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gatheringbones · 3 years

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["HOW SEX WORKERS TAUGHT ME HOW TO HUSTLE

Summer, 1995, Friday, and Species were blowing up at the box office. Groove Theory's "Tell Me" and Notorious B.I. G.'s "One More Chance (Remix)" were in heavy rotation on my Sony Walkman. I had just graduated from high school in Philadelphia, and despite having struggled with what felt like unreachable standards of black masculinity since childhood, my challenges with my sexual orientation nearly vanished when I felt the lips of another guy for the first time. There was no great debate in my soul. The natural emotion I felt from a man was something I never felt with a woman. Also, I found people who loved me and provided a space for conversation and freedom. I wasn't alone.

My friends and I were fixtures on Thirteenth Street. Before the City of Brotherly Love was gentrified, the strip was known as "Freak Street," especially after midnight, when most of the white gays headed home and the black and Latin LGBT kids held court. We were street urchins who terrified the white gay community and black heterosexuals. We didn't believe in same-sex marriage; we were anti-marriage. We proudly called ourselves dykes, trannies, fags, queens, butches, and drags— all unacceptable language by today's standards. The intersection of class, race, and sexuality was evident in our unique slang, tribal house music, and crafty survival skills.

Like clockwork, I strolled up Thirteenth Street every night, trekking to the club, which didn't open until one a.m. and didn't get hot for another two hours. There was usually a group of sex workers on the corner of Sansom and Thirteenth, the majority of whom were black and Latin trans women. Initially, I was terrified by these women. I had no experience with them; they had been torn down by a mid 1990's economy, never allowed in the workforce, and education was inaccessible to them due to rampant discrimination. Because of my internalized prejudices, their exterior shook my soul.

For weeks, I hurried past their gaze as I dashed up Thirteenth Street. These were the same women I would see in the club later that night, but in my stupid mind, I feared being associated with them. They could feel my disdain for them.

However, one particular woman was deeply insulted that I wouldn't speak to her when we crossed paths. "Hey, faggot!" she screamed after we locked eyes and I turned away. Attempting to channel a "Freak Like Me"-era Adina Howard in red leather hot pants, a black corset, and a short hairdo, she spat, "I see your ass down here every weekend, bitch— you ain't gonna speak?"

"I don't know you!" I shot back, startling myself.

"Mothafucka, I know you and you ain't that cute!" she sassed as I sped up. "Didn't your mama teach you to speak to people when you see them? I'm a damn human being!"

"These young faggots..." I heard another woman mumble in a tone that was more disappointed than angry.

The next night, Adina spotted me from a distance walking up the other side of Thirteenth Street. I couldn't believe she could see me from that far away. "There he go!" she hollered. I moved quickly, but she stomped across the street, necklaces, bracelets, and earrings jingling in unison. Adina stood before me, blocking my escape. I was scared for my life.

"You are gonna see me," she demanded in a surprisingly calm voice.

It was at that point something in my teenage brain clicked. I had not truly seen her before that moment. It occurred to me that I had often walked by her like she was garbage on the corner, the same way angry heterosexuals leered at my friends and me if they accidentally wandered down Thirteenth Street after midnight. Although I was never a sex worker, Adina and I were both part of the black and Latin LGBT community, living on the fringes of society.

"I'm sorry," I mumbled, eyes down as I squeezed my hands together in terror.

"You are sorry! You're sorry and you're tired!" Adina shouted. "Now, next time you walk down the goddamn street, you make sure you show some respect and speak to us. Got it?" I nodded my head. "Go on now to that club."

From that moment on I made it a point to see Adina.

Every night I walked down the street, I gave a hello to Adina and her friends. Eventually I walked down their side of the street and stopped to talk. She illuminated so much for a young, impressionable teenager, and in her own way, she taught me life skills. She could clock someone's story with one glance: "He's gonna wanna get fucked," "He's gonna be cheap," or "He's gonna be a rough client." More often than not, she was right.

"How are you able to figure someone out so quickly?" I asked her.

She smiled. "All you have to do is ask one question," she explained. "As long as you nod your head and look like you fucking care, they'll tell you their life story." As frightful as she originally appeared to me, Adina owned that superpower and could flip the switch, making anyone she chose feel instantly comfortable."]

clay cane, live through this: surviving the intersections of sexuality, god, and race

#clay cane #gay literature #history stuff #currently reading

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pjstafford · 2 years

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Scully, as a symbol of every woman born in the sixties and of every woman alive today.

I've been thinking quite a bit about Dana Scully and domesticity. Recent social media posts from various people explored the possibility that Scully was "let down" by the X-Files’ writers - not simply, as Gillian Anderson indicated in a recent statement, in the revival, but throughout the series. Those proponents argument seemed to be that the show was sexist because Scully never got to live the domestic life she wanted. My perspective is different. I don’t believe Scully was interested in domesticity until later in her journey. The more I thought about this, the more I began to theorize that, if you remove the alien abduction and paranormal piece - then, Scully's journey, her desire to "have it all" is not unlike the experience of many young women of her day. It is a worthwhile endeavor to look back at iconic characters with fresh eyes. I strive to do that now to argue that Scully's journey is very much deserving of iconic feminist status, but, perhaps, even more importantly, as that of a every woman of her generation.

From what we know, Margaret Scully (Dana's mom) appears to have been a stay-at-home mother. Dana grew up in a very traditional nuclear family construct with traditional values associated with Catholicism and a strong, patriotic, military father. From what we know, her family life was fairly typical with typical teenage rebellions such as smoking and typical sibling arguments.

Dana Scully was born in 1965 - two years after the publication of Betty Freidan's The Feminist Mystique which outlined the reasons why women had left the workforce to return to the home and how many women were unhappy with the lack of choices in lifestyles. This, along with the involvement of many teenage girls in the political activism of the 60s and the 70's, created a cultural change. Those of us who were female children in the sixties and teenagers in the seventies often wanted to have careers in addition to or instead of the traditional housewife role. Of course, we can look back and recognize that this perspective is from a white privilege perception. Also, that there were women who could be obvious role models who had successful careers. However, as a woman with a similar white Irish ethnicity and about the same age of Scully, I know that there was this feeling that our generation was going to break the mold. There is much literature about the cultural changes of the nineties as women had more active careers, delayed having children and getting married.

Scully, the medical doctor and scientist, made a decision to go into a male dominated field and to spend years in educational pursuits. Part of the reason Scully was seen as a feminist hero is because she was unlike other women characters on television. She influenced young girls and women watching to enter medicine or science.

When she decided to become an FBI agent, her father was upset. She went against his wishes. She did it anyway. She did it because she believed she could make a difference and she wanted to make that difference. She chose again to be in a male dominated field. This time she chose a career she knew would be dangerous. She seemed to like adventure. We have every reason to believe that in the pilot, when the audience first meets her, she had a desire to rise in the ranks of the FBI. She was an ambitious, intelligent, adventure seeking woman.

We see her early in season one at a godson's birthday party where she talks with a friend about not having time to begin a family. She goes out on a date with a man who has a son who asks her out again and she chooses not to go. Especially given that this is a show from the nineties, it is important that we not dismiss Scully's independent decision making. She decided, like many women of her generation, to delay family because she was focused on her career. We see Scully as a woman who, when she is faced with great distress such as the death of her father, chooses to work as a coping mechanism. She enjoyed her work. Additionally, Scully had early opportunity to change jobs within the FBI or return to medicine. She didn't. Maybe it was out of duty or loyalty to Mulder, but it was her decision. It was novel for women to have the options to make these decisions.

In season two Scully has a near death experience which sometimes causes people to reexamine their priorities. It is in the season four Home, that Scully shares that she would like to have children someday. Scully is, at this time, 31 years old. Then, later in season four, begins the cancer arc.

It is five years into the journey with Scully that Scully knows that she can't have children. She tells her mother she never knew she wanted something so badly until she couldn't have it. It is possible to think that, if, she was still able to have children at this time, she might have continued to delay. The knowledge of infertility created an urgency.

Then, she begins to try and adopt. Again, let's put aside the paranormal, abduction, and reasons why Scully cannot have children and that she wanted to adopt her own biological alien human hybrid child. It is not so hard, for those of us with lived experience, to remember the numerous news stories at the time about the unintended side-effects of women delaying getting married and starting families. It was actually about the same time as Scully that I, having delayed having children until my husband was out of school, discovered that, due to a health condition that started in my thirties, I was unable to have children. It turned out that our generation was the first generation to realize that you, in fact, cannot always have it all. There is a reason why such advances in scientific infertility treatments were madein the nineties. In many ways, Scully's statement - I didn't know I wanted it so much until I couldn't have it, was being said by woman across the country - many of whom looked into adoption or IVFs as alternative ways to have a family.

Here comes what will probably be the most unpopular opinion in this blog. It is my belief that Scully's statements in season six and seven related to “don't you ever want to stop and get out of the car” -her desire to stop running and to settle down are not statements that demonstrate that has been her desire the entire time. People change. I think she is older, has suffered some family losses, has almost died numerous times, and is being reflective of her needs. I think, though, that we see her saying these things to Mulder because she wants him to join her on this other journey of domesticity. Again, I think it is interesting that she at no point says to Mulder, let's start a relationship and you continue to do what you have always done, and I will be at home waiting for you when you return. All of the conversations include a desire to see Mulder and her stop.

Even in I want to believe, they do not have the traditional spousal duties assigned. Scully is the one that works. Mulder is the one who stays home (until he doesn't). I understand that by the time of the season 11 finale, the reveal of Scully being pregnant was complicated by much of the plotline around her first son. But we are not focused in this blog on these details. Women having babies in their fifties have quadrupled this century. This includes many prominent women such as Janet Jackson and Senator Duckworth.

I am not saying that the series would not have been better with more diverse writers. There are a couple of episodes, in particular, I think that this is true about. Even though I enjoy Scully being pregnant at the end of season 7 and think much of season 8 is superior story telling, I think, as with many other things, the lack of a coherent end game made the William/ Jackson storyline and, now, the new baby storyline, problematic. In terms of the fact that bad things happened to Scully - yes, they did…and to Mulder. Its an action/ adventure /horror drama. You can dislike the plot line and even the genre, but that doesn't make it sexist. (But there is sexism within certain episodes, problems with rape culture, absolutely).

Today in 2022, we are still discussing a show from the nineties because it is that good and because in many ways it is relevant. Many women are being forced out of the workforce now because of caregiving responsibilities. Reproductive rights are being threatened. Women Rights! Feminism! Sexism. These are complicated terms today. For me, Scully still represents the best of my generation. Scully making decisions. Scully as an FBI agent, doctor, bad-ass. Scully as a vulnerable woman. Scully who mirrors back that focusing on work means sacrifices for women that it doesn't mean for men. Scully not being perfect and not having a perfect life and, yes, Scully living in a sexist world where men consider women's reproductive systems as their playthings to make decisions about, and, despite that, her survival and resilience through it all - are things we women should celebrate.

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justforbooks · 3 years

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Ryū Murakami was born on February 19, 1952 in Sasebo, Nagasaki. He is a Japanese novelist, short story writer, essayist and filmmaker. His novels explore human nature through themes of disillusion, drug use, surrealism, murder and war, set against the dark backdrop of Japan. His best known novels are Almost Transparent Blue, Coin Locker Babies and In the Miso Soup.

Murakami's first work was the short novel Almost Transparent Blue, written while he was still a university student. It deals with promiscuity and drug use among disaffected youth. Critically acclaimed as a new style of literature, it won the Gunzo Prize for New Writers in 1976, despite some objections on the grounds of decadence. Later the same year, his Blue won the Akutagawa Prize, going on to become a bestseller.

In 1980, Murakami published a much longer novel, Coin Locker Babies, again to critical acclaim, and won the 3rd Noma Liberal Arts New Member Prize. Next came the autobiographical novel 69, and then Ai to Gensou no Fascism (1987), revolving around the struggle to reform Japan’s survival-of-the-fittest society with a secret "Hunting Society". His work Topaz (1988) concerns a sado-masochistic woman’s radical expression of her sexuality.

Murakami's The World in Five Minutes From Now (1994) is written as a point of view in a parallel universe version of Japan, and was nominated for the 30th Tanizaki Prize. In 1996 he continued his autobiography 69, and released the Murakami Ryū Movie and Novel Collection. He also won the Taiko Hirabayashi Prize. The same year, he wrote the novel Topaz II, about a female high school student engaged in "compensated dating", which later was adapted as the live-action film Love and Pop by anime director Hideaki Anno. His Popular Hits of the Showa Era concerns the escalating firepower in a battle between five teenage male and five middle-aged female social rejects.

In 1997 came the psychological thriller novel In the Miso Soup, set in Tokyo's Kabuki-cho red-light district, which won him the Yomiuri Prize for Fiction that year. Parasites (Kyōsei chū, 2000) is about a young hikikomori fascinated by war. It won him the 36th Tanizaki Prize. The same year Exodus From Hopeless Japan (Kibō no Kuni no Exodus) told of junior high school students who lose their desire to be involved in normal Japanese society and instead create a new one over the internet.

In 2001, Murakami became involved in his friend Ryuichi Sakamoto's group NML No More Landmines, which sets out to remove landmines from former battle sites around the world.

In 2004, Murakami announced the publication of 13 Year Old Hello Work, aimed at increasing interest in young people who are entering the workforce. Hantō wo Deyo (2005) is about an invasion of Japan by North Korea. It won him the Noma Liberal Arts Prize and Mainichi Shuppan Culture Award.

The novel Audition was made into a feature film by Takashi Miike. Murakami reportedly liked it so much he gave Miike his blessing to adapt Coin Locker Babies. The screenplay for the latter was worked on by director Jordan Galland but Miike failed to raise enough funding for it. An adaptation directed by Michele Civetta is currently in production.

In 2011, Utau Kujira won the Mainichi Art Award.

Daily inspiration. Discover more photos at http://justforbooks.tumblr.com

#JUST FOR BOOKS #Ryū Murakami #Famous Birthdays

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dwellordream · 3 years

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“If girls’ private schools encouraged an intimate atmosphere of nurture, sociability, and fun, much coeducational public schooling retained its competitive practices and was more challenging. Opponents of coeducation argued that the presence of girls feminized and compromised the secondary curriculum. But evidence suggests the contrary: that expectations of male achievement raised the stakes and the competition for girls.

As it was put in an 1841 article in Ladies’ Repository, in many young ladies’ seminaries ‘‘the girl is excused of strict scholarship. . . . She works to disadvantage. The mind itself has not been educated.’’ In contrast to girls educated at such ‘‘finishing schools,’’ the author argued, ‘‘see here and there is one who, we may say, has been educated—who has studied like a boy’’ and you will see ‘‘equality of attainment with any male youth of like years and pursuit.’’

Encouraging a girl to study ‘‘like a boy’’ was seldom the goal of the citizens who sponsored secondary schools; coeducational secondary schools which taught ostensibly parallel classes for boys and girls did not always deliver classes of like intensity to both. And sometimes, especially in the earlier days, there were different requirements for girls and boys. …Public schools sometimes attempted to soften lessons for girls so as to address the concerns raised by the debate over emulation.

Nonetheless, in comparison, the point seems indisputable. Girls studying in coeducational secondary schools were more likely to participate in a competitive and meritocratic form of schooling which rewarded and encouraged individual achievement among both girls and boys. Such schools published class rank and scheduled public exhibitions. Evidence from the few coeducational private boarding schools suggests that this might have been the case for both public and private, day and boarding schools.

Coeducation in practice in the nineteenth century included various arrangements governing the schooling of girls and boys together and apart. The word itself was of American origin and set up an implicit contrast with the tradition of same-sex schooling in Great Britain and in many parts of the American Northeast and South. Common grammar schools united boys and girls in the same classes under the same roofs, and many secondary schools adopted a similar model. Yet the ‘‘coeducating’’ of boys and girls in secondary schools, and sometimes even in grammar schools, generally involved some separation of boys and girls, by administrative order.

As we have seen, some high schools, particularly in the Northeast, went so far as to conduct parallel classes for girls and boys, using gender as a principle for dividing students into different sections for as long as they could. Gradually, however, throughout the country, school districts bowed to economic realities and chose to educate their boys and girls together, offering a common curriculum and a common standard for success. For those attending the new public high schools, which became increasingly common in the Northeast at midcentury, coeducational schooling meant attending schools which enrolled more girls than boys.

