why i'm not into renaissance festivals
i'm congested, sneezy, and grouchy from allergies, and i watched rob roy for the first time today. none of this was especially fun.
it's an okay movie. liam neeson is totally hot. tim roth and a guy whose name i won't disclose because it's a spoiler are very creepy villains. and you know i love dudes in kilts.
but dude, what's with all the self-impressed, soft-focus, wistful shots of the Simple Peasant Life? europe in the 1700s and several centuries before was fucking awful for most people! least favorite things: the part where your parentage determined your place in the world; where 'nobles' are accountable to almost no one, no matter how ignoble their behavior; where anyone who had no property had no rights; where women were pretty much property, where rape was even more commonplace than it is now, where there was no reliable birth control, and where poor working women were automatically dismissed with no recourse from their jobs for being pregnant or bearing children out of wedlock - but the 'noble' men who impregnated them suffered nothing; where the penalty for stealing livestock was death; where winter regularly killed people; where poor diet and near-nonexistent medical care meant that a peasant who lived to be 50 was omg old; where prisoners were routinely dragged behind horses and summarily hanged. in short, the part where unless you were royalty, your life was not your own.
yeah, okay, lots of the clothes were pretty. but other than that... how, exactly, is this fun? it's the softcore porn version of history - all the messy parts are edited out, everything's all shinied up, everybody's very young, and women don't much matter. yeah, no, thanks.
things i very much like that we've come up with since then: human rights, notably elected leadership, equality before the law, and universal suffrage; social mobility; sanitation; contraception; antibiotics; refrigeration; reliable food supplies; the germ theory of disease; modern pharmacology.
yeah, that's right. sometimes i'm a closet humanist. I BELIEVE IN PROGRESS. take your simpler time and shove it up your arse.
it's an okay movie. liam neeson is totally hot. tim roth and a guy whose name i won't disclose because it's a spoiler are very creepy villains. and you know i love dudes in kilts.
but dude, what's with all the self-impressed, soft-focus, wistful shots of the Simple Peasant Life? europe in the 1700s and several centuries before was fucking awful for most people! least favorite things: the part where your parentage determined your place in the world; where 'nobles' are accountable to almost no one, no matter how ignoble their behavior; where anyone who had no property had no rights; where women were pretty much property, where rape was even more commonplace than it is now, where there was no reliable birth control, and where poor working women were automatically dismissed with no recourse from their jobs for being pregnant or bearing children out of wedlock - but the 'noble' men who impregnated them suffered nothing; where the penalty for stealing livestock was death; where winter regularly killed people; where poor diet and near-nonexistent medical care meant that a peasant who lived to be 50 was omg old; where prisoners were routinely dragged behind horses and summarily hanged. in short, the part where unless you were royalty, your life was not your own.
yeah, okay, lots of the clothes were pretty. but other than that... how, exactly, is this fun? it's the softcore porn version of history - all the messy parts are edited out, everything's all shinied up, everybody's very young, and women don't much matter. yeah, no, thanks.
things i very much like that we've come up with since then: human rights, notably elected leadership, equality before the law, and universal suffrage; social mobility; sanitation; contraception; antibiotics; refrigeration; reliable food supplies; the germ theory of disease; modern pharmacology.
yeah, that's right. sometimes i'm a closet humanist. I BELIEVE IN PROGRESS. take your simpler time and shove it up your arse.