He looks back at the guy like, “SEE THAT? SHE SAID YES. YOU’RE SO FUCKED.”
Like, guys. Sparta was so kick ASS sometimes when it came to women. Spartan women were given these small knives so that if their husbands came home and tried to hit them or assault them, they had a weapon within reach. That weapon was for CUTTING THEIR HUSBANDS’ FUCKING FACES so that when he went out in public everyone would know he was an asshole, abusing jerkface and they would publicly shame him.
I DID NOT KNOW THAT THAT IS GREAT
LET’S JUST TALK ABOUT SPARTAN WOMEN FOR A SECOND.
In Sparta, women could own land and were considered citizens. THAT IS A HUGE BIG FUCKING DEAL. Why? Because that was RARE AS FUCK and there are lots of places TODAY where women don’t even get that much.
Divorce was totally fine, and a woman could expect to keep her own wealth and get custody of the kids because paternal lineage wasn’t very important. And it didn’t make her a pariah! She could totally remarry, no big deal at all.
Spartan women participated in some fuckin’ badass sporting events, too. And because they were expected to be as physically fit as the Spartan menfolk (who all had to serve compulsory military duties, btw, and couldn’t marry until they finished them at thirty) they didn’t have time for lots of swishy dresses. So they wore notoriously short skirts. According to some accounts, their thighs were visible at all times. HOLY SHIT.
Also, In Sparta men only got their names on their graves if they died in battle. And women? Women only got their names on their graves if they died in childbirth. THE SPARTANS COMPARED CHILDBIRTH TO FUCKING BATTLE AND IT WAS VIEWED AS A GODDAMN BADASS AND HONORABLE WAY TO GO OUT.
FUCKING SPARTAN WOMEN. THIS DUDE HAD FUCKIN’ BETTER MAKE SURE SHE’S COOL WITH WHATEVER HE’S DOING, IF HE KNOWS WHAT’S FUCKIN’ GOOD FOR HIM.
^^ I throughly enjoyed the history lesson dashed with the colorful adjectives.
I mean, he knew she was Cersei… lol
And the women were trained the exact same way as men were. As children they were equals ; they were not allowed to wear clothing until a certain age and at that point they were sent away to a training camp until they were 18. It was only the men who were sent into the wilderness for an extra two years to ensure their strength for battle.
Plus the women could marry whomever they pleased and the men weren’t allowed to live with the women in their house until she said so. And they were tough in Sparta but also all about family. To have male offspring was good luck, to have female offspring was an honour.
This part of the movie was true; King Leonidas really did kill a man because he insulted his wife and he always ensured that he had his wife’s approval. And while Leonidas was away in battle she did rule Sparta on her own.
Sparta knew what was up.
The Vikings are actually very similar to this!
There’s a lot of evidence of women being super hardcore warriors, either protecting the homestead while the men went viking, or even going viking themselves. (Viking is actually a verb, the act of going on raid.)
They also had divorce, which involved the woman getting together her posse and declaring that she divorced her husband three times - first at the entry to her property, second at the door of her house, and finally at the foot of her marriage bed. After that, she was no longer married to the dude, and could take all of the property she brought to the marriage and leave, usually to return to her parent’s home, but often also to marry some other guy.
…
The moral of this story is that patriarchy doesn’t just affect our present, but also our view of the past. Think that women have been oppressed across all cultures, throughout history? Wrong! Women have been kickass equals for millennia, but it is always the goal of oppressors to rewrite the past so they can use it to support their lifestyle in the present.
History is written by the victors, and right now, the victors are men.
so hey fun fact for anyone who wants queer history trivia: the first disco in Seattle was opened in 1973 and was a gay bar called “shelly’s leg” and it was named after a dancer named shelly who lost her leg in a confetti cannon accident and used the insurance/lawsuit settlement money to open a gay disco.
a) This is such a fantastic story that I wouldn’t care if it were made up, except that
vikings made their woman handle the finances because they thought math is witchcraft
During a military campaign, Vlad the Impaler, the basis for Dracula, once pulled his troops out of a major engagement in a valley at dusk so that the sun was in their enemies’ eyes. Once they were over the hill, they set loose a bunch of rabid bats who flew away from the sun (towards the enemy) and attacked them, leading to significant infection in their ranks, and Vlad’s eventual victory. Because of how the bats appeared from where Vlad’s soldiers appeared to be at dusk, myth stated that the soldiers turned into bats at night, which is where the “Dracula can change into a bat” thing came from.
raphael, the renaissance painter, literally fucked himself to death
during the Ottoman Empire, the Sultan Ibrahim I had 280 of his concubines drowned in the ocean after ONE of them slept with another man.
