fyi
Comments about Black Lives Matter protesters being agents of a Republican and/or government conspiracy = automatic unfollow. I just can’t deal with that shit.
Depictions of Lesbianism by Henri Toulouse Lautrec
During his life, Lautrec spent a lot of time in Montmarte, the bohemian centre of 19th century Paris and home to artists, philosophers, writers, performers, and prostitutes. He spent a lot of time with the sex workers there, and discovered that many of them had intimate relationships with one another.
Lautrec’s depiction of lesbianism is particularly notable because it doesn’t fetishise sexual intimacy between women or present it as spectacle for the male gaze. Lautrec was trying to capture small, tender moments in the lives of the women he met, and he did so with humanity and sensitivity. In a world of constructed sexuality and fantasy, he finds the real relationships, and reveals to us the hidden lives of queer women in the 19th century.
Fin-de-siècle Paris was the capital of lesbianism. However, until the mid century, and despite the acknowledgment of male homosexuality, female homosexuality had been considered absurd. This scepticism was grounded in the fact that many nineteenth-century psychologists and medical professionals did not believe in female sexual impulse. Thus, when instances of lesbianism were reported in Alexandre Parent-Duchâtelet’s 1836 study of prostitution in Paris, lesbianism came to be understood as an activity associated with the Montmartre counterculture and, in particular, with prostitution. Indeed, deluxe houses of tolerance often functioned as specialty brothels that catered for a clientele with particular fetishes, such as tableaux vivants where ‘inmates, entirely naked, abandon themselves to homosexual practices on a large black velvet carpet or in rooms hung with black satin to bring out the whiteness of their bodies’. This was lesbianism as commercial spectacle, performed within a closed environment for male consumption.
Lesbianism in the public realm was a sexual preference that, while common, was negatively judged by French conservative society and for this reason was conducted with subtlety and partially obscured. In fact, many of the biggest stars of the Parisian circuses, dance halls and café-concerts were lesbian or bisexual, including Jane Avril and May Milton (whom, it is generally agreed, had a short-lived love affair), Sarah Bernhardt, Cha-u-ka-o and La Goulue. Whilst these Montmartre celebrities were depicted on multiple occasions by Lautrec, the artist chose to represent them as skilled professionals, never exploiting their sexual preference as the main focus of his compositions. So subtle was Lautrec in his treatment of these themes that art historians such as David Sweetman have gone so far as to argue that ‘It comes as something of a shock to realise that most of the women … were in fact lesbians and that quite a few were lovers. So many, in fact, that it is possible to argue that lesbianism is the hidden subtext of much of the art of Henri’s mature years.’
- from nga.gov.au
Images shown:
1. At the Moulin Rouge: The Women Dancing
2. In Bed
3. The Kiss
4. Two Friends
5. Les Deux Amies
so beautiful!
(via hangingfire)
Jim Crow segregation meant that African American travelers couldn’t count on the typical parts of a road trip: filling the tank at a gas station, grabbing a bite at a restaurant, or staying the night in a motel. This book mapped out a safe route of accommodations, and came out every year from 1937 through 1964.
Its 1948 edition contained this quote from publishers Victor and Alma Green:
“There will be a day sometime in the near future when this guide will not have to be published. That is when we as a race will have equal opportunities and privileges in the United States. It will be a great day for us to suspend this publication for then we can go wherever we please, and without embarrassment.”
You can learn more about The Green Book on tumblr by following mappingthegreenbook
Wow! This is so interesting and inspiring.
(via johndarnielle)
Noel Shiveley
I could use a whole stack of cards with this on them that I could pass out wordlessly when necessary.
(via unrational)
‘I’m No Longer Afraid’: 35 Women Tell Their Stories About Being Assaulted by Bill Cosby, and the Culture That Wouldn’t Listen
By Noreen Malone and Portfolio By Amanda Demme
More has changed in the past few years for women who allege rape than in all the decades since the women’s movement began. Consider the evidence of October 2014, when an audience member at a Hannibal Buress show in Philadelphia uploaded a clip of the comedian talking about Bill Cosby: “He gets on TV, ‘Pull your pants up, black people … I can talk down to you because I had a successful sitcom.’ Yeah, but you rape women, Bill Cosby, so turn the crazy down a couple notches … I guess I want to just at least make it weird for you to watch Cosby Showreruns. Dude’s image, for the most part, it’s fucking public Teflon image. I’ve done this bit onstage and people think I’m making it up … That shit is upsetting.” The bit went viral swiftly, with irreversible, calamitous consequences for Cosby’s reputation.
