Pretty much everyone knows about witch trials. The European ones, Salem, etc. They even make movies for kids with the subject as a central plot point. (ParaNorman was pretty good.) It's emphasized over and over the distant, frightened past of it, the terrified, ignorant townspeople. But that's so long ago. I mean, people believed in fairies too, way back then, right? Little mostly harmless things as long as you didn't eat their food, but leave some milk out for them come harvest, it's mostly charming stuff.

Except when it really, really wasn't.

( TW: Extreme violence against womenCollapse )

Will Rogers once remarked "Governments used to murder by the bullet only. Now it's by the quart.", on the subject of Prohibition. Prohibition of alcohol was a costly, messy, awful mistake, and was responsible for thousands of deaths, as well as the rise of the Mafia in the US. I mean, none of this is controversial stuff, except possibly in parts of Utah. People acknowledge that it didn't work, in any way. Except people who got rich by bootlegging or moonshining. Anyway. Aside from some vague jokes about bathtub gin and checking to see if you went blind, what a lot of people are not fully aware of is the adulteration that went on in the rotgut available to the average person, as opposed to the romantically smuggled genuine stuff well-off jazz babies were drinking.

Wood alcohol was the most common, being ridiculously cheap, easy to make, tasted like grain alcohol and potent enough to spike a lot of fake booze. Well, potent in that it turned into formic acid, mostly in the brain. Down in the Bowery in NYC, you could get a "cocktail" called Smoke, which was straight methyl alcohol and water, for fifteen cents a glass. Unsurprisingly, deaths from Smoke alone in the Bowery averaged one a day.

That wasn't the only poison in the drinks, though. By the mid-20s, the government ordered the industrial alcohol that was still sold to be further poisoned, claiming it would reduce the numbers of people drinking it. Carbolic acid, benzene, mercury salts, chloroform, brucine (a strychnine relative), and such did slightly lower the number of people drinking it, though mostly just in the sense that they kept dying or ending up in alcoholic wards in hospitals.

Jamaican ginger was a patent medicine of the 19th century that was mostly just popular as a means of getting around Prohibition. Well, it was until the government cracked down on it. But some enterprising chemists and dealers found a way to get past the Prohibition agents' tests, and were back in business. All with the magic of tricresyl phosphate. It wasn't long until the paralysis cases started showing up at hospitals. And until blues singers started writing songs about it.

The Federal government's position was that the dead, blinded, poisoned and paralyzed drinkers knew what they were doing, and deserved it. A position pretty much on par with much modern policy.

Fast-forward to now. We're still, generally, as a society in the business of prohibition. And look how great it's going! Cartels are still making mad bank, narco-lords have even the police running scared, organized crime is doing fine, and addicted people are incarcerated at astonishing levels. And people are still being poisoned and told it's their fault.

In parts of Russia and the Ukraine now (though a few cases have reportedly shown up in Canada), heroin addiction is pretty rampant, because of poverty, and the main heroin trafficking roads being through the area. However, access to heroin, especially outside of wealthier major cities is extremely patchy. Enter homemade desomorphine, better known as krokodil. It gets its name from the fact that the unrefined mix of codeine pills, red phosphorus, iodine, kerosine and other similarly healthy ingredients will actually eat off your flesh. Despite the obvious horror and suffering, many of the people using it are simply allowed to die (which does happen quite quickly) because, as is generally the case with the very poor and the very addicted in any population, they've already been written off and rendered less than human.

These aren't isolated horrors. Up to 80% of the cocaine sold in the US is cut with a veterinary deworming drug which can cause an immune reaction leading to lethal flesh-eating infections. And then we get to the "bath salts", substituted cathinones which have already caused people to die, as has the synthetic weed sold as incense.

It's not the wealthy, or the elites who are suffering and dying from these poisoned, adulterated, or simply inherently toxic drugs any more than the ultra-wealthy were at risk of jake leg during Prohibition. These drugs are, without a doubt, vastly more dangerous than what they were devised to imitate, adulterate, or otherwise get around the law with. The underclasses have been written off as expected casualty of a dangerous, costly, bloody, and fundamentally needless war.

*tip of the hat goes to Deborah Blum, whose The Poisoner's Handbook is a fantastic read*

I've found myself thinking about Cat Marnell lately. It wasn't my intention, really. I mean, I have written about her before, but I kind of assumed that was it. Anyway, I read a lot of online beauty writing. Like a lot, a lot. So it turned out that I'd actually been reading her beauty writing for possibly ever. I never put two and two together, because I am incredibly terrible with names, and mostly only remembered websites that had decent reviews/tutorials. I did make the connection when her columns started to be increasingly full of allusions to kind of depressing sex and tips for making it look like you haven't been on a coke binge. And the speed. Always the speed.

