“Basically Enslaved”, “Indentured Servitude”, and “Scary Things”.

Engaged gay couple Dave Mullins, second from left, and Charlie Craig, left, were joined by a small group of supporters in Lakewood on Saturday, August 4, 2012 to protest and boycott the Masterpiece Cakeshop.  Kathryn Scott Osler, The Denver Post.

Oh, the conservachristians have their collective knickers in a knot over cake, and the fervent desire to discriminate. We’ll start with Tony Perkins, the despicable leader of the Family Research Council.

Yesterday, on FRC’s “Washington Watch” program, Perkins hosted anti-LGBTQ activist Jon Scruggs, senior counsel at Alliance Defending Freedom to discuss the Supreme Court arguments in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case. Perkins told Scruggs that requiring business owners not to discriminate against LGBTQ people seemed like a “slippery slope and there’s really no end to what the government could then force you to do.”

No, it’s not a slippery slope, and there isn’t any ‘beastly’ thing awaiting which the government wishes to force on you. It’s very simple: if you have a public business, in which you contract with the public to supply ____, then you should supply it, with no prejudice towards any paying customer. It’s not like the government is gonna come knockin’ on your door and tell you that you have to host a gay wedding or anything.

Scruggs said he agreed because the attorneys arguing for nondiscrimination protections believe that calligraphers should be forced to write wedding vows and that bakers should have to write “bless this marriage” on a purchased cake if requested, which Scruggs called “scary things.”

Oh, all the gods ever! Calligraphers with a public business might have to copy wedding vows! ‘Bless this marriage’ might have to come out of an icing tube! The horror, why those are the scariest fucking things ever! Couldn’t possibly be anything scarier, no, no.

“That sounds like to me, John, that sounds like indentured servitude. You have no choice in the matter. Yes, they’re compensating you, they’re giving you something, but you have no say as to what you do with your talent, your ability and your skills,” Perkins said.

That is not indentured servitude, it’s not even close. You fucking white christians are so damn desperate to come across as though you suffer on par with those who have been enslaved. It’s beyond offensive, and it’s arrogant assholery to the nth degree. Stop it. Of course people have a say as to what you do with your talent, your ability, and your skills. If you want to exchange your talent, abilities, and skills for money, well, then you have to deal with people. All kinds of people. If a cake baker lives in fear of the day a non-hetero couple walks in to their store, well, they could turn their talents to writing cookbooks. Then they wouldn’t have to fear facing gay people in person, and they could pretend no one but straight christians buys their cakebook. I’m an artist. I’m an atheist, bisexual artist. I’ve had plenty of christians as clients, and if someone wanted me to do a prayer in calligraphy, I’d do it. Who the fuck cares? I don’t have to believe in that crap to do my job, and I don’t have to like my clients, either. That’s kind of how business works, fellas. I’ve also had clients who decided they weren’t comfortable working with an atheist (Christians always ask), and I don’t run off screaming and crying about it.  It’s not even worth a shrug.

Scruggs agreed, adding, “And even worse, not just that type of servitude based off of something that’s irrelevant, but something that cuts against the core of who you are.”

Mmmm, and cutting against the core of a happy couple in search of cake, well, that’s okey dokey, right? It won’t hurt any of the bakers or calligraphers out there to just do their fucking job. They can always fall on their knees later and pray or something.

Via RWW.

Moving on to Mat Staver:

Liberty Counsel’s Mat Staver joined Florida radio host Joyce Kaufman yesterday to discuss the Supreme Court arguments in the Masterpiece Cakeshop case, which Staver said dealt with whether a baker, Jack Phillips, would be “basically enslaved” to be a spokesperson for views he disagrees with by being required to bake a wedding cake for a gay couple.

No, he would not be enslaved. Nor would Mr. Phillips be a spokesperson in any way, shape, or form. All he was asked to do was make a fuckin’ cake, something he does in his store, which caters to the public. Soon as the cake is done, his part in it is over.

You know, [Phillips] doesn’t bake Halloween cakes either. So, you know, it’s not like he’s just picking on one person or another, he’s an artist, he’s a person who doesn’t want his business and his life basically enslaved to be the mouthpiece for some issue or ceremony or message that violates his conscience and religious beliefs, and he should have the right to do so.”

