Prettybadco

me saying I can’t control my volume bc I’m autistic and ppl being like “okay well no matter what some people might view your loudness as aggression especially if they have triggers.”

babes I’m well aware that being autistic affects the way people perceive me in ways that are detrimental & socially isolating LMAO you don’t need to explain that to me. i say that with empathy & understanding to people who can’t be around loudness genuinely but it’s so funny to be like “I have an autistic trait I cannot control that doesn’t align with social politeness” and ppl saying “okay well I hope you know some people won’t like you.”

YEAH!!!!

The Beer Witch Post

(or how the stereotypical Wicked Witch is based in part on female brewsters*) 

Some background:

Women have been brewing beer for nearly 10 thousand years! 

That’s right! Beer is traditionally a woman’s drink, in that it was invented, produced, and drunk by women (and children) for all of recorded history. (src)

Beer only recently became associated with men (around the time it was commercialized of course!)  How did this happen?

Like many things, it involved the Church and a Witch Hunt.

(Note: this post is about a western stereotype; the action takes place in Europe.) Around the 11th cent., the Church realized that brewing alcohol was a great way for monasteries to generate revenue. At the time, brewing was the domain of Germanic tribal woman, and was important bc:

there was a huge demand for ale, due to its cheapness and the lack of potable water in most households

it allowed women to generate their own income at home.

That first part smelled like profit to the Church. That second part meant female independence, which they didn’t like at all. The solution was to get women out of brewing, and monasteries in. What better way than a witch hunt?

Of course, to have a good witch hunt, first you have to invent a witch.

Inventing the Wicked Witch

As female brewsters were pushed out of their fields (being denied licenses and guild membership), the Church set up shop. Monasteries & nunneries were sort of the perfect place to manufacture, what with their land & resources & free labor. Women were still the main brewers in many communities, but this would change over the centuries as the Church waged a War of Defamation against alewives & brewesses. 

The association between woman and sin has always been an easy argument to make, biblically. As women, alewives were ridiculously easy to defame. The rhetoric went something along the lines of:

women created sin

women are sinful

women use beer to spread their sinful ways & take money from men

Alewives, who ran alehouses, were cast as treacherous, deceitful women who cheated men by luring them into playgrounds for the devil, ruled by the sins of gluttony and lust.  

Alewives in hell became a popular Church-spread trope:  

“The Church specifically taught that alewives would be the only people left in hell after Christ freed all the damned.“ (src)

Thus, female brewers became easy target to associate with the devil, and with witchcraft. 

Whether or not brewsters were outright accused of consorting with the devil, the implication was there. And later, so was the imagery.

The Church’s centuries-long smear campaign worked too, helped by the fact that as brewing became more lucrative, more men entered the field, and were happy to help push women out. By the 17th century, the (European) brewing industry was male dominated, for the first time in human history. 

Witchcraft & Brewing: Symbology

The lifestyles, clothing, and tools of real women brewers were taken and used as iconography for witchcraft. 

Many of the props associated with the stereotypical Wicked Witch were just common objects alewives used to denote the brewing trade.

CALUDRONS & CATS: The image of a woman standing over a boiling cauldron once had a very different connotation: ale brewing. Cats, of course, were kept around to protect the grain supply.

BROOMSTICKS: these symbols of domestic trade were used as advertisements. A broom or ALESTAKE hung outside a home or alehouse was an easy-to-recognize sign that ale was available to buy. (Keep in mind that before literacy was common, most signs would be symbolic, not written.)

THOSE BIG, DISTINCTIVE HATS: This was a marketing thing too! Wearing a large hat to stand out in the market crowd was a symbol of a brewster with wares to sell. (src)

An Alewife, in her innocent witchy attire. Simple advertising like these allowed women to sell brews that they were already often making for their families at home.

The more you know! A shoutout to all those ladies brewing throughout history, from priestesses to alewives to homemakers alike. For thousands of years, generation after generation of families were fed & watered & kept healthy by women brewing at home. Thank you ladies, for your service.

if you enjoy my posts, i have a ko-fi! (this post took about 2 hours to research/write. links below)

Weiterlesen

I said this months ago but I'll say it again: if you're transgender you HAVE TO LIVE

nb people are members of the fae

Me and my sister have actually been bonding over the whole late/undiagnosed ADHD thing, and ever since I brought up to her that maybe she should get tested too, she's been spotting all sorts of Holy Shit How Did Nobody Notice signs about both of us. After finding out about stimulant resistance/paradoxal reaction, she pointed out that would explain why she's been hooked on coke (the drink, not the snorty stuff) and how I started my unfathomable coffee habit so early.

I started drinking a whole pot of coffee every day since I was like 10. I'd come home from school and brew myself a pot of coffee. I wasn't secretive about it and I was unaware that adults literally did not know that I was doing it, because by the time my parents got home from work in the evening, the whole pot would be gone.

