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i haven't typed here in a bit
not that anything's been wrong with me or us i've just been busy working on my own personal projects and hanging out with my friends
it's just that today's a pretty gloomy day i guess; i'm just in this state of yearning and missing people i used to call my friends
so much time has passed and yet..... i dunno
maybe i missed the closeness and understanding
@drasnianfrank said: I remember reading that book and being like 'I would really like you to focus more on these really cool and complicated madams' and less about prostitution mythos.
RIGHT??? I think probably it would have been a better book if it was more focused on them. Although also, I have to say, I do wish there was more discussion of her sources on them, because it sounds like they both had about seven different versions of their own lives and there’s a lot of “she said THIS once, and she said this OTHER thing once, and this is what it really was, but actually there were rumors that [other more plausible thing] was true,” but there’s not a ton of talk about why she said x one time and y another time, or why the author thinks something specific is true, given the wild unreliability of every available narrator.
Like, for example, the author was very clear on Actually Neither Of Them Ever Had Sex Even For Money, Because They Hated Men, and I mean... are we sure they never had sex for money? or... not for money? maybe they had sex but not with men??? I hear that’s very popular in some circles! It’s certainly plausible that, having had only horrible experiences with men and not being interested in women, they opted out of sex entirely, but the author’s assertion about this fact without any kind of explanation as to the sources was kind of weird. It’s an incredibly personal and private fact about people who have been dead for a long time, so I’m curious how the author knows it, but she doesn’t say.
Admittedly, I’m only like a third of the way into the book; maybe these questions are addressed! Not the Did They Have Sex thing specifically, I’m not super hung up on that? But this book is like, peak “I didn’t know that before, and I still don’t!”