The actual ratio varied from school to school. Where the public high school served as a college preparatory school for the affluent native-born, the numbers of boys tended to increase. In less affluent or immigrant communities, boys instead would leave school to take jobs, and high schools would sometimes graduate two or even three girls for every boy. The underattendance of boys at high schools was a cause of regular lament by all, including girl students who were left without escorts after school social functions. Yet it presents the historian of gender with some interesting questions. Some of them are simply statistical. Did girls excel and win honors proportionate to their greater attendance at high school? Did they excel at greater rates than the statistics might predict? And if so, why?

Girls and boys attending public high schools shared a liberal curriculum, competition, and grades. Unlike female seminaries and convent schools, which taught ornamental and domestic arts alongside more traditional liberal studies, the public high school at midcentury and after did not offer a gendered curriculum. Instead, it taught a classical or liberal curriculum, rich in history, moral philosophy, mathematics, Latin, Greek, and French. Botany, chemistry, and physical sciences were also often taught. Girls and boys took these classes either together or in separate tracks, a significant commonality in a world otherwise stratified by gender.

Increasingly toward the end of the century, citizens and educators came to question the usefulness of this classical learning to boys and girls attempting to make their way in the working world. And when high schools responded, they brought the gender segmentation of the workforce into school. Commercial subjects supplemented liberal studies, and educators provided manual training and home economics to prepare boys and girls for the future. Even then, though, high schools retained an important core of liberal studies, which established common ground between boys and girls, as well as across classes. In high schools, girls and boys studied together and competed to master abstract subject matter which neither sex could lay special claim to.

In studying North Carolina’s African-American community in the 1890s, Glenda Gilmore has noted the significance of its leaders’ dissent from the Tuskegee program of agricultural education and manual training advanced by Booker T. Washington. She sees their defense of a classical curriculum for the children and grandchildren of slaves as significant resistance to attempts to create a separate caste in this country under Jim Crow.

Classical education was similarly important for girls, for it offered a common ground on which to compete and succeed beyond the hierarchy of gender. The practice of recitation, saying one’s lessons orally, was not initially designed as a competitive practice. It was simply the most convenient way to test rote memory, the common style of teaching and learning in most grammar schools in the nineteenth century. Yet recitation meant that all would know when a student succeeded, and when one failed.

More deliberate was the spelling bee, a competition that was both a game and a pedagogy. Some schools held public examinations, which elevated the pressure to ‘‘know one’s lessons’’ to a higher degree. Almost all schools scheduled exhibition days in which students read or recited pieces to the general public and received awards. (In fact, the decision of the cloistered convent schools to bar the public from the awarding of prizes in the mid–nineteenth century was a cause of conflict with parents.) The consequences of such a system for teenage girl students, as for boy students, were that strong students thrived while weak ones foundered. This is an obvious result, of course. Yet in the world of Victorian gender relations, what is significant is that girls and boys were playing fundamentally the same game, both competing in the rough meritocracy that such competition encouraged.

At least initially and sometimes later as well, they were not equally comfortable with that competition: domestic culture discouraged self-promotion in girls, and successful girls were sometimes abashed and embarrassed. Sometimes, too, parents did not notice, honor, or encourage girls’ school accomplishments. …But within the universe of the schoolroom and at schoolwide ceremonies (neither insignificant for a peer based social world), girl scholars were encouraged and rewarded for achievement—for scoring high, for spelling well, for accomplishments of both mind and habit. They felt the sweet rewards of victory in conquering rivals, earning respect, and taking as prizes a seat at the front of the room.

These school rules made the institution unique within a woman’s life as it extended from cradle to grave. Not in the family or the workplace or the halls of government did females and males share so similar an experience. Even within the church, where souls were ungendered, women did not preach, sit as deacons, or otherwise live out their identities as equal competitors for eternity.

Coeducational grammar and secondary schools made all kinds of distinctions, and even those who encouraged girls to compete might in the same breath warn against it. Yet medals were awarded and reputations made in coeducational high schools. Of all the unequal institutions, such schools were the least unequal, and thus must stand as both an important harbinger of the future and a transformer, gradually, of their present.

Girls outnumbered boys in school. Barring other factors skewing accomplishments, girls could thus be expected to outnumber boys on the honor rolls. All things being equal, girls should have been salutatorians and valedictorians and honor-roll students in percentages similar to their representation in the class. In fact, though, girls tended to do better proportionately than boys. Statistics on one school, the high school of Milford, Massachusetts, reveal that between 1884 and 1900 girls represented 64 percent of graduates, a ratio of nearly two to one. But girls accounted for nearly three-quarters of those graduating in the top ten places during the late century.

When valedictorians and salutatorians were designated, beginning in 1889, 86 percent of those so honored through the next decade were girls. Girls’ tendency to dominate the academic ratings was an accepted part of the school’s culture and can undoubtedly be explained in part by Milford’s policy, probably followed by many other schools as well, of granting honors on the basis of scholarship and deportment together.

Deportment grades measured decorum and tractability; both by socialization and reputation, girls could be counted on to turn in higher performances. Usually there were a few male standouts, but sometimes it was a clean sweep. In the class of 1887 at Milford, for example, boys were completely eclipsed. The class began with an equal number of boys and girls, thirty-one each. By the end of the four year span, though, the numbers had been dramatically reduced to twelve girls and five boys.

The student newspaper announced: ‘‘The girls claim the first ten in scholarship and deportment. In attendance three girls are perfect and in deportment eight; of these, two have the honor of being perfect in both.’’ The article ended by noting, ‘‘These are facts of which they may well feel proud.’’ The reference here is a bit unclear. Perhaps it was referring to the individual girls who had triumphed, each of whom should feel proud. But a more plausible reference is to girls of the class as a group, all of whom, the article suggests, might take pride in their sex’s collective sweep of graduation honors.

How much of girls’ success can be attributed to their greater skill at achieving perfect conduct? For girls, for whom ‘‘being good’’ was a high priority, school offered any number of ways to fulfill that mandate. If being ‘‘perfect’’ simply required getting to school every day, or behaving once in school, it was certainly doable—a gratifyingly concrete measure for an otherwise elusive moral status.

Almyra Hubbard, a schoolgirl diarist in Hayesville, New Hampshire, wrote in 1859 of her discovery of this back door to school achievement. She knew that she worked hard; her journal, a school assignment itself written faithfully in a careful hand, indicates as much. Yet she did not get top grades and did not seem to be one of the handful of students she mentioned in February who would need to draw to see who got the first seat in the class. She could, however, make sure she got to class—a trip that took her an hour and a half when she walked it—and she seized upon this route to class honor.

One day, she wrote in her journal, ‘‘There are but few scholars here this afternoon. The room is quite still.’’ The quietness was not just a result of how many were there, but who was there: ‘‘As a general thing the noisy ones do not venture out in unpleasant weather.’’ Almyra Hubbard was both quiet and present, even when her classmates were fair-weather scholars.

When she attended her great uncle’s funeral in April, it was the first time she had missed school in a year and a half. In May the school principal adopted a new rule which advantaged Hubbard, ‘‘by which any one who is absent cannot make up her lessons.’’ She imagined, ‘‘It will cause some of the girls to be a little more regular in their attendance at school.’’ One key component of school success, as Almyra Hubbard had discovered early, was simply the ability to meet school demands for the regular habits of industrial discipline.

Girls outdid boys in this arena so regularly that when the Milford paper in 1890 reported on two students with perfect attendance throughout their high school careers, it featured what was newsworthy: ‘‘Wonderful to relate, one is a boy!’’ Not all girls had stellar grades in deportment. A consistent problem for boy and girl students both was ‘‘communication.’’ Students in many schools were forbidden to talk among themselves between classes and expected to be quiet most other times, an expectation which few could meet. The entire first-year class at Milford High School in 1865 was called to the teacher’s desk and scolded so that they nearly all cried, Annie Roberts Godfrey reported.

Godfrey was in the second-year class, and was also called up, where she ‘‘acknowledged that I had communicated but would try to improve. I did not cry.’’ The next year, though, Godfrey’s problems with communication meant that her deportment grade was very low—‘‘only 78, lowest in school, I fear.’’ We have no records for how Godfrey fared at graduation, but clearly convent schools were not alone in attempting to impose serious constraints on student sociability during school itself. It was an innovation in 1894 when Salem High School instituted a ‘‘whispering recess,’’ which allowed students to talk softly between classes.

- Jane H. Hunter, “Competitive Practices: Sentiment and Scholarship in Secondary Schools.” in How Young Ladies Became Girls: The Victorian Origins of American Girlhood

#victorian #history #education #jane h. hunter #how young ladies became girls #american

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screamingsilence · 3 years

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Ramblings of a Very Lonely Nobody

Cliffsnots - Single Mom battling C-PTSD while taking care of her Mom and 3 kids desperately wanting to buy a home for family, yet crippled by student loan debt that allowed her to get a decent job after horrific divorce from extremely abusive husband who took everything including her ability to cope, form attachment, and relationships with other people - resulting in her continued detachment and self isolation. ((#ouch I wrote this part at the end - after the below - very accurate and well worded but sucks to read.))

I'm used to this. Desperately used to this. Quiet, silence, ringing in my ears. Obviously that was from way too many concerts. Don't get too excited though, I went to those alone. Or with a concert buddy that I met offline. I did this to myself. Years of terrible coping skills followed by years of disconnect and disassociation - have lead to fight or flight skills that should be taught in military combat schools. I could definitely teach young women every person Red Flags of relationships and the do's and dont's. I can also help anyone draft up an excellent escape plan if needed? What I cannot do is form attachments / relationships / connections - to anyone. I cannot develop safe spaces and spiritually healthy interpersonal connections with anyone.

From the inside looking out: everyone is a danger. Every word out of anyone's mouth is a way to hurt, manipulate, gaslight, damage, get the upper foot, belittle, betray, and/or save information to use against me and black mail me. -- Am I a bad person? Nope. Do I do things that are blackmail worthy? Nope.

I go to work, come home, play with my kids, help them with school work, attempt not to throw the 13 year old off a cliff (damn teenage years), cuddle the 11 year old (she's going through a stage where she is afraid of her own shadow - poor thing) and listen to the 8 year old talk, and talk, and talk -- (and talk - and talk - Autism, w/adhd and a day of online school = a lot of talking when I get home).Years of moving around as a child - Military Brat, followed by years of being cheated on, and then an extremely abusive marriage, and a drawn out divorce, and being forced to cooperant with my abuser ... I created a bubble. The bubble was to protect the kids and me. It worked - really well. I tried so hard to do everything to keep us safe. And in return, they have thrived, and I have not.

Aside from my work - which struggles on the social / popularity side. And lets face it - when you are a women in the workforce - you have to have the popular vote to get anywhere. Not just looks, but the popular vote. It really doesn't matter how well you work, how good your work ethic is, you must look good and be really sociable. So that part is a real struggle for me.

So, here I am. 1245 AM, lonely. About to be 33, absolutely NO friends. (Not even exaggerating anymore). I am a divorced, single woman with 3 children. I support my unwell mother, in one of the most expensive cities and once my savings run out out (hopefully I can stretch it another few months) we are looking at homelessness. But because I technically make "too much money" ((still less than 40k)) I don't qualify for anything. The degree of abuse and torture I have endured in my life puts me in a place were any sort of relationship for the sake of the kids / for the sake of owning a home / or a better rental or anything is out of the question. Every time I try to date - I panic. I can feel the strangulation all over again. I had EMDR - It really helped. I was able to function again. I was able to work and take care of my children again. I was able to recall the memory and not full on black out from the panic.

But, I am no closer now than I was back then to being able to be with anyone. And this is 10 years later. But sometimes I do wonder - If i could just suck it up - If i could just gather the courage and strength - or maybe there was a different medication I could be on - I could meet someone and make it to the point where we could be sort of happy and get a home? The kids --- I want to give them so much better than I had. After the divorce I knew I needed to do something to make sure they had a good life. I enrolled in college. But I was so young and didn't have any real role models. I was taken for the fool that I was. As I write this I am 89k in student loan debt. It really wont matter how much money I make. I wont ever be able to pay that back. Each year I do the repayment options and each year the gov't tells me I don't make enough money to pay them back. So they put me in the Income repayment bracket and I pay $0. Rumor has it, If I don't default on that for 30 years - My Loans will go away. So In 30 years I can buy a home. That hurts. So Much.

Make better choices, do better, stupid people get what they deserve, you chose this path, its what you wanted, you get what you deserve. I worked so hard when I was younger. I was so smart. I tried so hard to be everything. I had plans, I had it all mapped out.

When we were younger - I was asked to stop college to help my brother who had been accepted to an amazing University that my parents were having a hard time paying for. I had chosen to go to a local community college and was paying my way and was going to do the transfer program and that transfer program could have been full ride depending on my grades and grants etc. I quit school. I started working. So my parents could send that money to my brothers school. I had dropped out of highschool, gotten my GED and enrolled into college by 17. ((Military brat - credits didn't transfer and the new highschool was trying to consider me a freshmen. I was in college from 17-18. I was not having any of it).

By 18 I was working full time to help keep my brother in College. By 19 I was pregnant. by 20 I was pregnant with #2. By 21 I was married. My life spiraled so fast out of control. It took me years to get the logistics of it back on track. By 26 I had 2 college degrees. A good job field. By 28 I realized Something maybe was broken inside of me. By 29 it was more and more apparent but I was becoming really engaged in my kids and my work life. 30-31 I started to focus on my body and my work and my kids. Enter 32 // Covid / Work / Kids / less physical health. Here we are - 33 right around the corner. Crippling Student Loan debt. Zero Friends. 4 Humans Depending on me. I have a pill case. One of those AM/PM ones. People at work report me for RBF. (That one makes me laugh a little).

I just bared my soul to strangers on Tumblr. Is this not the epitome of lonely?

(Not suicidal)This is probably more cathartic than anything. Maybe?

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heraldofzaun · 4 years

Text

Childhood

Viktor Grigoryevich Pahlen is four years old when his father pulls him aside one evening. He will be starting school, soon - it is the summer, all low-hanging smog and trapped heat, and fall is coming sooner rather than later.

“Viktor,” Grigoriy says softly, looking at how his son is curled up on the chair opposite to him, “Viktor, look at me.”

Viktor’s face pops into view, no longer smushed against his shoulder in a position that both Grigoriy and Yekaterina find profoundly uncomfortable to look at. His hair sticks up at many angles: a testament to his tendency to squirm whenever Yekaterina tries to make him presentable. He’s pouting - but he is looking at Grigoriy. That’s progress.

“Your mother and I wanted to talk to you, before you start school in a few months,” and then it had been simply his job, but he is more well-suited to this than her, “about you.”

“But I’m me.”

“You are, yes, but…” and where to begin, “when you go with your mother to the store, or out in public, do you see that people are different than you?”

“Mh-hm. They’re bigger, because they’re adults.”

No. That’s not… it’s irrational, yes, but Grigoriy often wishes Viktor would simply grow up faster. He can explain surgeries while his gloves are deep within another living, breathing person but not genetic mutations to his own son because the language isn’t there. He has to repackage the medical journals and studies he’s read since the day Viktor was born into something that a child who has barely learned to write his letters correctly can understand.

Grigoriy tries again. “What about your hand, Viktor? Isn’t that different?”

Viktor shifts and stares at his left hand, all four pudgy fingers of it. If he were older, Grigoriy would explain that he is missing the fifth metacarpal and its associated phalanges… medical terms are so clear in a way this is not. But his son is young, and his words have to match.

“I guess,” and Viktor’s curled back in on himself again, voice muffled. “But I saw a man on the train who had no hand!”

“He probably lost it in an accident,” damn, that tone’s too sharp. “I mean to say… you’ve always had it.”

“Mh-hm!”

“And you know how your hair is different than others’, too.”

“Mom says that it’s thicker than the Kumungu.”

“…I’m sure she does,” probably while trying to corral Viktor into letting a brush so much as touch his head, much less a set of scissors. “But I meant the white streak. The white part.”

“Oh. But people have pink hair, I saw a woman-“

Grigoriy sighs. “It’s not natural, Viktor. Not like yours. And… you know how you sometimes get sick, yes?”

His son is practically a ball now, with his head tucked somewhere between his chest and knees. Do other children of this era do that? His coworkers have children in the workforce, now, and so the time to ask his peers is long-gone. Perhaps there are medical journals he can request, although the gods only know what keywords he could use.

