As far as ethical materials go you can’t really get better than wool.
The sheep need the hair cut.
Nothing dies for it.
Sheep live pretty much wild for most the year.
Placed correctly they maintain a landscape and help the wildlife that live there to thrive.
Doesn’t use Vast Quantities of land for little product.
Not draining inland fresh water oceans.
Been spending thousands of years perfecting the genetics for this purpose.
Comes in many different kinds of uses.
And the animal it comes off is fully edible.
My main issue with it is it has fallen so out of fashion that it pays the farmers who make it more to transport it than they get per fleece, and people have really fucking weird hang ups about the ethics of giving a sheep a hair cut.
Sheep can get infested with wool maggots if they are not shorn.
Also an unshorn sheep can drown if it falls into water, just by the sheer weight of the water its wool can absorb, dragging it down.
A Tunis sheep can live in a large doghouse, and staked in a different place every day, will mow your lawn (buy they get lonely. Buy two).
Light shearing nicks heal fast because the sheep’s waxy lanolin coats their skin. Though most sheep farmers won’t Nick the sheep bc it gets blood on the wool.
Sheep farmers MUST treat their sheep with care, because any little thing that upsets sheep affects the quality of their wool.
Even “natural” fibers like bamboo take TONS of water to process and alkaline dyes to color them. You can dye wool with unsweetened koolaid.
People have been raising sheep for close to 10,000 years. And all that time, we’ve been breeding them for better wool. Most mammals with thick coats shed naturally in the spring, sheep don’t because we bred it out of them.
Sheep and their farmers have an actual symbiotic relationship. Farmers remove their excess wool, keeping them healthy, and then sell that wool to buy what they need.
it’s also naturally antimicrobial and resists odors (unlike polyester, which absorbs them better and makes it harder to wash them out).
saw this massive onion bigger than my entire hand in the produce aisle and immediately snatched it up solely to weigh it and a guy across the aisle asked how much it weighed because he was curious as well and when i told him it was two pounds he excitedly was like “it’s like the biggest one i’ve ever seen..” humanity rocks moment. bonding with strangers over giant onion
listen. i know itâs not 2014 anymore and i know itâs just a throwaway line and that the russo brothers didnt intend for marvel action blockbuster captain america the winter soldier to become the tragic gay love story that never was but man. having steve say âitâs kind of hard to find someone with shared life experienceâ in a conversation about romantic relationships right before the bucky reveal is so cruel. itâs not just about steve and bucky obviously having the shared experience of being âout of time,â itâs the fact that theyâve both been stripped of their humanity in opposite directions. steve is a legend, he is an american hero and a national icon before he is a human being the same way that bucky is a weapon and a killing machine before he is a human being. steve knows that anyone who falls in love with him in the 21st century fell in love with captain america first, and thatâs just not him. but then the one person who knew him first and knew him best and loved him (not captain america, that little guy from brooklyn) so much he died for it is alive, impossibly. and itâs a miracle because heâs back and itâs horrific because heâs back under the worst possible circumstances. but to steve, the winter soldier is worth tearing the world apart for because heâs always been bucky first. they find each other and suddenly theyâre human again. and maybe, despite it all, being âout of timeâ becomes a blessing, because in this century theyâd finally be allowed to love each other the way theyâve always wanted to. like real people do.
like. no. the captain america trilogy isnât about two queer men traumatized and alienated by war and modern life rediscovering and reclaiming their humanity through their love for each other. but. i mean. it couldve been
girl help the eldritch horrors are organising a pride and prejudice party and making us dance to mirror their forbidden and repressed love. yes there is a michael jackson thriller video reenactment outside trying to get in. no yeah i still want that rare doctor who annual
*opens my photo app to look at pictures of my cat at work like a ww1 soldier flipping open his locket to look at a picture of his sweetheart back home*
when I was a kid you had to do the charlie the unicorn voice whether you liked it or not. you had to say candy mountain charlieeee in the voice. not like these days
Feminist fantasy is funny sometimes in how much it wants to shit on femininity for no goddamned reason. Like the whole âskirts are tools of the patriarchy made to cripple women into immobility, breeches are much betterâ thing.
(Letâs get it straight: Most societies over history have defaulted to skirts for everyone because you donât have to take anything off to relieve yourself, you just have to squat down or lift your skirts and go. The main advantage of bifurcated garments is they make it easier to ride horses. But Western men wear pants so women wearing pants has become ~the universal symbol of gender equality~)
The book Iâm reading literally just had its medievalesque heroine declare that peasant women wear breeches to work in the field because âYou canât swing a scythe in a skirt!â
Hm yes story checks out
peasant women definitely never did farm labour in skirts
skirts definitely mean youâre weak and fragile and canât accomplish anything
skirts are definitely bad and will keep you from truly living life
no skirts for anyone, thatâs definitely the moral of the story here
Now, a skirt thatâs too long will be harder to work inâskirts brushing the floor may look elegant, but is also a tripping hazardâbut that is not a problem with skirts in general, itâs a problem with that particular skirt not being suited to being worked in.
Skirts are very practical. You can hike them up if youâre hot or need more freedom to maneuver (this is called âgirding your loinsâ). If you need to carry something, you can lift up your hem and make a pouch just like the person in yellow in the bottom picture above. If you need to handle something hot, a skirt generally has enough material you can hold it out from your body to use as a hot pad. (Tight skirts were only used by people who didnât need to work/move until the invention of elastic fabric.)
Long skirts were markers of class almost as much as gender. Both men and women in the European middle ages wore extravagantly long garments to indicate both âIâm so rich I can afford THIS MUCH fabricâ and âI donât walk in the mud, I pay servants to do that for me.â
Skirt hiking: Definitely a Thing. (Janetâs tied her kirtle green/above the knee and not belowâŠ)
Love this post, and want to add: another example of the âempowerment means shitting on feminityâ is the bizarro way that this genre attacks basic survival skills like cooking and sewing as pointless, inferior or mutually exclusive with masculine pursuits (like your lady knight should probably know how to cook for herself and sew her own wounds and patch her clothes while sheâs on her quest through the North to rescue her boyfriend, or this happy couple is in for a world of hurt!)
Historically, skirts have been the garment of choice for almost every culture, gender and class. Breeches, or pants, were created specifically for riding horses.
Meanwhile, men wearing skirts.
*bangs gavel* NEEDS MOAR SKIRT
(Seriously, the notes on this post are a goldmine for people mentioning their cultures where men wear skirts. I couldnât fit them all in. This is missing toooons of cultures from every part of the globe, especially Asia, Africa, and the Americas.)
Ancient Rome
Modern Morocco
Medieval Europe
Traditional Saudi Arabia
16th century Russia
Traditional Papua New Guinea
16th century Turkey
Modern India
i deliver propane. this means driving a large truck, then dragging a heavy hose up to one hundred and fifty feet through peopleâs yards, usually in deep snow and severe cold. i was the first woman my company ever hired.
and when i showed up for work in a skirt, all the men went BALLISTIC. they told me iâd trip, iâd get stuck, iâd freeze, iâd quit within the month when i found that i had underestimated how hard the work was. i asked what they thought women wore to work outside before the mid twentieth century, and they told me âwomen didnât work outside then. they stayed in the house all the time.â and thatâs when i learned that hatred of the skirt is another way of erasing womenâs historyâif you can pretend that all women were too hobbled by their clothes to even function, you can pretend that they never contributed jack shit to society.
anyway iâve been doing this job in a skirt for three years now, and all the men should be jealous of my complete range of movement and infinite layering potential.