This year, she stopped writing for xojane, and is now the "pills and narcissism" correspondent for Vice. Yes really. She's a lot of things. Really, really emotionally fucked up, as she freely relates. A pretty good writer. An absolute trainwreck. She looks kind of like a very high manga character, all tiny with huge eyes and a tiny mouth. Those last two, I think, are part of why the media and public can't stop watching.

Edgar Allan Poe once said "The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.", and this still seems to be the case. We can't seem to get over watching attractive, often-but-not-always talented (you can just be famous) women crumble and burn. The cult of Marilyn Monroe comes to mind. The sick car crash fascination so many people have for Britney and Lindsay Lohan's spirals downward. There's a very gross, misogynist schadenfreude that seem to frequently bubble to the surface, like the woman in question deserves it for being famous. Like a bleached, tanned Greek tragedy. It often tends to the sexual. The public cries for more, and there's always more to take. Until there isn't. But there are always more women.

I cant help but notice the difference between the attention given to famous male trainwrecks and the women who are also deeply fucked up. Amy Winehouse vs. Keith Richards. Cat Marnell doesn't want help at this point, or pity and armchair diagnosis. But the gaze she's receiving is deeply creepy and vampiric. Ultimately, what comes to mind is a story involving Joan Crawford and Marilyn Monroe: "Upon hearing the news of Marilyn’s death, Joan was quite upset. She was having dinner at George Cukor’s house, when he called her on it. "What is this? You never liked Marilyn." Joan answered, "Yes, you’re right. She was cheap, and an exhibitionist. She was never professional, and that irritated the hell out of people. But, for God’s sake, she needed help. She had all these people on her payroll. Where they hell were they when she needed them? Why in the hell did she have to die alone?"" Pretty much.

It occurred to me, while I was cleaning the bathtub, just how much a lot of the popular rhetoric around the medieval European witch-craze is really, really offensive, and that apparently I need to write about it on the internet instead of cleaning the sink.

To start, it's really, really depressing that its apparently easier to believe that accused witches were part of a massive, well-hidden secret religion whose truths were only learned in the late 19th century and early 20th by an assortment of highly dubious "scholars", than that misogyny is a really big, really terrible...reality. Yes, a massive secret cult, for which there's extremely little evidence aside from a few superstitions hovering halfway outside the predominant strains of Christianity, as opposed to the idea that patriarchy (which is pretty obvious) is profoundly threatened by women perceived as deviant, and that torture will extract just about any confession you want. Also, it's not like people were fucking out of their minds because of social upheavals, climate changes, plagues, xenophobia, Millennarian splinter sects left right and centre, and thus generally paranoid and extra-authoritarian. Nah, none of that provable stuff. None of that stuff we actually are dealing with now, and should maaaaybe consider addressing. Much more comforting to go with the ancient mother-goddess stuff that was mostly made up in the late 30s.

And then there's the people who actually have the fucking gall to refer to it as "The Women's Holocaust". Are they aware that there were women in the Holocaust/Porrajmos/Shoah? Because WTF is this shit. It's depressing enough that panic and patriarchy slaughtered 35000-50000 people, mostly women without making shit up. (It's also really telling that the massacres of Jewish people of the time also don't get much airtime.)

Now, back to the cleaning of All The Things, and my apparent muse, Bleach Fumes.

Because everyone else has parodied that damn Gotye song. It was really hard not to just keep the verse by Kimbra unaltered.

Some Shakesville That I used To Know.


Now and then I think of when I used to read you
like when you said you were Queen Cunt of Fuck Mountain
bookmarked you in my favourite sites
stayed up reading oh so many nights
but that was then and it's your fails I most remember

You then got addicted to a certain kind of anger
you directed it at us, always at us
So when we said that we were not "all in"
you said we were all bad feminists
But I'll admit that I was glad that it was over.


But you didn't have to fail so hard
make like it's "you Vs. them" and we were Hitler
I don't need your "teaspoon" crap
Now you're just the Shakesville that I used to know.

No you didn't have to ban us all
delete our posts and have your mods then scold us
I guess that I don't need that now
Now you're just the Shakesville that I used to know.

(New singer)Now and then I think of all the times you really messed up.
But had me believing it was always something that I'd done.
Your internalized misogyny, your token gays always scolding me
You never could just let it go
No returning to the Shakesville that I used to know!

