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grow a vagina

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A great alternative to "grow a pair" or "grow some balls". A phrase largely attributed to Betty White.
Why would anybody want to grow such sensitive organs when babies pass through the vagina nine months after penetration by a penis?
"Why do people say, 'Grow some balls'? Balls are weak and sensitive! If you really want to get tough, grow a vagina! Those things take a pounding!" -Betty White.

If someone bitchslaps a man in the balls, he cries and collapses in a heap; if someone bitchslaps a woman in the vulva, it pisses her off royally. It's men who need to woman up and grow a vagina!
by Lorelili November 26, 2011
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Most of the definitions here are embarrassingly incorrect; hostile means "antagonistic", "contentious", "combative", "unfriendly", "antisocial", "belligerent", "unsympathetic", "scrappy", "quarrelsome," "disagreeable".

Hostile basically means "of or relating to an enemy"; unfriendly or inhospitable.
The homeless man gave me a hostile look as I passed him, but who could blame him? Life on the streets was pretty hostile for anybody.
by Lorelili November 21, 2011
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wolfsbane

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The common name for the 250 plants of the genus aconitum, also known as aconite, monkshood, the Devil's helmet, or (disturbingly) wifesbane. A highly poisonous flowering plant closely related to buttercups, the toxins can easily soak through the skin. Wolfsbane kills quickly (within six hours of consumption) and the symptoms are almost immediate: vomiting and diarrhea, followed by a sensation of burning, tingling, and numbness in the mouth and face, and of burning in the abdomen. In severe poisonings, pronounced motor weakness occurs and cutaneous sensations of tingling and numbness spread to the limbs. Heart, lung, and organ failure soon follows.
Wolfsbane has been ascribed with supernatural powers in the mythology relating to the werewolf and similar creatures, either to repel them, relating to wolfsbane's use in poisoning wolves and other animals, or in some way induce their transformation, as wolfsbane was often an important ingredient in witches' magic ointments. In folklore, wolfsbane was also said to make a person into a werewolf if it is worn, smelled, or eaten. They are also said to kill werewolves if they wear, smell, or eat aconite.
The poisons extracted from wolfsbane are difficult to detect and can easily be disguised in food or drink; aconite certainly deserves the title given by the ancient Greeks as "the Queen of Poisons".
Cleopatra VI of Egypt was known for testing poisons on slaves, war prisoners, and even her servants to see which ones were the quickest or the least painful. She was said by the Romans to have poisoned her youngest brother by lacing his food with wolfsbane.
Cleopatra might not have actually died from a snake bite at all; historians think that she could easily have killed herself by a cocktail of opium, wolfsbane, and hemlock.
by Lorelili November 19, 2011
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A supposed meeting of those who practice witchcraft and other rites.
In Europe during the Burning Times of the Early Modern Period, the mass paranoia of the times fed the belief that witches, at special times of the year, flew to these secret meetings/ festivities held in remote areas, typically in the forest or in the mountains (places like Brocken or Bald Mountain). The popular imagination envisioned a secret society that turned every moral norm of mainstream society on its head.
At the witches sabbath, Satan was supposed to have presided over the congregation and initiated new witches in a face-to-face pact. The Sabbath was imagined to begin with a mockery of Christian rites and "baptism" with new satanic names, building into an orgy of naked dancing, sex with demons (including Satan himself), and gluttonous feasting on the flesh of human infants.
by Lorelili October 29, 2011
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A usually beautiful, virginal, virtuous, and hopelessly passive young woman constantly in need of rescue by the dashing hero. She is portrayed as rather asexual and usually a foil for the assertive but dangerously seductive femme fatale.

While the damsel in distress makes appearances in many folk stories dating back to Antiquity and features in a few fairy tales, this passive heroine does not seem to make regular appearances until the Victorian era; the Middle Ages were idealized as a time of pre-industrial innocence and the Victorians projected their ideals of men and women onto their Medieval ancestors; the Industrial Revolution was in full swing and women, displaced from farms and entering the middle class, lost some autonomy over their lives and became more ornamental, more dependent on their husbands.
Damsels in distress are often shown tied to railroad tracks, to sawmill conveyor belts, or offered as sacrifice to a dragon (or King Kong) until her knight in shining armor arrives to save her in the nick of time.
A damsel in distress would not have fared well in Medieval Europe. Generally, European women in the Middle Ages were not expected to be these timid shrinking violets; Christina of Markyate (who resisted a forced marriage and followed her dream of becoming a holy woman), Marjorie of Carrick, Christine de Pisan (a proto-feminist of sorts), Margery Kempe (another mystic), and Nicola de la Haye (led her castle against a siege in her 60s) are just a few of examples of women who took the reins in their own lives.

