#and we could still all unite for the common cause of women being safe at night

[k-s-morgan]

What is your HC for Will’s sexuality? Do you see him as bisexual? Also if we only consider canon, is Will a straight man who happened to fall in love with one man (Hannibal)? Sorry for my ignorance here as I am not part of the queer community, but if a straight man falls in love with just one man in particular and doesn’t feel attracted to others, is he considered bisexual? Because I think this is where Will fits. I personally don’t think he’d be attracted to any other men, just Hannibal.

What do you think?

Hi! I don't have a clear headcanon here, but I enjoy speculating because I adore Will as a character.

To note, I won’t be relying on Bryan’s words in this meta as he gave us three different versions of Will’s sexuality, where he called him heterosexual with Hannibal being his possible exception (Bryan: I feel one is omnisexual and one is heterosexual and there's a lot of influence going back and forth, who knows with a six pack of beer what would happen), hinted at Will’s bisexuality (Bryan: You can have this intimate connection with somebody that then causes you to wonder where the lines of your own sexuality are), and implied that Will might be gay (Bryan on Twitter: “YOU KNOW BETTER THAN TO BREED” #SUBTEXT #HANNIGRAM #WhatAreYouBecoming). These tags point out not simply to Will’s darkness, but to the other things he (possibly) represses.

So, I think only the show itself should be taken into account when discussing this topic. On the surface, we see Will interested in Alana in S1, sleeping with Margot in S2, and marrying Molly in S3 — and of course, falling in love with Hannibal in the process of all 3 seasons. However, the three women in his life are united by some common aspects — namely, 1) they are perfectly safe and ordinary (with maybe Margot being an exception, but her own sexuality plays a role in this); 2) Will never develops any real emotional connection with any of them. To be more specific.

Alana

We first hear Will referring to Alana in E1 of S1, when he just distantly calls her by her last name. In the course of their time together, Will never seeks Alana out himself. It is Alana who comes to his class, or to the hospital, or to his home — Will does flirt with her, and he kisses her first, but he never appears genuinely interested because he never seems to think about her unless she comes to him. The only exception I personally remember is in E8, where we learn that Will called Alana and invited her over to help him find an animal that was attacked by coyote. Still, the script offers an interesting bit here.

WILL GRAHAM: I invited you over on the off chance we find it alive. Hard to wrangle a wounded animal by myself. (then, realizing) Did you think it was a date?

ALANA BLOOM: Honestly, it never crossed my mind.

Will is at first relieved, then almost disappointed.

So, why relieved? And why flirt with Alana at all if he isn’t actually interested? As I see it, Alana is a very normal, perfectly safe and socially acceptable choice, a nice beautiful woman whose acceptance is clearly important to Will. We know that Will is fighting his demons all the time — he desperately wants to be normal, to bury the darkness inside him. I would say, to him, an acceptance by such a normal person as Alana would mean that there is nothing wrong with him and that he can be normal, too. Now, I can’t say if it was really planned or if it is just a set of coincidences, but I think that the theory that makes most sense is that Will was attracted to Alana’s normalcy first and foremost. He craved an ordinary life at that point, and Alana was someone who could give it to him. The more time passes, the stronger Hannibal and Will’s bond gets, the colder Will acts with Alana. By S3, he doesn’t even know that she had a child and who she is with, so they obviously do not keep any contact. For these reasons, Will never appears emotionally invested in their relationship to me — he remembers about Alana only when she comes to him, like he is only interested in her because she is the only woman he is friends with, someone he doesn’t have to try hard with.

The only aspect that points to the sincerity of Will’s attraction to Alana is his words to Hannibal — that he wanted to kiss her since he’d met her as she’s very kissable. I can interpret it in two different ways. Will can be truly attracted to Alana or he might be so repressed that he thinks he wants things that he doesn’t (and we do have a precedent here — Will tries to deny who he really is in regard to his darkness for quite a long time).

Margot

I think we can all agree that Will was never emotionally interested in Margot. Like with Alana, it is Margot who seeks him out, and Margot is the one to initiate sex. Why does Will agree to it? Just because he wants it? I think it is possible, but I also think it’d be a little out of character for him for several reasons. Will knows Margot has some agenda. He knows she is not interested in sex with him because she admitted she is a lesbian. When she makes her move, Will tells her, "I've got the wrong parts for your proclivities". So he knows the truth, yet still agrees to have sex with her, and during this process, he doesn’t really see Margot. He sees Alana, Hannibal, and a Stag Man– a being that symbolizes his and Hannibal’s connection. More than that, he reaches orgasm only when the Stag Man appears. So, it is equally possible to read this scene as Will’s attempt to engage into the most natural activity in the world — sex with a woman, but he still fails at it by dragging a man and a monster into it.

Molly

Molly is a character who seems alien in the world of the show because she’s the embodiment of normalcy. Will marries her, and we can surely assume they have sex, but from the first seconds of their scenes, it is clear that emotional intimacy between them is missing. Molly and Walter go fishing, an activity that Will enjoys deeply and that could be a uniting hobby for him and his new family. However, Molly and Walter go alone, Will stays home. In all their scenes together, Will never initiates contact between them — he never attempts to touch Molly, sometimes even going out of his way to avoid it. In the hospital, after Dolarhyde’s attack, Will still doesn’t touch her, though his hand twitches as if he considers it. In the second scene, he touches the pillow near Molly’s head, which is so awkward and embarrassing that I’d personally never be able to tell these people are married. The most important thing, Will doesn’t return her ‘I love you’, which is very deliberate. Hannibal tells him that he has chosen a ready-made family, and Will doesn’t argue with it. He goes to Hannibal at the first opportunity because he missed him, not because he needed his help, and then after Dolarhyde’s attack and after learning Hannibal is in love with him, Will easily discards both Molly and Walter and we never see them again. He basically breaks up with Molly back at the hospital, as if her first contact with something not normal taints her in his eyes, breaks the normalcy he thought he needed from her.

So, it is clear that Will never really developed emotional bonds with women in his life. Was he truly attracted to them, or did he like them for the cover of normalcy they could potentially provide for him? I wouldn’t be surprised if Will turned out to be flexible, bisexual, or gay, as it is really open to interpretation and there is enough subtext to support every version. I used to think that Will was bi, but I also wonder if his possible repressed homosexuality could be one the factors that made his fight with himself so intense. Taking into account the area where Will has grown, to him, it is bad enough that he is a killer — he’s also a gay one at that. I think it could enhance his struggle through S1-3 and his slow realization that adhering to social norms in all ways does not make him happy.

Then again, I think Will’s sexuality doesn’t actually even matter at this point because after all seasons, there is only one person who is going to be a permanent part of his life, among all men and women — Hannibal. We have seen that neither Will nor Hannibal can tolerate the other’s partners, and with rich sexual subtext between the two of them, I believe they will easily move forward in their relationship post-fall.

[nevermindirah]

Non-Jewish friends, y’all might be wondering right now: Israel is doing clearly unacceptable shit to Palestinians. So, why are some Jews ardent Zionists, and why do some Jews seem to feel personally attacked by criticism of Israel?

A lot of (non-Palestinian) non-Jews have asked me where I stand on Israel/Palestine over the years, apropos of nothing, just because I’m Jewish. For the longest time I felt so stuck because I just didn’t know much about Israel/Palestine and what little I did know turned out to be largely misinformation and I felt so much pressure to say The Correct Thing That All Jews Should Say About This Issue. Obviously the violence Israel is committing against Palestinians is horrific and the interpersonal weirdness individual Jews might experience as people discuss Israel’s horrific violence doesn’t compare. I’m making this post as a small supplement to the important conversations going on about what Israel is doing to Palestinians in East Jerusalem, Gaza, and the West Bank, as well as Palestinian citizens of Israel and Palestinian refugees and their descendants living outside land Israel controls. I’m making this post because non-Jews might be feeling confused by conflicting messages about Zionism as either settler colonialism or Jewish self-determination. It sucks feeling like you have to choose only one oppressed group or another. It’s possible to support Palestinian liberation and Jewish liberation at the same time! Here’s some context that might help.

Palestinian friends will probably want to ignore this post, y’all shouldn’t have to deal with your oppressors’ feelings, and especially not right now.

Zionism is the ideology behind the devastating violence Israel is committing against Palestinians right now and has been committing against Palestinians since 1947-48. It’s heartbreaking and messy to talk about this reality, because Zionism originated as a strategy to protect Jews from antisemitism.

Any oppressed group can turn into oppressors under enough pressure, because humans are flawed. Jews fleeing antisemitism turning into Israelis ethnically cleansing Palestinians happened because Zionism is profoundly influenced by its time and place of origin: 19th century Europe.

Europe invented antisemitism, and basically every European country has done at least one very very bad structural antisemitism, like expelling all the country's Jews (the monarch and/or the church then stole all the wealth the expelled people had to leave behind), looking the other way when peasants murdered a bunch of Jews as an outlet for their frustration with the actual (non-Jewish) ruling class, banning Jews from owning property or holding certain jobs or being members of guilds etc, and of course the big horrific state-sponsored mass-murder operations the Inquisition and the Holocaust. From the 1790s through the 19th century different European governments emancipated their Jews, ie removed legal barriers to full citizenship and economic participation. But this didn't end antisemitism. Just like the legal improvements of the 19th and 20th centuries didn't end antiblackness in the United States.

Also happening in this time: nationalism swept Europe. From the French Revolution through the end of World War I, Europe’s predominant form of government transformed from multiethnic empires to nation-states, countries led by and for a particular ethnic group.

So this Austro-Hungarian dude Theodor Herzl came up with this idea for Jewish nationalism. Every other European ethnic group is getting their own country, so why not Jews? Maybe this is the solution to antisemitism! Maybe we’ll finally be safe if we just all move en masse out of Europe to a place that will take all of us and never expel us!

But also also happening in Europe and around the world in this time: European imperialism and white supremacist settler colonialism. Chattel slavery saw its height and then its end (legally, at least) during this era, but white supremacy entrenched itself across the planet in post-slavery economic practices and cultural imperialism as well as national and international laws.

I believe countries have a moral obligation to take in as many refugees as they can squeeze in. International law protecting refugees has evolved a lot over the past century, but we’re still devastatingly far from every refugee getting a safe place to call home, and the main reason for that is white supremacy. The Biden administration didn’t undo the Trump administration’s horrifically low cap on refugees until like last week and it’s because Democratic party leaders treat centrist white people as more valuable voters than the huge and growing numbers of people of color, immigrants, LGBT people, unmarried women, and working class people who want to vote for elected leaders who get that nobody’s free until we’re all free. Ahem. Back to the topic at hand, the US and many other countries turned away untold numbers of refugees fleeing the fucking Holocaust, so odds are slim they’d be more welcoming in less desperate times. Moving from places where Jews are an unwanted minority to places where Jews are still a minority and either still unwanted or little understood and unlikely to win revolutionary levels of support from a largely non-Jewish public seems like a bad plan.

In the mid to late 19th century, lots of Jews took the kernel of Zionism and ran with it in different directions. Maybe this ideology could mean Jewish cultural flourishing alongside stronger political/economic integration into the societies where we’re already living! Maybe it could mean a particular kind of socialism that advocates for the liberation of Jews both as Jews and as workers! Maybe it could mean a revitalization of Jewish religious practice both in Jerusalem where we have important heritage sites and everywhere we live across the world!

Eventually Herzl’s vision of Zionism won out over the others: Jewish nationalism in the sense of a Jewish nation-state, a country that has a Jewish demographic majority and/or that legally privileges Jews over non-Jews.

Problem is, if you want to do that, you have to find a piece of land on which to do it, and Earth was already a pretty crowded place a hundred years ago. Many locations were considered, and the one that ended up winning that debate was Palestine. Where a shit ton of people, mostly non-Jews, were already living. They were forming their own nationalist movement at the time: in the waning days of the Ottoman Empire they began to organize for local self-determination in Palestine.

The Herzl types who developed Zionism as an ideology and built institutions to advocate for and create a Jewish ethnostate in Palestine were a small subset of European Jews, mostly men, mostly with significant economic privilege within what Jews were able to achieve in their particular societies at the time. They were just as Orientalist as the non-Jews around them, just as antiblack, just as racist generally for all that Jews were (and sometimes still are) considered non-white in much of Europe. They had a cool idea (put a lot of effort into something that could protect Jews from antisemitism) floating in a bathtub full of shit, and they did practically nothing to protect the cool idea from absorbing that shit. Results of this include thinking about the millions of people already living in Palestine as if they were either like the rocks and the trees that will go with the flow and accept a new ruling class, or indistinct Arabs who would just leave for other Arab countries because what could be the difference — in the staggeringly small amount of time they considered the existing residents of Palestine at all.

This racist hand-waving extended to Zionist leaders’ attitudes about Jews outside Europe as well. White Jews in settler colonies like the US were largely anti-Zionist at the time (not wanting their own countries to accuse them of dual loyalty was a common reason) but European Zionist leaders took what help they could get from Jews in the US, South Africa, Australia, etc. Jews across the Middle East and North Africa, however, barely heard from Zionist leaders about any of this until Zionist militias had removed enough Palestinians from the land and it was time to repopulate it with whichever Jewish bodies were convenient. You might have heard "all the Arab countries expelled their Jews in 1948" but lots of first-person accounts tell a different story of Israel coercing Jews who’d lived securely for a long time in places like Morocco to immigrate to Israel and then confiscating their passports and forcing them to live on less-fertile land with fewer resources while serving as a buffer between Palestinians and European Jewish immigrants. Ella Shohat is the best-known writer on Israeli racism against non-European Jews and I strongly recommend Sephardim in Israel: Zionism from the Perspective of Its Jewish Victims as a starting point to learn more about this.

Which brings us to today. We still haven’t eradicated antisemitism, several European governments that did a lot of structural antisemitism they still haven’t made meaningful reparations for get to feel good about themselves for “giving the Jews a state” as if carving up the former Ottoman Empire was up to them and not the people who lived there, and millions of people across the world who previously either lived peacefully enough alongside Jews or hadn’t really thought about us much at all now have very valid reasons to be pissed at this country that claims it represents all of us.

Zionism was supposed to protect Jews from antisemitism. And Israel has saved Jewish lives! But if we hadn’t sunk the past 70+ years into an ethnostate we could’ve been putting that energy into other political and economic activity to create adequate international support for refugees while we work on ending root causes of refugee crises, like antisemitism, racism, climate change, and capitalism. Meanwhile Zionism has killed, maimed, incarcerated, stolen from, traumatized, and erased the history of millions of Palestinians just because they happened to be living on land that some dudes who had a lot more in common with Thomas Jefferson and Donald Trump than with you or me decided needed to be cleansed for a Jewish ethnostate.

White nationalists in the US love Israel because they want American Jews to go away. Fascist leaders across Europe love Israel for the same reason, so much so that Israel’s prime minister is buddy-buddy with Trump and the equivalent shitstains of several European far-right parties. And I don’t know what it’s like in other white supremacist countries that are close allies of Israel, but the overwhelming majority of Zionist lobbying that pushes the US to give so much aid to Israel comes from Evangelical Christians, because they believe all the Jews have to be in the Holy Land for Jesus to come back. No thanks.

