Just Another Blog

Laura

[thedogfeelings]

[devinellekurtz]

An Unusual Night…

[girlyy-lovee]

[whitepeopletwitter]

[bocceclub]

wow i wonder if that 300 year gap could be explained by any outside factors…….whoa! for some reason it lines up with the timeline of britain’s invasion and subsequent colonization of ireland! wild, huh? i wonder if the two are connected in some way? i guess the world will never know….

[trickstertime]

“why do the Irish hate the English so much? It couldn’t have been *that* bad!!”

This was in place till 1973.

[hippieseurope-deactivated202503]

Animals look to us with such hope and longing in their eyes, that we’ll be kind to them and treat them right. Because somewhere deep inside they know we have power over them and can choose to be unkind and cruel to them. And perhaps they may even feel that their place in this world is not a safe place and that their lives are not secure in mankind’s hand.

Sereno Sky, author of “Lonely Traveller” (via hippieseurope)

[sosuperawesome]

Ana Novaes on Instagram

[rosswoodpark]

‪GOD I found another article about why ADHD kids say “I don’t know” so much. my entire childhood was getting yelled at for doing some ADHD shit and me not being able to offer an explanation when asked why I did something. ‬

[abcsofadhd]

Adding to this, its cause of our executive dysfunction and emotional dysregulation (naturally there’s more things at play than just these two but I’m naming main aspects).

We tend to have alexithymia, meaning we have difficulty identifying and describing own feelings. 

You can’t say how you feel if you legit don’t know.

Self monitoring is an executive function; our self awareness about how we are doing presently .. which is hampered in ADHDers. 

You can’t say what you think if you legit don’t know.

[gayvian]

oh my god

[dysfunctionalfocus]

Of fucking course there’s a word for it.

Also,

Of fucking course it’s because of ADHD.

[benevolentsupergoogle]

That text is from the book “Driven to Distraction” by Edward M Hallowell M.D. and John J. Ratey M.D.

Has some amazing case studies on ADHD, and is a very cathartic read for someone diagnosed as an adult.

[myadhdlife]

Thank you so much for adding a source to this! In general any book by M.D. Hallowell or by Dr. Russell Barkley is a sound bet for a good book on adhd that’s incredibly validating!

[mountainqoats]

Angel (1887), Abbott Handerson Thayer / This Year, The Mountain Goats

[systlin]

Anyway, if you read marriage certificates from church records, a full 85% of first marriages for young women were around 18-19 years old. The rest skewed higher, into the early twenties, with only a few being below that age and only one in a thousand was younger than 16. 

The age of puberty has declined over the centuries as girls get better nutrition, as well, so throughout the middle ages the age at which a girl could expect her first period was around 16, where modern girls often get it much younger. 

The idea that women in earlier ages were married and mothers in their early teens is a myth. Marriages of children were usually only between noble families, and made for political reasons, or creepy old bastards who wanted a child-wife and could get away with it because they were rich and powerful. They often would point to the fact that the Roman elite did the same thing as justification. The Romans, of course, would point to the Greeks doing the same thing as justification, the Greeks pointed at the Assyrians, and so on back through the ages. 

It was considered disgusting by normal people then and still is. 

This myth is still brought out and touted by sick fuckers. Know it for what it is; a falsehood. 

[mistresstrevelyan]

And EVEN among the nobility marriages at such a young age were a much rarer occasion than those apologists would make you believe.

Let’s look an an egregious example, Henry the bloody VIII:

First marriage:

He was 18, Katharine of Aragon was 23.

Second marriage:

He was 40/41, Anne Boleyn, depending on which theory you believe, was anywhere between 24 to 32.

Third marriage:

He was 44, Jane Seymour was 28.

Fourth marriage:

He was 48, Anne of Cleves was 25

Fifth marriage:

He was 48, Catherine Howard, depending on which source you believe, was between 17-22. And yes, people at the time actually were squicked out by this age difference. And rightly so.

Sixth marriage:

He was 51, Catherine Parr was 31. 

Even the most notorious LECHER and WIFE MURDERER in history did not marry teenagers in at least 5 if not 6 out of 6 marriages. 

And here’s another Tudor tidbit, both Henry VII and VIII knew how traumatic and damaging it is for women marrying/having children too young. Henry VII’s mother was married at 12 and gave birth to Henry VII at 13. It caused so much damage and trauma that she never had another child after him despite being married three times.

So yes CUT THAT SHIT OUT. Teenage girls are NOT adults and anyone preying on them is pure evil.

[systlin]

YOU 

I LIKE YOU

And as for the marriage of Elizabeth Woodville to King Edward IV, she was 27 at the time. He? Was 22. 

She had been married before, and did marry young…at the age of sixteen or seventeen, to Sir John Gray, who was about five years her senior. 

[ghiraheeheeheem]

@systlin This is good information, but do you have a source for the information about how most marriages back in the day were not actually usually from a younger age? I tried Googling it but I can only find things talking about modern day issues.

[systlin]

Well, if you don’t want to spend months crawling through digitized copies of marriage records preserved in church archives from the 12th through 18th centuries from England, Italy, Germany, France, ect (which you can do, and it will show you I’m right) you can go read  “ Medieval Households” by David Herlihy, Harvard University Press, 1985. He did the archive crawling for you. 

