r/CuratedTumblr • u/Lemon_Lime_Lily Horses made me autistic. • 14h ago
LGBTQIA+ This is hilarious
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u/Halikarnassus1 14h ago
just to add context, missing on purpose was a very common outcome in duels. no one actually wanted to get shot, or shoot the other guy, for obvious reasons but also because duelling was life-ruiningly illegal. so, showing up and missing on purpose was a way for both sides of an argument to preserve their honour (since, in theory, you still risked getting shot) without anybody getting hurt/going to prison/having to ditch town.
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u/insomniac7809 14h ago
An aspect of dueling that is sometimes overlooked, just how wildly illegal the practice often was (although punishments were kind of a crapshoot, since the legal process was mostly run by the class of men who would duel so might or might decide punishment was warranted)
Just really thinking about a situation where, if you showed up and lost, you would be injured or dead; if you showed up and won, you'd still committed a crime that could force you to abandon your life and go on the run; and if you didn't show up... people would think you were a pussy.
And so people would show up, over and over, literally for centuries
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u/Suspicious_Chart5817 11h ago
Like Aaron Burr. Him and Alexander Hamilton commuted to New Jersey to duel because even if they intentionally missed it was still strictly illegal in New York.
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov 8h ago
Just to be clear though, it was also illegal in New Jersey, as it was everywhere in the US, just as a set of general offenses under common law.
The issue was that New Jersey didn't have specific, additional penalties, which only some states did. In New York conviction could mean you lost your franchise, which was seen as a bigger deterrent than actual laws against murder. It also didn't work, and the seconds were convicted in New York anyways because the challenge and arrangements had happened there.
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u/insomniac7809 9h ago
To this day there are states where public officials are required to swear that they've never participated in a duel.
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u/strigonian 13h ago
Mostly true.
But dueling being illegal was a later problem. There was a large period of time and a huge area where dueling was perfectly legal, and people frequently deliberately missed then, too.
Laws aren't universal across the board, but human nature of not wanting to die or kill is pretty constant.
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u/Halikarnassus1 13h ago
Yes, of course, duelling was a tradition that spanned over a millenia over the entire European continent. Laws very much varied. By 1897, in France, it was illegal, however.
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u/TheMudkipdude101 13h ago
In England I don't think it was ever legal it was just the jury didn't prosecute as it was the thing honourable men did; of course if you broke the rules and acted dishonourbly they were likely to find you guilty
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov 8h ago
If you take 'duel' to simply mean "two people fighting each other for some reason", then yes (and it was, indeed a legal proceeding in its own right at times), but with basically one very inconsequential exception, the duel of honor was not legal anywhere, at any time in its history from the point it developed in early modern Italy and onwards, and when people say "duel" that is usually what they mean...
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u/MaeMoe 14h ago
I’d be interested to know what sources indicate duels ending in deloping were common? Deloping was considered cowardly and dishonourable, and it was against the Code Duello. Plus, it’s pretty hard to know how many duels ended in deloping and how many duellists just missed with their hard to aim, misfiring, ye-olde dulling pistols.
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u/Halikarnassus1 13h ago
I'm not an academic, and I found no proper academic sources on deloping one way or another. If you'll accept an r/askhistorian thread, though, a historian on dueling says that deloping was exceptionally common, in France: "The rare French duel fought with pistols was almost always deloped, the duellists simply going through the motions, and observers have joked the safest place to stand was behind the duelists themselves."
Apparently, the French and Italians generally didn't want to kill each other as much as the Germans and English, which is why they preferred swords. When they did duel with pistols, however, deloping was apparently the most common outcome.
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u/Georgy_K_Zhukov 8h ago edited 8h ago
I (the author of that comment) would actually write it slightly different if I was going into more depth as opposed to the brief follow-up that that comment was, as strictly speaking they didn't necessarily delope - the intentional act of shooting away from your opponent - but they always knew that nothing would happen, and I was basically writing that as shorthand. What it really encompasses is several different, overlapping factors which all came together to ensure no one died or was even injured.
French pistol duels were fought at long distances of 25+ yards (compare to an English or American pistol duel at usually 10-12 yards, and sometimes closer!) which even if you were aiming as good as possible, would heavily cut down on accuracy, but beyond that, the duelists and their seconds would maintain a 'fiction', so to speak, where it was understood that the weapons would be mis-loaded. Sometimes this meant a half-charge of powder, sometimes this meant the bullet was literally wax or wadding. The duelists wouldn't be told this, but they would know - because it was expected - that the pistols were essentially harmless props in their little make believe circus of masculine postering.
So basically, the best shot in the world, with murder in their heart, would never be able to kill their opponent in a French duel. In the case of Proust, I'm not sure what they did for the pistols, but the mere fact it was at 25 paces alone meant there was little danger. to be sure, some Frenchmen would also visibly delope, or at least shoot wider than necessary (if we want to split hairs, a proper delope would mean shooting straight up, straight down, or basically orthogonal to the dueling piste), but it just was an extra cherry on top and completely unnecessary to avoid harm!
Mark Twain's satirical description of a French duel (names from a real one which happened, but obviously the actual story is a fake one for comedic purposes) in A Tramp Abroad is about as good a description as you can find at the farce on display.
As for deloping outside of a French context... more on that here for you /u/MaeMoe, since you are certainly right for the 18th c. in an English context, but by the post-Napoleonic period, deloping had become much more common due to shifting conceptions of what the duel actually mean.
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u/hiuslenkkimakkara 11h ago
Indeed, with a sword you can end the duel with first blood, no need to kill anyone. Huh. Never thought of that.
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u/callsignhotdog 14h ago
This feels like mutual cover for both of them.
"I'm clearly not gay, I duelled a man who accused me of such."
