyed their bedding, throwing the feathers from pillows and blankets into the air. What does it say that in our history we have taken away the focus of the event from the more domestic, traditionally feminine, realms, and placed it in the business, traditionally masculine, realms?
Badass women and interesting commentary. Though I would argue that “Night of Broken Glass" includes both the personal and the private spheres. It was called Kristallnacht by the Nazis, which led to Jewish survivors referring to it as the November Pogrom until the term “Kristallnacht" was reclaimed, as such.
None of this runs directly counter to your fascinating commentary, though.
Trans-inclusive language in religious texts is SO IMPORTANT. There is nothing in some young people’s lives that can either validate or dehumanize them so quickly as how they see themselves represented in the words of their religion.
Correction: There’s this one car company called Mitsubishi who made some good research on mythological symbols and when they saw a Nordic and cool symbol that meant “Heavenly power”, Blessed by the God, the power of God may come down to Earth and return to Him, they just used it.
I’ve already been told that I have a lack of imagination for using a “””car’s logo””” as cheekmarks and tbh it’s kinda tiring already getting those jokes at least once a week.
*Being Hindu and having swastika tattoo*
People: ARE YOU SUPPORTING NAZI???
Sad facts: Swastika was an ancient symbol used in a lot of different religions from Hindu to Greek and it has A LOT of positive meanings like victory, good luck, peace and life.
Go plant an organic flower native to wherever you are
Leave your “weeds” alone they probably aren’t hurting anything
Stop using/buying Roundup and all other insecticides, herbicides, pesticides.
If you have a bee problem (which almost never happens) call a local beekeeper! They will remove them safely free of charge
Bumblebees usually nest underground and just wanna be left alone! They won’t hurt you. To prevent destroying their habit during hibernation, avoid mowing yards until April or May. If you do mow, raise the blades to the highest setting
Please save my fat clumsy fuzzy friends I love them and they’re very good pollinators.
This is from the forecast discussion of Major Hurricane Florence from this afternoon. As a meteorologist, when I saw this, my heart sank. They don’t use wording like this for every storm.
Florence is going to be a devastating. There will be huge amounts of flooding, both from inland rain and from costal storm surge. Winds are going to be some of the strongest you can get from a hurricane. People within the path of this storm could lose everything.
If you know anyone who lives on the North or South Carolina coast, tell them that if there’s an evacuation ordered, they need to get the hell out. Do not take chances with this one.
Artisan Scribbles 