This whole thing fucking sucks. Jews and Palestinians, like all human beings, deserve to be free. Many Jews are understandably afraid of what might happen next if Israel decided to give up on ethnonationalism, allow Palestinian refugees to return, make reparations, and establish a pluralistic democracy that represents and protects all its residents — will some Palestinians murder Jews in revenge? That’s genuinely fucking scary. And it’s genuinely fucking scary to be a Palestinian in Israel/Palestine, and has been for over 70 years. We’ve gotta do something different. I say that as a white person sitting on land stolen from Piscataway people who has thought in detail about what portion of my income would be reasonable for my government to tax in order to fund reparations for the descendants of enslaved people.

Ok. One final piece of context before I wrap this up.

Most Jewish institutions in the US are explicitly Zionist, teach children that Zionism is THE way to ensure Jewish safety, and increasingly tell non-Zionist Jews that we're unwelcome or even that we’re not “real” Jews. This comes in a context where it’s only been 76 years since the latest and most gruesome of several attempts to wipe our entire people off the face of the planet. If you grew up in that environment, you, too, might be jumpy about even hearing the words Zionism or Israel, let alone considering the devastation this ideology and country have caused Palestinians.

Jews have a right to exist. Jews have a millennia-old connection to this scrap of land in the Levant, and we have a right to access religiously and culturally important geographic landmarks. What we don't have a right to is murdering or expelling other people in order to make an ethnostate, on that land or any other. Zionism is settler colonialism, but it’s settler colonialism by and for people who have a valid need for protection from structural antisemitism, which means that it’s going to take a lot of messy empathy to undo. The members of my extended family who voted for Trump (non-Jews in my case, though Jared Kushner isn’t the only Jewish Trumpite) are afraid that ending white supremacy will demote them from a privileged class to equal footing with everyone else — that’s the kind of fear individuals work on in therapy, not the kind that’s reasonable for a whole society to prevent from happening. I and millions of Jews do deserve for whole societies to work hard to end antisemitism.

I would never and will never ask a Palestinian to gently request their liberation. But if you’re not Palestinian, and you’ve got a little extra empathy to spare this week, I ask you to remember what I’ve shared here when interacting with Jews about Israel/Palestine.

If you’re a fellow Jew reading this and you feel like Israel is the only way to guarantee our safety, all I ask of you is to sit with the idea that what Israel is doing to Palestinians is too high a cost for safety that’s still not guaranteed, and start to imagine real-world ways we can protect our people from antisemitism without an ethnostate.

I made this post for people who know me (or know of me I guess?) in Old Guard and Cap fandom, despite my better judgment, because talking about Jewish Booker and Jewish Bucky and Jewish Natasha makes me so happy and I think some of the people I love on these characters with might appreciate this perspective. I didn’t provide any links in this post on purpose (to decrease its usefulness, so fewer people will reblog it) because the risk of anon hate when talking about Zionism outside my immediate fandom circles is so high. You’re welcome to reblog this post if you find it helpful! Unless you’re not within a few concentric circles of me, in which case, maybe don’t? If seeing this post makes you want to send me anon hate, no need: many people who share your perspective have already done so on Twitter.

Reliable sources on all this info are a few googles away, and I apologize for the things I know I oversimplified as well as any things I might have misremembered. I’m an American who’s never lived in Israel/Palestine who is posting this on my fandom blog.

TL;DR: This is a short ‘n pithy post about the same idea.

TL;DR, fandom edition: The shortest distillation of this anti-Zionist Jew’s feelings on the matter can be found in segment 4 of Five Times Booker Got Wasted on Purim and One Time He Didn’t.

[camaradarulitos]

Despite decades of research demonstrating that women live longer than men, women are also living in poorer health. How is it possible? A closer examination of some of the facts about female anatomy and how women’s health is treated in medicine and science may offer an answer to this question.

Female anatomy: The XX Factor

According to the book “The Better Half: On the Genetic Superiority of Women,” by Sharon Moalem, women are genetically superior to men in some ways. Moalem, who is a Canadian-American physician, scientist, and an expert in sex differentiation, neurogenetics, and biotechnology, has proposed that inheriting the same two sex chromosomes (called “homogameity”), gives the homogametic sex a survival advantage over the heterogametic sex. This pattern has been replicated in 229 different species, including species where the male is the homogametic sex (like birds).

“When applied to humans,” Moalem says, “the Law of Homogameity predicts that from birth, genetic females possess a survival advantage that results from them being the homogametic sex because they have inherited two X chromosomes, as opposed to genetic males who are the heterogametic sex with one X and Y chromosomes.”

Moalem’s book explains that “beyond mere redundancy, genetic females not only have more genetic information than males, but that female cells using different X chromosomes can interact and cooperate, which gives them an advantage throughout the life course and especially in times of famine and pandemics.”

The physician points to the fact that in times of famine, more female babies are born than males, and females also show “superiority” in color vision, immune response, longevity, even basic survival from birth to death — in pediatric ICUs, girls have a greater survival rate.

In the past, large studies have been done on the advantage of homogameity. Mary Lyon, for instance, proposed a concept called X-inactivation in 1961, which explains why calico cats (three-colored) are mostly females, while male cats with sex variations may be calico but are often infertile. In female mammals, if one of the two X chromosomes is “faulty,” it is “shut off” while the other chromosome, another X, activates. This could also explain why color-blindness affects more males than females, since the “genes responsible for the most common forms of color blindness are on the X chromosome.” In males, there is no backup X chromosome to take over when one fails.

Females in a world where males are the “default”

Despite modern advancements in science and health, women’s bodies and health are still ignored in all aspects, from clinical trials to personal care. For hundreds of years, females were excluded from scientific studies because they menstruate. Scientists claimed that females’ hormone fluctuations would “skew” the results (despite the fact that men also experience hormone fluctuations, even throughout the same day). In patriarchy, male bodies are considered the default. Therefore, scientific research would rarely take sex differences into account, even when females were used in clinical trials.

Most female-specific conditions are under-researched and underfunded, including polycystic ovary syndrome (PCOS), premenstrual dysphoric disorder (PMDD) or vaginismus, with their causes and treatments “unknown.” On average, it takes up to ten years to get a diagnosis for endometriosis, which affects one in ten women during their reproductive age. That is because the condition is not researched and not fully understood, and normally mistaken for “heavier periods.” When a diagnosis comes, after years of pelvic pain and other debilitating symptoms, the treatments offered, such as surgeries and medication, still leave women suffering for years.

“On average, it takes up to ten years to get a diagnosis for endometriosis, which affects one in ten women during their reproductive age.”

Even diseases or conditions that affect both men and women are often misdiagnosed or disregarded when they happen to female bodies, and are mistaken for irregular periods. Countless women with heart disease have been “misdiagnosed in emergency rooms and sent home, possibly to die from heart attacks,” because doctors didn’t know that women tend to exhibit different symptoms than men for cardiovascular disease. Women also tend to suffer significantly more side effects from medications because the recommended doses were based on clinical trials that “focused largely on average-size men.”

Women’s pain is also largely not taken seriously compared to men’s. Since women are considered more “emotional” or expressive, when men express pain medical professionals may assume it is more severe than a woman expressing the same level of pain.

According to Harvard Health, women “wait an average of 65 minutes before receiving an analgesic for acute abdominal pain in the ER in the United States, while men wait only 49 minutes.” Researchers have long assumed women’s self-reported health (or lack thereof) was exaggerated, but research has found that these self-reported differences are actually explained by genuine differences in chronic health conditions. And yes, despite the fact that 70 percent of the people with chronic pain are women, 80 percent of pain studies are conducted on male mice or human men.

“Women’s pain is also largely not taken seriously compared to men’s. ”

A major report by Public Health England (PHE) in 2017 found that women still spend more years of their life in poorer health than men due to causes including depression and poverty. Women living in poorer areas are still living longer than the men from the same areas, but their health, especially in their elder years, is more neglected than men’s.

The sex gap lives on: women are still ignored in science

The same report predicted a flu pandemic before 2023, which came to pass with COVID-19. Despite the fact that women are more resilient against COVID, women have still had to bear the brunt of the pandemic, including throughout the administration of vaccines.

The first attempts to create a COVID vaccine, for instance, didn’t include many female subjects. Early on, it was said the shots were not safe for women, especially women who are pregnant. Now that the vaccines are being administered throughout the world, women are experiencing the worst side effects after receiving them. Yet, research on women’s bodies and health is still largely underfunded or dismissed as biased.

In conclusion, even though women may have a natural genetic advantage over men, women still live in poorer health. It’s not a genetic trait, as if women were weaker than men. It’s because women’s health is neglected. And despite all the efforts to not only include female subjects in clinical trials, but also to have a more equal representation of women in science, we will not be able to improve women’s lives if we deny that the female anatomy exists and that it’s different from the male anatomy.

[echo-three-one]

Chapter 38

THE ROAD SO FAR

The EIGHT-Thirty Appointment

John 'Soap' MacTavish

London, UK

Following the events of Shepherd's surrender to authorities, the members of Task Force 141 who went rogue in pursuit of him had been exonerated from treason. This meant that from then on, life would be a little more 'normal'. No more hiding in public, no more lack of equipment, no more secret hiding areas.

This prompted Laswell to recreate the task force she once poured her heart on, with a few changes to its jurisdiction. With Ghost, Roach and Alexandra still recovering, the remaining members were invited to celebrate their success.

"So John, now that 141 is back your main focus will be Nero. Do you want the reassigned members back?" Laswell asked Price while they exited the building. Soap overheard this because he thought he was the John being called.

"If it's still okay and not much of a hassle, then yes." Price replied.

"What about Kyle?" Laswell added.

"No. Not yet. Just keep an eye on him." Price mused and turned to Soap, who quickly turned to focus back on Alex as he pushed his wheelchair.

"Excuse me, Captain Price. Can we talk for a moment?" Samantha interrupted as they stopped on their tracks. Alex turned out of curiosity, wondering what matter they were discussing.

"Hey hey hey. What was that about?" Alex asked Soap and France, who continued walking. Laswell turned to the next right as she already finished her conversation with Price, waving at Alex and the rest of the 141.

Soap chuckled at the CIA. This was about Samantha's surprise for him and he shouldn't spoil it.

"Well, with 141 back maybe she just wanted to know where she will be now. Nero no longer needs the IP Address and she's been through a lot." France reasoned, making Alex frown.

"You know… I want her safe and all but I also want her within my reach. I've lost her far too many times already. I'm not going to lose her again." Alex grumbled making Soap and France look at each other, their faces were worried at their sorry excuse.

"I think Samantha feels the same way too. Maybe she's bargaining for staying at 141." Soap lied, making France question him quietly.

"You know what, Alex? Don't overthink this." Soap tapped his shoulders reassuringly.

"Overthink what?" Samantha inserted. They fell quiet and Samantha slowly asked Soap to let her push Alex as they moved forward, Samantha being excited of what's next.

"Well, we did a great job. I guess." Soap quietly commented sarcastically, earning a soft elbow from France.

"Ow!" he exaggerated and turned to France, his face looked bewildered.

"Way to go, John." She sneered and followed the two on their way to their appointment, riding Soap's trusty jeep.

The drive to the surprise area consisted of mostly Soap and Francine acting like couples while they drove. Soap could see the two murmuring at each other whenever Soap would argue with France on whatever's going on in the road.

"I always wanted to try out some London restaurants." she mused, looking at the place they just passed by.

"Yeah? I could see you as the fancy kind." he chuckled at his guess.

"What does that mean?" France gave him a suspicious glare. Soap looked at her, feigning surrender.

"I just said it as is. You're the kind of person who would want fancy stuff." He explained, focusing back on the road.

"I-"

"Come on. You don't have to read everything I say between the lines. Sometimes, I'm just a simple man" he whined and Alex and Samantha burst out laughing, causing the two to be quiet.

"Are you sure there's nothing going on with you two?" Samantha asked, making the silence a little bit more awkward.

Soap carefully rolled his eyes toward Francine, who was actually looking down and blushing. He really had no definitive stance on whatever's going on between them, and if you ask him, he'd love to assume that they're already together. But he remembered that he told her that he'll be patient, and that's the only thing that's hindering him from taking her to the next level.

"Well…" Francine croaked, her voice was shaky and Soap was actually worried that she was already under pressure.

"We're here." Soap interrupted, wishing he did the right thing. Alex quickly looked outside to see where they actually were.

"What is this place, Soap? Where did you bring us?" Alex asked and Soap just nodded.

"I'll let your girl fill in everything for you. This was her idea after all and we're here to help her out." Soap replied as he assisted him to his wheelchair and watched the two enter the establishment.

He then knocked on Samantha's door as she was still out of focus.

"There's a coffee shop across the street, we could wait there until they finish." He invited her for another coffee date. Hopefully this time, there would be no more emp phone wielding persons to interrupt it.

"About Samantha's question…" She muttered.

"Don't pressure yourself about it. You actually owe me for saving you, by the way." He chuckled, already opening her door.

France slowly stepped down the vehicle and turned to Soap, her head looked up to his face.

"Look John. There's no other reason I can think of that would make you wait anymore. I really enjoy your company, your personality, and I'm curious about everything else about you. So, if you've been waiting all this time ever since that night, my answer is that I'm ready." She smiled, and John's eyes widened at the sight of her. The message made him hug her tight, lift her up and spin her around briefly while she giggled at the feeling.

"Wow. You don't know how much you made my day, France!" he sighed as he slowly set her down and closed the door and made their way to the coffee shop.

"I missed these so much!" France happily chewed on a slice of blueberry cheesecake, with a few crumbs stuck on the edge of her mouth. Soap smiled as she watched her enjoy the simple things in life, a thing he was always looking for in women.

Most of his dating life were his parents setting him up on business dates and most women there were far too serious. They looked like they haven't enjoyed anything in years. Some of them admittedly loved to have fun, but their idea of fun was far too complicated. Like expensive travels and luxurious shopping sprees, none of them piqued Soap's interest.

However, Francine was the first one who begged to differ. It's like every great idea in John's activity book is enjoyable for her. Simple things such as Netflix, Cinemas and even this coffee shop date, made her smile.

"What's funny?" Francine asked as she noticed the odd smile on his face.

"Oh nothing… you just looked cute eating that whole thing. It makes me want to buy a whole cake and watch you smile and eat that all day." he mused, imagining how things would've been if they weren't in public. He could've been tasting that cake from her mouth already.

He quickly grabbed a tissue and wiped off the crumbs as Francine blushed in embarrassment.

"I'm sorry. I didn't notice it was there." she blushed shyly and looked down.

"Nah… why apologize. I was thinking you were hinting at me to kiss you. Like what most movies and cliché shows would mean." He scoffed and sipped on his coffee.

"Ha ha. Well you could try. As if I'd let you." She smiled bravely, but Soap could see her weakness behind that smile. She's raising her guard up again, and it's always like that when people are around.

"Wow. Umm that went differently." Soap commented, attempting to let France open up. This has been a common trend with her lately, toughening up when people are around but when they're alone, she's still strict but less tense.

"I'm sorry. It's just-" She hesitated and turned to the window.

"Say, how long would it take for them to finish?" She asked. Soap also turned to the building and shrugged.

"I don't know. Honestly, I'm excited for him. They make the best prosthetics around here and it'd make Alex's life easier. It'll look and weigh and bend like an actual leg." he said proudly as he turned to France who was looking at him weirdly.

"What?" he asked as he checked his phone which just beeped.

"Actually, they're almost done. And they're asking for an order. I'll just go get some for them, you stay here." He added, holding the thought, wiping his face and proceeded to the counter.

The reformed Task Force 141 would soon be back in business as papers were already approved by the board. They'll be situating themselves on American soil as their previous base was compromised by the traitorous General.

