(no subject)
It occurred to me, while I was cleaning the bathtub, just how much a lot of the popular rhetoric around the medieval European witch-craze is really, really offensive, and that apparently I need to write about it on the internet instead of cleaning the sink.
To start, it's really, really depressing that its apparently easier to believe that accused witches were part of a massive, well-hidden secret religion whose truths were only learned in the late 19th century and early 20th by an assortment of highly dubious "scholars", than that misogyny is a really big, really terrible...reality. Yes, a massive secret cult, for which there's extremely little evidence aside from a few superstitions hovering halfway outside the predominant strains of Christianity, as opposed to the idea that patriarchy (which is pretty obvious) is profoundly threatened by women perceived as deviant, and that torture will extract just about any confession you want. Also, it's not like people were fucking out of their minds because of social upheavals, climate changes, plagues, xenophobia, Millennarian splinter sects left right and centre, and thus generally paranoid and extra-authoritarian. Nah, none of that provable stuff. None of that stuff we actually are dealing with now, and should maaaaybe consider addressing. Much more comforting to go with the ancient mother-goddess stuff that was mostly made up in the late 30s.
And then there's the people who actually have the fucking gall to refer to it as "The Women's Holocaust". Are they aware that there were women in the Holocaust/Porrajmos/Shoah? Because WTF is this shit. It's depressing enough that panic and patriarchy slaughtered 35000-50000 people, mostly women without making shit up. (It's also really telling that the massacres of Jewish people of the time also don't get much airtime.)
Now, back to the cleaning of All The Things, and my apparent muse, Bleach Fumes.
To start, it's really, really depressing that its apparently easier to believe that accused witches were part of a massive, well-hidden secret religion whose truths were only learned in the late 19th century and early 20th by an assortment of highly dubious "scholars", than that misogyny is a really big, really terrible...reality. Yes, a massive secret cult, for which there's extremely little evidence aside from a few superstitions hovering halfway outside the predominant strains of Christianity, as opposed to the idea that patriarchy (which is pretty obvious) is profoundly threatened by women perceived as deviant, and that torture will extract just about any confession you want. Also, it's not like people were fucking out of their minds because of social upheavals, climate changes, plagues, xenophobia, Millennarian splinter sects left right and centre, and thus generally paranoid and extra-authoritarian. Nah, none of that provable stuff. None of that stuff we actually are dealing with now, and should maaaaybe consider addressing. Much more comforting to go with the ancient mother-goddess stuff that was mostly made up in the late 30s.
And then there's the people who actually have the fucking gall to refer to it as "The Women's Holocaust". Are they aware that there were women in the Holocaust/Porrajmos/Shoah? Because WTF is this shit. It's depressing enough that panic and patriarchy slaughtered 35000-50000 people, mostly women without making shit up. (It's also really telling that the massacres of Jewish people of the time also don't get much airtime.)
Now, back to the cleaning of All The Things, and my apparent muse, Bleach Fumes.