Perhaps the most shocking thing wasn’t that Buress had called Cosby a rapist; it was that the world had actually heard him. A decade earlier, 14 women had accused Cosby of rape. In 2005, a former basketball star named Andrea Constand, who met Cosby when she was working in the athletic department at Temple University, where he served on the board of trustees, alleged to authorities that he had drugged her to a state of semi-consciousness and then groped and digitally penetrated her. After her allegations were made public, a California lawyer named Tamara Green appeared on the Today show and said that, 30 years earlier, Cosby had drugged and assaulted her as well. Eventually, 12 Jane Does signed up to tell their own stories of being assaulted by Cosby in support of Constand’s case. Several of them eventually made their names public. But they were met, mostly, with skepticism, threats, and attacks on their character.
In Cosby’s deposition for the Constand case, revealed to the public just last week, the comedian admitted pursuing sex with young women with the aid of Quaaludes, which can render a person functionally immobile. “I used them,” he said, “the same as a person would say, ‘Have a drink.’ ” He asked a modeling agent to connect him with young women who were new in town and “financially not doing well.” In the deposition, Cosby seemed confident that his behavior did not constitute rape; he apparently saw little difference between buying someone dinner in pursuit of sex and drugging them to reach the same goal. As for consent, he said, “I think that I’m a pretty decent reader of people and their emotions in these romantic sexual things.” If these women agreed to meet up, his deposition suggested, he felt that he had a right to them. And part of what took the accusations against Cosby so long to surface is that this belief extended to many of the women themselves (as well as the staff and lawyers and friends and others who helped keep the incidents secret).
Months after his depositions, Cosby settled the case with Constand. The accusations quickly faded from the public’s memory, if they registered at all. No one wanted to believe the TV dad in a cardigan was capable of such things, and so they didn’t. The National Enquirer had planned to run a big story detailing one of the women’s accounts, but the magazine pulled it when Cosby agreed to give them a two-page exclusive telling his side (essentially that these were instances that had been “misinterpreted”).People ran a story alleging that several of the women had taken money in exchange for their silence, implying that this was nothing more than an elaborate shakedown. Cosby’s career rolled on: In 2014 alone, there was a stand-up special, plans for a new family comedy on NBC, and a high-profile biography by Mark Whitaker that glossed over the accusations.
The group of women Cosby allegedly assaulted functions almost as a longitudinal study — both for how an individual woman, on her own, deals with such trauma over the decades and for how the culture at large has grappled with rape over the same time period. In the ’60s, when the first alleged assault by Cosby occurred, rape was considered to be something violent committed by a stranger; acquaintance rape didn’t register as such, even for the women experiencing it. A few of Cosby’s accusers claim that he molested or raped them multiple times; one remained in his orbit, in and out of a drugged state, for years. In the ’70s and ’80s, campus movements like Take Back the Night and “No Means No” helped raise awareness of the reality that 80 to 90 percent of victims know their attacker. Still, the culture of silence and shame lingered, especially when the men accused had any kind of status. The first assumption was that women who accused famous men were after money or attention. As Cosby allegedly told some of his victims: No one would believe you. So why speak up?
But among younger women, and particularly online, there is a strong sense now that speaking up is the only thing to do, that a woman claiming her own victimhood is more powerful than any other weapon in the fight against rape. Emma Sulkowicz, carrying her mattress around Columbia in a performance-art protest of her alleged rape, is an extreme practitioner of this idea. This is a generation that’s been radicalized, in just the past few years, by horrific examples of rape and reactions to rape — like the 2012 Steubenville incident, in which high-school football players brutally violated a passed-out teenage girl at a party and photographed and braggingly circulated the evidence. That same year, when a 14-year-old Missouri cheerleader accused a popular older boy at her school of sexual assault, her classmates shamed her on social media and the family’s house was burned down. The whole world watched online. How could this kind of thing still be happening? These cases felt unignorable, unforgettable, Old Testament biblical. Would anyone have believed the girls, or cared, had the evidence not been digitizable? And: How could you be a young woman and not care deeply about trying to fix this?
This generation will probably be further galvanized by the allegations that a national cultural icon may have been allowed to drug and rape women for decades, with no repercussions. But these younger women have given something to Cosby’s accusers as well: a model for how to speak up, and a megaphone in the form of social media.