The earths carbon levels fell by 700 million tons because Genghis Khan killed so many people
King James (the one known for revising the Bible) liked to watch women give birth. That’s where the “tradition” of women laying on their backs to give birth comes from.
Previous to that it was common for women to have chairs with holes in them and straw underneath, so they could sit on this special chair and let gravity help with the birthing process.
Spicy foods were thought to increase libido and cause children to masturbate. To prevent kids from touching themselves at night, a man named Kellogg invented the blandest combination of cereals, marketed it at kids, and called it Corn Flakes
At the Battle of Gettysburg during the American Civil War, a small group of Union soldiers had run out of ammo against a large group of the Confederate Army. In a panic, the Union soldiers sprinted at them, screaming, with only bayonets drawn. The entire Confederate Army that was present turned and ran away in fear, not knowing that they had literally no ammunition.
When the Roman Emperor Caligula went to invade Britain he stood on the coast of Gaul with his army and suddenly declared war on Neptune, God of the Sea. He had his men collect sea shells from the shore as “spoils from the Ocean”.
Oh and he appointed his horse to the senate.
During the Austro-Prussian war of 1868, Liechtenstein sent over an army of 80 people, but ended up coming back with 81 people because they befriended a guy on the other side.
The Roman Empire had a group of Holy Chickens. Fortune was good or bad depending on how well they ate.
The hero Perseus was so popular in ancient Greece that multiple cities tried to claim a relation to him. Mycenae did this by connecting its name to his myth. Because of this, the name is said to derive from the pommel (mukes) of his sword, which he dropped; the mushrooms (mukes, again) that he ate there and the bellow (mukema) Medusa’s sisters let forth when they finally gave up their pursuit (which obviously happened near the city).
Prayers to the gods in Ancient Greece were often first spoken, then tied to the right statue so they would not be forgotten. If a prayer was unanswered, it was acceptable to curse the god instead (and tie said curse to the statue as well).
It is unclear whether the Greeks actually sacrificed humans or just really liked writing about it.
Priests had little to no power in ancient Greece.
The goddess Hera, queen of the gods, was not only goddess of marriage, but also of divorce.
Aphrodite was goddess of love but also goddess of the Gentle Sea (as opposed to Poseidon who ruled the chaos of the sea).
Apollo was considered the most Greek of all the Gods but he’s originally from the East.
Artemis was the goddess of the wild, terrifying and dangerous, until Homerus turned her into a gentle virgin.
In the ancient Egyptian afterlife, they believed they had to pass certain levels to get to rest in peace. One of these involved being chased by a giant dung beetle
Margaret Thatcher was on the team that invented Mr Whippy ice-cream
In 1970 famous Japanese author/actor Yukio Mishima wanted to restore Japan’s empire by giving the emperor back his power. He and his extremist group, the Shield Society, took over the Tokyo JSDF headquarters and after a long speech, he attempted to commit seppuku, which meant taking a sword and slowly cutting your abdomen open from side to side and then slicing the body cavity vertically up the center. One of his followers was in charge of severing Yukio’s head if he wasn’t able to complete seppuku, which he wasn’t. But this soldier was like 19 and freaked out. He closed his eyes, took a swing at Yukio, and cut off part of his skull, Yukio still alive. He tried again but this time took a chunk out of Yukio’s shoulder/arm. Finally, some other person had to come up and cut off Yukio’s head to put him out of his misery.
historians wanted to figure out what had given the north the upper hand in this one key battle in the civil war.
they set up re-enactments, looked at pictures, read the stories, and came to the conclusion that the north had a fence to hide behind,
a literal FENCE turned the tide of the civil war.
(we thank the fences we do)
Potatoes are from Peru, and Europeans didn’t desire them. So Frederick the Great used reverse psychology to get potatoes to be popular in the Kingdom of Prussia. He had patatoes heavily gaurded. Thus, making people interested in them. Some people even started stealing them.
