Source One is Burchard of Worms' Decretum, Book XIX. The Decretum was a collection of canon laws compiled in the early half of the 11th Century. Book XIX, or The Corrector, was a penitential: basically a guidebook for confessors. Here's a sin, have u done it, here's your penance.
One of the questions for women was, essentially, "Did you make a dildo, strap it to yourself and fuck someone with it?". The original text is in Latin, and there's a few translations floating around of what it said. Here's one, which I spent the past three days looking for, because I wanted a direct source:
Have you done what women are wont to do: to make a certain device in the form of a male member to the measure of your will, and to tie it to your own or another woman's genitals with some ties, and commit fornication with other women, or others with the same instrument, or with another with you?
- Translated from Latin, taken from "Die Bussordnungen der abendlÀndischen Kirche nebst einer rechtsgeschichtichen Einleitung", F. W. H Wasserschleben
Pretty cut and dry re: the use of strap-ons. And dildos, because the next question is "and did you use this device on yourself?"
The second source is from the trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer, specifically Female Sodomy: The Trial of Katherina Hetzeldorfer (1477) by Helmut Puff, which has an analysis of the trial as well as a translation of the trial texts.
Katherina is the first recorded woman to be executed for homosexuality. There's a lot to be said about her and the way she performed gender but what I'm interested in today is the strap. So, from the court text itself:
...She made an instrument with a red piece of leather, at the front filled with cotton, and a wooden stick stuck into it, and made a hole through the wooden stick, put a string through, and tied it round; and therewith she had her roguery with the two women...
And there we go! Two sources about people in medieval times using strap-ons, one from around 1020 and one from 1477.
Shout out to all the janitors that clean public bathrooms. Seriously thank you. You make going to public bathrooms a little more bearable when itâs clean. Youâre all under appreciated heroes.
This is - legitimately - my favourite delivery of Shakespeare I have EVER seen (and I have seen some good-ass productions yo, in the Globe Theatre itself even). Like seriously, even though the words are unchanged, heâs stripped away ALL of the archaic pretense and assumed grandeur of ~presenting the bard~ that makes even the most wildly talented of actors and innovative of productions inherently inaccessible to a modern audience. Like, theyâre still great, they can still communicate the message and (some) of the nuance, but theyâre still always a step removed from being identifiable to any viewerâs lived experience. Theyâre still always reciting 15th century poetry. But this guy? This guy is like, screw iambic pentameter, to hell with being precious about the material, HOW WOULD AN ACTUAL PERSON SAY THIS SHIT?
Like this. And itâs beautiful. Itâs beautiful to hear a soliloquy I loved so much already, and have it come to life in a way it never, ever, did before. I feel like I grasp his motivations, his twists and turns, no longer on an academic level but on a visceral, instinctive one. Because heâs presenting his mental and emotional journey in a way that speaks honestly, like a real person.
So yeah, this shit post? I love it. Deeply and sincerely.
She played bass on 10,000 songs, including the most-played track of the twentieth century. She was paid $55 per session. Her name never appeared on the albums.
Gold Star Studios, Los Angeles, 1964. A woman in a cardigan walks past the receptionist, a Fender Precision bass in her hand like a briefcase. She doesnât sign autographs. She signs a timesheet.
Her name is Carol Kaye. In three hours, she will record what will become the most-played track of the twentieth century. Sheâll pocket fifty-five dollars and head to another studio, on the other side of town, for the next session.
The record label will never put her name on the album.
Between 1957 and 1973, Carol Kaye took part in roughly 10,000 recording sessions. Not as the featured artist, not as a guest, but as a hired hand. She was part of an anonymous collective nicknamed The Wrecking Crewâelite studio musicians who actually played the instruments on your favorite records while the famous bands posed for promotional photos.
The work was relentless. Three albums before the day was over. Stale coffee in paper cups. No rehearsal. The charts arrived minutes before the tape rolled. If you couldnât read a chart and nail the take in two tries, you didnât get called for the next session.
Carol could do it on the first try.
She started playing guitar in grimy bars at fourteen because her family couldnât pay the electric bill. Music wasnât a romantic dream for her. It was survival. It was a jobâfactory work with better acoustics and lower pay.
