who will love a little sparrow?

we've come a long way, baby / from adam's rib to women's lib!

[wellward]

GUIDELINES + ABOUT + MARY + LILITH + EVE

this is an independent roleplaying blog written by rabbit. there will be nsfw content and it is preferred that writing partners are 18+. “and god and adam were expectant and afraid the day eve and lilith returned to the garden, bursting with possibilities, ready to rebuild it together.” 🐍🍎🌈❤️

[wellward]

are you a fan of the movie midsommar?

Yes! There’s quite a lot I liked about it 😄

[wellward]

Honestly the posts that you make about men oppressing women have really good points. I do believe there are good men out there, (I know quite a few) but even if they are good I don’t ever see any evidence of them actually trying to help and lift up the women around them. I do classify myself as straight, but I’ve struggled with my sexuality because men have basically treated me like yesterday’s dried up dog shit. There are other reasons I won’t explicitly say, but it’s gross, and they wonder why a lot of women end up resenting or even being bitter towards them. I’ve read the replies and comments to your posts, and I’m glad to see another person that doesn’t allow the words of online people get to them, especially when they try to put words in your mouth which seems to be a common practice on this website.. a VERY common one. You have feelings, and they’re valid. Just like everybody else has feelings that are valid. 💞🙂

Thank you sm for this lovely message, and telling me your perspective ❤️❤️❤️ Experiences like yours are what I was talking about, in the original post that sparked all this, and what I was wishing would end. I want men to stop hurting women. Misogyny is truly endemic in our world and it’s proven by the results in women’s lives. I have no idea why that person decided to take my post out of context and create an issue where there didn’t need to be one, tbh, but it is what it is.

[wellward]

Results came in and we’re covid negative baybee

[wellward]

👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀👀

[wellward]

I saw your post about Mary being a closeted lesbian and I ABSOLUTELY AGREE but would love to hear your take on it, if you feel up to discussing it 👀👉👈

I feel like it’s right in the text tbh! Like, she’s a long-time singleton in a time period where it’s uncommon and culturally disapproved-of for women to be unmarried. She gets a male partner later in life, but she’s never been sexually intimate with him (or any man, given that she meets the patriarchal standard for “virginity”), he has the personality of a box of rocks, and he has a career that is guaranteed to take him away for long periods of time, repeatedly, so she only rarely has to see him. And her body language with women is really suggestive--I think she’s a sort of tense, fluttery person in general, but when she’s around women, like Lilith in pt 1, the fortune teller lady in pt 3, Agatha in pt 4, she’s so visibly tense, her back is ramrod-straight, whenever they get close to her or initiate physical contact she’s like 😳 She just reads so much like somebody who has zero interest in men and is terrified of getting too close to women because of what it makes her feel. Very dykonic of her tbh

[yesterdaysprint]

The Washington Bee, Washington DC, September 27, 1902

[jyou-no-sonoko19]

Script supervisor Wardwell, dealing with ‘the talent’.

[precision-instrument]

[wellward]

what I must look like to the normies when im talking about how both Adam 2.0 and Baby Adam were part of a heterosexual propaganda campaign to make Lilith over into a fresh remix of patriarchal myth

[wellward]

Soooooooo to make a long story short, I’m in isolation rn because I was exposed to a confirmed case of COVID. If anyone wants to start beef with me now, feel free, cuz I’ll have more time. Subjects we can start beef on:

Whether or not women are oppressed (they are)

Does blogging on your Tumblr count as activism (it doesn’t)

Whose feminist praxis is better (this one isn’t for me to judge)

If the depiction of Lilith this season was misogynist (it was)

If turning Mambo Marie into a man was racist, homophobic, and misogynist (it was)

If Adam 2.0 had a personality (he didn’t)

Whether or not Mary Wardwell is canonically a closeted lesbian (she is)

What Lilith’s astrological signs would be if she had any (I have no idea)

Which Shakespeare heroine should Michelle play on stage ASAP (Beatrice from Much Ado)

[wellward]

rectoress​.

                 there is something to be said, truly there is, about new england’s hospitality but this, ah this goes above and beyond hospitable, affable manners. this is entirely different - and entirely unexpected. It is forced upon her with a gracious and old fashioned cordiality tissaia cannot spurn lest she prove to be the disrespectful one. the words, the downpour of words and facts streaming in different directions under the pull of ms wardwell’s erratic thoughts encountering the obstacles of memories deviating them further and further away from their destination, would be enough to sweep her away if it weren’t for the woman herself. birdlike in her mannerisms. not exactly frail but wary and aware in the way small birds are when they know they are being watched.

she fits. here. the town is almost a pastiche, some illustration brought to life and filled with near cartoonish characters inhabiting picturesque streets, quaint houses and fairytale-like woods. and mary wardwell simply, exquisitely fits in. oh yes, there is some sort of dignity about her, a simple and sober elegance in the way she carries herself. tissaia angles her head to alter her vantage. in the way you hide herself, she amends. in the way she burrows behind an old cardigan, an eclectic collection of trinkets and other singular curiosities, and a rather impressive compilation of books (oh and maps, apparently) talking is easy to her, recounting lore and fragments of history that would all but be lost if it weren’t for her scholarly devotion comes naturally. being on the receiving end of observation, however, unnerves her.

