Something about this wave of puritanical evangelism in a progressive hat that’s gripping the zeitgeist currently recently caught my attention and I think I’ve figured it out.
I kept seeing advertisements on Instagram about that movie Corsage, about Empress Elisabeth of Austria. The mini-trailer features Vicky Krieps, who plays Elisabeth, being tightly laced into a corset, demanding it be tighter while maids look concerned.
This is par for the course. Empress Elisabeth was famed for her obsession with her looks and her documented fear of fatness that caused both her orthorexia and her chasing an ever-thinner look. I’d be surprised if that wasn’t depicted at all.
And yet there were tons of people in the comments bitching about how the movie was “depicting unsafe corseting practices” and “can’t you people get anything about this stuff right?”
It gave me pause. Maybe not everyone knew about Empress Sisi. So I responded to one commenter, “but it’s truthful. She really did corset like this.”
And the response I got was, “Well, they’re making it look like a good thing! People won’t know!”
And it clicked. It suddenly made absolute sense.
The idea that depiction is equal to endorsement and encouragement is what is currently in the popular belief system.
Empress Elisabeth was well-documented as going through a well-made leather corset every few weeks because she tightlaced so severely. Her thinnest recorded waist size was 16 inches. She frantically kept herself at 110 pounds on a 5'8 frame. She would fast for days and barely ate when she wasn’t fasting. She had herself sewn into her goddamn clothes just to look as thin as possible. You cannot simply overlook this when making historical fiction of her, just like you couldn’t overlook Winston Churchill’s rampant drinking if you wrote things about him. It is intrinsic to her identity and if you remove it you remove something very fundamental.
And because the trailer depicts this facet of her life, everyone decided that the filmmakers were condoning and even encouraging this practice in real life.
Because they cannot conceive of something just existing. Even in fiction, a depiction of something negative must be proof that the creator thinks it’s a good thing. Why else would it be there?
And it was such an enlightening look into how people think. It makes so much more sense.
History, and Sisi’s dangerous tightlacing, be damned.
when I’m just walking around and something makes me screech to a halt and my eyeballs shoot out like binoculars and I gotta drop everything to take photos
change your icon/pfp and put something coherent in your blog description or you’re going to get blocked bcs people think you’re a bot
this site is built around reblogs, so please actually reblog posts(especially art and fics!!)
you can set your likes and follows to private
checkmarks here are a meme and mean nothing
follower counts are private and we like it that way, so get used to not judging people by that metric
drama and discourse is boring, use your blacklist and block button liberally
DON’T CENSOR YOURSELF!! we can swear and say kill and make fun of corporations all we want, and if you tiktok-ify your tags people who have things blacklisted for whatever reason will still see them, and people who want to see that content won’t be able to find it!! spell words out normally, you won’t get in trouble!!
tumblr live is sketchy as hell and full of fake accounts, if you decide to use it anyway may god have mercy on your soul o7
be nice to the reddit refugees, they’re our friends <3