“I don’t like that.”

“Neither do your mother and I. But it’s all the same, your hand and your hair and your stomach.”

“No it’s not.”

“Yes, it is.”

“Nuh-uh.”

“It is all from the same source, Viktor!” and that is the sound of Yekaterina dropping a pan into the sink - he shouldn’t have raised his voice. “It’s fine, dear,” Grigoriy calls to the other room.

Viktor has pulled himself out of the ball enough to focus his gaze on his father’s knee, or perhaps the hand resting on it. “…Sorry I made you mad.”

Oh… “It’s not you, Viktor. I’m…” just tired, just old, just out of my depth, “fine now. What I meant to say is that all of those are caused by the same thing. There’s…”

He has to explain genetics to a five-year-old, doesn’t he. That’s how this conversation ends. Maybe…

“I’ll be back.”

---

Yekaterina is still in the kitchen, putting the last of the night’s dishes on the drying rack. She’s tired, too - the hours Grigoriy spends at the hospital, in surgeries and consults and teaching, she spends with Viktor and her work. Her research laboratory wants her back soon. They’d been generous with letting her have time off after Viktor’s birth, and then let her work from home as he aged… but he’ll be enrolled in school soon enough and then she can return to the lab for six hours on every weekday.

The two of them had mutually decided that her work would be the one to take a back-seat to Viktor, although Grigoriy sometimes wonders if raising a child would be less stressful than his long hours. Probably not.

“Did you explain it to him?” she asks quietly, drying off her hands.

“…I’m trying. I thought some diagrams could help.”

That gets a small laugh from her. “Maybe they will. I can tell you realized you can’t just treat him like one of the visiting students. You can’t yell at him, for one.”

She probably didn’t intend for her comment to hurt. “He kept talking about the kinds of people he sees when you take him out. Drawing the wrong comparisons.”

“He’s five, dear, what else is he supposed to do? It’s our job to make sure he makes the right ones.”

Another heavy sigh, and he presses a kiss to her cheek. “You’re right. It’s just been a long day.”

“I tend to be,” and she kisses him in return, “now go get those diagrams.”

---

Grigoriy returns to the living room, holding a textbook as if it’s the key to immortality. It’s one from his undergraduate years, so it’s probably incredibly outdated in more than a few aspects - but he just wants it for the illustrations. He sits down across from Viktor, who’s currently splayed out in his chair like a ragdoll. Grigoriy notes the hypermobility of his son’s shoulders and elbows. That, too, is most likely tied to this topic of discussion.

“Viktor?” he asks, flipping through the book in search of the right page. “Can you come over here?”

Viktor rolls off of the chair with a thud but bounces to his feet only a moment after. He peers at the book with great interest. “What’s that?”

“It’s…” Grigoriy inhales, willing the words into place. “Your body is made up of a lot of little things called cells. They make up your skin, your hair, your brain… they make up you! In each-”

“But I’m me!” Viktor sounds indignant, as if the concept of cells is an affront to him.

“Ah… think of it like how… your arm is your arm, but it’s not all of you. You are more than just what makes you up. So, in-”

“Oh, okay.”

“So, in each of these cells is a lot of these,” he points to the illustration, a basic model of DNA. “This is DNA, and it tells your cells what to do. It makes sure that each cell is doing the right thing, so that eye cells are eye cells and… er, skin is skin… so on.”

This isn’t as easy as he thought it would be. Grigoriy looks over to his son, who is… utterly terrified. Oh dear.

“If it messes up, could I grow hair out of my eyes?” Oh no. He’s crying. “I don’t wanna have hair in my eyes!”

Yekaterina chooses that moment to poke her head through the doorway. “Vityusha, you won’t grow hair out of your eyes.”

Grigoriy shoots her a look. She returns it, greying eyebrow raised high, as she fully enters the room.

“Dad said I would!”

“Your dad didn’t say anything like that,” she replies, crouching down and embracing Viktor. “You won’t grow hair out of your eyes. I promise.”

A muffled “Okay...” comes from the general area of Yekaterina’s shoulder. Viktor worms away from the hug and wipes his eyes.

Grigoriy, by contrast, feels completely lost at sea. His wife gives him another meaningful look, kisses him on the cheek once more (to the disgusted groans of Viktor), and leaves. Where was he? Cells, DNA, right…

“So the DNA tells your cells what to do. It tells them how to look, which is why people have different colors of hair, skin, and eyes. Your DNA comes from your parents, which is why you look like your mom and I…”

“But I don’t! My hair!”

“Sometimes the DNA doesn’t… do its job,” Grigoriy adds, pointing to the diagram. “These pairs tell your DNA what to do. Sometimes they get… mixed up or damaged. Then you have a mutation. Sometimes these mutations are good, sometimes they are bad… ah, and so you have some mutations.”

“Are mine bad?”

Grigoriy squeezes his eyes shut. How is he supposed to answer this? Yes, Viktor, they’re bad. You’re missing a finger and we had to have surgery done to give you a good quality-of-life. And even that didn’t fix everything. That would just make his son convinced that he was somehow defective. No, Viktor, they’re good. Some people dye their hair to look like what you have. That was just a lie. Maybe some did, but fashionable hair wasn’t worth these costs…

“They… they’re just mutations. They don’t make you bad. They make you… unique. Special.”

“Oh!”

“And…” here is where the real point of this comes through, “sometimes, people may say rude things about your mutations. Like when you go to school in a few months.”

“Because I’m special and they’re not?”

That is certainly one way to look at it. Should he dissuade Viktor from that line of reasoning? Tell him the truth: that children are cruel because their parents are, and that they will take any sign of weakness as a signal to attack? That Grigoriy and Yekaterina can’t be there for him at school, can’t defend him from unkind words and rumors? That he will carry these signs throughout his life, signs that Zaun’s atmosphere is toxic… signs that his parents, perhaps, were too old. That some would say that Viktor should not have been brought into this world.

How could Grigoriy ever package such harsh truths into something a child could understand? Maybe in a few years, maybe when Viktor is a teenager… maybe then he could be told these facts without them destroying him. He needs to be nurtured now, the flame of his curiosity tended to so it can grow into a fire. If this misbelief can guard him against those who would snuff his flame out, then there’s only one answer Grigoriy can give. He shuts the textbook with a thud.

“Yes, exactly that. So don’t listen to anyone who tells you that you’re anything else.”

#writing | journals stored away #//enjoy a kid viktor and his parents!#//forgot to post this here after i threw it at ao3 lol :/

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long70s · 5 years

Text

The Troubles, Pt 2

1972

2 January: An anti-internment rally is held in Belfast, North Ireland

3 January: The Irish Republican Army (IRA) explodes a bomb in Callender Street, Belfast, injuring over 60 people.

17 January: Seven men who were held as internees escape from the prison ship HMS Maidstone in Belfast Lough.

21 January: Prime Minister of Northern Ireland Brian Faulkner bans all parades and marches in Northern Ireland until the end of the year.

27 January: Two Royal Ulster Constabulary officers shot dead by IRA in an attack on their patrol car in the Creggan Road, Derry; The British Army and the Irish Republican Army engage in gun battles near County Armagh; British troops fire over 1,000 rounds of ammunition.

28 January: The Northern Ireland Civil Rights Association place "special emphasis on the necessity for a peaceful incident-free day" at the next march on 30 January in an effort to avoid violence.

30 January: Bloody Sunday: 27 unarmed civilians are shot (14 are killed) by the British Army during a civil rights march in Derry, Northern Ireland; this is the highest death toll from a single shooting incident during 'the Troubles.’

31 January: British Home Secretary Reginald Maudling to House of Commons on 'Bloody Sunday', "The Army returned the fire directed at them with aimed shots and inflicted a number of casualties on those who were attacking them with firearms and with bombs.”

1 February: British Prime Minister Edward Heath announces the appointment of Lord Chief Justice Lord Widgery to undertake an inquiry into the 13 deaths on 'Bloody Sunday; The Ministry of Defence also issues a detailed account of the British Army's version of events during 'Bloody Sunday.'

2 February: Angry demonstrators burn the British Embassy in Dublin to the ground in protest at the shooting dead of 13 people on 'bloody sunday'

5 February: Two IRA members are killed when a bomb they were planting exploded prematurely.

6 February: A Civil Rights march held in Newry, County Down; very large turn-out with many people attending to protest at the killings in Derry the previous Sunday.

10 February: BBC bans "Give Ireland Back to the Irish" by Wings; two British soldiers are killed in a land mine attack near Cullyhanna, County Armagh; an IRA member is shot dead during an exchange of gunfire with RUC officers.

14 February: Lord Widgery arrives in Coleraine, where the 'Bloody Sunday' (30 January 1972) Tribunal was to be based, and holds a preliminary hearing.

22 Febuary: The Official IRA bombs Aldershot military barracks, the headquarters of the British Parachute Regiment, killing seven people; thought to be in retaliation for Bloody Sunday.

25 February: Attempted assassination of Irish Minister of State for Home Affairs John Taylor who is shot a number of times (the Official Irish Republican Army later claimed responsibility)

1 March: Two Catholic teenagers shot dead by the Royal Ulster Constabulary while 'joy riding' in a stolen car in Belfast.

4 March: Abercorn Restaurant bombing: a bomb explodes in a crowded restaurant in Belfast, killing two civilians and wounding 130.

9 March: Four members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) die in a premature explosion at a house in Clonard Street, Lower Falls, Belfast.

14 March: Two IRA members shot dead by British soldiers in the Bogside area of Derry.

15 March: Two British soldiers killed when attempting to defuse a bomb in Belfast; an RUC officer iskilled in an IRA attack in Coalisland, County Tyrone.

18 March: Ulster Vanguard hold a rally of 60,000 people in Belfast; William Craig tells the crowd: "if and when the politicians fail us, it may be our job to liquidate the enemy.”

20 March: Donegall Street bombing: the Provisional Irish Republican Army detonate its first car bomb on Donegall Street in Belfast; four civilians, two RUC officers and a UDR soldier killed while 148 people were wounded.

24 March: Great Britain imposes direct rule over Northern Ireland

27 March: Ulster Vanguard organise industrial strike against the imposition of direct rule on Northern Ireland by Westminster

30 March: Northern Ireland's Government and Parliament dissolved by the British Government and 'direct rule' from Westminster is introduced.

6 April: The Scarman Tribunal Report, an inquiry into the causes of violence during the summer of 1969 in N Ireland, is published, finding that the Royal Ulster Constabulary had been seriously at fault.

7 April: Three members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) die in a premature bomb explosion in Belfast

10 April: Two British soldiers are killed in a bomb attack in Derry.

14 April: The Provisional Irish Republican Army explodes twenty-four bombs in towns and cities across Northern Ireland.

15 April: A member of the Official Irish Republican Army is shot dead by British soldiers at Joy Street in the Markets area of Belfast close to his home; a member of the British Army is shot dead by the Official IRA in the Divis area of Belfast.< April: Two British soldiers are shot dead by the Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA) in separate incidents in Derry.

18 April: The Widgery Report on 'Bloody Sunday' in Northern Ireland is published, causing outrage among the people of Derry who call it the "Widgery Whitewash.”

19 April: British Prime Minister Edward Heath confirms that a plan to conduct an arrest operation, in the event of a riot during the march on 30 January 1972, was known to British government Ministers in advance.

22 April: An 11-year-old boy killed by a rubber bullet fired by the British Army in Belfast; he was the first to die from a rubber bullet impact.

22 April: The Sunday Times Insight Team publish their account of the events of 'Bloody Sunday.’

10 May: An Irish Republican Army bomb starts a fire that destroys the Belfast Co-operative store.

13 May: Battle at Springmartin: following a loyalist car bombing of a Catholic-owned pub in the Ballymurphy area of Belfast, clashes erupt between PIRA, UVF and British Army.

14 May: 13 year old Catholic girl is shot dead by Loyalist paramilitaries in Ballymurphy, Belfast.

17 May: The Irish Republican Army (IRA) fires on workers leaving the Mackies engineering works in west Belfast (Although the factory was sited in a Catholic area it had an almost entirely Protestant workforce.

21 May: The Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA) kidnaps and shoots dead William Best (19), a soldier in the Royal Irish Rangers stationed in Germany whilst on leave at home.

22 May: Over 400 women in Derry attack the offices of Official Sinn Féin in Derry, North Ireland, following the shooting of William Best by the Official Irish Republican Army.

24 May: Official Irish Republican Army (OIRA) kidnaps and shoots dead William Best (19), a soldier in the Royal Irish Rangers stationed in Germany whilst on leave at home.

26 May: The Irish Republican Army (IRA) plant a bomb in Oxford Street, Belfast, killing a 64 year old woman.

28 May: Four Provisional Irish Republican Army volunteers and four civilians killed when a bomb they were preparing exploded prematurely at a house in Belfast.

29 May: The Official IRA announce a ceasefire.

2 June: British soldiers die in an IRA land mine attack near Rosslea, County Fermanagh.

11 June: Gun battle between Loyalist and Republican paramilitaries break out in the Oldpark area of Belfast.

13 June: The Irish Republican Army invites British Secretary of State for Northern Ireland Willie Whitelaw to 'Free Derry'; Whitelaw rejects offer and reaffirms his policy to not "let part of the United Kingdom ... default from the rule of law.”

14 June: Members of the NI Social Democratic and Labour Party hold a meeting with representatives of the Irish Republican Army in Derry; the IRA representatives outline their conditions for talks with the British Government.

15 June: The Social Democratic and Labour Party meet Secretary of State for Northern Ireland W Whitelaw, to present the IRA's conditions for a meeting.

18 June: 3 members of the British Army are killed by an Irish Republican Army (IRA) bomb in a derelict house near Lurgan, County Down.

19 June: A Catholic civilian is shot dead by the Provisional Irish Republican Army in the Cracked Cup Social Club, Belfast; Secretary of State for Northern Ireland William Whitelaw concedes 'special category' status, or 'political status' for paramilitary prisoners in Northern Ireland.

20 June: Secret Meeting Between IRA and British Officials held.

22 June: The Irish Republican Army announce that it would call a ceasefire from 26 June 1972 provided that there is a "reciprocal response" from the security forces.

24 June: The Irish Republican Army (IRA) kill 3 British Army soldiers in a land mine attack near Dungiven, County Derry.

26 June: IRA proclaims resistant in North-Ireland; The Provisional Irish Republican Army (IRA) begin a "bi-lateral truce" as at midnight; The Irish Republican Army (IRA) kill two British Army soldiers in separate attacks during the day.

30 June: Ulster Defence Association (UDA) begin to organise its own 'no-go' areas (this is a response to the continuation of Republican 'no-go' areas and fears about concessions to the IRA).

2 July: Two Catholic civilians are shot and killed in Belfast by Loyalist paramilitaries, probably the Ulster Defence Association (UDA)

3 July: The Ulster Defence Association and the British Army come into conflict about a 'no-go' area at Ainsworth Avenue, Belfast

4 July: The Royal Ulster Constabulary forward a file about the killings on 'Bloody Sunday' (30 January 1972) to the Director of Public Prosecutions for Northern Ireland

5 July: Two Protestant brothers are found shot dead outside of Belfast (speculation that they were killed by Loyalists because they had Catholic girlfriends).

7 July: Secret Talks Between IRA and British Government: Gerry Adams is part of a delegation to London for talks with the British Government; 7 people are killed in separate incidents across Northern Ireland.

9 July: Springhill Massacre: British snipers shoot dead five Catholic civilians and wounded two others in Springhill, Belfast; The ceasefire between the Provisional IRA and the British Army comes to an end.

13 July: A series of gun-battles and shootings erupt across Belfast between the Provisional Irish Republican Army and British Army soldiers.

18 July: The 100th British soldier to die in the Northern Ireland "troubles" is shot by a sniper in Belfast; Leader of the British Labour Party Harold Wilson holds meeting with representatives of the Irish Republican Army.

21 July: Bloody Friday: within the space of seventy-five minutes, the Provisional Irish Republican Army explode twenty-two bombs in Belfast; six civilians, two British Army soldiers and one UDA volunteer were killed, 130 injured.

22 July: 2 Catholics are abducted, beaten, and shot dead in a Loyalist area of Belfast.

31 July: Operation Motorman: the British Army use 12,000 soldiers supported by tanks and bulldozers to re-take the "no-go areas" controlled by the Provisional Irish Republican Army; Claudy bombing: nine civilians were killed when three car bombs exploded in County Londonderry, North Ireland; no group has since claimed responsibility.