 “there were witch trials here?” 

tissaia moves a few inches in an unusual display of physical enthusiasm. it’s barely a step in the teacher’s direction but it is enough to knock a small pile of books over. they topple down from the corner of a most offensively cluttered desk (how does she manage to navigate this place is beyond her) down to the equally busy paper basket. “my apologies.” inwardly rattled by what feels like an overwhelming mess, she experiences a greater level of discomfort now that she is picking the books up to place them back where they belong in a neat little pile, each tome perfectly adjusted to the one under it. there now, stop. count. she takes in a breath, counts to ten, pulls on the sleeves of her coat.

“i would very much like to see this house.” the smile that ensues isn’t disingenuous but it is strained by the effort demanded by her presence in this office. “shall we?”

         “Oh, please don’t worry about...” But Ms. de Vries is already stacking the books, in a pile so geometrically ideal that it almost embarrasses Mary, makes her want to go about adjusting everything to right angles. Having reached out to take care of the mess, she falls back as Tissaia completes her task, blinking, then smiling as the words come: I would very much like to see this house. Really? The Winover Farmstead? There’s a flutter of excitement, and a twitch of nerves: the odd sites of Greendale seem to impinge on her more deeply now, as though all that’s happened has peeled a layer of her away, left the sensitive underskin open to the elements. She hopes Ms. de Vries won’t notice.

        “Yes, yes. Let me just get my coat.” She crosses to the stand by the door, taking down her scarf, chattering as she winds it around her neck, drawing a fold up over her head to shield her hair: “It really is such an intriguing spot. It’s so unfortunate that the house is no longer standing. Of course, it’s not farmland anymore there. You’ll see when we get there--of necessity they’ve made a little... Park, I suppose, out of it, but the rest of the area is quite developed, lots of new buildings. I should say, newer, new to the Puritans, at least.” She smiles to herself at that, slipping on her coat, doing up the buttons. “Let me see. My purse. We can take my car, of course."

        As they emerge from her office into the school hallway, Mary switches off the light in her office and locks the door. “I’m surprised you didn’t know about our witch trials, Ms. de Vries. But I suppose it’s not really... Publicized, in quite the way of, oh, Salem. Greendale remembers, but we don’t advertise. There were thirteen executed witches here. All women. But I suppose you could have guessed that. There’s been a few books published on it but mostly local presses, I would be happy to loan them to you, if you were interested. And at the historical society we have quite a few documents from the time period, although most of the major holdings went to, hmm, the university.”

         It’s only a few cars in the school’s parking lot, Mary’s among them. “There are several other sites in town, and in the woods around Greendale, if you were interested, Ms. de Vries. The gallows tree where the witches were hanged is still standing... Well, supposedly. Are you very fond of witches?”

[humangreenskull]

I work in a rare/used bookstore and today I found this absolute gem: a complete bibliography of every book printed before 1966 containing lesbian characters. It’s the first edition printed by The Ladder – the publication the Daughters of Bilitis used to publish and circulate some of the first lesbian statistics and surveys. 

There are HUDNREDS of titles in here, most of them lesbian pulp novels, and they all indicate whether the lesbian characters are main characters (A), secondary characters (B), or characters vaguely implied to be lesbians ©. We’re still deciding if it’s a salable book, but I hope we keep it in the shop as a reference text.

Their coding system also has me rolling, like they wanted to empirically catalogue the fact that though a work may have lesbians in it, that work is still T for Trash 

[wellward]

gratiaplcna.

A cottage feels like the ideal place to be in a cold, snowy night — if the circumstances were different, she could almost imagine herself reading by the fire with a warm cup of coffee as snow fell outside in a place like this.  It was most certainly an interesting place — && the number of books caught her attention; she wondered what sort of things the woman named Mary was reading.

She follows her into the kitchen, appreciating both the comforting heat of the stove and Mary’s chatty nature. There was something about her, Lou couldn’t yet decipher what — something that drew her in, even as a perfect stranger.

“No, it’s fine… I’ve just had dinner… But please don’t let that stop you, if you’d like to eat”

“We had one, growing up — I’m from California and it made the kitchen so stuffy and hot… I was thrilled when they changed it to a more modern one, my mother not so much — quite an old fashioned woman. I say we must get on with the times, don’t you agree?”

She thanks Mary for the coffee, starting to drink it. It would likely keep her up all night, but that’s probably for the best — it would be quite the drive back to Boston once the snow settles. Better to be prepared.