As for their last day on English soil, the rest of the team stayed in a penthouse condominium unit owned by the MacTavishes.

"Wow. This is top class!" Samantha mused as Alex plopped himself on the couch, his new leg quickly rested on the table. He's been in it for only a few hours but he already got the hang of it.

Samantha shot a glare at Alex's actions to which he shrugged on, prompting Soap to reply.

"Don't worry Samantha, make yourselves at home. We don't use this place anyway so help yourselves out. I promise it'll be fine." he eased as Samantha slowly plopped down beside him as Alex's arm rested on her shoulders. Soap actually wondered if he could do that to her too, get comfortable, open up, just normal stuff.

"I'll go get tea." he quickly said to himself as his imagination got the best of him as he walked to the kitchen. France quickly followed him to help out.

"Fancy place you got here, John. I wonder how many girls you've brought in here." She mused standing in front of him, helping with the teacups. Soap eyed her for a second and replied.

"Honestly, I can't count. I used to stay here when I studied and that was years ago." he replied as seriously as possible, looking at the changes on her face. She's actually jealous.

"Yeah. Figures. I saw your photos from earlier years. It was no doubt you'd have a lot of women over." She chuckled, nervously at it. Soap saw through her as she started to get curious about his life. A sign that she's ready to stop lowering her guard. Soap on the other hand, wanted her to feel special. Asking her out as soon as possible would make him come out as a desperate one, so he planned to do it the long traditional way. Which he actually despised, he would want to hug her so tight right now and it was already killing him.

"What about you? How many different rooms did you wake up to already?" he asked, changing the subject as she was already starting to feel bad about her question.

"Me?! Only a few. And most of them were owned by you. I've been very serious about my life choices that I never let myself loose." she sighed as Soap raised an eyebrow.

"Let loose? Like going out to parties?" He added.

"Yes. But broader. Like letting myself loose. I've always followed the path I wanted to be in, not letting any distractions bother me." she explained, blushing at it like it's a secret she was too shy to tell. Soap on the other hand, didn't quite get it.

"So you mean…" He tilted his head.

"Yes. Since birth, I never had a boyfriend." she looked down in embarrassment for the second time today.

Soap gulped. He didn't actually know how to respond to her statement. Sure he wanted to be the first one, but now wasn't the time. It would feel forced. And he wasn't a fan of forced relationships.

The kettle whistled and the two of them quickly responded to it as they both reached out for it, their hands met just by the handle.

"I'll take care of this one." She said as Soap slowly let go of her soft hands and watched her pour it on, carrying it to Samantha and Alex who were already giggling through a romcom.

"Way to go, John." he muttered to himself with a sigh as he ran his hand on his hair.

The day actually felt worse as France continued to remain quiet towards Soap as she invested herself on the television, third wheeling on Alex and Samantha.

Soap pondered about the words he chose to say to her and those he didn't over a steamy shower.

With the place having only two bedrooms, it was inevitable that France would sleep beside him but he also considered sleeping on the couch to respect her privacy or something like that.

As soon as he exited the bathroom, he saw France already tucked on her side of the bed, scrolling through her phone.

"Hey there." he muttered as she rolled her eyes to him and back to her phone.

"Hey." she said nonchalantly, her eyes dead focused on her screen. Soap quickly grabbed his nighttime clothes and slipped them on.

"Are you in any way excited for tomorrow?" he asked, trying to keep her from interacting with him.

"Yeah. A little." she said as she turned to him and smiled.

"Listen, about earlier today, in the kitchen..." he said.

"I'm not mad, John. I just wanted to say it out there so you could understand me."

"Tell me what you feel."

"Embarrassed."

"Why?"

"Because I looked like a fool earlier. When I told you I was ready and now I feel that you're the one who isn't. You told me you would wait but-" Soap placed his hand on her face, gently touching her cheek.

"France. You don't have to worry. You're still the one I'm thinking about every second. I just… wanted to do this the slow and steady way, where I would show off how worthy I am for you. I want you to enjoy the whole John MacTavish Experience." he smiled and she slowly turned her frown upside down.

Soap wanted to take a picture of that smile and plaster it all around the room as his heart started to pound like crazy, his face unknowingly moving closer to hers. They both started to close their eyes as they let their lips do the talking, but in a quiet and intimate way. Soap felt France's greed for his kiss as she slowly learned how to beg for more of him. It was true that she had no experience on these things but something told him that she's starting to learn some tricks herself.

Soap didn't hesitate to retaliate as she released a soft groan, a sign of her being content as her hands slowly grazed his arms, her thumb softly pressed his biceps, digging deeper as their tongues clashed. After a few more seconds, they both broke their kiss as they gasped for air.

"Yeah. Go sleep on the floor before we do something stupid." She giggled and Soap nodded in agreement as they quickly shuffled about, set their beds and called it a night.

Next Chapter - The SEVEN Inch Wound

Notification Squad my Beloved

@samatedeansbroccoli @smokeywhalee @enderio @bumblingbee1 @ricinbach @whimsywispsblog

[draven-imani]

Journal 6

Today was another long day. Another very long day. I don’t even know how to begin to express how much happened today.

We broke fate.

We did what we came to the Grey Garrison to do and according to a higher being we weren’t actually meant to have done that but we did anyways and it changed everything. It changed an entire timeline. We did that. I’m still processing that.

Let me start from the top.

We made for Old Kenabres first thing in the morning. We were given a number of supplies from Arashniaval for our strike force, while Horgus was using his own funds to supply the main troops. The Silver Legion and the units Commander Tirabade had been able to muster rode ahead and drew away the brunt of the demonic forces, leaving the Grey Garrison mostly unguarded. The Commander did not join the forces drawing distraction, however. She would be fighting alongside us to reclaim the shard of the Wardstone from Deskari’s hands. And she was not the only one. This morning the envoy the Commander sent down to speak with the First Descendants returned as well. And they came alongside forces from below ground lead by Lann, ready to join the fight against the demon scourge. Lann and a number of his rangers joined our strike team. Each of us paired up with a ranger, with the group deciding I should team up with Lann since I was the captain of this mission. I had no arguments there. Lann proved to be a very capable marksman. Even without cold iron arrows he managed to do some damage to some of the demons we faced, which is more than I could say for most people.

If we ever have a moment when we aren’t fighting for our lives for once, I wouldn’t mind having a chance to chat with him outside of life-threatening situations. Lann seems like a good guy. But apparently my life is going to be getting really busy really soon, so that’s probably not in the cards.

As we approached the grey garrison, we saw two sentries. We identified the twisted reanimated mockeries as vermleks, parasitic demons who puppeteer corpses of the dead. The victims in question were High Commander Hulrun, and the head of Nyserian Manor ironically enough. It would seem Lord Nyserian met with a terrible fate when he presented Commander Tirabade’s sword to the demons, in a bid to try to get safe passage and a position of power. We found proof later that this was their punishment for him not giving it to them sooner. Serves a coward and a traitor right, for the innocent blood on his hands.

My feelings about Hulrun are more complicated. He was a powerful crusader. He should have been able to stand up against the demons as a symbol of strength against the tide of evil. Instead he was felled and turned into a mockery. So I found what they did despicable and I wanted to put him to rest. But I also never found him to be the height of what we could stand for. He was no Irabeth Tirabade. At one time he was a paranoid man who brought out the worst in our people for many years. He led the witch hunts, which may have been a little before my time, but the effects of which still echo down. I…deeply fear what would happen if anyone found out about the mark I keep under wraps.

Whether he truly become better or simply had others who advised him to tone it down, I will likely never know now. And quite frankly it doesn’t matter, as he is dead and we have more pressing matters than the past to contend with.

Speaking of that accursed mark, it was bleeding a stream of blood worse than ever before, and burning like someone had taken a hot iron to it. I couldn’t help but flinch, and the others couldn’t help but notice the bandages that were already stained red before we had even entered battle. I…promised to explain later. And I suppose I will have to, if it’s going to cause so much blood that I cannot hide it around so many demons. I will have to find a new method. Perhaps a bracer of some kind…

Hiskaria asked ‘you too’ when I started rubbing at my arm initially, and showed me a mark on her back. It was not anything near the same as the festering mark on my wrist. She had some sort of large glowing spiral birthmark on her back. Although there was one thing in common I found: both appeared the day our families died. Hers was reacting here as well, which was apparently abnormal. Hers had something to do with the Riftwardens—which now that I think about it she’d kept buddying up to Arashniaval frequently, going to him to comfort him when he thought the Riftwardens died despite just meeting him, and he’d reacted to her in surprise when we’d first met her.

For now, however, we needed to focus on the mission as hand. There were two demon sentries. If we took them out fast, we might not alert the entire temple of our presence right away. Luna did her usual thing, going invisible and sneaking up on one, getting a good swing in on it, although not enough to destroy its host. Commander Tirabade charged in behind her, stabbing it, and Melody joined her.

Hiskaria and I focused on the other. Radiance was more insistent than ever that these demons be cleansed—the bodies of the faithful needed to be freed and put to rest properly.

These creatures took a beating and still remained standing, sending wave after wave of negative energy through us with mass inflict wounds. The Commander cut down the one who was possessing Hulrun—trying to be respectful of the dead, although once Luna got started insulting him for the witch hunts it was hard for any of us to not agree with her points that the man was kind of an ass. Still, the demon was dead and I’d at least follow Radiance’s request to lay his body to rest later, even he deserved that much.

The other demon devoured its host, but was then skewered through on Melody’s glaive, leaving the courtyard outside the temple silent.

Then Melody looked up. She told us in a hushed voice that she saw her goddess’ songbird. But also a twisted being who looked like a humanoid woman with a clawed locust’s arm. An oracle of Deskari. And probably a powerful one at that if her body was twisted in such a manner.

This would be no easy task. But we needed to get to the wardstone and destroy it, to keep it from being used as a weapon and turning our own symbol of protection against our unsuspecting men and women on the front lines. Whether it would be easy or not didn’t matter.

Luna slipped ahead of us, practically vanishing as she pulled her hood over her head and she seemed to become one with the shadows with her mastery of stealth. I focused on Iomedae’s blessings, using her mastery of the warrior’s ways to try to keep up with my swift footed companion.

A fight had already broken out by the time I arrived. Luna had snuck up behind a tiefling cultist and liberated his head from his shoulders. The rest had tried to swarm her, but she was not an easy woman to harm in such a way. Lann shot an arrow into the fray, catching the attention of one of the tieflings and drawing him out of the room to me, which I swiftly cut down. The rest were taken care of by Hiskaria’s arrows and Luna and Melody’s blades.

Now that we were inside of the temple, Radiance’s energy was feeling more insistent than usual. They told me that this was once a temple to Iomedae, and it should be cleansed and returned to its former glory. I got the sense that they meant immediately, not after we got rid of the demons. At first as I cleared the demons I argued with Radiance, telling the sword that I needed them to be patient—if we tried to cleanse the temple before we got rid of all the demons, the demons would just desecrate it again.

What made me change my mind was the room with the arms.

I am not going to describe the room with the arms. Just know that…the demons and their cultists made some very visceral and disgusting idols in mockery of our holy places.

I was ambushed by several cultists of Deskari in that room. Which was a veeeeeery good way to get some very recently acquired bad feelings out of my system. With some help from the others, we cleared out the three cultists who thought they would be adding me to their sick idol. Sick bastards.

Then Melody opened a door. And got a bomb right in the face.

Because alchemists suck like that.

Luna went in with her axe, but the man had a spell on that made hitting him difficult, he shifted around the attacks, our visuals on him were blurred and difficult to see correctly. Hiskaria got a bright idea, and cast magic missile on him.

I liked that idea, and produced a wand of magic missile we’d been given by Arashniaval, and did the same. Between the two of us and Luna, we beat away at the alchemist. He used a smoke bomb to try to hide from the missiles. Hiskaria got in closer, drew fire from him, and was able to give me enough of an idea of where he was that I could get up in his face and cast it once more. Which was all we needed.

From there we only had one way to go. Which was behind a locked door Luna was having difficulty opening. We decided to work together to smash through it. With Luna taking point, we threw everything we had into it, and finally managed to burst the door.

Straight into a room with a tiefling and three dretches.

It wasn’t actually that difficult. Luna ran past the dretches and took on the tiefling. Commander Tirabade and Melody took on the dretch nearest the door, which I used the Commander’s shield for cover to slip in and attack the one next to her, Radiance giving me a particularly spectacular moment killing the dretch in a single swing. The final dretch tried to flee, but Luna took a swing at it as it did, then ran after it and ended it before it could try to warn anyone on the second floor.

We were a little bruised, but not so much that we felt like we needed to sound the retreat yet.

Radiance was even more insistent, and I was feeling a bit twitchy after the aforementioned room as well. I requested some time to clear out the bottom floor before we continued on. The others agreed, as it would give them some time to check for anything of value on the bodies they may have missed.

So, I got to work. First clearing out the…aforementioned room. Doing burial rites for the desecrated bodies and for Hulrun while I was at it. Then I cleaned the prayer room. Which had an interesting engraving in celestial, although I cannot read the language. I recalled that Gabrielle could as an aasimar, although I didn’t want to make assumptions given how different Luna is—so I asked if anyone in our group could speak the language. As fortune would have it, Luna did speak celestial, and was willing to help, despite needing to kneel before the alter to see the engraving properly. She would not tell me what it said, instead, she went over to a glowing outline of a doorway we’d noticed in the other room, and spoke the words, “Let us inherit thine arms, Iomedae.” The doorway swung open. Inside was an amazing armory. Cold iron weapons of all kinds, an enchanted longsword, sturdy shields, and a gorgeous breastplate with Iomedae’s holy symbol emblazoned across it. I feel speed is what we needed more than heavy armor at the moment, or I would have gladly donned it.

I also may have hesitated because I think it looked like that sort of think Auriel would have liked. I feel like I remember him mentioning he intended to get something similar to this at some point. Or maybe that’s just me projecting. I don’t know.

Anyways.

After that was done we cleaned up the museum, in which we found an adamantine morningstar of all things. Would have been useful for that door earlier. We gave it to Luna. Adamantine with her strength will be useful I’m certain.

With everything cleaned up and Radiance a bit quieter, we decided to head up to the second floor.

The second floor was almost blood bath. I…kind of don’t remember a lot of the fight that happened here. It was a blur, and I went down a few times. A lot of times. They really had it out for me. For obvious reasons, I was the only Iomedaen in the room. And possibly because of the accursed mark on my arm, who knows? What I do know is, we got upstairs. Melody got besieged on all sides, and the moment one of the tiefling cultists died, we heard the voice of the oracle. And she summoned a swarm of locusts from the tiefling’s body, which attacked Melody on his death, badly injurying her with negative energy. I ended up running in and putting myself in between her and some of the other enemies with the intention of drawing some attention away from her. Which worked. Unfortunately it worked a little too well. I got swarmed by tieflings and Deskari cultists, and when Melody or Heskaria killed one the oracle would cause the locust swarms to pull the life from me. I went in and out of consciousness more than a few times here. I was lucky the Commander was here. She and Hiskaria kept me alive. Between Commander Tirabade’s lay on hand’s and Hiskaria’s wand of cure moderate wounds she’d picked up somewhere along the way. I definitely owed her one. I guess as her ‘acting captain’ I’m putting in a few good words for her for sure at this point.