9 August: There is widespread and severe rioting in Nationalist areas of Northern Ireland on the anniversary of the introduction of Internment.

11 August: Two IRA members are killed when a bomb they were transporting exploded prematurely.

12 August: British soldiers are killed by an IRA booby trap bomb in Belfast.

14 August: A Catholic civilian is shot dead during an IRA attack on a British Army patrol in Belfast.

22 August: IRA bomb explodes prematurely at a customs post at Newry, County Down - 9 people, including three members of the IRA and five Catholic civilians, are killed in the explosion.

23 August: 4 civilians and 1 British soldier are injured in separate overnight shooting incidents in North Ireland.

2 September: The headquarters of the Ulster Unionist Party (UUP) in Belfast is severely damaged by an IRA bomb.

10 September: 3 British soldiers are killed in a land mine attack near Dungannon, County Tyrone.

14 September: 2 people are killed and 1 mortally wounded in a Ulster Volunteer Force bomb attack on the Imperial Hotel, Belfast.

20 September: The Social Democratic and Labour Party issues a document entitled "Towards a New Ireland", proposing that the British and Irish governments should have joint sovereignty over Northern Ireland.

6 October: Taoiseach (Irish Prime Minister) Jack Lynch closes the Sinn Féin office in Dublin.

10 October: 3 members of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) die in a premature explosion in a house in Balkan Street, Lower Falls, Belfast.

14 October: North Irish Loyalist paramilitaries raid Headquarters of the 10 Ulster Defence Regiment in Belfast and steal rifles and ammunition.

16 October: 2 members of the Offical Irish Republican Army are shot dead by the British Army in County Tyrone. Protestant youth members of the Ulster Defence Association, and a UDA member are run over by British Army vehicles during riots in east Belfast.

17 October: The Ulster Defence Association open fire on the British Army in several areas of Belfast.

19 October: The Ulster Defence Association open fire on the British Army in several areas of Belfast.

23 October: Loyalist paramilitaries carry out raid on an Ulster Defence Regiment.

24 October: British soldiers kill 2 Catholic men at a farm at Aughinahinch, near Newtownbbutler, County Fermanagh.

30 October: The Northern Ireland Office issues a discussion document 'The Future of Northern Ireland'; the paper states Britain's commitment to the union as long as the majority of people wish to remain part of the United Kingdom; Loyalist paramilitaries carry out a raid on Royal Ulster Constabulary station in County Derry, and steal 4 British Army Sterling sub-machine Guns.

31 October: 2 Catholic children (6 and 4) playing on the street are killed in a Ulster Freedom Fighters (UFF) car bomb attack on a bar in Ship Street, Belfast.

2 November: Government of the Republic of Ireland introduce a bill to remove the special position of the Catholic Church from the Irish Constitution.

5 November: Vice-President of Sinn Féin Maire Drumm is arrested in the Republic of Ireland.

19 November: Leader of the Irish Republican Army (IRA) Seán MacStiofáin is arrested in Dublin.

20 November: 2 British soldiers are killed in a booby trap bomb in Cullyhanna, County Armagh.

24 November: Taoiseach Jack Lynch meets with British Prime Minister Edward Heath in London to give Irish approval to Attlee's paper stating new arrangements should be 'acceptable to and accepted by the Republic of Ireland'

26 November: Bomb explosion at the Film Centre Cinema, in O’Connell Bridge House in Dublin.

28 November: 2 IRA members are killed in a premature bomb explosion in the Bogside area of Derry.

1 December: 2 people killed and 127 injured when 2 car bombs explode in the centre of Dublin, Republic of Ireland

20 December: Five civilians (four Catholics, one Protestant) killed in gun attack on the Top of the Hill Bar in Derry, North Ireland.

28 December: 2 people are killed in a Loyalist bomb attack on the village of Belturbet, County Cavan, Republic of Ireland.

29 December: President of Sinn Féin Ruairi O Bradaigh is arrested and held under new legislation in Republic of Ireland.

#ulster #northern ireland #irish republican army #sinn fein #the troubles #belfast #united kingdom #edward heath #derry

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lakeham · 5 years

Photo

CHARLOTTE DAVENPORT is 28 YEARS OLD, resides in GRANDVIEW and has lived in Lakeham for 18 YEARS. She is FEMALE and works as a FREELANCE WRITER. She is portrayed by MARGOT ROBBIE and is played by NATASHA.

Trigger Warnings: Death, drugs, depression.

The son of one of the most influential families in a wealthy Connecticut town falling in love with the daughter of a British lord was almost too perfect of a match. Jeff Davenport and Caroline Dormer met at Columbia University while they were pursuing master’s degrees; Jeff’s future working in his family’s company was decided for him while Caroline, who had no real desire to return to England to live as a noblewoman, had dreams of becoming a professor. Once the pair graduated and were engaged, there was no question that they were going to live in Jeff’s affluent hometown of Lakeham while he worked his way to being the CEO of his family’s Bridgeport-based cybersecurity company. Caroline taught mathematics at Lakeham University for some time, leaving the workforce entirely when she gave birth to their son Henry. Two girls followed in the subsequent years, Charlotte and Olivia. The Davenports had always wanted many children, not because they loved the idea of parenthood, but because they had a legacy to secure through them. They reminded themselves that a marriage like theirs, although based in love, was far too powerful to waste in any way but creating their own dynasty, a subset of the one that Jeff’s ancestors had begun when they settled in Lakeham.

Henry was the pride and joy of their family, the one who would eventually take over the family business, and the youngest daughter Olivia was the baby of the family who was constantly adored by both her parents and siblings. Charlotte was just that, Charlotte. She was seen as being beautiful and bookish, but no one else knew how to describe the black sheep of the Davenport family. Although she suffered from middle child syndrome and felt as though she was living in the shadows of her siblings, it would have been a lie to say that Charlotte was not loved by them. Jeff and Caroline tried their best to be the ever-loving parents, but they both had other priorities that took precedence over being there for their offspring. But if there was one thing that they had ensured to teach them, it was that their image and reputation were everything - only enhanced by associating with people of the same caliber as them. Valley Prep School was an easy time for Charlotte, with friends that her parents had deemed appropriate including her in their social circle. Insecurity plagued her brain as a teenager, knowing that had she not had the Davenport name backing her, she would not be friends with the people whom she called as such. Not that it mattered, as the young girl internalized that to be among them was a privilege that she should never question and should instead show gratitude for. So many teenage girls would give anything to be in her position, and she would be a fool to not acknowledge that. Henry played the role perfectly, and it would be an utter shame if she could not hold a torch to his performance.

Instead of following in the footsteps of her parents and older brother in attending Columbia when the time came, Charlotte flew across the pond to attend University College London in her mother’s homeland. Pursuing a degree in Comparative Literature with a concentration in French, Charlotte had no idea what she wanted to do with her life - just that there was more to it than the cushy confines of her family’s manor back in Lakeham. With Henry set to take over the family business, the middle Davenport child was free to make whatever life choices she wanted - within reason, of course. Caroline’s family was ever present in London, and welcomed their American relative with arms wide open. Her cousins invited her to social gatherings among London’s upper class, and for someone who had such distaste for her New England aristocratic upbringing, Charlotte ironically adored the British high society lifestyle and even thrived as an honorary socialite for some time. London had become her second home and she vowed that she would be back once she had seen enough of the rest of the world. As much as Henry and Olivia begged her to come back, Charlotte had no intentions of returning to Lakeham. In her eyes, she would have been returning to exactly what she wanted to escape: a stagnant and elitist society, where she would never be seen as anything but Jeff Davenport’s beautiful and introverted daughter. Although her older brother Henry especially kept bringing up the topic, Charlotte reassured him of her affection for him but also her reluctance to return to the life she once knew and did not enjoy, not when there was a chance to create a future independent of her family name, the future that she chose for herself.

Getting certified to teach English as a Second Language was not difficult, and getting a placement to teach in France at first was simple as well given her knowledge of the language. Being based in a small town in southern France teaching teenagers for two years, Charlotte embraced the culture and immersed herself in the French language before deciding that she wanted to move on to her next destination. The next four years were spent as an expat, from teaching English in South Korea to doing humanitarian work in Costa Rica to spending time on a working holiday visa in Australia. While she worked, Charlotte did some freelance writing jobs over the years, writing pieces mostly for lifestyle publications and even started her own blog. Her brother’s continuous pleas for her to return home fell on deaf ears, as the blonde ignored them and continued to embrace the life that she was meant to live. Her living conditions were not luxurious by any means, but she was truly happy with her life and the spontaneity of not knowing what country or project it would lead her to next.

It was in Australia that she crossed paths with a British expat who was also working there, and for the first time in her life, Charlotte was falling in love with a person instead of a place. Like her, David was also from an affluent family but wanted to forge his own path in the world, which led him to Sydney and right into Charlotte’s life. What started off as just them having fun turned into a serious courtship, with the pair becoming engaged just a little over a year into dating with plans to go to London for the time being, where they would marry in the presence of their friends and families before embarking on their next journey together. Once again, Henry’s desperate pleas for his sister to return home were met with an exasperated sigh, with Charlotte not knowing why a thirty-year-old man was so insistent on his sister being in the same place as him. Could he have not respected her newfound independence and desire to be on her own, regardless of how she felt about him? Their last conversation would haunt the young woman forever, as it was a week later that she received the call that no one had wanted to: Henry had died of a drug overdose in a Bridgeport hotel room. Charlotte’s world crumbled with that news, how long had he been using? Were his pleas for her to come home also a cry for help? Had she really been that selfish to ignore her older brother’s issues and focused on her own goals too much to see that she was needed by one of the people she cared about the most?

Charlotte and David were only supposed to have been in Lakeham for two weeks to attend Henry’s funeral and offer support to her family. It was the first time that the blonde had stepped foot on American soil since she was eighteen years old, and she was a changed woman since then, given her experiences and growth over the prior decade. The night before their transatlantic flight back to London Heathrow, Charlotte told her fiancé that she needed some more time in Lakeham and that he should go back to London and she’d join him soon. She was lucky to have such an understanding and patient man by her side, who was more than willing to give her the time she needed. The couple parted ways for the time being while David headed home, wanting to give Charlotte some the opportunity to collect herself and be at peace with her family - if only she knew how to do that.

❝ I'M OUT WITH LANTERNS, LOOKING FOR MYSELF.❞

It has been one year since Henry’s death, and almost a year since Charlotte has been back in Connecticut. She is still in a strained long distance relationship with her fiancé, who has grown frustrated with her reluctance to return to London or even set a wedding date, always telling him that she is “ not ready”. Quite a jump from the months prior to losing her brother, when she knew that she was ready to settle down with David and fairly sure of herself. She has since moved back into the Davenport manor in Grandview, although it had become a shell of the home that it once was. Her parents were devastated after having lost their only son, and Olivia… Charlotte did not even know where to start with her younger sister. She has been trying to read the youngest Davenport’s true emotions regarding their family and would like to rekindle their relationship, but also knowing what it feels like to need space she did not want to stifle her.

Charlotte’s career has been paused, but she has been keeping somewhat busy with continuing her freelance career while falling back on her financial stability, credited to her own savings and her family’s money that she was given. Being a jack of all trades but a master of none, she has yet to choose something to focus mostly one from her extensive resume of teaching, volunteering, and writing. She is contracted to write various pieces for publications and websites, sometimes thinking of starting an actual career but not knowing exactly where to begin.

Anyone who knows Charlotte is waiting to see which country she flies off to next, or what her next job would be. Surely she would not be staying in Lakeham, as she has enjoyed her time away from it far too much and had a life waiting to begin in England. She is definitely not a contender to take over the Davenport business, and the only person she would have stayed behind for is deceased. But Charlotte cannot bring herself to leave Lakeham yet again, as the sadness and guilt have consumed her and made her unsure even of what her purpose in life is. Death changes people, and she had been unprepared for it. She only hopes that she can keep her head above water long enough to find a life jacket, unsure as to how to ask for the help that she so desperately needs.

Charlotte has been running a travel and lifestyle blog for the past five years, documenting her various stints in different countries and the lives she leads in each one, seeing no two as being the same. But her online life has been on a hiatus since she returned to Connecticut, with only throwback photos being posted. She is not ready to come out to her followers about the pain that she is enduring currently. Her blog is her happy place, why should she ruin it? That being said, she hates the term “influencer” despite having a significant social media following due to her blog.

Ever since she left home for university, Charlotte has always wanted a pet but has never had the time to actually take care of one, with being so busy and moving from country to country. She is definitely more of a cat person than a dog person, and plans on adopting one soon now that she’s settled for the time being.

Charlotte loves being by bodies of water, and she can often be found on the beach or by Lake Marin relaxing peacefully. However, she is not much of a swimmer.

(+) Intelligent, compassionate, open-minded. (-) Guarded, self-righteous, hypocritical.

#charlotte davenport #margot robbie #female #all #grandview #tw drugs #tw depression #tw death

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josiemaxinegallows · 5 years

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LIFE BEGINS AT CUM Sermon #1 of the SUNDAY SATANISM series by Josie M. Gallows

Life begins at cum. Cum doesn’t have a heartbeat but it can travel. Cum is alive. When a cumshot is killed we call it “spermicide.” When an egg dies that’s called “ovicide.”

The abortion debate is a moral stopwatch. When is life alive? Choose your philosophy. The intrepid sperm is alive. The egg, also. Both have potential to become Bible believing patriots. Inshallah. Certain extremists take these factoids deadly serious. The anti-masturbators of the past are the great-grandpappies of today’s anti-abortion sharia.

Zygotes and blastocysts are living. But they’re unthinking. Devoid of personality. No stake in the world of human affairs. No history, with thousands of man hours invested. Unlike the mother, the fetus is alive but has no life that can be halted, delayed, or destroyed. Nobody relies on the unwanted fetus. The fetal heartbeat can’t be heartbroken. It knows nothing about itself. The fetus is the most innocent thing in all the world, because it’s a non-person.

Pregnancy effects the woman more than abortion effects the unborn. Abortion isn’t a care free decision but the scales have been miscalibrated. Intentionally.

It’s political theater. The Christians who rule value the cumshot more than the woman. They legitimize their rule by appealing to ignorant sentimentality. Observe the very same men, and their dutiful wives, dispassionate towards every other example of innocent life. It’s assured these men are unsympathetic to strange fetuses. They bother because of theater, simple and plain. Their own misogynistic superstition plays a role, and takes its toll, but whatever the motivation, the damage is the same.

Dysfunctional Christian strongholds such as Georgia and Alabama are threatening the state’s violence against women who might need an abortion. I’m sure, the Mega Churches blame loose moral values for the “murder of babies.” They indict everything but Christianity for the sorry state of family values. But they don’t get off the hook. Christianity is the loose moral value.

The state of family life is botched by religions like Christianity. The church is why the proletariat struggles to find its footing. Place your hopes and your values in the unreal and a barren harvest is a sure thing. The Satanic Age can’t be faulted. The church can be blamed for Girls Gone Stupid. I blame the peer pressure of good Christian morality for every teenage girl who stunts her future by the wretchedly sentimental act of becoming a teen mom, in this day and age; if she has any choice. Chances are, she doesn’t have a choice. I don’t blame sexual promiscuity.

Without the church, abortion and dysfunction wouldn’t occur at the rate they do. If the Satanic Age, an age of meaningful liberty, were allowed to flourish and take its final shape – and sooner rather than later, it will – only the most necessary of abortions would take place. Anton LaVey himself commented on this in Satan Speaks!, where he suggested compulsory sterilization. Read for yourself, The Third Side: The Uncomfortable Alternative, pages 30-31. With everything we’ve learned since then, perhaps it’s time to elaborate.

The Christian types have resisted, corrupted, or destroyed efforts to create a more responsible public, better fit for parenting and less likely to abort. The Christian resists education as a natural predator, because it challenges the primacy of The Holy Bible as the sole source of public wisdom. But it’s sexual education he truly rails against. Private neurosis becomes a civilization wide crisis.

As much as possible, the public’s kept in the dark about their own bodies, practically bereft of deeper knowledge about birth control and relationships. Resistance is met with an unhinged freak-out, each and every time. Ignorance, not family, is the public institution.