Facebook and Twitter, the forums that helped circulate the Buress clip, were full of rage at Cosby’s perceived cruelty. Barbara Bowman, who’d come forward during the Constand case, wrote an op-ed in the Washington Post about her frustration that no one had believed her for all those years. Three days after Bowman’s op-ed, another woman, Joan Tarshis, came forward to say Cosby had drugged and raped her in 1969. By the end of November, 16 more women had come forward. Cosby resigned from Temple’s board of trustees and sought monetary damages from one of his accusers; he also told “Page Six” that he wanted “the black media to uphold the standards of excellence in journalism [and] go in with a neutral mind.” (Cosby, through representatives, has consistently denied any wrongdoing, and hasn’t been charged with any crimes. Emails to four of his lawyers and press reps went unanswered, although his team has begun a media tour to deny that his admission of offering Quaaludes to women was tantamount to admitting he’d raped anyone.) By February, there were another 12 accusers. Tina Fey and Amy Poehler joked about it at the Golden Globes: “Sleeping Beauty just thought she was getting coffee with Bill Cosby.” Attorney Gloria Allred got involved, representing more than a dozen of the women. Even President Obama said it was clear to him: “If you give a woman — or a man, for that matter — without his or her knowledge a drug, and then have sex with that person without consent, that’s rape.”
There are now 46 women who have come forward publicly to accuse Cosby of rape or sexual assault; the 35 women here are the accusers who were willing to be photographed and interviewed by New York. The group, at present, ranges in age from early 20s to 80 and includes supermodels Beverly Johnson and Janice Dickinson alongside waitresses and Playboy bunnies and journalists and a host of women who formerly worked in show business. Many of the women say they know of others still out there who’ve chosen to remain silent.
This project began six months ago, when we started contacting the then-30 women who had publicly claimed Cosby assaulted them, and it snowballed in the same way that the initial accusations did: First two women signed on, then others heard about it and joined in, and so on. Just a few days before the story was published, we photographed the final two women, bringing our total to 35. “I’m no longer afraid,” said Chelan Lasha, who came forward late last year to say that Cosby had drugged her when she was 17. “I feel more powerful than him.”
Accompanying this photo essay is a compilation of the interviews with these women, a record of trauma and survival — the memories that remain of the decades-old incidents. All 35 were interviewed separately, and yet their stories have remarkable similarities, in everything from their descriptions of the incidents to the way they felt in the aftermath. Each story is awful in its own right. But the horror is multiplied by the sheer volume of seeing them together, reading them together, considering their shared experience. The women have found solace in their number — discovering that they hadn’t been alone, that there were others out there who believed them implicitly, with whom they didn’t need to be afraid of sharing the darkest details of their lives. They are scattered all over the country — ten different states are represented — and most of them had no contact with their fellow accusers until recently. But since reading about each other’s stories in the news, or finding one another on social media, or meeting in person at the photo shoots arranged by New York, many of the women have forged a bond. It is, as Tarshis calls it, “a sorrowful sisterhood.” ■
Their stories, in their own words:
Rebecca Lynn Neal
Barbara Bowman
Beth Ferrier
Helen Hayes
Chelan Lasha
Margie Shapiro
Patricia Leary Steuer
Marcella Tate
Heidi Thomas
Sunni Welles
Jewel Allison
Linda Brown
Sarita Butterfield
Helen Gumpel
“Kacey"
PJ Masten
Joan Tarshis
Kaya Thompson
Sammie Mays
Victoria Valentino
Kathy McKee
Lise-Lotte Lublin
Linda Kirkpatrick
Autumn Burns
Louisa Moritz
Lili Bernard
Therese Serignese
Janice Dickinson
Linda Joy Traitz
Janice Baker-Kinney
Joyce Emmons
Tamara Green
Beverly Johnson
Carla Ferrigno
Cindra Ladd
Beyond important. A true must-read.
how many abused women do you think have been called “crazy ex girlfriends”?
Uh, pretty much all of them. Or worse versions thereof.
(Source: girthakitt, via alexwrekk)
"
The problem with the idea that race is a social construct — as the idea is generally understood — is not that race is not, in fact, a social construct but that the nature and meaning of the words ‘social construct’ are being obliterated. Let us, for a moment, think of how race operates in contingent, conditional ways, as in the case of, say, the Irish, who became white, or the ways in which particular ethnic categories gained social mobility by, ironically, ghettoising African-Americans, as Erez Bleicher points out, or how Asians have managed to become a desirable minority while keeping intact a narrative that positions African-Americans as vastly inferior in body and mind.
The problem with the way the notion of a ‘construct’ is understood, by both liberals and leftists, is that it presumes that race simply does not exist. Inevitably, this takes on a more sinister meaning: that because race cannot really exist, racism is not really a problem and can simply be willed away.
"—
, “
Rachel Dolezal and the Materiality of Race
“ (H/T Alexis Emilia)
Just because race is a social construct, this has never meant oppressive material, emotional, and institutional realities are not generated from it.
(via america-wakiewakie)
(Source: sonofbaldwin, via fatnutritionist)
These leafdogs soothe my soul
this is the highest level of wizard
theyre hiding
these dogs have seen Totoro a few too many times
(Source: mostlydogsmostly, via fatnutritionist)