When the swarm of enemies died down, we began looking around a bit more. We found a room with a bowl of water and—viscera—with zombies milling about. We took care of them with literally no issue. Radiance once again began insisting on immediately consecrating the room, and I once again told them that we needed to wait until we knew there was nothing nastier on this floor after what we’d just dealt with, if the oracle could reach out through her followers up here. Radiance didn’t like that answer, but conceded that it was my choice either way. Good. Maybe Luna was onto something with putting my foot down with them.

Melody was standing near a door looking a bit spooked, and as I approached she quietly told me something was on the other side talking in her mind. She described it, and I reasoned out that it was a Schir demon due to the sound of gnawing on metal she heard. We decided to let Luna go in first, as it was probably prepared but to my knowledge they couldn’t see those who were invisible. So she downed another potion and slipped inside, getting a good stab at him before he could react. Unfortunately, he proved a bit more damaging than expected, and we heard Luna calling for someone to help her out. I was planning to join her, since demon slaying is kind of my specialty. But then something else burst from the door behind me. A strange chimera creature. Not a demon, but an evil intelligent beast working with them. A peryton. The creature bared its fanged in something between a smile and a snarl as it greeted me, before lashing out, knocking me against the wall and dashing any hope of me going to Luna’s aid.

Fortunately, both Melody and Commander Tirabade were able to help Luna, while Hiskaria put some arrows into the creature attacking me. The Commander apparently killed the demon, then Luna charged out of the room and with a single swing of her axe beheaded the peryton.

The rest of the floor was so easily cleared out I legitimately don’t even remember what the creatures in the last room were. Some kind of insect or spider that caused darkness, but Luna was able to cast light due to her aasimar bloodline and dispel it. I blocked the doorway to protect Melody and let Hiskaria and Melody take shots at them until I was hurting too badly to continue that tactic, then stepped aside for Luna the clean up the rest.

After that was done, Luna began going through some papers that she had seen the cultists looking over before. I began clearing out the room the zombies had been in that Radiance had reacted to. And the others began checking the other rooms for anything that might be useful or important.

After I cleared and purified the water in the bowl it became immediately obvious that it was a scrying dish, as it activated on its own. It had two things to show me. First, was Leto and Commander Spriggans. They were in the middle of the demon hordes, separated from their unit. They were fighting valiantly, and they didn’t look worse for the wear at the moment. But with their positioning, I knew if I called the retreat now, they might get left behind. They might end up stuck behind enemy lines. Or worse, overwhelmed and killed.

Before I had time to process that, a second vision was granted. This one a bit closer to where we were. It was of the oracle, upstairs. She was panicking. Pacing, muttering to herself “fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck fuck”, terrified of how quickly we were tearing through her forces, of how quickly we were making our way to her and undoing all her work. The angle of the scry then panned out, showing me the room outside, allowing me to see the fiendish minotaur guarding the door to her chambers. It gave me a good idea of what we were going to be facing when we went up there. It was a tiny room to be dealing with such a large creature, not much room to maneuver. Not much room to get Luna into a flanking position.

But more importantly, we’d been planning to call the retreat after this floor. Because we were all exhausted. We were low on magic. We were low on healing. We were hurting. But if we did that, we were going to put Leto and Commander Spriggans in danger.

I had to make a call. Retreat. Put the mission and the people in front of me first and risk Leto. Or push forward, risk everything so I could try to bring everyone back safe. Assuming I didn’t get everyone killed doing so.

I was paralyzed with indecision.

The others were talking about various things they’d found. A list of traitors here and elsewhere, which was useful. Some other things I honestly was too distracted at the time to really process. Then Luna started talking about how we ought to head out if we were going to call the retreat and get back to Defender’s heart, since we were getting tired. Melody and Hiskaria agreed.

I stopped them. I told them to wait. I explained I’d seen something in the scrying room, and I explained what I’d seen and why it was a problem for retreating. But also why not retreating was a problem.

Luna said she didn’t give a damn, and said on the count of three everyone raise their hand who voted to keep going. All three of them did.

I—was speechless. I am not so proud as to think they did not understand how much of a risk they were taking pushing forward. They knew how much they were risking, and what they were doing, to keep Leto safe. A man they’ve barely even met once, but who they knew was important to me.

I owe them. More than I can begin to repay. But I am going to start, as best I can.

After I finished cleansing the second floor, we made our plan for how to deal with the third. We knew that the oracle was not at her best. We also knew how the minotaur’s room was laid out. We decided to use this to our advantage. There wasn’t much room to maneuver—not even enough for us to bring our ranger companions along, we had them watch our backs and stay on the second floor—but there was just enough to possibly get Luna in behind him if we played our cards right.

Luna drank another invisibility potion, and crept ahead of us. We waited for half a minute, then followed, with Melody in the lead. The plan was for her to lure the beast forward, as she was the only one with a weapon that could reach as far as the minotaur’s. She would stand in the stairwell and taunt the beast until it charged her, then Luna would step behind it and attack the moment its back was no longer to the door.

The plan worked. It worked exactly like we’d planned. Except for one problem. I didn’t see it for myself, I was still in the stairwell. But I heard about it afterwards. When the beast began to lumber forward, Luna stepped in to attack. She landed a devastating blow, drawing her axe up from the bottom of its spine to its neck. The creature stopped, and swung around, and its own axe swung into Luna. The fiendish creature put a smite into the blow, and its full strength behind it. With a single swing, Luna crumpled. I didn’t see the attack, but I saw the end result. There was blood everywhere.

Commander Tirabade charged in, and ended the beast’s life in a single final stroke, Luna having nearly ended it with her single blow. This left the room clear for Hiskaria to run in and use her wand to heal Luna back to her feet, and Melody to finish getting her back up. By the time I reached her, she looked good as new, if not a little shaken or perhaps just displeased that her blow hadn’t killed the beast outright. There was blood splattered across everything.

I really owe Luna after all this is over, with how close that was.

Then Luna suggested we do that again for the next room. We went to argue. I wondered if maybe she’d taken some head trauma on top of the axe wound. But she pointed out that technically the plan worked fine—she’d just gotten unlucky with the minotaur’s axe. She was pretty sure the same wouldn’t happen a second time with this panicky oracle. And this time we’d all be right outside the door.

I hated to admit it, but the plan had worked pretty well. And getting Luna in the room and flanking the oracle would be the best way to ensure she went down quickly. So we all agreed. Luna drank another potion and vanished, then we opened the door.

The oracle laughed manically when she saw us, her eyes wild and desperate. She was a twisted disgusting thing, her form warped into some sort of half-elf/locust combination by Deskari’s magic. I wouldn’t have even recognized her as a fellow half-elf myself if Luna hadn’t said something earlier when one of us was describing her. I am glad that the taint that this mark on my arm has left on me has done no such thing, I much prefer my face and arm as they are thank you.

The oracle—whose name I felt no particular urge to memorize, my apologies, I think it would have galled her to know she wasn’t that important—warned us to stay back. She asked where Luna was, to which Melody claimed that she’d been killed by the minotaur. One look at the bloodied room seemed to be enough to convince her of the truth of that, as she laughed in our faces at our folly. She motioned, and two portals appeared. What appeared to be two babau demons appeared, with Leto and Commander Spriggans held hostage. She warned that she would have them killed if we didn’t retreat and let her finish her work.

I…admit to not thinking straight here. I froze. Obviously, I knew we couldn’t just throw down our arms, not when so many lives were at stake with the wardstone right there. But I also wasn’t about to throw my brother and commander to the wolves.

Thankfully, Melody was much more clear-sighted than I. She ran forward, and attacked one of the supposed demons. The illusion around them flickered and vanished, revealing the truth underneath. Two constructs, which had created the illusory demons—and the illusions of Leto and Commander Spriggans, who were not there at all.

I was incensed at the trickery. I realized then that the desecrated scrying chamber had very likely been to look for someone one of us cared about to use against us, and she had chosen Leto. This kind of construct could only be used with an illusion preprogrammed into it—which meant they knew what to put in ahead of time, and someone elsewhere had put it in and sent it over. The constructs had the holy symbol of Sivanah emblazoned on them, so it seemed someone within their church was responsible. According to Luna, it was Lady Salzala. I’m inclined to believe her. Apparently, the mummified locust with the book she stole the day we met was addressed to her as well, so a lot of things keep pointing back in her direction. Commander Tirabade said she left with a contingent of her men on ‘business’ after the attack, so it would appear she fled the scene.

Unfortunately, her name was not amongst the ones in the documents Luna found naming traitors, so we lack any further evidence, although the Commander is going to look into it further.

With the bluff called, we attacked. Luna appeared as she swung her axe at the twisted locust oracle. Both Luna and the oracle looked surprised for a moment, I didn’t catch what either said, but then the oracle used a spell to teleport across the room.

While Melody and I focused on her and Luna dealt with the constructs that had flanked her, Hiskaria had a different idea in mind. She swung around, avoiding the fight entirely, and pulled out the rod of cancellation we’d been given to destroy the Wardstone. We were here to do a job, and she was going to make sure it got done, one way or another.

The oracle cried out, but it was too late. Hiskaria pushed past whatever last defenses the final piece of the wardstone may have had, and it shattered in a blinding flash. Shards rained down around us like meteors in miniature. They ripped the oracle and her constructs to shreds, but miraculously the rest of us were untouched—whenever they came near us, they redirected, whooshing around as if we had our own little gravity field and then being thrown in another direction.

Then everything went white. Me, Luna, Melody, and Hiskaria found ourselves in this place alone, Commander Tirabade was nowhere to be seen. Radiance floated before us, pulsing with energy, their blade face down. They spoke, and as they did we began to see visions of what they spoke of. Visions of things past. Of how the Wardstone came to be. Of Commander Tirabade and Stauton Vhagn…apparently former friends, before his betrayal. Of the Stormlord’s first attack on the Wardstone, and then Stauton’s betrayal and escape from the city. And then the most recent attack on the stone, the one that shattered it and brought us together. The attack that killed Trendalor—we know for certain now that the city’s defender is dead, his body stolen away by demons. And then we saw various demons guarding the stone, each powerful entity growing bored with their post and handing it off to one below them, until finally it fell to the oracle, who paced the room fearfully, knowing what would happen to her should she fail at our hands.

Then we saw what was supposed to happen next. The fate that we avoided. The time that was meant to come to pass, but didn’t. Arelu Vorlesh stepped from a portal with a purple crystal in hand, and began corrupting the Wardstone. And she succeeded. Dark tendrils spread through the land, they infected the crusaders through their connection to the divine within the Wardstone, and it twisted and warped them all into half-fiend monstrosities under Deskari’s power. Deskari’s army grew into a force all that more unstoppable, bolstered by our own men whose lives and souls were ripped away all at once.

Then the vision shattered, and we saw what had happened when we shattered the Wardstone instead. A great wave of golden energy swept across the land, destroying countless demons in its wake. Not obliterating their forces, unfortunately—more will come crawling from the Worldwound in the days to come, but it’s still a mighty blow that should buy us some time to regroup after what they did to Kenabres. A nice bit of divine retribution for those who have died.

Radiance spoke to us again. Or, the Spirit of the Hall of Heroes. I couldn’t quite tell if this was the exact same being as the one who spoke to me through the blade. I do recall Radiance referring to themself as the Spirit of the Hall of Heroes before, so likely the same? Radiance is less of a mouthful and easier to write, though. Maybe just ‘The Spirit’ for now, to avoid confusion, because I still had a version of Radiance to use in what was to come as well.

The Spirit drew a glowing blade of light from what had appeared to be Radiance’s blade, and pointed it at us. They told us to show them that we were worthy of the power to defy fate itself. Then they took the form of a man wielding a polearm and the form of a crystalline phoenix formed before them. And flames erupted around us.

Hiskaria did what she does best and peppered him with arrows. I patched myself up with some quick healing and tried to come in for an attack, but their form shifted again, this time into a tiefling man with a large hexagonal shield and he blocked my blow. However since I was harrying them, Luna was about to come around behind him and get a blow of her own off with her axe. Their form shifted to a human woman with a similar axe in an attempt to block, but Luna’s attack managed to get through. Then the spirit’s form shattered. They reformed their crystalline body farther in the white void—now an elven woman with a bow, and began shooting off rapid deadly arrow shots at us that made Hiskaria’s already deadly aim look like a child’s shooting.

We went with the same tactic as before, with Hiskaria shooting from afar, Melody charging in with her glaive, myself healing and sweeping in to flank with Luna, and finally Luna dealing a crippling blow to the crystalline Spirit. The being’s form shattered, underneath was a second form, somewhat like an elven man in appearance, although still made of crystal, holding a staff with twisting gears, the only part of them not crystalline. They tapped the staff, and everything was tugged backwards, returned to how it had been when the fight had first begun. The Spirit sheathed their blade. They asked each of us in turn what we were fighting for, and in turn each of us gave our personal answer.

For me…the answer’s always been the same. I want to protect people. To defend those who are less powerful from the demons, be it with a shield or at the end of a blade.

The Spirit acknowledged us as worthy of the power that had fallen into our laps—and as such they were going to return us to that moment in time, and, as he put it, ‘allow you the power you were nearly denied’.

I found myself back in the moment when the Wardstone was exploding. Shards were flying everywhere. This time, however, a piece hit me, square in the chest. Unlike the oracle and her constructs, it didn’t tear me apart. Instead, an energy flowed through every part of my being, all at once. Through my body, my blood, and my very soul. The other three experienced the same.

We didn’t have time to talk about it, or to wonder at it. As the explosion died down, a portal opened before us. One we’d already seen once before, in a vision, mere moments ago. What felt like mere moments ago, in that white void. Out stepped Arelu Vorlesh, one of Deskari’s generals, in the flesh. She was holding that same purple crystal that she’d had in the vision. She commented on the fact that we’d destroyed the Wardstone that she’d intended to use—but that its power lived on within us, and she would just have to corrupt us instead. Then she activated the crystal. There was a terrible sensation, like something cold and oily trying to take hold of my soul. Commander Tirabade charged Vorlesh, but she cast a spell that began to suffocate her, and she went unconscious in moments. Apparently it was meant to hit all of us, but the Wardstone’s power had protected us. Unfortunately its power was not protecting us from the purple crystal’s power, and we were frozen to the spot. I…was certain we were done for.

Then a blue hand reached out through Vorlesh’s portal. A light from Radiance’s crystal streaked out through her and into that being’s hand. Something was cast, and Arelu Vorlesh was left badly injured, and we were freed. Vorlesh fled. We didn’t ever get a good look at the other being.

Radiance has been silent since.

I can’t say for certain. But I think Auriel saved us. Some piece of his soul. Some version of him. I don’t know. It’s the only explanation I have. That light was in Radiance because of Auriel’s soul, so if it went to that being, it had to have been. Somehow. I know that’s weirdly optimistic of me. I’m not the sort to cling to thinking people spontaneously come back from the dead, especially people whose souls shatter on death. But—I mean Auriel was literally the Chosen One. If anyone was going to come back, right?

Anyways, Radiance doesn’t talk to me anymore. Or can’t, more likely, just like the whole ‘can’t choose Irabeth over you’ thing. But they haven’t flayed my hands, either. I think the whole ‘breaking fate’ thing means I’m able to bend the rules on the whole chosen one thing. Or maybe having a little divine power from the wardstone’s what did it. Who knows. I’m glad. If I’m honest, I’ve gotten a little attached. As much as they’ve gotten on my nerves and the whole ‘flay you alive’ thing pissed me off, I’m actually kind of sad that I can’t hear them now. For one thing, it was the last little connection to Auriel we had. I have no idea if they can hear me or if they’re in some kind of hibernation now. I’ve still been talking to them a bit. Like a crazy person, yeah, yeah.

