For The Sake Of Women

Posted on by Sarah A. Hoyt

What is now, unbelievably, 15 years, maybe 20 years ago, I had reached my limit with science fiction and fantasy I could find on shelves. Oh, not my favorites, which included most Baen authors as well as people like Terry Pratchett were fine, but you have to understand I read very fast. (I still read fast, but thanks to two concussions and resultant eye issues, not that fast.)

I couldn’t even tell you why I was tired of it, though if you’d asked I’d have told you I was tired of “women with a sword.” I remember five or ten years before that going on a rant at a panel at a con about how all these women who grabbed a sword and set out to save the world were sissies. What they needed was to have an hyperactive, smart two year old boy and try to keep him alive through the happy suicidal years, and then they’d learn the limits of their abilities. (As you can imagine this got me very shocked looks and might have started the rumors I was “not one of us, deary.”) But I hadn’t vocalized my issues beyond that.

The next time I abandoned a whole genre, except for those few favorites I kept, many of them re-reads, was mystery. I had bought more and more over the years, and to be honest had a long backlog of it to fall into as until then it hadn’t been my preferential reading. But eventually it caught up to me there also. Every woman was some sort of heroic fighter against a terrible and oppressive league of men. (Most men, tbf, could not find their own way to their sock drawer much less form a league against women. In fact, men not having a concept of “solidarity among men” is what allowed feminism to become institutionalized. They might mouth “bros before hos” but in real life it’s the not-ho every single time. And it should be, as we’ll get to later.) It was unendurable, and so I fell into the one field sort of left.

Surely in romance they couldn’t have the woman go out with a sword to save the world every other day and twice and Sunday. And the men were love interests so they had to be admirable, right?

People, I sure picked the wrong time to stop sniffing glue start reading romances. The contemporaries were all about…. well, sex. Had to be because the men were fairly despicable. The women too, to be fair. It was as though the women writing them were vaguely embarrassed to be attracted to men (five years earlier I’d been rejected by a romance house because my female character was too heterosexual, after all!) and therefore must continuously try to prove they were better than the love interest. Which left the love interest as the bumbling dad of commercials, but with a tight bod and amazing bed skills.

Look, I’m not a prude. I’m just no biblio-sexual. Reading other people’s exploits is interesting when they’re looking for the Roc’s egg or trying to find who murdered the guardian of the egg, but not so much when they’re putting tab a in slot b and moaning about it. I get bored and flip through for the next bit of non-bed action. It made some of these books very short. Pamphlets, really.

So I fell into regencies, which were slightly better except…. not really, because unfortunately I know history. There is no way on the Green Hills of Earth that every woman under the rule of the Prince Regent was a feminist, aggressively rescuing soiled doves (who are all, all very noble and done ill by. (I’ve read historical accounts, biographies and surveys. They were in habits and behavior the same population as our homeless. Yes, there were hapless innocents. They were few and far between.)) caring for the downtrodden and afflicted and teaching other women not to be oppressed.

There were in fact feminists of that era. You’d be shocked how different from our feminists they were. Or rather they’d be, as all of them without exception had their characters read The Vindications of The Rights of Woman by Mary Wollstonecraft and then treat it as if this book made the women into modern day feminism. (The problem is not that the kids don’t write well. The problem is that they either don’t read or can’t process what they read.) Mind you, it’s full of nonsense and weird assumptions about women, but they’re wholly different from the weirdness we now deal with.

So if you’re guessing I eventually got pitchforked out of romance, you’ll be right and wrong. I got pitchforked out of contemporary romance and into “regencies of the seventies” is the best way to put it. There is a vast group of women (or there was) centered on used bookstores. I ran a sort of tab for these. I’d go in and buy 40 old romances for $20. Read them and take them back in at the end of the week, trading them for twenty. When I got to ten, I’d use money to bring it to 40 again.

And then Indie happened in sufficient force that if I go through one of my depressive phases I can read regencies end to end. But more frequently I read Jane Austen fanfic. Oh, it has the same issues as contemporary regencies, in a way, but it’s more just lip service: “Lizzy hated embroidery and loved learning about her father’s job managing the estate.” Cool story, bro. Now show me her getting together with Mr. Darcy. … Nine out of ten times they do, and the genuflection towards the altar of feminism causes no more than an under-the-breath huff.

I mean there are other things that drive me insane and again “For the love of heaven, people, if you’re going to read historical, read a book about the time period (There are now a few specifically about Jane Austen’s time that give you manners and modes and are simply written. They even have pictures.) Yes, I know you watched the movie of Pride and Prejudice and think you know everything about it. (At least watch the A & E mini-series. No, seriously. Not only didn’t Lizzy go traipsing barefoot in the muck of the farmyard — they were a manor family, not tenant farmers, people! — but no one in that book EVER said “We are all fools in love.” In fact that’s so anti-Jane-Austen she’d probably beat you across the face and head with an inkpot for putting that in her story. And you’re deserve it.) I’ve had my fill and beyond of exploding carriages, people — in the regency, people! — writing letters on parchment or vellum and in one notable occasion papyrus, and… this is very pervasive lately, Mr. Darcy going on vacation and living in a little cottage with no servants or help of any kind, cooking and cleaning for himself. (Tell me you know nothing of what housekeeping used to entail without telling me you know nothing of what housekeeping used to entail.)

But when I’m non-depressed, I also found all sorts of interesting things to read that aren’t romance. We live in a much better age. (Though my latest non-Austen binge was in fact Lynn Austin. Eh. But I’m very ecumenical when it comes to genres. My favorite genre is “written in English and it interests me.”)

However, this last week a friend who was reading regencies stumbled onto the “And of course she hates embroidery and needle work, loves estate management and horse racing.” She had a worthy mini-rant. And I bobbed my head along with it, because I know the music and the words. But it was her “It’s all so tiring” that hit me.

That is exactly as I experience this sort of thing “It’s all so tiring.”

And then thinking about it I realized what is tiring and what makes me huff and want to reach through the kindle screen and hit the author on the face with a very dead fish (very dead. Practically lyophilized.)

It’s the extreme effort of trying to hold a world that makes no sense — either in historical or modern sense — in my head at all times to make the story work. Look, I know I’m supposed to suspend disbelief. But must it be with an hemp rope, by the neck, till dead?

Modern… well, guys, you’ve been out in the world. You know not every man is a bumbling fool. And you know that not every woman — perhaps not any woman — can go from 19 year old temp receptionist to managing his billionaire empire better than he does. (Some women are amazing, yes. So are some men. But humans in general are not that precocious and the entire idea of being able to do things you never had occasion to do without learning is outright pernicious.)

Regency/historical… Hits head on desk, because it hurts less.

Guys, I didn’t grow up in the regency, but when I was a kid we didn’t have TV (we had radio, and if you can imagine a family clustering around the radio at night doing various things and listening, you’re exactly right. I just realized I treat TV and movies exactly like this (to my husband’s confusion) with only occasional looks up when something is unclear.) And books were expensive. Even when you came from a family of bibliophiles that had stashed books everywhere including the various outbuildings of a small farm (of sorts) eventually you ran out of them or at least ran out of books that interested you in any way shape or form. (Turns out nineteenth century books about medicine are fascinating in a morbid sort of way but not for sustained reading.)

So what did most women do in the evening? Sew. What did most men do? Oh, not in my family where they were all thumbs, but usually whittle or do some kind of manual work similar to that. Sometimes read. Or … racks brain…. oh, yeah, organize their stamp collections or other collections, repair a radio, clean a gun. That sort of thing.

Women mostly sewed for a reason. And 90% of the sewing they did was mending. You see clothes were expensive too. After my mom — to supplement our pathetic income — bought a knitting machine (from her savings. Look, there’s a reason sometimes dinner was stale bread fried in tallow. Not complaining. We didn’t starve) and took the course to use it — people would bring her old sweaters to unravel, redye and re-knit into a “new” sweater. THAT expensive. Most of us, even people living in relative poverty can’t imagine how the middle class of a small, unimportant country of the mid 20th century lived. And — here’s the thing — we were in no way poor by historical standards. Nowhere close to it. (Incidentally, that’s why women wore aprons. It had nothing to do with oppression. A lot of men wore aprons too, particularly those who worked with their hands. And those who didn’t wear aprons usually had a really old, horrible-looking version of their every day clothes that they wore while doing the inevitable dirty chore. (Except my maternal grandfather who once emptied the septic tank in his Sunday suit. The fact that I was told that story multiple times 30 years later tells you how unusual that was. I also wonder what — probably stupid because he was a genius and so… — point he was trying to make and/or how mad he was at grandma.)

There was a Portuguese comic I read when I was little which made a joke you’ll only understand if you know that “role” in Portuguese is “paper”. The joke was the little girl learning about women in history and saying “Ahah, the problem is that women don’t have a role in history. They have a cloth.”

That was supposed to be cutting and feminist, (the stupid has been with us a LONG time) but seriously cloth: producing it, fashioning it, etc. has been a big job throughout the centuries. And because it can be picked up and put down and combined to advantage with watching kids or minding the cooking or whatever, it mostly fell to women. (Not always. Sailors and shepherds famously knit. And I imagine on long voyages sailors mended their clothes.) The point is that clothes are the tech that allowed humans to live out of the climate they were designed for, and that processing the fabric for clothes is mostly for various reasons of convenience a feminine task.

And, like the male tasks of the time and now up to and including yes “managing estates” or fixing tools or going out and slaying the mammoth in whatever form, the job isn’t wildly interesting or amazing or mind-expanding.

Most jobs aren’t. The stories that try to sell you on finding your life’s satisfaction in a career might as well be selling you that your life’s purpose is to weave endless lengths of cloth and mending your husband’s socks. They’re just jobs. That’s all.

Now…. embroidery…. Unless it was your job, which it never is because the women in these books are always upper class, embroidery was something you did in the precious time you managed to carve out of your chores, which, yes, even for the upper class included mending and also writing endless letters because women kept society connected.

Embroidery allowed you to express yourself, to create something beautiful and something people would admire. Mind you, Regency ladies did a lot of other things under that heading, including painting tables (why did they need so many tables, anyway), playing music and dancing and drawing and other such pursuits. BUT embroidery was also useful as in you could wear it, or your child could wear it, and it made every day a little better.

From my experience — though due to family dynamics I didn’t do this till I was married — embroidering was something smart women did. And the smarter the woman the more complex and innovative the stitches and the design. It was much admired and any woman in the village could point you at the best embroiderer in the village. (Mostly because a favorite activity of unmarried women was showing each other our stash, aka the hope chest. (No, not me. I distracted them with hand written novels. But again, this was not because I was smarter but because of weird family dynamics.)

Could a regency lady despise embroidery and want to manage an estate instead? Well, some number of them managed estates because they were the only manager either through accident of birth or weird turn in life. But would they prefer it? And would it be, as ALL these writers assume far superior and indicative of a greater intelligence? Pardon me while I make a very rude sound.

Managing an estate, like leading men in battle was simply a matter of necessity of time and position. And wasn’t what women in our time imagine, either.

Yes, throughout history queens led armies in battle. So, famously, did Joan of Arc. But mostly their role was to be inspiration and a sort of banner. Any real generalling (totally a word) they did was conveyed through underlings who were inevitably men.

In the same way, women in the regency who managed estates usually just kept a close eye on the books, and had detailed instructions for their stewards. They might ride around and see what needed to be done too. What they almost certainly except perhaps in very rare occasions didn’t do was go out in the fields, in the muck, and personally command tenant farmers and servants on what to do. They would if wealthy enough to have them, instruct gardeners and maybe do a little gentle weeding and such. And possibly if not wealthy keep their own herb and flower garden though even then the servant of all work would do the digging, etc.

The thing that these writers misunderstand is that this was not because women were “kept out” of these highly desirable tasks. It is because in a time when most tasks done outside required strength and stamina more typical of men, women took the other set of tasks that needed doing. And mind you the other set of tasks ALSO needed doing.

Managing a manor house was not piddly work. They lacked most of the things we have, and among them they lacked all the chemical cleaners we have. This means even if you had a ton of servants you needed to stay on them through things like routine cleaning which was more or less constant. Otherwise it wouldn’t get done and your family would catch the never-get-wells. Also linens needed to be mended and replaced on the regular. Menus made. Parties planned and, under “maintaining social connections” letters written. I remember grandma — and mind you, much longer after, when calling was a thing for close-by relatives and friends — had an entire day blocked out just for keeping up with her correspondence.

Was it possible for a woman to want to manage a manor house, instead? Well. I suppose anything is possible. Though she’d better have someone to do the tasks that normally fell to her.

But what it begs the question is WHY? Why were male tasks preferable to or supposedly indicative of higher intelligence?

Why in the name of all that is holy SHOULD the highest aspiration of a woman be to become a man?

And that’s what’s so tiring about it all. At the back of all this rah rah rah “Women can do everything” is the dripping, whispered poison of “But you shouldn’t though. You should do what men do, because that’s what’s amazeballs and super-satisfying.”

And you have to read this while looking at the men around you who, honestly, aren’t any more satisfied than you and your friends are and who certainly don’t think their every day jobs are some sort of holy vocation. Just what they do for a paycheck. Like most women.

It’s like reading about aliens that no one acknowledges are aliens.

Which is the problem with this entire “Feminism” project as being exerted in this year of our Lord of 2025. As a group we’re supposed to be amazing and special and forever fighting back against the oppressive restraints men impose on us.

And because that’s our group mission we can’t, of course, ever fully win. We must forever be fighting. Which is why women are always fighting to “Break into” science fiction, even though by the time I came in it was already female dominated, now almost 30 years ago.

We’re somehow not supposed to want to do anything feminine, but we should be displacing every male in his job.

And then they wonder why women in the civilized world manage to be more unhappy than were life is brutish and short.

Look, the problem is not trying to “liberate” women. The problem there is in the PLURAL “women.”

There is the woman here and there (most often there, and you know exactly WHERE) who needs liberating. There are a lot of men in the same boat at that.

There are people everywhere suffering horrible oppression by other people. And then there is the sheer oppression of this material world that doesn’t yield to your dreams.

But it’s mostly a matter of individual circumstances and individual choices and individual — yes — oppression. I’m mostly descended from women who couldn’t be oppressed and if you tried you’d regret it. Which means we more or less did as we pleased despite an authentically chauvinistic and patriarchal overculture. None of us had a marked interest in horse racing, though most of us ran our own business which I suppose is the equivalent of running a manor, while raising kids and keeping house. This was possible because increasingly through time we could afford housekeeping aids. (In mom’s case a succession of teenage mother’s helpers who worked in exchange for new clothes.) And none of us was so stupid as to tell our husbands they couldn’t help with the accounting and other boring tasks, like tax liability estimation. (Which at this point is a second job for my poor husband.)

And mostly it was really tiring, not particularly indicative of high intelligence (though perhaps of drive) and just what we did to keep body and soul together.

Because I work in words and in a highly abstract product I’m not any smarter than the ancestresses whose businesses were in large-scale resale, or commercial art, or clothes making/design/creation. We each did what we could do at the time to supplement family income and make a better life for our kids and grandkids. (Okay, I’ll confess to being broken so writing is all I could do.)

There isn’t a set of jobs — male — that means success and satisfaction and a set of people — women — who are automatically downtrodden and mistreated.

In the past — and even today — everyone is mistreated by life and reality. And there is no eternal satisfaction in any task, though some of us work at our dream jobs and even have moments when it’s all worth it.

We need to — NEED TO — stop treating people as homogeneous groups. Particularly groups based on physical characteristics that have absolutely nothing to do with individual circumstances, needs and abilities.