Well, if you want to go that route, then the solution is simple: Mr. Phillips can stop making wedding cakes. Once again, there is no enslavement here. If Mr. Phillips wants to have a store in which he contracts with the public, then he must deal with the public. All of it.

Via RWW.

Yer Not Trad!

(Composite Image/Screenshots/YouTube.com).

A few days ago, we had a bunch of drunk nazis singing about trad [traditional] women. Today, we have two white supremacist women who sing praises to trad women being taken down by the audience they cater to, because it turns out, they aren’t trad.

Lauren Southern, a conservative activist and media personality who is frequently praised by the alt-right sympathizers on YouTube and 4chan, thought it was necessary to explain to her viewers earlier this month why she was not married and did not have children despite being one of the most prominent new media voices promoting “traditionalist” lifestyles where women marry early and are relegated to housekeeping and child-rearing.

[…]

“I don’t usually respond to comments because in my opinion comments don’t represent what I say, however I have gotten so many comments lately that have misinterpreted the message  I’m trying to put out there that it’s gotten to a point where unfortunately I think I do need to address it,” Southern said, going on to explain that she is not married at 22 years old for many of the same reasons other women do not get married in their early 20s and that it would actually be “degenerate” of her to get married right now.

Southern described the attacks against her as “shocking” and “insane,” which is a bit odd given that she has conditioned her audience with video after video promoting traditionalism among women, mocking women who are happy being single, attempting to embarrass protesters marching for women’s rights, among other generally anti-social-justice messages. When her most ideologically devoted fans tested her commitment to the views she espouses, Southern conceded that she speaks in “generalities.”

Shocking! Insane! It’s very difficult for me to believe any of this could actually come as a shock. I suppose a person could put themselves in an intentional bubble, parroting evil shit to make money, without paying attention to their audience. I seriously doubt this is the case, though. These women had to know the sort of views their audience had and supported, and that their audience is highly misogynistic.

As for the hypocrisy, well, that’s nothing new. “Do as I say, not as I do.”

Tara McCarthy, a YouTube pundit who describes herself as an ethno-nationalist and a member of the alt-right, has been facing similar attacks. McCarthy received so many comments attacking her for not having children that she locked her Twitter account right after posting that she was going to “take a break from Twitter because I need to think without being inundated by notifications.”

Tara McCarthy: I had no idea that the Alt Right was a designated ‘male space’ but at this rate I’ll happily leave the Alt Right. I have no desire to stick around in a place where I am unwanted.

She was responding to #DSA Melancholia: Oh look, another slit trying to police male spaces.

Slit. There’s lovely language for you.

Last year, McCarthy and her husband were outed by the YouTube vegan community as insane racists, spurring a backlash that forced McCarthy to delete her channel. Since then, McCarthy has created a newer YouTube presence to provide a platform for white supremacist activists who openly identify as neo-Nazis, such as Greg Johnson and Andrew Anglin, to advocate that women produce as many white children as possible, and to decry feminism and encourage women to get married early.

It’s easier for me to believe McCarthy is in a self-made bubble, doing whatever she can to gain a following and monetize whatever she goes on about. Even so, it can’t be any sort of surprise that the ‘alt-right’ takes a dim view of women in general, relegating them to background, doing all those trad things: poppin’ out babies, and hanging out in the kitchen, cooking for those hard working nazis.

RWW has video and a tonne of links.

Yer So Trad…

Prairie Dress. Jumpinbloomers.com

I’m not entirely sure how to introduce this one. Okay, a bunch of Nazis were hanging out in a garage, drinking and smoking cigars, listening to Tom Petty, when they decided to write their own song, set to Petty’s Yer So Bad.

