ibelieveinthelittletreetopper:

attackfish:

theactualcluegirl:

thelibraryofmars:

mariaslozak:

Forbidden Fruit (Le Fruit Défendu) by Auguste Toulmouche, 1865, illustrating how young women have always rebelled against having their access to knowledge policed.

Nineteenth-century French and British families kept a close eye on the literature allowed to pass into the hands of unmarried girls (married women were not automatically exempt, either). While Toulmouche’s painting garnered great acclaim for its aesthetic charms when it was exhibited at the Salon of 1865, a contemporary male art critic’s sour aside summed up the prevailing attitude to independent female minds:

“I do not approve of these silly girls; instead of searching forbidden pages for the knowledge that they lack, they would do better to leave tomorrow’s lover the pleasure of instructing them in the matters of which they are ignorant.”
Paul Mantz quoted in Women Readers in French Painting 1870-1890

by Kathryn J. Brown.

No comment.

Relatable, honestly.

And here we have one of the earlier examples of the Cult of Mansplaining, immortalized in the form of art critique…

What gets me is that this isn’t quite mansplaining, which is men explaining to women what they already understand, but I think it’s the roots of mansplaining. Here we see men seeing a woman’s ignorance as their right. Women’s ignorance and intellectual blankness is equated to a type of virginity, and the “pleasure” of taking away that ignorance, of giving knowledge, is reserved explicitly for a woman’s future lover, or husband. Let me repeat, women are to be kept intellectually stifled because men are entitled to be the ones to instruct and teach their perfect blank slate woman.

Just as the value placed on female virginity is as much about the fear of being compared to a woman’s previous lovers and being found wanting, as it ever was about heirs and property rights, this intellectual virginity is about men’s fears about being found wanting, but instead of being inadequate in comparison to a woman’s former lovers, it’s about her finding him inadequate in comparison to her. The only way to avoid this potential fate is to ensure that women are kept ignorant and unsullied by access to information until the right man can come along to initiate them into sex and the knowledge he desires to teach her, thus ensuring her intellectual dependence on him.

We no longer live in a world where an insecure man can expect that women will be kept ignorant for his enjoyment. Instead he simply pretends, and insists on “educating” women who know more than he does, and refuses to recognize their knowledge.

Also

We all know these gals are lesbians