(slight trigger warning for the literary insinuation of abandonment and death)
When the world was new, there was a lone god that loved the stars.
The god had hung each and every one of those same stars in the sky with its own divine hands, carefully constructing artworks of great beauty that could be seen no matter where it turned its gaze.
For thousands of years, the god wandered the earth beneath its feet with its eyes trained to the sky, too enamored by its own creation in the heavens to notice what it had created in the wake of its wandering. From the very footprints the god left behind, seeds of wonder and light were sown — the same wonder the god held for the stars and the same light that those very stars were created from.
With every step the god took, another light was brought into existence. One by one, the creatures born from the light left behind by the god's footprints started to emerge from the soil, like that of a seedling, wonderfully and gloriously alive. As they woke, they lifted their eyes and saw lights — both in the earth like they themselves were and in the dark expanse of open sky above their heads. They marveled in the delight of simply being brought into existence among such beautiful creations. Looking past their brethren they saw the god, and saw the flecks of light its feet left in the soil. Soon, the creatures grown from light pulled their forms from the ground and hurried to follow the being that created them.
But all this, its accidental act of creation of life, went unnoticed by the god, who was still too enraptured by the lights above its head to see the lights around its feet.
At first, these creatures loved their god, their creator. The one that loved their light so much it had given them form. They knew it must have been this being that gave them life, for they watched as it happened, as the indents the god's feet left behind glowed with the same soft, ethereal light that their forms had. Step by step, a new light appeared, and as those lights appeared the creatures showed their newest companions how to walk, to follow in the footsteps of the light-making god.
They wanted to show their beloved creator their love and gratitude for giving them life. They started to create things of their own, weaved with the same light they themselves were made of, pulling wisps of their own being to create beautiful and delicate things, presenting them to the god in hopes that it will see that they can make themselves beautiful things too, that the god will be proud of how quickly they had learned.
But the god did not see...
Try as they might, they were not able to get their beloved creator to turn its gaze onto them.
The creatures could not understand why the god did not see them. Were their gifts not enough? Not good enough? Was their light not enough to harbor the same amount of love that the god gave the stars so far away when they were right at its feet?
"What did we do wrong?"
they cried,
"Why do you not accept our gifts
and continue to ignore us?"
But the god did not hear...
All the creatures wanted to do was give thanks to the being that created them, but all they received in return was to be ignored. The god did not care, the creatures realized. It would rather give all its attention to the lights high up in the sky than simply look at the ground and see the lights at its own feet.
Slowly, the creatures gave up on trying to garner the attention of the god they had once looked at with adoration. The warmth and love within the creatures started to dim, having lost the love for their light. Looking upon their fading forms, the creatures could not bring themselves to care. Faster than the god's steps could create them, the lights on earth started winking out of existence...
Only then did the god see.
The choking feeling of despair had crept into the god's senses, and for the first instance since the earth was made, the god tore its eyes from the heavens, and looked upon the once empty earth. The sight the god was met with was one that it could not have ever fathomed. It was a sight the god could not bear to see.
Looking at the ground at its feet, the god's eyes followed the trail of footprints it had left behind in its wandering, and saw the lights it had left behind. As the god watched, little creatures pulled themselves from the ground, but the thing that it was most horrified to see was the ocean of dying lights far behind the newborn ones. The miasma of despair that had ripped the god's attention from the sky had rooted itself into the soil itself. The light inside every creature, including that of the creatures who had just been born...
The god could not bear to see what was happening. For how long had it been walking? How long had it been creating life, and neglecting to acknowledge the lights at its feet?
How long did the lights suffer to cause them to become shadows?
Starting to walk once again, the god no longer had its eyes to the lights above, but instead looked on in sadness as the lights around it died. Some still flickered with the last remnants of light they tried to hold on to, but they could not meet the god's gaze, they could not bring themselves to. The aura of despair had entered the being of the creator, and its footsteps had stopped creating light...
Soon, the world was dark, and the heavens wept.
The god came to a stop atop a mountain, and looked over the land as lightning illuminated a brilliant pathway above, as if it were starlight pulsing through the sky. Just as quickly as the streak of light appeared, it faded, leaving behind a rumble of thunder that resonated deep in the god's bones. Lifting its eyes skyward, the god gazed at the beauty of the fleeting light.
After some time, the sky ceased its weeping, and the god was left in silence once more.