Before you click play, you might want to read the lyrics:

My girlfriend Stacy wants lots of babies
Maybe in five years or so
While I’m in the basement she larps as a peasant
Soon we’ll go live in the woods

In Fashy Dating she pretends she’s a lady
Yer so trad, liftin yer skirt for chad
In a world gone mad, yer so trad

She reads Evola, a lesbian chola
What kind of wheat fields are these?
A culture or fetish? A THOT with a purpose
Fishnets under the prairie dress

Oh Nazi Lady, oben bobs and vagene
Yer so trad, best lay I ever had
In a world gone chad, yer so trad

Incels and autists, virgins and kissless,
Too good to wed single moms

Oh Nazi Lady, oben bobs and vagene
In Fashy Dating (in fashy dating!), She pretends she’s a lady
Yer so trad, givin it up for a chad
In a world gone mad, yer so trad

Yer so trad, best lay I ever had
In a world gone mad, yer so trad

They described the song as “funnier than the original” and “about the scene of trad thoughts that are out there.”

Could just be me, but I don’t find that to be funny at all. Then again, I’m not a Nazi. You can read more at RWW.

Victorian London’s Dirty Book Trade.

19th-century “French postcard” from the personal collection of the German-Austrian psychiatrist and early sexologist Richard Freiherr von Krafft-Ebing — Source.

Title page to an 1891 edition of The Story of a Dildoe! — Source. The full book is available, in English.

The Public Domain has a fascinating article on Holywell Street, home of the Victorian porn trade. There’s much to see, and read.

Victorian sexuality is often considered synonymous with prudishness, conjuring images of covered-up piano legs and dark ankle-length skirts. Historian Matthew Green uncovers a quite different scene in the sordid story of Holywell St, 19th-century London’s epicentre of erotica and smut.

(Tentative warning: the essay includes some mildly explicit content, both text and image, which may not be suitable for all ages and dispositions!)*

*Having read the article, there’s some very explicit language, not all of it nice. If you’re sensitive to that sort of thing, have a care. And there are a host of pictures, lots of nudity.

Via The Public Domain.

Lavender Files 27.

The Price of Salt and Spring Fire are both well known, especially Highsmith’s Price of Salt. Spring Fire started the Lesbian pulp genre, and the author, Marijane Meaker, was always unhappy about the forced ending she had to do. As for Satan Was A Lesbian, people may not know the story, but it’s probably one of the best known pulp covers, which has been reproduced on all manner of goods.

The Terror of…SOY!

Via Medium.com

The things which go on while I’m under my rock. Perhaps it’s just me, but none of the men in the above look to be lacking in masculine qualities. This, of course, calls into question as to what those ‘necessary masculine qualities’ might be, and I’m not sure I want to know. The concepts of masculinity and femininity are, for the best part, damn silly, and for the worst part, terribly toxic and harmful. We aren’t extruded bits of plastic labeled Ken and Barbie. We come in a wide variety of everything. Ah well, on with the show.

Popular figures among the alt-right and users of right-wing internet forum boards such as 4chan frequently used the term “soy boy” to attack their liberal critics, using the term to label their targets as politically or physically weak. Alt-right YouTube pundit James Allsup claims to have invented the term “soy boy,” which experienced brief mainstream exposure through right-wing pundits such as Mike Cernovich.

The weakness, it is argued, comes from increased estrogen levels experienced when consuming soy products and the alleged resulting feminine behavior.

Oh for pity’s sake. Soy has to be one of the most studied and investigated plants on the planet, considering its versatility and utility. There are no studies which show that soy consumption “effiminizes” the poor menfolk. For most people, soy is quite beneficial, and no, it has no impact on those precious testosterone numbers, dudes. Your testosterone is safe with soy.

In a video uploaded to his YouTube account yesterday, Paul Joseph Watson, Infowars editor, attempted to explain how the consumption of soy products is to blame for decreased testosterone levels and lower sperm counts in men, resulting in depression and feminine behavior.

“Men with high estrogen take on feminine traits. They find it harder to handle stress. They become less assertive. They become low energy. Their voices get higher. Their genitals shrink. They lose muscle tone,” Watson said.

Goodness me. You’d think there would be panic in the streets! Media would be wall to wall coverage of the great penis shrink of 2017. Talk shows would have sobbing men behind screens, talking about the horrible degredation of testicle loss and puberty voices. Interestingly enough, there have been a high number of men lately who have not handled stress well at all. These are ‘masculine’ men, too. The ones who have histories of abusive, assertive, nay, aggressive behaviour. They tend to take out their problems with a gun, which ends up with many dead people, including themselves. I think I’ll stick with the men who aren’t terrified of soy.

