Stoically - My Musings

A Question of Creepyness

So I was scrolling through Tumblr, my four year old niece on my lap, when she squeals, points, and exclaims "I wanna watch THAT!"  Seeing as how she was pointing directly at Lana Parrilla decked out as the Evil Queen I quickly complied with her request (whilst finding it mildly funny that she has a sixth sense for witches, her favourite character of all time being the wicked witch from the Wizard of Oz).  In re-watching the first episode of the first season of Once Upon a Time I was struck by how fracking creepy Graham is.

Now, hear me out.  I admit to not liking him for personal reasons.  That's me and I don't mind anyone who does like him.  I will not demand that everyone hate him, you all have your own personal reasons for liking him or not.  There's just a couple things in the first episode that point at the character Graham as being disturbingly creeptastic towards a woman.

Firstly, the genuine surprise of Regina when she comes into the station after finding Henry missing.  She didn't come to blame Emma, she didn't even know that Emma was still in Storybrooke.  Graham was the one who arrested her with no interference or suggestion from Regina.  Fine, you think, he's a sheriff and its his job.  Only, wouldn't he have found Emma passed out in her car, door open, after having crashed?  Did he do a blood or breath test on a passed out woman to ascertain that alcohol was present? Did he sniff the breath of a passed out, helpless, female before arresting her for property damage?

Secondly, did he ever think that she might need a doctor?  Why didn't he take her to the hospital, seeing as how she was in a car accident, before locking her up?

Thirdly, and perhaps most creeptastic to me, how the hell did he find her? Oh, you might say, someone called it in.  To which my response is who?  Did the curse not ensure that nobody left Storybrooke?  Why would anyone be around the leaving Storybrooke sign in the middle of the night if not, like Emma, leaving?  Which, to me, points at a sinister conclusion.  Graham, being the only one shown to have known where she was between hitting the sign and waking up in jail, had followed her.  Regina was certain she was leaving so it is unlikely that she asked him to make sure.  Emma had spent at least five minutes inside after Graham left.  Yet between the ten minutes after she left town and hit the leaving Storybrooke sign and morning Graham somehow stumbled into her and arrested her.

And, as a final consideration, isn't it odd that the only other wolf seen was Graham familiar?   Why would a wolf be standing there stopping Emma from leaving?  Makes me think.

Next up, how Snow White as Mary Margaret ruined Regina's happy ending and things you never want a teacher to do with your son (like taking him away from school alone during school hours without parental permission after having her question your right to talk to him, tell an absolute stranger where he is before telling you, and bailing a stranger out of prison so that they can spend more time with him).

Yay! Feminist Anthropology time!

Prehistoric Cave Prints Show Most Early Artists Were Women

Alongside drawings of bison and horses, the first painters left clues to their identity on the stone walls of caves, blowing red-brown paint through rough tubes and stenciling outlines of their palms. New analysis of ancient handprints in France and Spain suggests that most of those early artists were women. This is a surprise, since most archaeologists have assumed it was men who had been making the cave art. One interpretation is that early humans painted animals to influence the presence and fate of real animals that they’d find on their hunt, and it’s widely accepted that it was the men who found and killed dinner. But a new study indicates that the majority of handprints found near cave art were made by women, based on their overall size and relative lengths of their fingers. "The assumption that most people made was it had something to do with hunting magic," Penn State archaeologist Dean Snow, who has been scrutinizing hand prints for a decade, told NBC News. The new work challenges the theory that it was mostly men, who hunted, that made those first creative marks.  Another reason we thought it was men all along? Male archeologists from modern society where gender roles are rigid and well-defined — they found the art. "[M]ale archaeologists were doing the work," Snow said, and it’s possible that ”had something to do with it.”

I added the emphasis in bold, but the “that” was already italicized in the article, and it’s probably my favorite part. I love this article, although I’m not a huge fan of the fact that it’s considered so incredibly shocking and radical to imagine that women possibly participated in society 40,000 years ago.

In other awesome feminist anthropology news: it is now somewhat accepted that the venus sculptures, rather than being depictions of female beauty by male artists, were self-portraits by women looking down at their own bodies. The paleolithic figurines lose their distorted proportions and acquire representational realism if we understand that they are self-portraits created by women looking down at their own bodies. 

See also: This quote by Sandy Toksvig

When I was a student at Cambridge I remember an anthropology professor holding up a picture of a bone with 28 incisions carved in it. ‘This is often considered to be man’s first attempt at a calendar’ she explained. She paused as we dutifully wrote this down. ‘My question to you is this – what man needs to mark 28 days? I would suggest to you that this is woman’s first attempt at a calendar.’

It was a moment that changed my life. In that second I stopped to question almost everything I had been taught about the past. How often had I overlooked women’s contributions? How often had I sped past them as I learned of male achievement and men’s place in the history books? Then I read Rosalind Miles’s book The Women’s History of the World (recently republished as Who Cooked the Last Supper?) and I knew I needed to look again. History is full of fabulous females who have been systematically ignored, forgotten or simply written out of the records. They’re not all saints, they’re not all geniuses, but they do deserve remembering.

Umm, but how did it get in the AIRPORT's pharmacy?  I tried to get into an airport without a passport and a boarding ticket.  Didn't work.  They may want new security.

There are no slow news days in Australia

I find it intriguing that the question of who Regina is was 'answered' with two statements of people around her and no statement about her.  A fact that Blue's later statement, "she is surrounded by darkness" hints at.  Nowhere here does Blue say that Regina is the cause of darkness, that her own choices and actions are suspect.  Even the wording in the one statement that could attributed to Regina's agency, to me, subtly changes this so that Regina is the least important aspect of the sentence.  Consider the difference between "her teacher is the Dark One" and "she convinced the Dark One to teach her magic" or "she is the student/apprentice of the Dark One".  In fact both statements start with "her" instead of "she".  "She" is the subject of the sentence.  "Her" is the object.  Being an object of Cora and Rumpelstlitskin is who she is, this is why she is a woman beyond help.

P.S. "So consider yourself lucky you're still alive" because the people who own the object you are trying to save are very willing and capable of killing you.

I've got a dream about two unicorns kissing in a Disney movie too!  I have never felt so close to a silent and deadly warrior!  .... except maybe Mulan.

I’ve got a dream!