Forthcoming generations will be deprived of choice through sheer ignorance. The mutation is already taking hold. What good is a public, today, where only the therapist and the educator are compelled to learn about child psychology and child education? This is a profound loss to the species because Mega Church Christians are hysterical, in need of a 72-hour psych hold, that gays might be included, that women wouldn’t be beasts of burden by default. The unreality of porn is the greatest source of sex ed for boys. Good going, Jesus.

There is a gaping hole where adult values have been effectively sledge hammered out of the wall between order and chaos. The most basic of instruction is morally troubled. The young won’t learn the folkways and traditions that made life effective in the old world. The third world can do more with less. The western kiddo is deprived, because the girl might be oppressed and the boy might be sissified by wearing an apron. They aren’t taught to cook, clean, build, organize, mend, hunt, or study for anything but a standardized test. They don’t learn to grow, preserve, take inventory, or balance an account. They certainly won’t learn to be effective parents, parents on purpose, able to delegate roles, and capable of discipline without abuse. Their own parents won’t be around to teach these things in full because, thanks to Protestant austerity, both parents are entrenched in the workforce. Seeing as the churches on every street corner don’t pay their taxes, to subsidize the results of their own fuck-up failures, it wouldn’t be affordable to institute these solutions anyway. Let me make it Satanically clear, the zygote has little to look forward to.

Let’s no longer pretend Christian hyperbole isn’t to blame, please and thank you. It’s time to skewer the bastards. They’ve had US Surgeon Generals fired in disgrace for trying to turn the tide. It’s not hypothetical. Our botched republics are at least one part theocracy, right now. Each of us have a vested interest in dismantling Christendom.

The Christian man can’t get a clue. After millennia of accrued evidence that hormones are stronger than scripture, he persists in his delusional pipe-dream that abstinence will save the soul of the nation. Of the 2 billion odd Christians, the majority of them are Catholic. The Catholic is well known to teach the poor, destitute, or insane, to forego contraceptives. The missionaries of Christ are plague rats who journey to regions frequented by famine, drought, and genocide. In their wake, they leave behind the building blocks of ignorance. Be fruitful and multiply, and should the babes die of dehydration, God bless. If abortion is murder, are missionaries enacting crimes against humanity? If we’re talking results, let’s talk negligent manslaughter. Can we try the Pope in Nuremberg? Every Mega Church pastor, too? And why not? Lately, they love the idea of threatening us with the state’s violence. Tit for fucking tat.

I suspect the degeneracy and misery they sow is coincidentally of great benefit to Christendom. If a child is born with his hands outstretched for alms then he’s a vassal to whoever controls the collection plate. The destitute and dysfunctional are most in need of the mad hope of spiritual religion. The more dysfunction at play the better, with less help to go around the desperation can only deepen, creating ever more loyal subservience. This is why the junkie, the convict, and the lunatic, are often the most devout believers. Look to the worst human settlements and you’ll find the most religion. It sure looks that way. It’s coincidental, but all the same.

Christian men don’t lead. They force. They penalize. Ironically, it’s not we Satanists who love a human sacrifice. It’s the Christian type, the Muslim type, who make burnt offerings of suffering women and children. The stench is pleasing to the nostrils of Allah. Here’s a secret: killing a woman isn’t necessary to sacrifice her to God. Remember that.

We do need a program of family planning. A real institution. A revolution of prevention would provide all the family values we’d ever need. What do we get instead? Pale face sharia.

The frauen of the church want the children of rape born into this world. The morally unsatisfied Christian man wants a mother’s trauma relived at every milestone of development. Allahu Ackbar. Children of incest would skinny dip in our gene pool, protecting and defending the purity of southern heritage. Christians want their own nightmarish conjuring of “family values, with no compromise and no revision. The Handmaid’s Tale feels less like speculative fiction and more like a plausible threat under the right working conditions. Christian family values reduce women into beasts of burden. Breeding stock. If it means killing our mothers, sisters, and daughters, then praise be. They would rescind the right to terminate a high risk pregnancy. In Jesus name, hands to the sky. A family should lose its matriarch for the sake of one doomed pregnancy.

The mother’s heartbeat is a chicken heart, to the Christian – she exists for her eggs. Her own heartbeat is a petty concern. Her body is meant to warm the nest and receive the cock. Nothing more. Thy Kingdom Cum.

By the sign of the cross, the bodies of women are livestock to be tortured, not respected. Should her fetus be nonviable, this Peckerwood Caliphate would have her carry the miscarriage to term, wrecking her mental and physical health in the process. If an accident should happen, should contraceptives fail, should a bright and talented woman be impregnated against her will, the saints would have her follow through. Carry the mistake to the very bitter end. Nevermind the repercussions to herself, to her family, or to her society. God is good. “Live with your mistakes,” she’s told. “Take responsibility.” Yet abortion is often the most responsible choice possible.

Under His Eye, a profoundly deformed fetus would be denied a merciful death in the comfort of the womb. The family home would become a hospice care for the irreparably broken. Christians fancy using adjectives like “unnatural” and “abomination.” Their tongues can’t taste the irony. There couldn’t be a more apt description of permissive, degenerate behavior, than rooting for the legally required birth of genetic tragedies. And yet, they’d deny women, at every opportunity, to choose health over deformity, to choose success over pointless drudgery. Foundering horses get more mercy at the hands of the farmer.

Since these Christians can’t send us to hell themselves, they seem bent on making the Earth as miserable as possible. And with what they’re pushing, they’re getting the job done as best they can.

What might be the Satanic alternative? The third side? “Of course, whenever an issue becomes more important than a solution, don’t expect to stumble over a third side.” Dok LaVey was right. And I don’t suspect any real solution, proposed by any Satanist, stands a chance of becoming the mainstream institution. Flying the banner of Satan over an issue would probably be detrimental, anyway. Though what could we do, individually, to fight back?

We need to knock the crucifix off the flag pole. We need education, to start with. Miseducation is the church’s lifeblood. With so much agitation about the pay of teachers, there’s not much talk about the usefulness of what they’re allowed to teach. The program must be fixed, from K to 12, from Associates to Bachelors. If the public infrastructure is rendered obsolete by moral trouble, then rational, secular, wealthy individuals with a stake in the future, might consider building an alternative – freely available. Perhaps. A revival of classic education and training, strengthened by the lessons we’ve learned in the last century, could be useful. Sex ed, and what comes after birth, would have its place.

Up next, accountability. I know it sounds feminist – and I know that puts it in the bargain bin of ideology for a great many of this “congregation” – but men aren’t taking nearly responsibility they could. The burdens of sexuality and care of the young still fall, mainly, to women. Should we stay 2,000 years backwards, also?

If not, it’s time to talk about the vasectomy. The vasectomy is the most effective, lowest risk, cost effective, least detrimental form of birth control on the market. It has no effect on hormones. It poses no risk of blood clot or mood instability. The vas differens, the small tube that makes ejaculate fertile, provides around 2% of the total volume in a cumshot. If a spectator were genuflecting for her facial, she could never tell the difference. It’s reliable and reversible. Some 80% of American men are circumcised so there should be no squeamishness involved here. Unlike circumcision, the vasectomy doesn’t decrease sexual pleasure. It’s not outwardly visible.

If it’s such a man’s world, where’s the man’s choice in conception?

How many parasitic industries would collapse in a generation were the vasectomy as common as the circumcision? If the vasectomy were incentivized, normalized, and subsidized as the responsible choice it is, Christianity would spring another leak in its gas tank. And we could start to say “Good riddance.” Where Satan is no longer an effective spook to lure in the masses, abortion picks up the slack. Take away abortion and we deprive the church of its holocaust propaganda.

The courts would lose their cut of the child support racket. Ghettos would flourish. With more to go around, and less waste, what would become of the welfare state? And in turn, the nanny state?

Schools would no longer be overcrowded brainwash laundromats, where thanks to inherited hardship we still separate our whites from our colors. Missionaries could dig wells while doctors without borders could perform vasectomies. The global population could start to shrink, reduced to only the most wanted, most loved, best cared for generations of children.

Tract housing wouldn’t scar the earth and wildlife could return, ecosystems restored. With so much concern for global warming and the clear cutting of rain forests, isn’t any sensible environmental policy one that reduces the human population and human consumption together? With so many human rights violations, wouldn’t a smaller, better educated, better prepared generation, be less susceptible to tyranny? By virtue of there being fewer people, each person would matter all the more. That sounds like pro-life to me.

Is my speculation so far fetched? Could the proliferation of schooling and the all-but-compulsory vasectomy get so much accomplished? Look to their absence. Look to a Christian Nation, as forced as it is. Look everywhere ignorance and theocracy hold hands.

The outrage will have its way. A woman’s choice vs. a woman’s jail time. And for all the sorrow caused by unplanned, unmitigated, uneducated parenthood, solutions will go ignored. Remember this, the uncomfortable third side is so uncomfortable because nobody gets to feel like a messiah, and somebody has to do an honest day’s work.

HAIL SATAN! Josie Maxine Gallows Kali Yuga

Disclaimer: the views expressed here are not THE Satanic view on abortion. But they are MY Satanic views on abortion. Cross-posted from my official website. Want more? Become a member of The Kali Yuga by subscribing to my content on PATREON. www.patreon.com/josiemaxinegallows

#abortion #satanism #feminism

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minghoy · 5 years

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Biggest Loser

The office did a 'Biggest Loser' contest the first quarter of 2019, right after Christmas. I caught the tail end of it this month when I re-joined the workforce, people walking around talking loud about how they've lost a kilogram or horrified mumbling about how they've gained a pound—a whole pound!—and today they announced the winners, two teams that collectively lost 9.78% and 7.23% of "body percentage." I think they mean body fat percentage, though I can't be sure. Maybe someone lost a limb. A kidney. Their appendix. Something they won't miss very much but is worth less than the cash the 'Piggy Wiggy Team' won for second place.

That's what they called themselves, The Piggy Wiggy Team. As if joining an office Biggest Loser contest wasn't humiliating enough. Anyone who's over an 18 BMI I've noticed likes to make other people very aware that they're aware they're a little goopier around the waist than they should be. I do it, too. A lot. As if we get points for self-awareness. I think there's this fear of not being in on the joke, and if you're laughing at yourself the same time as everyone else is, then maybe you're less of a punchline. You've got comedic ownership. You know, like, "I meant to do that." I meant to eat all that food. I meant to get this fat.

Anyway, an office Biggest Loser, as if offices aren't toxic enough cesspools in which eating disorders breed like petri dish viruses. Ditto schools. Ditto everywhere else. This is just the world we live in. The setting. Now the plot, the characters: the office Biggest Loser, and the woman I heard purging in the bathroom stall today, a woman on team Piggy Wiggy—beautiful, stylish, overall pretty classy and bougie, well-to-do, and apparently from an old-rich family, one of the five families that were here when this city mushroomed out of the sea.

She's in her mid-thirties. Let's call her Miss L. Miss L's one of the women the younger girls call "titas"—a group of women who torture themselves with keto diets and trendy fasts, who do yoga every other day and have motivational quotes in their cubicles, loud laughs, big hair. They love themselves. They want you to know they love themselves as they gorge on cake, pizza, garlic bread on birthday-month team feeds, and then always have cake in their cubicles for some reason, and they grab at anything that gets passed around the office, free or otherwise, with a hunger that I recognize in myself. So of course it's gross to me. It's horrific. It's like staring at your reflection at the bottom of a deep, dark well.

Our office has this quasi-open workspace thing going on: one wide floor but cubicles and wall-to-wall depression-blue carpet, blank white walls that reflect the depression-blue, and six windows that are never open. Sometimes it gets so loud I can't hear myself think. Even if I put headphones and brown noise on, I can still sense the conversations and the whine of workday stress going on around me, which is like tinnitus but with words. That's when I take my book and sit on the toilet for a while. It's quiet in there, and the people who clean it do a very good job of it, and there's even a nice green plant so it's this oasis of quiet in the middle of the workday if I can't get away from work for more than five minutes. (I get why people have beautiful bathrooms in their homes now. One day I'm going to have a beautiful bathroom with white tiles, a window, and a writing desk.)

I heard Miss L walk in, and then the gagging started, then that chunky, gloopy splash of solid food that's become so familiar and dear to me it sends a frisson of recognition through my spine so strong it makes me want to hurl, too. Except I haven't done that in a month. (There's a sign on my forehead: It's been 27 days since our last episode. This soon changes to 0 days, barely two weeks later, after I ill-advisedly weigh myself on a Friday night while I'm PMS-ing.)

I sit and listen to her purge. I listen to her purge. This woman is purging. I have this really vivid daydream about about kicking the door in and holding her head in the toilet to teach her a tough-love lesson about self-love. I imagine that I'm not sitting here and really I'm the one purging and someone else is listening to me purge. Listening to her purge is making me dissociate, and I can't sit here anymore so I flush the toilet to announce that someone else is there and get up to wash my hands. I wash my hands. She's sitting in there, trying to be quiet. She shuffles her feet.

How many times have I been this woman? I spent a lot of time getting acquainted with the toilets at the last office I worked in. This was at the height of my bulimia, when I was bingeing and purging two, maybe three times a day at work. McDonald's, corner store bread, cookies and milk, the latter so much that I developed a sensitivity to dairy and caffeine, which sucks because I love dairy and caffeine. My cheeks were always swollen. My eyes were always red. I was always in a shit mood. I didn't think anybody noticed, but of course they did, and when I finally told K, an ex-coworker, about what was then my bulimia, she said she guessed that I was doing something like that in there, and that she wasn't sure what to do—if she should talk to me about it or not.

(You can bet she talked about it with other people, though.)

Like most people beset by eating disorders, my complicated relationship with food started when I was very young. My grandmother and my great aunt expressed their love with food, and food shut me up when I was throwing tantrums and being a generally shitty, angry little kid and when I was a shitty, angry teenager. It shuts me up as a shitty, angry young adult, except these days I'm starting to understand that I'm probably trying to fill up a different kind of void. Not that knowing why you do something makes it easier not to do it.

My partner, who in my eyes is the most understanding and intelligent person in the world, doesn't get why people do things that upset them. I wish I had an satisfying answer for why binge eaters binge eat, or why anorexics can't just eat a burger and be okay with it, or why drug addicts keep doing drugs even after they've ruined their lives and alienated themselves from their entire families because of them.

If it were that simple, the economy would crumble. Self-help magnates and motivational speakers would be out of jobs. The diet industry would vanish into thin (ha) air. Every marketer in the world would starve.

The ugly truth is that like most people, and like Miss L, I'm probably always going to be dieting, always going to be trying to lose weight, always going to be unhappy with the way I look, am, feel, etc., and even if I were to recover from my eating disorder I know there'd be times where the angry baby brain-monster tantrums in its cage and kicks up such a fuss it's easier to just give it what it wants rather than to sit there and endure the noise.

I don't know why there are so many of us like this, why we're so dissatisfied with ourselves.

If I were to find a purpose, if I were to find something else to obsess over, something that I cared about more than what I looked like, would I be able to forget about my obsession with food and the way I look? If Miss L, who's a mother and a career woman and in all other aspects successful still hasn't gotten over this obsession with food and looks, do I even stand a chance? Do any of us?

If this were a story I could give it some kind of resolution, or some kind of confrontation that has all the twanging of hope. Miss L and I could lock eyes on our way out of the bathroom stalls, exchanging looks that said, 'I see you. I understand. You're not alone.' In the real world we don't talk to each other unless we need to, and we hardly ever need to, and when I walk past her cubicle I try not to make eye contact because I'm afraid she might see that I know what she's doing when she ducks for another mouthful of the slice of carrot cake she keeps on top of her computer tower. I try not to listen to her talk to the other titas about "gaining all the weight back," and I don't say a word to her unless I need to. I don't make eye contact. I'm afraid she'll see the hunger in me, too.

#eating disorders #weight loss #weight loss competition #office biggest loser #biggest loser #diet culture

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batneko · 6 years

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like a book

automatic writing soulmate au, Saitama/Genos, mostly montages and fluff and a touch of hurt/comfort

warnings for parental death, depression, and implied teenage horniness

rating: G words: 3386

Saitama's soulmate thought too much.

He decided this when he was fifteen, after filling up yet another sheet of what was supposed to be exam notes with stream-of-thought ramblings. The stuff they were thinking about was familiar, school subjects that Saitama had covered years ago. But his soulmate (and Saitama didn't want to assume a gender) was working way harder than Saitama ever had back then.

