Random Thursday: Special Podcast Episode with Susie Carr

The Lesbian Talk Show, which hosts my Lesbian Historic Motif Podcast episodes, is doing a holiday special series currently, with special episodes of regular shows and additional episodes that mix and match the regular contributors. I was matched up with Suzie Carr who does a regular postive-thinking series called "Curves Welcome" and we brainstormed the intersection of our two topics and came up with "The Masks We Wear", discussing both phyiscal and psychological masks and costumes and how we use them to interact with others and negotiate our identities in the contemporary world and in history.

You can listen to the show directly online, or even better, you can subscribe to The Lesbian Talk Show through iTunes, Podbean, or Stitcher. (And if you like the show, we'd love it if you give it a rating to help others find it.)

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I apologize for not posting my wrap-up of A Little Princess yesterday. It's being a demanding week--I have an intense investigation at work that is eating up my lunch hours, and the final proofs of Mother of Souls came in for review and took priority over other things in my non-work hours. You'll have to wait until next Wednesday to find out how the story ends!

Countdown to Mother of Souls release day: 17 days!

LHMP #137u Faderman 1981 Surpassing the Love of Men III.A.3 Keeping Women Down

Faderman, Lillian. 1981. Surpassing the Love of Men. William Morrow and Company, Inc., New York. ISBN 0-688-00396-6

A detailed and extensive study of the phenomenon of “romantic friendship” in western culture (primarily England and the US).

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The rest of these entries are going to get shorter and more condensed as we work though the 20th century.

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This chapter details a variety of English and American cultural responses to feminism and to women’s greater independent present in the public sphere in the early parts of the 20th century. Women had entered traditionally masculine professions during the upheavals of World War I and suffrage movements in both England and America pushed for political equality.

Satire and caricature were major tools of the backlash, depicting independent and/or feminist women as agressive, ugly man-haters who are destined to be lonely old maids. Only abandoning their ideals for a traditional role of wife and mother can redeem them. The strongest tool was to depict independent/feminist women as “mannish” and on the road to lesbianism.

The 20th century saw several cycles of increased freedom--often associated with the economic and demographic disruptions of war--followed by social attempts to retrun women to traditional roles by stigmatizing the most assertive movements as unwomanly and deviant. In the 1970s, this tactic intersected with the “Gay Liberation” movement which undermined some of its success.

Huh, that's really weird

Ok, ok, so I'm a massive numbers geek and I've realized that checking my online traffic statistics and that sort of this is sort of a ritual self-soothing technique for me. If it weren't I wouldn't have had occasion to notice that this past Monday, at 9-10am local time, I have an enormous spike of LJ traffic. (Like: triple my normal daily rate, and the "extra" all visiting during that one hour.) I suppose it's possible that some p0rn-sniffing web-bot picked up on the LHMP topic for that day, but given how often I use "the L word" I doubt that just adding the words "decadent" and "evil" would increase hits. And there was no similar jump in hits on my Alpennia website, which is where I link to when posting blog pointers in other social media. The visitor log shows a jump in logged visits from Russian accounts over the next few days after that (which I'm generally certain are bot-like activity).

So I guess I'll chalk it up to some sort of random fallout from some entirely unrelated LJ phenomenon. A pity. I thought maybe I'd posted something that really took off and went viral. I guess not.