Also  Peter Laslett’s book “The World We Have Lost”, where he details over a thousand marriage certificates, and he dug through many more in the writing of the work. 

[im-defalut]

Wait. I am spanish. Do they actually think henry/enrique VII married fucking katherin/catalina de Aragón as a teenager?

You know we see films about this in school and every one is pretty much adult there, both fisically and in the story.

[systlin]

There’s this…really weird trend in a lot of pseudo-European fantasy/ ‘historical’ books to have girls marry like…really young, to vastly older dudes. Like at about 13, getting married off to like 30 year olds. And then say “Well that’s what it was like back then.” 

(Sideyes G.R.R.M)

And…no. No it wasn’t. That’s gross. England was creeped TF out when Henry VIII married Catherine Howard when she was between 17 and 22 and he was 48 as stated above, and rightly so. 

[prismatic-bell]

All of this is excellent, and there is one thing I would add:

When you DID have these super-young marriages between nobility, it was more or less the same thing we do today when we scream “DIBS!” over who gets the TV remote. You might have a 13-year-old lord marrying a 14-year-old girl, but they weren’t expected to actually act as husband and wife, not yet. He had schooling to finish, she had to learn how to run a household. The union was purely political and not to be consummated until later–you know, at a point when they were 18 or 19 and she could carry a child without dying of it and he could actually support a wife.

[bloodasredlipstick-deactivated2]

I think one of the major causes of many misconceptions like this is because people have been basing their preceptions on life in the past off of works of FICTION written in the past. When I was studying Early Modern literature in undergrad, this topic was brought up regarding the presence of sexual abuse. There were many plays and what not that implied things such as this, however the scene in the play WAS CONSIDERED SHOCKING to people back then too. It would be like someone 500 years from now watching some grimdark noire mopey antihero cop drama in a city of sin, and then thinking that it demonstrates what the everyday life of today’s world is. No one in this thread is saying things like that NEVER happened back then, it was just… not as common as historical fiction and fiction written 500 years ago might have you believe. As OP mentioned, historical documents from the time have far fewer child marriages and sexual abuse than literary works from the time do.

[norseminuteman]

Rebloging for A+ history. 

[aspiringwarriorlibrarian]

I think the best metaphor for this sort of lazy, ahistorical bullshit I’ve ever heard (that I sadly can’t find the source for) is “Imagine if someone dug up records of Donald Trump and Woody Allen and decided they were the norm for society from 1700-2100″. 

[kaumnyakte]

in which tumblr heckin learns itself a hajnal line

[rendakuenthusiast]

Definitely a lot of treating the past of western Europe like it’s the only past that exists.

[systlin]

Well, I was specifically talking about the modern fantasy genre, most of which is set in a ‘pseudo medieval Europe’ kind of world. So, yes, this post is focusing on western Europe, because that’s the location and time period most often drawn on by writers responsible for the sorta bullshit I’m talking about in this post.

[prismatic-bell]

I was going to bring up the “young marriages were basically on paper” thing and then saw I’d already done it.

I have no memory of this place.

How old is this post?!

[ruffboi-mags]

Old. I definitely reblogged it on my old account at least once.

[findingfeather]

Good post. I also am fundamentally incapable of letting this kind of discourse go by without adding: 

Juliet Capulet is meant to be seen as very young, and when Paris (cousin of the Prince, aka privileged as everfucking hell) is on-scene talking her reluctant father into giving her away in marriage, at 13, with the bs “younger than her are happy mothers made”, you are meant to be squicked the fuck out by both the fact that he’s doing that, and the fact that Capulet lets himself be convinced. 

It is serious foreshadowing about just how fucking stupid Capulet is about his power, prestige and “face”, and tied into the actual point of the play (which is that this feud is a human-eating cursed evil monster that will not be stopped by anything less than both families, in effect, being destroyed, which is what happens when both of them lose their only heirs to mutual suicide, and that is partly because of the complacency and corruption of the Prince and his family, who are perpetually in the middle of shit making the feud worse instead of fixing it), and Paris is not a Good Guy. He is a creepy fucker. 

[catchymemes]

[hamburgeroisie]

I deadass thought this was 3 Star Wars movies

[metalgirlysolid]

its called Color Theory and we been knew. “Art is subjective” but there are certain “rules” you can follow to make things more appealing in a subconscious/subliminal kind of way.

once you see it, you cant unsee it.

[greenvelvetchaise]

I can’t believe there are only 9 movies

[starz28]

[nouveaured]

[gunsandfireandshit]

[surrealist-lyricist]

All Out Bruised Bodies and the Whole Heart Shrinks - La Dispute

Art Credit: @drain-my-head

[approvers]

[versaceslut]

[garlictoastie-deactivated202501]

when straight people talk to gays

[wizzardhat]

BACK WHEN DISNEY CHANNEL KNEW WHAT WAS UP I CANNOT BELIEVE THIS SHOW

[superstonedd]

“I will never understand how people decide to get up and just leave. How do you go from telling someone their importance and meaning to you one week and avoiding them the next? Did you actually mean what you said, or were you just lying like everyone else?”

[kyberpank]