But she was faster and sharper than almost everyone else. She corrected charts in pencil while the producer was still explaining what he wanted. In one session in 1968, she told a famous producer his arrangement sounded like a dying dog. She chose her own line. They kept her version.
That descending bass line that drives the Beach Boysâ âWouldnât It Be Niceâ? Carol Kaye. The propulsive groove of âThese Boots Are Made for Walkinââ? Carol Kaye. The acoustic-guitar intro to âLa Bambaâ? Carol Kaye. The iconic theme from Mission: Impossible? Carol Kaye.
She invented techniques on the spot, out of sheer necessity. When the bass sound was too muddy for AM radio, she stuck felt under the strings and used a hard pick instead of her fingers. The tone cut through the static like a blade. It became the sonic signature that defined 1960s pop.
Bassists spent yearsâdecadesâtrying to crack the secret of the Beach Boysâ gear to get that sound. They were studying the wrong people. They should have been studying Carol.
She received no royalties. No residuals. No gold-record ceremony. No credit on the album sleeves. When âYouâve Lost That Lovinâ Feelinââ hit number one, Carol was already back in a studio cutting a soap jingle.
The biggest bands mimed her bass lines on TV variety shows. New York marketing departments decided a mom in classic clothes didnât fit the rebellious-youth image they were selling. So they simply left her name off the album credits.
For thirty years, almost no one cared. The truth only began to surface in the late 1990s, when music researchers found the same union contract numbers on thousands of hit records. The very documents meant to preserve studio musiciansâ anonymity betrayed them.
Think about it. Every time you heard âGood Vibrations,â âRiver Deep â Mountain High,â the Righteous Brothers, Nancy Sinatra, or Sonny and Cher, you were hearing Carol Kaye. She composed the soundtrack of an entire generationâs youth.
And yet the records still say nothing. Sheâs now over eighty. She wrote instructional books. She trained countless bassists. She is finally starting to be recognized by music historians who uncovered the truth about The Wrecking Crew.
But she never got what she deserved: her name on those albums. Credit for the music that defined an era. Recognition that those bass lines everyone associates with the âBeach Boysâ were, in fact, Carol Kayeâs.
Fifty-five dollars a session. Ten thousand sessions. The most-played track of the twentieth century.
People seem to like my hands, so, hereâs my first "tutorial", tackling my approach on how to draw and construct hands! I hope to do more of these, and that next one will dive into hand gestures and applying it with this structure.
Everyone talking about posts that changed their brain chemistry seem to be leaving out this classic, which probably propelled me into activism and more self confidence in a way that I cannot put into words.
"Heâs called himself Sam's mother, he said heâs nesting, heâs great with kids. He is The Omega, out of all of his sex scenes he has never been on top, he gets disproportionately flustered when men flirt with him as opposed to women. He deserves to be pregnant and eat pie and relax for once damn it."
"Look at his face and you simply cannot deny that man needs to be pregnant. Heâs The Omega tm."
Dean propaganda from last season
[Columbo]
"This little man is SO babygirl with his 'one more thing' bit and his awful cigars and his giant coat and his 'my wife' and his commitment to truth and justice. He is so cute and small and his smile is made of dreams. He seems very submissive and breedable. In some episodes he mentions having kids and I know he is such a loving (if vaguely bumbling) father. Let him and his wife have many children, and let him be the one to have them. If Columbo and I walk into a room one of us is walking out pregnant and it will not be me."
"look at that man!!! motherhood beckons him. he'd be so proud to hide a baby bump under that coat, only to reveal it at the last second as a dangerous killer says 'the only people I don't kill are pregnant women and children' and he says 'gotcha.'"
"I want to see him solve the mystery of who got him pregnant (spoiler: it was his wife)."
The data engineer started as a casual reader of the Jeffrey Epstein files. Then he became obsessed, and built the most extensive network gra
In February, a user named EricKeller2 posted on Reddit. âI mapped every connection in the Epstein files,â he wrote. He had built a website and database of more than 1.5 million files related to the Jeffrey Epstein case. A giant interactive network graph showed the connections between 1,000-plus people in Epsteinâs social worldâthrough flight manifests, email exchanges, and other documents that connect them. The post included a link to the site: Epsteinexposed.com.
