squirrel girl is canonically more powerful than thanos
if anyone is wondering “how the fuck?”: this was a pretty complicated thing that marvel set up, where they evaluated each hero and villain’s capabilities based on who they defeated, how they defeated them, who they were defeated by, and so on.
except, as it turns out, squirrel girl has defeated a LOT of powerful villains. case in point, her very first appearance has her solo-defeating doctor doom, without the help of iron man (who was nearby). this was also one of the few occasions where doom was defeated and it WASN’T a doombot. this turned squirrel girl into kind of a meme once the story hit the internet for obvious reasons, even though this story was just a one-shot. so then marvel brings her back, and has her defeat three villains in one comic, INCLUDING THANOS. (they even had other characters confirm that it wasn’t a trick, it wasn’t a fake thanos, that was actually thanos and he lost to squirrel girl because she set squirrels on him.)
the result? squirrel girl always wins. if there is an argument about “who would win?”, and squirrel girl is one of the options, then she wins by default because she’s squirrel girl. and this means that squirrel girl has to be the most powerful character in marvel by raw stats, because she always wins. you genuinely can’t beat squirrel girl.
by the by: she’s coming to the mcu soon in the new warriors tv show. that should be entertaining.
this tweet goes from surreal to hilarious when you realize that she was the CEO of Reddit
Casual reminder that while she was CEO at Reddit she created a salary negotiation policy that evened the playing field for women employed by Reddit.
Not-at-all-casual-reminder that she left Reddit in 2015 after being forced to resign because Reddit lost its collective shit at her when the site banned 5 subreddits for harassment; not-at-fucking-all casual reminder that Ellen Pao was the CEO of Reddit when it banned revenge porn after The Fappening.
One of the subreddits that was banned that led to her resignation was r/fatpeople hate. The others were transphobic and racist.
In her time at Reddit Pao did more than the site had ever before done to fight harassment from its user base and for that someone started a subreddit calling for her firing and trying to make nazi and ISIS imagery come up in searches associated with her name.
If *anyone* in the tech industry knows what the blackpill subculture is like and how vile and toxic groups spawned in subreddits can be it’s Ellen Pao.
This isn’t someone who’s oblivious to the fact that her former company is a source of the problem, this is someone who is speaking from personal experience with online harassment campaigns orchestrated by people who want the freedom to post celebrity nudes who were *enraged* that she made it harder for them to do so.
(also basically the rest of her twitter is about #metoo, the need for labor regulation and worker protections, and salary transparency so maybe go check her out)
I honestly always find the term ‘spinster’ as referring to an elderly, never-married woman as funny because you know what?
Wool was a huge industry in Europe in the middle ages. It was hugely in demand, particularly broadcloth, and was a valuable trade good. A great deal of wool was owned by monasteries and landed gentry who owned the land.
And, well, the only way to spin wool into yarn to make broadcloth was by hand.
This was viewed as a feminine occupation, and below the dignity of the monks and male gentry that largely ran the trade.
So what did they do?
They hired women to spin it. And, turns out, this was a stable job that paid very well. Well enough that it was one of the few viable economic options considered ‘respectable’ outside of marriage for a woman. A spinster could earn quite a tidy salary for her art, and maintain full control over her own money, no husband required.
So, naturally, women who had little interest in marriage or men? Grabbed this opportunity with both hands and ran with it. Of course, most people didn’t get this, because All Women Want Is Husbands, Right?
So when people say ‘spinster’ as in ‘spinster aunt’, they are TRYING to conjure up an image of a little old lady who is lonely and bitter.
But what I HEAR are the smiles and laughter of a million women as they earned their own money in their own homes and controlled their own fortunes and lived life on their own terms, and damn what society expected of them.
I hope this a shit post cause that’s not even close to being true.
Please. I am very curious as to why you think I am incorrect.
The OP’s etymology for the word spinster is correct, but the way in which that information is framed, and the way in which medieval women’s economic status is characterised, is if not outright incorrect than pretty skewed. (Not to mention that some of the sources marshalled as evidence, like links 2 or 5, are outright online trash, while the last link goes to a journal article from 1925 which takes the concept of the Frauenfrage as established historical fact. Will we ever be free of the ghost of Grundmann?)
Women were certainly a large part of the labour force in medieval cloth production. That is undeniable. However, while the concept of a “Golden Age” for economically liberated medieval women is one current in a lot of pop history, and it was also common in the historiography through at least the 1980s, it has been greatly complicated by a lot of subsequent scholarly work. Historians are now much more suspicious of neat narratives of Golden Ages and/or declines for women.
Edit to add: Also, while for sure no male member of the gentry was going to do any kind of manual labour, the concept of, say, a twelfth-century Cistercian monk turning up his nose at working in cloth production? That distant sound you hear is the garbled screaming of Bernard of Clairvaux.
theclumsiestninja 