i think my ideal life is a senator’s son in, say, 140 BC. I’m climbing the cursus honorum, but in a very leisurely way; I’m not really aiming for consul, which would be Too Much Trouble. I have dinner parties at which we discuss Greek theater and maybe think about trying to write Latin versions of them, but dismiss it as, again, too much work. Cato probably hates me. i am idle. my villa is opulent.
George Barbier, Illustrations for Les Liaisons Dangereuses by Pierre Choderlos De Laclos, 1934.
During his life, George Barbier was one of France’s most acclaimed illustrators and designers, a forefather of the art deco movement. But after his death in 1932 he quickly sank into obscurity. It’s only in the modern era that his work has been reappraised.
George Barbier, Illustration for Les Chansons de Bilitis by
Pierre Louÿs, 1929.
Barbier is notable for his bold depictions of female sexuality, and an aesthetic in his design work that a modern critic called ‘a kind of lipstick lesbian chic’. Many of his illustrations have a sapphic subtext, featuring women together in intimate poses, or women embracing people of ambiguous gender. Some show women dancing or being affectionate with figures that appear to be male but on closer inspection are clearly women in drag.
George Barbier, Le Feu (The Fire), 1925.This illustration shows a woman reclining in the arms of a person of indeterminate gender.
In his illustrations for Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Les Chansons de Bilitis, this
subtext became outright text, with women naked together, kissing or making love. For the time, these illustrations were extremely daring and
verged on the pornographic (even if they seem quite tame by today’s
standards).
George Barbier, Illustration for Les Chansons de Bilitis by
Pierre Louÿs, 1929.
Little is known about Barbier’s personal life in his hometown of Nantes, but we do know that in Paris he moved almost exclusively in homosexual circles. He was an intimate friend of the dandy and poet Robert de Montesquiou, and mixed with gay intellectuals like Marcel Proust.
George Barbier, Les dames seules (the single ladies), 1910. This early work is particularly striking for its apparent depiction of a butch/femme subculture among gay women in Paris.
His sexuality gave him access to the underground gay scene in Paris, and his knowledge of it filters through into his work. Although many of his illustrations are fictional, fantastical, or historical, here and there we see glimpses of the hidden lives of queer women in
fin-de-siecle Paris.
It also makes his work particularly notable, IMO, because unlike many of his straight male contemporaries, he did not depict sex and romance between women for the titillation of the straight male gaze. His women are complex, resisting bland stereotypes or didactic stories of innocence and fallen virtue. They are beautiful, sensual, dangerous and daring. Even idealised, they seem like real people. They have a self-possession that resists objectification. Their sexuality belongs to them, not to the viewer.
You see, while some people are very much excited for a new show about our pompous king of the assholes (and I say this as a term of endearment, having loved Lestat since I was a depressed teenager living in New York, shuffling through my mom’s fiction section) we need to pause and remember this:
Anne Rice does not support fan fiction or anything that is not glowing praise.
Read it again, slowly.
Anne Rice does not support fan fiction or anything that is not glowing praise.
This is difficult for younger fans to understand, but let’s take a walk down memory lane.
She has threatened to sue writers in the past. She is one of the most prolific writers of our generation, and she does not support people using her characters for their own work.
In fact, in 2000 she went on a binge-attack against her fans. She threatened legal action against fans who wrote or drew her characters, but especially those who wrote with them. She sent them weeks of harassing letters and doxxed them on the internet.
Let me repeat that.
She doxxed people who wrote fan fiction.
She harassed them online and threatened to contact employers.
She used her fans to outright attack other fans.
This isn’t even something she can just shake off now, with the comment of “It was so long ago” because she did this to a writer who wrote commentary on her story in 2013.
In 2013.
While it was not that she wrote fan fiction, she still shows that she has no respect for people who are in fandom.
Remember those disclaimers used in fan fics, at the beginning? “I do not own …. ”? Yeah, a lot of that has to do with the fact that Anne Rice and others like her would attack fandoms and threaten them, and was in hopes that they would just leave us alone. She didn’t.