'For what I have done
And failed to do
I am sorry.'
The god had not spoken to anything in particular. Was it speaking to the souls of its creatures that it had allowed to fade? Speaking to the stars? Asking the stars for forgiveness?
Turning away from the stars, the god realized that there were things more beautiful in existence than the stars could ever dream to be, and that was the fading light of a mortal soul.
It had taught the god that there is beauty in that which is temporary, and most importantly... It had taught the god to be thankful for little things, like the little lights that it had come to love too late.
Lowering its eyes to the ground at its feet, the god started to create again, this time with the full intent for loving all that it created.
What do you mean “chat” is now referring to ChatGPT and not twitch chat? What? What? What the fuck? No?
When I address chat I am speaking to a presumed Greek chorus of real human people shitposting on their lunch break, not a machine that devours lakes to covert electricity into slop.
Fanmade Witch Hat Atelier spells come in two flavours
Magic air fryer
This is why magic is a trade secret
A Kugelblitz is type of black hole formed by concetrating a sufficiently high concentration of light, heat, or radiation into a given space to form an event horizon
Open a bank account or get a credit card without signed permission from her father or hr husband.
Serve on a jury - because it might inconvenience the family not to have the woman at home being her husband’s helpmate.
Obtain any form of birth control without her husband’s permission. You had to be married, and your hub and had to agree to postpone having children.
Get an Ivy League education. Ivy League schools were men’s colleges ntil the 70′s and 80′s. When they opened their doors to women it was agree that women went there for their MRS. Degee.
Experience equality in the workplace: Kennedy’s Commission on the Status of Women produced a report in 1963 that revealed, among other things, that women earned 59 cents for every dollar that men earned and were kept out of the more lucrative professional positions.
Keep her job if she was pregnant.Until the Pregnancy Discrimination Act in 1978, women were regularly fired from their workplace for being pregnant.
Refuse to have sex with her husband.The mid 70s saw most states recognize marital rape and in 1993 it became criminalized in all 50 states. Nevertheless, marital rape is still often treated differently to other forms of rape in some states even today.
Get a divorce with some degree of ease.Before the No Fault Divorce law in 1969, spouses had to show the faults of the other party, such as adultery, and could easily be overturned by recrimination.
Have a legal abortion in most states.The Roe v. Wade case in 1973 protected a woman’s right to abortion until viability.
Take legal action against workplace sexual harassment. According to The Week, the first time a court recognized office sexual harassment as grounds for legal action was in 1977.
Play college sports Title IX of the Education Amendments of protects people from discrimination based on sex in education programs or activities that receive Federal financial assistance It was nt until this statute that colleges had teams for women’s sports
Apply for men’s Jobs The EEOC rules that sex-segregated help wanted ads in newspapers are illegal. This ruling is upheld in 1973 by the Supreme Court, opening the way for women to apply for higher-paying jobs hitherto open only to men.
This is why we needed feminism - this is why we know that feminism works
I just want to reiterate this stuff, because I legit get the feeling there are a lot of younger women for whom it hasn’t really sunk in what it is today’s GOP is actively trying to return to.
Did you go to a good college? Shame on you, you took a college placement that could have gone to a man who deserves and needs it to support or prepare for his wife & children. But if you really must attend college, well, some men like that, you can still get married if you focus on finding the right man.
Got a job? Why? A man could be doing that job. You should be at home caring for a family. You shouldn’t be taking that job away from a man who needs it (see college, above). You definitely don’t have a career – you’ll be pregnant and raising children soon, so no need to worry about promoting you.
This shit was within living memory. I’M A MILLENIAL and my mother was in the second class that allowed women at an Ivy League school. Men who are alive today either personally remember shit like this or have parents/family who have raised them into thinking this was the way America functioned back in the blissful Good Old Days. There are literally dudes in the GOP old enough to remember when it was like this and yearn for those days to return.
When people talk about resisting conservativism and the GOP, we’re not just talking about whether the wage gap is a myth or not. We’re talking about whether women even have the fundamental right to exist as individuals, to run their own households and compete for jobs and be considered on an equal footing with men in any arena at all in the first place.
I was a child in the 1960s, a teenager in the 1970s, a young adult in the 1980s.
This is what it was like:
When I was growing up, it was considered unfortunate if a girl was good at sports. Girls were not allowed in Little League. Girls’ teams didn’t exist in high school, except at all-girls’ high schools. Boys played sports, and girls were the cheerleaders.