*chorus*

Red dye is blackface!
(The Shakesville that I used to know!)
Surprise Buttplugs!
(The Shakesville that I used to know!)
No dyke sex!
(The Shakesville that I used to know!)
Give money!
(The Shakesville that I used to know!)

*outro*

This one's been floating around for a long, long time. But, as these posts often do, it takes a specific thing to make me point out, once again, that the game is fucking fixed.

So yeah. Makeup. And this damn thing. Ten "scary celebrity closeups" *cue spooky theremin*. All I'm seeing are nine women who adhere to the standards of beauty and Iggy Pop.

I will forever be irritated by people (okay, 99% straight cis men) who insist that women who adhere to a very male-generated/supported standard of beauty must somehow pretend that that appearance is both totally natural and effortless. Helen Gurley Brown advocated sleeping in your makeup and waking as the asscrack of dawn to touch up your face, so as to make him think lipstick and fake eyelashes are totally what women always look like. And seeing random male complaints about seeing makeup lying around. And always, always the smug insistence that women look better without makeup. (This is my favourite, because the woman they're praising is almost always wearing it. Happens to me a lot as well. Ahem.)

The idea that beauty work is both frivolous, stupid and something that must never, ever be acknowledged is just one more way the game is fucking rigged. Women and other femmes must look absolutely flawless at all points, from all angles, and often in ways that are physically impossible. (Seriously, nobody's eyes look like Zooey Deschanel's, except Katy Perry's. And that's because they do their makeup mostly the same.) Or else they get to be "high-maintence", "shallow", "vain", and varying permutations of stupid, despite that actual skill being displayed. Or if they don't follow, they get to be "ugly", "frumpy", "letting themselves go" and "don't care for themselves". (Can I also complain about how self-care advice for women is generally limited to a bubble bath and more beauty work?)

I also am amused by their sole male example, an attempt maybe to deflect accusations that they're just hating on women's appearances. Seriously, Iggy fucking Pop? I suppose, if you're going for an example unlikely to offend your largely young-male readership. Gotta go to the cartoonish end of things.

I really dislike this insistence on a simultaneous illusion and rebuking for participating in it.

BONUS: While puttering about online, I was linked to this "famous hotties without makeup" gallery I can tell you what specific makeup every single person except Katie Holmes is wearing. This is why I roll my eyes at people who yammer on about how much they prefer women without makeup. Also, I'm just going to point out that most of them have also undergone extensive plastic surgery, so.

Note: I ain't locking this, or most further entries. Haters gonna hate, creepy stalkers gonna creep (I seeeeee yooooooou!)

So anyway. It hit me after seeing entirely too many "jokes" that were supposed to be about Justin Bieber that were actually just halfway reheated homophobic cliches, strung together by the magic of demotivator templates.

I got to thinking (a dangerous pastime, I know), about where I've seen this before. OH YEAH. When masculinity was declared to be in severe crisis because of "metrosexuality", (which is poorly defined enough as to mean anything more than a cheeto-stained shirt and never doing your hair), for one. During the last big boyband crazes, where boys and grown-ass men alike lamented that apparently teenage girls were going to forever be destroyed by lusting for guys who looked like girls. Apparently. Because they looked an awful lot like young men to me, even back then. Or, say, The Beatles, who got an awful lot of flack for their scandalously long hair. (They got a lot of "like a girl" cracks too.) So now, we're far back, and that means Rudolf Valentino. One of the first big sex symbols of the 20th century, he got all the of the same shit. That he was destroying masculinity, that he'll ruin any chances regular dudes have, etc. And cut your hair, you look too pretty.

They all enjoy/ed the attention of many, many screaming, horny female fans. Who loved to look at them. And this? This shit just throws the natural order of things all out of whack. (Has anything ever been "in whack"?) Girls are for looking at, not for looking at you, the male! And now they're judging. And desiring. Not you, standard everyman. You're a rugged man's man, with means you eat no fibre, wear whatever your mom or wife buys you, and resist grooming.

This concludes my wondering about teen idols, who are mostly kind of crap, and how they break the male gaze by existing and simultaneously reinforcing it in their art. Now the burritos are cooked, and I must eat.

It's kind of interesting to think about how far back we've really gone when it comes to sex within the last few years. I mean, I remember that condoms weren't this weird taboo thing, and the idea of women fucking because they want to was actually like relatively common. Like Salt-n-Pepa songs. And Left Eye from TLC with her condom eyepatch.It seems like that's changed somewhere between when I was a teenager and when I was grown. And, how I feel most of the time aside, I'm not that old.

