Karen Piippo

Canadian back home f Oz-likes music(anything I can sing or dance to); AFL:Richmond,SKOB; Podiobooks Fiction (Sigler, Hutchins, amongst many)

[SubRosa )✿( Magick @subrosamagick.bsky.social @SubRosaMagick]

She was 57 years old.
White hair. No carefully managed image. No media training designed to make her more palatable. Just thirty years of accumulated knowledge and the calm, unhurried authority of a woman who had spent her life mastering her subject.
She sat on a BBC panel, answered questions about immigration and politics, cited evidence, made arguments — and then went home.
The next morning, her inbox looked like a crime scene.
Her name is Mary Beard — Cambridge professor, classicist, one of the most respected scholars of ancient Rome and Western civilisation alive. And the internet had decided that a woman speaking with quiet authority on television needed to be punished for it.
The messages were not criticism. They were not debate. They were rape threats. Death threats. Coordinated campaigns of personal destruction targeting her appearance, her age, her voice — anything that could be used to remind her that spaces like the one she had just occupied were not meant for her.
Most people would have gone quiet.
Mary Beard went further in.
She did what scholars do when they find a pattern that disturbs them: she followed it backward. Through decades. Through centuries. Through millennia. All the way back to some of the oldest texts in Western civilisation.
And she found it had always been there.
In Homer's Odyssey — one of the foundational works of Western literature, nearly three thousand years old — there is a scene that most readers pass over without registering its quiet violence. Penelope comes downstairs and asks the poet to sing a different song. Her own son, Telemachus, cuts her off. He orders her back to her room and tells her plainly: speech is the business of men.
She goes.
Mary Beard read that scene and recognized it immediately.
Not as ancient history. As a pattern.
In ancient Rome, women who dared to speak in public were not described as orators or thinkers. They were described as noise — disorderly sound, something that did not deserve to be called language or argument. Their voices were not speech. Their thoughts were not thoughts.
In the medieval world, women who claimed public authority were labeled as witches.
Elizabeth I — Queen of England, ruler of a nation — had to rhetorically reshape herself into something masculine just to be taken seriously as the leader of her own country.
The silencing of women who speak with authority was not invented by social media. It was not a modern pathology or a cultural accident. It was built deliberately, over centuries, into the very foundations of how Western civilisation defined who gets to speak, what authority sounds like, and who is allowed to take up space in public life.
Mary Beard had found something important.
In 2017, she published Women & Power: A Manifesto — short enough to read in an afternoon, substantial enough to reframe everything you thought you understood about why this keeps happening.
Her argument was precise and devastating.
The problem is not that women lack the ability to lead. The problem is that the model of leadership itself — the template for what public authority looks, sounds, and feels like — was built by men over centuries and has never been redesigned. When a woman enters public life and doesn't fit that template, she is not failing. The template was never built for her. It was built specifically to exclude her, and it has been doing exactly that, efficiently and continuously, for three thousand years.
The solution, Beard argued, is not to teach women to perform power the way men have always performed it. The solution is to dismantle and rebuild the very concept of what power is allowed to look like.
She kept teaching. She kept writing. She kept appearing on television — white-haired, unhurried, carrying her decades of authority without performing it, without packaging it for comfort, without apologizing for it.
The threats continued.
But other messages began arriving too. Letters from women and girls who had spent their entire lives feeling that every door was slightly too narrow, every table slightly too high, every room slightly reluctant to make space for them. Women who had spent years wondering what was wrong with them — why they couldn't quite fit, couldn't quite belong, couldn't quite be taken seriously no matter how much they knew or how hard they worked.
They read the book and understood, perhaps for the first time, that nothing had ever been wrong with them.
The room had been designed without them in mind.
That is not a personal failing.
That is a three-thousand-year-old architectural decision.
And one Cambridge professor with white hair and a calm voice — who refused to go quiet when the internet told her to — spent her career documenting it, naming it, and handing that knowledge to everyone who needed to hear it.
Telemachus told Penelope that speech was the business of men.
He was wrong then.
He is still wrong now.
And Mary Beard has three thousand years of evidence to prove it.
via The Inspireist

#FeministFriday #HERstory

[Karen Piippo @piipster]

@harperlee789 Of course

[Karen Piippo @piipster]

@awkwardgoogle That is awesome. Big hugs.