People used to ask me as a child what I wanted to be when I grew up. I said I wanted to be a brain surgeon or the first woman justice on the Supreme Court. Everyone told me it was impossible–those just weren’t realistic goals for a girl–the latter, especially, because you couldn’t trust women to judge fairly and rationally, after all.
In the 1960s and 1970s, all women were identified by their marital status, even in arrest reports and obituaries. In elementary school, my science teacher referred to Pierre Curie as DOCTOR Curie and Marie Curie as MRS. Curie…because, as he put it, “she was just his wife.” (Both had doctorates and both were Nobel prize winners, so you would think that both would be accorded respect.)
Companies could and did require women to wear dresses and skirts. Failure to do could and did get women fired. And it was legal. It was also legal to fire women for getting married or getting pregnant. The rationale was that a woman who was married or who had a child had no business working; that was what her husband was for. Aetna Insurance, the biggest insurance company in America, fired women for all of the above.
A man could rape his wife. Legally. I can remember being twelve years old and reading about legal experts actually debating whether or not a man could actually be said to coerce his wife into having sex. This was a serious debate in 1974.
The debate about marital rape came up in my law school, too, in 1984. Could a woman be raped by her husband? The guys all said no–a woman got married, so she was consenting to sex at all times. So I turned it around. I asked them if, since a man had gotten married, that meant that his wife could shove a dildo or a stick or something up his ass any time she wanted to for HER sexual pleasure.
(Hey, I thought it was reasonable. If one gender was legally entitled to force sex on the other, then obviously the reverse should also be true.)
The male law students didn’t like the idea. Interestingly, they commented that being treated like that would make them feel like a woman.
My reaction was, “Thank you for proving my point…”
The concept of date rape, when first proposed, was considered laughable. If a woman went out on a date, the argument of legal experts ran, sexual consent was implied. Even more sickening was the fact that in some states–even in the early 1980s–a man could rape his daughter…and it was no worse than a misdemeanor.
Women taking self-defense classes in the 1970s and 1980s were frequently described in books and on TV as “cute.” The implication was that it was absurd for a woman to attempt to defend herself, but wasn’t it just adorable for her to try?
I was expressly forbidden to take computer classes in junior and senior years of high school–1978-79 and 1979-80–because, as the principal told me, “Only boys have to know that kind of thing. You girls are going to get married, and you won’t use it.”
When I was in college–from 1980 to 1984–there were no womens’ studies. The idea hadn’t occurred in many places because the presumption was that there was nothing TO study. My history professor–a man who had a doctorate in history–informed me quite seriously that women had never produced a noted painter, sculptor, composer, architect or scientist because…wait for it…womens’ brains were too small.
(He was very surprised when I came up with a list of fifty women gifted in the arts and science, most of whom he had never heard of before.)
When Walter Mondale picked Geraldine Ferraro as a running mate in 1984, the press hailed it as a disaster. What would happen, they asked fearfully, if Mondale died and Ferraro became president? What if an international crisis arose and she was menstruating? She could push the nuclear button in a fit of PMS! It would be the end of the WORLD!!
…No, they WEREN’T kidding.
On the surface, things are very different now than they were when I was a child, a teen and a young adult. But I’m afraid that people now do not realize what it was like then. I’ve read a lot of posts from young women who say that they are not feminists. If the only exposure to feminism they have is the work of extremists, I cannot blame them overmuch.
I wish that I could tell them what feminism was like when it was new–when the dream of legal equality was just a dream, and hadn’t even begun to come true. When “woman’s work” was a sneer–and an overt putdown. When people tut-tutted over bright and athletic girls with the words, “Really, it’s a shame she’s not a boy.” That lack of feminism wasn’t all men opening doors and picking up checks. A lot of it was an attitude of patronizing contempt that hasn’t entirely died out, but which has become less publicly acceptable.
I wish I could make them feel what it was like…when grown men were called “men” and grown women were “girls.”
I am 70. I remember all those things. I was a student nurse from 64 to 67 and we were not permitted to “finish” a bed bath on a male or insert a catheter in a male. Seeing male genitals might cause us “harm” or upset our delicate sensibilities. Imagine when we graduated and were “thrown” to the wolves. Imagine if you were a male patient who had to be the first to be “practiced” on by a graduate nurse. (Ha!) At the school I attended no student nurse could be married. Only one school in my city (Atlanta) would even admit married women and Male Nurses weren’t even thought of. What man would want to be a nurse when he could be a Doctor. In all my training I only remember 3 or 4 Women who were Doctor’s and a very few, (less than 5 or 6) female interns or residents (and this was a teaching hospital) and most of those were OB/Gyns and one was a pediatrician.
