lustfulpasiphae wrote this beautiful love story about a selkie. She wrote it in response to a post about dating a selkie, but not hiding her cloak.
In Celtic and Norse mythology, selkies meaning “seal folk” are mythological beings capable of shapeshifting, changing from seal to human form by shedding their skin (aka cloak). They are found in folktales and mythology originating from the Northern Isles of Scotland. The folktales frequently revolve around female selkies being coerced into relationships with humans by someone stealing and hiding their sealskin, thus exhibiting the tale motif of the swan maiden type. There are counterparts in Faroese and Icelandic folklore that speak of seal-women and seal-skin.
Source: lustfulpasiphae
(via: Just Sock Thoughts)
This is everything.
DITTO!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
There’s something inherently toxic about the idea that fishermen (or, by implication, MEN) aren’t capable of loving in the manner described, with trust, respect, equity, and autonomy.
Well, since it wasn’t until 1974 that the USA allowed women the right to have their own bank account, not to mention the backwards trend of women’s rights in this country……yeah. As a whole, men can’t love like this. Individuals can, but they also don’t say “not all men” when rapeculture comes up. They don’t bemoan bring a “nice guy never given a chance.” They laugh at the idea of alpha males while pulling out Motrin for someone who’s aching without being asked.
As a whole in society right now, men are toxic who see women as a prize they are owed. If you don’t like it, do something about it.
And the message you’re putting out when you say that ‘as a whole, men can’t love like this’ is that men are categorically REQUIRED to abuse the women they claim to love, or they are no longer men. That’s UNSPEAKABLY toxic. It defines toxicity INTO the gender that doesn’t need to be there.
The issue is that when you’re speaking categorically, when you’re talking ‘as a whole’, you’re by definition saying that there are no exceptions to be carved. You can’t part it out, or it is no longer a whole. You don’t get to say ‘as a whole, men can’t love like this’, and then say ‘individual men can’. The statement has already condemned them for what they are without considering who they are.
Which just goes back to the original problem. Treating people as being in some manner an incomplete person because of what they are is EXACTLY what women have had to put up with for centuries, and engaging in the same thought processes aimed at another demographic isn’t any less toxic than doing it to women. Women were never mentally incompetent, overemotional, or in any other way incompetent to function as people despite society insisting otherwise, and men were never categorically competent, hyperrational (emotionally stunted), or in any other way better fitted to operate as people despite society assuming and insisting that they are.
Patriarchy is what perpetuates both stereotypes. The same traditions that tell women that they must be submissive also tell men that they must be dominators. The same social programming that teaches women they must yield also programs men to press women into defined roles. If we’re treating the roles of men as dominators, violators, and abusers as immutable and part of their nature as men, it’s not reasonable or righteous to say ‘but women are free and able to escape these roles because the expectation of submission was always a lie’.
We have to throw out the whole patriarchy because leaving any part of it in place to reestablish those historical oppressions undermines the entire fight. That means accepting that it’s lying about the nature of men just as much as it is the nature of women, and it means acknowledging that men can experience and express the full range of human emotion, including honest, selfless, equal love just as it means that women can think and imagine the full range of human thought.
Sometimes ‘not all men’ is less a claim that there are good men and bad men than it is a plea to let men escape the toxic gender roles that demand they act as patriarchal enforcers of an abusive and oppressive social order that never should’ve arisen in human culture.
Sometimes it’s less a deflection of responsibility for playing a role in the oppression of women than it is a statement that we want freedom from indoctrinations that teach us we can’t cry or we won’t be manly, that we can’t have friendships with women that aren’t inherently sexual, that we must control our romantic partners rather than PARTNERING with them as equals.
Patriarchy seeks to control and limit women, but it also seeks to control and limit men. Feminism liberates women, but it also liberates men… and it’s okay for men to WANT to be quit of it.
And by ‘quit of it’, to clarify, I mean ‘quit of the patriarchy’. I’m saying that feminism is the path towards that point, and benefits everyone.
You are more Toxic than 95% of the men I know.
Agreed. The majority of us have experienced patriarchy at the interpersonal level in our relationships.
One might argue that pretty much all of us have experienced it.
It’s just that some of us are mindful and introspective enough to be aware of it, while others are so entrenched and indoctrinated in the traditional roles of the system that they can’t judge that what they’re dealing with isn’t necessary or healthy.
The story didn’t mention all men. It mentioned all fishermen. Who most likely have heard tales of selkie. My uncle was a fisherman and he said that to have a selkie wife would be great because she’d understand the sea and can mend nets properly etc. Fishermen wouldn’t be this understanding because they would value her skill more than her heart.
So is it being a fisher that makes them inherently abusive then, rather than being a man? How does that jibe with other instances in folklore where fishers are presented as generous and supportive?
Faerie stories are often allegorical. What here suggests to you that the fae creature can be allegory but the literal human beings have to be taken literally?
So I am missing something. What is the significance of the drying oilskin jacket?
Well, another telling thing is the fact that the selkie is an Irish folklore, yet America is what is being invoked. I do not deny that males can be possessive and controlling, but the fact is, men aren’t the only ones, are they? As norms are challenged, you find that the norms aren’t really all that normal, it’s just the idea of normal that everyone perpetuates in order to create a baseline of normal. Similar to stereotypes.