Tiny cultural lesson alongside my troll/fun photo: I got a lingling-o pendant yesterday!
The lingling-o is a widespread piece of Filipino jewelry, and it’s usually known as a good-luck/fertility charm, but it also represents the balance/combination of masculine and feminine energies. The open “circle“ represents the womb/uterus and the stylized inner half represents the phallus, so it is also strongly connected to people who took on third-gender identities. The most common records we have about that are of men who were trained/socialized to become priestesses and regarded as women by their community, up to marrying other men, but post-colonization, they were unfortunately ridiculed by Spain as “effeminate men” or “cross-dressers.”
Who better to take a glamour shot with my pendant than Loki Laufeyjarson? After all, he plays a genderfluid version of himself in the The Avengers franchise, and his real-life mythology involves turning into a mare to give birth to Sleipnir, turning into a milkmaid and being accused of marrying a guy in that form, forcing Thor to cross-dress as Freyja in a wacky scheme to get his lost hammer back, and generally “not being manly enough” for the warrior culture of the Aesir.