Honestly, an entire page comparing political coups? Listing similarities and differences, accounting for outside influences and personal motivations, the success or failure of the overthrowers. It was crazy!

If only they were the same age, this stuff might actually be useful.

It was a good thing that they were so studious, though. If they spent so much time concentrating on studies they probably didn't check in on Saitama very often. And Saitama's thoughts for the last couple years had been full of... well... stuff that made him realize he couldn't assume a gender for his soulmate.

Saitama didn't start checking on his soulmate until he was ten. He knew about them, sure, everyone did. It would be like not knowing about birds, or trees. Soulmates were just a fact of the world. But he'd never thought much about his until he got old enough to think about his future.

He'd done it by accident a couple times before when he was younger. Sitting there with a crayon in hand, staring off into space, his arm had suddenly been pulled by something he couldn't see, and before he knew it there was a startlingly detailed drawing of a woman's face rendered in green crayon. His teacher had seen it and cooed, and said it was probably his soulmate's mother. So Saitama gave it to his mother, who put it away somewhere special. Everybody told him that was just a thing that happened sometimes, so he forgot about it pretty quickly.

A couple years later, a few months after the funeral, Saitama saw his father sitting alone at the kitchen table. He had a single sheet of paper in front of him, and a pen in his hand. Even from the doorway Saitama could see his knuckles had gone white from the strength of his grip. As Saitama watched his hand began to tremble violently. But still, Saitama's father didn't move. Nothing but the shaking of his writing hand.

The next day Saitama asked a teacher what happened when your soulmate died. He could tell she didn't want to answer, but it was the first time Saitama had spoken at school aside from his introduction. That evening he tried it himself, alone in his room. His hand moved by itself, like an invisible puppeteer was pulling it, and a rough sketch of bunnies eating clover appeared beneath his pen.

Saitama laughed. It felt hollow and empty, but it was still the first time he'd laughed since...

For a couple years it was like that. Nothing but drawings or the wavy lines of sleep. Sometimes they were the really detailed ones depicting a real thing, sometimes it was loose sketches for thoughts. But as time went on Saitama's soulmate started thinking more and more. And soon it was nothing but words, a lot of them, all at once, sometimes so fast that Saitama's shoulder would hurt when he stopped.

And Saitama got older too. He recovered, more or less. He stopped needing the reassurance every day that his soulmate was out there and fine.

Well, as "fine" as someone who read Heien-era poetry apparently just for fun could be.

One evening when Saitama was in his last year of college (he could have graduated sooner but he wasn't exactly in a hurry to join the workforce), he grabbed a notebook and a pencil like he did once a week or so. His roommates were hogging the TV, he'd done as much homework as he cared to, and it was too much effort to go out looking for entertainment. He figured he'd see whatever his soulmate was fixated on today and then go to bed early.

Saitama sat down at the little kitchen table, pen in hand, and stared at the blank page for a moment to allow his thoughts to drift.

His fingers seized.

Clenched around the pencil, so hard his knuckles went white. Fear like a wave of ice shot through him, his stomach dropped down to his feet, and for a flash Saitama saw the rest of his life laid out ahead of him. Empty, lonely, silent. Would he go like his dad had, drawing away from everyone around him? Would he even be able to take it?

And then his hand jerked, scrawling across the page, a thick heavy line. Then another, and another, so hard it tore through the paper. By the time Saitama managed to yank his hand back he had a huge angry scribble before him.

"Dude." One of Saitama's roommates (the better one) looked at him from the couch. "What are you doing?"

"I..." Saitama glanced at the scribble again. "I don't know."

His roommate came to join him at the table. "Whoa. Are you okay?"

"Yeah. This... wasn't me."

"Your soulmate?" His eyes widened. "Is she okay?"

"I don't know." Saitama flipped to a new page, turning over two that the pencil had ripped, and placed his hand over it once again.

There wasn't that seizing feeling this time. As soon as Saitama made himself relax his hand began its frantic motion, practically stabbing through the paper and covering it in lines until the lead snapped. Even then Saitama's hand tried to draw more, dragging the bits of wood over the grooves of previous lines until Saitama managed to let go.

"Dude," his roommate said again, which seemed to sum things up.

"Has yours ever done this?" Saitama asked. His hand was still shaking.

"Nah but sometimes when she's mad I just end up writing like, AAAAAA."

Saitama flipped through the pages of the notebook. His soulmate's scribbles had even left an incident on the cardboard back cover.

"Give her some space," his roommate advised. "She'd probably be embarrassed if she ever found out about this."

Saitama waited two weeks. Fourteen days, he counted down. He'd wanted to wait only a week, but he felt so helpless knowing his soulmate was upset and he could do nothing. Surely two weeks would be enough for whatever-it-was to pass.

On the fifteenth day he sat down, in the library this time, with two cheap notepads stacked on top of each other to protect the table. It took him a moment to relax, to clear his head when he was so worried (the last couple weeks had not done his grades any favors), but once he did he began to write.

tungsten has the highest melting point but in its pure form can be brittle and hard to work tungsten carbide is a 9 on the Mohs scale but inhalation of the dust can lead to fibrosis and is difficult to process in large quantities carbon fiber is

Well that was more like it. Saitama had never seen his soulmate thinking about metals before, but it was certainly in character.

Saitama told himself to stop worrying about it. His soulmate was a teenager now, as evidenced by their recent worrying about entrance exams and their increasing interest in boys. Teenage emotions always ran high. They were probably fine, and in a few years when they found each other Saitama could ask him about it. Or not, like his roommate suggested.

It would be fine.

***

Genos made a difference, though Saitama was reluctant at first to admit it even to himself. He'd expected to be annoyed by his constant presence, but Genos had already been coming around every day for weeks. Hell, Saitama had given him a key. He shouldn't have been surprised when Genos wanted to move in.

It was different, that was for sure, but it was a good different. Having someone to talk to, to eat with, who was willing (downright eager) to clean the bathroom when Saitama couldn't work up the energy. There was an adjustment period, yeah, but Saitama didn't really feel like he needed to "get used" to Genos living there. He just... slotted into place. Like he'd been made to fit.

Realizing he was starting to fall in love with him was an issue. But Saitama blamed it on loneliness and tried to ignore it.

A few months after they started living together, almost two months after Saitama figured out his attraction and affection had mingled into something deeper, Saitama was flipping through channels one evening while Genos wrote in his latest notebook. He didn't much like being studied, but it was the whole reason Genos was here, after all.

Nothing was on. Saitama tried the different news programs, but it was just interviews about movies he wasn't interested in. He looked at Genos again, scribbling away, and got the idea to check on his soulmate.

It had been a while. He felt guilty when he thought about them, especially whenever he caught himself fantasizing about Genos and wondered whether they'd been writing it. But it was only fair, his soulmate seemed to have a crush on one of their teachers. The times he tried recently it was nothing but "sensei this" or "sensei that."

Over the last few years they'd developed an odd sort of obsession with robotics and metals. It was pretty interesting, pretty impressive if they were pursuing a career in it. But if they were still in school it was too early to start trying to find each other, so Saitama kept reminding himself that it was perfectly normal to go through a few relationships before you settled down.

He might as well try it, there was nothing else to do. Saitama found the beat up yellow notepad he used for shopping lists and sat down across the table from Genos.

Just a second, to clear his head, just like always. Then Saitama's hand was pulled by someone else's muscles into writing a string of numbers that he was pretty sure were weight measurements.

900 kilos without strain not that it's unexpected it's always like this one of these days I should ask sensei to do some tests but he'll probably just say it's a pain better to leave him alone

This "sensei" again. Saitama really didn't have the right to be jealous, considering he had feelings for somebody who called him sensei, but it was hard to turn off. He heard Genos give a little exhale, the closest he got to sighing.

I'm bothering him I know I'm bothering him but I have to keep doing this, it's the only way I have to protect the only people I have left

And then Saitama's hand stopped. It had never done this before, not in the middle of writing. He didn't have enough time to be scared before he moved over a line and wrote:

what are you always thinking about so hard?

It wasn't like normal. When Saitama channeled his soulmate's thoughts it felt like his hand was being moved by someone else, but this time it was definitely his own power. Except he hadn't chosen to write it; he was thinking it and it just spilled out.

The puppet-hand feeling he was so used to happened again, this time writing:

Revenge. Strength. My sensei. Shopping.

Saitama snorted and wrote, I think about shopping a lot too.

Why are you so sad?

Saitama blinked. It was a second before he wrote back.

I'm not?

You are. Your thoughts are always lonely, or melancholy.

Was that true? Saitama didn't think he was sad. Sure he was alone a lot and he sometimes thought about how he didn't have any friends outside of hero work... about how he didn't have much of anything, really... about how hard it was to be happy...

He wrote, I didn't know.

There was a sound like a hiccup from across the table, and Saitama glanced up from his paper conversation. Genos had pressed a hand to his mouth, pen gripped in the other, and thick drops of oil were trailing down his cheeks.

Saitama dropped his pencil. "Oh, dude, you okay?"

Genos nodded, but Saitama was already on his feet. "I'm fine sensei, I... I just read something..."

Saitama went to retrieve the heavy-duty tissues from the kitchen. He sat next to Genos when he returned, hand on his back in an attempt to be comforting. He didn't know what to do, even though this happened on a semi-regular basis. Genos was so intense about everything.

Funny. The words his soulmate had written spring to mind. Revenge. Strength. My sensei. Shopping. That was pretty much what Genos spent his time on too.

Maybe the reason Saitama fell for him was that Genos subconsciously reminded him of his soulmate? They were both younger, both overthinkers, both smarter than him...

Genos had been writing while Saitama got the tissues, but now he set his pen down and reached out to close the notebook. Saitama's eyes automatically followed the motion, and he saw a few short lines in Genos' precise handwriting that looked like a conversation.

He only glimpsed it, only for a second before Genos shut the pages, but he knew what he saw.

Revenge. Strength. My sensei. Shopping.

Saitama's mouth went dry. Genos was still sniffling and wiping his tears, he hadn't noticed anything.

"Genos?" Saitama heard himself say.

"I'm okay, sensei," Genos reassured him. "I apologize. I... There is someone I wish to help, but I can't. Not yet."

He swallowed, not easy with his suddenly-parched throat. "Were you talking to your soulmate?"

Genos glanced at the notebook, almost guilty. "Yes. It was the first time we've been writing at the same time."

"What did he say? What did you say?"

"Not much. I think it was a surprise for both of us. But..." Genos grabbed another tissue for a new crop of tears. "He's- he's so sad, all the time, and... It's been getting better, the last couple months, but even if I was there I don't know if I could help."

"You do." Saitama felt like he was watching this play out from a distance. From a stage inside his own head. "You are."

Genos looked at him in utter confusion. "Sensei?"

"I didn't know. I thought it was normal. It's normal for me." Saitama shook his head. "But then you cried when I told you about some of it. And King too, he didn't cry, but he didn't leave me alone for like three days afterward."

Genos was still crying but he'd given up on the tissues, letting the tears fall freely as he stared at Saitama with wide eyes. "Sensei?"

Saitama got up on his knees and reached across the table. On the yellow notebook, in his own handwriting, was the same conversation he'd seen in Genos' journal.

Genos took the notebook in both hands, staring at it as tears stained his shirt. "This... But it can't be... Can it?"

"Do you have another explanation?" Mostly for something to do with his hands, Saitama wiped Genos' cheek. "I dunno how I didn't figure it out sooner. I've been reading you think about cybernetics and stuff for years."

"But then," Genos sniffled, "that guy you've been thinking about? That's me?"

"Uh." Saitama felt his ears getting hot. "Probably. What kind of- Never mind, I don't want to know."

"I was jealous." At least Genos was smiling through his tears now. "But I didn't feel like I had the right to be, because I had feelings for someone else too."

Saitama buried his face in his hands and let out a wet laugh. The moisture in his face-holes had come back full force, he was in real danger of starting to cry too. "Except you didn't because I'm me."

He could hear Genos smirking. "Yes sensei."

It was all too much to process. Ten minutes ago Saitama was sitting with his roommate and crush and self-proclaimed student and checking on his soulmate, like he had a dozen times before. Now those people were one person and his feelings were returned and... where could he even start?

He'd daydreamed about meeting his soulmate before. Thought about what he was gonna say and do and wear. All the questions he had, all the-

Saitama's head jerked up. There was one thing he hadn't been intending to ask about, but now he realized he already knew the answer.

"Four years ago," he said. "I- I was checking your thoughts and it was just... awful. Anger and pain. That was..."

Genos rubbed one last tissue across his face, tears drying up as his expression grew serious. "The day the Mad Cyborg attacked. Yes, I think so. Or... not long after, I felt nothing but those things for some time."

"I'm sorry," Saitama said. "I thought it was better to leave you alone. Give you space. But I should have tried to help."

Genos smiled, softly. "You did."

"I didn't even try to find you!"

"How could you have, sensei? I didn't know where I was. I was so preoccupied with what happened and my new body that I didn't think to ask Dr. Kuseno where his lab was actually located for months."

"But I didn't-"

"Sensei," Genos said firmly. "You helped."

Saitama couldn't exactly argue with that tone. "How?"

Genos' eyes fell to his hands, clutching damp tissues in his lap. "When I was... recovering. Learning to use my body. Learning to walk again. I found that I could still channel your thoughts as easily as I ever had. I didn't have to worry about how inflexible my joints were, how imprecise my fingers were. All I had to do was put a pen in my hand and you would move it for me." He looked up and gave that soft smile again. "Besides, you did enough worrying for both of us."

Saitama couldn't hold the eye contact for long. "Sorry. It's just-"

"You were afraid I was dead, I understand sensei. And I didn't mind, I was glad." Genos hunched his shoulders. "Maybe that sounds selfish. Whenever I wrote your thoughts it was always, 'I hope you're okay, please be okay, are you okay?'" His voice dropped. "'Please don't leave me.'"

Saitama gulped.

"It reminded me that I wasn't alone. I still had someone who needed me. Who wanted me to be okay."

"I... I still shoulda tried."

Genos shook his head. "I don't think I was ready to meet you then. I think... I think, sensei, we met exactly how we were meant to. So that I'd know how amazing you were before I knew you were mine."

Saitama's heart started pounding suddenly, jumping up by what felt like at least ten beats. "That sounds good."

"What does?"

"You. Saying I'm yours."

Genos' eyes widened and his pupils did that size-changing thing that Saitama strongly suspected meant he was recording. "D- does it?"

"Yeah." Saitama leaned in. "'Cuz it's true."

He met Genos' lips, soft and warm, slick with oil where Genos had inadvertently smeared it. They fit perfectly against Saitama's, like they'd been born for it. Or designed for it. Whichever.

"Sensei," Genos murmured when Saitama pulled away. He swayed forward, like he wanted more, but Saitama didn't give in to the temptation. Not yet.

"Um. So. You probably know already," Saitama gestured at the two notebooks and the abandoned pens. "But I love you."

"Sensei!" Genos threw himself into Saitama's arms, sobbing openly. Whoops, that had a bigger impact than intended. But Saitama couldn't say he minded, not really, not when he'd been reading Genos overreact to stuff since he was twelve.

This was who Genos was. Thinking too much and fixating on things and crying because he felt all his feelings to their fullest extent. And Saitama loved him. He'd been born to love him, and then he'd fallen for him anyway on top of that.

"I love you too," Genos proclaimed between hiccups. "I love you so much!"

Saitama hugged him, as tightly as he dared. "We've been helping each other this whole time," he said. "But can you... help me a little more?"

"Anything, sensei!"

"Call me Saitama."

#one punch man #saitama x genos #soulmates #soulmate au #opm #saigenos #genosai #batfics #genotama #soulmate #soulmates au

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beertengoku · 6 years

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Here at BeerTengoku, we believe in bringing people to drink together and talk over a few pints of craft beer. We may not agree with what makes craft beer, what constitutes a good beer, or even if a beer is any good or not. Yes, Joe and myself do make jokes at each other’s expense. However, one thing that we can all agree on is that everyone should be treated equally and with respect.

Women make up 50% or so of the population of Earth – give or take a few hundreds of million people. Japan makes up 127,000,000 or so of that population, with a female to male ratio standing at roughly 0.95. That means for every female in Japan, there are 0.95 males1, which means Japan has a population of 66 million females vs 61 million males or so. An important statistic that we’ll come back to later on.

