3d ago

Weekly chit chat thread week beginning 5th May

Want to chatter but don't want to do a whole thread? Chat here!

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You knew there was another "Kick-Ass Women" thread coming, right?
Just some general questions:
Are these history dumps welcomed?
Are there any women from history you'd like seen covered?
- 100% always welcome!! They're really interesting and the comments and upvotes shows other people think so too. I personally really like that you're shining a light on the ones not many people have heard of.
  
  The "ones not many people have heard of" thing is very deliberate. Everybody knows Cleopatra (even if only by that horrifically ahistorical film). Many have heard of Nefertiti (even if only because of that famous bust that shows her gorgeous face).
  Yet probably the most influential woman in Egyptian history, Hapshetsup, is a name most people haven't even heard, not to mention know anything of. She's way more interesting (to me at any rate) than Cleopatra or Nefertiti (though both may show up in later entries because both of them have some intriguing bits to their stories) and more of an inspiration as well. Nefertiti, though influential, got all of her influence from her husband. Cleopatra is more defined by the men in her life than by her own agency. But Hapshetsup? She ruled. Both literally and figuratively.
- I put a vote in for covering the stepmother / aunt / foster mother of the historical Buddha who basically bullied him into ordaining her as a nun and including women in monasteries.
  There's a bit on this here: https://buddhism.stackexchange.com/questions/9905/why-the-buddha-didnt-originally-allow-ordination-of-women
  There's a tendency to try to cover up Buddhism's misogyny, especially these days with Buddhist-modernism running rampant in the West. What most people hear is that the Buddha was unusually accepting of women (and maybe he was for his time), but they gloss over all his misogyny, or the fact that he was essentially forced into accepting women by a woman rather than being so open-minded that he included women from the start.
  
  Yeah, there's a lot of misogyny buried in Buddhism. It's very much a product of its times and modern westerners who venerate Buddhism as any kind of model piss me off as a result. It's pretty clear these faux-Buddhists have never read anything past maybe the Heart Sutra.

How's your day going
- Pretty good! I trained for 3 hours which isn't as impressive as it sounds... I have to do that long cos I'm disabled and have to sit for most of it. Now lemmying and vaguely watching the gilded age. How's your day
  
  Dam girl that's dope! I struggle getting my ass to the dam gym lol so good on you! I'm good. Just browsing lemmy, gunna hop back and forth on the internet.

16 comments