The thing with ADHD is about a chemical imbalance in the brains, below average amounts of the kind of reward chemicals that prompt you to do anything. That's why procrastinating until last-minute panic is a regular habit - the task itself isn't just boring, it's intolerably tedious all the way until the adrenaline from the deadline panic boosts the brain to function on a - well, functional - level.

A lot of undiagnosed ADHD people unconsciously self-medicate with caffeine. I'm not a chemist, but as a mild stimulant, the caffeine gives you a boost that helps balance out the brain. Not as much as actually being medicated, but it's still better than nothing.

I didn't do it on purpose because it would "help me focus" on anything important or constructive - I didn't do my homework unprompted, not once, ever, since I was like 15 - but considering that nobody noticed a 10-year-old drinking a whole goddamn pot of coffee in the span of 4-5 hours every single day, one could conclude that it wasn't making me noticeably hyperactive.

I didn't drink coffee because I wanted a specific effect, though. As far as I was concerned I was drinking it because I liked it. And the reason why I started the habit in the first place was because at the time, I was reading a shit ton of Garfield comics for some reason and that orange cat managed to convince me that drinking a shit ton of coffee every day is cool. Anyway, the moral of the story is

Made a chart about my three favorite families. Hope this helps. 

i'm an adult but i still think penis humor is funny which is why my eldritch horror story has a dick joke in it. i tried to resist i really did.

"we don't have girl talk, we have creature talk," my roommate Julia just said while rolling on the floor, "put that on your fucking tumblr, they'll love that shit"

As a kid, I wasn't taught any concept that there's a difference between wanting to do something, and enjoying it. I was a largely unsupervised kid with undiagnosed ADHD and parents who expected their kids to just raise themselves on their own. So when I was capable of spending hours drawing or reading a fun book, but couldn't even remember that I had homework, ever, I was told that I simply didn't want to do well in school. And who was I to question that, I'm eight years old.

Enjoyment and passion were the only forms of motivation I knew, and if I couldn't make myself either love doing boring math homework as much as I loved my hobbies, or force myself to push through things I hated with sheer willpower alone because I want to succeed so bad, then clearly I was simply not as good as all the other kids, who could do that. And that attitude carried onto adulthood. Every time I struggled to muster genuine love and passion into something, I thought that I just don't want it badly enough. Not to enough to love it, or to suffer through it.

Being medicated for the first time was a game changer. Like holy shit, so this is your brain on dopamine. And suddenly I wanted to do things, turned my life around, took up the passion career I had never dared to try. And when the first "honeymoon phase" of the meds wore down, the same fear came back - I don't like this anymore, do I not want it bad enough? What else could I possibly want?

And I shit you not I was literally 30 years old when I understood that life isn't just either loving every minute of pursuing a passion that you love, or joylessly dragging yourself through things that you don't even want to do. I can just tell myself "just because I don't like doing this doesn't mean I don't want to be doing it." It's not a mark of failure, weakness or lack of motivation, if sometimes the career you want to be doing just feels like having a job.

Mulling over something right now.

My journey into understanding neurodivergence and my own AuDHD-ness has changed how I doctor, and sometimes I can see this when looking at things like auto text scripts I set up previously.

For example, when it comes to picky eaters, I used to do a lot of education about how to get kids to eat, discussing strategies like gamifying intake of fruits and vegetables, enforcing #-bite rules, and having cutoff times for meals. I also put a lot more weight on having a balanced, whole-food meal. The only thing I discussed that was focused on any underlying reason was involving kids in meal prep, though I didn't necessarily have a reason as to why. And, to be fair, these strategies work for picky, NT toddlers.

Contrast that to today, where I'm asking questions about texture sensitivities and taste preferences. I'm acknowledging that processed foods are more predictable than fresh. I'm discussing meal prep involvement as a means of sensory food play. I'm discussing about how stressful #-bite requirements can be and I'm encouraging having safe foods available and permissable - not as a means of giving in, but to make trying a new food less stressful. I'm also acknowledging that some food is better than no food, as long as we get the basics/macros in as we can always supplement micros with multivitamins.

These are things that weren't taught when I was in medical school or residency. I attended in 2015, just after the DSM changes and the focus then was, and largely still is, eating a "well-rounded", normativized, white, upper-middle class diet. Anything other than that was treated as subpar and is bad medicine, let alone parenting.

You know the other thing? When I started asking, do you know how many of my picky eaters DIDN'T have some kind of sensory basis to their eating patterns? Do you know just how many undiagnosed, unseen neurodivergent kids are out there, masking along, not making waves, with equally ND parents who don't know otherwise?

The number of times I see at least one parent squirm when I start asking the kids, especially older kids, autism symptom questions and autism distinct anxiety questions... Why, if I had a nickel for every time, I would definitely have more than two. It's not a coincidence.