That post got 5.5 million views. Hundreds of thousands of people from all over the world visited the site in the days that followed. And EricKeller2 was busier than ever.
EricKeller2âs real name isnât Eric Keller. He used a pseudonym to protect himself and his family from Jeffrey Epsteinâs rich and powerful friends. A thirtysomething data engineer with a wife and kids, heâd been following the child sexual abuse case for yearsâreading court filings, depositions, materials from the Giuffre v. Maxwell case. But in the fall of 2025, as the initial deadline from the Epstein Files Transparency Act approached, he got more organized. And then he got obsessed.
Every day since then, Keller has been doggedly loading hundreds and hundreds of files into his database. Epstein Exposed contains material from many sources beyond the US Department of Justiceâs file dump, including unsealed court records and FBI tips, and it focuses on exposing âthe connective tissue,â as Keller put it, between the files. The site calls itself âthe most comprehensive searchable database of every person, document, flight, and connection in the Epstein files.â
âThere were nights I had to stop,â he tells me. âThere are descriptions of things no human being should have experienced.â He remembers one 2017 email thread between Epstein and an intermediary, in which Epstein offers $300 to a girl for a topless massage. The intermediary tells him that the girl wasnât available because she had school on Monday. Epstein then ups the offer to $400.
âYou can build a mental wall between yourself and what youâre reading, but it doesnât always hold up,â he adds. âSome nights it doesnât hold at all.â
He has a personal reason for pouring himself into this project. âI am a survivor of childhood sexual abuse,â he tells me. Itâs why he canât seem to look away from the horror inside those files. And so he builds.
The Epstein Library on the Justice Departmentâs website is a model of disorganization. In early December, Keller was clicking through the tens of thousands of pages of documents in the library and feeling âfrustrated disbeliefâ at the chaosâfiles that could be hundreds of pages long, text that was sometimes blurry or sideways, a wire transfer with no context, an email chain with half the names blacked out, a flight log with only initials. âItâs disorienting,â he says. âYouâre reading fragments of something enormous and trying to figure out which fragments matter and how they connect.â
One night, he spent about four hours trying to trace a single personâs name across some 30 documents in the archive. âI just stopped and thought, I am doing by hand what a database could do in milliseconds,â he says. As a builder of database infrastructure at a midsize company, he knew exactly what to do next. âI opened a code editor and started building. By 3 am I had a basic search prototype working against a few hundred documents,â he says.
Around that time, a site called Jmail.world was making a splash as a tool for people to peruse Epsteinâs emails as if using a Gmail interface. Launched in mid-November and built by a group of tech-savvy volunteers, it has since grown to include, among other things, his photos, flights, and Amazon purchase history, also displayed as if the reader is viewing Epsteinâs own accounts. Keller used the tool and liked it. âJmail was proof that the community could build better tools than the government was providing,â he told me.
It also helped him hone his own project. âInstead of thinking about one category of documents, I started thinking about the network,â he says. âHow do you connect a person who appears in an email to a flight they were on, to a wire transfer, to a deposition they gave? That cross-referencing problem is what I wanted to solve.â
Then, on December 19, the Justice Department released its first big tranche, adding hundreds of thousands of new documents to the existing archive. Immediately, Kellerâs workload ballooned to an all-time high. The prototype he had built earlier in the month became the foundation for processing all of it.
Most nights he worked until 3 or 4 am, sipping cold coffee while navigating a sea of open tabs.
Because of his childhood, he says, âwhen the first documents started dropping, I couldnât look away. I understood at a gut level what was being described in those files.â In the evenings, heâd return home from his day job and, once everyone in his family was in bed, heâd hole up in his home office and spend hours scrolling through downloaded PDFs.