In short: Do not trust Anne Rice. I love her writing, I have read every book she has even written, but I do not trust her.
You shouldn’t, either.
Anne Rice was and still is a bully. Don’t support her work.
She’s been like this since Geocities was the big place to have spec (that’s what fics used to be called, specs, as in speculative fiction) pages back in the mid 90s.
She use to threaten to sue anyone she found posting specs anywhere, and there was a whole underground network of people to share specs and fan art (which she also would threaten to sue over).
Anne Rice has always been kind of a twat about fan works based on her mediocre writing.
She’s harassed people quite recently. @jennytrout Wanna gossip?
What was that? “Raise your hand if you were ever personally victimized by Anne Rice?”
DISCLAIMER: this is not about fanfic, but it is about what she can do to you.
So, I totally idolized Anne Rice. Fully and adoringly so. One day, she shared one of my HuffPo articles with her “people of the page” and it was probably the greatest day of my entire career.
But she has this thing where she’s OBSESSED with bad reviews. At one point, she complained about a bad review she got for Interview from the New York Times or some such thing like forty years ago. She used it as an example of how reviews can hurt authors. I was like, seriously, lady, you have how many millions of copies of your books sold? How many movies have been made from them? *People try to find your house to take pictures of themselves in front of it.* But okay, everybody has their quirks. I just kind of rolled my eyes over it.
Not long after that, she made a post about this website that was made by a writer who apparently wasn’t getting the sales numbers or accolades they so richly deserved. The problem wasn’t like, the nature of the business or anything, nay, my friends, nay, but the fact that people–BULLIES!–left mean reviews on Amazon. So these people whom Rice so admired would make posts where they would reveal Amazon/GoodReads reviewers names and home addresses and such. One post even mentioned something like, “Between this time and that time every weekday, they go for a walk by the sea wall.” Scary, scary shit. And Rice LOVED these people.
I don’t know why I took it upon myself to argue with her. I really don’t. Maybe because I respected her so much and her support of the site was so disappointing? This was the result.
So, I’m a bully. Big whoop, right? And my feelings were a little hurt, but hey, never meet (or follow on social media) your idols, right? Lesson learned, and it wasn’t like this could destroy my fond memories of how much I loved her books, right?
So, fast forward, I think it was the next year, or at least a few months later, when I wrote a post about a dumb $0.99 Kindle book about Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings in a BDSM relationship. A pathetic little troll with too much hair gel and not enough parenting ran to his goddess Anne Rice to tell her how mean, mean, mean I was being. She posted a link to a blog post made about me on the reviews-are-bullies site and said something to the effect of someone needing to teach me a lesson or someone needed to show me how it feels or something like that. To THREE. MILLION. PEOPLE.
As a fan of Anne Rice, I am confident in stating that many of her fans are not okay people. And they heeded the command of their “queen.” Yes, they referred to her as such, flooding me with emails, tweets, FB messages, anywhere they could reach me. They posted my address, screenshots of google earth images of my house, they threatened to kill me, they made graphic threats against my children, one charming gentleman on parole from his assault sentence offered to make a necklace of my teeth to present to “my queen.”
When confronted about the fact that she had unleashed all of this on me, her response was basically: ¯_(ツ)_/¯
She insisted she hadn’t done anything wrong, she couldn’t control what people were doing, and oh yes, it’s terrible that people are saying this, but she NEVER. ASKED. THEM. TO. STOP. In fact, she joined her “people of the page” in mocking my appearance, mourning the horrible lives my children must have, and continuing to insist that my “prison tats” indicated that I was a member of a gang (I have “TIME LADY” tattooed across my knuckles in the 11th Doctor era Doctor Who font). Egging them on with this coy, “Well, we shouldn’t say things like that, we’re better than that, BUT” bullshit.