And now, we get shit like this in terms of trend pieces. This is that online mag's health editor. Really. Jesus wept.

Starting with the "abortion is murder" rhetoric and the Camille Paglia quote (I didn't know anyone read her still, now that we have Ann Coulter to be unpleasantly right-wing) , and heading into the raging bullshit about the pill. Yes, some may cause weight gain, and some may cause spotting. Alternately, pregnancy tends to cause a lot of tummy-girth and the pill is actually used to treat spotting. And then the "lol, teehee, I only take pills right if they're getting me high, also the pill never works for me.!" Uhh, I think I found your problem. Also, Plan B is just a super megadose of the pill, but I suspect she actually hasn't picked up on this.

I know there's a lot of debate going around as to whether this is supposed to be satire or not. Poe's Law strikes again! There's no wit or wink that would be there is it were good satire, so maybe it's terrible satire and she's an incompetent writer? This is a mystery like some kind of non-Euclidean relic in a Lovecraft story, where no matter what, I will go irreparably insane from pondering it. So, moving along.

Can I just point out how completely ridiculous it is to write "I hate talking about my sex life!" over and over in your column, the subject of which you chose, and presumably you have a delete key? It's this creepy 1950s coyness that's seeping its way back in to the basement of our view on sex like Love Canal groundwater. And about as healthy! Because there's nothing that says "I am an adult who actively consents to sex" like this "Ooh, I shouldn't, but I suppose if it doesn't look like I planned it, I could just say it happened!" thing. Which, hey, is also what she's doing when it comes to actual sex, not just talking about it, so I suppose I can give her a gold star for being consistent.

But that's not what really got me. It hit me like a ton of bricks while I was sitting here, drinking my coffee.

This passage here: " Condoms. Nope! As if. I don't know. I don't sleep with that many people and so I just don't do condoms! "
STIs are not actually a deity's punishment for harlotry, nor do they emerge as a form of spontaneous generation from a mysteriously-able-to-count orifice. Along related lines, meat does not spontaneously generate maggots, and mice to not appear from grain. I'm sorry if this comes as a shock to anyone, but I thought we had already as a society pretty much accepted germ theory. It turns out that there are people who don't still, and they're not just weird fundamentalists. Apparently hip magazine writers are kicking it old-school. I can't wait to see her next feature, where we learn how to balance our humours. Alchemical makeup?

I've been noticing something. Just here and there. Maybe it's the existence of Men's Pocky, a less sweet version for those macho manly men who don't want to eat girly feminine..uh...chocolate-dipped pretzel sticks. Right. Or this helpful list, which will make sure you don't shame yourself by ordering something as revolting as a drink known primarily to be drunk by women. Sweet things are coded as feminine, and, to some extent, lesser. As opposed to, you know, a matter of taste and preference, because then how would you know who's winning?

In Victorian times, sweets and greens alone were considered ideal food for women (no manly meat or anything), which illustrates that the dichotomy of women/sweet vs men/not-sweet was already a deeply ingrained idea. Many cultures have had the idea of men's versus women's foods, but I'm honestly not sufficiently informed to really touch on more than the more recent and Western one at hand. Beer managed to make the transition from being a very female-oriented drink up to the turn of the century to a more masculine one, but it's something of an oddity for that, though the extreme, caricatured masculinity of the advertising has definitely played a part. And the beer companies have been coming up with brilliant and not at all offensive ideas to try to convince women to drink more beer and disregard the offensive sausage-party-ness of the beer advertising that already exists.

The fact remains that there is a sexist stereotype about women and sugar. From the idea that women all drink pink, sweet cocktails which are somehow inferior to bitter or dry beverages, to the stereotype of the housewife eating bonbons before the television or the tragic single with a pint of Ben and Jerry's. I think there's more to it than a general bias against women consuming things that may possibly lead to Fat (a fate worse than death or hairy pits). I think it's the oppositional nature of sexism and gender stereotypes at work. If sweetness is women's food, then men's must be as unsweet as possible. And as men's perceived preferences are more esteemed, therefore women's must be dismissed as inferior. And that shit? Is fucked. There's not a damn thing wrong with preferring either, or not even having a preference. Taste is taste. Campari and soda? Enjoy. Sweet Riesling? If it floats your boat. You are not superior for your 75% dark chocolate, and the person enjoying their white chocolate is not a cocoa-wuss for it. (Though white chocolate IS straight-up gross.)