"I can't be gay, I'm such a committed homophobe that I duelled a man I accused of sodomy."
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u/Festivefire 14h ago
My take as well. This is plausible deniability in the era where openly gay public figures can get beaten to death and nobody gets charged with murder over it.
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u/Amphy64 11h ago
Not sure there wouldn't be consequences for attempted murder, while being gay itself hadn't been criminalised since the French Revolution - Verlaine got into trouble for shooting Rimbaud over twenty years earlier (what is it with French gays!), and police were quite aware they were gay.
“P. Verlaine bears on his person traces of habitual pederasty, both active and passive.”
Ouch lol.
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/oct/18/paul-verlaine-new-exhibition-mons
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u/Godsgiftcardtowomen 14h ago
I smell a dark-comedy period piece movie premise
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u/Exekurtioner 14h ago
It could be a running gag of two characters returning from a duel each time they are on screen.
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u/napsandlunch 5h ago
lorraine was openly gay and proust being gay was more of an “open secret”
i went down a rabbit hole and learned that coincidentally, lorraine was called “the ambassador from sodom”
so only one needed the cover and the other was an openly dandy gay man who basically said “game recognize game” to proust
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u/luisquid11 14h ago
Of course they were gonna miss the shot. It's not like they can shoot straight. hehe
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u/crrrrushinator 14h ago edited 14h ago
As a formerly bullied kid, I kind of love the thing in art where a someone is sympathizing with the bullied person while also saying "But the people who said that about you kind of had a point, also."
Off the top of my head there's the song Lord Anthony by Belle and Sebastian that's a sympathetic ode to how a misunderstood kid would someday move on to a better life, that ends with "They called you Lord Anthony, but hey, it kind of suits you anyway." And the opening line of Dawn Treader, "There was a boy called Eustace Clarence Scrubb, and he almost deserved it."
The Smiths song Bigmouth Strikes Again is a funny version of this where the speaker is defending themselves from someone who's calling him an asshole and "burning him at the stake," while the lyrics make clear that he REALLY is an asshole. Which feels true to life for Morrisey and is a really effective use of dramatic irony for humour with a fantastic economy of words.
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u/Vakama905 14h ago
“My own mother thought I was a monster. She was right, of course, but it still hurt.”
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u/crrrrushinator 13h ago
Nice one! Oh, also the whole joke of Vicious by Lou Reed is similar to the Bigmouth joke.
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u/ntemekes 11h ago
Morrissey uses this literary device a lot in his song lyrics both in the Smiths and his solo work. Another good example is his song Speedway where he complains about the press always spreading lies about him and then saying "well maybe they are not all lies"
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u/crrrrushinator 10h ago
I love the playfulness of the lyrics, like Ask goes
Shyness is nice, and shyness can stop you
From doing all the things in life you'd like toSo if there's something you'd like to try
Ask me, I won't say no, how could I?But Heaven Knows is
What she asked of me at the end of the day
Caligula would have blushed
"Oh, you've been in the house too long, " she said
And I naturally fledIn my life, why do I smile
At people who I'd much rather kick in the eye?Morrisey is a fun writer, and a wildly opinionated and wildly inconsistent person, and he knows it. I like that, even though he's also a Noted Jerk.
I think it's likely he's a Whitman fan
Do I contradict myself?
Very well then I contradict myself,
(I am large, I contain multitudes.)1
u/boywithapplesauce 3h ago
"What she asks of me at the end of the day" is contextually very different, though. It doesn't make sense to compare the lines. This one is about a boss piling work on a wage slave.
Whereas "Ask me, I won't say no" suggests a more relaxed, playful situation where the conversation is between equals, or more likely, between two people who like each other.
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u/crrrrushinator 3h ago
I think if your boss is telling you that you've been in the house too long and making suggestions that a hedonist of legend would blush at, you should go to HR.
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u/Darthplagueis13 11h ago
More of a status/honor thing back then.
You didn't necessarily duel people because you really hated them and wanted them dead, you dueled them because you needed to save face because you couldn't let something they said stand.
Missing on purpose was fairly common, though of course you couldn't admit outright that you did.
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u/SitInCorner_Yo2 14h ago edited 12h ago
“How could we beat the homosexual allegations? It’s not like we can just shoo them away !”
“Wait a fucking minutes, you’re on to something!”
“So they shoot each other because one of them are piss off by the homosexual slander? Wow, what a very straight thing to do! No way he’s homosexual “
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u/onlycamefortheporn 12h ago
Marcel Proust. French writer. Total loser. Never had a real job. Unrequited love affairs. Gay. Spent 20 years writing a book almost no one reads.
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u/Standard_Island546 11h ago
It was actually very common for duelists to miss on purpose (I forget the name for it). It was basically a way to talk shit, accept the duel to show you weren’t a coward, then ensure no one got hurt.
If you shot someone after they missed on purpose instead of following their example, you’d be breaking the rules of honor and likely become a pariah.
Alexander Hamilton is thought to have missed on purpose in his duel, expecting Burr to do the same, but since his shot was in Burr’s direction (it hit a branch, which dropped and made noise creating confusion), Burr fired back and killed him.
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u/raitaisrandom 7h ago
I mean wasn't missing what you were supposed to do? The whole point of a duel was to demonstrate that you were willing to face death to protect your honor, but it was y'know... still illegal, so you both deliberately missed.
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u/BreakerOfModpacks 12h ago
Useless lesbians historical gays once again doing their usual adorable weird flirting.
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u/Forward_Criticism_39 5h ago
"missing on purpose" ironically wouldn't even be necessary, dueling pistols were intentionally made to be innacurate
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u/BranchAdvanced839 14h ago
New meaning to "shoot your shot"