[sinclairfan]

As soon as I dismounted from the Dublin streetwalker, we both knew the fight was over between us.  We both let our guard down, as we both knew instinctively, and by our body language, that there would be no Round 2 to our fight.  We weren't a Lynne-Dawn situation:  we didn't hate each other.  And .... for the Dublin streetwalker, she just wanted her money.

I used to love back home at Buffalo streetfights when two girls would separate midfight, (usually because both were winded, or sometimes because both were a bit surprised to learn the other could fight and that there wouldnot be the 30-second TKO each was expecting), but they both looked over their shoulder warily at the other (as they fixed their hair or drank water), knowing they were each hungry for Round 2 (and, if necessary, 3, 4, and 5) and that it would be starting momentarily.

As if there was an irresistable magnetic attraction between their fists and their face, so strong was the feminine hatred between them.  That would have been Dawn and me.  We would have gone multiple rounds.

I offer the Dublin streetwalker a lemonade, which she accepts.  She looks at her face in the mirror.  Still pretty.  Important for her profession.  She can keep working tonight and this week.  Does she work 7 nights a week? I want to ask her.  But I don't.  I don't want to remind her what she does for a living.  Or remind Shannon.  Or remind me.

Although, as if on cue, Shannon does remember.  She paulys her whatever amount they negotiated.

Is it more than sex?  The same?  Less?

What would I charge?

Sex was with men.  Fighting was with women.

I would charge more for sex.  A lot more.

The Dublin streetwalker hugs me.  No hard feelings.

That was a good fight.

But Round 2 wouldn't have resolved anything.  Good thing we stopped.

Maybe it's a good thing, too, that Dawn and I never started.

Nah.

To be continued.....

[sinclairfan]

The 19th Century diarist whose writings I had discovered in Dublin, the woman named Shannon who had been sent to, and somehow survived, the First Carlist War, had risen from her 1820s Dublin anonymity for the same reasons tonight's Dublin streetwalker had put on such a good showing in fighting me.

The primary one being the ability to not flinch at a punch in the face.

I remember growing up in Buffalo, a small group of girls gathered around in a circle at a girlfight that semi-miraculously had fulfilled its life-cycle from rumor to hype to actual fight.  Both girls had made it to the same place at the same time.  There were no "peacekeepers" (another parallel, by the way, with the Carlist Wars) to break them up--no school counsellors or meddling friends.  The two girls were here to fight, and they were actually going to fight.  The electricity was palpable.

And then, the first punch happens, and .....

Nothing.  Worse than nothing, actually, for the crowd who had finally allowed themselves to get their hopes up that they were finally going to witness something exciting; something to offset the long, cold, dark Buffalo winters.

The girl who had gotten hit first just .... turns away.  She doesn't hit back.  She doesn't quite cry.  She just .... quits, really.  Without saying she quits.  Her body just ... quits on her, mid-fight.

Because she can't take a punch.

That makes it pretty hard to fight.  When you can't take s punch.  Duh.
 Obviously. 

Earlier in the week, when modern-day Shannon and I had arranged to have what, for each of us, was our first real fistfight against each other, the elephant in the room for each of us was that question--could we take a punch?  Or would we turn and crumble the first time a girl punchdd us in the face.

We had both passed the test.  Even though I won the fight, Shannon had done nothing to disgrace herself in that category.  The small group of women who circled and watched us had gotfen a good show.  They had seen a complete girlfight.

Is that part of what held Dawn and I back from fighting in Buffalo before it was too late (and she moved)?  Neither of us knowing for sure if we could take a punch in the face?

In 1820s Ireland (then England, then Spain), there weren't many socially-accepted opportunities for a young woman to find out if she could take a punch to the face.  When I watch "Bridgerton" here in 2022, which takes place in 1813, I have to just roll my eyes at ease the characters have at finding times and places to hook up ('sometimes, they even use beds', is the funny line I remember reading about it).  Because it just wasn't like that.  Setting aside the crushingly repressive social norms (from, in Dublin, not one but two churches--the Established Church of Ireland--for the Protestant Ascendency, and the still-medieval Inquisitorial Roman Catholic Church in 26 bishoprics spread thru the counties), there was the public health dystopia to navigate (everyone knows about the 1846 Famine--but that had been preceded by cholera in 1832-37 and typhus in 1818).

How Shannon had rise above these to learn to fight was .... miraculous.

She figured out she could fight.  And latched onto a band of mercenary Iridh-British soldiers who had helped Spain fight of Napoleon in the Peninsular Wars.

And whose familiarity with the Iberian port cities of the north (Bilbao, Santander) became useful again in 1820-23, when the Spanish liberals temporarily gained the upper hand over the traditional element of Ferdinand VII's Spain.