This all went on for weeks. Some of these people still occasionally pop up to threaten/antagonize. So, yeah. Steer clear. She holds a grudge, she can and will mobilize her fanbase against you, if she dislikes you she will ruin you, and she doesn’t care if her readers literally kill you.
and for those interested, you can find the report HERE
Just in case any dudebros are unclear on what this means: it means that your buddy who totally just had some bitch trying to ruin his life by accusing him of rape…almost certainly actually did rape her.
Just keep that in mind.
Yeah man, imagine that, bitches don’t be lying.
Can we put this into context? It means that 99.4% of rape allegations are true.
It means that 99.4% of rape allegations are true.
When you read through and learn about those 0.6% who did make false allegations, there are some seriously important things to note. Firstly :
“Furthermore, the report shows that a significant number of these cases involved young, often vulnerable people. About half of the cases involved people aged 21 years old and under, and some involved people with mental health difficulties. In some cases, the person alleged to have made the false report had undoubtedly been the victim of some kind of offence (sic), even if not the one which he or she had reported.”
And then, when you get into the case studies you find things like a 14 year old girl sleeping with an 18 year old. When discovered, she claimed the sex was non-consensual in fear of her father’s disapproval, but investigation of texts and emails found that to be untrue. THAT SAID, the 18 year old was found to have a history of pursuing and seducing many very young girls, and once he was counseled he expressed not only regret over his actions, but the knowledge that he was
purposefully picking vulnerable girls who could be easily manipulated into consent.
Another case was a married couple, where the wife claimed rape and domestic violence, so the husband was arrested and held. After some contact between the two while he was incarcerated, she went back to him and wanted the charges dropped. It’s okay because she still loves him. When the DA decided to keep going, she suddenly said that she made it up and he never raped her at all. Further counseling revealed that the allegations were true, but she didn’t want to be without him so she lied about the allegations being false. I don’t know about you, but this kind of sounds like classic domestic violence, and the kind of patterns you get into after living with an abuser.
The point I’m trying to make is that even though there are 0.6% false claims… when you break them down you find that there’s generally a lot of skeevy shit going on, and like the above quote, many of the alleged rape victims are actual victims of other abuses. For some of them, I’m guessing that an allegation of rape was the only way to bring enough attention to their abuse to finally get protection by law enforcement, or enough care from family to be freed from their abusive situations and moved somewhere safe. Some are mentally ill and have been taken advantage of, or are victims of statutory rape because they are not even remotely mature enough to truly consent to a sexual relationship with an adult. These cases aren’t just as simple as, “some bitch regretted sex and cried rape”.
Yeah. About the only people who make actual false accusations are 1) that time some MRAs flooded a college’s anonymous reporting system with false reports, 2) antis and other bigots who want to smear the group they hate (fave tactic of lynch mobs) and in modern times often can never produce an actual “victim” so they pretty much never bother with the authorities except for sometimes falls CP reports, and 3) the fucking “”“Veritas Project,”“” which was literally trying to manipulate an election.
I don’t doubt that false accusations ruin lives, and I think we should especially be on the lookout for them lately, given that a lot of people are making accusations right now and there’s always the potential for a real problem to morph slowly into a moral panic.
But… the prevalence of data like this is why I still think this is a problem.
This looked sketchy, because the numbers were far lower than the numbers I’d seen on other reports. So I read the article until I came to where they got the 0.6 percent figure from:
“In the period of the review, there were 5,651 prosecutions for rape and 111,891 for domestic violence. During the same period there were 35 prosecutions for making false allegations of rape, six for making false allegation of domestic violence and three for making false allegations of both rape and domestic violence.”
This isn’t measuring the percentage of rape accusations which are false. This is measuring how often false accusations are prosecuted, relative to how often rape is prosecuted.
Recognizing that rape victims can be silenced is very important, BUT so is critical thinking and reading data associated with a study properly.
This study is focused on cases that faced prosecution at TRIAL, meaning that the state believed they had enough evidence to convict the accused using the standard “beyond all reasonable doubt”. The state will NOT go to trial if they don’t think they can convict the accused, no one has time or money to send every single case to trial.
This means that OF COURSE these numbers come up this way. The state cherry picked the cases they thought they would win.
Penhales 