Anyways, it wasn’t over with Vorlesh leaving. She decided to leave a parting gift. A whole swarm of babau demons. Real ones, not a bunch of illusions over constructs. Babaus are quite a bit stronger than the dretches and vermleks we’d been fighting. Under any other circumstances, we’d have definitely been overwhelmed and killed by a swarm of eight of them.

Instead, they couldn’t even touch us. I mean it, there wasn’t a scratch on us when we left. We completely overpowered these demons that should have easily outclassed us. The wardstone’s powers completely suffused our every action, everything we did seemed to be at the most perfect it could be. I cannot begin to describe to you how it feels to completely annihilate demons that should be such fearsome foes without risking going into territory that may start sounding like It’s bordering blasphemy, so I think I’ll reel it back a bit.

Afterwards, we healed the Commander, and began making our way back to Defender’s Heart. On the way, Hiskaria told us that apparently the very supportive voice in her head was apparently her goddess, Cassandalee. I’d never heard of her before, but Melody had. She was apparently more of a Numerian goddess, one of love, redemption, artifice, and good. Strange that she hadn’t gotten bigger in the 300 years she’s been around if redemption’s in her portfolio since there’s been a big need for that all things considered, since Valoria didn’t pick that up from Sarenrae. But I suppose since her main followers are apparently androids maybe she wasn’t really able to spread much outside her home base, so to speak.

Then the others decided to start hounding me as we walked back. I thought it would be about my arm, considering that seemed like the most pressing thing to ask about. But no. Apparently Luna and Melody had gotten it into their heads that Leto and I are an item. Really! I tried vehemently to correct them, that they really had the wrong idea, that we grew up together and I think of him more like a brother, but for whatever reason they still seem really unconvinced. Maybe if I send them Leto’s way he can talk some sense into them. No. He’ll probably just get them more wound up and release them back on me for the laughs. I tried to get Hiskaria to try to talk some sense into them, but she said since Cassandalee is a goddess of love she felt like it was now her sworn duty to not get in the way of this kind of talk. So now I have a Shelynite and Hiskaria to deal with about this kind of thing. Great!

Anyways. With the demons destroyed by the shockwave, there was no reason to worry about Leto and Commander Spriggans’ safety anymore. I’ll tell Leto about these shenanigans some other day. Tonight, I’m too exhausted to even think about going down there and drinking. Sleep. Sleep sounds good.

[newstfionline]

Friday, September 3, 2021

US faith groups unite to help Afghanistan refugees after war (AP) America’s major religions and denominations, often divided on other big issues, have united behind the effort to help receive an influx of refugees from Afghanistan following the end of the United States’ longest war and one of the largest airlifts in history. Among those gearing up to help are Jewish refugee resettlement agencies and Islamic groups; conservative and liberal Protestant churches; and prominent Catholic relief organizations, providing everything from food and clothes to legal assistance and housing. “It’s incredible. It’s an interfaith effort that involved Catholic, Lutheran, Muslim, Jews, Episcopalians ... Hindus ... as well as nonfaith communities who just believe that maybe it’s not a matter of faith, but it’s just a matter of who we are as a nation,” said Krish O’Mara Vignarajah, president and CEO of Lutheran Immigration and Refugee Service. The U.S. and its coalition partners have evacuated more than 100,000 people from Afghanistan since the airlift began Aug. 14, including more than 5,400 American citizens and many Afghans who helped the U.S. during the 20-year war.

Hurricane Ida’s aftermath, recovery uneven across Louisiana (AP) In New Orleans, an ongoing power outage after Hurricane Ida is making the sweltering summer unbearable. But in some areas outside the city, that misery is compounded by a lack of water, flooded neighborhoods and severely damaged homes. Four days after Hurricane Ida struck, the storm’s aftermath—and progress in recovering from it—are being felt unevenly across affected communities in Louisiana. In New Orleans, power was restored Wednesday to a small number of homes and businesses, city crews had some streets almost completely cleared of fallen trees and debris and a few corner stores reopened. Outside New Orleans, neighborhoods remained flooded and residents were still reeling from damage to their homes and property. More than 1,200 people were walking through some of Ida’s hardest-hit communities to look for those needing help, according to the Louisiana Fire Marshal’s office.

More than 45 dead after Ida’s remnants blindside Northeast (AP) A stunned U.S. East Coast faced a rising death toll, surging rivers and tornado damage Thursday after the remnants of Hurricane Ida walloped the region with record-breaking rain, drowning more than 40 people in their homes and cars. In a region that had been warned about potentially deadly flash flooding but hadn’t braced for such a blow from the no-longer-hurricane, the storm killed at least 46 people from Maryland to Connecticut on Wednesday night and Thursday morning. In New York, nearly 500 vehicles were abandoned on flooded highways, garbage bobbed in streaming streets and water cascaded into the city’s subway tunnels, trapping at least 17 trains and disrupting service all day. Videos online showed riders standing on seats in swamped cars. All were safely evacuated, with police aiding 835 riders and scores of people elsewhere. The National Weather Service said the ferocious storm also spawned at least 10 tornadoes from Maryland to Massachusetts, including a 150-mph (241 kph) twister that splintered homes and toppled silos in Mullica Hill, New Jersey, south of Philadelphia.

President’s murder inquiry slow amid Haiti’s multiple crises (AP) In the nearly two months since President Jovenel Moïse was assassinated, Haiti has suffered a devastating earthquake and a drenching tropical storm, the twin natural disasters deflecting attention from the man-made one that preceded them. Add the constant worry over deteriorating security at the hands of gangs that by some estimates control territory that’s home to about a fifth of Haiti’s 11 million citizens, and the investigation into Moïse’s killing is fast fading from the public consciousness. Even those still paying attention, demanding accountability and pressuring for a thorough investigation give no chance to the crime’s masterminds being brought to justice in a country where impunity reigns. It doesn’t help that Moïse was despised by a large portion of the population. “The hope for finding justice for Jovenel is zero,” said Pierre Esperance, executive director of the National Human Rights Defense Network.

Fancy a beer in Britain? In some pubs, supplies are running low. (Washington Post) Fears are brewing among pint-loving Brits amid reports of a national beer shortage. Some pubs say they are running low on pints of Carling and Coors—the latest victims of the United Kingdom’s supply chain crisis, sparked by Brexit and exacerbated by the coronavirus pandemic, that has led to headline-grabbing scarcities of items including McDonald’s milkshakes, beloved Nando’s chicken and the polarizing breakfast spread Marmite. “We are experiencing some supply problems,” a spokesman for pub chain Wetherspoons said Tuesday, apologizing for any inconvenience caused to customers. The lack of beer has been attributed to the ongoing shortage of truck drivers to transport goods, a problem sparked by Britain’s decision to leave the European Union following a 2016 referendum that divided the country. The driver shortage has not been helped by the country’s “pingdemic,” in which tens of thousands of workers were forced to self-isolate after being contacted by the National Health Service app for coming into contact with someone who tested positive for coronavirus.

Merkel steps down with legacy dominated by tackling crises (AP) Angela Merkel will leave office as one of modern Germany’s longest-serving leaders and a global diplomatic heavyweight, with a legacy defined by her management of a succession of crises that shook a fragile Europe rather than any grand visions for her own country. In 16 years at the helm of Europe’s biggest economy, Merkel did end military conscription, set Germany on course for a future without nuclear and fossil-fueled power, and introduce a national minimum wage and benefits encouraging fathers to look after young children, among other things. But a senior ally recently summed up what many view as her main service: as an anchor of stability in stormy times. He told Merkel: “You protected our country well.”

India locks down Kashmir after top separatist leader’s death (AP) Indian authorities cracked down on public movement and imposed a near-total communications blackout Thursday in disputed Kashmir after the death of Syed Ali Geelani, a top separatist leader who became the emblem of the region’s defiance against New Delhi. Geelani, who died late Wednesday at age 92, was buried in a quiet funeral at a local graveyard organized by authorities under harsh restrictions, his son Naseem Geelani told The Associated Press. “They snatched his body and forcibly buried him. Nobody from the family was present for his burial. We tried to resist but they overpowered us and even scuffled with women,” said Naseem Geelani. As most Kashmiris remained locked inside their homes, armed police and soldiers patrolled the tense region. Government forces placed steel barricades and razor wire across many roads, bridges and intersections and set up additional checkpoints across towns and villages in the Kashmir Valley. Authorities cut most of cellphone networks and mobile internet service in a common tactic employed by India in anticipation of mass protests.

Women and technology in Japan (NYT) Japan is facing a severe shortage of workers in technology and engineering. And in university programs that produce workers in these fields, Japan has some of the lowest percentages of women in the developed world. Up to age 15, Japanese girls and boys perform equally well in math and science on international standardized tests. But at this critical juncture, when students must choose between the science and humanities tracks in high school, girls appear to lose confidence and interest in math and science. In these fields, the higher the educational level, the fewer the women, a phenomenon many blame on cultural expectations. “The sex-based division of labor is deeply rooted,” one young woman said. To help change the trend, two women with science backgrounds co-founded a nonprofit called Waffle, which runs one-day tech camps for middle and high school girls. Asumi Saito and Sayaka Tanaka offer career lectures and hands-on experiences that emphasize problem solving, community, and entrepreneurship to counter the stereotypically geeky image of technology. “Our vision is to close the gender gap by empowering and educating women in technology,” Saito said.

Taiwan Warns China Can ‘Paralyze’ Island’s Defenses in Conflict (Bloomberg) Taiwan warned that China could “paralyze” its defenses in a conflict, a stark new assessment expected to fuel calls in Washington for more support for the democratically ruled island. China is able to neutralize Taiwan’s air-and-sea defenses and counter-attack systems with “soft and hard electronic attacks,” Taiwan’s Ministry of National Defense said in an annual report to lawmakers seen by Bloomberg News. The document offered a more alarming assessment than last year’s report, which had said China still lacked the capability to launch an assault. While Beijing isn’t believed to possess the transport and logistical capacity necessary for an invasion of Taiwan’s large and mountainous main island, the ministry recommended monitoring Chinese efforts to expand training and preparations for complex landing operations. China already has the ability to seize Taiwan’s surrounding islands, it said.

Those left in Afghanistan complain of broken US promises (AP) Even in the final days of Washington’s chaotic airlift in Afghanistan, Javed Habibi was getting phone calls from the U.S. government promising that the green card holder from Richmond, Virginia, his wife and their four daughters would not be left behind. He was told to stay home and not worry, that they would be evacuated. Late Monday, however, his heart sank as he heard that the final U.S. flights had left Kabul’s airport, followed by the blistering staccato sound of Taliban gunfire, celebrating what they saw as their victory over America. “They lied to us,” Habibi said of the U.S. government. He is among hundreds of American citizens and green card holders stranded in the Afghan capital. Victoria Nuland, undersecretary of state for political affairs, would not address individual cases but said all U.S. citizens and lawful permanent residents who could not get evacuation flights or were otherwise stranded had been contacted individually in the past 24 hours and told to expect further information about routes out once those have been arranged.

[lisarichardsonbylines]

How to Tell Your Husband You’re a Witch

Witches we need you. Now more than ever. In the time of COVID-19 we can find respite in place-based reverence, plant magic and the divine feminine. So writes Lisa Richardson, who came to witchiness with nothing but white hetero straight-lacedness and a crush on a yoga teacher.

Lisa Richardson | Longreads | April 2020 | 15 minutes (4,084 words)

On a Friday afternoon, pre-COVID-19, my husband dropped some ice-cubes into glasses, ready to make us screwdrivers and cheers to surviving another week of working/parenting/wondering where the hell the years were going, only, the vodka bottle was empty.

“Oh yeah,” I said, my eyes sliding sideways, trying to not cause a fuss, “I used it for medicine.” The previous week, the kitchen counter had been cluttered with a giant mason jar full of oily plant matter. “Balm of Gilead!” I explained, brightly, as he wiped away the breakfast crumbs around it.

“But what is it?”

“Cottonwood tips in oil.”

His eyes had flicked, then, over to the brand-new bottle of extra virgin olive oil that was now nearly empty, as I enumerated the medicinal benefits of this old herbal remedy (and all this from a tree in our backyard!). Twenty-four years together means I could hear the abacus in his brain clicking, as he wordlessly calculated the cost per milliliter of a gallon jar of plant matter masticating in top-shelf olive oil, against the cost per unit of a bottle of generic aspirin tables, overlaid with the probability of me losing interest in this project.

First the olive oil. Now the vodka for dozens of little jars of tinctures — garden herbs and weeds soaking in now-undrinkable booze. My midlife quest to attune more deeply to the rhythms of the natural world was starting to incur unexpected, but real, costs.

He was quiet, as he opened the fridge and pulled out a beer instead.

* * *

In my defense, I could have pointed my finger at Natalie Rousseau, a yoga teacher living in my 5,000 person village, who I’d first encountered leading a solstice yoga class billed as a way to survive the madness of the holidays (in slightly more gracious language). Thanks to her offerings of insight I did survive the commercial horror of the “festive” season, and a few months later, as the new moon entered Aries (whatever that actually means), I plonked down $200 to subscribe to her online 13 Moons course — my foray into “slowing down and being more present,” as I pitched it to my husband when he inquired about the strange entry on the credit card statement.

But I did not deflect the simmering tension between us by naming Natalie as the instigator of these “kitchen witch” experiments. Even though I am not a member of any kind of coven or cult, (I don’t think book club counts), I know deep in my bones to never throw another woman onto the fire for helping you. That has been done too many times.

But there it is. The word. Witch. The wound.

* * *

Every day, after COVID-19 entered our world, Natalie Rousseau has responded with an offering, a teaching — a meditation, an ancient mantra of protection, a yoga practice for managing anxiety, a how-to video on harvesting poplar medicine. It’s as if she’s been resourcing herself for this moment to develop the richest arsenal imaginable, to navigate, not the public health crisis, but the billion personal crises each of us is forced to confront as life as we know it slams into pandemic mode. It’s not what I thought a witch would do, if I ever thought about them at all.

Natalie doesn’t look like a witch either — not in the way I conceived it for last year’s Halloween costume, with my long black skirt, dollar-store pointy hat, and heavy black eyeliner, walking alongside my 6-year-old vampire-werewolf. Natalie is petite, just a few inches over five feet, her long blond hair still evoking the decade she spent living in a west coast surf town, her chest and lean muscled arms bright with full sleeve flowery tattoos and Mary Oliver quotes. She moves like a dancer, demonstrating yoga poses as if she’s transcending gravity. As a teacher, she speaks exactly, even in Sanskrit, and guides movement precisely, padding gently and soundlessly through the room, making an adjustment here, offering an instruction there.

So, I was surprised when she used the word “witch” to launch her new online offering, The Witches Wheel. The lure was irresistible. Natalie was claiming the word “witch” without flinching, without anger, without provocation, not as a way to reclaim feminine power and stick it to the men, warranted as that may be: It was essentially an invitation to observe the cycle of the seasons.

A threshold beckoned.

* * *

Natalie, a recent empty-nester, lives with her husband Paul and two dogs in a modest townhome, with a creek and a dozen rogue gardens installed by various residents running behind it. The garage is full of motorbikes. The porch is swept clean on the day I visit, six months into the 13 Moons program, wanting to talk with her about this radical word and why, in a world still unsure what to do with powerful women, she’s not afraid that she’s exposing herself to pitchforks and fires, haters, and trolls.