We need to stop telling women, all women, across the wide world, that they’re uniquely oppressed and need to “heroically” seize… the other sex’s roles.

We need to stop this in educations and entertainment and life.

Men and women aren’t Marxist classes. They’re different forms of the species, and have a lot of complementary strengths and a lot of reasons to come together and work together towards the future. (No, we’re not doing phrasing anymore. It’s 2025. When we do phrasing, it’s with intent and malice.)

For the sake of women, for the sake of men and — truly, desperately — for the sake of children, let’s stop lying to each other and the young.

Let’s stop trying to hold up an insane, fractured illusion and live in the real world.

There is a future to build and the stars to conquer. Petty bitterness is not generative. Of life, interest or children.

And besides it’s such a complete lie.

Let’s live in the light of truth, instead.

343 thoughts on “For The Sake Of Women”

  2. I desperately want my wife–who, as you know, edits mostly what we call “pressed extruded writing product” (PEWP) Regencies as a side job and has given the Huns many wonderful rants about them–to write a Regency where the heroine is a hypercompetent girl boss AT STUFF A WOMAN AT THAT SOCIAL LEVEL IN THAT TIME WOULD BE HYPERCOMPETENTLY GOOD AT. She can sew. Maybe she knows a tiny bit about cooking (I imagine a high-social-status woman in that time wouldn’t exactly be Julia Child, but hey). She knows how to run a manor house back to front. Then pair her with Duke Fumpcurdle or whatever who is hypercompetent at the stuff a MAN could do back then. He shoots. He socializes. He does Duke guy things. But she doesn’t try to be him and he doesn’t try to be her and they have wonderfully sanctioned nineteenth-century sexytiems at the end.

    Too revolutionarily boring?

    Liked by 5 people

    1. Well, *I* would buy it, but I’m not the mass of market.

      Regarding high-status women in the nineteenth century–they would know how to SUPERVISE the cook and cook’s expenditures. And they might have one or two SPECIAL recipes they made with their own dainty hands when they wanted to coyly indicate excessive interest in the recipient.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. One notes that in P&P, Mr. Collins thinks it possible that one daughter is responsible for a dish, but Mrs. Bennett scotches that notion quickly. She is also sniffy when suggesting that Charlotte’s being wanted in the kitchen was why she had to go home quickly.

        So even in a gentleman’s daughters, cooking was — borderline at best.

        Liked by 2 people

                1. Her father was a lawyer, succeeded by her brother-in-law. Her brother is a merchant. All well-off, but middle-class. Her marriage has catapulted her into the gentry. So yes, she’s nouveau riche, even if her husband isn’t.

                  Liked by 1 person

    2. Would read, would buy!

      What can I say, my kink is competence. I will watch a video on anyone doing just about anything so long as they do it well. And read likewise on any subject as long as the author is both enthusiastic and accurate!

      Liked by 3 people

    3. I mean, *I* would read the heck out of it. I think it’s why I’ve enjoyed so many of the self-published Regency offerings on Amazon, like the ones by Mary Kingswood, where she often uses “stereotype” characters (particularly female characters) that would otherwise be considered villains and showing us why they act like this, and that really it’s not as bad as you think. (Also what little sex occurs in the novels happens off-screen, and on the very rare occasion it happens amongst folks for whom it would NOT be socially acceptable, there IS fallout from it, although also because they are romances there is generally still a happy ending for all concerned.)

      Liked by 3 people

      1. ok, gonna check her out.

        so many Regency novels have 21st century characters LARPing their way through a script that makes no sense.

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        1. I really enjoy her work–so much so that I pre-order pretty much everything she’s got as soon as I finish the latest. She tends to combine a bit of mystery into each series. She’s got a recurring group of side-characters who investigate the crimes in the background of each story–and it actually works quite well. You like the investigators, but they aren’t the focus–this author gets how genre-coding works. Often the last book of the particular series will have the main character help in some way to finally solving the mystery, and often the mystery (whether murder or a theft–or in one series a very cold case murder) acts as the kick-off event for the series. Her most current one, for example, starts with the murder of a clergyman who was brother-in-law to a nobleman. His death reveals that he was not, in fact, ever ordained–and since he’s the one who performed the nobleman and his wife’s marriage, their marriage is null and void, and their children are all rendered bastards, and the series proceeds to deal with the social fallout from that–which is what drives the various romance plots–as well as trying to solve who killed the clergyman, which is what the investigator side characters are trying to crack. (Which reminds me, I haven’t yet read the latest installment…)

          Liked by 1 person

    4. “Too revolutionarily boring?”

      You’re not allowed to APPROVE of the Regency Era, or show people happily fitting in there. You must rebel against it. That is the iron rule.

      This is the same as all corporations are evil. Thou shalt not stray from The Narrative.

      So of course I stray from it as hard as I can. ~:D

      Liked by 1 person

    5. If you haven’t yet, look up Frederica, The Nonesuch, or Bath Tangle (I was thinking of The Grand Sophy at first, but although Sophy is a BOSS, she’s notably…unconventional).

      But if your wife knows Regencies, she undoubtedly already knows her Georgette Heyer, and maybe you do, too. :)

      I’d throw money at anybody who could bottle some of what Georgette Heyer had going…if I knew where to find them. My problem is that I don’t want to risk my time or money on a bunch of stuff I’m 90% likely not to like, so I stay in a rut that mostly consists of the Richard Sharpe series, Georgette Heyer regencies, and Larry Correia’s novels. Plus Tolkien and Harry Potter. And there’s also this lady named Sarah Hoyt who does good sci-fi and urban fantasy. :) (Fanfiction is right out. The couple of times I was curious enough to go poking around, I discovered that I’ll probably never be desperate enough keep at it; life’s too short for that.)

      Like

      1. I’ve had rather good luck with books from the members of the Mad Genius Club, and also the North Texas Troublemakers. (Old NFO is one entry point, as well as Lawdog’s Raconteur Press. The latter easy to find via search engine, and Old NFO is at oldnfo dot org.)

        There’s a bit of overlap between MGC and NTT, as well as posters here (Hi TXRed!)

        Like

    6. Ooh, on cooking– have her know by scent that this or that expensive, stylish spice is being used.

      Look at what folks were using to show off, and have her be a step ahead there.

      Liked by 2 people

    7. Nope on the sexytimes and nope on the butch Corinthians (I want more Freddy Stantons and Gervase St. Erths in my regencies, and fewer macho macho men who just want to be a macho man). Yes to basic premise ;)

      Liked by 1 person

        1. We were on a long car trip way back when and my mom stopped at a used bookstore and picked up Cotillion and another Heyer and handed them to me. I was in my “romance? ew,” phase, but she persisted and said that I’d like them.

          She was very right, and I still have that copy of Cotillion with its used bookstore stamp from 1000 miles away.

          Like

    8. A few (?!) years ago I read an article lamenting that no one reads anymore. This female author started putting racy stuff in her books (she strongly advocated for waiting until chapter 2 so your reader was hooked by the time they got to it) and couldn’t figure out why she was losing readers. The readers muttering about a broken contract were obviously whining outliers, since her publisher assured her this is what the public wants.

      This is not what the public wants, but what the publishers in their echo chambers think the public should want.

      In the comments I mentioned that I put a content statement at the beginning of every book. She (tried to) rip me a new one, saying that I’m setting up unreasonable expectations and it’s people like me who are destroying the market. She went so far as to say that by telling people what they’re getting I’m “censoring” other people’s books.

      Liked by 4 people

  4. Whenever I discuss how Madeleine (of Madeleine and the Mists) is the mother of a two-year-old, I get gasps from the mothers, and questions on how she find the time to have adventures.

    She also sews. A lot.

    I did get one beta reader complaining that I keep on mentioning that she’s sewing whenever they sit and talk.

    Liked by 2 people

  5. Hmmm. Random thoughts/responses:

    Does finding yourself playing the (step) father role to TWO adolescent really ADHD boys and trying to keep them alive compare to the single toddler challenge?

    Sailors had to sew. You’ve heard of Sailmakers, right? And Knots are just knitting with big thick yarn.

    Fast reading. Kinda like fast eating. It is possible to carefully chew each morsel before swallowing but unfortunately easy to gulp it all down too fast. I do both, unfortunately.

    Liked by 2 people

  6. *sigh* I have not the need to read such fribbles as Sarah does, so I am spared most of the idiocy about female roles in the 19th century … but in a couple of my own books I have written about women in businesses; either independently because they are widows and have the burden of supporting a family alone – or because they are full partners in the business that their husbands own and run. Cattle ranches, farms, managing a retail store. Going back and actually reading accounts by 19th century women about their lives and interests and one discovers that most women who weren’t upper middle class were fully engaged in activities that modern so-called feminists would recognize. Even just running a middle-class household with servants meant a full schedule of work for a woman.

    Which reminds me of what I read about one woman who was frenetically active in one of the regional headquarters of the Sanitary Commission during the ACW – her husband hired a housekeeper so that she could devote all of her time to running the Sanitary Commission office, and working as a reporter/writer for the newspaper that he owned — so that the family would have meals and a clean house while Mama and Papa worked. Very modern!

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I swear modern “feminists” have this bizarre and entirely fictional idea of the 1950s housewife–you know, doing the housework in full makeup and heels and pearls, and has nothing else to do but “please” her husband. I am reasonably certain that a.) most of a 1950s housewife’s average daily schedule, even in the upper middle or upper classes, did not look like this, and b.) when it DID happen it was because they were 1.) taking advantage of new tech that made housework a lot easier and 2.) doing the equivalent of surprising your husband when he comes home with new lingerie (and presumably after having booted the kids out of the house to go play until it gets dark, heh).

      It goes right along with their bizarro-world view of the 1950s that was ultra conservative and oppressive, and which actually was nothing whatsoever like that (it’s like they fail to recall that, among other things, beatniks were a thing in the 50s, and not exactly shocking…)

      Liked by 1 person

      3. Think about the world of the 1950s. We had just won the biggest war in history, while mostly carrying our allies along for the ride. The war was won with American war machines, American trucks, American supplies, and mostly American soldiers, sailors and pilots. Millions of American women spent 3 years in factories building those machines. Then we got mixed up in that ‘Korean conflict’ which we were not allowed to win except on paper.

        Americans wanted life to get back to normal. Like it was before the wars, only better. And, for the most part, it was. Keeping a house had never been easier, when all that wartime production was turned back to civilian purposes. There was a refrigerator, hot and cold running water, a modern stove you didn’t have to shove logs into and shovel ashes out of, a washer and dryer, a vacuum cleaner…it was Paradise! Today’s spoiled brats don’t have a clue.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. This, only more. The Great Depression basically segued right into World War II, with not a whole lot of previous-“normal” in many ways. (“New Deal” quasi-fascism, and see the pre-war transatlantic love letters between New Dealers and Actual Fascists on that, segued right into wartime rationing and other restrictions too.) So the early 1950s were, to a greater extent than a lot of moderns are equipped to realize, one great collective sigh of relief.

          Finally, no actual or looming disaster! Real Life (TM and R) returns! After about 20 years of… not.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Finally, no actual or looming disaster! Real Life (TM and R) returns! After about 20 years of… not.

            :eyes the past 16 years, with one four year period of sunshine in between: I think I can actually almost grasp that 1950s attitude, at this point….

            Liked by 4 people

              2. I’ve personally been thinking about the way Dorothy Parker was reputed to answer the phone. “What fresh hell is this?”

                I’d really like to have some point when I wasn’t having to think that on a regular basis. Medical helicopter crash on a local freeway being the latest fresh hell.

                Liked by 1 person

          1. Yes. Mom and grandma were both still using the, um, fancy solar dryer when I was an infant (late ’50s). They had dryers, but the solar dryer was cheaper when conditions allowed.

            I’ve used a wringer washer, with a hose and crank, in the mid-’70s, then the solar dryer. (No car to get to a laundry, it came with the small apartment complex.) Thank you at the time. But no thank you.

            That was an improvement on what grandma had when mom and her sister were little. And grandma had a basin and washboard, even if she had to haul the water from the creek to heat it for both wash and rinse cycles. She wasn’t taking the wash down to the creek and pounding it on the rocks. The other grandmother at least got to pump her water out of the well.

            I’ve never had to improvise because I forgot to get something that needed to thaw first before cooking it for dinner. Heck I’ve had to more worry about freezer burn rather than food going rancid before it was used. Freezer burn does not render food unusable. Rancid renders food unsafe for almost everything.

            I don’t event think about the clothing I own. Every once awhile I go through and eliminate what I haven’t worn for years, and either never will because can’t or just won’t. No using clothing throughout the family until it is only good for quilts. Hand me downs? I’m the oldest so, no, not even from cousins (among the oldest). But even my sisters didn’t wear hand me downs. As infants and toddlers? Maybe? Our children? Not really.

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            1. I prefer “thermonuclear dryer” myself. We used one here, until dust/pollen/birdpoop became too much of a problem. The pumice-heavy soil makes for amazing dust.

              Mom used one in the 50s and 60s, though youngest kid (bows) frequently did the hanging. Actually, Dad did most of the laundry in the ’60s since Mom was allergic to the mold in the basement. On good days, I still hung stuff to dry, at least until high school.

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        3. The 1950’s kind of couldn’t help but be optimistic, overall. Sure, some concerns. But as mentioned… the Great Depression was over. The Second World War was over. And in the USA, all but untouched by the War… drugs that worked, diseases of old falling one after another. Rockets going into space… barely, but… Atomic power for a push-button future of electric convenience.

          This shows in the music of the day – which is still played today and not purely as retro. The closest we’ve come to that since was… the 1980’s. Unless something is a-going on right now, or about to.

          Liked by 1 person

        4. Robert Heinlein’s very short story “On the slopes of Vesuvius” was published in 1947. Thoughtful people after the war couldn’t go back to their regular peace-time lives: the bomb was always a possibility in the back of their minds!

          Liked by 1 person

      4. The 1950s was when lifestyle propaganda swung into high gear. The fact that people today think of it as accurate shows how good they’d gotten at the presentation of the facade.

        Liked by 2 people

    2. All-American Girl by Frances B. Cogan. Useful book. She observes when reading about women’s employment she was gravely confused until it dawned on her that “paid employment” is not tautological. They supported not only the women who had to work for wages, but also women who worked in the family business, or did housework, or (for the very best off) did charity work.

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  7. I noticed the same trends in fiction back in the eighties. Female protagonist is stunningly good at EVERYTHING except traditional female tasks–can’t cook, can’t mend, etc. But she’s BETTER than the men at, oh, swordplay. Without having trained at it.

    I got SO sick of these “heroines” that I’d test-read. Which as a teenager I had not previously done.

    Liked by 4 people

    1. I don’t mind female characters that are good at everything. Mine are, after all.

      I do mind when everything revolves around how oppressed they are by The Patriarchy, and how they have to therefore treat every man like a dog with a chew toy before throwing them away. And also when they have not even the honor God gave a piglet. That’s annoying.

      These days if there’s even a hint of Woke I’m done. Won’t read it, won’t watch it. Lots of time for writing instead. ~:D

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Just so long as it’s justified. My husband has a fantasy book that he dearly loves simply because a major character was Prophesied as the One True Hero character and his tribe or whoever heard that and thought, Okay, let’s get this boy the best military/warlord education we can buy.

        Yeah, the guy was really good at being a warlord/hero type, and that’s primarily because he’d been trained in swordfights and strategy. You can definitely get that across by implying how obsessive they are.