Women of that time and place were in danger of abduction, especially if they were wealthy... but it was preferable to a loveless marriage. The average "knight in shining armor" was a mix of professional assassin and local rapist, so the damsel often arranged to be kidnapped by her preferred suitor or even do the abducting herself:
Marjorie of Carrick (c. 1253-1292) was a countess in her own right, but was married young to an older husband who died in the Crusades in 1271; she was informed of this by her husband's handsome young companion, Robert de Brus. Marjorie, out hunting at the time and far from upset by the news, was so taken by his beauty that she took him back to her castle and held him captive until he agreed to marry her; she must have done something right, because they were married within days. The second of their eleven children was Robert the Bruce himself.
by Lorelili October 10, 2011
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chivalry

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From the old French word for knighthood, "chevalerie", the art of being a chevalier (a knight or horseman).
This was originally a system by which mounted warriors were to act, but while service to their people is touched upon the general goal of medieval knights was not saving many a damsel in distress, devotion to God, or enforcing justice; most knights defined chivalry as warfare and obtaining fame and fortune in the name of their king(s) and without any display of cowardice in battle. In a sense, it's hardly different from joining the military for the benefits that it offers, including the money that pours in from the business of war. Chivalry was basically a boy's culture: fighting other men, riding horses, power and profit and the ability to exploit that power.
The modern notion of chivalry as courtesy to women has tenuous links to chivalry as it was originally conceived. Perhaps courtly love (coined in 1883 to describe the worship of a married noblewoman by a lowly troubadour or knight and his vow to do great deeds in her honor) influenced this notion, but courtly love is, for all intents and purposes, adultery (very dangerous to both participants) and to what extent that courtly love was ever practiced remains unknown.
Chivalry, for the most part, was the opposite of the Geneva Convention; it was all about making a profit on war. The image of an honorable knight saving a fair maiden from a dragon is not much more than sheer fantasy, and most of it seems to stem from the Victorian era; the Victorians, in the midst of the Industrial Revolution, looked at the Middle Ages through rose colored glasses as an idyllic place of pre-industrial innocence, projecting their own ideals of men and women onto the knight and the damsel in distress. A real knight in shining armor was actually more like a trained assassin and the local rapist rolled into one and the damsel in distress, a helpless shrinking violet, never really existed.
by Lorelili October 9, 2011
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Hays Code

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The Motion Picture Production Code, also known as the "Hays Code" for Hollywood's chief censor at the time, William Hays, was the set of guidelines that governed how United States motion pictures were produced from 1935 to 1968. This system dictated what was acceptable for films.

Before 1935, Hollywood and the films that it produced were pretty raunchy and did not shy from some the grittier aspects of life (racism, references to sex, stereotypical depictions of gay men, drinking, drug use, etc) and several off-screen scandals sent the studios to seek someone to rehabilitate Hollywood's image, eventually picking the rat-faced Presbyterian elder Will H. Hays in 1922. His Code was rarely taken seriously by directors and actors, but when the Catholic Church and religious zealots in general threatened massive boycotts in the early 1930s, filmmakers were forced to play by the rules, despite their resentment of this censorship and of Hays and Joseph Breen, the all-powerful head of the Production Code.

It would not be until 1968 that the Hays Code, which was by then undermined by television and terribly weak, was abandoned in favor of the MPAA rating system.
The Hays Code forbade the following in films:
Open-mouthed kissing
Lustful embraces
"Sexual perversion" (which lumped the LGBT community and actual perverts together)
Sexual slavery or prostitution
Miscegenation (keeping with the racism of the time)
Seduction (wenchers seducing ingenues, temptresses seducing the boy next door, seduction of any kind)
Rape
Abortion
Nudity (no scenes of childbirth, sexual hygiene, nothing)
Obscenity
Profanity
no portrayal of political, legal, or religious figures as villains or buffoons; no sympathy afforded to criminals, regardless of circumstances; no explicit violence (crime, operations, or cruelty); no ethnic jokes or religious jokes; no depictions of sexuality, and especially if it's not a heterosexual married couple; no drug related material; no cursing or foul language... everything had to be squeaky-clean and family-friendly, where heroes always win and goodness conquers all, generally ignoring the complications of reality.
Gays and lesbians were portrayed as unflatteringly stereotypeed as bulldyke lotharios and asexual sissies before the Hays Code; after the Code, they were harder to find and usually made an appearance as cold-blooded villains or self-loathing wretches.
by Lorelili October 8, 2011
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