orichalcum (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
orichalcum) wrote2004-04-21 10:27 am
orichalcum) wrote2004-04-21 10:27 am
Happy 2,757th birthday of Rome!
Also, it's the Floralia, the Roman festival of spring which celebrates prostitution. All the prostitutes wore flower garlands and paraded up and down the streets, with one day for male prostitutes and two days for female prostitutes. I hope to defend my dissertation a year from now during this time.
No prostitutes, but you can look at the hundreds who marched through the Coliseum to celebrate the birthday last weekend.
Two other important issues I actually need commentary on:
1. Should I cut my hair? It's been growing again, and is now about 2-3 inches past my shoulders. It has also suddenly hit the "hot and hard to take care of stage" again; it's much more tangly than it was when it was shorter, and harder to keep from frizzing. OTOH, I like having longer hair, and there are always ponytails and buns for the summer. Thoughts? Opinions?
2. One of the things I really need for the next two conferences, this Friday and in two weeks, is to polish up my 20-second dissertation blurb. So I'm going to write a one-paragraph version, but I'm deliberately trying to use colloquial oral language rather than formal academic written language. Obviously, this is not any of your areas of expertise, but please, let me know if you a. understand it and b. find it interesting and c. how I could improve a. and b.
My dissertation focuses on the different negative stereotypes of promiscuous Roman women which were largely created by elite Roman men. I am mostly concentrating on different representations of prostitutes, such as the gold-digger, the good little prostitute, and the political manipulator, but I'm also examining respectable women who were tainted with the label of prostitute due to their unconventional activities and lifestyles. The second half of the book seeks to put the prostitutes of the high Roman Empire into a temporal and spatial context: one of the most fascinating aspects about female sex workers is that they interacted with and influenced men from all levels of society. I argue that the Romans were the first Western culture to draw a strong connotation between female promiscuity and female assertiveness or unconventionality, and that many of our modern stereotypes about women "who sleep their way to the top" or nymphomaniac/virginal career women are directly descended from these ancient representations.
No prostitutes, but you can look at the hundreds who marched through the Coliseum to celebrate the birthday last weekend.
Two other important issues I actually need commentary on:
1. Should I cut my hair? It's been growing again, and is now about 2-3 inches past my shoulders. It has also suddenly hit the "hot and hard to take care of stage" again; it's much more tangly than it was when it was shorter, and harder to keep from frizzing. OTOH, I like having longer hair, and there are always ponytails and buns for the summer. Thoughts? Opinions?
2. One of the things I really need for the next two conferences, this Friday and in two weeks, is to polish up my 20-second dissertation blurb. So I'm going to write a one-paragraph version, but I'm deliberately trying to use colloquial oral language rather than formal academic written language. Obviously, this is not any of your areas of expertise, but please, let me know if you a. understand it and b. find it interesting and c. how I could improve a. and b.
My dissertation focuses on the different negative stereotypes of promiscuous Roman women which were largely created by elite Roman men. I am mostly concentrating on different representations of prostitutes, such as the gold-digger, the good little prostitute, and the political manipulator, but I'm also examining respectable women who were tainted with the label of prostitute due to their unconventional activities and lifestyles. The second half of the book seeks to put the prostitutes of the high Roman Empire into a temporal and spatial context: one of the most fascinating aspects about female sex workers is that they interacted with and influenced men from all levels of society. I argue that the Romans were the first Western culture to draw a strong connotation between female promiscuity and female assertiveness or unconventionality, and that many of our modern stereotypes about women "who sleep their way to the top" or nymphomaniac/virginal career women are directly descended from these ancient representations.
no subject
- rearrange the first sentence so it's clearer that the stereotypes were created by elite Roman men rather than the women being created by them :)
- maybe give an example of a 'tainted' woman (if you're going to be explaining this to people who have enough knowledge of your field to know who you're talking about), or give a few more specifics about the social class of the respectable women that you're talking about.
- change 'connotation' in the last sentence to 'correlation'
As for the question of hair...well, I'm not the best one to give advice on hair-cutting :) Maybe wait a bit, to see how you feel when the weather gets warmer?