Even though I am not a member of any kind of coven or cult, (I don’t think book club counts), I know deep in my bones to never throw another woman onto the fire for helping you. That has been done too many times.

A tea blend of her own mixing — vanilla chaga chai — is brewing on the stove in an open saucepan. She tends to it, as I settle in, sneaking glimpses around the room, looking for evidence of witchcraft — pentagrams, cloaks, bottled frogs. Nothing. The space is uncluttered, a throw-rug on the armchair, a couple of stark white deer skulls are mounted, European-style, on a wall against a reclaimed barn board — definitely more Soho chic than occult-goth. Her husband returns from town, where he has picked up fresh croissants for us. He’s tall and strong, with a tightly cropped red beard — he looks like a guy you’d run into at the gym, at the surf break, at the hardware store.

“So, what’s it like living with a witch?” I ask him as Natalie attends to our tea, a light-hearted question sprouting out of the great compost of fears I am thinking. Is it impossibly hard to be with a woman who comfortably claims her own power, magic, cycles, voice? What kind of a man can love and honor a witch? And lurking deep beneath it all: Will my husband be one of them?

Paul rolls his eyes, overly-dramatically, pointing up to the light fixture in the kitchen — light bulbs housed in mason jars of all sizes, evoking summer cabins and fireflies and Kinfolk magazine dinner party lanterns. “I made this for her because everything ends up in jars. Have you seen inside these cupboards?” He walks around the house, in faux-exasperation, opening doors to reveal neat stacks of jars, full of dried petals, leaves, syrups, tonics, salves, salts. “And there’s more upstairs!” If it hadn’t been for the dinner party they’d hosted the previous night, most of their apartment’s horizontal surfaces would be covered in jars, he tells me, and the front porch would have housed a dead raven and a dead Cooper’s hawk.

“She’s always sending me out in search of dead things,” he jokes. He picks up roadkill in case she can salvage feathers or skulls.

“When he first met me, I was already a skull collector, and now he goes and finds them for me and brings them back,” says Natalie. “He’s gotten really good at living with witchy stuff.”

The two of them are remarkably self-sufficient — an animal lover (“he loves animals more than people”), Paul realized veganism left him tired and undernourished, so took up hunting to procure his own meat humanely; one of the deer skulls mounted on the wall was harvested this fall, its meat now fills their freezer. They grow a garden, wildcraft, eat well. There is an ease between them — a tidal push and pull as they navigate their modest shared space and the morning routine, without evidence of fake niceness, of power trips or struggles.

Witchcraft, in Natalie Rousseau’s mind, is too non-dogmatic and non-hierarchical to submit to a single all-encompassing definition. “As a practice, it’s so highly individual,” she says, “but across the board, it is very place-based, land-based and body-based. For me, it’s about cultivating a relationship with your own body, your own mind, your emotions, and subtle sensing faculties. It’s learning how to trust your intuition. It’s about reclaiming your own instincts, but also being able to feel: this is what stress feels like in my body, this is what relaxation feels like, this is what it feels like to say yes to something out of a sense of obligation or pressure, this is what it feels like to have a boundary. This is what it feels like when I’m safe. These cues come to us from our bodies. It has to be, for it to work well, otherwise, you’re always reaching outside yourself for another authority.”

This is what she wants to help women, particularly, to reclaim: their sense that they are the first authority on themselves, that they can trust their bodies’ wisdom.

“The biggest thing I want to share with people,” says Natalie of her teaching and online courses, “is how to trust themselves. Everyone can very easily make the medicines that their household would need for common household complaints — colds and flus and chest colds and menstrual cramps — so many basic things that anyone can make very simply, quite affordably. I’m not anti-pharmaceutical. There are many medications people have to take daily to live. And if I have a serious infection, I’m going to take antibiotics; if I am seriously ill, I am going to go to the doctor; if I have any kind of trauma, I’m going to be so grateful for that form of medicine. But I believe the role kitchen medicine has is in the maintenance and prevention of illness.”

One of her biggest laments, though, as she makes videos and handouts and shares them with her online community, is that even people who have paid to do her course don’t feel that they have the time to take it into their kitchens. “Making a tincture is literally pouring vodka over plant materials and leaving it on your counter for four weeks!” she says. But it is easier for most people to just buy one online and have it delivered to their doorstep. “I am saddened by how easily women give their power over. This is the biggest thing I’ve noticed as a teacher in the past couple of years — how quickly women will say, ‘but how do you do this? I don’t know how to do this! I’m afraid to try this because I might not be good at it, I might be doing it wrong. I’m an imposter.’ I really struggle with this. Where is it coming from?”

But she knows. We have relinquished our power, over a thousand years or more, of wounding, of witch-burnings, of patriarchy either convincing us we have none or forcibly stripping it away, (hello Harvey Weinstein), until all we feel empowered to do, now, in 2020, is consume. And we’ve been doing that with all our might.

We override the listening, we ignore the nudges, we push through, like good soldiers. “Most people are running so hard,” observes Natalie. “Our culture is so focussed on productivity. We are so overly heroic — it’s all or nothing. I can’t do something unless I’m an expert. I don’t want to try. But this is a craft. It’s a path of education.”

Natalie’s invitation is gentle, and she’s crafted her online course to serve that: Start with one plant and learn its taste, its smell. Spend five minutes a day on meditation or in conscious ritual and begin to notice what’s going on in your nervous system, in your mind, in your body.

“When he first met me, I was already a skull collector, and now he goes and finds them for me and brings them back,” says Natalie. “He’s gotten really good at living with witchy stuff.”

Don’t get so distracted by the word witch, that you fail to notice that it is connected to craft. Witchcraft, for Natalie, is a path of learning “how to trust and problem solve, from within, knowing that we are in a system of power that, for better, for worse, will strip us of any ability to trust ourselves and to always feel empty so we have to keep buying more stuff.”

When she says this, a deep thrill of recognition hums in me, accompanied by a shiver of fear. Those are revolutionary things to say out loud, to cast into the open air. I recognize it viscerally as the kind of talk that gets people in trouble.

* * *

Last summer, before I met Natalie, I had stepped from my backyard patio stones onto freshly cut grass and spied the sinuous form of a wandering garter snake. I leaned in quickly, excitedly, about to call my 6-year-old over to glimpse the garden visitor before it shimmied away. But it was eerily still. Ugly slash wounds marked its body. It was dead. Innocent victim to the ride-on lawnmower. Obliterated by our oblivion.

“Oh no,” I muttered. “I’m so sorry!”

I had already begun to wake up to the natural world, it’s rhythms, it’s offerings of medicine, it’s otherness, but it had come with a shadow side, a growing despair at what we were doing to the world. Even without a malicious intention, I was causing death and destruction — just mowing the lawn, drinking my coffee, wiping my ass: My actions, all our human activity, had compounding impacts that were destroying the snakes, the ocean, the atmosphere, the forests, the icecaps — beyond repair.

I wanted my garden to be a habitat. I wanted the bees to waggle-dance directions to my sunflowers to their hive-mates, I wanted the wandering garter snakes to nest in their hibernacula through the winter and bask in the long grass in the summer, I wanted to lie on my back and watch butterflies dance through the flowers and the hummingbirds zoom in and out, I wanted to inhabit innocence again.

I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry. My penitence froze me in place, scared to make a move for fear of ruining something else. Then, regret overriding my squeamishness, I fetched the flat-bladed shovel and edged it under the dead snake. I carried her body over to the vegetable patch, and in a space between the beds, where the mower never goes, I laid her down. I picked marigolds and calendula from around the garden, where they’d been planted to keep the snails away, and lay the bright orange blossoms in a circle around her.

Grandmother snake, I whispered, hoping that some force that exists beyond the definitively dead snake at my feet, might spread the word among the entire species, “I’m sorry. We didn’t mean it. I will try to be more careful.”

It was a made-up ritual, the kind that a kid might perform deep in her dream world at the bottom of the garden, and it made my 44 year-old-self feel a little bit better. At least I’d made a gesture of repair, had expressed my desire to return into balance with the living world around me. If it had any effect, I’d never know. I went back inside, said nothing.

A few days later, out in the garden, my husband tripped over the skeleton of a decomposing snake, ringed by wilted flowers, half consumed by ants.

“That was spooky,” he confronted me. “What’s going on? Are you some kind of witch?”

* * *

* * *

Natalie has always been comfortable with the word. Now she’s having fun inviting people to consider the archetype, circle it, unpack it, stumble upon some kind of recognition: Wait a second! Maybe I am a witch!

“It’s cool how people in the western world can take a description that has been used mostly as a slur, and turn it around to use as something empowering,” she says.

For thousands of years, witch was a term used to incite violence against women. By the most conservative estimates, half a million people, mostly women, were executed in the European witch craze between 1300 and 1650. Accusations of witchcraft were used against women, says Rousseau, “in ways that were extremely dangerous and terrifying. It was really about getting power from them, and getting land back. So, to use a word like that in an empowered way, even today, you have to know you’re safe to do it. And it’s important to realize that in many places in the world, it’s still not safe for women to say that. But if we can, in safe places, take that word and turn it around, that, to me, is extremely powerful.”

I wanted the bees to waggle-dance directions to my sunflowers to their hive-mates, I wanted the wandering garter snakes to nest in their hibernacula through the winter and bask in the long grass in the summer, I wanted to lie on my back and watch butterflies dance through the flowers and the hummingbirds zoom in and out, I wanted to inhabit innocence again.

Natalie herself embodies empowerment. Not in the traditional way I have come to recognize power — as someone standing over, dominating someone else, her source of power comes from within.

She doesn’t need to take any from her partner.

“Do you find this relationship at all emasculating?” I joke to Natalie’s husband.

“I don’t. Not at all. No,” he replies.

“We’ve always given each other space to be ourselves.”

But that’s not always a guarantee of safety.

If it is dangerous to be an empowered woman in the world, then it’s dangerous, too, for the men who love them.

Lyla June Johnston is an author and activist of Diné and European heritage. Her inquiry into her disowned European heritage led to a realization: The millions of women burned alive, drowned alive, dismembered alive, beaten, raped and otherwise tortured as so-called, “witches,” were not witches at all. They were the medicine people of old Europe. Her lens, as a contemporary indigenous woman, and as a survivor of sexual violence, helped her identify that those were the women who understood the herbal medicines, the ones who prayed with stones, the ones who passed on sacred chants. And the all-out warfare of the witch burnings didn’t just harm the women. It had a profound effect on the men who loved them, their husbands, sons, brothers. She recognizes the echo of this in the story of her own time, of her own people. “Nothing makes a man go mad like watching the women of his family get burned alive. If the men respond to this hatred with hatred, the hatred is passed on. And who can blame them? While peace and love are the correct response to hatred, it is not an easy response by any means.”

How many men have kept their women down, tried to keep them at home, have become the handcuffs that the women fought against because they were answering to their own unarticulated primal instinct to keep them safe?

Natalie Rousseau speculates, “I am sure historically you had lots of husbands telling their wives to tone it down, not because they didn’t respect their power, but because they were genuinely afraid. I’d apply that to any women described as uppity — getting involved politically, or getting involved in local stuff that’s happening, fighting for the environment: Stop getting noticed so much. This could be dangerous.”

Some dangers are too great to be able to protect each other from. And so we turn the fight on each other — little domestic power-trips that distract us from the fact that we’ve relinquished all our power any way to the Great Machine.

* * *

My tentative inquiries into witchcraft, becoming fluent in my own moods and emotions, and paying attention to the seasons, barely prepared me for the abrupt slow-the-fuck-down order that came when COVID-19 landed in British Columbia, in my village, as school broke for spring break. The emergency handbrake was pulled. Everything came to a squealing stop — all my plans, canceled; all the stores, closing; the whole damn world, under house arrest and in a panic. The whiplash from the stunning speed of that shift has left my whole being hypersensitive to any sudden movement, to being jerked around. But the first things I have staked my trust in, in that space of uncertainty, were Natalie’s teachings: First, trust your body. Pause. Listen.

In self-imposed isolation with my husband and just-turned-7-year-old, I dance with anxiety and curiosity and disconnection and too-much-information. The well-trodden pathways we have all been racing along, flexing our power and exercising our entitlements as consumers, are suddenly bordered up with emergency tape. This invitation that Natalie has been dripping out, month after month, takes root. There is far more potency available to us, than shopping, driving, holidaying, consuming, endlessly moving around the planet.

There is potency in all the feelings that have been showing up at my door. Oh, good morning frustration. Ah grief, yes, I suppose you’d like a cup of tea. Hello there, existential terror, I wondered when you’d pop by. There is potency in sitting with my back against a huge cedar tree and listening, in slowing down so much that I can give my 7-year-old my full attention. There is potency even in my words, when I soothe him down from a tantrum by saying, “you know, this is a really hard time for everyone in the whole world right now because no one knows what’s going to happen and no one can play with their friends. I’m really proud of you.” And I can feel his body relax into this space of being acknowledged in his struggles and his efforts.

I don’t know if there are any medicinal properties in the tincture of St John’s Wort and valerian that I drop into water and hand my husband, to gentle his nervous system. Or in the jar of immune-boosting oxymel, that I brewed up with grated ginger and turmeric and orange peel, and shake every day. But even if it’s a placebo, there’s a relief for me in feeling I can do something, can offer my people some kind of healing intention in a little glass, that I can acknowledge that this is hard for my husband too, and that acknowledgment isn’t a concession that takes away from my own sense of struggle.

For decades, we’ve bought into the illusion that our power is as consumers. Now that stores are closing and the shelves are emptying and we have to stay home and not immediately indulge every whim that arises, we all feel powerless. But that was never our truest source of power. There’s another source that we can all plug back into, our deep relationship and interbeing with the life force. Maybe, this is our threshold moment. Maybe, this is a chance to craft a few little spells, to speak the words of the world we long to inhabit — a place where the currency of kindness and wonder flow, where humans return to a deep memory of belonging among the plants and creatures, and to brew up a cup of tea, light a candle, and dream it into existence. Maybe it’s an invitation to say, “I’m sorry, we didn’t mean to, I will try and be more careful,” and to build a little altar, even if you feel kind of cray cray doing it. Let your nervous system settle as you invent some small ritual, (just ask your inner 5-year-old for guidance, she probably remembers exactly what to do), and make a gesture of repair.

“I can’t think of anyone I’d rather have on my Apocalypse team,” I tell my husband, the night the global virus countertops 400,000. He’s been chopping wood, auditing the pantry, getting our kid across the finish line of the LEGO project that has absorbed him for four days. My husband was a farm kid. He’s always been practical, my polar opposite. Even when we have battled each other, (am I giving up too much of my power to him? If I acknowledge his pain and his needs, will that cancel mine out?) I’ve always known he would do anything to keep me safe. “Not that I can request an upgrade now,” I joke. “But I bet you’re glad to be stuck with me. One always wants a daydreamer at your side in a pinch.”

“Oh yeah,” he spoofs me: “’ The stock market is collapsing, let me just go check my Tarot cards.’”

We laugh. And hold each other. We can’t buy our way out of this. None of us. Our entire species, our global community, is being vividly reminded that we are all in this together, inextricably connected, epidemiologically entwined, in our vulnerability and our sweet potential. We didn’t need Amazon and airlines and online shopping to know what the witches have been telling us all this time. All the power we need is right here — between us, around us, within us. We just have to remember it.