Later in the video, Watson attempted to correlate increased sales of soy products in the United States to unrelated articles that detail a “substantial drop” in men’s testosterone levels in the United States and “otherwise healthy and lean” young men developing enlarged breasts—or as Watson describes them, “bitch tits.”

Bitch tits. Gosh, that must be one of those necessary masculine qualities, denigrating anything deemed female. I think we can all live without that one. One of these days, you manly menly dudely types are going to have to deal with the fact that yes, men have breasts. By the way, you should be doing regular checks for lumps, just like you do for those precious testicles, because men get breast cancer too. They come in many different shapes and sizes. A lot depends on diet, true, and whether or not you work out. If you’re eating a trash diet, you’re probably gonna have hairy man teats. Have you all taken a good look at your idol Trump when he’s in his golf clothes? Yeah. He could probably do with laying off the McD’s. Going back to the image above, none of those men look like they are sporting a healthy rack.

In his pseudo-scientific explanation, Watson even claimed that soy found in infant baby formula is making children liberal “from birth.”

“Rather than people with already pre-existing left-wing beliefs being attracted to vegan-style tofu soy diets, we’re actually creating an army of soy boys from birth,” Watson said. “What a terrifying thought.”

:Cough: Excu…hahahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha *gasp* hahahahahahahahahahahahahaha *thud*

Okay. I’m a bleeding heart liberal, a compleat lefty. I did not grow up on soy products, because they weren’t a big thing way back when. I don’t eat much soy now. That has not affected my leftiness in the least. I’m pretty sure you can’t get leftiness in bottle. That would be rather big news. Why do I get the idea you idiots think this is just like the “commies are behind flouridation” business?

Watson warned that “soy is the silent killer” of masculine behavior and that the world is “losing an entire generation of young men to soy.”

At the end of the video, Watson issued a warning to his male viewers: “Men, if you don’t want to develop a bunch of retarded beliefs about how inviting in millions of rapey migrants is a good idea, about how anyone to the right of Michael Moore is literally Hitler, about how fantastic communism is, or about how being a white male is shameful and wrong, while literally growing tits and seeing your penis shrink at the same time, when it comes to soy just say no.”

Hahahahahahaha. My my. I look forward to the intense, saturated, “Just Say No…to Soy!” campaign. The War on Soy. Maybe that could put an end to the idiocy of the war on drugs. Okay, probably not. You fellas don’t need to be concerned with ‘rapey’ immigrants. You should be concerned with all the homegrown rapey men, y’know, the ones who tend to put all kinds of emphasis on being masculine.

Such privilege, that you literally have nothing more to do than to sit around and make up such shit. I wish I had that kind of free time. The whole mess, including video, is available at RWW.

Women and Demons in Medieval Finland.

The aim of the article is primarily to examine late medieval wall paintings in the church of Espoo that include women with some form of diabolical entity. The paintings under examination include five different motifs: the milking and churning, the Journey to Blåkulla, Skoella and Tutivillus.

The milking scene in Espoo shows a woman with a cow and a man-size demon with horns, hoofs and a tail observing the task (Fig. 1). Immediately above the woman milking a cow
another woman is seen riding on a broom, holding a pouch-like object in her left hand and a horn in her right (Figs. 1, 3).

On the south side of the church, the milking scene continues with a scene representing a demon assisting women in churning the butter (Fig. 2). Skoella scene represents a demon passing a pair of shoes to a woman on the west wall above the entrance (Fig. 7), and above, three demons are seen twiddling with a parchment (Fig. 9). This motif is referred to as Tutivillus. The analysis of the motifs begins with the examination of the images at their visual level in which the content of the images is explained. The analysis then proceeds to the examination of the motifs in their cultural and historical context. The article discusses the origin of the different motifs and compares them to similar ones found among other early
sixteenth-century wall paintings in Finland. The methodological approach combines art historical analysis and cultural-historical contextualisation.

A fascinating look at the pairing of women and demons, where a woman-centered activity is involved. Demons, always so much more interesting than saints and gods, even in churches. The paper may be read here.