Peter the Great traded several of his tallest Russian soldiers for possession of the original Amber Room from a Prussian king, who liked the idea of surrounding himself with tall fighters.
There is a writer known as B. Tavern, for whom a lot isn’t well known about. It is believed that he did live in Mexico, where a lot of his novels are set in, including The Treasure of the Sierra Nevada.
The writer, Ambrose Bierce disappeared one day in 1914 in Mexico. No one is quite sure what happened to him.
There are small objects called Roman Dodecahedrons that have been excavated in many places from Wales to Italy, though most have been found in Germany and France. No one is quite sure what they have been used for, though some have been found with melted wax. Speculations have ranged between candlestick holders to survey instruments to religious artefacts.
There is no such thing as a brontasaurus. A group of archeologists coming to the end of their dig strung together what bones they did find and called it an whole skeleton so as not to have come up empty handed.
There was literally an article in this Sunday’s New York Post dragging Aaron Burr for saddling NYC with a grid system instead of wide Parisian boulevards. The first line was “We’ll never have Paris here in New York. But we could have … if not for Aaron Burr.” Marvelous. Hamilton’s ghost is weeping tears of joy.
This is the best addition to this post in 10,000+ notes and I would like to personally thank you for sharing this crucially important historical development
200+ years later and Burr still can’t catch a break from Alexander Hamilton’s legacy
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN AND JOHN ADAMS ONCE HAD TO SHARE A BED IN A CROWDED INN, AND SPENT A CONSIDERABLE AMOUNT OF TIME ARGUING OVER WHETHER OR NOT THE WINDOW SHOULD REMAIN OPEN DURING THE NIGHT, AND WHETHER AN OPEN WINDOW WAS A HEALTHIER WAY TO SLEEP OR A SUREFIRE WAY TO GET SICK.
I wonder who was of which opinion
FRANKLIN WANTED THE WINDOW OPEN, ADAMS WANTED IT CLOSED.
I wonder who won.
FRANKLIN, BY TOTAL KNOCKOUT. HE KEPT EXPLAINING WHY FRESH AIR IS ACTUALLY GOOD FOR THE BODY UNTIL ADAMS GOT BORED AND FELL ASLEEP, ALLOWING FRANKLIN TO DO AS HE PLEASED RE: THE WINDOW.
#‘close the window ben the draft is intolerable’#‘FRESH AIR IS NOT INTOLERABLE JOHN. FRESH AIR REJUVENATES THE BODY AND MIND JOHN. YOU ARE THE ONE WHO IS INTOLERABLE JOHN. THIS IS WHY NOBOD#Y LIKES YOU JOHN.’
the assassination of franz ferdinand was actually the most hilariously botched assassination attempt of all time though like i can’t even explain to you how badly it went i mean there were six guys and the first one chickened out and the second one forgot to factor in the delay on a hand grenade so it exploded like three cars past the archduke’s so the guy took a cyanide pill and threw himself into a river, but the cyanide was expired and the river was six inches deep so the police just pulled him out and took him off to jail and then everyone else basically gave up and headed home, and then the driver of the archduke took a wrong turn and the car stalled next to the last of the six guys, and he was just like “what a crazy random happenstance” and started world war one
You forgot to mention that the last guy only happened to kill Franz because he had just come out of the sandwich shop where the car stopped
It is obvious to even the most casual observer that this particular event has been meddled with by at least two groups of time travelers trying to change history. Please, if you invent a time machine, leave the assassination of Ferdinand alone; the space-time continuum there is already showing obvious cracks from the strain.
You probably don’t know this woman: her name is Franca Viola. She was born in Alcamo, Sicily, in 1947, during a time where, see, things for women were deeply different.
This is her when she was 17.
She was 17 when, on the 26th of December, 1965, she was kidnapped by her former boyfriend, Filippo Melodia, the son of a local mobster, and a few of his friends: she had broken the engagement with him a couple of years prior, when she was 15 and he was 23, and he couldn’t accept it. He kept her segregated in a farmhouse for 8 days and raped her, before she was found and freed by the police.