[Karen Piippo @piipster]

@Fascinate_Hist Sault Ste Marie Ontario Canada
Where the lakers traverse the locks between Lake Superior and St Mary's River.

[Fun Tom 🇨🇦 💂 @funtomvids]

🟥 Just a little more than a year into his first term and the world is already making songs praising Canada, and Carney's leadership. 🙂
#CanadaStrong 🇨🇦

🎶 "See what a real leader looks like
Not a bully not a coward, not a hype
Canada strong, elbows up, never forget
The world is watching Carney and they ain't done yet
Bold, confident and kind
That's the Canadian Way" 🎶

[BrooklynDad_Defiant!☮️ @mmpadellan]

This LEGO video is hilarious.

But the fact that people halfway around the world are trolling trump about the Epstein files more aggressively than many American media outlets should embarrass the hell out of us.

Don't stop talking about the Epstein files.

[Fun Viral Vids @Fun_Viral_Vids2]

We were absolutely floored by the millions of you that watched us make silly water sillouettes on our driveway last summer. We are starting out the summer the only way we know how, and this time it’s all about movies! What else do you want to see? We have a whole summer ahead, a driveway and a hose. The possibilities are endless!!!

[Karen Piippo @piipster]

@Fun_Viral_Vids2 These are brilliant

[Andrew—#IAmTheResistance @AmoneyResists]

Spot on. Love this guy’s videos.

[𝗖𝗹𝗮𝘀𝘀𝗶𝗰𝗮𝗹 𝗠𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗱𝗶𝗲𝘀 @Old_But_Gold50s]

Widely acclaimed as one of the greatest duets of all time, this 1987 archival footage from Ibiza captures the iconic song "Barcelona." It stands as a vivid testament to the perfect fusion of Montserrat Caballé’s sublime operatic vocals and Freddie Mercury’s captivating stage presence—a masterpiece that left an indelible mark on music history and went on to become the official and defining anthem of the 1992 Summer Olympics in Barcelona.

[Karen Piippo @piipster]

@Kinza1278 20

[Karen Piippo @piipster]

@papisaurus @brittlestar I thought all dressed or ketchup

[Bill Madden @maddenifico]

OMG! This spot-on Karoline Leavitt impersonation is courtesy of our friends in Canada. 😂🤣👇

[Dalai Lama @DalaiLama]

MESSAGE

I wholeheartedly endorse the powerful appeal for peace made by the Holy Father, Pope Leo, during his Palm Sunday Mass. His call for the laying down of arms and the renunciation of violence resonated profoundly with me, as it speaks to the very essence of what all major religions teach.

Indeed, whether we look to Christianity, Buddhism, Islam, Hinduism, Judaism or any of the world's great spiritual traditions, the message is fundamentally the same: love, compassion, tolerance, and self-discipline. Violence finds no true home in any of these teachings. History has shown us time and again that violence only begets more violence and is never a lasting foundation for peace.

An enduring resolution to conflict, including the ones we see in the Middle East or between Russia and Ukraine, must be rooted in dialogue, diplomacy and mutual respect — approached with the understanding that, at the deepest level, we are all brothers and sisters.

I urge for and pray that the violence and conflicts may soon come to an end.

DALAI LAMA

31 March 2026

[Éros Brousson @erosbrousson]

A DAY IN THE LIFE OF A FRENCH TRANSPLANT IN TEXAS 🦅🇺🇸

[LanaQuest aka RosaSparks @LqLana]

If the average white person does not speak up when they hear or see racism and injustice.

If they don’t have those conversations with their family and friends, not only are they beneficiaries of systematic racism they are providing cover for the advancement of it.

Allies are necessary.

This woman gets it. #DemsUnited
#NoKings

[Brittlestar @brittlestar]

MODEL’S STUNNING SECRET

[Karen Piippo @piipster]

@sciencegirl Can you imagine the story the 3 of them will be telling?

[Karen Piippo @piipster]

@TacoforFive1 What a handsome young man and an amazing dad.