Well, Actually is an ongoing reader-supported newsletter series debunking the mythconceptions and outright lies told by those invested in upholding patriarchy. For the price of a monthly glass of wine, I’ll supply weekly facts, figures and funnies to break down all the patriarchal myths and nonsense you need to help you stay calm at the next family dinner! You can find the introduction post here.
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This is Part 3 in a paid short series looking at the myth of women as inherent nurturers. You can read part one (free to everyone) here. If you are a paid subscriber, you can find part two here.
Picture it. Europe, the Middle Ages. Pestilence, disease and just a generally very low standard of hygiene has everyone stinking to high heaven and getting all manner of illnesses. Forget washing your hands for twenty seconds - if you bathed, it was in a cold river.
During this period of egregious body odours, religious paranoia led everyone to believe cats were agents of Satan. And so, in 1233AD, Pope Gregory IX (178th in a series of Men Pretending To Be God’s Earthly Compadre) reportedly issued a Papal Bull in ordering the widespread execution of any and all cats. There’s an apocryphal myth that suggests this misguided attempt to rid the world of our enigmatic feline friends was what led to the bubonic plague - with no cats to hunt the rats blamed for spreading the disease, the Black Death tore across the continent, dead bodies piling up faster than they could be buried. Of course, we know now that it wasn’t rats themselves that carried the disease but the fleas they were giving free transportation too. Having dealt with a flea infestation myself (there are very few pitfalls to having domestic cats, but fleas are definitely one of them), I can only imagine how useless cats would have been against an army of bloodsucking filth monsters. After all, no one wants to cuddle a rat to sleep.
The point is, it was a very smelly time. There was no such thing as Palmolive Ylang-Ylang body wash. People pissed and shat into chamber pots or privys that were then emptied into the same rivers in which they bathed and washed their clothes (which was done using detergent made out of ashes and animal fat). I have to laugh whenever I hear contemporary men complaining that having underarm hair and pubes is ‘unhygienic’ (but only for women, obviously). If dudes had standards for cleanliness rather than general disgust for women’s bodies, they’d have no need to learn how to wash their own butts - because we would have expired as a species long ago. If the human race can survive millenia of fucking without access to sanitation, Chad can get his snout into your bush.
Why do I mention all this? Because the coalition of religion, patriarchy and class warfare put a target squarely on the backs of a particular group of experts whose work was no longer respected as the realm of “women’s business” but pathologised instead as consortment with the Devil. The power they held over life and death was blasphemous, made even worse by the sluttishness all women held at their core. Society had yet to invent the myth of the genteel, infantile woman whose delicate constitutions and even more delicate brains had to be protected from the realities of the world and gently eased into the capacities of their own bodies. The women of the Middle Ages were all evil hoo-ers, driven by lust and the animalistic desperation to fill their constantly wet cunts with the horn of Lucifer. But it was one thing to be eagerly fucked by Satan. It was quite another to commit yourself to feeding him innocent babies.
Have you ever wondered why supposedly ‘modern’ society for so long imagined obstetrics to be the realm of male physicians?
They said they were hunting and killing witches. But really, what they were mostly doing was slaughtering midwives.
After the paywall: how patriarchal religion destroyed midwifery while demonising women who did not have children as witches.
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