Nanni

The massive catch 22s in job application instructions are the worst. You're not supposed to mention your disability status, but you have to notify an employer if you need accommodation while you're applying! You can't mention your marriage status or whether you have kids or any kind of "medical issue" but you have to "explain all gaps in employment."

What? There's a blatant and gross contradiction here. Suppose a woman left the workplace for a while to raise her young kids. She can't say that or she's breaking non-discolusre, which exists so everyone can genteely pretend we are all able bodied men. And I can't tell the truth about most of my gaps in employment, which consists of "I was too depressed to find work."

The "explain gaps in employment" thing is so rage worthy anyway. Have you even looked around in the last fifteen years? But nooooo I have to prove I'm somehow not morally culpable for being out of work. If I just couldn't find a job, that's a mark against me!

*head in hands* I hate job hunting. It always makes me feel so worthless.

...Why does Amazon think that my ownership of Fanny Burney's Evelina is an indication that I'll like ostensibly BDSM themed bodice rippers that appear, from the blurbs, to be conflating masculinity with dominance and femininity with submission?

Read the 1740 text of Pamela in two days.

...Why Volume II, Why?

(Also, Volume I is the trashiest classic literature I have ever read. I mean, it's basically torture porn, only the torture's psychological. I can see why it caused an uproar. It's all about lingering voyeuristically on Pamela's pain and defiance.)

No, no, I got to say, a fictional narrative about war is not "of necessity" populated only by men. Women live through wars too. They fight in them, they spy in them, they nurse the sick, wounded, and dying, they staff operations posts, they run the phones, they take their turns behind anti-aircraft guns or on public safety details, they make the bombs and guns and ships and planes, they do the immense work of farming, they hold the fortress or take refuge in the subway. War is not something that happens solely to men.

That a narrative is about a war does not mean that it cannot have women for characters. Women don't stop existing when a war's on. They don't keep existing but somehow do so in a box off to the side, where there's no war. A war narrative that does not contain women is not truer and more authentic than one that does. It's true that war tends to be culturally constructed as a male enterprise, one in which the only possible role women can have is as far off motivation/potential prize but that's not the historical or present reality.

A book or television show or movie about war with no women in it is not telling the whole truth.

The commercial exploitation of whales has always been multifaceted, but the most valuable product derived from them has always been the unsaturated fat produced by rendering their blubber. Whale oil.

In the middle ages the Basques hunted bowheads for their meat as well as for their oil, and they would, of course, take their baleen, which is a very versatile substance, but it was the oil that made it profitable to lay out the substantial amount of capital required for the journey. Several centuries later the same would be true of the whaling industry centered in Nantucket. When that industry turned its attention to sperm whales, it would be for the oil, as well as for the spermaceti and the possibility of ambergris. But while these were excellent and valuable side benefits that helped determine choice of target, it was always the oil that made the venture the profitable.

When, at last, the factory ships were invented, and the blue whale population in the Antarctic sea was heavily targeted for the first time, it was for the oil. By that time the oil was not being used to light lamps, it was being used to make margarine for inter-war households. It was this round of whaling, with the trying out occurring on the high seas, that, though it lasted for what was probably a single generation, whale wise, made the Antarctic blue whale population one of the most endangered in the world.

Oil, oil, oil. It was always the oil that drove the industry. Now, with the ban on large scale whaling, this is no longer exactly true. The whales killed by humans now are killed primarily for their meat. This is the case whether it's Japan's heavily mechanized whaling fleet or the handful of whales taken by traditional fisheries yearly. But the traditional fisheries were never part of commercial whaling to begin with, being about subsistence and, generally, communal generosity and bonding - no one can eat a whale alone, just as no one can catch and kill the creature without aid. Japan always was fishing for meat as well as oil, and the bottom is gone from the whale oil now. That shift isn't surprising.

It was about the oil.

So why exactly does the social construction of "why whaling?" always involve so much discourse about things gendered feminine? Corsets and parasols (somehow the illustrations conveniently omit that men used whale bone umbrellas as well) and bonnets. Unless you are actually reading a book that is explicitly about whaling, you won't generally get a discussion of whale oil, and the market's vast hunger for clear burning lamp oil, and for lubricants that wouldn't readily dry out. That was what commanded the bulk of the profits from whaling, that is what drove the industry. But instead we get this discussion of women. Frequently the word "vanity" is actually used. There's a lot of implicit condemnation of women for wanting pretty things and by that desire causing the death of these magnificent animals.

It's bizarre, but it's really not just whaling. It's a discourse you see a lot around intensive exploitation of wild animals and the endangerment there-of. God forbid we have a discussion of human interaction with our ecology without invoking a misogynist Aesop or two (or three, or four, or...) about women's frippery to leaven the loaf.