While times are changing, with more and more women remaining in the workforce, or reentering after childbirth, some things do not change. Household finances are one of them. Japan is very different to other countries, besides the oft-told-myth of Japan having four seasons.

In Japan, the wife is usually the head of finances – something that is often long talked about and is a very different custom, compared to other developed nations. The husband tends to work full time hours, sometimes staying late in the office as he tries to out-sleep his coworkers to show how hard he is working. The salary for all that sleeping goes to the house account, where he then is dealt a monthly allowance by the wife, who has carefully calculated the outgoings and balanced them to ensure the kids can go to school, everyone is fed, and all are sorted for the month.

Even though roles are showing signs of changing, some things still persist in Japan and that is advertising. Women are still used as advertising tools, be it from your clothes, house hunting, toys, family stuff, right through to more dubious circumstances such as beer modelling. While the former are usually done tastefully or are often intermixed with both sexes, the latter still needs a lot of work. Drastically.

Starting with the perhaps least condescending. Some breweries advertise their beers towards women with a belief that the sweet, gentle beers are more suited towards a woman’s palate. Some misguided notion that the bitter, hoppy kick to the face can’t be handled by such nice people. Yet go down to your local bar and you’ll see men drinking weizens and women drinking IPAs. Go even further afield and you’ll see women drinking imperial stouts and imperial IPAs too.

Beer bottles. While Japanese breweries do tend to lack with imaginative designs, some of them really do need changing. Shonan Beer Tsuma and also Barbaric Works Lick Me All Over use the naked female form to advertise their beer. The former features a full frontal nude of “an Oiso wife”, while the latter features a topless nude of a women with her tongue sticking out. Something that is truly unnecessary and smacks of an immature approach to their customers. While the bottles may be eye-catching and a talking point, it’s more than likely going to be towards a negative turning point, bringing negative impressions on the brewery.

Look at those bottles – and the final one. Is it necessary? (Courtesy of Barbaric Works)

Shonan Beer Tsuma – bodyshaming or a joke? (Courtesy of Shonan Beer)

While some may find that offensive, it does get worse. The big four breweries are known for producing posters each year, with bikini clad girls drinking their beers. Perhaps they hope that this will appeal to people to drink their beer. Does it work? Who knows. The big four produce so much beer that it seems like a moot point to use this way. However, Bay Brewing Yokohama have also taken this same approach. Go to any off their bars, and you can find their model posing with their beer. Does it convince me to drink the beer? No. Does it convince me to tell people about their beer? No.

So now we’re getting warmed up – the posters of bikini girls modeling a beer is outdated and out-fashioned but fewer breweries are using that idea to advertise their beers. Yet it still gets worse. For those who went to the Japan Brewers’ Cup then you know what’s coming up. “Entertainment” we shall say. While we all love some music, it should be appropriate to the surroundings. You wouldn’t really play thrash metal in your office at full volume as others are trying to work, unless you work at Rolling Stone? So why are there idol bands cavorting around stage at a craft beer festival? That’s right, using women as an advertising tool to encourage people. It’s a weird underbelly in Japan where grown men seem have a thing for teenage girls dressed up to the nines. And that’s before we get onto the pole dancers. Why are there pole dancers at a craft beer festival? Seriously? We get that it is a skill unto itself; however, I can’t really think of many actual reasons for having pole dancers at a craft beer festival unless you’re trying to attract people to your craft beer festival…

Saison Sayuri (Courtesy of Baird Beer)

Four Sisters Springbock (Courtesy of Baird Beer)

Minoh Beer Oshita sisters

Harvestmoon / Sonoda-san (Courtesy of Jbja)

It’s important to note that not all breweries do this in Japan, with some taking inspiration from women and using them in a positive form. Examples are Locobeer that produce an annual beer towards the Pink Boot series and Baird Beer with Four Sisters Springbock, Saison Sayuri being two examples of breweries that are being inclusive rather exclusive. Minoh Beer, Harvestmoon, and Oriental Brewing are just three of the breweries that have head female brewers. With a potential domestic market of 66 millions females (well let’s ignore some of the underage drinkers for now), why bother alienating them, when you could be encouraging people to drink?

Footnotes

1 – https://knoema.com/atlas/Japan/topics/Demographics/Population/Male-to-female-ratio

Soapbox Article 12 - Women & Beer #craftbeer #beer #japan Here at BeerTengoku, we believe in bringing people to drink together and talk over a few pints of craft beer.

#Soapbox

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newstfionline · 6 years

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Road trip through Middle America reveals resilience, pragmatism, and diversity

Doug Struck, CS Monitor, November 26, 2017

STORM LAKE, IOWA--La Juanita is packed. Under a mural of a farmer in a sombrero, three Asian teenage girls sit in a booth giggling with their white friend. At the next table, an ethnic pea pod of workers ogle overflowing quesadillas, arguing about sports. Spanish, English, and Hmong words slide within sentences and leap between tables.

And this is Iowa.

The presidential election a year ago produced a somber map of the United States, colored red and blue. The blue states were mostly clustered on the East and West Coasts, with a broad brush of red between. President Trump’s volcanic presidency has cemented the image of an urban elite and rural heartland frothing at each other over politics, culture, and heritage.

Mr. Trump’s election was delivered by these “flyover states,” cast as places of angry whites, frustrated at being left out of the economic recovery, besieged demographically, ignored politically, and stuck in shrinking small towns with vanishing jobs.

These problems exist. But they are not etched in inevitability. There are exceptions--exceptional people trying to buck the trends, and exceptional places that are succeeding. More than a few small towns are figuring out ways to stop their economic slide and to grow. More and more, white Middle America is being repeopled with newcomers of color, bringing a workforce to agricultural jobs, a vibrancy to decaying towns, and a mix of welcome--and suspicion--from older residents.

To meander on a 6,712-mile drive across the US on routes mostly painted red is to rediscover a heartland that is often not what the rest of America thinks it is. It is not monolithic. There are places refusing to be an emptying and failing “other” America. They are places of inspiration, optimism, and hope.

Exhibit A might be Storm Lake, Iowa, where half the population is Hispanic, black, or Asian and where schools are stuffed with children speaking 30 languages.

The town of 10,000 (locals say 14,000) is in northwest Iowa--solidly within Trump country. It is the picture of an idyllic Midwest: Dappled trees break the heat in summer and the town hugs a sparkling lake. Avenues are lined by homes with wide porches, and kids wander in blissful confidence about town. Cars stop midstreet as drivers chat with senior citizens in sneakers out on their evening walks.

Midwest towns like Storm Lake are seen as an endangered species. Rural areas cover 72 percent of the nation’s land but host only 14 percent of the population. “Nonmetropolitan” populations began to stagnate in the 1940s and have gradually declined since. Smaller, more rural populations have fallen more precipitously: 1,350 rural counties have lost residents in the past six years, while only 626 showed any gain, according to the research arm of the US Department of Agriculture.

But Storm Lake is different. Across from the town water tower is a Buddhist temple for more than 500 Laotian refugees who came here in the late 1980s. Rust’s Western Shed, the quintessential small-town clothing store, no longer just rents tuxedos for prom night and weddings, but displays quinceañera dresses. The high school valedictorian speech a couple years ago was given by a young woman who had first come from Mexico to Storm Lake speaking no English.

“Just because somebody doesn’t speak English, it doesn’t mean they aren’t bright,” says Carl Turner, superintendent of schools. Eighty percent of his 2,500 students are ethnic minorities, and the first language of 60 percent is not English.

For years, Storm Lake’s workers--almost all white men of European stock--slaughtered pork at the meat plant on the edge of town. It was hard work, but paid $30,000 a year, a solid middle-class income then. In 1981, the plant closed, citing competition, putting 500 people out of work. When it was reopened a year later by Iowa Beef Processors, wages had been slashed to $6 an hour, productivity demands were higher, and fewer than 30 former workers had been rehired, according to Mark Grey, a sociologist at the University of Northern Iowa in Cedar Falls. Instead, the assembly lines were filled with immigrants who came for the jobs and did not complain about the pay.

The first group were Laotians, brought by a single respected patron from an earlier church-sponsored group of resettled Vietnam War refugees, according to Professor Grey. They were followed by waves of Hispanics, Mennonites from Mexico, Micronesians, Burmese, Africans, and others.

The resentments that followed the job upheavals have softened, and Storm Lake officials have stepped up to try to help the newcomers. The influx is now mostly accepted as the pain of necessary change, those officials say.

“It’s a pretty amazing place, for this to be in northwestern Iowa,” Dr. Turner, the school superintendent, says at his office in the center of town. “I tell new teachers they will never work harder and never learn more than they will here.”

The schools weave English as a second language courses throughout each day’s classes and have rigged up a system for high-schoolers to earn a year’s worth of college credits before they officially graduate, in part to help students who lack the legal documents to apply for colleges, loans, or financial aid.

Emilia Marroquin came to Storm Lake 16 years ago. She was born in El Salvador, spent 10 years in Los Angeles, and moved with her husband because they heard there were good jobs in the packing plant, and, she says, “we were looking for a safer place for our kids.”

“It was a shock. I came in November in the middle of a blizzard,” she recalls, now laughing at the memory. “Nobody spoke Spanish, and I didn’t speak English. We were living in a motel and I didn’t know anybody.” She lasted only a couple days on the exhausting, chilled meatpacking line. She quit--her husband stayed at the plant--and she plunged into English classes. She is now finishing a four-year college degree.

She chats while sitting in a tiny school chair at the town’s new Head Start program building, where she works as a community liaison. She just finished enrolling the child of a Sudanese arrival. “They need a person they can trust,” she says of people like the tall, lanky man who had come to her office, clutching a sheaf of official documents for his daughter.

“Those who stay feel they have job security, their kids’ school is safe, and it’s a safe community,” she says. “It’s a place where they can do things that they never thought of before, like owning a house, having a car, having a job that will give them good wages.”

If the newcomers bring problems, they would wash up at the foot of Mark Prosser, Storm Lake’s burly chief of police. But “in 28 years, I can probably count the hate crimes we’ve had on one hand,” he says.

The force makes an ambitious outreach effort to the communities, with mixed success. Their potluck dinner flopped: “We learned that in other cultures you don’t invite someone to a meal and then ask them to bring the food.”

And they don’t round up the town’s citizens to check their papers. Mr. Prosser shrugs at the question of how many are here illegally--he’s heard from one-third to one-half. But “we’re not in the immigration business,” he says. “I honestly have not even had that conversation for two or three years. It’s not an issue.”

Prosser, too, is bullish on the town’s diversity. “Sure, there are problems. But let’s be clear: The pros so outweigh the cons--it’s not comparable. Storm Lake is so young, so colorful, so vibrant compared to other Iowa communities. What kind of problems do you want to have--the problems of dying or growing?”

Other rural towns are seeing a similar influx. Hispanics, blacks, and other races made up 82 percent of what growth there was in rural areas between 2000 and 2010, according to an analysis by Daniel Lichter, a sociologist at Cornell University in Ithaca, N.Y.

But the dagger in the heart of many small towns is the loss of industry. The Department of Agriculture says rural areas lost nearly a quarter of their manufacturing jobs during the 2000s.

There are towns trying to overcome that. Peru, Ind., was born almost two centuries ago, first as a trading post with the Miami Indians and then as a way stop on the Wabash and Erie Canal. It became a railroad hub when the canal was filled in, and thrived as the county seat with an Air Force base and several auto parts manufacturing plants. But the base and the plants were mostly closed by the 1990s, the town’s population shrank to 11,000, and longtime businesses gave way to shops selling electronic cigarettes and fireworks--a familiar death spiral for rural towns.

Gabriel Greer is the mayor. He is only 35 years old and owns a small construction business. He’s also a Democrat. “Donald Trump won hands-down here. I won hands-down here. Hard to square,” he acknowledges, sitting in his office in City Hall.

One reason is townsfolk are buying into his refusal to let Peru wither away. He and a small cohort of mostly young businesspeople are trying to save the town. The trick, he believes, is not the traditional one of courting the odd industrial plant to bring new jobs.

“‘Jobs first’ is not how it works anymore. What we are fighting now is a battle for people,” he says. “People now decide where they want to live, and start looking for a job from there. The jobs will follow.”

Mr. Greer notes there are five medium-sized or larger cities within about an hour’s drive offering employment. “Then the question is, where do you want to live?” Small towns, with cheaper and bigger homes, low crime, kid-friendly streets, and a strong sense of community may persuade many people to put up with a longer commute, he says.

Or eliminate it altogether. “There’s a lot of people working jobs online, and they can live wherever they want,” says Steve Dobbs. He moved with his wife, a lawyer, back to her hometown of Peru six years ago. They set up offices in the old Montgomery Ward store, and Mr. Dobbs started renovating the boarded-up storefronts to put lipstick on an aging downtown.

He sees signs it is working. The plywood is coming down, windows are being repaired, and a few new businesses have opened. In fact, the US Census Bureau says the rate of new start-ups in rural areas nationwide is nearly double that in metropolitan areas.

“We are definitely coming back,” says Sandra Tossou. She left a fast-paced culinary career in five-star restaurants to return to Peru, where she reopened an old bakery and now has a dozen workers. Facing down a towering cake with an icing bag, she says it was the right choice. “We’re part of the revival. It’s the young entrepreneurs who have to have the drive to make a comeback.”

The country looks different from the heartland. Middle America is a seductively vast tableau where people are shaped by natural elements--soil, water, wind, and space. The people in the heartland are more defined by the boundlessness of those characteristics than laws. Rules from Washington often seem an insolent din from afar, naive to the dictates of the land. Parents here raise their kids with an ethos of endurance, not complaint. They labor to overcome problems, not to circumvent them. They see religion, not government, as the only force equal to the power of the land and the weather and the miseries those sometimes bring. They honor consistency, not discord.

To the people of the heartland, the coastal denizens who fly over don’t know what’s below and don’t understand it. They pull down the window shades in their airplane to watch a movie.

But the very vastness of Middle America is drawing new industries. In Nebraska, corn is king. The countryside is a mosaic of huge circles of cornfields--grown around the radius of giant pivoting sprinklers--set within the squares of traditional property lines.

Yet from O’Neill, Neb. (pop. 3,700), you can take roads due east for 10 sections (as square miles are measured on farmland) and then due north for nine sections to find the state’s newest bumper crop--wind turbines.

Berkshire Hathaway Energy planted 200 turbines here at the Grande Prairie Wind Farm, an army of mechanical giants that loom over the landscape like the Martian invaders in H.G. Wells’s “War of the Worlds.” Shawn O’Connor is the senior manager who oversees the wind farm for Vestas, the Danish turbine manufacturer. He is a US Army-trained engineer whose background is in coal. He has run coal plants and helped build them. He says he realized they were industrial dinosaurs.

“I had a lot of career left. I wanted something that would grow,” he says. He calls the turbines “masterful creatures.”

He is right about the growth. Mr. O’Connor’s 200 wind machines will soon seem modest compared with the 1,000 turbines being erected in the massive Wind XI project in next-door Iowa, part of that state’s plans to abandon fossil fuels entirely.

O’Connor walks into his office with a job seeker who is wearing a hard hat and safety harness. Before a person is hired, the candidate must pass a climb test: Scale a ladder 300 feet to the top of the tower and traverse the “nacelle,” the pod at the hub of three 177-foot blades.

“It’s not for everyone,” O’Connor says. When the wind blows, the turbine sways a bit, which can be unnerving at 30 stories high. O’Connor likes to hire local farmhands for his crew of 20 technicians. They respect safety, understand big machinery, and “show up for work every day,” he says. His technicians start at $17 to $22 an hour, not bad in a rural area where jobs off the farm are hard to get and usually pay meager wages.

Not far away, Jared Sanderson and Tim Peter are working at a grain silo set amid cornfields studded by the turbines. In every direction, giant white towers support blades that cut the air. Neither farmer minds the turbines.

“I’d rather have that than the leak from an oil pipe,” says Mr. Sanderson, referring to the ongoing controversy in the state over the Keystone XL oil pipeline.

Do the machines mar the aesthetics? “There’s nothing to look at here anyway,” says Mr. Peter, grinning. The men say farmers get about $10,000 a year to put a wind turbine on their land, and the blades are high enough that they can till the soil under them. The cows seem to approve, too: On hot days, they will line up single-file in the slender shade of a turbine tower.

