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?
She’s likely a fisher. Or does something outdoors for a job like rancher or oil-rig worker or something with exposure to the elements, specifically rain and cold.
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.
You accidentally left the screenshot symbols on lol
I grew up in a fishery dependant area and we’ve held onto our Irish roots with a death grip- meaning I have heard selkie stories for 50+ years.
In traditional fishing communities young boys were raised to expect to spend half or more of their life on the water, young men know they will likely be taken by the sea eventually, and so they are taught to look for a wife who is happy with her own company, and able to go months without a husband at home.
Fishermen were raised to look for wives who were anchored to the home and happy to wait for his return- someone who understood the love of the sea calling you away from hearth and family and would not feel slighted by that.
The daughters and sisyers of fishermen were raised with the expectation that they would marry a fisherman. They would have to be able to keep themselves content for months at a time, manage most of the demands of the home- including growing food, tending livestock, and repairs- on her own, or with community help (often other women, and the few men unable to go on the boats due to age or injury). They were responsible for keeping things running smoothly and for their husbands to come home to somewhere he could rest and recover from the demands of being on the water.
The oilskin jacket indicates that the human woman is a fisher, or works outdoors near water. It *suggests* that this is someone who grew up being taught to expect that when she fell in love, she’d be left alone a lot. She would have grown up where this was normal and very common. Where for parts of the year, her small community population dropped by half, or doubled depending on which fish were plentiful. The fact that she bucked expectations and became a fisher herself doesn’t mean that she hadn’t already accepted and embraced the idea that she’d be parted from her love while they were at sea as just how adult life worked.
A fisherMAN would never have thought to make the offer, because it runs completely counter to everything he has been taught is needed in a wife: someone who will not leave his home, possibly taking his children with her, while he is away on the boats. He needs a wife who is devoted to their home and all that entails. The only way he can get what he needs from a wife in a Selkie, is to keep her cloak and make her a prisoner… but if he does that, Selkies are breathtakingly beautiful and extremely devoted mothers, they are also very strong and clever, and birth sons who understand water and fish better than a human ever could. His cultural messaging is very specific: if you find a selkie, never, ever, risk losing her.
A fisherWOMAN would never expect to chain their partner to the shore. Her whole life she’s expected that her partner would have the freedom to leave and she would have to have faith that they would return unless the sea claimed them. She’s not culturally expected to find someone who will function as her groundskeeper/housemaid/nanny while she is at sea. It would never occur to her that she ‘should’ trap the Selkie, because she was raised on tales of how a Selkie is the perfect wife for a man like she would become someday. She grew up on stories of how to keep the memory of a person present and alive, of how women banded together to help one another, how even the most devoted husband might not return if the ocean claimed him, how to love from a distance, how not to resent the ocean, how to WAIT. So, she offers what she would want- as someone who learned all those lessons and still couldn’t stay on land: I am me and I am yours, as I am. You are you and I want you, as you are. As long as you want the same, this is our home.
With Selkie stories, it’s VITAL to remember that it’s not that men are inherently abusive. It’s that Selkies have a very limited scope of information and are distrustful of humans (please remember that seals are human prey). In THIS story, it is also a matter of looking through the queer lens to see that the heteronormative social expectations that make a human husband such a terrifying prospect for Selkies, conversely allow for a human wife to be a wonderful option for Selkies. It about the expectations we assign to the role of ‘spouse’ and how vastly different they can be when split down strict gender roles.