When I graduated and was going to get married I wanted to go on birth control pills. You needed to be on them for a least one cycle before they were effective. I won’t go into what hoops I had to jump through to get a prescription from my Dr. (a man, natch) but when i went to the drug store to get the prescription filled I ended up having to get my future husband to “accompany” me so the pharmacist “interview” him and see if it was okay with him for me to be on the pill.
Even when we went to get a marriage license I had to get my Father’s signature and we had to go before a Judge because I was not yet 21 (I was 20 and 9 months).
I could go on and on, getting a credit card in MY name, etc., but I will tell you that WE MUST RESIST.
The number of people I know who romanticize gender inequality is frankly terrifying. A world never existed in which the lives of women were simplified by benevolent men who saw to her every want and need. That was not a thing. A world never existed in which women were all ladies, men were all gentlemen, & everything was some great big cishet fairytale. Feminists aren’t a bunch of upstarts who want to destroy a perfectly wholesome and non-harmful system. Just…look at history. Look at the posts above. We. Must. Resist..
This is what they mean, when they say “Old-fashioned values”
When conservatives start waxing lyrical about the ‘good old days’, this is what they mean. They are fully aware how much things blew for women, and they would like to return to that.
At first I re-blogged this with no commentary added because it’s already so thorough and good.
But then I realized I actually do want to add something. This was written nine years ago. In the 9 years that have come to pass the white nationalist Christian fascism ultra right agenda of misogyny has had many victories.
In the United States just off the top of my head a very few examples: there’s no longer a legally protected right to abortion. Countless laws across our country police, how woman you must look or be to enter a public bathroom. We know with certainty the president and countless people around him are pedophiles and rapists. Women’s participation in the workforce has been rolled back to 1980s levels. The pressure to be thin is higher now than 10 years ago.
i hate you private jets i hate you bitcoin i hate you cars that go 200 mph i hate you golf parks i hate you yachts i hate you huge mansions with a pool i hate you luxery resorts i hate you exessive wealth causally killing the planet and using up ressources we all need
“okay but it’s their money! They can decide how to spend it!” Yeah okay but it’s our atmosphere! and water! and no amount of wealth should give you free reign over that!
Yeah this is actually pretty much exactly what is going on. It’s why anti-oxidants are such a big deal. Bonus fact: oxygen oxidizes stuff in your cells or, in other words, it’s not toxic, just setting you on fire very very slowly.
What if there are aliens out there but they subsist on entirely different substances and they’re just scared as shit of us and our crazy ass hell planet? Once in a while some alien anthropologist type suggests checking out the people on this inhabited planet out towards the galaxy’s edge. The other aliens just look at the naive academic with horror. No!! We do not go to that world. That is where the DEATH BREATHERS live. They recreationally consume poisons and are more or less composed of biological fire. Their atmosphere is made of rocket fuel. We must leave the DEATH BREATHERS in peace. Do not go there. Do not.
okay but…that is actually what went down on earth about 2.5 billion years ago.
Earth was doing just fine with a mostly nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere and everyone was happy to go on living in anaerobic bliss and then cyanobacteria suddenly hit the scene, altered the atmosphere composition so that there was a ton of oxygen gas and killed practically everything (97% or more of all species on earth).
We are literally descendants of the DEATH BREATHERS and cyanobacteria is our deadly mother.
The cyanobacteria holocaust is so big, it doesn’t even have a cool name; it’s just called “The Great Oxygenation Event”; the *second* most apocalyptic extinction event in our planet’s history is the one that’s called THE GREAT DYING (the Permian-Triassic event, about 252 million years ago).
This shit makes like the rock-throwing that wiped out the dinosaurs look like kindergarten.
i so appreciate when fic authors tag their work with like “major death but not derek or stiles” or “cheating and abuse but not between sterek” because baby i am delicate and i will cry
poverty is a form of torture utilized by the government to bring about a conditioned response
that conditioned response is considered a form of learned helplessness wherein the victim stops fighting back against what it believe to be the inevitable
but not everyone breaks under torture
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