Nanni

I get really angry when people use blatantly incorrect assertions about history to bully people.

Less blatantly incorrect assertions as bullying tool are also infuriating, but don't make my brain short out quite the same way.

I don't need to get into stupid arguments in the comments of a Bitch blog post a month old about whether or not white was a color reserved, when it came to textiles, for the uber wealthy in the mid-nineteenth century.

So I'm not going to. However, in my own space I will say this:

Bleach. Not an invention of the 1950s, folks.

I wonder if today's Commonwealth Club broadcast was less infuriating if heard in full instead of in fragments while dashing about filling prescriptions, picking up household necessities, and buying food for the dog.

Poorly educated. I'll give you poorly educated. Yes, everyone should self educate by asking their doctors for patient guides. This is a brilliant plan and not contraindicated by the number of people who don't have doctors and the number of doctors who pull the "you shouldn't worry your pretty little head about that" shtick. ARGH. YOU try navigating the world of chronic illness for a while and then tell me again about self advocacy and how people are deluded by the media into "wanting something done" about their pain. Which, let me tell you, it is often remarkably hard to convince doctors actually exists.

The small print is, however, very probably unfair as, as I said, I did not hear the whole thing. But venting was still vital to my stress level.

On Wednesday I overheard Kate Chopin's "Story of An Hour" described by a classmate as, "the one where that guy's wife thinks he's died..."

It took me five minutes to stop gaping. Mrs. Mallard really can't have her own story, even when it is her story, can she?

I think I would have been far less irritated with Paul Johnson's A Shopkeeper's Millennium: Society and Revivals in Rochester, New York, 1815-1837 if I hadn't read the preface he wrote for the twenty fifth anniversary edition first.

( Cut for length. )

It seems to me that if your position on history, morality, and the historian's task (especially as it pertains to Columbus) is "there are no good guys, there are no bad guys, there's just guys," it might indicate a slight discrepancy in your thinking if you then inform us that World War II was a "true Manichean conflict".

So the elder of the two cousins is twelve. And she's been listening to this Adventures in Odyssey series she gets out from the library. She really enjoys them.

I just went into her room, where she's listening while she cleans up, to remind her about taking a shower and suggest some lunch, and one of the characters says that there's no transitional fossils known.

Me: ... ....*waits for the other character in the conversation to rebut this fallacy* *not, mind, that 'transitional fossil' is a great term, since all forms are their own forms and not just shifts from one form to another*
Other Character: But maybe we will find them. We've only been looking for a hundred years.
Me: *inward sigh* That's not true, you know. There are lots of fossils known that indicate forms between more ancient species and the ones around today.
Cousin: Yeeeeah. Maybe they weren't known when this was done.
Me: Maybe. But most of the famous ones have been known for several decades at least. Were you recycling these newspapers?

...And, yep. They're from Focus on the Family. Nrrrgh. I don't understand the line of thought that holds that evolutionary theory, of all things, is a key Christian issue. Mind, some of the fucked up power capitalist twistings of the concept, like Social Darwinism, are something that Christians (and all responsible people - but addressing Christianity specifically here) need to engage with, but frankly, I don't see what in heaven's name the degree and mechanism of my biological kinship with the banana slugs in the garden has to do with any of the key ethical or theological issues at the heart of the faith. I suppose you could argue that it has some bearing on whether or not the banana slug is my neighbor...

Next time, be more upfront with both yourself and the person/people you're talking to about what's really bothering you. Everything will be resolved sooner, more amicably, and with less stress and worry and general embarrassment over being unclear and less than perfectly measured for you. <br

So evidently I hate sloppiness and inaccuracy in all its forms - including the form which is me shying away from explaining myself and/or explaining myself badly SO.

Here we go. First off, I kind of hate talking about people who lived centuries ago who might very well ID as LGBT if they lived today, because well. It leads to sentences like that. Obviously it's a bit iffy to say that someone was gay or lesbian or trans or bisexual or asexual or genderqueer well before that was the paradigm. They wouldn't have had that language and they might very well not have thought have about themselves at all that way. The thing is, this gets used as an excuse to elide us completely (and it never applies to bisexuals. Apparently we are special and have always existed, even before lesbians, ever since gossip and scandals were invented, and must always be mentioned in connection with such). Queer people? We see no queer people!

...I might be slightly bitter. And we seem to be finally making some inroads on the sexual minority side of things, but not so much the gender minority side. It's still really hard to get historians writing popular books to even acknowledge the possibility. Even people who were almost certainly trans women (nobody works as a laundress for an entire regiment for years on end because they find it sexually kinky or fun performance art, that's clearly a matter of gender ID and what's open to women who need to bolster their husband's pay) get implied to be gay men who fitted into a regionally and actually, I am pretty sure, time period inappropriate subcultures that involved cross dressing. (It's not cross dressing if a woman wears skirts! Unless it's a kilt. Or otherwise feminine inappropriate skirt. If a woman wears women's skirts, it's not crossdressing!)

Anyway, you can't actually say this with any firm assurance, is the thing, because the courts and medical boards and discharge boards and chains of command didn't care how people defined themselves. As organs of authority, they were interested in defining people by authority's standards. Which usually have to do with what's in their underthings, not the life they're living. So often we don't have the testimony of the one person who could tell us, and there are lots of compelling reasons that, historically, cisgendered women have worn men's clothes and done men's work while passing for men.

That doesn't mean that all the people classed as crossdressers in court records actually were.

( Cut for Length and Quotes )

What I am saying is that no. We can't talk to people from the past and listen to what they tell us about who they are. In the case of LGBT+ people, most of the time we only have the writings and evidence of people who didn't want them to be who they were, or act on the inclinations of their hearts and minds. Because of the structure of the medieval and early modern Catholic church we have a fair number of voices of people who might today tell you that they are asexual, but reformist rhetoric has tended to pass these off as voices of people who were profoundly repressed and twisted by their culture, sometimes in ways that are hurtful and triggering. (Ah, the victim blaming of a marital rape survivor that I once ran across in an ostensibly feminist history of marriage. That was fun.)

It's important to recognize that in the sense that naming makes it so, there were no gay people, trans people, cis people, bisexual people, heterosexual people, or asexual people in these time periods. They wouldn't have called themselves these things, although if a rogue time machine snatched one of them from their context and dumped them in a supportive contemporary community, they might use the language to explain. Or they might not! Who knows? Even people raised within this cultural context don't always like the language and the thought patterns that go with.

But at the same time, it's important not to erase gender and sexual minorities. It's easy to do this by saying that we can't see them, and it's easy to do this by classing them all according to the powerful people who didn't see them at the time. It's easy to do this by refusing to recognize even the possibility that they existed. It's easy to do this by saying it's too hard to talk about them because the modern categories and words didn't exist, and I think it's important to guard against that.

And if you're going to say it's too hard to discuss queer women in your huge survey/overview because the words and categories didn't exist, then it would probably be a good idea not to constantly identify people as bisexual, frequently with no other information about them than their name and their most famous lover. I am just saying.

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.