I don’t usually bother to read the comments on Chateau Heartiste; making it through Heartiste’s own florid yet turgid prose is exhausting enough. But after skimming a recent post of his on the increasing historical fatness of British women, I happened to glance down at the comments, only to see a discussion of the comparative anatomy of female humans and deer that was so odd and creepy I felt obligated to bring it to you all.
Brace yourself, because the following might just ruin your breakfast:
Ewwwwww.
I’m pretty sure that guy’s hunting license should be taken away from him. And if there were sex licenses for human beings, well, all three of these guys should lose those as well.
Not gonna lie, tight-lacing gives me the willies. I mean, if people want to do that, it’s their body, whatever, you do you, but the sexual fetishization factor of it really makes me uncomfortable?
Robert
That’s a good thought but i don’t know, I don’t think we should look too deep into fairy tales that’s all they are, just stories.
But the stories we tell are important, and how they’ve changed over time can tell us a lot about our culture. I think it’s a bit short-sighted to call them “just” stories and assume there are no deeper meanings or implications.
I love fairy tales and the things that they teach us.
like the story of red riding hood teaches us about stranger danger but what I meant was that we shouldn’t assume that the authors had parent/step parent or even women issues.
Robert, I had certainly heard the same thing. fruitloopsie, I don’t think it was so much a matter of the authors having issues (after all, many of the stories were based on already existing folklore), so much as their stories reflected the facts and culture of the time they lived.
My elementary school had both a super-happy sanitized version of the Grimm’s Fairy Tales, and a darker version that I preferred, odd duck that I was.
When it comes to fairy tales, there’s generally not a single author of a given story. They’re communal works, and they reflect the values of the culture that produced them, and the cultures that came after that culture and assimilated and changed its stories. We can sometimes track a given change in a story to a person or time period, but that doesn’t mean that that person actually wrote the story. Also, everything we know about the periods from which we have surviving fairy tales tells us that they did, in fact, have hella woman issues, and I’m pretty sure we know pretty specifically that the Grimm brothers did, in fact, change the stories they set down in ink to reflect the cultural mores of their particular time and culture (which included a shifting of the “blame-the-woman” trope – which dates at least as far back as to the story of Adam and Eve, btw – to the “blame-the-interloping-woman” trope that so stigmatized step-mothers).
And the whole “stranger danger” interpretation of Little Red Riding Hood is not the original moral of that story, I would hazard. Honestly, I wouldn’t say it’s even a good interpretation of the currently popular telling, given that the kid couldn’t even tell that her supposed grandmother was literally a wolf dressed up like an old lady – are kids just supposed to be constantly frightened that everyone is a stranger? What about the wood cutter? Isn’t he a stranger?
Red riding hood told the wolf on where she was going and that gave the wolf the idea to dress like her grandma and trick her. The wood cutter saved her, her grandma and cut the wolf open. So it is about stranger danger.
I read a lot of stories and thats all it was just stories that entertain and teach us.
The original Red Riding Hood story was actually pretty grim (sorry; the pun was there, I had to take the opportunity). Red Riding Hood’s grandma gets partially eaten by the wolf, then the wolf tricks Red Riding Hood into taking her clothes off (?!!), tricks her into eating part of her own grandma, then eats her too. The End. Festive.
Of course, there have been a lot of variations and spoofs since then. My favorite is James Thurber’s, who points out that “a wolf about as much like your grandma as the MGM lion resembles Herbert Hoover”, so the Red Riding Hood takes a gun out of her basket and shoots the wolf dead. Moral of the story: “It is not as easy to fool little girls as it used to be.”
And then there’s Mercedes Lackey’s new “Red As Blood” novel, where Red is an Earth Mage who survives an encounter with a werewolf and grows up to be a Victorian Buffy the Werewolf Slayer.
Arrhg! “A wolf looks about as much like your grandma…”
Disney has distilled a lot of these stories into more…palatable versions. I really love the darker, more “original” stuff but I can see how it would be shocking for some if they saw the more “accurate” versions of fairy tales. I feel like they’re almost horror stories but they have more nuance and meaning in them than just some scary story. Though, I’m sure, one would argue that even horror stories can be nuanced and powerful.
I mean, in some of the really old versions of Snow White/Sleeping Beauty, the girl the prince falls in love with is actually dead, and he just kinda shacks up with this dead girl’s body because SO HOT, which pisses off his mother because ew, dead body stench in her castle.
Really, I’ve yet to meet a fairy tale that wasn’t hella fucked up in an older retelling.