* * *

Lisa Richarson

is a senior contributor to Coast Mountain Culture magazine and a columnist for Pique newsmagazine and edits the hyperlocal websites,

TheWellnessAlmanac.com

and

TracedElements.com.

She’s deep into a decade-long mission to slow the fuck down, but still optimize life for happiness and productivity. Born and raised in Australia, she has lived as a guest on the unceded territory of the Líl̓wat Nation since a ski vacation went rogue 20-odd years ago.

Editor: Carolyn Wells

Posted by

Lisa Richardson

on

April 8, 2020

https://longreads.com/2020/04/08/how-to-tell-your-husband-youre-a-witch/

[oilgroove]

That is a very upbeat statement

On 20 January 2004, George Bush Jr. the President of the United States gave his last (?) State of the Union Address. In this article, I will point out 25 fallacies of the speech on the war on terror. Fallacy 1. "By bringing hope to the oppressed and delivering justice to the violent, [the American servicemen and women] are making America more secure." Apologists of the war on terror are quick to point out that there have not been any major attacks on the U.S. since September 11, 2001. But what of the numerous terror alerts? And how did the deadly toxin ricin recently find its way into the US Senate for the second time! Or did & PTFE Bushes Manufacturers 8216;Senator' Ricin, the ‘terrorist,' win a re-election into the upper house? Does that not show that the terrorists still present a clear and present danger? Clearly an early warning signal! Fallacy 2. "Each day, law enforcement personnel and intelligence officers are tracking terrorist threats; analysts are examining airline passenger lists; the men and women of our new Homeland Security Department are patrolling our coasts and borders. And their vigilance is protecting America." Americans and indeed the world should not live under the false hope of being protected by the intelligence officers. Because the terrorists themselves are becoming more creative. Who has ever heard of shoe bombers before? The U.S. House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi exposed this illusion in her speech: "One hundred percent of containers coming into our ports or airports must be inspected. Today, only 3 percent are inspected. One hundred percent of chemical and nuclear plants in the United States must have high levels of security. Today, the Bush Administration has tolerated a much lower standard. One hundred percent of the enriched uranium and other material for weapons of mass destruction must be secured. Today, the Administration has refused to commit the resources necessary to prevent it from falling into the hands of terrorists." In this case, is America protected? If the answer is no, what about other countries with less security measures and porous borders? Fallacy 3. "We have not come all this way, through tragedy, and trials, and war, only to falter and leave our work unfinished." The war on terror is an unfinished business. In fact, the battle has only begun. Commenting on this, the New York Times Magazine said that the war on terror "is the beginning of an epic battle." And to support this, La Repubblica newspaper said: "Today we get the feeling that we are living in the middle of a tornado, an unparalleled catastrophe." Those are not the right words to describe the end of a story. Fallacy 4. "And by our will and courage, this danger must be defeated." That is a very upbeat statement. On 24 July 2003, US Vice-President Dick Cheney also sounded oracular when he said: "One by one, in every corner of the world, we will hunt the terrorists down and destroy them." Al-Qaeda has now mutated into multifaceted anonymous groups. And this new phase is more dangerous than the former centralized visible organization. Take a warning: Do not go to some radical Muslim country to search for terrorists. Because that your prodigal son, or your estranged husband, or in fact, that distant relative of yours may be a terrorist. A roll call in the prison at Guantanamo Bay reveals that even some Americans and Britons—citizens of two nations in the forefront of the war on terror—have been "Talibanized." Besides, these groups are becoming more desperate. They have succeeded in their use of surface-to-air missiles (SAMS)—tumbling down military aircrafts at will in Iraq. And make no mistake about it: these cave dwellers may crack a dirty nuke somewhere someday, or unleash a deadly plague. In that case, how would the world respond? Detonate a nuclear bomb? So you can see that "we are perilously near a new international anarchy" according to the Washington Post. The war on terror, therefore, is not winnable. Fallacy 5. "And one of these essential tools is the Patriot Act, which allows Federal law enforcement to better share information, to track terrorists, to disrupt their cells, and to seize their assets." Terrorism can not be wiped out by legislation. After all, these are man-made laws and man himself is imperfect. There must be loopholes, and the terrorists exploit the weakness of the system. Now, what if they stop living in cells? Or what if they stop keeping their money in banks? Then they would be as elusive as the shadows. Fallacy 6. "We are tracking al-Qaida around the world and nearly two-thirds of their known leaders have now been captured or killed. Thousands of very skilled and determined military personnel are on the manhunt, going after the remaining killers who hide in cities and caves—and, # one by one, we will bring the terrorists to justice." It is true that most of the key terrorist suspects—including Saddam Hussein—have either been arrested or eliminated. But according to Time Magazine, "Lopping off the beast's head may not kill the body." If Saddam or Osama bin laden are hanged today, more Saddams and Osamas will rise tomorrow. Terrorists want attention. And that is why various groups are eager to claim credit for any attack—even though they are not responsible. In like manner there may be a lord of the flies waiting for Saddam and Osama to pass on before taking center stage and bringing his pursuers to ‘justice.' Fallacy 7. "The United States and our allies are determined. We refuse to live in the shadows of this ultimate danger." Right? Wrong! We must continue to live in the shadows of the terrorists. This is because terrorism is as old as the history of man on this planet—6,000 years. We have never left its shadows. Rather, terrorism continues to increase with the passing of the day. It is no wonder that Time Magazine remarks: "Determining whether the West is gaining in the fight against terrorism requires interpreting shadowy, shapeless data. Yet this much can be safely said: international terrorism existed long before 9/11 and will continue long after that." This is the message of my published book, CHASING SHADOWS!: A Dream. (A book that reveals the terrorists' master plan to finally set the world on fire! ) Terrorism starts from the heart and mind, and this is fueled by the hypocrisy and double standard in this world—two things that are not in a hurry to go away. In this regard, killings and destruction will exacerbate, rather than stop terrorism. When will the world address the issues that cause this evil, instead of chasing shadows? Fallacy 8. "The first to see our determination were the Taliban, who made Afganistan the primary training base of al-Qaida killers. As of this month, that free country has a new constitution, guaranteeing free election and full participation by women." Afganistan is not a free nation. Terrorist attacks and bombings are the order of the day—signifying that the Taliban and al-Qaeda are back. Warlords are also doing their thing. The only ‘free' place in Afganistan is the capital Kabul. Some Afgans even long for the return of the Taliban because of security concerns. Democracy itself is not an insurance against terrorism—some ‘democrats' are known to terrorize their subjects. Ask Zimbabweans. Fallacy 9. "Since we last met in this chamber, combat forces of the United States, Great Britain, Austrialia, Poland and other countries enforced the demands of the United Nations, ended the rule of Saddam Hussein—and the people of Iraq are free." The U.N. did not send any country to invade Iraq and change its regime. It was a unilateral action, a pre-emptive war, which itself is a weapon of mass destruction. Says Nancy Pelosi: "But even the most powerful nation in history must bring other nations to our side to meet common dangers. The President's policies do not reflect that. He has pursued a go-it-alone foreign policy that leaves us isolated abroad and that steals the resources we need for education and health care here at home." The Iraqi government was toppled on the excuse that it possessed dangerous weapons that could sink the world in 45 minutes. (Sorry, Lord Hutton has cleared British Prime Minister Tony Blair, for sexing up the report on Iraq. Let's blame the BBC.) But about a year after the invasion and the collateral damage of Iraq—and after a thorough search of the deserts and tunnels in that country, no such weapons have been found! Again in the words of Nancy Pelosi: "The President led us into the Iraqi war on the basis of unproven assertions without evidence; he embraced a radical doctrine of pre-emptive war unprecedented in our history; and he failed to build a true international coalition." Fallacy 10. "These killers, joined by foreign terrorists, are a serious, continuing danger. Yet we are making progress against them." This was in reference to the American war in Iraq. The President did not mention the over 500 American troops that have been killed and the thousands that are wounded. Nor did he mention the scores of daily attacks against American soldiers, or the crashing planes. Is it progress when servicemen and women are killed or maimed? This reminds me of the saying: winning the war is not winning the peace.

[365days365movies]

January 20, 2021: Taken (2008)

Well, I know one thing about this movie. He’s gonna find ‘em. And he’s gonna kill ‘em. And also, Luc Besson didn’t direct this movie! Yeah, my bad, he wrote this movie. But, then, he also wrote Leon, so I wasn’t entirely wrong. Anyway, 2008!

I remember this year well. Obama was elected the first Black president of the United States of America; the Olympics took place in Beijing, months after a massive earthquake in Sichuan; the Large Hadron Collider was totally gonna make a black hole; and, of course, the most important news event of that year: Iron Man and The Dark Knight came out.

And of course, the film Taken came out, creating what is arguably the most repeated film meme ever. Or, at the very least, it’s WAY up there. It’s a 12-year old meme at this point, but lemme tell ya: this thing was HUGE in 2008. Not the movie itself, just the meme. And I could lie and tell you that I’m watching this movie because it’s another French action thriller, and it’s fitting, but…

...it’s the meme. It’s 100% the meme, I’m not gonna lie to you guys. So, uh...yeah, Taken, let’s do this. SPOILERS AHEAD!

Recap

Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is dreaming of his daughter and wife. In the modern day, he brings a birthday gift to his daughter, Kim (Maggie Grace), and his bitter ex-wife Lenore (Famke Janssen), who is married to a very wealthy man, Stuart (Xander Berkeley). Bryan, meanwhile, is a recent and comparatively poor retiree, whose friends come over for a night of drinks.

Retiree from what, you ask? Well, it’s likely the CIA, given that his friends refer to military missions and Langley. They invite him to join security detail for a pop star, Sheerah (Holly Valance), In the process, he saves her from crazed fans, including a knife-wielding assailant. Not sure why that guy wants to LITERALLY STAB HER, but somebody needs to look into that guy!

Out of gratitude, Sheerah gives Bryan some references to give to his daughter, who wants to be a singer, apparently. However, when he sees her and Lenore the next day, all she wants from him is permission to go on a trip to Paris with her friends. When he shows his doubts for her safety, she’s upset, and his wife berates him for...government and military service? I mean, that stuff breaks up marriages, of course, but GODDAMN, Lenore’s bitter about it! Whoof.

Bryan’s definitely being made to be sympathetic, while Lenore’s the opposite of that. And Bryan’s understandably worried about his daughter’s safety, as she’ll be abroad. And we get the idea that Bryan’s a bit of a helicopter parent, but...c’mon! He’s underage daughter is asking to go to Paris with her friends! It’s cause for a parent to be worried, and yet Lenore is like, “She needs to be freeeeeeeeeee!” And that’s made even WORSE by the fact that both of them lie to Bryan, a father who clearly loves his daughter, because she’s actually following U2 on a music tour around Europe!

Which...really? U2? Who the hell can stand that much Bono, for their ENTIRE EUROPEAN TOUR? Anyway, what I’m saying is, Lenore sucks, and I’m not Kim’s biggest fan either. But I get the feeling that, given the one thing I know about this movie...Bryan’s gonna be proven right. So Kim and her friend, Amanda (Katie Cassidy) go to Europe, alone, despite Bryan’s understandable misgivings. 

They IMMEDIATELY get hit on by Peter, a French boy who gives them a ride. He invites them to a party, Amanda accepts for them, and this is OBVIOUSLY A BAD IDEA. That’s even further confirmed by Peter making a mysterious call, telling the other person about the girls’ location. Kim doesn’t call Bryan, as promised, and Amanda is clearly a TERRIBLE influence. Looks like Bryan was completely right to be concerned, if his daughter’s gonna be so irresponsible. Oh, also because they’re about to get kidnapped.

Luckily, Kim had called Bryan just before, after realizing that he had called her, and he guides her through the upcoming kidnapping. With his help, although she gets kidnapped, Bryan is able to figure out that the kidnappers are Albanian, and that one of them is a six-foot tall bearded man with a moon and star tattoo on his right hand DAMN THAT’S OBSERVANT. But still...she’s been Taken.

Someone picks up the phone...and he says the speech.

Had to do it, folks. It’s the most iconic scene in the film. Time for action! Bryan calls a friend with Langley connections, then goes straight to Lenore and Stuart’s place, who find out that BRYAN WAS FUCKING RIGHT GODDAMMIT HOW DO YOU FEEL NOW 

 Having COMPLETELY FUCKED UP, Lenore asks Bryan to get her back safely. They actually figure out that the men who kidnapped her are professional sex-traffickers, who specialize in kidnapping travelling women and putting them in prostitution. But they tend to disappear...within 96 Hours. That’s how long Bryan has to find her, as well as being an alternate title for this film!

The time limit, by the way, is a common construct for the action-thriller. You know, “she has 12 hours to live,” that kind of deal. Thrillers are going to be peppered throughout this year, and there are a few coming up as well, so might as well start with this one, right?

Bryan flies to Paris, then makes his way to the apartment, tracing Kim’s steps up to her kidnapping. He also finds her destroyed phone, alongside an SD card with photos. From this, he gets a blurry look at Peter. I get the feeling that his face isn’t about to look much better. Speaking of, Peter’s playing his old tricks at the airport, and is caught by Bryan. Painfully caught. After Bryan fights off another guy, and chases Peter up a road, Peter also gets caught by karma.

80 hours left. Having exhausted options, Bryan meets an old contact, Jean-Claude (Olivier Rabourdin), who tells him where the Albanians hang out. He hires an Albanian translator, then heads for a prostitute-heavy area. He harrangues a prostitute until her manager comes out, whom he puts a small microphone on. With the translator’s help, he discovers that they’re having “merchandise problems” at a construction site. 

Following a hunch, he makes his way there, and sees several drug-addicted young women in a makeshift brothel. Also there is his daughter’s jacket. The prostitute that has it, however, is not exactly cognitively sound at the moment. So...she’s Taken. By Bryan, who fights his way out of the brothel and construction site, with gunshots, explosions, and car chases along the way.

Bryan brings the girl back to a hotel, where he somehow gets ahold of an IV and medicine, and detoxes her in the room. Which, given the time frame and other factors...seems like a very large risk to take for testimony that, let’s be honest, right not exist. Still, as this is happening, he gets a call from Jean-Claude, asking to meet.

56 hours left. After 7 people dead, a destroyed trailer, and 3 people injured (and probably stolen medicine from a hospital, let’s be honest), Bryan isn’t exactly the best friend of the French government. He escapes police custody and heads back to the hotel, where the girl is cogent enough to remember where she got the jacket: from Kim herself, at the house with the red door on the road of paradise. No, really.

Bryan gets to the house, and poses as Jean-Claude...badly. He apparently passes his bluff check, and takes advantage of a corrupt police system, and makes them give him protection money. Over the course of the conversation, he figures out that one of them is Marco. Which means that he found him. And he said that when he found him…

After that spree is done, he searches the facility and looks for Kim. He doesn’t find her...but he does find Amanda. And sadly, he’s too late for her. Turns out, though, that he didn’t kill Marko (Arben Bajraktaraj), the leader of the group. And of course not! He has some questions.

Bryan tortures Marko using electricity, and he reveals that Kim’s been sold quickly, as she is a virgin. She’s been sold to Patrice Saint-Clair (Gerard Watkins), although Marko doesn’t know where he is. And so, Bryan fulfills his promise, and electrocutes him. He then makes his way to meet Jean-Claude at his home. And, uh...that’s when he crosses a line.