        (And sometimes you get someone who is naturally good at something AND trains at it, thinking of eldest who is taking college calculus 3 as a high school senior, because of course he is. And now he has also learned what “five credit hours” actually means, which is probably a more important thing to know before you get into a full college schedule.)

        Liked by 1 person

          1. I have a Bachelor of Arts in Music (and a Master of Music), Violin major. That major earned 5 credit hours – which equated to 25 hours every week of practice on the violin. That did not include lessons, or orchestra rehearsals twice or three times a week (another 5-7 hours of playing time). I spent half my day every single weekday in a practice room, basically a very large closet with a window in the door so any instructor passing by could confirm I was really practicing, not sleeping or reading or eating my lunch.

            I remember others teasing me that being a Music Major was easy. But the curriculum required a minimum of 18 credit hours each semester, more than any other major I can think of.

            At least the calculus student gets to sit down while studying.

            ;-)

            Liked by 1 person

            1. The Reader’s engineering degree at yea ole land grant university required 18 credit hours per quarter (3 quarters = 2 semesters). And the number of 1 credit labs required that took more work than the average 3 credit course was legend.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. My university had a maximum of 18 credit hours without extra cost per semester except for the Honors Program, which had a max of 21 without extra cost. I think. There was one guy who did a 25-credit term, but everyone agreed that was crazy.

                I discovered that I could swing 20 credits, but 21 was a bit too much. And I certainly didn’t do that when I was still in engineering; I only tried that after I’d switched to a lighter major.

                Like

              2. Same for forestry degree, 204 hours to graduate. 18 credit hours on 3 quarter (4th is you went to summer school) if you wanted the degree in 4 years. I took 4 years + 1 quarter (13 quarters over 4 years + 2 quarters, counting non-credit fall to get in *6 months work required for degree). A lot of the degree classes were 5 hour classes, that had all day labs (off **campus). Try scheduling other classes around that! The chemistry, and other science, 4 hour credits, 3 hour class time + 3 hour labs, were easy in comparison.

                (*) Yes, most split it over 3 or more summers. But the only way I could also afford a vehicle. Which, as parents realized, I really did need. Important because I got sick and parental insurance only paid because of that requirement.

                (**) The only forestry program where class labs could be done in tandem during the term with in lecture classes because the bulk of the school forest was just north of town. (MacDonald Forest). Other schools the labs had to be taken during summer school by going to “forest camp”.

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        2. Oooh, so like Deku in My Hero Academia being an awesome hero, yeah, and imprinted like an adorable green tinted duckling on The Number One Hero, Almight– but he’s amazing as a leader because he is an abject geeky fanatic about all the stats.

          Yeah, it’d be kinda spooky to have a classmate pull out a notebook with details of all your superpowers that he made from observation and gushes about because you’re so super cool– but it’s also really useful when he’s going a Captain America, “Hulk! Smash!”

          Liked by 2 people

        3. “Just so long as it’s justified.”

          Right? And herein lies the problem with pretty much all of Dead Tree since 2010ish, there’s NO REASON for these characters to be doing what they’re doing. It isn’t sensible, and inevitably seems contrived. And tiresome.

          Therefore, when I have a character like Charlotte Smith whose main characteristic is that she’s -fabulous- and people walk into lamp posts when she’s around…

          … she needs to be like that. She’s an AI running a biomechanical drone, and her job is to look after Humans. If she’s completely fabulous, everyone will be eating out of her hand. Even stupid people will react positively. If she was weird looking, they’d all freak out.

          And so forth.

          Liked by 2 people

  8. Three thoughts today, probably need to recharge tonight:

    I followed the same path of exhaustion as you did, with the exception of romance. It all soured eventually. I left sci fi/fantasy slowly, can’t even remember an “end date” it was so gradual. I left mystery/thriller after a James Patterson novel that was just so grotesquely violent that I realized it was damaging to my mind and soul. It reminded me of the ongoing regret I have at reading Stephen King as a teen: nobody needs to have that in their brains forever. I can’t remember when I connected with indy publishing, but it was such a relief, even when the works needed work. No amount of mis-spellings can soil a fantastic plot and characters the way the feminazis can soil a story just by existing.

    There was an interim period somewhere in there with mysteries of the more but not totally cozy style such as the Tony Hillerman novels and other suchlike that did NOT cross the line into paranormal stuff. There is a series about a nun/detective, and others I can’t remember. Those were enjoyable. Nowadays that genre is just paranormal.

    “And I imagine on long voyages sailors mended their clothes.” The Patrick O’Brien sea novels feature sailors not only mending but designing and manufacturing entire wardrobes while at sea. They had their specific standards for couture in varying contexts. I read all 20 of those books while detoxing from the above.

    I gave up TV/video/movies entirely a few years back. First I gave up on Star Trek (pre-2006) when the nubile female officer was stripped of her gold shirt by wriggling through a too-tight Jeffries tube. Then I gave up on any other show types when (1) I was following Person of Interest and a kick-ass nubile female character was added to do nothing but stupid fantasy kick-ass bullpucky and totally sideline the two main characters who were actually interesting and (2) a Captain America spinoff series featuring his girlfriend becoming a detective had her kick-assing five (5!) goons at the waterfront and she didn’t break a heel and her hat didn’t even fall off. Life is too short for that crap.

    Bonus for a fourth thought: here’s a story idea that had me chuckling: https://althouse.blogspot.com/2025/10/the-blizzard-struck-on-friday-evening.html

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Yeah, I watched Person of Interest for the first time a couple of years ago, around the time I was first playing with AI.(the ads on FreeVee were great. Endless ads for pool-cleaning robots and ai-capable laptops. POI looked super relevant!) I was invested enough to stick it out to the bitter end, but i utterly despised one of the two girl bosses and barely tolerated the other. I much preferred the show when it was about two guys and a computer program splitting out Batman’s job between them, with a v very pretty Malinois along for the ride.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. re: “And I imagine on long voyages sailors mended their clothes.”  the phrase is “Make and Mend” which in British nautical practice means an afternoon without fixed assigned duties, with the assumption that sailors would use the time to make or mend clothing, though basically it’s a half-day off.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Supposedly on the old sailing ships, Saturday was a “work day” doing ship’s maintenance and Sunday was a “rest day” with no duties except watches. Astute captains would time their crossings of the international date line so that one way there were two Saturdays and the other way so there was no Sunday.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. Yes. Jerks. Like Adm. “Old Grogram”, who ordered the ration rum diluted with water and spiked with sweetened preserved lime juice.

            AKA Navy Grog.

            Liked by 1 person

          2. Yes. Jerks. Like Adm. “Old Grogram”, who ordered the ration rum diluted with water and spiked with sweetened preserved lime juice.

            AKA Navy Grog.

            Like

  9. I tapped out of any interest in a “female hero” with the introduction of Rey in the Star Wars films … just another scrappy untrained, undernourished TEENAGER … who magically is able to fight a fully trained Jedi to a draw … yeah right … real fight would have been over in 30 seconds (or less) with Rey cut in half …

    hell, even Luke with instruction from Obi Wan and Yoda, got his a** (and a hand) handed too him the first time he fought Vader … and in the final fight only becasue Vader didn’t want to kill his son did he stop and turn on the Emperor …

    Liked by 2 people

    1. To be fair, there was almost never any chance of Luke beating Vader in Empire, both from a narrative (he has to have at least one major fail related to not heeding Yoda’s warning) and in-universe (Vader was the very best at what he did and Luke had never fought another lightsaber-armed combatant before) perspective.

      Rey is just poorly written. Honestly, Finn was a much more interesting character.

      Liked by 2 people

    2. I’ve mentally nicknamed Rey “intensity girl”, because being intense seems to be her only personality trait.

      Luke did beat Vader in their second duel. But then the Emperor got involved…

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      1. Vader was

        A. Under orders not to kill Luke

        B. and wanted to kill the Emperor (who he truly hated) and have Luke at his side.

        His fighting was noticeably toned down and less aggressive than in Empire. If Luke had died in the fight, or even been seriously injured without falling to the Dark Side, all of Vader’s hopes would go up in smoke.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Luke is also trying to avoid seriously hurting Vader. He says it himself at one point while he’s hiding in the throne room. But late in the fight he goes berserk, and Vader ends up losing his hand (again). If it were ESB Luke, Vader would have successfully defended himself and put the whelp in his place despite Luke’s rage. But he’s unable to do so in the RotJ fight.

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          1. Well, Luke did train intensively with Yoda for several weeks after ESB, and Yoda pronounced him ready to face Vader. That implies a significant boost in both combat skills and Force abilities.

            RotJ Luke would absolutely *destroy* ESB Luke.

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    3. All they needed to do was make the planet where she grew up a hell world and give her a ruthless, paranoid personality similar to the female lead in Dosadi Experiment by Frank Herbert. These losers just don’t read/watch the classics.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Basically, the safe fantasy for a feminist is to get the social rewards of elite men, while only cultivating the personality traits and behaviors that minion feminists do.

        Being the mean social enforcer who ruthlessly punishes girls who step out of line, but also somehow be on a functioning team of men, and officially in charge of the men.

        A character who accomplishes things by way of a personality or choices which means not caring about the opinions of very many people is maybe right out. They can be bitchy, uncaring of who they hurt, but they have to value fairly mainstream social markers that are in the power of other people, and they have to get those social markers.

        Which naturally leads to people who have a broader view of human behavior going, ‘wait, wait, wait. What? How is that supposed to work?’

        The general consequence of feminism is that feminists have stopped themselves from accomplishing some of what they think are their goals. The specific consequence here of feminism is some fairly garbage storytelling.

        Liked by 1 person

    4. That being said, I think the Dagobah training scenes are the least interesting part of a movie I already didn’t love. The solution, however, was not to do away with them in the sequels but take more cues from movies where it actually works, like Rocky or Karate Kid (Yoda WISHES he were half the trolling master Pat Morita is in the latter movie).

      Like

  10. We need to stop telling women, all women, across the wide world, that they’re uniquely oppressed and need to “heroically” seize… the other sex’s roles.

    My mind instantly jumped to what “role” means in Portuguese. XD Thank you, I needed that laugh!

    But yes, yes, yes, yes. For the love of all that’s holy, stop trying to shove me into a man’s job. I don’t want it. It doesn’t make me smarter. I’m not broken that way. Just leave me alone, dang it….

    Liked by 2 people

      1. Look for “orgoglio e pregiudizio” and “de vier dochters bennet” on YouTube if the missus is really and truly out of Jane Austen adaptations. They are very old, moderately ridiculous Italian and Dutch adaptations of P&P, floating around with fansfans ups. The Italians overdo the melodrama but seem to dimly grasp the social protocols and class issues, whereas you can practically see the class/protocol stuff go whooshing over the Dutch creatives’ heads. Or if she likes Bollywood, I think Kandukondein (S&S) and Aisha (Emma) should be rentals on Amazon and YouTube. We’re also getting a new P&P miniseries from Netflix next year, with more attention to period costumes what classes might include people of color than their stupid Persuasion did, and a new S&S film from the production company that made 2020 Emma.

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      2. When I first started reading Austen, the visual adaptations helped so much to understand the undercurrents. As in, we’re more than two centuries away from her writings, so the snark slips right under the radar unless it’s pointed out.

        Mark Twain famously thought her writing was awful, but he also thought she was only ever funny by accident. Which shows he had no clue how to spot the subtlety, and so rather missed the point. And that is also not surprising, since he moved in cultures (both American and male) that were very direct, whereas Austen’s culture was exceedingly indirect.

        I enjoy her work, but I read 19th century novels for fun, and that is not a common pastime.

        Liked by 5 people

        1. In one of his short stories, Mark Twain also flayed James Fenimore Cooper. I think he was rebelling against the form of earlier novels and advocating “realism”.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. I once read an article discussing Twain’s dislike of Cooper. The author noted that some of Twain’s criticisms were unfair and overblown, and that other criticisms were based on the environment (particularly the river environment) that Twain was used to being different from the one that Cooper was used to. The author suspected that Twain blithely assumed that Cooper’s environment was the same as Twain’s, when that simply wasn’t the case.

            Liked by 3 people

            1. Twain had a lot of good points (most notably figuring out that Grant’s potential publisher was trying to screw a dying man out of the money that would save his family, and stepping in to offer him a fair deal.) He did let his snark run ahead of his critical thinking when it came to other writers.

              Liked by 1 person

        2. He said he hated P&P every time he read it. Which raises the little question of why he read it even more than once if he hated it.

          Liked by 3 people

          1. Quite possibly because books weren’t as readily available back then and an avid reader desperate for the written word will read whatever is near at hand, even if it’s not what they would choose if choice is available.

            Like

              1. Envision if you will a young man of 17, fit and trim from a summer spent at the Army Basic Training, reduced literally to tears as he begs his HS literature teacher to move him to the set reading Mrs. Shelley’s Frankenstein or, The Modern Prometheus and to be freed from the agonies of boredom imposed by Austen in Pride and Prejudice. He promises to catch up with the rest in no time! Please!!

                That was me, in 1999 or so, senior year. I never yet did make it through an Austen book.

                Liked by 1 person

                1. What I find interesting is that most young men absolutely loathe Austen, while most young women absolutely loathe The Catcher in the Rye. (I was older when I read the latter, and know exactly why I loathe the self-absorbed little creep.)

                  Mind you, I have found at least two men of my age group who adore her work, one who identified with Mr. Darcy, and the other who has a fairly strong steampunk vibe to his life.

                  Liked by 3 people

        3. Emma was the one book it took me three trys to finally get through. I wasn’t thrilled with Mansfield Park but I made it through on the first try. All the other completed novels, I breezed through pretty fast.

          Liked by 2 people

            1. I don’t hate it, but the fact that I’m usually way more invested in the heroine’s uncle/quasi-guardian and her dad the drunken marine than in any of the young people speaks for itself. This and S&S feel to me like Austen was trying to reconcile too many paradoxes in her plots/characters, and she just got tired of fighting with them and pushed the manuscripts out the door. S&S comes closer to working on its own terms, and like P&P has been blessed with a bunch of decent to good (IMO) adaptations, so it’s generally better liked than Mansfield Park.

              Liked by 1 person

            2. That is one of the reasons it interests me. Because the ONLY character in the entire book who is both good and wise throughout is poor relation Fanny. Even Sir Thomas is blind to the character flaws of the people around him.

              Liked by 1 person

      5. I liked Pride and Prejudice, Persuasion, and Northanger Abbey, but the last requires an ability to appreciate the satire of works you have not read.

        Her juvenilia is also fun.

        Liked by 3 people

            1. Sorry, I was a 90s teenager and I hated 90s teenagers and movies about them. And 30 years of my peers claiming this one in particular was awesome has only hardened my heart. 😉

              Like

  12. “What is now, unbelievably, 15 years, maybe 20 years ago, I had reached my limit with science fiction and fantasy I could find on shelves.”

    Yep. 2010. That’s right. Everything started sucking and I couldn’t find anything to read. By 2014 I was writing my own, in sheer desperation.

    “It’s the extreme effort of trying to hold a world that makes no sense — either in historical or modern sense — in my head at all times to make the story work.”

    That’s true. That is indeed one major thing that makes it suck. The world makes no sense, and the characters inevitably behave like insane people.

    For me it’s the characters. I don’t understand the world at the best of times, or why people do most of the things they do. But at least I know who’s good and who’s bad. In fiction, I want to read about the good people trying hard to win. Whether its about space travel, time travel, even a war, the Good Guys are good. They behave with honor and integrity, and even when they fail, at least they tried.

    But I can’t FIND that anymore! They’re disgusting people! I don’t want to read about them.