Shannon was shuttle back and forth from the Dublin to Bilbao, whose banking center was distributing cash to the recovering port city.  The Bilbao nightlife was showing signs of life, and its taverns would host topless (what they titillatingly called "bare-bosomed" women's fist fights).

And Shannon wad a popular draw at those.

Women would face each other in a ring and swing, bare-knuckled, at each other until there was a victor.  Or until mutual exhaustion.

Which would sometimes take hours.

It was a lucrative life if uou were good at it.  And Shannon was.

She was a Bilbao celebrity.

She was good at fighting.  And she liked it.

No wonder I was drawn to her story.

1820-23 were good years for her.

Too good to last.

To be continued.....

[sinclairfan]

On Sunday morning, I attend my first Catholic Mass in a Dublin Church.  It's a Gothic-revival type structure shoe-horned into the dense urban neighborhood, with beautiful stained-glass windows and an organ built into the wall behind the altar.  The words to Catholic Mass come back to me as I sit in the pew, with the exception of some Irish-Gaelic vernacular dialect inserted at unexpected times ("The Lord be with ya"), sounding at first as if it's meant mockingly, but no different than Upstate New York pronunciaton quirks which had escaped my attention until I went away to college. 

The vibration of the urban soothes my anxieties of being so far from home.  And ease my fears about my growing awareness of my lesbian-ism.  I'm not bi or bi-curious, like I lied to myself during middle school and high school.

I'm a lesbian.  Boys arouse me, but it's the attention from them that's arousing to me.  I could never cum with one.  Well......., not never.  I suppose if one rubbed me just the right way for hours.  Or went down on me.  I would love a boy to go down on me, actually.  To taste me.  Especially if he had never done it and was kind of hesitant about it.

What am I doing?  What am I thinking?  Why does sitting in Catholic Mass, listening to organ music,  make thoughts like this come into my head?

Shannon, the 1820 diarist, thought about men her age, or younger.  She hoped one day her Prince would come.  All the time knowing he probably wouldn't.  She was born in the wrong place, at the wrong time.  Everyone in Georgian England knew their place and stayed in it.

There were no Cinderella stories. 

Just vicious bare-fisted boxing matches, if that's the station you were born into.

To be continued.....

[sinclairfan]

In January, in the Catholic Church's liturgical, there are three consecutive Sunday's known separately as Epiphany Sunday, The Baptism of the Lord, and Cana Wedding Feast Sunday; but which are known together as the Three Epiphanies.  They go by that name because they describe three events in the youthful life of Jesus, before he began His Ministry, where those surrounding him, including His Mother, the Blessed Virgin, came to realize that he was the Messiah.

The Dublin Church that I attended that January stressed the importance of the Three Epiphanies.  How sometimes we flawed, distracted humans need to hear the same message multiple times in multiple ways in order for it to sink in.

I thought back to my youthful, slow-burn rivalry with Dawn, where it felt like for years she and I were building up to a catfight.  But then she moved away unexpectedly, so nothing happened.

She and I had been building up to SOMETHING.  But was it a catfight?  Or a kiss?

Did we each sense that the other was a lesbian?  We were both awkward around boys.  Was it because we each had little attraction to them?  And were instead attracted to girls?  Is that why we each looked forward to weekend slumber parties so much?  And tried to socially freeze the other one out?

Was our desire to fight each other actually a repressed desire to physically touch the other?  If we had fought alone, would it have turned into five minutes of play-wrestling, and then an hour of making out?

Slumber party play wrestling had always seemed "off" to me.  The girls that engaged in it most intently always seemed to be the least silly when watching it.  The one's laughing the hardest didn't seem to have their hearts in it.

Dawn used to sullenly stare at girls play-wrestling at weekend slumber parties.  Trying to memorize the images for later, when she was back home alone.

Did she fantasize to the thought of play-wrestling with me?

Now that she was in college, wherever she was, was she having her own epiphany about her sexuality?

Or was she still repressing it, having unsatisfying sex with college jocks?

I was so happy to be in Ireland. 

A world of possibilities felt in front of me.

To be continued.....

[sinclairfan]

In 1823, there was a counter-Revolution in Spain, and the traditionalist-Catholic forces in the country took over the court of King Ferdinand VII and forced him to renounce his English and French modernizing supporters.  You might think this put an end to the nightly naked fistfights in the northen port city of Bilbao, but for a brief period, the exact opposite was the case.  The English and French courtiers and businessmen, and their female courtesans and mistresses, withdrew from the inland capital city of Madrid, and briefly set up shop in the northern port cities of Bilbao and Santander.  They were half making plans to retreat back home to England, France, or whatever anonymous global port city would take them and their baggage (tangible or intangible); and they were partly hoping for another reversal of fortunes at the mercurial court of the spineless Ferdinand.