Many documents were posted as images, and heâd run each page through layers of software to convert them into searchable textâsometimes one system would fail to convert the text and heâd run it through a second or third. Then heâd use another system to extract important details such as names, organizations, dates, and locations. Heâd perform hash verificationâa process that checks whether the Justice Departmentâs files have been tampered withâand redaction analysis, to scan for inconsistencies in how the government blacked out information. He tracked all his work in a meticulous, digital, color-coded ledger. âItâs not uploading files,â he says. âItâs rebuilding a crime scene from 2 million fragments of evidence.â
At the end of January, the DOJ dropped an even bigger tranche, this one containing more than 3 million files. Although the workload swelled even more overnight, Keller says the file drop was validating. After all, the entire system heâd been building had been designed for that moment.
On February 5, Keller registered his domain. A week later, the number of files in his database had crossed a million. Heâd also set up the first version of a colorful, interactive network graph that showed the connections between the powerful figures orbiting Epsteinâfinanciers, politicians, academics, royalty. He decided he was ready to share it with the world, and he turned to Reddit.
With the sudden influx of visitors, the site needed constant attention. At one point it crashed in the middle of the night; Keller got it stable by dawn only to have it crash again that afternoon.
A former investigator messaged him, wanting to cross-reference a specific set of Deutsche Bank wire transfers against flight dates to see if money had moved on the same days that people had flown. A journalist from a major European outlet was using the site to investigate connections between Epsteinâs financial network and someone in their country, and wanted help finding every document that mentioned certain company names. A forensic accountant specializing in financial crime reached out, offering to review a pattern of wire transfers that Kellerâs site had surfaced; that person said that certain transaction patterns were consistent with layering techniques used in money laundering. âThe response tells you something specific,â Keller said. âThere is a real community of people who have been trying to get to the truth here for a long time, and the site gave them something they did not have before.â
The site kept crashing, and he was rewriting infrastructure deep into the night. In the mornings, heâd stagger into his day job and pretend that everything was normal. What fueled him was anger, he saysâa sense that the DOJ had made the files practically unsearchable and that the public deserved better.
Twelve days after the launch of Epstein Exposed, Keller quit his job. On Reddit and through his siteâs contact email, people were asking him how they could contribute, so he set up a donation page. âWhen I looked at what had come in, and what the site had become, it was clear that this was now the work.â
Even committing himself full-time to the site, heâs stretched thin. He forgets to eat, he says, unless his wife puts food in front of him. His back hurts. His eyes are constantly tired. He drinks too much coffee. Some mornings he forgets what day it is or when he last went outside. âMy wife jokes that when this chapter is over I owe her about three months of normal,â he says.
Heâs also under legal pressure. He has received formal demand letters from law firms representing individuals in the database. The letters arrive with 24-hour deadlines. âSome are on behalf of genuine victims, and I take those seriously,â he says. âIâve redacted dozens of documents for verified survivors. But not all of them check out.â
Keller says the files force him to reflect on his own childhood trauma. âWhen Iâm reading through testimony or looking at records of what was done to these girls and young women, Iâm not seeing strangers. Iâm seeing something I understand from the inside,â he says. Sometimes the emails stop him cold. In one from March 2014, someone writes to Epstein: âThank you for a fun night. Your littlest girl was a little naughty.â Or thereâs the email from 2017, in which someone tells Epstein they met a girl whoâs âlike Lolita from Nabokov, femme miniature,â and asks if they should send him âher type of candidates only.â
âTheyâre referencing a novel about a man raping a 12-year-old,â Keller says. âAs scouting criterion. In an email.â
Keller canât help but think about his own kids too. âThere are moments where that connection hits you, and you have to stop and just sit with it. Itâs part of what makes it hard to walk away at the end of the night.â
Scroll through the hundreds of replies to Kellerâs launch post on Reddit and youâll notice a recurring sentiment: Heâs building the infrastructure that the government should have set up in the first place.