    Okay, you want to write a superwoman? I’m down with that. Honor Harrington, I’ll read about her all day long. She’s a stand-up chick. Doesn’t cheat on her boyfriend, treats her parents properly, isn’t spending her time trying to sleep her way through the Manticoran Navy, and she GETS THE JOB DONE. That’s a superwoman.

    What is there on offer these days in dead tree? Nothing. What do we get instead? Disgusting people doing disgraceful things, in space. Or in a fantasy setting.

    Harem anime is better than that. This is not to say it is deathless prose, but it’s better than your average SF/F dead-tree from 2022, which was the last time I looked at the SF/F section in Chapters. Korean soap operas are better than that.

    I can do better than that. And I’ve done it three times now, proving the first time wasn’t a fluke.

    All I do is take the real world, add something crazy to it, pick some characters with a clue and a regular amount of courage, and turn them loose. It’s not that hard, other people should be able to do it. They all used to do it, pre-2010 right? My basement is full of books from pre-2010.

    But they DON’T anymore. Now all we get is The Message. Which I for one am disinclined to pay for. I haven’t bought a book in three years. Or a movie, for that matter.

    Here endeth my rantings of the day. >:(

    Liked by 2 people

    2. Huh. I hadn’t actually noticed at the time – was buried in RL problems – but yeah, about that time I mostly went to reading manga and nonfiction. And decided to write and publish in part because I was absolutely fed up with the proliferation of black-leather-wearing Vampire Slayers who were more Vampire Layers.

      Liked by 4 people

    4. “The Message.”

      Do you hear that in Critical Drinker Voice too? 😄

      Superwomen are fun to write about. Properly done, they’re fun to read about, too. Hell, anime is full of superwomen. Magical Girls, anyone? Mecha pilots?

      But a ‘superwoman’ has to have a reason for being super besides ‘she just is‘. She has to work at it. I’ve re-watched the first few episodes of Sailor Moon and at the beginning, she’s pretty much helpless. She barely survives with the help of a cat familiar and Magical Girl accoutrements she’s just learning to use. There’s very little to be seen of the icon she is destined to become. Tohka Yatogami is a super-powered Spirit from another dimension. Birdy Ceiphon Altera is a genetically engineered super-soldier with years of law enforcement experience. Naomi Armitage is a Third Type robot, also with years of experience. They work as characters because they make sense, and because they are not presented as perfect. They try to do the right thing, without being sanctimonious about it.

      I’m writing a story about a superwoman, and I’m trying to take lessons from those characters, and others. She’s OPAF, but I don’t want her to be an annoying Mary Sue. I want her to solve problems, not just blow them up. She has a lot to learn, outside of being ‘super’.

      Liked by 2 people

      2. Birdy! *Fistbumps fellow fan.*

        You might also appreciate Mumei in Kabaneri of the Iron Fortress. Superhuman, yes. Social fail, oh so much, with reasons….

        And yes. Critical Drinker’s voice shall ever resound in my head, because he summed up the Hollyweird mess so well.

        Like

        1. I would never have even heard of Birdy the Mighty, except that a guy I used to go to church with (before I moved overseas) was cast as the voice of the main male character (Tsutomu) in the English dub. His girlfriend (now wife) showed me the anime (the English dub, naturally). It was quite fun.

          Liked by 3 people

            1. Nope. I only saw the Funimation dub of the TV series (on DVD), because that’s the one my friend voice-acted in. Never did see the VCR version. Not sure how I’d get hold of it to see it now: unless someone has digitized the VCR version and put it up somewhere accessible, I’d have a lot of trouble getting hold of those videotapes in the country I live in.

              But thanks for the info; that’s interesting to know.

              P.S. I realize that it would be trivially easy to look up the Wikipedia page for Birdy the Mighty and find out my friend’s name, since I mentioned which character he voiced. But I’m still going to keep saying “my friend” and refrain from actually writing his name, and I would ask that others do the same. He’s a rather private person, plus he’s had some fans act in obsessive ways in the past, so I don’t want his name to show up where it can be Googled if I can avoid it.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Oh, who am I kidding, of course someone has digitized the VCR version. A simple DDG search just turned it up on archive.org. I’ll check it out.

                Like

                1. There are some actors that do such a good job that I find myself wanting to seek out anything else they’ve done because I’ll enjoy watching their performance; David Tennant is one of those. My wife and I really enjoyed the 2011 version of Much Ado About Nothing where David Tennant plays Benedick and Catherine Tate plays Beatrice. But my interest in such actors is limited to their professional talents, and not to the people themselves.

                  Liked by 2 people

                2. If I like a certain type of character alot, one of the better bets for finding more like them is to check the rest of the actor’s filmography. You do get people, especially theater trained Brits, who do a small handful of roles (like Jane Austen characters) that appeal to me and everything else in their resume is dismal bs, but generally an actor who cares more about his/her financial responsibilities than critical acclaim generally is generally somewhat typecast with multiple fun characters adjacent to what I like.

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            2. OK, my DVD set is ‘Birdy The Mighty: Decode Aniplex/Funimation S.A.V.E. Edition, The Complete Series Episodes 1-26’

              There is actually a 27th episode that’s sort of a bridge between the Ryunka arc and the Alten Terrorists arc. I had to download it from a site that has since been taken down. There was no other source for that episode.

              Liked by 1 person

      3. “She’s OPAF, but I don’t want her to be an annoying Mary Sue.”

        I have Alice Haddison. She’d be Mary Sue AF except she pukes and gets the shakes after a fight. Charlotte actually -is- Mary Sue, she’s perfect in every way, except she’s got a temper.

        And so forth. We love them, and they are awesome, but they do have their little quirks…

        Liked by 1 person

    6. And Honor’s parents are happily married and faithful to one another, plus Allison Harrington has a wicked sense of humor. (For that matter, Honor and Emily watching political talk shows and exchanging snarky remarks is a hoot).

      Liked by 2 people

    7. The shift depends a lot on what you read– they got into YA, and Fantasy, before they went after Sci-Fi, and I know they’ve taken out tons of the sub-groups of mystery.

      Before that they got Westerns, I can just remember the Walmart shelves being utterly stuffed with Westerns so bad even my mom wouldn’t read them, and then the complaints because there weren’t many anymore.

      I know with YA the publishers saw that it was being read by that “teen to middle aged female” demographic, so they went in and gutted everything to replace it with what they ‘know’ that demographic wants.

      And the market crashed.

      ….why yes, this does sound like the zillion scifi remakes that are what “Everybody Wants To Watch”.

      Liked by 5 people

  13. The missing clue is that men of the day were generally seen as the directors of the household, the ones who set the tasks and assigned the work and owned the land or other productive asset (and to be fair, the titles and lands passed primarily through primogeniture to male heirs)

    The role the feminists want is not necessarily the male role, but the role of BOSS.

    But that role is earned by performance – and at least outside family units, males tend to be better at the types of things that earn ‘boss’.

    Let me ask: How many of these feminist authors had any clue whatsoever of the kinds of work that needed to be done to manage such things? I can’t recall a single one. Of course, that’s not generally the sort of story I’d be looking to read, but in the course of my reading I’ve nonetheless hit quite a few where they faked it with a one sentence description of ‘managing’ that estate.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. “Seen as.” Except for the ownership laws, the men generally did not boss the household.

      Except for a few enclaves that were particularly theirs – the study, maybe the library, and their personal servants – the house, and immediate environs, were under the authority of the wife.

      As Sarah noted, this was simply a rational division of the managerial labor. The man simply was not usually there to handle the myriad details of maintaining the house. Even financially, the man could dictate the total budget (the smart ones listened to the co-manager, however) – but the wife decided the details of how it was spent.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. There’s a lot of nonsense going around today about how Mr. Bennet ought to “make” Mrs. Bennet save money. It’s true that he shouldn’t give into her every whim the way he seems to, but interfering in the household accounts was not his job. As far as his actual job, he hunts, socializes with his peers when required (he does call on Mr. Bingley promptly after all), seems invested in the home farm, and neither the narrator nor the main POV character say anything bad about his handling of the Longbourn estate, so apparently he and his steward are doing okay on that front.

        Liked by 1 person

          1. This is a point on which my fussiness and stupidity is more informed by the genres I read a lot of recently, then it is Regency.

            Arbitrary profitable investments are not mandatory in every setting. Landowners invested in quite a lot of, or maybe even all, periods, but some times and places the opportunities or places to put money were quite limited.

            Agriculture was quite a lot of investmetn, historically, and agriculture had serious risks and also limits on the potential profit. Trade expeditions likewise.

            People fully detached from reality checking today’s economic whatsits would maybe not have the background to ground truth that, say, there were no dot com billionaires in Cromwell’s day.

            Anyhow, I only vaguely grasp the part of the industrial revolution that was Regency, but I am pretty sure that most land owners were not also doing super well in industrial investing.

            Liked by 2 people

          2. I’m up with the allergic insomnia, but maybe am about to bed again.

            Was talking semiconductor fabs, and economic stuffs late last night.

            Had a mad impulse to do an otherwise standard regency world Pride and Prejudice fanfic, but for some reason the characters are talking about investing in 10^24 nm semiconductor fabrication processes. (I know what number I wrote, and I know the actual history of semiconductor electronics, if only very vaguely.)

            But, really, I don’t need to be writing fanfics of that length on such thin inspiration.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Do a very basic summary of the idea and ask your preferred AI to write for you :). The two of you may need to hash out a more detailed outline first, and it probably won’t be as good as writing it yourself from scratch, but it beats just turning the plot bunny loose.

              Like

  15. Just got a fraud-by-mail ballot for next month’s special election over the Gruesom Redistricting Plan To Guarantee Eternal Absolute Democrat One-Party Rule Over Kalifornia. Although of course it’s not called that. $Millions they’re spending on this infernal plot to make non-Democrat voters even more irrelevant than we are already, while ignoring the state’s multiple real problems affecting millions of people the government is supposed to be working for.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. The good news is that the polls suggest the effort to take district drawing power out of the hands of the commission will fail.

      Like

      1. I don’t exactly trust that commission, but I know how Eeevul the Kalifornia Democrat Party is, how they already twist every law into a pretzel, and how Republicans can be well ahead the day after an election, but then the state keeps on ‘counting ballots’ for weeks, sometimes a month or more, and somehow all those ‘late’ votes go to the Democrat. Somehow, too, the ‘counting’ stops when the Democrat has enough to win.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Yeah, at least with the Ahnold commission they have to leave a paper trail for their cheating. With the “Temporary” transfer of redistricting power to Gavin’s Whim, the cheating is just structured into the process.

          Like

  16. What’s really aggravating about the “she loves estate management” crap is that they (the writers thereof) utterly disdain *household management* which was at least as much work and involved supporting estate management.

    Chances are good they’re the same sort who will whine about how “landlording isn’t a job” because they have no earthly idea about property or agricultural management in any capacity.

    Ahem.

    One historical (War of Independence-era, pre-Regency) book I otherwise quite liked had the heroine (who is a sort of proto-fashion designer in a way that WORKED for the era) having an issue with the hero employing children in his lace-making factory. It was wholly in keeping with the era otherwise (and I’m sure there WERE people at the time who had that concern and worked to end the practice. There are always do-gooder types.) But it just READ like such a contemporary argument that it was hard to stay in the story. Unfortunate, because I quite like the others in that series.

    Liked by 5 people

    1. The age at which children worked in that era was predicated solely on the poverty of the parents and the feasibility of the job.

      Liked by 2 people

    2. having an issue with the hero employing children in his lace-making factory. 

      … If they were tatting by hand that sounds like a fine job for children. Older children. Who can follow instructions and have an attention span.

      Better than sending them up chimneys to clean, certainly.

      Like

  17. When I was working the practice fanfic thing, one of the characters I was working with was a sword girl. At the time I hadn’t learned as much of the scope of the differences between men and women as I did now, so I started into it with the assumption that being a sword girl was what she wanted out of life.

    Yet, what made the character really click and finally breath was the realization it was the exact opposite: she hated it. She only did it because it was a duty, and that she valued above all else. But what she actually loved were her gardens*, cooking, and her people. She was never the type of person to complain, or even think about complaining, but just knowing that made the character feel real and fully dimensional in a way that she had not quite before.

    Oddly, I think she just saw sewing as a purely time neutral thing, and I doubt she would even think to do much embroidery, until she had someone she was specifically doing it for. And then it would be entirely for the recipient’s joy. That I could see her getting pretty sophisticated.

    *In universe, the character’s other job, aside from sword heavy, is grounds keeper for a shrine. The shrine’s gardens are described as so beautiful poets and the spirits of poets will go there when they’re going to die. Her boss leaves pretty much everything about keeping and maintaining it to her. And that’s pretty much all that’s said about any of that in the source material.

    But realizing that she was not a man in a dress, but rather a girl pressed into a shape that did not fit, and doing it anyway because it needed to be done, as well as discovering that brought the character unique problems was a real revelation.

    And it strikes me that it goes the other way too, a guy needing to suddenly fill the role of mom, even if he is able to do the job, he is going to be pinched in unique ways too.

    Liked by 2 people

  18. Isn’t it funny how all the women they want to liberate are already in the freest of all countries for women? Never hear about them trying to liberate women in 3rd world or Muslim majority nations.

    After all, these strong liberated women should be able to take out any 5 drugged-to-the-gills jihadis with just their bare hands, right?

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I suspect that underneath all their outrage, they are dimly aware of how they’d fare if they tried their ‘mostly peaceful protesting’ in an actual male chauvinist patriarchy.

      “They chose…poorly.” 😛

      Liked by 1 person

      1. There’s also the aspect that if they actually solved the problems they would be out of a job. Complaining that women are not all CEOs can’t be solved.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. I never got another fundraising letter from NOW after I asked them why they weren’t working to stop female trafficking and female genital mutilation in other parts of the world instead of fretting over our trivial issues.

      Liked by 3 people

    3. And only some of them. They want women in the CEO office — as if anyone but a tiny fraction of the population could do that.

      Liked by 2 people

  19. I had the same reaction to sci fi and mystery at about the same time. Too much estrogen and way, way too bitter for me. Outside a few select authors,I don’t read it any more. My sci fi and fantasy collection pre 2000 or so is fairly complete and then it more,or less stops other than a select few authors — mostly Baen. It’s a pity

    Liked by 3 people

    1. Yep. Same here. My library fills the basement but dwindles to nothing about 2010. Maybe four authors were writing anything I wanted to read after that, all Baen plus Neal Asher.

      Like

  20. one thing to think about regarding women working outside the home is that, in NYC at least, being able to afford more that two children and a non- employed wife is THE flex. For myself, where we decided together a long time ago and shaped our lives accordingly, I get all sorts of people drawing wrong conclusions about my earning power because my wife doesn’t “have to” work outside the home and we, externally at least, live the same sort of life they do. It’s all very peculiar.

    as you consider why so many wanna be NYC matrons are so bitter, well their men couldn’t deliver that kind of life, and/or the men who can aren’t interested in them.

    something to think about anyway.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. That’s… interesting. I wonder if that’s worldwide actually. A repressed desire to have what their moms had making them bitter.
      I was a stay at home mom. Part of the reason I chose writing, as opposed to teaching languages or multilingual translation. When the kids were little writing happened late at night, very early morning or on Saturday when Dan took them on adventures. Were we tight? Eh. Sometimes. BUT no one from the outside could tell. We got told more than once that we were “so lucky.”