The latter did not occur.  By 1825, darkness had fallen over the Spanish Enlightenment, and the Age of the Spanish Inquisition was reborn.

But for those 2 years, 1823 to 1825, Bilbao was Babylon and New Orleans Mardi Gras and Rio Carnival and Bluto Blutarski's Kappa house all rolled into one.  And the partiers all had one item on the party wishlist:  watching Shannon in a topless fistfight against the prettiest beauties Georgian Britain and Restoration Bourbon France had on offer.

Fights would incredibly last over 45 minutes, Shannon would put on quite the show, giving the crowd what they wanted in skill, blood, and gore.

Her diaries from this period include sketches of French and Waldensian and Welsh and Walloon hookers after she had finished battering them with her bare hands.

And sketches of her bare hands.

Both looked like scenes from the Peninsular War.

I was spellbound reading them in Trinity Library.

To be continued....

[Pallas_Athena]

As a student of history myself I am loving this!

[sinclairfan]

The northern Spanish port city of Bilbao sustained itself with liberal Britsh/French refugees for two years from 1823 to 1825, but by then the party (the literal and figurative parties) was over, suffocated by the rules and prohibitions on the Traditionalists, as all of Spain held its breath waiting for Ferdinand VII to die and hoping he and his child bride (and niece) Queen Maria Christina would produce a son who could alone prevent a Civil War.

(They produced no son.  Just two daughters.  Ferdinand died in 1834, and the Civil War started in 1835.)

So Shannon the gladiatrix/diarist returned to Dublin in 1825 and threw herself at the mercy of Lady Belfast, the patroness-extraordinaire of servant-girl catfughts.  Very few servants in 1820s Ireland were any match for Shannon in combat, but that suited Lady Belfast just fine.  Lady Belfast was a bit of a Sadist, and enjoyed fights which ended with the loser getting battered, the bloodier the better.  And Shannon's fisticuff skills had become so well-honed in the dive-bars of Bilbao that she usually drew blood from her hapless opponents, even when she wasn't trying to.

And Lady Belfast loved every minute of it.  She would ask for Shannon to be summoned as a breakfast, lunch, tea, and dinner companion of hers.  The late night dinners would include several rounds of mutton, between which Shannon was expected to regale Lady Belfast with tales of Bilbao fistfights for drunken sailors.

Why did Shannon tolerate the beastly and decadent Lady Belfast?

For two reasons. 

The first was transactional.  According to Shannon's diaries in the Trinity Library, Lady Belfast would be so grateful to Shannon for a well-told tale of a bare-knuckled 1820-1825 Spanish fistfight that she would reward her troubador with oral sex, going down on Shannon until Shannon was well-satisfied.  Lady Belfast was quite the performer in this area, if Shannon's diaries are to be believed.

The second reason was competitive.  Shannon well understood the ebb and flow of Spanish politics, and looked to keep her skills honed in advance of the day that Bilbao's ports would welcome back topless female boxing.  She intended to return as Champion when that day arrived.

She was half right and half wrong.

She was right that a return to Spain was in her future.
She was wrong about the circumstances. 

The Bilbao she returned to in 1834 was not a city of peace, but of war.  A vicious Civil War of royal succession.

To be continued.....

[sinclairfan]

Almost as fascinating as the catfight stories inside Shannon's memoirs was the 150-year saga of how the physical pages I was touching in 1985 had survived from the 1830s to the 1980s in the cursed-yet-blessed Land of Eire.  They resided in the attic of Lady Belfast's Big House (her country estate in County Monaghan) from Lady Belfast's death in the 1850s until a bad economic crash in Northwest Europe set of a Land War and Rent Strike between the native Irish (mostly Catholic) tenants and the Anglo-Irish (mostly Protestant) landlords, which was followed the divorce scandal, then death, of the Rent Strike leader Parnell in 1891, and escalating violence across the island.  The 1903 Land Act encouraged the indebted landlords to sell (at supressed prices) to their tenants, and in 1912 the Protestants of the North saw their grip on power and culture slipping away, and formed a league to fight their impending subjugation to Home Rule by an Irish Parliament. 

County Monaghan was stuck in the No Man's Land between North and South, and Lady Belfast's personal belingings were packed up for safety and sent to different places in Ireland.

At every stop, a new woman would discover the exciting memoirs packed into the dusty boxes, and give them TLC to make sure they weren't destroyed in the violence.

And every woman who became their protectress and guardian would masturbate to them, just like I was.  And would make notes in the margins about what they most enjoyed about Shannon's fights.  Her barfights in Spain got occassional mention.  And her maid fights and 3on3 for Lady Belfast were a treat for others.

But her showdown with Juana was everyone's favorite.

To be continued.....