Wednesday, May 25, 2016

Collection

"(W)hen anonymous harassers come along — saying they would like to rape us, or cut off our heads, or scrutinize our bodies in public, or shame us for our sexual habits — they serve to remind us in ways both big and small that we can’t be at ease online. It is precisely the banality of Internet harassment, University of Miami law professor Mary Anne Franks has argued, that makes it 'both so effective and so harmful, especially as a form of discrimination.'

Have you ever heard that thing, men are afraid that women will laugh at them and women are afraid that men will kill them?

… Is there hope? Hard to say. Rachel Dolezal has all but disappeared from the media, but her life’s not looking easy, given a prurient catch-up peek. But then, there is this ...  “(T)he smartest way to survive is to be bland.” Hmm.

Okay, let's lighten up.

Thanks in part to Kiehl's and the National Museum of American History's Division of Medicine and Science, as well as a number of other famous skin and health care names, a massive collection of beauty and hygiene products' images have been digitized in a photo archive of stunning usefulness for 19th and 20th century vintage fans, historical authors, and just beauty nerds such as myself. This makes a good conservation move as well, as some of the artifacts in the collection are deteriorating and cannot be made to last forever. Cultural/research notes: Cuticura's emphasis on the beauty of white hands hints at the "ideals" of beauty in this period. There are resources on the needfuls of menstrual care, and health tonics galore. I can see getting quite lost-slash-carried away down this rabbit hole!

In other artifactoral news, Gary Corby has a very cool post about the earliest keys - goodly, and of goodly size as well. So cool.

5 comments:

Lilac Shoshani said...

Amanda's story is horrendous. It's terrible that women can't be safe even online. :-(

DLM said...

http://lilacshoshani.com/2016/05/27/when-men-dance/

Yours should have been included in this collection. Your stories are like the Damien Echols excerpt I put up recently (https://dianelmajor.blogspot.com/2016/05/my-letter-to-you-damien-echols.html), or even Rachel Dolezal. They read like compelling fiction, but the truth of it makes you shudder.

DLM said...

(Now if only we had Colin to linkify my links in comments! :))

Lilac Shoshani said...

I'm deeply moved by what you wrote about my stories. Thank you so much, my dear. <3

Lilac Shoshani said...

(Sending a telepathic message to Colin! ;-))