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Heck, I wish I could have been a stay-at-home mom. I’d have been agreeable to taking on that role – this was basically what my mother had trained me for. Run the household on a budget, dressed the offspring and myself tastefully (also on a budget) followed the husband-select around the world and supported him in his career …

        And all that fell through; the husband-select turned out not to be the man that I thought he was, so I went off being a career woman and single parent. Depending in a large part on other women who did have better taste and luck in the male of their choice.

        Not my choice – just what was left to me by default. I made the best of it, or so everyone says.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. I’m not criticizing anyone’s decision, one does what one must, alas, the status games here amongst the wannabe haut bourgeoisie are cutthroat and I suspect that a certain resentment toward a spouse whose income is just not quite enough is common. I can’t imagine that they’re really fulfilled by working in hr.

          I

          Liked by 2 people

    2. I’ve been running into this some lately.

      Mostly from the, ah, interesting assumptions and signaling differences for the stay-at-home/homeschooling thing, very similar to the difference between me using grandma’s cast iron (yes, we use soap, the only issue is you need to cure it again) vs the “oh, no! Soap was in the same room, it’s RUUIIIIIIINED!!!!” folks. Or the cooking-to-eat vs cooking-to-show-off, or the homesteading cottage core, or– yeah.

      … and ‘flex’ is exactly the thing– the guy is demonstrating status, just like having a trophy wife of the pretty-and-young type.

      Being a trophy isn’t much of a flex.

      And for some reason it’s still an assumption that she’s stupid.

      (Yes, I am tired of the “reproduced and keeps them all alive, is stupid” thing.)

      Liked by 3 people

  21. “Why in the name of all that is holy SHOULD the highest aspiration of a woman be to become a man?”

    Well, but not just any man, right? They all think they’re entitled to be the CEO of Bignuts Inc. They wanna be the BOSS, the capo de tuti capo. (Build up the company from scratch? No, they don’t want to do that.)

    How many women do you see turning out for welding jobs? Or how about heavy equipment jobs eh, there’s a great one. Is there any reason why a woman can’t drive a backhoe? Scraper? Front-end loader? NOPE! They can totally do it. No question.

    But they DON’T because it is stupid boy stuff. When was the last time you saw a JCB loader and the driver was a chick? You’ve never seen that, is when. Zero times. I’ve met one (1) female welder, and that was at welding school.

    I think most feminists are a bit dim, honestly. Men aren’t even a little bit like women. Most men will -beg- to be allowed to drive the backhoe. We love that stuff. Welding, fire and sparks and molten metal? Hell yeah. We love watching it for fun. Some of the biggest channels on youtube, guys making stuff.

    Not too many girls making stuff, and when they do it’s more about the tanktop than the thing they’re making. Single exception I can think of offhand, BlondieHacks. She totally gets the making stuff thing. No tanktop.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I got to forge something this last summer and it was awesome. Took me about forty minutes, all told, because a lifetime of craft skills apparently transfers over to “taper here, bend here, bend here.”

      Unfortunately, I also managed to screw up my elbow while doing so. It’s finally stopping the yelling at me, so maybe I’ll be able to do some strengthening exercises so I can do it again sometime, but without the injury.

      So this is just to say that yes, welding sounds fun as heck. But it also sounds like you will maybe be employing muscles that women are generally less endowed with, and that comes with potential injury effects, and that could be a problem. After all, the hammer I was using to forge with was not all that heavy… swung once.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. Stuff like this is why I’ve started rolling my eyes whenever I see yet another of the increasingly common “Body Type B” blacksmiths in fantasy stories.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. I mean, you can have a wiry build and still be strong, BUT the likelihood is that your body is going to bulk with blacksmithing. You have to do a very particular type of exercise to strengthen without bulking, and we all know that ballet has a lot of eating disorders attached to it for a reason.

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          1. Depending on the magic and tech story level, there’s work-arounds, too.

            Which absolutely can work as reader cookies, because if you go and research the stuff modern blacksmiths use and translate it into your magic system they are gonna swoon.

            You want to show your smiths are as much engineers as anything? Describe how they make it so the hammer mostly lifts itself.

            Liked by 1 person

          2. More importantly, men get the extra upper body strength that comes simply by virtue of being male and going through puberty. That’s not to say that a woman can’t gain the strength to effectively swing a smithing hammer. But it’s easier for the men to develop it.

            Liked by 3 people

      2. “…employing muscles that women are generally less endowed with…”

        Indeed. Brigid, the Goddess of the Forge and patron of blacksmiths, has forearms like most people’s calves. Quoth Our Hero upon meeting Her Holiness in the miserable mists of Niflheim, “big arms are hot on a girl.”

        She’s a little bashful about her big arms. ~:D

        Liked by 1 person

    2. That’s going into a story I’m writing. When the main characters present a new power plant to the public, a Feminist! reporter gets all hissy about the workers in a steam turbine gallery.

      “Those are all men! Why don’t you hire any women?”

      “None applied.”

      I saw woman welder at the Bremerton shipyard back in the 1980s. One, out of about a dozen. Nobody discriminated against her that I could see. Then again, she was the one who brought the pan of rum jello squares to work one day… 😛

      Liked by 3 people

      1. Welding, apart from the sparks and fire and plasma and frikkin lasers, is precise persnickety work, requiring fine motor skills in uncomfortable gear, with fumes. There is a reason skilled welders get serious pay. But you don’t get that skill by going to college, nor does it suddenly magically appear Rey-style just because you are the MC.

        Liked by 1 person

      2. Generally, a woman welder won’t put up with the BS that you usually get in a place hiring a couple dozen guys at once. Ditto for a really good man welder.

        My mom made that mistake once. On the logic that it is the kind of work she likes and is good at.

        …it went poorly. She still has no tolerance for being an idiot with explosives, blinding light, and fire, and even less because some of ’em were making up for lacks elsewhere. (Mom was very pretty and had curves even in welding leathers.)

        The guy who hired her was pissed when he found out why she’d quit and suggested her to a shop a friend of his owned– because as FM points out, fine motor skills and uncomfortable corners.

        Most women don’t want to go into welding, but they’re in high demand for a lot of stuff the high supply guys can’t do, most notably “fit in this spot and do a nice joint.”

        She was still getting called in to do some fiddly bits in her mid sixties, with bad knees. Pretty common with decent female welders.

        Liked by 4 people

        1. Highest paid mechanic at Southwest Airlines was a lady welder, back in the 1980s-90s, perhaps later. She had the certifications and FAA blessing to do repairs, rather than the birds going back to Boe!ng. Her dad told her to learn to weld and she’d never go hungry. No joke!

          Liked by 4 people

    3. And if you would like to read a romance about a welding chick who is also a fashion maven whose knowledge of fashion helps break an eco-fascist terrorist group, may I commend to your attention Dorothy Grant’s Blood, Oil, and Love series?

      Good, solid, clean fun (even if the heroines get down in the mud, one being a petroleum geologist, one an airline pilot, and the aforementioned welder), adventure, romance, solid worldbuilding.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Yes; and also see her human-alien hybrid series (Shattered Under Midnight and Dust of the Ocean, so far).

        When your characters start quoting other people’s books (“What are you?” / “I’m what they send in when the good men fail.” ) you know it’s worked its way far into the back of your head. (Which means sometime I’d have to ask permission for ‘Professora’ Kathleen Macgillivray to actually say that in print.)

        Liked by 1 person

      2. Objection! There wasn’t any welding stuff other than a side mention! Still good stories, on my comfort read list when the world is hating to much.

        Like

        1. Usually poses with a power tool and a setup completely wrong for what they’re doing.

          …although not infrequently that is because they’re pissed at being the pose-girl, when it’s a real worker.

          (the game is to make it look good for people who know nothing about it, and have more problems the longer you look and the more you understand)

          Liked by 1 person

        2. Eh, its promotional stills. Which tend to boil down to “Do something the photographer recognizes as “sciency” (or “technologicy” or “constructiony”)”

          I think they get bonus points if the most “sciency (or whatever)” looking person is young and female.

          Liked by 1 person

  22. I’m mostly descended from women who couldn’t be oppressed and if you tried you’d regret it.

    THIS is absolutely and unequivocally a Celtic cultural trait. No, of course it isn’t exclusive, but it really does just about hold (culturally and statistically, not always individually) in any identifiably Celtic context I can think of… including my own Southern Scottish/Scotch-Irish background.

    “Oppressed women” was one of those, “how in the heck did you manage that?” things, at first.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. It’s trivial to oppress women when literally everything is oppression, due to “DahPatriarchy!!!”.

      So basically, all the “modern feminists” are self-oppressing, via their own mental construct.

      Like

  23. I’m not near my reference books, but Elizabeth Wayland Barber in Primitive Textiles quoted another researcher that tribes/groups normally live so close to the edge everyone must contribute. But women get pregnant, nurse and have to care for small children. Therefore, their contributions tended to: be safe for children to be around; involve little or no traveling; and be easy to,put down and resume. (There was a fourth characteristic which I’m not remembering).

    So no, you would not have female smiths; the smithy is not safe for small children. Nor will they be hunters: carrying an infant or small child for miles on a hunt would be exhausting, not to mention the frustration when little Oog starts wailing just before they attack the mammoth. This is why, in many cultures, women’s work was producing textiles.

    And another thing…..modern ladies, a woman. Who did her own scutwork was likely to be low-status. Scutwork is why you have servants, and your higher-status job is to manage the servants, not do servants’ work. And this goes back a long, long time. Thinking of the Assyrian wife of a merchant, with her own textile business, instructing her husband to buy her a new slave for her business…

    Liked by 4 people

  24. Somebody thought, and said outright on a Tolkien group, that Tolkien was a rich privileged Englishman.

    When of course his early life was all about most of his family abandoning his widowed mom, and him never making much money. And then most of the money he eventually made, went to UK taxes.

    And then it turned out that this person thought all Oxford professors were rich to start out with, and were paid giant loads of money by the colleges too.

    I just don’t understand why people have such a warped idea of the world.

    Liked by 7 people

    1. The place one goes to get an extremely warped understanding of the world is called a university.

      :D

      There’s more to the story than simply cutting quality to increase throughput, and more than simple deliberate incompetence, but a lot of common understanding these days is bad scholarship applied to bad scholarship.

      Liked by 2 people

    2. They assume Oxford professors hold high status jobs and those jobs automatically pay very high salaries because they’re high-status.

      Liked by 3 people

    4. “I just don’t understand why people have such a warped idea of the world.”

      It’s because they’re stupid. Some of the dumbest people I’ve ever met, I met in university.

      Any liberal arts department. Filled with idiots. They can’t even write.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Academia – all the stupid folks congregate at a place where they can get an official credential that proclaims “not stupid”.

        (trots off)

        “Until we meet again!”

        Liked by 2 people

      2. I’ve probably said this around here before, but back in the old days of 25 years ago, when I was working in a university writing lab and my brother was too (at a small liberal arts college and a large public university in different states), we’d compare notes from time to time. At both schools, the most helplessly stupid, rock-bottom idiots we had to deal with — the ones who couldn’t write because they couldn’t *think* — were *always* either education majors or communication majors..

        Liked by 2 people

    5. Several years back, I had to walk someone through why it was such a weird thing to say that there were too many “high-paid authors” dictating—I dunno, something. First I pointed out a list of the 100 highest-paid authors out there. Then I had to point out that several of those authors—such as Agatha Christie—were dead, and therefore not getting much money. Then I had to go down to the last author on the list, making somewhere between 100-200K annually.

      After much back-and-forth, I finally beat it through that person’s head that with however many billion people there were in the world, and with whatever percentage of them being writers, the existence of this list meant that every other writer in the world was making less than 100K annually.

      Absolutely no understanding of statistics. One writer made stupid money, therefore writers are rich.

      Liked by 2 people

  25. So, because I have an extreme case of idiocy, and because I am consistently wasting the spoons I have…

    I had the thought of ‘what about doing an another world regency, with mysteries, and no fantastical bullshit on the personal economics, except for the other broader bullshit that I assume, and also for some reason women with swords, but they don’t save the world’.

    I have consistently (1) wanted to have something like modern cheapness of textiles, semi-automated cheap garment construction, and washing machines, with a bunch of other things that amount to women commonly wearing dresses down to their ankles. (In universe, partly due to cold climates and/or universal HVAC. Outside of universe, I am feeling like a contrarian to all of the things where WWII technological changes necessarily track to WWII fashion changes to shorter skirts. I’m hardly a real garment, textile or fashion enthusiast, but it is kinda boring to basically read the same modern tastes everywhere. Alien cultures should some of the time have alien tastes or preferences.)

    I also tend to want some reason to justify a lack of photography, or modern computing/IT technology, especially when I want to have supers in universe. (Supers are a situation where modern to semi-modern clothing technology makes a lot of sense, but also where semi-modern widespread garment repair skills may be interesting. Modern plus tech, well, if I have something like an awakened novel, where it is possible to justify a second more expensive market for clothing that cannot be fully automated…)

    It should be possible to have space planes and regency maidens making appropriate marriages in the same setting, I’m fairly sure people here have done so.

    I basically tend to make a lot of worlds that people woudl default into medivial tech levels actually have serious mechanized agriculture, because I like a society wealthy enough not to have most of the labor tied up in agriculture. Let’s me move people around, without necessarily having extreme implied expenses, and feels more free to me. A society can afford other sorts of stupid wastes if they have zero chance of famine, no matter what.

    But, unless I am doing a cultivation(2) novel and supposing an unusual calender (3), I would have a bit of trouble convincing myself that women who both sink lots of time into embroidery, and sink a lot of time into swords don’t strain my disbelief when it comes to personal economics. My tolerance for my disbelief seems to be a lot wider when I am reading, than when I am writing.

    (1) These last couple of years, it has shown up several times.

    (2) xianxia. Dude who practice kung fu to become immortal wizards, not agriculture.

    (3) Also possibilities I frequently investigate

    Liked by 1 person

    1. “…an another world regency…”

      The Liaden stories (Lee and Miller) basically start/started out just that way. Somewhere in one of the (early novel) introductions, there’s a remark to exactly that effect. Of course, making up your own very highly mannered, quasi-Regency but totally different in detail setting isn’t really easier; but it can make it easier to start out without tripping badly over “obvious stuff” — so they did.

      Many years and very many books later, it would be pretty hard to out-do them at this; and there’s now a danger of being accused of “being derivative” (assuming, as a writer, you’d care).

      Liked by 1 person

      1. There’s maybe two Liaden books that play as space regencies to me and they’re the second and third (IIRC) in publication order within a very convoluted and prolific series. Anyone who accuses other space regency writers of ripping off the Liaden series will get shown both my middle fingers, I assure you.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. I’m concerned about the series now that Steve Miller is no longer with us. The last book used “pronouns.” Worse, in the previous one that character was not referred to as “they”.

          Like

    2. Regarding Xanxia…

      I could see a female character who gains insight into the universe (aka cultivates) when she focuses on her embroidery…

      :P

      Liked by 1 person

        1. Never played it, and I think for the longest time it was the only LucasArts SCUMM game (except for maybe Fate of Atlantis, which was licensed) to be pretty much impossible to get in one form or another. Which is pretty surprising, given that the only SCUMM game that seems more beloved than it for old-time LucasArts SCUMM aficionados are the early Monkey Island games.

          Though I see that GOG has it these days.

          Liked by 1 person

    3. (2) xianxia. Dude who practice kung fu to become immortal wizards, not agriculture.

      If you haven’t read it already you might enjoy Beware of Chicken.

      It’s about a dude who practices Kung Fu to become a farmer.