At that time, the Italian law stood with her kidnapper and rapist, as it stated that if the rapist married his victim, then the crime was virtually erased, and, had the guilty part already been prosecuted and convicted, the trial and the sentence would cease. This kind of marriage was called “rehabilitating marriage,” as it was believed that the victim, and her family, had to fix the dishonour caused by the rape.
Incredible, isn’t it? Not really. In an area where families still used to hang the sheet dirty with blood to their balcony after the first wedding night to prove the virginity of the woman to the entire town, the law and the public opinion still expected women to marry their abusers to mantain their honour.
Franca refused to marry Melodia. Knowing that the entire town - and, later, the whole country - could turn its back at her, knowing that she was going to be mocked, frowned upon, and insulted, she denounced him. Her family, who, contrarily to many other families, stood with her and supported her choice, needed to be guarded at all times by a handful of policemen, having been threatened by Melodia and his family. Franca was assisted by a brilliant lawyer. The trial ended up being reported by Italy’s major newspapers, and Franca, the first woman - girl - to refuse rehabilitating marriage, quickly became an example of bravery for many, many other women.
In court, Melodia tried to turn the judge against her. He said she’d already hooked up with him when they were together. He tried to escape conviction.
He was convicted for rape anyway, and justly. Eight years later, when he got out, he was shot dead by an unknown killer.
Despite earlier threats that she was dishonoured, and that she wasn’t going to find anyone willing to marry her, she married Giuseppe, a childhood friend, in 1968, who stated that he wasn’t afraid of any possible acts of revenge from Melodia. He’s said to have said, “I’d rather live ten years with you than a lifetime with another woman.” About her dad, who supported her every step, she recently said, “My father Bernardo came [to get me] unshaven, with a week’s beard: I could not shave if you were not there, he said. What do you want to do, Franca? I will not marry him. All right, you put your hand, I will put one hundred. This sentence, he said. I just want you to be happy, nothing else. He took me home and he did the great effort, not me. It was him who put up with those who no longer greeted him, his friends gone. The shame, the dishonour. His head up high. He wanted only what was good for me.”
When he heard about her wedding, even Pope Paul VI asked to meet her to congratulate her.
Her trial was the final push to erase the law about rehabilitating marriage and honour killings, which also allowed “mitigating circumstances” if the killer had acted upon jealousy or to restore his honour (for instance, if a husband walked in on his wife cheating on him, and killed both her and her lover). But that didn’t happen until 1981.
Rape was finally considered a “crime against the person,” instead of a crime “against the morals”, only in 1996.
She still lives in Alcamo; she says that, sometimes, she still sees her kidnappers, and whilst she greets them, they lower her gaze in shame. Franca has never, not once, lowered her gaze, and that’s why she changed history.
This is just a tiny post to remember how small acts of courage can change history and change the shape of a nation - and as a woman, an Italian, a Sicilian woman, I want to thank Franca for saying ‘no’ and - perhaps by chance - changing the history of Italy.
"The truth is, chivalry has basically fuck all to do with women, and everything to do with horses.
See, the word “chivalry” comes from the French word “chevalier,” which comes from “cheval,” which means “horse.” Chivalry is literally just “rules for if you have a horse.” This was an important set of rules to have in chivalry times. Horses were the Blackhawk Helicopters of the Middle Ages; if you had a horse, you could absolutely kill anybody who didn’t have a horse and nobody was going to say a god damn thing. The only thing stopping you was chivalry.
That’s what chivalry was for. Chivalry was – and still is – basically a way of saying, “okay, I have an optimized death machine between my legs, maybe I should look out for people who don’t have one of these.” So it’s not that chivalry is specifically about defending women because women are weak. It’s that chivalry is about defending people who don’t own horses, and in the middle ages women didn’t own shit."
“Chivalry boils down to three things: mercy, charity, and humility. Mercy means being conscious of your advantages, and treating other humans gently. Charity means giving without expecting anything in return. Humility means accepting your mistakes, and recognizing that those who don’t have your advantages aren’t your inferiors.“
In the late 19th century, an inexperienced doctor performed his first surgery n a room full of people. Feeling the pressure, he felt the need to perform the amputation in the quickest time possible, and ended up amputating his patient’s arm in the space of around 25 seconds. In the process of this, he accidentally amputated his assistant’s fingers too. Both patient and assistant died of sepsis, and a spectator died from shock, making it the only operation ever with a 300% mortality rate.
