agreyeyedgirl

I have a NEW FAVORITE THING and it’s this ballad!

EDIT: Now as a bonus, here is some additional commentary addressing those who have reblogged or replied to this post to say things like ‘this is gross, if it were about a man doing this to a woman everyone would be up in arms’ or ‘forced marriage isn’t funny! this is NOT goals!’ (spoiler: it is in fact goals, as you will see).

So I’ve seen a handful of comments like this on this post, and people can have their own opinions etc etc but that also means that I get to have an opinion about your opinions! and my opinion is that you’re* completely wrong and I’m going to tell you why

*this is a generic you, not the above posters specifically, their nonsense just happens to be at the top of my activity page and has therefore been chosen as the default sample

OKAY so there are two main reasons why the above criticism is not the scalding tea you* seem to think it is (and is in fact powdered Crystal Light that’s only partially dissolved in lukewarm bathwater), and the first one is

1) the ‘omg this is problematic/abusive’ argument, which I’m going to call Reading Comprehension Failure, because, my good personages, did you read the fcking thing? at all? The Berkshire Lady does not in fact force this dude to do ANYTHING. She challenges him to a duel which he shows up for. Willingly! One might even say consensually. He came to the grove ready and WILLING to have a fight with someone! And when she made her counter offer she wasn’t holding her sturdy rapier to his throat? she didn’t have goons holding his arms?

All she did was say ‘either go through with the fight–the prearranged fight that you knowingly signed on for when you showed up–or marry me instead!’ and then she walked away for an hour to let him think about it! He could have chosen to fight. He could have gone home. He even had a buddy to back him up, while the Berkshire Lady doesn’t have any companion mentioned in the ballad at all. Gentle reader! this is not what coercion looks like!

2) Now I’m going to address the second argument, the ‘this isn’t actually progressive’/’just imagine if a MAN did this’, which I think of as Y’all Don’t Know Anything About Ballads. Because the POWER SWITCH IS WHY THIS BALLAD IS RAD AS FUCK. Flipping the power dynamics IS progressive, especially in this ballad from approximately 1709ish.

More than one person has tossed out the ‘imagine if this was about a man forcing himself on a woman! then you’d see!’ but my dear people, I don’t have to imagine because there is literally an entire extensive subgenre of ballads that are specifically about men coming across women alone and taking advantage of them. Often they steal a Symbolically Significant Piece of Clothing, or sometimes a Symbolically Significant Food/Crop Item, but we ALL KNOW WHAT IT REALLY MEANS except maybe the people who failed the reading comprehensive don’t so I’ll clarify, the theft of the whatever = rape. This is such a big subgenre of ballads that Terry Pratchett does a whole bit about it in Monstrous Regiment, because Sir Terry knew what was UP.

So yeah, I can compare, and now we’re getting to the really juicy bit, the really Fuck Yeah This is Subversive stuff, BECAUSE The Berkshire Lady’s Garland aka Wife or Knife is sung to the tune of another ballad, a ballad called The Royal Forester.

And The Royal Forester is a jolly little ditty that is LITERALLY about a guy meeting a woman in the woods, ‘robbing her of her maidenhead’, and then refusing to tell her his name before riding off and leaving her. She figures out who he is, takes her case to the king, the king says ‘oh oops, well we’ll find him and if he’s married, we’ll hang him! but if he’s single, he’ll marry you’. And the twist ending of that ballad is that the Earl’s daughter ends up married to the blacksmith’s son, ha ha what a good joke. ha ha.

I mean, fuck that, right? So yeah, you take the tune of THAT ballad and slap this new narrative on it, this story about a badass woman of wealth and independence choosing her own husband based on her own desire even though he’s significantly below her social station, proposing to him in the most ridiculously badass way, marrying him without revealing her beauty or wealth, and then trolling him as her first married act?

YEAH. IT IS IN FACT SUBVERSIVE AF

And bonus point 3) This ballad is about an independent woman acting on her own desires, including (VERY clearly if you read the actual ballad) her sexual desires! That’s a cool thing that we don’t see very often, women in control of their identities and tuned into their desires AND valuing those desires.

IN CONCLUSION the Berkshire Lady was a top and y’all can’t handle her

no I don’t accept constructive criticism

THANK YOU for coming to my ted talk

good DAY

wanderthewoods

“Ice Cave” by Georgia O’Keeffe and a photograph of an ice cave.

ina-gartens-weave

yeah Georgia? that’s an ice cave ? that’s a god damn ice cave? that’s the only thing you intended to paint? that’s it? just an ice cave?

nyanbianry

all of georgia okeefes art is like this dont act surprised

s0mbr4-h4xx3d-m3

It Really Is.

roskii

Staff seeing this:

daredevilbf

i hate to ruin everyone’s fun BUT you guys are so annoying. georgia o’keeffe very specifically stated how much she hated it when people, especially men, sexualized her art. male art critics pushed the interpretation of her artwork as sexual onto her and it upset her VERY deeply:

“When people read erotic symbols into my paintings they’re really talking about their own affairs,” O’Keeffe said. Still, the sexualized misconceptions of her work devastated her. “I almost wept,” she wrote of one review in 1921.

http://nymag.com/arts/art/reviews/59249/

now, because of some immature dudes in the art community, her work has been sexualized forever, and her paintings are now sexual objects. so like…making pussy jokes about her artwork isn’t just annoying, it’s disrespectful to everything she worked for, and it’s like rubbing her legacy in her face.

jaspurr

also “all of her paintings are like that” is just plain wrong. she did a series of extreme close ups of flowers (which is where these paintings come from) but that was just one series of paintings

she also loved painting landscapes, and was particularly inspired by desert landscapes in new mexico:

she also painted bones, particularly skulls. like flowers, she was inspired by the abstract shapes that bones make:

her artwork is extremely cool and she deserves to have a legacy other than “flowers”

ifishouldvanish

Also, part of the reason people were so quick to interpret her work as sexualized pieces instead of the cutting edge explorations of color and abstraction they really were, was because of her relationship with photographer Alfred Stieglitz, who helped launch her career.

For Stieglitz and much of the male avant garde, eroticism was what set their work apart as ~edgy and exciting, and so O’Keeffe kinda got pigeon-holed by association. It’s a real testament to how a lack of diversity in the art world stifles artists’ own voices in regard to their own damn work.

See, that’s what the app is perfect for.

It Really Is.