      Liked by 1 person

  26. Textiles today are incredibly long lasting. Cotton, linen, and wool wear rapidly, in contrast.

    Really, the modern family could easily manage on 1/3 the clothing and linens they do. Most of it is still useable when it has gone out of fashion.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. The relatively short duration of cotton, etc… textiles is yet another reason why silk was such an *amazing* textile back in the day.

      Chinese period piece TV shows that aren’t Xanxia often have at least one scene in which one character is gifting another character bolts of silk fabric. Silk cloth was incredible, and valuable.

      Like

  27. Textiles today are incredibly long lasting. Cotton, linen, and wool wear rapidly, in contrast.

    Really, the modern family could easily manage on 1/3 the clothing and linens they do. Most of it is still useable when it has gone out of fashion.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Colors!

      OMG, colors!

      We don’t need to redye stuff for anything but fun.

      And getting stuff at second hand stores where folks sent it because “Fashion’ or just, “don’t want anymore” is easy and invisible if you don’t tell folks or use utterly cutting edge style.

      Liked by 4 people

  28. “Tell me you know nothing of what housekeeping used to entail without telling me you know nothing of what housekeeping used to entail.“

    –

    This.

    People do not realize today’s modern household has unpaid purchased labor doing what servants used to do. I say liberate the Samsung, GE, Shark, and Kenmore, of the household laborers, you slavers you. I mean really already.

    Liked by 4 people

  29. “Most men, tbf, could not find their own way to their sock drawer much less form a league against women. In fact, men not having a concept of “solidarity among men” is what allowed feminism to become institutionalized. “

    My take on it has been that men more or less looked at each other and said “the women will handle it,” and went on their merry way in life. Men do the men stuff, women do the women stuff sort of thing. Feminism was women only stuff.

    Then women want to work where men do? Sure! Men love women. Many have daughters, wives, sisters, aunts and so on. ALL men have mothers, of course. So letting women in to the men spaces was, while not without a bit of difficulty or friction, something that was inevitable, I suspect.

    Even the craziness of feminism was, and to a large part still is, a woman thing to most men. We try to avoid it where possible. One, because getting into the middle of it is a quick way to make women hate you. If you win, you’re a bully, if you lose you’re a p#ssy. So homie don’t even play that game. And two, for a good many of us, we know formidable women in our lives. The sort no sane man would mess with. Surely, these redoubtable women could police their own?

    Ah, but we were conned, all of us. It wasn’t just feminism. Nor “racism” (which doesn’t exist because race does not exist). It was all of a piece. The SCM (socialist communist marxist) plot was already in. Near a century ago, even. We’ve talked about such wokism sneaking in when we barely even notice it. It was more subtle, back in the day. That, and they had a lock on mass media at the time. Among other things.

    Men these days are wary of women. The #poundmetoo movement hurt a lot of the native trust between the sexes. We don’t need to go into the reasons for that, the reasons are as obvious as a wet fart in a crowded elevator. And women are mistrustful of men, too. Women are taught, told, and trained that men are oppressors and rape machines. Men have learned that the wrong women can ruin your entire life- job, home life, children, everything they work like slaves and sacrifice everything they are for.

    That’s good for those who seek to be master manipulators. Mistrust amongst ones opponents and even underlings makes for an easier overlordship. Less likelihood of getting your food poisoned and stabbed in your sleep. They want everyone scared and against each other, constantly petitioning the big boss for an edge over their opponents.

    That’s a tribal mindset, by the by. Utterly primitive, yet consistently effective against simple or too naive and trusting opponents.

    There are signs of hope yet though, these days. Some of the young people I work with and mentor are showing signs of throwbacks to earlier times. Young men that hold doors for women, say sir and ma’am, and keep themselves neat and well groomed. Young women that wear long skirts and kerchiefs, carry themselves with feminine grace, and who use courtesy and manners with skill and verve. Such things prove to me that the old culture of America is not yet dead.

    If we as the respectable adults we are can nurture and reward such mature and civilized behaviors properly, all to the good say I. Let us all work towards a future where further generations can grow up into fine young gentlemen and ladies through proper households that teach, train, and prepare them for an often uncaring world. Yet that world still has much beauty in it, nonetheless.

    Go and view a sunrise or sunset, ye who read these words. Seek the natural beauty in the world. Whether wrought by human hands or by nature itself. A little beauty makes the day just a bit brighter.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. I simply adore the degree of courtesy that I get, when I am in my Victorian/Edwardian-era author drag: skirt to my toes, gloves, hat and all. Present and behave like a lady … be treated like a lady.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. This is key. When you present yourself a certain way, and act accordingly, the rules are known. Even proper posture and carrying yourself a certain way has impact.

        During a certain event, I had people looking to me in the emergency and later told me it was just because I was standing tall, looking calm, and taking action. At the time, I was only wearing sweatpants and a ragged tee shirt, but purposeful action tends to get the job done even when, by rights, you’re not properly dressed for the job.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. I am told this is a major issue with overseas service by covert operatives of certain three letter agencies – their posture and bearing and stride and attitude and even the manner in which they look around at their environment is a straight tell to locals that they are not only not local, they are Americans, no matter what other appearance factors they display which might blend in.

          Apparently this takes significant training to mask, and is something that fails easily under stress.

          Liked by 2 people

          1. It’s one of the factors most people don’t really think about, but it is also something almost immediately recognizable. Nonverbal cues is one heck of a rabbit hole.

            Liked by 2 people

          2. Our Hostess has mentioned this from time to time. Americans carry themselves differently than everyone else.

            IIRC, she’s also mentioned shoes as a tell.

            Liked by 2 people

      2. I get treated like a lady in jeans. It is all how one acts and expects. They see my husband and son treating me like a lady. But then I act like one too (or try). Another sees/hears me telling son and husband “thank you” (or another) when they open and hold the door for me.

        I’ve worn long dresses, made them and wore them in college. Don’t now, haven’t in decades. Only wear skirts now at weddings, interviews (which retired so those are done), and funerals. Got away from them with both careers. First was outside in wilderness, or climbing ladders, second was indoors, but often crawling around on floors. The guys I worked with treated me like a lady. I expected it. Being treated like a lady is not special treatment. It is respect.

        Like

  30. Though male I quite like SF&F from a lady’s standpoint. Tamora Pierce’s novels are awesome for example.

    Speed reading is an interesting skill. My old mom can do 3000 wpm, she’s 87. I tried speed reading and decided I didn’t like it. She is an English Literature grad, I am a chemistry grad. So I didn’t need it, but she did.

    As a result I can leisurely take in novels. I don’t want to absorb them in an hour, I want to experience them like watching a movie, or sipping fine wine.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. It’s also a survival skill when you are working two jobs and going to school full time. I can still kill a novel in a short afternoon, but getting one uninterrupted by something is rather unnatural in this day and age. Either a furry apocalypse or friend/family crisis (frozen yoghurt is not a crisis, coz, no matter how much you try and make it one) or something breaks and needs fixing right bloody now.

      Eh. Keeps me out of trouble, I guess. Though it’d be nice if I had more time to write.

      Liked by 2 people

    2. What stopped my speed reading was eye issues more than age.
      Also I don’t dislike SF & F from a female perspective. This is NOT the point of the article. The point of the blog post is that I got tired of female characters being used ONLY to push feminism. CURRENT feminism. Not decent characters, etc.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. Exactly. Tamora Pierce’s characters are ladies. Admittedly sometimes they swing a sword ( :D ). I also like David Weber’s female characters, and also Melissa Scott’s too, even though I don’t agree with her life outlook.

        Like

    3. I read very fast, but I don’t consider it speed-reading. To me, speed-reading is a specific style that is distinct from your normal reading speed, while my reading speed is naturally very fast because it is a skill I have been practicing daily for far more than four decades. I’m getting it voices, setting, and all.

      As a side note, movie pans are very disturbing on a big screen because my persistence of vision doesn’t smooth them out. 30fps, it might be okay, but the classic 24fps is not enough. My eyes apparently track unusually fast.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Same.

        I read fast. Because I read a lot.

        At that anticipated new releases I really try to slow down the reading. Taking pauses. Rarely succeed in letting the novel spread over a week. But I try. End up finishing at 2 AM, almost every single dang time. Now 2 AM after three, two, or one day? Depends.

        Liked by 2 people

  32. IIRC, old-timey blacksmiths had the apprentice pump the bellows for years before letting them get near the metal works. Two reasons: (1) vegetative or coal fires need lots of air over long periods, to get hot enough to work the metal, and (2) pumping the bellows built the muscles to actually swing that hammer all day. Some things just can’t be short-cutted (if this isn’t a word, it should be)

    Liked by 1 person

    1. I suspect the apprentices also absorbed a lot of “what to look for/signs of trouble” by seeing over and over the proper colors of the iron, and the problems that came from wrong temps and fuels.

      And from Journeymen who just had to do it differently, and learned the hard way “why we don’t do that.”

      Like

    3. A buddy (RIP) was a pro knife maker, hammer and forge stuff. He needed a low-cost apprentice, and I needed a hobby and low cost hardware for it.

      The Army failed to add significantly to my upper body strength. a “medium tall” shirt was baggy on me.

      Six months of weekends working all day at a forge? Swinging an 8 pound sledgehammer on hot steel? Damascus making? Hammer faster boss? Medium to XL in 6 months. I got -big-.

      Liked by 2 people

  33. This reminded me of an instagram post by Elizabeth Wheatley. 

    https://www.instagram.com/reel/DPTkji7iVa6/?igsh=MWdhZGdjN3p2MmdrbQ==

    Not sure if a link will work here so I’ll summarize. As part of a campaign to promote the new Witcher book, she asked the author, AS (abbreviating for spelling reasons), what advice he has for writers of historical based fantasy. He said you have to learn history, not just a “school knowledge” of history, but a “deep knowledge.”  

    Modern romance authors don’t even have a school knowledge of history. And now historical romance is apparently dying off.

    Liked by 2 people

    1. Oooooh yes. Once you get past the popular history summaries, the technical and detailed knowledge to get the feel of a time right … Especially if it is something that people know and will ding you on. It has to make sense to both readers, and to the characters, and that means knowing why something was done that way back then, even if it seems strange or bass-akwards today. Why do you use horn to measure some medications, but metal is OK for others? Why were there so many medical preparations for people who were elf shot or hag-ridden? And what does it say about the Church and folk medicine when the recipes call for the blend to sit at the foot of the altar for “nine masses” before being blended with the proper fat to make an ointment?

      But you can’t tell that in the story. You have to show in ways that are perfectly sensible to the characters, and thus to readers. Putting yourself in the pre-modern mind is not easy.

      Liked by 1 person

  34. All these women who grabbed a sword and set out to save the world were sissies. What they needed was to have an hyperactive, smart two year old boy and try to keep him alive through the happy suicidal years, and then they’d learn the limits of their abilities.

    Ah-hah! Story concept: Son of Red Sonja, aged Two and a Half. Wherein the buxom heroine in the chain-mail bikini slashes her way through one adventure after another in constant pursuit of a maniacly fearless (except for bathing) wee man-cub in the hopes of having the child safe and sleeping at home before her beloved mate his father returns from the wars in Cimmeria or the great mammoth hunt or whatever.

    Liked by 1 person

      1. Riding, feeding things to, biting the ears and tail of, co-conspiring with, boasting about it in toddler-speak, enrolling it in races and dog-fights, accidentally wagering half the kingdom on (and winning), and mom is always three steps behind trying to pull him out of ANOTHER mad catastrophe.

        Yep, that’s the one!

        Liked by 1 person

          1. Being serious a moment, the happy suicidal years are a blessing. My beloved still recalls the young boy his mother brought with her to her tax appointment. He sat quietly through the whole appointment, reading. My beloved commented on how well behaved he was.

            Her response: Yes, he’s always like this after chemo.

            Liked by 2 people

  35. I have a list of Pet Peeves of my own. One of them is “alternate history” writers who have the Third Reich (with or without Japanese help) defeating and conquering the US. Look, people, they couldn’t even get across the English Channel, and trust me on this, the Atlantic Ocean is a lot bigger! And Japan was jammed up good and hard with the tar-baby of trying to take over China! A related trope is having the US somehow-or-other falling under a regime that’s the Third Reich in all the details with the serial numbers filed off to fool the cops. Can’t people do any research? Every “Fascist” movement was different and unique to its own nation! Italian Fascism was not like German National Socialism was not like Degrelle’s Rexist movement was not like the Arrow Cross in Hungary or the Iron Guard in Romania.

    Another is future societies that practice chattel slavery (Heinlein [PBUH] committed this in Citizen of the Galaxy). By the time you have sufficient technology for interstellar travel, you’ll have machines that are much better at almost anything than human slaves. Machines don’t get ideas of their own about what they should be doing, don’t raise rebellions, don’t seduce their owner’s womenfolk (a perennial problem in Ancient Rome, or so I am given to understand) and are far less of a PITA in general. Slave labor is inefficient (the South showed clear signs of this in the antebellum era; a lot of tool makers had to have much sturdier tools to sell to the South to cut down on slaves deliberately breaking or damaging them, and the South used mules instead of horses for many things because mules were tougher under slave mistreatment) and generally not good. The only reason authors do this is to have villains that everybody can automatically agree to hate. Rather like the lazy writers I mentioned above who use the Nazis, or Nazi-alikes, as villains because they can’t be arsed to come up with original bad guys.

    In historical fiction, I get very tired of “good guys” who just happen to have attitudes far more suited to the present day than the times they lived in. Nobody in the ancient world wanted to become a slave (usually, but I don’t want to go into endless detail on this) but nobody thought slavery was bad in and of itself. It was like going to prison—it could happen to anybody, but nobody was going around yelling about abolishing slavery. Same goes for capital punishment and things like flogging. Horatio Hornblower doesn’t like floggings, but that’s because he thinks that a well-run ship with a happy crew shouldn’t have them happening. Too many floggings is a sign that something is wrong.

    Liked by 1 person

    1. Human slaves have one major advantage that machines don’t:

      you have total power over another human being.

      That is absolutely worth risking death for, for quite a lot of the world. I don’t get it, mind you, but it is.

      Liked by 4 people

      1. This.

        Sadism is an unfortunately common trait; some psychologists estimate over 3% of the general population. Power over another, inflicting pain on another, is as intoxicating as a hit of cocaine.

        So yes, people will risk death for the chance to totally control another person. Horrid but true.

        Liked by 1 person

    2. Someone genuinely believing that Germany had a chance against the US means that they haven’t done any research at all. The imbalance was simply absurd. My YouTube feed keeps getting videos that are AI narrations of stories about German POWs arriving in the US, seeing what things are like (Coca cola being fed to the POWs, etc…) and realizing that they’d never had a chance at winning the war once the US got involved.

      What doesn’t help matters is the number of wrongly-held beliefs about the German army. One of the keys beliefs is the idea that the Germans were fully mechanized, when that couldn’t be further from the truth.

      On the other hand, the American army *was*, and they provided enough trucks for the British to likewise be fully mechanized. The same happened with the 1st French Army, which fought in Western Europe as part of the US 6th Army Group. The Soviets had too many troops to fully mechanize them, but thanks to American trucks they were able to get vast numbers of troops mounted up that otherwise would have had to try and chase the German army in Summer 1944 on foot.

      And that’s before you even get to the naval situation…

      People talk about how powerful the Bismark was. While I don’t pretend to have done an in depth study of her, I’m genuinely convinced that a modern US battleship of the time, such as the South Dakota or Washington, would have been able to take her. Iowa versus Biskmark would have just been downright embarrassing for the Kriegsmarine.

