An ode to thunderstealers
A tale as old as time...
Are you sitting comfortably? Then we’ll begin.
For this week, dear hags, we tell the oldest story in the book: fellas nicking the credit for something women did. Yep, from the origins of vaccination to the story behind a very famous urinal, that good old glass ceiling is the gift that keeps on giving.
Thankfully, you can rely on us to dig a bit deeper – for example, we find there’s a bit more to the discovery of a smallpox vaccine than Edward Jenner messing about with milkmaids.
Of course, we pride ourselves on our varied coverage, and this week we’ve got everything from disgusting bald rodents to... er... Alex Salmond. Add to that an exciting DNA development, Soviet Union-style Tolkien and some cracking news for babies, and you get a veritable smörgåsbord of HEXish delights.
Of course, we can’t promise everyone will live happily ever after. But we hope you read on and enjoy our ‘feminine muck’ all the same…
TIT BITS
Keeping abreast of the latest news, views, and research
Somethin’ in the air
Lovers of true crime, take note: DNA can be collected from the air. A recent proof-of-concept study detected environmental DNA (eDNA) in air samples taken from rooms harbouring naked mole rats (aka our lockdown kindred spirits). They also found human DNA. The team hopes their finding might help ecology studies as well as have “potential applications in forensics, anthropology and even medicine”. We’ll be keeping an eye on what our fave crime shows will do with this information 🍿.
Muck spreading
What if the person behind Marcel Duchamp’s famous conceptual artwork Fountain was in fact a woman...and the urinal it features actually represents a uterus? This compelling argument for reattribution to Baroness Elsa Von Freytag-Loringhoven describes how the artist – who lost her mother to uterine cancer – often used found objects to challenge feminine beauty ideals. Naturally, the art world prefers the idea of a conceptual piece by a ‘brilliant man’ rather than “being dragged down into fleshy feminine muck”...but tbh that just makes us want to smear feminine muck over everyone’s windows. Grab your squeegees.
Baby got vacc
Good news: mRNA COVID vaccines (Pfizer/BioNTech and Moderna) appear to work well in pregnant and breastfeeding women, generating lots of lovely covid-zapping antibodies. Bonus: those antibodies are passed on to their babies via the umbilical cord or milk, so vaccination should protect newborns too. See – we can share heartwarming stories!
Plague and Prejudice
Today’s lesson from history: don’t dismiss potentially life-saving ideas just because they don’t come from a white dude
Who invented vaccination? The pub quiz answer is Edward Jenner, who introduced smallpox vaccination to England in the 18th century. Jenner noticed that milkmaids who caught cowpox from their bovine charges were immune to smallpox, and realised that the phenomenon could be used to protect people from the deadly disease (a theory he tested on his gardener’s 9-year-old son 😬).
But people had been practising an early form of vaccination – variolation – for centuries in Asia, Africa and the Ottoman empire. Admittedly, the procedure (essentially, rubbing pus from smallpox victims into small cuts on the arm) could be dangerous, but when all went well patients got a very mild dose of smallpox, after which they were protected for life. Given that 3 in 10 people who caught smallpox the old-fashioned way died, and those who survived were often left with terrible scarring, it was the lesser of two evils.
But when Lady Mary Wortley Montagu brought the practice to England from Turkey (75 years before Jenner’s cowpox discovery), she was dismissed as “an ignorant woman.” English doctors (all men, natch) either rejected the whole idea of variolation, trolling Wortley Montagu via articles and even bawdy poems (the 18th century equivalent of a Twitter pile-on), or “medicalized” the process, unnecessarily bleeding and purging their unfortunate patients. Worse, they ignored the hard-won folk knowledge of the “illiterate old Greek and Armenian women” carrying out the procedure in Turkey (hags saving the world, yet again) and allowed recently inoculated people to mix with others, causing outbreaks.
Meanwhile, the concept of variolation was introduced to America by an enslaved man in Boston, Onesimus. The “foreign” practice, common in Africa, was initially greeted with suspicion but after a devastating smallpox outbreak killed 14% of Boston’s population, it quickly gained popularity.
Jenner’s work was undoubtedly important – his cowpox-based inoculation was much safer (and less gross) than variolation – but it would not have been possible without advocates like Wortley Montagu and Onesimus (or indeed early scientists in China, who first developed the procedure 200 years earlier).
TO THE KRAKEN 🦑
Oh there’ll be “sacrifices on an altar” alright
So Scottish First Minister Nicola Sturgeon will work with the rival Alba Party after she stops being “upset,” will she? What next, she’s been on her period for six and a half years? With this patronising bullshit, it’s not surprising that she and Alba leader Alex Salmond have what he describes as a “difficult relationship.”
For those of you not following this latest political shitshow, former SNP leader Alex Salmond (who resigned after being accused of multiple counts of sexual assault, before suing the Scottish government) has thrown his toys out of the pram because current SNP leader Sturgeon will not work with him. Sturgeon describes the whole debacle as a sacrifice on “an altar of the ego of one man,” while Salmond attempts to paint Sturgeon as the over-emotional female.
Our favourite nightmarish cephalopod has no position on Scottish independence, but she is sick to her many stomachs of men in politics playing the ‘women are emotional’ card when they don’t get their way – on the other hand, a bit of male hysteria really gets her saliva glands going. She also thinks men taken to court for 14 counts of sexual assault should keep their heads down. But no matter. She’s happy to keep their heads down for them – down in the depths, as part of her growing collection...
More things spreading our feminine muck this week:
Become a Patron of Mxogyny magazine | Soviet-era Lord of the Rings | The cottagecore trend is saving the bees 🐝 | A playlist for a 19th-century villain scheming against his (or her) enemies | Quaint English village murder mystery TV shows with a million seasons
The HEX Science team
🧬Jean Splicer | ☢ Marie Fury | 🧠 Rorschach Tess | 🔬 Rosalind Frankly