“What sort of project?” Curiosity always took the better of her; the question Mary asks makes her a bit nervous - or embarrassed, but since she did just invade the woman’s home && was drinking her coffee, Lou decides to answer “Well… I suppose I did make it your business, barging into your house in the middle of the night… My husband and I, we— well, we got into a bit of a fight.” Her cheeks involuntarily turn red “I suppose I needed space to think, breathe… Ended up driving a little longer than intended, though”

        “A fight,” Mary repeats, “I see.” Well, she’s put her foot in it already, hasn’t she? Louisa’s face is red, a nervous flush behind her coffee cup. Mary wishes she could soothe it away, tell her, really, I know just how it is, sometimes our loved ones are the most insufferable people in our lives, and all we want to do is run, someplace new, someplace we aren’t ourselves--“Yes--I do understand.“ She nods, sips her own coffee. “It can be... So difficult,” she says, “to think quite clearly, when we’re troubled in our minds, and our hearts.”

        She takes another sip. “My project--well. Let me see. There was a writer who--I hardly remember, but he said something like, the most merciful thing in the world is that the human mind can’t correlate all its contents--something along those lines. Well, I’m correlating--” she smiles ruefully--”or trying to. This is rather--oh, is the word I’m looking for... Esoteric? There was an elder of Greendale who lived here from, oh, 1650 or so, and he was a very prolific writer of letters. He wrote about the, hmm, about the witch trials we had here in the 1690s, when he was already middle-aged and considered venerable--in his forties, can you imagine--and those letters are quite interesting, but I’m reading a few from earlier. There were...”

        More coffee, to clear her throat. “Quite a lot of thinkers, here, quite a lot of learned men--no Cotton or Increase Mathers, but our own peculiar group, and several of his letters were about their meetings and discussions, which were on theological subjects, but also town politics. Now, you understand, these things weren’t separate in the least. Religion and the law and the whole society went quite hand in hand--as they do today. So the references he makes fly quite fast and thick and some of it seems to be transcriptions of their conversations, done in a sort of shorthand, and I’m...” She laughs a little.

        “I’ve gone on. I mean to say that I’m trying to correlate every reference in his letters with the text they reference. Each book of the Bible, or letter by Martin Luther, or Richard Sibbes.” Her voice gains a little self-deprecation, a note of sarcasm, as she says, “Isn’t that fascinating. But I’m very fond of my hobbies.” She looks at Louisa over her coffee cup, gentling her voice to ask, “Is there anything... Would you want to--I know I’m a stranger, but to talk about what’s gone on? With your husband.”

[wellward]

We are all raised in a misogynist society and taught that our fundamental purpose is to please men—even just the man that lives in our head, Margaret Atwood’s perpetual, eternal voyeur, who watches our actions and demands we course-correct should we deviate from the path most pleasing, most flattering, most comfortable for men. Protecting imaginary men from the mean, too-harsh words of a stranger on the internet is an expression of that misogynist course-correction; conjuring imaginary arguments and projecting imaginary statements that that mean, mean woman never made, in order to justify your attempt to course-correct her, is a basic psychological salve applied to soothe cognitive dissonance and feel self-righteous. Sorry, but it’s not my job to make you feel comfortable, because you’re worried my words were too meanie-pants for those men who remain fundamentally unaffected by anything marginalized women chat lightly about in their own spaces. They still own the world, they still have the money, they still hurt the women in their lives. It is not a denial of one’s own privilege to point out the basic fact that men as a class are oppressors, that regardless of their own positions of marginalization, they still oppress women, and are not harmed by the words of one woman in her little corner of the internet. I get that you want to make men happy and comfortable, but that’s a you problem? Get well soon, I guess.

[wellward]

Anyway, good to know the man fandom never rests. Here’s some quotes from Kate Manne’s Down Girl: The Logic of Misogyny:

On my analysis, misogyny’s primary function and constitutive manifestation is the punishment of “bad” women, and policing of women’s behavior. But systems of punishment and reward—and conviction and exoneration—tend to work together, holistically. So, the overall structural features of the account predict that misogyny as I’ve analyzed it is likely to work alongside other systems and mechanisms to enforce gender conformity. And a little reflection on current social realities encourages pursuing this line of thinking, which would take the hostility women face to be the pointy, protruding tip of a larger patriarchal iceberg. We should also be concerned with the rewarding and valorizing of women who [ ... ] enforce the “good” behavior of others, and engage in certain common forms of patriarchal virtue-signaling—by, for example, participating in slut-shaming, victim-blaming, or the Internet analog of witch-burning practices.

And

Misogyny frequently involves morality take-downs or the unforgiving shaming of women for their (real or supposed) moral errors. Misogyny also subjects women to what I have come to think of as a kind of tyranny of vulnerability- by pointing to any and every (supposedly) more vulnerable (supposed) person or creature in her vicinity to whom she might (again, supposedly) do better, and require her to care for them, or else risk being judged callous, even monstrous.

If anyone wants to have an actual conversation with me about... Anything tbh, I’ll be here to hear it. If not... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

[wellward]

Sorry one rando decided to be mad at you for no good reason... Personally, I'd just block them. But I wanted to send you a nice ask to say: I love your content ❤️ don't let the idiots get you down ❤️

I appreciate you sm! I’m trying not to block ppl because of, Idk, feeling like conversations should be able to happen? But I’m grateful to you and I’m hopeful that the drama will recede. Thank you so much ❤️❤️❤️