unknownfate: (cat says 'riiiiight')
unknownfate ([personal profile] unknownfate) wrote2009-11-23 12:45 am
Entry tags:

somethings are maybe better left unsaid

So, somebody said something and I concocted a whole counterargument in my brain and later wondered if I should’ve said it out loud. You be the judge.

“Everybody is so aggressive these days!” complained the person. “Remember when something bad would happen and people reacted with horror instead of contempt? Like women! Women used to faint! Why don’t women faint anymore?”

I wasn’t finished with my eye-rolling by the time the person walked away, but I did supply an answer, if only in my brain.

In olden times, a woman could faint at something horrible, I thought huffily, and stood a decent chance of waking up on a couch being fanned or something, whilst the nearby gentlemen put the horrible thing right. Nowadays, we’re more likely to wake up robbed, raped, and maybe dead in a dumpster while the horrible thing was manfully ignored by the local menfolk. Simple evolution at work. Those who didn’t faint lived to pass on the ‘don’t faint’ genes.

To be fair, waking up RR&D was probably common in olden times too. But it seemed an appropriate reply to someone who thought incapacitating fear was a desirable and proper quality for a woman. We could also blame it on a lack of corsets, I suppose.

[identity profile] rosehiptea.livejournal.com 2009-11-23 06:30 am (UTC)(link)
How really strange that someone would want women to faint.

[identity profile] bane-6.livejournal.com 2009-11-23 07:27 am (UTC)(link)
Hyeah, I thought so, too. There's nostalgia for days gone by, but it's usually for good stuff, right?

Yeah....

[identity profile] eternal-chimera.livejournal.com 2009-11-23 11:08 pm (UTC)(link)
Women had a few other things going against them. Corsets and Malnutrition worked together to create a smaller lung capacity, due to the body modification. Women ate lead to make their skin pale and put laudnum drops in their eyes to make their pupils big. The Cosmetics were quite toxic in some instances.

Men, in victorian times, were not judged by how strong they were, but by how well they treated women.

Re: Yeah....

[identity profile] bane-6.livejournal.com 2009-11-24 06:41 am (UTC)(link)
Those were dark times, ladies.
lithrael: (Default)

[personal profile] lithrael 2009-11-23 11:30 pm (UTC)(link)
Heh, yeah. And I suspect neither the working farm women nor the whores fainted much.

[identity profile] bane-6.livejournal.com 2009-11-24 06:45 am (UTC)(link)
Probably not! At least not the ones who weren't stepped on by cows or sold to mad scientists.