I forget who but I think npr’s On Point had a woman talking about fairy tales. If any of you are interested just search the archive on line it a free download. as for the Grimes their biggest changes had more to do with sexual content, also the tales where not meant for children specifically. Another thing to ponder is that the tales the grimes recorded where Germanic, I don’t know for sure but my thought would be that the region was about typical in terms of treatment of women’s right as the rest of the world at the time.
In Mercedes Lackey-related news, I’m bummed there hasn’t been a Five Hundred Kingdoms release in the last few years. I hope she hasn’t ditched that world for good; I really liked it.
So now I’m wondering, was it a teal deer?
On the Anita Sarkeesian front, the threats have gotten really bad.
Still…
http://img1.wikia.nocookie.net/__cb20140319132425/walkingdead/images/9/9a/Screaming_internally.gif
Ok.
Still so disturbed I don’t know what to say about that.
…but I love folklore and kids’ stories and story telling. I’m a big fan of Hans Christian Anderson. His stories are dark and assume the reader is smart enough to get a certain amount of sarcasm. Yay! That’s fun.
I’m still so squicked…
Buttercup,
tl’dr = Too long, didn’t read.
Get it? Teal deer.
I hope she is ok and takes the actions that she needs in order to feel safe. All of this backlash….for what? Pointing out things that are true? They only seem to listen to the “critical” part but don’t process the REST of what she’s saying. And even then, they fuck up the critical part. She isn’t advocating for any bans. She is just pointing out that hey it’s a little fucked up the way women are portrayed in video games. Maybe we can do better. Saying that DOES NOT MEAN game developers can no longer make the games they want to. Since these idiots live in some bizarre all or nothing world it’s no wonder they think she’s out to take away their toys. It’s also hardcore projection. If they had the power, they’d probably try VERY hard to completely get rid of any and all gamers that disagree with them (mostly women). I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s how they think. No one else thinks that way.
18″ in waist? That’s not even the supposed ideal measurement.
I’m curious – were these average measurements taken of naked women, or women wearing the foundation garments of the day? If they were wearing the foundation garments of the day, then that would explain a lot.
Girdles and corsets and other such stuff that have only recently gone out of fashion squeezed women to have VERY tiny waists. Now, more natural figures are going to be larger.
Also, we’re not having food rationing because of war (not in England or America, at least, which is where the blog post was about).
We are also, interestingly enough, living longer. Hmmmm…
Trigger warning for those who are squeamish and/or don’t like hunting.
After the animal is dead, there’s not much holding the poo inside so hunters use a tool called a Butt Out to pull the alimentary canal out of deer and other game animals. Once it’s out, they tie off the intestines and cut off and discard the end with the poo. It keeps fecal matter from getting everywhere and contaminating the meat when they start the actual process of removing the innards. It requires cutting around the anus, so that’s probably what he was referring to.
That being said, I can’t imagine what kind of thought process would lead anyone to mention something like that or compare it to their level of arousal to live people.
I like how this douche automatically knows these women are spending their husbands’ money. I guess women don’t have their own jobs or money these days.
18 inch waist used to be considered huge, back when women squeezed their organs up into their chests, starting at about age 8. The standard used to be “can a man put his hands around your waist and interlace his fingers? Or at least touch the tips?” Any bigger than that, and you were HUGE!
Also, pregnancy and childbirth complications were rampant. But, hey, you gotta suffer for beauty, right?
I have a theory about this “obesity epidemic.”
We now have better medical care than we’ve ever had before, so people who would have otherwise died off young are now living longer, and breeding. Thus, those people with the genetic predisposition toward fatness are having more fat children, while they would not have had nearly as many before.
Just a theory.
Full disclosure – I’m a big, fat, Fatty!!!!!!, so I guess I’m as attractive as a dead deer to these guys. But that’s OK, because it’s a quick way to weed out the jerks. I’m so glad that these guys won’t bother me.
Well, they’ll be mean and cruel and ridicule me, but at least I’ll never have to worry about being charmed by one of them, only to have him turn around and abuse me, once we’re married. This way, they put it all out in the open, and I can avoid them. Yay!
Meanwhile, beauty standards are NOT universal, and I can hang out with men who actually do prefer fat women. And while there’s a difference between fat fetishist and fat appreciator, their behavior is generally a good way to spot which they are.
When it comes to ideal figures, I am often reminded of fashion. I’m a fashion history nut. Love it. During the late 1820s and first part of the 1830s, it was fashionable to have enormous gigot sleeves and huge hats. These hats were ostentatious and had lots of flowers, feathers and ribbons. This, along with the massive sleeves, helped in creating the illusion of a smaller waist. I believe that at that time the corset was coming back in fashion as well since it fell out of favor during the Empire/Regency fashion period. Natural lines were preferred then.
@cloudiah
I eagerly await the day when one of the many shitbags that threaten women online gets jailtime.