      (yes, I’m ignoring the aircraft carriers; go away!)

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Spent time in a National Guard camp used as a POW camp for Italian and later German prisoners. The Italians are alleged to have gone singing off to their jobs on the local farms/factories. Several returned to the US after the war either with wives in tow or to marry the girl they met in town…

        Liked by 2 people

        1. I think more than a few German POWs did the same.

          They were generally treated well in the US camps. The US honored the international agreements that stated that POWs should be treated as well as the country’s own troops. Most other countries couldn’t afford to do that even if they were so inclined (*looks pointedly at the Soviets and Japanese…*). That meant that POWs were eating better in the camps than they were when they were free. While I don’t know the mechanics involved (except apparently it had something to do with the Red Cross), one of the AI narrated YouTube videos I saw claimed that some POWs actually sent things home to their families that were easier for the POWs to obtain than it was for their families back home. Additionally, it was effectively impossible for POWs to escape from camps in the US and make it back to the warzone. So, many of them were given opportunities to help out on nearby farms with almost no oversight (and paid for it). And the American farmers that they worked with treated them well.

          The result was POWs who were spoiled by American largesse, and stunned by the wealth and industry of the country. They saw that America was fully participating in fighting a war, and yet the average civilian could go to the local store and buy a bottle of Coke.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. My grandmother– not prone to humor– told me absolutely dead-pan that America had a really really horrible rate of our POWs escaping, but it was all at the end of war, when they’d have been going home. Totally weird, good thing that they must’ve all gotten lost and died in the winter.

            And paperwork back then was so messed up that a lot of folks had cousins from out of the area move in to take over the work those POWs had been doing, but man was the documentation messy. Some were from old immigrant groups that didn’t have great record keeping and still spoke German or Italian, in spite of being in the country for generations.

            …picture a little old lady who could be an extra in Murder, She Wrote saying this with a completely serious expression.

            Liked by 2 people

            2. Oversight was pretty lax on the POW work crews in any case. As I mentioned above, there was no way for them to rejoin the war, aside from doing something really stupid like engaging in sabotage. It made little sense for the POWs to escape. It happened occasionally (even before the end of the war), but so what?

              Like

      2. Re Bismark vs. either the USN or the RN (or frankly even the French if you go alt history enough): Even making the fight in the North Atlantic winter in a rainstorm during an eclipse or somesuch so even the stringbags off the RN carriers can’t matter, let alone the mass of firepower that was even one pre-/early-war USN CV, the main issue was the krauts only made two real BBs, Bismark and Tirpitz, and everyone else had a whole lot more big guns. Add in all the DDs firing torpedoes and the cruisers doing nasty cruiser things, and the Kriegsmarine was just really dumb to even spend a single pfennig building any battleships. They simply didn’t have the industry to build a credible threat fleet.

        Like

        1. “everyone else had a whole lot more big guns.”

          Yes… and no.

          The bulk of the Royal Navy’s battleships were armed with 14″ guns. That included the new King George V-class (including Prince of Wales, which fought in the same engagement where the Hood blew up). Over the course of Bismark’s sortie, she proved to be quite resistant to the RN’s 14″ shells. The Royal Navy had exactly two battleships armed with the more effective 16″ guns, Rodney and Nelson (the former was involved in the final battle). So the RN’s battleships might not have been as effective as one would have hoped.

          The US Navy, on the other hand, commissioned its first battleship with 16″ guns in 1921 (USS Colorado), and never looked back. Every subsequent USN battleship mounted three turrets with three 16″ guns in each turret (the Colorado-class only had eight 16″ guns spread evenly across four turrets).

          Bismark herself carried 38cm guns (just under 15″). The Italian navy was getting old at that point. The French navy was out of the picture. The only post-treaty battleships in the Japanese navy were the Yamato and Musashi (although they mounted 46cm guns, just over 18″; they’re the largest guns ever used in a battleship). That leaves the Soviets, and, well… *coughs to hide laughter*

          Additionally, Bismark and Tirpitz were much faster than the pre-Treaty battleships. Bismark was capable of 30 knots. USS Colorado could only do 23. Post-treaty fast battleships generally had better speed. But as I mentioned above, the post-treaty Royal Navy battleships were the King George V-class, which were only armed with 14″ guns. Only the US Navy had fast battleships with 16″ armament.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. Yes to all, and catching the damn thing was already near impossible for the RN heavies without that stringbag’s torpedo jamming Bismark’s rudder, but my point is they only built two, and RAF and RN air did exist.

            Even if Bismark had made it under Luftwaffe fighter cover and into Brest in France, it would have been in the same boat (heh) as Scharnhorst, Gneisenau, and Prinz Eugen, which had the snot bombed out of them sitting in harbor until the Channel Dash. Sure, the mustache fellow was a naval moron who basically grounded the Kriegsmarine after the Bismark was lost (and apparently after Japanese naval air sank Prince of Wales and Repulse in the Indian Ocean – cite: https://warfarehistorynetwork.com/article/operation-cerberus-the-kriegsmarine-channel-dash/) but even with Bismark repaired I doubt the Kriegsmarine could have done anything useful towards the Germans winning the war from Brest.

            If the Germans had waited and got five more years of shipbuilding in, maybe that fleet could have mounted a real breakout into the Atlantic, but everyone else would have been building for five more years too.

            On the other hand, if the Germans had build only u-boats for five more years England would have starved.

            But only two of those fast heavy gun battleships were just really of no use.

            Like

    3. There will still be slavery if you’re exporting them to worlds with less machinery, etc. Which I think was the setup in Citizen.
      …. societies aren’t rational. slavery is a very attractive vice to people who want to rule over others.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. I remember reading a space opera with space Romans where the slaves were often people who basically agreed to it for the free healthcare and food/lodging. I wasn’t 100% sure I bought it, but as a fig leaf for a particular set of improbabilities in a series that was mostly about other stuff, I didn’t mind it.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Like much of the Roman society, slavery was engineered. It was a way to turn surplus defeated folk and surplus criminals into productivity, and keep them too busy to revolt. The hard-heads that just had to get uppity were the examples nailed up on crosses along major roads. (or worse, always was there “worse”.) There were methods to get oneself emancipated, in theory, which also took some of the pressure off the system. Very much also an element of dom/sub and demonstrating same.

          One of the chief reasons Rome never really had any chance at an “industrial revolution” is that saving labor meant idling slaves. And That Just Will Not Do.

          Liked by 2 people

        2. It happened. I don’t know enough about Rome, but in Anglo-Saxon England, we have a document where a woman freed a bunch of slaves, mostly those who had “given her their heads for food in the evil times.”

          In Russia in the time of Ivan the Terrible, it was the done thing for people to sell themselves in slavery for a time when they were down and out.

          Liked by 1 person

        3. slaves were often people who basically agreed to it for the free healthcare and food/lodging.

          I can see if for people who are particularly desperate or haven’t found an ambition yet.

          Liked by 2 people

      2. There are still slaves in our modern world, although many are turning a blind eye to outright slavery in Other Places.

        But! I will argue that Putin’s Russia is engaging in contract slavery from other countries, such as soldiers from North Korea and (just heard today) Cuba. The Cubans, reportedly, are often tricked onto the front lines in Ukraine. They think they’re signing up for construction jobs. Putin is stealing Ukrainian children wholesale as well.

        So maybe slaves will be filling the roles that used to be filled by citizens, when those citizens failed to be born. (Kinda infelicitous phrasing, but then the unborn citizen is a new phenomenon.)

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Nah. Rome had a big problem with falling population. They even allowed women who had three (or four if a freedwoman) living children to be free of the manus in their fathers’ lifetimes. It didn’t work.

          Liked by 1 person

          1. True, but there’s a difference between a state having a problem with a decrease in population, and kidnapping people to fulfill roles such as “child,” and “soldier.”

            For much of human history, countries’ population rested on a knife’s edge, due to deaths from poor harvests, illness, random violence and wars. Modern medicine and the agricultural revolution led to large increases in population, but it’s unusual for population to decrease due to a prolonged decrease in births, which is being observed across the world.

            Forty years ago or so, it seemed to me that political leaders in Europe thought that young citizens would take elder care jobs in the future (i.e., now.) So there wasn’t as much of a need to invest in educating the children. I thought it odd at the time–wouldn’t young people move to opportunity? Why would you stay home to change adult diapers at low wages, rather than emigrate? And it did happen. You can’t force people even to stay in the same country, if there’s a better deal somewhere else.

            It would be paradoxical if a decrease in population were to lead to an increase in slavery. I know I’ve read science fiction stories in the past set in worlds in which countries bid for contract workers. Really, reading science fiction has been very valuable as a guide to life in the 21st century.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Modern medicine and the agricultural revolution led to large increases in population, but it’s unusual for population to decrease due to a prolonged decrease in births, which is being observed across the world.

              :raises a finger in mild correction:

              Which is being reported around the world.

              And it’s noteworthy that you describe it as a decrease in births, when the screamers go for birth rate— I think we can be fairly sure the recorded births for the US are accurate, and those haven’t been “adjusted for under-counting” since 1960.

              They’ve gone up and down from 3.5 and 4.3 million a year, since then, except for a couple of years in the mid seventies when they popped down to 3.1-ish million.

              The “we are all going to die from no babies” freak out right now?

              Is the same numbers of births that were around when our median population were kids. And in the ’50s.

              We don’t have a clue how many kids are born in countries where “we have lots of babies” is either an ego boost or a way to get money.

              What we definitely do have is the “youth generation” retiring in job lots and having to face that yeah, the folks they grew up with are dying of old age.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. Well, in Germany and Japan, it’s not just reported. They’re at the point of closing schools, due to a lack of students. This leads to unemployment for teachers, a drop in spending for children’s toys, clothes, extra bedrooms, etc. Property values are falling in Germany, due to a lack of demand, especially outside the marquee cities. Japanese villages are dying out. In Japan, finding people who died alone in their apartments is a routine event. https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cwyx6wwp5d5o

                Liked by 1 person

                1. Please note that your original statement was on numbers of births falling world-wide.

                  Not one country which is famous for their number of children going down, and another that… when I go look… is in a second slight lowering (matching 2010ish) after a lower-and-increase post reunification, in spite of being a notably horrible place to live as far as punishing the young for being young, and making it difficult to live at all.

                  https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Population/Births/Tables/lrbev04.html#242410

                  Since Germany is wholesale importing third world barbarians and indulging them in their worst behaviors, there are other reasons for drops in property value, etc.

                  Like

                  1. After I posted my original comment about Germany, this ad popped up on the next page to be loaded: https://www.make-it-in-germany.com/en/?gad_source=5&gad_campaignid=15513688790

                    Make it in Germany.com. There are openings in many industries, from shipping to IT. Someone in the German government is worried enough to pay for linked ads abroad.

                    The page you linked–births are now only 2/3rd of deaths. In the last 10 years, the trend has been increasingly negative. That’s alarming.

                    Liked by 1 person

                    1. The page you linked–births are now only 2/3rd of deaths. In the last 10 years, the trend has been increasingly negative. That’s alarming.

                      What pattern would you expect to result when there was a massive decrease in all-cause mortality, and a minor increase in life expectancy over 60?

                      When neither of those increases continues at the same rate?

                      Like

              2. “having to face that yeah, the folks they grew up with are dying of old age“

                –

                Raises hand. Having hit our 50th year from graduation, my classmates appear to be dropping fast. Still a small percentage but dang.

                I can’t be “old”. Why? Mom is still alive. She’s “old”. She’s 90. I’m within a week of being 89. The observation was made by mom today that we are going to a funeral of someone we have known for 62 years (new neighbor when we moved into the house mom & dad built in ’63). That mom knows of only one other person, who was an adult back then, that all 3 of them knew, who is still alive.

                Are there going to be any one to come to mom’s funeral/memorial when it happens? Yes. Won’t be her same age contemporaries that she went to school with, or the parents of those me and my sisters went to school with, but there will be other than us, our spouses, grandchildren, great-grands, and the nieces and nephews progeny. For that matter her brother and sister and their spouses are still alive, as well as a few inlaws (time has been harder on dad’s siblings and spouses for all that four were quite younger than mom and dad).

                Liked by 2 people

    4. I remember in one of May Renault’s historical novels a Greek father sternly telling the protagonist not to look down on his slaves precisely because it could happen to anyone.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. And as often as you reflect how much power you have over a slave, remember that your master has just as much power over you. “But I have no master,” you say. You are still young; perhaps you will have one. Do you not know at what age Hecuba entered captivity, or Croesus, or the mother of Darius, or Plato, or Diogenes?
        —Seneca

        Liked by 1 person

    5. Don’t forget that a large amount of modern slavery is the euphemistically-titled “human trafficking.” You know, the kind of things they’re grabbing teen runaways for.

      Liked by 1 person

    6. By the time you have sufficient technology for interstellar travel, you’ll have machines that are much better at almost anything than human slaves.

      Ah, but that’s when having a human slave becomes a status symbol!

      Everybody and their brother has mechanical chattel. Only the Rich have humans to do what a machine could.

      Liked by 1 person

  36. A person who has not pleasure in a good bit of humor has no business teaching Jane Austen. 😀 in terms of Emma adaptations specifically, I’ve seen most of them, barring only Clueless (as a 90s teenager, I really didn’t want to watch other 90s teenagers) and the 2009 miniseries (because it’s a major time commitment and its fans are ***holes). It’s fashionable to virtue-signal against Gwyneth Paltrow in general and her Emma in particular, but I thought that one did a good job of…trivializing her? Making her a stupid ditz who shouldn’t be taken too seriously and who won’t end up doing permanent damage to anyone’s lives? That version also has the best Knightley, for my money. The 2020 version with Anya Taylor-Joy has the best production design (PRETTY CLOTHES) and is probably the most upfront about considering Emma a fairly bad person who needs to be taken down a peg.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. I still need to watch that one. Actually, I don’t think I saw the Gwyneth Paltrow one, come to think of it.

      I have not seen the P&P Kiera Knightly movie, because from various indications I would just get mad at it.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. A word of warning on Emma 2020 with Anya Taylor-Joy: there is some brief “artistic” rear nudity (man disrobing in front of his servants.) I don’t think anyone here is likely to be shocked by it, but something to keep in mind if you’re likely to be viewing it with, say, teen or pre-teen girls who have strict parents. (For now. We are maybe five years and a bunch of Hollywood lawsuits away from being able to tell the clankas we need to lightly sanitize a particular viewing of a particular movie for a specific audience, and getting the bots to do it for us.)

        Liked by 1 person

      2. No matter what one may think of the P&P Kiera Knightly movie, I’ll note that it has absolutely *gorgeous* music. It was nominated for an Oscar, although it didn’t get the win.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. The music to that one didn’t do much for me, but then again, I think Ecstasy of Gold and the Shire Theme both overstay their welcomes in their respective films, so this is probably a me problem. 😀 the one gotta see part of the Keira Knightley version is the assembly ball, which is considered fairly authentic and makes a very good case for why Darcy doesn’t want to be there.

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          1. Interesting about the ball. Because the impression that I came away with is that the setting in the Kiera Knightly movie was a few decades prior to when we usually see the story set in a movie or mini-series.

            But I don’t pretend to have much knowledge on the subject.

            Liked by 1 person

            1. Here’s the thing about P&P: the plot seems to require the local market town to have a militia regiment billeted upon it, which was an early/mid 1790s thing, mostly ended by 1796. The novel itself was supposedly first drafted around 1796 but only published in a heavily revised version in 1813. So alot of adaptations go with the clothing and furniture styles of when the novel was published, and just kind of ignore any implications that it might have been set earlier. (I feel like one of the older TV versions tries to square the circle by saying the militia lives in barracks, but don’t quote me on that.) The Keira Knightley version is set in a somewhat stylized, “cottagecore” version of the 1790s.

