Adrie’s Hot Take: The Comstock Act & Clinch Covers
In the 1870s, Anthony Comstock got such a splintered stick up his rear end about even the most remote possibility of “obscenity” that he made it his life’s mission to stop everyone else from having fun. The Comstock Act, passed in 1873, made it illegal to mail “obscene” material including books, art, pharmaceuticals, and even medical information through the US Postal Service (USPS). What does obscene mean? No one knows, that’s the best part. Comstock didn’t have a real definition for obscenity, he just knew he didn’t like it.
Sell me! I’ll be the most expensive lady to obtain.
While scheming to get out of an arranged marriage, Cesare runs into Adele, a shoeshine girl from the slums. The two make a 3-month deal to help Cesare elude marriage. However, Adele is so different from the women he’s met before that he can’t help but be drawn to her.
My Thoughts:
High Society is a lot.
It begins with Adele, a shoeshine girl whose identity as a woman has just been revealed by thugs in the back alleys of the city’s slums. In her attempt to escape, she crosses paths with the handsome libertine Cesare Buonaparte. Despite not being related – not a single drop of blood connects them – they look like they could be brother and sister, and that’s exactly what Cesare needs to keep from being swept up into an unwanted and unprofitable match with Lucrezia Della Valle, a young woman who is absolutely obsessed with him.
This is a fake everything series. Cesare hires Adele to pretend to be his sister as they share the same golden eyes and dark hair, promising to make her into a perfect noble woman to be married off to Lucrezia’s older brother instead. Think Pygmalion with an incest angle.
Why do people need to watch videos of Black death to believe what happens to us?
I’ve been wondering about this for several years now.
Why is it that when a Black person is murdered – whether that is as a result of a cop’s itchy trigger finger or due to a wannabe cop shooting first and asking questions never – one of the first things people do is watch and share the video?
You have to do whatever I say, because I'm all you got! And I want… a BIGGER ROOM! I want a closet like Big made for Carrie in Sex and the City, I want a Labradoodle, and a nice camera to take PICTURES OF US!
The original headline for this piece was supposed to be “people are so weird about Black women on the internet,” but that didn’t do enough. It doesn’t say enough.
It’s not just that people are some unspecified but supposedly harmless form of “weird” when they see a Black woman (or queer or femme) online speak on anything with any seriousness.
We’re currently in what feels like a shoujo series renaissance. Kimi Ni Todoke is about to get its third season, A Condition Called Love showed that not all red flag male leads are actually terrible, and A Sign of Affection had everybody talking about the most gorgeous white-haired guy since Jujutsu Kaisen’s Gojo Satoru.
There are so many shoujo and josei series – the latter geared towards more mature audiences via series like the upcoming anime adaptation of Yakuza Fiancé: Raise wa Tanin ga Ii – that have either gotten picked up for anime adaptations or have gained new fans thanks to the rise of passionate fans online.
One set of amazing fans are the lovely hosts of the shoujo anime podcast Shoujo Sundae. I sat down with hosts Giana Luna and Chika Supreme to talk about what got them into the podcast arena, their favorite series, what they’ve learned about themselves while working on this podcast together, and the future of their team-up.
(It’s actually been up but I forgot about it! This week, however, I’ll be laying my hopes on an automation to crosspost in a timely fashion.)
Anyway, this week on the podcast we talk about dark romance, chat about The Acolyte, and Adrie actually manages to find a series that truly gives me the ick.
It’s also the first time in three episodes that we haven’t had to have a trigger warning for bestiality!
In this episode, Adrie and I talk about celebrity romances, our views on celebrity culture and stans, parasocial relationships, and so much more. You will learn lore about both of us and a little bit of lore about my late dad!
This week, we’re talking about Greek mythology in romance! On top of our regularly scheduled introspection about pop culture – I’m always here to digress and distract we do some lore drops and chat about some interesting aspects of Greek mythology adaptations. Most interesting, I feel? The conversation about how Demeter gets rewritten from a reasonably over protective mother grieving her (temporary) loss to… an abusive narcissist who wants to control Persephone and gets framed as a villain.
You can listen to our podcast wherever you get your podcasts!
This week, Adrie lets me take the wheel on an expansive episode all about why we (broadly, but not entirely) like incest in romance and see it as a site not just for taboos but for a deep intimacy. I use my literature degree real hard here, finally figuring out what the abject is just in time to make a case for it in eroticizing incest.
Check out our podcast wherever you get podcasts and please, because I don’t have a social media presence, share with folks who like this stuff! (And even with the ones who hate it because they’ll learn some shit, I swear!)
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