Reblog this or you hate kittens!

[lizbee]

One for the researchers: is the ease of reblogging on Tumblr facilitating the spreading of unfounded stories in the name of slacktivism?

I wonder, as tree_and_leaf casts doubt on the heartwarming banned books locker library story, and last week saw the return of the old "Australian government makes transgendered people go on sex offenders register to get hormone treatment" story that was debunked two years ago. 

On the other hand, the ease of reblogging on Tumblr also lets one see at a glance which of one's friends secretly think less of you for being religious*, which is convenient.

* Or at least, such is the logical conclusion to be drawn from their reblogging of tired old anti-Catholic jokes, devoid of any meaningful content beyond, "Christians! SO STUPID!"

Comments

[marymac]

That sounds fabulously interesting, have you got reading links? Or hell, volunteering for proofreading if it's in English. *nerd*

It's something that makes me even less capable of coping with my more-aethist-than-thou friend's rants, because really, I know whereof I speak and whereof I speak is somewhere girls like me could not get a secondary education unless the nuns did it until 30 years ago.

I wish I could introduce her to those Nigerian girls and let them tear small, carefully considered, beautifully educated strips off her.

[melengro]

I'm afraid all I have right on me right now is this biographical sketch of Arii Shokyuu, because most of the rest of this sort of thing is in Japanese. Ema Saiko, though she didn't technically take Holy Orders, is another example of a woman of the same time period who cited devotion to religion and art as a reason not to take the typical roles. Earlier there was also Hojo Masako, a member of the family that ran the military junta during the Kamakura period, who is referred to as the 'Nun Shogun' (which is one of the more awesome sobriquets I've ever heard, I must say).

In a lot of these cases the women did have husbands and families at one point, but they died or left them or something else unfortunate befell them and the women didn't feel like killing themselves so this was the preferable option to solve the situation.

There is also Onibi (Demon Fire), a book by Yoshiya Nobuko--the author I'm going to be doing my thesis on--about Christian nuns in seventeenth-century Japan (hitherto these nuns I've been mentioning have all been Buddhist) that was originally pitched to me as The Power and the Floridly-Written, Ultra-Feminine Glory.