              Liked by 1 person

  37. I find it amusing that this article was posted on the same day that Japan, for the first time ever, just voted in a majority in a party that has a female leader (who will probably be Japan’s next prime minister very soon). And she’s a conservative who looks up to Margaret Thatcher.

    I saw someone make the observation elsewhere that for all the left’s talk about women, it’s the conservative parties that seem to do a better job electing women to the top spot.

    It’s probably also worth noting that the conservative parties in both Germany and France are currently led by women (and my understanding is that the head of AfD is also a lesbian, to boot). And of course there’s Italy’s current leader, who is also a conservative (for Europe) woman.

    Liked by 3 people

    1. And in VA the Republican candidate is a black woman. And if you haven’t heard, take a gander at the current awfulness in the VA Democratic scene. When your Attorney General candidate is found to have fantasized (in writing, to someone who didn’t care for it) about putting two bullets in the head of the former Republican Speaker…

      Liked by 3 people

      1. The Reader notes that the Republican candidate for Lt. Governor here in the Commonwealth is an openly gay male and the current Republican Attorney General is Hispanic. The Reader voted for all of them despite knowing that his Northern Neck ancestors turned over in their graves at the thought.

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    2. It has occurred to me that women, biologically, should be naturally conservative. We have to consider the survival of our offspring–which means settling down young with a good provider/protector. Men, biologically, can afford to fritter away their young days, and if their woman/babies get eaten by wolves, well, they can produce children in old age. With multiple women.

      It’s taken an amazing amount of propaganda to convince females to think otherwise. Truly, an impressive achievement for the party of the Father of Lies.

      Liked by 3 people

      1. Not propaganda — changing the situation. Specifically, poisoning the network of support so the only thing there is, is the immediate.

        That’s why the Progs work to prevent alternate power structures. They can’t compete on merits with the stupid social games, so it has to be the only option.

        Which is why they pour so much time and effort into the war between the sexes. The most worthless thing on earth, for their power, is a couple who have become truly one against the world, and their children.

        So they have to farm up fear, uncertainty, and doubt in all aspects, remove support structures, and go flamico dancing with the “isn’t that cult behavior?” red flags.

        Liked by 2 people

        1. Part of this is chopping away at the idea of maintenance– which is a lot of what “women’s work” is. Upkeeping and taking care of stuff before it gets big.

          Just like in business, as all our tech support guys know, you’re supposed to magically prevent the need for big repairs with no resources including time, and the resources you have swiped for someone’s Big New Idea which will then be left to fall apart for lack of work in upkeep.

          Liked by 4 people

          1. “Just like in business, as all our tech support guys know, you’re supposed to magically prevent the need for big repairs with no resources including time, and the resources you have swiped for someone’s Big New Idea…”

            An ubiquitous problem that led me to develop my theory of “Crisis Design Engineering” that I explain in my work biography “A Geek’s Progress” https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0C3N2N14N. We did that successfully with Y2K, so well that everybody not in the know considers it wildly overhyped.

            Liked by 2 people

            1. There was a lot of work that was done correctly, so nothing blew up, so obviously it was not a real thing. To morons. And MBAs. But I repeat myself.

              And I will note that managerial “I don’t know how to do it, so it must be easy” is a real widespread thing.

              I have friends who made a whole bunch of money fixing COBOL code for Y2K, basically enough to really retire and be done. It was real difficult work. Definitely a real thing.

              Liked by 1 person

              1. And they will generously offer to change the requirements — for instance, let you deliver it in stages — to make it easier!

                Even after you’ve pointed out that when you’ve been told to leap the Grand Canyon, being told you can do it in two jumps is not generous.

                Liked by 3 people

            2. I started my career on Y2K and because of those who “can get close but it won’t do exactly what I want”. Then the tool I was forced to use (was moving away from it but had a lot of legacy code still running) decided an upgrade was going to “fix” that “bug”. There had to be a way around that problem, given how I’d come up with the code blocks, but company assets sold and offices shutdown. The two companies that bought the assets swore they didn’t need one single programmer as they already had 5 or six (depending on which company). Documented the issues (there was this one plus a hardware problem) and walked away.

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      2. Clairk, You are right. Married women with children vote overwhelmingly conservative. It’s the unmarried, childless, career-first women who make up the backbone of the socialist left, especially those who have degrees that require government subsidies. The propaganda is aimed at convincing young women not to either get married or have children.

        Liked by 2 people

      3. As an opposing view, as it were, men may be biologically able to fritter away their younger days and many do. But the men who want families? The ones who desire the ideal of home, wife, children, and a future together? These men are as adamantly conservative as any, I would say.

        Serial partners is unsatisfying. Stability allows for growth. Allows a man to build something that will stand the test of time. Forming and raising a family is something well worth pursuing, for a man with his head on straight. It isn’t easy, but we men are genetically driven to seek challenge. Fatherhood and being a good husband is a great bloody challenge. Well worth the effort put into it.

        Liked by 1 person

        1. Agree that men may want stability at a young age, just as women may not hear the ticking of their biological clocks until the alarm rings. But men have the option, biologically, to pursue a career or play the field until they are in their mid forties. A woman who does that risks not having any offspring at all,

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          1. Men are risking it as well– when the man had to get well established in order to provide for a family, it was different.

            Now?

            An older husband means decades alone, after he dies. Assuming that he isn’t addicted to gadding about, which… looking around at the dating culture since the 60s, where there’s guys who have been “dating” since I was a teen, occasionally marrying for a while… isn’t the way to bet.

            Which is why the folks running on “destroy the connection between the sexes” goals has started in on making it so women don’t have an option but to go for the “high status” guys. (Which has never worked before, but if they scream really loud and stamp their feet, insisting that the little hook-up pool they’re fixating on is really the whole of the species….)

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              1. And all men are dismissing anything female that’s older than 16, less than athletic, and lacking in… excessive frontal buoyancy.

                The grapes are just as sour from the other side, you know.

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              2. There’s some of that going on, but it’s not quite that bad.

                I’ll also add that I suspect a lot of that is strictly limited to on-line dating (including apps) that messes with the available “pool”. If a woman’s dating pool is the guys in her geographical area, then she probably has a pretty good idea of her shot with the top tier guys. If her dating pool is the 100,000 guys who use the same dating app she does (with along with 25,000 other women), then it’s going to distort her perceptions about what is and isn’t available. And since these are the people who are online, they’re also the ones that you’re most likely to hear about when you’re online.

                I also saw an interesting observation the other day. A female influencer who largely focuses her attention on the men (and who is married; she had her husband as a guest on her latest video) noted that the streamer women who give advice in their streams on how a woman can get a good husband are generally single themselves. She had a rationale for that which I won’t get into here, but her general point holds. The women providing the most marriage advice to the large body of random women on the internet are, themselves, not exactly proven experts at it.

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                1. ll also add that I suspect a lot of that is strictly limited to on-line dating (including apps) that messes with the available “pool”. 

                  Bingo.

                  Although I am very, very amused by some of the articles where I dug into the studies they were referencing, and it was based off of Grindr surveys.

                  ….for what it’s worth, I’d gone looking because based on the details given, I’d guessed it would be an anonymous sex app. I just hadn’t figured it would be the biggest name anonymous gay sex app being used for “this is what dating is like today.”

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                2. The women providing the most marriage advice to the large body of random women on the internet are, themselves, not exactly proven experts at it.

                  That’s who’s saying stuff that gets attention, and often that folks want to hear. (know your market, right?)

                  All our married buddies? Can’t get anyone to listen when we try to tell them how to find a good husband or wife– they all go to people who have been dating for decades. In one memorable case, the flock of teens dismissed my husband explaining that knowing your spouse really well before you married and made babies was a Very Good Thing because that wasn’t “romantic.” Both sexes were expecting the magical other to swoop in and make everything awesome with no risk and 100% satisfaction.

                  Yeah, sometimes the guy who has six broken marriages knows what’s up, and sometimes the pr0n star has good advice, but it’s not going to be “do just like I do and you’ll get what I have never managed to get!”

                  … I’ll admit it’s kind of funny to have folks lecture me on proper relationship advice based on folks who can’t manage decent relationships, though.

                  “But so and so has a popular show, they must know what they’re talking about!” “How many successful relationships do they have?” “Uh…he gets laid a lot?” “… is that what you are trying for, or do you want to find your other half? Kinda matters.”

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              3. No, that’s bullshit of such low quality that the faintest attempt to reality check it would blow it sky high– and I have linked to the one fig-leaf of evidence for repeatedly.

                https://archive.fo/BtTP2

                The very, very short version is that when you design a dating system so that rating someone at the highest level sends them a note saying “hi, you’re cute,” very few women will hit that button.

                Which, again, is basic reality testing.

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              4. Here, I’ll fix it for you:

                70% of the women willing to do no strings sex with strangers are dismissing 99% of available men from consideration.

                That it’s a tiny sub-section of actual women doesn’t matter– it flatters the traditional progressive resource of easy chicks and abuses those who don’t put out, who do everything that we’re told “women need to do” to “fix the dating culture”… and we’re ignored, because if she doesn’t trip you and beat you to the floor, she’s not interested.

                :disgusted sound:

                Heck with that.

                Date friends.

                Even though that requires being a friend, first and foremost– I was trying to find a gal good enough for my good buddy when he clued me in that he had really weird taste in women, and was interested in me. Because that is what a real friend does.

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            2. On the other hand, a younger man can get away with not having an established fortune (of sorts). An older guy looking for a wife is expected to have something to show for his age.

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              1. :nod:

                My husband is only a little older than I am. We got going just out of the Navy, nothing established but us.

                These days the only gals who don’t hear “play the field” and get the f’ away are the ones who are also playing the field, or are too innocent to realize they’re the next on the list to be used.

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    4. There’s an argument that it is less amusing and more sad.

      That the feminist leadership culture is so toxic that the folks raised within it are so often too insane to really compete as top leadership talent.

      And that the people not trying to deliberately promote whatevers wind up nurturing those talents better.

      Liked by 1 person

      1. Might be sad, but seems true.

        When you select for anything other than doing the job, the ability to do the job goes down.

        And the skills to get in to power aren’t the same as upkeeping the structure.

        Liked by 2 people

  38. I apologize folks if somebody has already said this stuff. I spent most of the day fixing the Son of SilverCon website, then trying to fit my wife’s giant novel into a paperback format after already having spent a whole day using the wrong format, so I just now got the chance to read Sarah’s post, and I haven’t had time to read all the comments.

    “Why in the name of all that is holy SHOULD the highest aspiration of a woman be to become a man?”

    Oh my stars, yes! We need to treat individuals as individuals with their own distinct talents and eccentricities. The idiot marxist notion that your group identity is what says everything about you is the exact opposite of that. Marie Sklodowska and Sofia Korvin-Krukovskaya were given grief for that very reason. They were treated as if “all women” applied to them. Clearly it did not. They were exceptional as have been many other women.

    As to the fifties fantasies, I was raised in the fifties in a middle class family, and I can tell you the Donna Reed in heels and a print dress in the kitchen business was just as much a fantasy of the MEN on Madison Avenue as the, “I shot a bear in my Maidenform bra” ads were.

    As I read your essay Sarah, I couldn’t help thinking about Thomas Hardy’s Far From the Madding Crowd. That book describes a woman thrust uncomfortably into managing her deceased uncle’s estate. Seriously I wish the writers you describe had at least read that book, but as you say, they doubtlessly never actually read Jane Austen either. I can also recommend The Mayor of Casterbridge, but for the love of God, Montresor, don’t read his other novels. It’s one thing to read a extremely clever downer of a tragedy and quite another to read one where every character is too stupid for words. <end rant>

    Liked by 3 people

    1. I mean, if you can do kitchen work in heels and a sundress, you’re probably already married at this point, today. Traditional femininity is in as much demand as traditional masculinity these days, despite all the howls and cries of the idiots and fools of the world.

      Liked by 1 person

    2. “I shot a bear in my Maidenform bra” ads were.

      Obligatory: “What the bear was doing in my bra, I’ll never know”

      Liked by 2 people

    2. The video game equivalent of this comes up a lot. Critics of video gamers claim that video gamers just don’t like female protagonists in video games. Then the video gamers point out that there have been popular female video game protagonists for decades.

      Another item I saw recently was people noting that today’s reviled “misogynist male-gaze” female protagonist is tomorrow’s claimed feminist icon. As an example, Bayonetta (whose long dress and weapons are made of her extremely long hair; and her hair can’t serve as both at once…) was once reviled as a misogynistic depiction of women. But by the time 2B arrived in Neir: Automata, Bayonetta was claimed as the feminist icon that 2B (who does nothing worse than wear a short dress) should have really been modeled after. Now it’s Stellar Blade’s Eve who is the reviled character that should be more like 2B. And most likely in a few years, Eve will be the role model protagonist that we’re told the feminists always liked, as opposed to the latest female protagonist to draw their ire.

      Liked by 2 people

      1. Sounds a lot like the way today’s Designated Hitler in American politics always evolves into tomorrow’s level-headed elder statesman who turns out to be vastly preferably to that generation’s Designated Hitler.

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  40. Fairy tales can have girl bosses.

    The thing is that they are always the love interest. They are the Mad Ogre’s Beautiful Daughter, with magic. They are the princess whose kingdom has the treasure the prince needs to heal his father (I drew on the latter for The Enchanted Princess Wakes, and both for Even After.)

    On the other hand, they are also the princess who sets challenges to wooers and cuts off their heads if they fail, or the princess who tricks the hero out of his magical treasures until he steals them back. Dude, why do you marry her? (Let’s hear if for the French fairy tales, where he does.)

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  41. OK, totally off topic, but I have two things I want to get off my chest. In light of the depraved celebrations on the anniversary of the barbaric attack on Israel civilians, I read a lot of stuff about the European and even US “elites” who are so divorced from reality that they are actually stoking the Islamic fervor to overthrow the West. Like many terms redefined by the Left, “elites” implies some sense of nobility or at least achievement. IMO we should always call them “The Entitled”. They are the infamous ones in the elegant metaphor who were born on third base and think they hit a triple and their well-paid sycophants.

    One other unrelated topic is online news. I address it here because I think a lot of us use the same sites. The 3 sites I check every morning for news are Instapundit, Powerline, and Accordingtohoyt (of course). Sarah’s site and Instapundit are fine, but Powerline is so riddled with obnoxious ads that I resort to using my browser’s reader app. I understand content creators’ need for money, and I’m a paid substack subscriber to hollymathnerd, an insightful commentator. I also contribute to Sarah’s funding appeals when she has them because she’s worth it. But I’m not going to sign up for a constant drain on my bank account (that I’m not even sure will prevent all the ads) for sites like Powerline and PJMedia. I don’t mind ads to the side of the screen or even the occasional one in the midst of Instapundit’s voluminous content scroll, but the nature of the latest ads on sites like Powerline and PJMedia are constantly popping up and obscuring the content I’m in the middle of reading. Auto-playing videos and constantly resizing ad windows that make my eyes feel like they’re on trampolines are just too much. Instead of pushing me to subscribe, these ads push me to use ad-free reader app that allows me to actually read the article.

    Whew, I feel much better. Now I return you to your regularly scheduled comments section.

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  43. Pingback: Instapundit » Blog Archive » AND MEN. AND THE FUTURE:  For The Sake Of Women.

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