One of my favourite bits of media history trivia is that back in the Elizabethan period, people used to publish unauthorised copies of plays by sending someone who was good with shorthand to discretely write down all of the play’s dialogue while they watched it, then reconstructing the play by combining those notes with audience interviews to recover the stage directions; in some cases, these unauthorised copies are the only record of a given play that survives to the present day. It’s one of my favourites for two reasons:
It demonstrates that piracy has always lay at the heart of media preservation; and
Imagine being the 1603 equivalent of the guy with the cell phone camera in the movie theatre, furtively scribbling down notes in a little book and hoping Shakespeare himself doesn’t catch you.
100% for real, this lil fash shithead has no idea, but this is such an absolutely perfect encapsulation of how the squalid institution of hetero marriage under capitalism is. Marx could not have phrased it better himself.
This is what they have in mind as the ideal, as the institution that the state is supposed to revolve around. All the means testing, tax shit, etc etc etc All the medieval fuckery that treats people who aren’t married as different from people who aren’t. This is what it comes down to.
You get to be a sex slave (because leaving is about to become financially impossible) and you get free food (you shop for, cook, wash dishes, and clean the kitchen), clothes (you do the laundry for the whole family and iron his shirts), lodging (you clean the house), income (an allowance that he decides on), healthcare (he’s not going to let you decide on when to have kids or how many), a car (it’s his so if you escape in it he gets to report it stolen so the police will help find you), and lots of cute clothes (sexy clothes to show you off as a trophy but when other men look too hard at you he’ll call you a boundary less, disrespectful slut). What a deal!
and very, very often, self care is not plants and ice rollers and fluffy blankets of peace.
it’s standing over your kitchen sink and crying while doing the dishes because you just want to go back to bed but the dishes need done. and you don’t know why you’re crying but you’re trusting you need it. and you aren’t listening to the music that pulls you into a spiral; you’re listening to some cheerful shit your friend sent you. it’s getting up and staring at your fridge and closing your eyes and then cooking yourself food even though you hate it and it’s miserable. because you know that you’d cook for your friend, and you are trying to befriend yourself. it’s dragging yourself into the shower because you know you’ll feel better afterwards. it’s doing mundane tasks with patience, cursing under your breath, trying desperately to give yourself grace. grace is the beginning of care. care is the beginning of love.
we think it’s supposed to be peace and yet the most powerful self care moments are when we hate everything but especially ourselves. and life does not feel worth the loving. to look into that pain and yet choose to care for yourself in however many pieces you are — that is care. love. grace. trust. belief. it hurts because it’s love where there was no love before. it heals because it believes there will be love, one day, soon.
the feminine urge to mourn lost cultures and empires. for your heart to ache every time you remember how many languages no longer have speakers, how many ruins are abandoned, how many people lived happy lives before you. to feel melancholy and longing every time you study history - of this world or another, even fictional. to want to play a role in history, but in the same time fear dying, passing, being forgotten like those thousands before you.
ALT