Other new industries are cropping up in Middle America, not all welcome. Pueblo, Colo., made steel for the country’s westward expansion and was known as “the Pittsburgh of the West” until the price collapse of the 1980s. Its bruised economy is now reviving in part because of marijuana. Twenty-nine states have legalized pot use in some form; Colorado was the first to approve recreational use. Pueblo has one of the largest outdoor fields of marijuana--21,000 plants and expanding--in the country.

Pueblo’s citizens continue to argue about the crop--Isn’t it a gateway drug? dangerous to your health?--but the city reaped $3.5 million in taxes and fees from the pot businesses last year. A year ago, Beverly Duran, director of the Pueblo Hispanic Education Foundation, selected 30 high school graduates to each receive a $1,000 college scholarship. This year she gave all 210 students who applied for scholarships $2,000 a year for college, thanks to pot taxes. At the school awards ceremony, “the excitement and the look on the faces of the students was incredible,” she says. “It was the look of hope.”

Other towns in Middle America are hoping a change in Washington will bring new vigor to their main streets and monthly incomes. Across the state from Pueblo, in northwest Colorado, lies Craig (pop. 9,500). This is red country--Trump won the county by 82 percent. Ranchers graze cattle on dry, cinnamon-brown land dotted with sagebrush. Historical photos show gunslingers and huge cattle drives. The local museum keeps Native American displays on one side and cowboy displays on the other.

The scene at Craig’s annual Moffat County Fair seems relaxed. Worn boots and cowboy hats are standard uniform. Men and women deftly navigate around the grounds on horseback, willing their animals with gentle nudges and tugs. People wave hello.

Still, “it was a little scary before the election,” says Katrina Springer, president of the fair board, who grew up on a sheep ranch. Passions run deep here: At the center of town is a store dedicated to survivalists. “Prepare for the worst,” the sign in the window says. “Hope for the best.” Yard signs proclaim “Coal Keeps the Lights On,” in defense of the thick seams of the Yampa coal field underlying Craig.

It is impolite to ask ranchers here how many head of cattle they have--it’s like asking how much money they have in their bank account. Nor does one inquire too pointedly about the size of their ranches. Many ranchers graze their cows and horses on federal land, and their relation to the Bureau of Land Management (BLM) is a touchy subject. By that calculation, they saw President Barack Obama as against them and see Trump as for them.

Standing by the auction lot fence at the fair, Shandy Deakins, who grew up in Moffat County, says the Trump election has eased anxieties in the area. “I feel that we have a voice now,” she says.

“Absolutely,” agrees Shane Ridnour, who works with show cattle. “We feel way more secure. In the last eight years, they were really going after coal. People back East don’t understand the benefits of coal and ranching. The BLM was trying to take away land that ranchers had used for years.”

“That’s the thing about this president,” says Mr. Ridnour. “He wants us to succeed.”

A few, quietly, are not so sure. By the craft exhibits, Susan Domer takes a moment from extolling the virtues of knitting--“your kids and husband think you’re busy working, but it’s relaxing”--to contemplate her town.

“Craig needs another industry,” she says. “When I was 18, I put Craig in my rearview mirror. I was going to take the world by storm.” Now more than five decades later, she is back, not out of defeat, but by choice. “It’s home. People here have common sense. They’re raised that way.” But she sees the challenges of living in rural America. “I have one granddaughter who sees what I see,” she reflects. “But she can’t afford to live here because there’s no job that will pay her [enough].”

Still, Craig is just 42 miles away from Steamboat Springs, a thriving tourist hub. The tools of change are there for rural America--a national infrastructure of good highways, a growing system of internet and virtual work, a variety of new professions that can thrive outside cities. The question for many small towns is whether they can overcome the image of isolation that the residents themselves embrace but outsiders are wary of.

#Middle America #Storm Lake Iowa #Craig Colorado #diversity #rural America

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fidelityjobs · 5 years

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“You can’t be what you can’t see”

By Lorna Martyn, SVP, Head of Technology, Fidelity Investments

When I graduated from university in the 1990s, conversations around diversity and inclusion were very few. Indeed, having graduated from a Computer Science program, where approximately 50% of the participants were female, it never occurred to me (or my contemporaries) that we would face a different situation in the workplace, where we might be a minority or our progression paths might differ from our male counterparts. Today, computer science graduating classes in Europe are usually 10-15% female, with overall female participation in STEM-oriented degrees at 25%. What has changed so dramatically in a couple of decades?

I’m not sure I have a definitive answer to this question. While reams of research have been published in this space, in my opinion it boils down to three factors—career influencers, advocates and role models.

The research tells us that parents and particularly mothers are primary influencers of the subjects selected in school and courses of study at university. When I was applying for college in the pre-internet days (yes, I was around then!) and growing up as an only girl with five brothers, I wasn’t aware of any barriers—my brothers studied Physics and Maths, so it didn’t strike me as unusual that I would take these courses. But the real catalyst for a career in technology for me was at age 12 when my mother enrolled me in a summer coding class. I genuinely think she didn’t even know what she was signing me up for—she just wanted her bored near teenage daughter out from under her feet during the summer holidays. For a woman who gave up work upon marriage (which was the norm at that time), she was determined that each of her children would have equal opportunities. She didn’t believe that there were male careers and female careers—just careers. I didn’t appreciate it at the time but in hindsight, her open-mindedness gave me confidence.

The importance of advocates cannot be underestimated. A number of my female peers left the industry because their peers and managers did not advocate for them, and they felt frustrated by the glass ceilings for women in many organizations. Again, I have been fortunate in this regard and have experienced the benefit of male and female advocates in the course of my career. That doesn’t mean it has been all plain sailing. I’ve worked hard, taken a few detours and made more lateral than upward moves to gain experience. However, I appreciate the doors that advocates have opened for me and feel obligated to advocate for others.

While I didn’t have any female role model for careers in technology before embarking on my degree program, I had an uncle who worked in the technology sector, and so I had some appreciation of the opportunities it presented. Fortunately, in my very first job, there was a woman on the leadership team who took me under her wing. Today, since the paths to careers in technology and the diversity of roles continue to evolve, one might expect this in itself would lead to greater diversity, right? Unfortunately not. Despite most teenagers being exposed to more information via the internet than I ever had at their age, the saying “You can’t be what you can’t see” seems to be the reality. Therefore, role models are more important than ever to counteract some of the pervasive stereotypes.

Having worked at several companies and across different business domains prior to joining Fidelity, I am proud to work for an organization focused on inclusion and diversity. The Women’s Leadership Group (WLG) and Women in Technology Special Interest Group (WITSIG) are great examples of how Fidelity supports our associates in reaching their full potential. These employee-driven groups are doing fantastic work across the globe to influence and advocate inclusion efforts, and we are fortunate to have some exceptional role models in them.

The full gambit of WLG/WITSIG activities is far too broad to outline here but some great examples this year include the ‘Wit-a-thon’, an internal hackathon event organized by WITSIG. We had the second edition last year, which saw teams participating from across Ireland and India. It was great to see women taking the lead to drive innovation; but it was equally impressive that there was gender balance on most of the teams, reflecting the future state goal. Our male colleagues who participated did so because they genuinely want to support WITSIG, and so many commented that they were participating because they have daughters or sisters whom they would like to support in considering careers in technology.

Other examples include ‘Bring your Child to Work’ or ‘Bring your Daughter to Work’ days that are running globally. These are high-octane but very enjoyable events, and so many children walk away with an appreciation of Fidelity as a workplace, and many parents become ‘cool’ in their children’s eyes once they see what mom or dad does at work.

At Fidelity Ireland, we were incredibly privileged to win the inaugural Technology Ireland ‘Women in Technology Company Award’. Technology Ireland is an industry body with participants from over 200 technology companies. The award recognizes the work Fidelity is doing to promote technology careers in schools and universities, support alternative pipelines including RESUME (the Fidelity program that offers professionals who have taken a break in their career an opportunity to return to the workforce) and apprenticeships, in addition to the focus internally on supporting our employee development and retention (an area where WLG contributes significantly).

So, back to influencers, advocates and role models. I genuinely believe that to make any significant progress, we all need to be cognizant of how we can influence greater participation, retention and progression of women at the workplace, especially in leadership roles.

I’d like to encourage our Fidelity women to speak up more about their careers. You may not see yourself as a role model, but if you can encourage even one person to consider a career, that is a win!

Finally, I would urge one and all to be brave and advocate for others. Think of those who did the same for you and, as we say in Fidelity, “Pay IT Forward!” As the old Irish saying goes, “Níor bhris focal maith fiacail riamh”, or as the English translation goes, “A kind word never broke a tooth.”

#FidelityAssociate #FidelityIreland #womenintech #STEM #womeninstem #tech #technology #financial services #finance #fidelityjobs #fidelity #fidelity investments

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lovequotescom · 4 years

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The wedding challenge: Can the trend of decreasing wedding prices in East Asia be reversed?

HONG KONG: decreasing wedding prices are increasingly being seen across the world, however it is possibly within the aging communities of Asia that the growing wide range of singletons is stressing moms and dads – and governments – the absolute most.

In Asia, moms and dads have actually taken fully to offering leaflets in matchmaking areas, often minus the younger generation’s knowledge; in Japan, blind relationship cafes make an effort to create busy experts over some coffee and dessert, and when they find no chemistry, there’s constantly going back into slogging away at the office.

A preference for baby boys has resulted in a massive gender imbalance and men who can’t find a wife at home, so they’ve turned to marriage migrants: Foreign women are now getting married to Korean men to escape poverty in South Korea. In Hong Kong, guys finding lovers in mainland Asia has resulted in a surplus of females into the town and an agency that is dating regional ladies US$600 for the blind relationship supper which international males could go to free of charge.

Yet absolutely absolutely nothing appears to assist. Wedding prices continue steadily to slump across East Asia. It’s a pressing problem because in Confucian communities, no wedding can indicate no young ones, which may jeopardize a country’s economic leads and, perhaps, its success.

MARRIAGELESS IN JAPAN

While parallels of moscowbrides login less marriages and plunging delivery prices are available in all eastern Asian societies, the broad trends almost always were only available in Japan.

Based on Japan’s nationwide Institute of Population and personal protection analysis, because of the time they turn 50, one out of four men that are japanese solitary, as does one out of seven females.

But that’s perhaps maybe maybe not when it comes to lack of attempting. Studies additionally claim that numerous singletons that are japanese would like to get hitched.

Therefore Arata Funabara, four times hitched himself, started a rate cafe that is dating Ginza to aid. Workers in offices can drop set for an hour or so in the center of a single day to chat within the opposite gender.

In real Japanese fashion, most come in pairs or trios. Funabara provides them a range of 3 wristbands that are coloured. Many choose “not searching” blue, although the cafe owner claims that doesn’t suggest they have been actually uninterested.

“Japanese individuals, our company is extremely bashful. ”

But anthropologist Yoshie Moriki states this hasn’t been the truth. She recalls when you look at the 80s and 90s when Japan experienced quick financial development, males had been more excited about courting females. Nevertheless, 2 decades of financial stagnation changed the video game for teenage boys.

“These teenagers within their 20s and 30s now are making less cash compared to the generation that is previous. But nevertheless the ladies are searching for similar amount of financial capability, ” she said.

“At the time that is same teenage boys by themselves nevertheless think it is their obligation to give you, thus I think the financial framework is actually extremely hard. ”

To be certain, Moriki’s perhaps perhaps not blaming females for seeking economic protection in a wedding. In mainland China and Hong Kong too, females frequently desire to “marry up”, an activity made harder given that they’ve been better educated and better paid by themselves. However in Japan, wedding, or simply the perception of planning to get hitched, might take a cost on a woman’s job.

“There’s plenty of businesses, ” says Prof Jeff Kingston, Director of Asian Studies at Temple University. “Companies assume ladies are likely to get hitched and possess young ones, so they really wear them the alleged mommy track, in less responsible roles. ”

Even in the event a female can skirt that trap at the beginning of her profession, getting married and children that are having often requires her to just take a lifetime career break.

“Gender division of functions continues to be quite strong. Raising kiddies and care that is taking of family members is observed as being a woman’s work, ” says Kingston. “If they sacrifice either child care or senior look after their professions, they’ve been accused to be selfish. ”

As soon as from the workforce, the majority of women believe it is impractical to come back to a job that is fulltime. This means the quick profession break would find yourself costing a Japanese woman US$2 million in life time profits.

“Naturally whenever ladies think of wedding, these are typically very careful in Japan, ” claims Zhou Yanfei, A senior researcher during the Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training. “They need to set money degree for his or her lovers. ”

THE KIDS ARE ALRIGHT

When Asians don’t marry, they tend to not have kiddies.

In Britain, near to 50 percent of the latest children are now actually born away from wedlock. The figure is simply 2.3 in Japan, 1.9 in Korea.

For all your efforts made towards halting the populace decrease, few Asian governments, including Japan’s, allow it to be easy for males and females to possess kiddies by themselves.

“Politicians are reluctant to get here because their concept of the Japanese identification is associated with the original family” which is comprised of a daddy, a mom and two kids, stated Kingston.

“By 2040, they estimate 40 percent of Japanese households will undoubtedly be solitary individuals, and so the family that is traditional currently departed, but federal federal government policies continue to be assuming that it is a powerful pillar of culture. ”

Solitary mom Masami Onishi together with her two young daughters at house in Osaka. (Picture: Wei Du)

For the women that are few decide to be solitary mothers, difficulty awaits.

Based on Zhou of Japan Institute for Labour Policy and Training, 51 percent of solitary moms in Japan reside in poverty, plus one in seven states she cannot afford necessities that are basic food at the least every once in awhile.

Masami Onishi, 24, works nine hours a time, six days per week to help make us$800 per month. Having a full-time task is additionally a necessity on her to get some federal government welfare.

Though never married, she wears a marriage band.

“once I didn’t wear the band, strangers would show up and tell my girls that they had no dad. It hurt them badly, ” she stated.

The insurance policy of requiring mothers that are single work befuddles specialists.

“The rate of poverty does not alter quite definitely even though the moms will work, due to the position that is weak occupy when you look at the labour market, ” said Zhou. “The federal government has to boost welfare paying for these families now, because poor moms raise kids who carry on become bad. ”

The inter-generational transfer of poverty is maybe perhaps not news to Yasuko Kawabe whom operates a meals bank for solitary moms and kids. But she feels politicians are intentionally searching one other means.

“If we assist these kids now, they’ll grow up become taxpayers for the united states, ” she states. “Just consider exactly just just how wonderful that might be. ”

WE HAVE BEEN NOT SPECIAL

An extra problem for Korea and Asia in nudging their visitors to marry is just a choice for infant guys, that has resulted in gender that is skewed, and today statistically a percentage of the guys won’t ever look for a spouse in the home.

Enter Vietnam, nation that stocks their Confucian culture. Beginning within the 90s, commercial wedding agents took Korean males here to take into consideration a partner.

For Korea though, it had been an affront into the national country’s identity.

“We have traditionally been convinced that Korea is a uni-race, pure country that is blooded” said Prof Choi Hyup, a study teacher in anthropology at Chonnam University.

Into the hastily arranged unions, the mismatch of objectives often resulted in tragedies.

“The ladies arrived right right here since they wished to assist their own families in Vietnam. The males are usually really disabled or old. They covered the ladies become right here to simply help their own families, ” said Yoo Si Hwang who counsels Vietnamese migrants in a Seoul church.

The korean government tightened rules for cross-border marriages, setting a minimum income requirement for the men after a slew of high profile abuses and a few murders of Vietnamese brides in the 90s and early 2000s. Moreover it launched multicultural household facilities round the nation to greatly help the foreign spouses incorporate.

Pham Minh Chinh is amongst the tens and thousands of young Vietnamese girls who married Korean men significantly more than a decade their senior. She’s now proficient in Korean, adapted well towards the lifetime of a strawberry farmer and raised two kids along with her spouse in Korea’s rural Chonnam province.

Kiddies of mix-race wedding though tend to struggle in school. Because their moms frequently speak restricted Korean, they develop language abilities later on than their peers.

The theory that being Korean that is pure-blooded is nevertheless lingers, and sometimes means they become objectives of bullies.

“We have to show our kids it’s just one of the many cultures in the world that we are not special, ” says Choi. “That the Korean culture is not special. Because exactly just what option do we’ve? ”

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