For some time now, online communities have been helping to fill holes left by institutions. Reddit in particular has stood out. Last month, when the DOJ gave lawmakers a strict window in which to peek at the unredacted Epstein files, many members of Congress felt overwhelmed. Congressman Maxwell Frost, a Democrat from Florida, knew he needed to âbe strategic and act fast.â
âOn Reddit, there was an active community (r/Epstein) crowdsourcing information and digging into the details, so we posted there to gather direct links to the DOJâs website and better understand what to prioritize,â Frost told me. âMillions of people interacted with that post, which made clear that the American people want answers.â
As Keller sees it, the online communityâs role in the Epstein saga is, primarily, to refuse to let the issue dieâto spur new prosecutions and to help the victims see justice. âI think about them constantly,â he says of the survivors. âIf they can come to this site and search and find documentation that confirms yes, this happened, yes, it was real, yes, the world knows,â he said, âthat matters in a way I donât have adequate language for.â
Since quitting his job, Keller has found himself burning through his savings faster than he expected. He says he spends roughly $3,500 a month to keep the server running, and some weeks the donations donât cover it. But he says his wife understands why this matters to him and has been supportive. The database has now indexed 2.15 million documents, cataloged 1,500 people, and mapped tens of thousands of Epsteinâs connections. âYou donât walk away from that,â he said. âImagine where this can be in six months or a year from now. I believe this will make a difference. I have to. These things cannot be allowed to stand.â
Traffic to his site remains high for now, but Keller says he isnât obsessed with those numbers. âEven if the traffic drops to 10 people a day, those 10 people might include a journalist working on a lead, a researcher writing a paper, or a survivor looking for their own name in the record. Thatâs enough,â he says.
The work is far from over. He recently finished building out a forensic finance system. More than 130,000 documents still need to have their text made fully machine-readable. Hash verification is only 64 percent complete.
Not to mention, community members are still submitting names and researchers are still flagging new connections between documents. Itâs why he doesnât think this project has a finish line. So for now, Eric Keller will do what heâs been doing for months: sit down at his monitor, sip some stale coffee, and get back to work.
some of you are painfully unaware that part of the whole reason many kinksters are like "what happens in my or someone else's bedroom is no one else's business"
is because people have been arrested and put in fucking PRISON just for having gay sex in the privacy of their own homes. in the United States. this millennia.
if you think i'm joking, look up Lawrence v. Texas (2003). 14 out of the 50 US States STILL had laws on the books criminalizing sodomy--and yes, you could be imprisoned for multiple years and sometimes even life for repeat offenses.
in the years directly leading up to the landmark case, enforcement even in those 14 states varied, but it was absolutely weaponized against queer people, especially when stacked on top of other offenses to make up a longer sentence.
um so anyway, what happens between two or more consenting adults in the privacy of their own homes is none of my OR YOUR business, and i'm not fucking kidding!
"Sodomy" does not, in a legal context, mean "anal sex."
It means "any sexual act the court has decided is deviant."
BDSM? Sodomy.
Crossdressing for sexual pleasure? Sodomy.
Jacking off to nude photos or video your consenting adult lover sent you of themselves? Sodomy.
Het oral sex? SODOMY!!!
If you're starting to think "but how could anyone prove that happened without breaking down the door?"
Ha. Haha. Ahaha.
First, I'll give you one guess how they did prove it.
Two, these were often scapegoat charges--basically they couldn't actually nail you on anything because you hadn't done anything actually illegal, only things they didn't like, and they relied on public disgust against your "degenerate character" (yeah there's a very big reason we keep saying not to use that word and it's not to be killjoys) to make sure you knew your place.
Which means that in practice:
Went to a socialist meeting? Sodomy.
Male kindergarten teacher? Sodomy.
Mixing races? Sodomy.
Not Christian (or the right kind of Christian)? Sodomy.
Kink is only the beginning. They'll come after the kinksters because they're low-hanging fruit, and you'll gleefully help them dig a hole, laughing all the way and never consider that it's way too big for the number of bodies you need to bury.
I see someone in the tags saying "except pedophiles, they don't count, hang them."
YES THEY FUCKING DO COUNT.
Wanna know why?
Take a look at how many politicians have labeled trans people and their allies as pedophiles.
Take a look at how many politicians used to label gay people as pedophiles.
Take a look at how much suspicion falls on innocent men who just think working with kids is fun and want the chance to help, grow, nurture, and teach.
Take a look at yourself.
What about you could someone twist into "that person is a pedophile" if they wanted rid of you?
I can tell you exactly how they'd do it with me. I'm queer. I have a niece who came out as lesbian in her teens. I supported her.
Clearly I groomed her into that lifestyle, right?
Child sex abusers should be proven in a court of law to be guilty, and penalized to the fullest extent of the law. Pedophiles who have not abused children and seek to avoid doing so should not be hanged for something going wild in their brains.
Yes! That's super uncomfortable to say! I'm a CSA survivor! It's awkward and it means I have to defend people I really wish were not the way they are!
But the rope you use to lynch another will yank you into the tree to die.
TW for talk on CSA and child marriage, this topic tends to get me fired up
Its also a fucking useless example for sodomy law especially because of how wildly age of consent can vary even in the united states. Which I hate that people get so weird about when you try to discuss it. No, knowing this stuff isnt a "red flag" you have to know something before you can speak on it or try and change it!
Child marriage is legal in 34 states with 4 of them technically not even having an age minimum outside of common law that could theoretically set it at 12. If we go back a few years the state of it would be even MORE dire as many of these laws putting age minimums only were put into place in the past eight years! So if one defines sodomy as "any sexual act done premarital that isnt missionary" then these wouldn't be covered.
Sodomy laws are USELESS for protecting children, because laws about CSA are better off being their OWN thing with strictly defined terms. Sodomy is so nebulous and hand wavy it does nothing but punish people who have done nothing wrong, strict terms with clear meanings is what creates protections. "You can't just make "if we think its gross" the law and expect that to actually work on deterring people who are doing the actual crimes. Which are ALREADY illegal.
Plus this isn't even getting into the psychology part of it that most people who commit CSA aren't even attracted to minors, they just like power over their victims and its easy to hold power over a child. its about control. Not 100% of the time, but very very often its about dominance rather then attraction. Plus there's the fact of sexual intrusive thoughts being a common form of OCD that causes a lot of distress in those that have those thoughts. This is a whole rabbit hole but just... You dont need to be attracted to a victims to traffic them, you might just want control, or authority, or just money!
I think it is really, really worth focusing on that âalready illegalâ part, because this is the foot in the door for a million and a half fascist proposed laws, not just sodomy.
âWe need a law that makes it illegal to go into a bathroom that doesnât align with your birth sex! Otherwise, people might go into the wrong bathroom to sexually assault someone!â Huh, interesting, but isnât it already illegal to sexually assault someone, including in a bathroom??? Because if so, then you can just completely discard that explanation for the entire law. It is already illegal to go into the wrong bathroom and sexually assault a person; ergo, the law is not about sexual assault at all, itâs just about bathrooms.
âWe need to arrest undocumented immigrants in order to crack down on gang activity!â Huh, interesting, but isnât that gang activity already illegal??? So, if you wanted to crack down on gang activity, you could simply arrest people who are associated with gangs, and in fact, we do already do that. Ergo, this rhetoric isnât actually about gang activity at all; itâs just about undocumented immigrants.
âWe need to diminish free speech and freedom of movement rights for suspected terrorists, because otherwise they could commit mass murder!â Well, interestingly, mass murder is already illegal, and if you have probable cause that indicates that someone is planning to commit mass murder, you can simply arrest them for that. Since the law is already fully equipped to go after people who are genuinely suspected of gearing up to commit a violent terroristic act, this clearly isnât really about terrorism at all; itâs just about diminishing free speech and freedom of movement rights.
âWe need tort reform that caps the monetary damages that large corporations can be forced to pay, in order to keep people from bringing frivolous and fraudulent lawsuits!â Hmm, but see the thing with that is fraud is already a crime, and frivolous lawsuits can already be thrown out. If a law caps the amount of damages corporations need to pay in lawsuits which were not found to be frivolous or fraudulent, then almost by definition, it has nothing to do with frivolous lawsuits or fraud â itâs just about limiting corporate liability.
I could go on.
Always ask yourself what the actual function of a proposed law is â not just the stated goal, but what it actually does that is not already covered by an equally restrictive law.
And remember, a good general rule is:
If something is already illegal, then the people who are trying to pass a new law to ban it are probably trying to ban something else.