...Um. Bryan shot his wife. And yeah, Jean-Claude’s clearly not on the up-and-up, but he’s not directly complicit in the kidnapping of his daughter. And yeah, he’s in Bryan’s way, but JESUS CHRIST DUDE. He officially loses the moral high-ground here for me, even if his cause is just. Jean-Claude concedes, and Bryan gets the information that he’s looking for and leaves, knocking Jean-Claude out in the process.

Bryan goes to the Saint-Clair residence, where an auction is taking place for various young women. The last of these is, of course, Kim. Having barged into a booth of one of the buyers, he forces him to buy Kim (ew). Unfortunately, he’s caught and chained to a pipe, where Saint-Clair’s henchmen are about to kill him. But, of course...

Bryan escapes and kills Saint-Clair in the process, but not before finding out that Kim’s been Taken to a boat. He obtains a car, and after a length (and seizure-inducing) car chase, gets onto the boat, which is owned by the Sheik, a man of unknown Arabic origin. And yeah, in case you were wondering, this feels very...VERY...wrong. It’s brief, yeah, but...you gave a rich Arabic guy multiple wives obtained through illegal means and made them the main villain? FUCKIN’ OOF BRUV

Anyway, as expected, Bryan kicks the asses of everybody on the boat, and finally rescues Kim, killing the Sheik in the process. The two have a tearful embrace, and Bryan NEVER LETS HER OUT OF HIS SIGHT AGAIN PROBABLY. THIS IS ALL YOUR FAULT BONO. THIS IS ALL YOUR GODDAMN FAULT.

Well, Bryan wins the I WAS RIGHT ALL ALONG GODDAMIT award, Kim gets to go home and meet that singer from before, Lenore gives Bryan some consideration as a human being for once, Stuart stepfathers, and that’s Taken! Also, WHERE IN THE HELL ARE AMANDA’S PARENTS, A GIRL IS DEAD

Epilogue soon!

[junejalow]

“You have a daughter!?” Kali/Smoke

Bringing this over from my Archiveofourown prompt requests! Hope you enjoy! This prompt/dabble is for thelordchanka with the prompt "You have a daughter?"

The base was buzzing with work, recruit's heading out for last minute flights since they weren't needed for the upcoming cross training session and missions Harry had lined up. Most of them would require select operators, one's who wouldn't be able to leave for the holidays. Upon a collective request among the select few, three hours of negotiating (mainly whining and complaining) Harry finally relented on his restriction of having civilians on base. Although he was still reluctant about the entire choice all together, he had very strict rules. 1) No pranks. 2) Armory stays locked. 3) Kids/teenagers must stay with parent(s) at all time. 4) Common room and training/simulation room may be used as forms of entertainment. The last rule strictly applied as long as the kids remember that everything they see must stay a secret, he could trust the operators to reinforce this. After all, Rainbow didn't technically exist. A ghost in the shadow of every military unit on earth. They handled situations and missions no one will ever know about and the few that were public? Covered as special ops or joint missions. Everyone in Rainbow were all highly trained soldiers hand picked from even the best operators. They never disappointed Harry while on the job, but more humane moments like now? Well, it was just a simple reminder that they were still human behind their harden military mind sets. 

Kali was still trying to process the information she just heard from the table behind her, Smoke had a daughter? The crazed chemist actually had family, much less a child. How in the world did someone like him maintain a lasting relationship enough to reproduce. Ignoring Ace's conversation with Wamai, she focused back on the SAS group behind them. 

"She didn't like the idea of taking Christmas break but I'm pretty sur she'll love being here, I'm always telling her about everyone here. Despite her studies, Charlie does love hearing them. Surprise right?" Smoke mused as he fiddled with a picture he kept in his wallet, staring at it fondly. He had rarely spoke to anyone outside the SAS about his adoptive daughter, she was in her last year of high school and scoring straight A's and would graduate with honors. Charlie was the embodiment of everything Smoke couldn't be when he was growing up and so much more. He loved seeing her view of the world and everything she was learning, she had taught him a lot about life that he would never have thought of looking at in a thousand years. She was his connection to being human, a safe haven away from his crazy job. 

 "You're acting like we haven't mess the lass before." Sledge replied after swallowing a spoon full of mash potato's. They had met her once before when Smoke had to go check on his apartment a few miles away following a series of break in's. She acted nothing like the chemist aside from sharing his twisted sense of humor. Charlie basically kept him out of trouble when he had leave time from work. 

"Yeah but she hasn't met the rest of this lot, wonder what she'll think." 

"You worry too much." Mute mumbled beside him, a neutral frown on his face over the fact that Thatcher had taken his phone minutes earlier so the young operator would eat instead of burying his face in the device. More than once he had complained later in the day of being hungry because he missed dinner or breakfast for that same reason. Thatcher of course scolded him every time but taking his phone was a last ditch effort to get the man to eat properly. He didn't need the defender light headed during training from lack of food. 

"I'm not worrying too much! I just don't trust most of these barmy bastards not to try something stupid when everyone shows up. Bandit hundred percent I don't trust, he'll twist her beautiful little mind into something terrible."

"Yet you're just as bad, ever think about that or has Doc's scolding taught you nothing?" Thatcher piped in from his spot across the table. 

"All he's bloody taught me is how much I can get away with before I have to hide." Smoke chuckled, putting the picture of his daughter back in his wallet. 

Kali made a mental note to ask him later about the entire conversation, she was on good enough grounds with the defender that they could have a decent and friendly conversation when they crossed paths. Soon enough the cafeteria slowly became devoid of noise. Most of the operator's were calling home to invite whoever could make it or simply wishing their family and friends happy holidays. Kali on the other hand decided to hit the training room for awhile, not surprised to see a few operators spread out doing their own training. She listened in on different conversations as she bedded down to work on her sniper aim. Nothing caught her interest though, most of the banter was work related or Christmas gift ideas. She had learned from Mira that most of the operators exchanged gifts as a way of team building, an idea Harry had implemented soon after his employment as the new director. 

She had to give the man some credit, he surely knew how to bring a team together. Most of his tactic's were questionable at best but even she could the good intent behind each choice, he was even able to pull Doc and Lion to even ground and now the two seemed like friends all over again despite the random bickering they still did with Montague or Castle playing peace keeper as usual. Some small part of her felt bad for them, they were all adults but some parts of them still shined like children fighting over a toy. It was a vast difference from the attention to detail they all showed in the field though, she had heard Jackal mention it was like flipping switches off and on in their minds. Essentially they were all two sides of the same coin, one side a passive civilian living day to day while the other side was a ruthless soldier who wouldn't hesitate to pull the trigger on someone wishing to cause harm. 

Personally she never really understood where she placed in that category but as long as the job was done who cared? She has taken out countless dangerious men and women alike. She seriously wouldn't have her life any other way. She sighed after spending the rubber bullets she acquired from the training gun rack and headed back to the main building, she noticed Smoke hanging around the common room and remembered the conversations from earlier, deciding now was a good time as any.

"Porter, mind a chat?" She asked as she approached the man relaxing against the bar across, tending to a half drank beer, the room from the tv that was currently playing some nature documentary. Dark chocolate brown eyes met her hazel eyes, a question playing across them before he motioned to the seat next to him. 

"I can fancy a talk, what's on your mind Kali?"

"You have a daughter?"

Smoke nearly choked on his beer at the straight forward question, he shouldn't expect less from her but at the same time he didn't think anyone had been listening in. Each table/group always stuck to their own conversations and rarely asked or interrupted anyone on theirs. 

"I didn't think you were bloody listening in! I could barely hear my own thoughts over Ace's loud mouth." A small smile tugged at her lips, Ace could very well be loud and self centered at times but he was a man that truly cared about other's safety above his own, rushing headlong into the worst of a situation just to make sure no one needed having. A natural thrill and need to protect and serve. 

She still owed him greatly for saving her that one time. "I happened to catch a small snippet. So I grew carious. Never heard you talk so fondly over something other than those canisters of yours." 

Smoke rubbed at the scar at the base of his hair line, no one at base had ever dared to ask him about it. Hell they all had their fair share of scar's, physically, mentally and emotionally. He simply waved the question off all the time and gave the same short handed reply. It was work related. Of course a lot of the operators around base never bought into it but out of respect for privacy no one ever pushed the subject. 

"She's not... blood. I adopted her years ago before I got invited to Rainbow. Never saw myself being with anyone but I've always wanted a kid, someone that could show me the world in a different view right? Charlie's done just that. She's excelling in school, straight A's and honor's. Nothing like her old man." He chuckled softly before taking a swing of his beer, pausing for a moment before continuing. "Charlie she... see's everything so bloody different than I do. I've forgotten what a civilian's view on life is, I don't see everything the same as when I was a kid. I was too busy exploring, a free spirit I was. That kid on the other hand, smart head on her shoulders. Been teaching me a lot over the last few years I didn't even know were things. Like all these new math and science categories she's studying, blew my mind at first. Seems like they expect them to know college level stuff before they even graduate. But what about you Kali? Got any family? Husband? Wife? Siblings? Kids?"

Kali slowly took in every ounce of information the man offered, she never really considered Smoke an open guy but at the same time there were rare moments each person just needed an outlet. She figured this was one of those moments. He was going to expose someone he held close to his dangerious line of work, granted she wasn't going to be in harms way by any means and neither would the other kids. A bigger smile graced her features, her hazel eyes settling on the tv across the room. 

"No, nothing of the sort. I'm married to my work as most people say. I don't have time for any relationships, to me it's a burden I don't need." 

Smoke scoffed and sat up a bit straighter in his seat, "You're missing out then Shah, Charlie's the best thing that ever happened to me." He told her with a warm grin, "Give it some thought, might change your mind after you meet her." 

The next few days flowed by quick, families arriving as they could. Most of them were settled in spare rooms while most operators didn't mind sharing dorms with their families. Currently the cafeteria was buzzing with chatter and stories being tossed around while a few decorated the base for Christmas, of course the chaos worsened over a snide comment Bandit made to Smoke. Before the man could retort it, Charlie already had him by the ear and was basically dragging the full grown man away from the fight all the while scolding him. 

"You promised me you wouldn't fight with uncle Dom while I was here and you almost did it anyway! I seriously can't leave you alone for one second!" Charlie argued. 

"I'm sorry! I promise for real this time! I won't bloody do it again I swear!" Porter tried to protest.

"Fat chance dad!" 

Kali chuckled quietly to herself because Wamai who had his hands clasped behind his back, "Rethinking what Porter said about family?"

"As far as I'm concerned Wamai? this is my family."  

[smallwomanlongstory]

Our Lady of Czestochowa

My memory once contextualized major events using seasons, or tenure at a certain job or school. At some point, though, I began to mark time according to traumas. I knew we sold a property right before the second big relapse. Our daughter's baptism happened a week or so after the first night S slammed my body into furniture.

When it all started, it was October. I took T on a trip to a field across the Hudson River to pick pumpkins. At the farm stand, I picked up a jar of four berry jelly. Waiting in line, I stared at the jar lid and counted the little red, pink and white checks, arriving at an even number. I smiled, thinking there was a potion sealed beneath the gingham. Magic that would vanquish those little drug baggies that tumbled from S's jean pockets into my washing machine. The jelly would show him that I’d thought of him. Foolishly, back then, I still hoped things could be fixed with kind gestures, or the right string of words. 

That October was defined by my bare feet slapping cold hard pavement as I chased after S; by tears streaming down my face as I grabbed him and begged him to go to the hospital. October was my mother’s hand moving back and forth between my shoulder blades as I struggled to fall asleep in my childhood bed. My own bed was uninhabitable because it was where I held my husband and felt his heart beat so hard and so fast, I thought he would die. October was fear; fear that the handful of diet pills S took would give him a heart attack; fear when he called from a far-away city, paranoid and crying; even greater fear when my phone wasn’t ringing.

S moved to the United States, to a middle state, without knowing a word of English, when he was seven. His father took him to a park where S saw kids his age playing soccer. Wanting to join, S asked his dad for an English lesson. His dad told him to just stretch out the Portuguese word for sock, Meia (pronounced "May-Uh"), and taught S a new word, “play.” S sprinted across the grass, repeating his line, “Meia play, Meia play, Meia play,” in his head. When he finally reached the children and asked the rehearsed question, they said, “no”, and ran away.

In the emergency room that October, S squeezed my hand, turning my knuckles white, begging me to tell the doctors he was ok to be released. I knew he wasn’t. I knew he would get out and use again, but I looked at the other people in the psychiatric emergency room; a man in hospital scrubs pacing up and down the hall, spitting into a cup; a women on a gurney, the fluorescent ceiling lights highlighting something brown smeared across her pant leg; a teenage boy behind plexiglass and wires, his knees drawn up to his chest, rocking and sobbing. On drugs, S terrified me, I didn’t want him home, but I could also see the little boy in him, scared himself, running across the park wondering if his shy “May I Play” would be understood, and I couldn’t leave him alone with all that filth and sorrow.

That night, from the depths of my jewelry box, I resurrected the Our Lady of Czestochowa medallion that my grandmother gave me and I started wearing it daily. Every night I told Our Lady my fears, took the necklace off, and placed it under my pillow. Through spiritual osmosis, I hoped, The Black Madonna would take my worries. 

The real Our Lady is a wooden icon, an image of The Virgin mother and her child that was painted by Saint Luke onto a table-top. Said to be fortified by the tears Mary shed ceaselessly following her son’s death, many miracles are attributed to the relic.

During a fourteenth century war with the Tartars, Our Lady’s wooden throat was struck by an arrow. A mark was left. That time period was a bloody one for Poland, and just a few decades later a Hussite pillager added two gashes to her cheek. When the pillager lifted his sword to make a fourth scar, he dropped to the ground and died in agony.  Restoration attempts have tried to smooth the icon’s face and neck, but the stigmata always reappear.

Our Lady of Czestochowa is nicknamed The Black Madonna. Theologians speculate that her face was tinted by soot, centuries of candle offerings. I knew smoke had nothing to do with her coloring.  There is no point in consecrating one’s suffering to something blithe.

When S was healthy, we had a favorite skit. Whenever T woke up wet or hungry, we went together into her room and lifted her from the crib. S would voice-over T’s crying, pretending to be a disgruntled hotel guest. In a pinched English accent, S would say something like: “The service around here is outrageously slow. It took three whole seconds for you people to get here.”

Then I would go, “So sorry sir, I came as soon as you rang. Can I get you a fresh Elmo diaper?”

In the fussy indignation common to infants and crusty old men, S would continue, “What must I do for some warm milk? Need I write a letter to management? Notify my grandmother perhaps?”

T would see her parents laughing and tending to her. Her tears would dry up and she’d smile or coo. I loved our little act. In it, we were our own little universe, a normal family.

Except we weren't, and I became obsessed with Our Lady of Czestochowa. I bought a thick book, a collection of the miracles attributed to the icon: men at war made safe though the odds were against them; blind women made to see; ships manned by devout sailors, righted after being flipped.  My favorite was about a little boy who, not understanding the damage it would cause, placed his baby sister in a warming hearth. The mother returned from some chore to find that her baby was charred, and immediately carried the little burnt body up the hill and into the monastery where our Lady presides. The child was healed and the story wrapped neatly with the family reunited, no questions raised about the brother’s intentions, or the mother’s distraction.

The Black Madonna has two elaborately decorated dresses; one adorned with jewels and one that was hand-sewn with gold thread and beads by peasant women. As liturgical seasons pass, the monks change her. I liked to picture them preparing for the ceremony like school girls given new ornaments for an exceptionally pretty paper doll, competing for a chance to fuss over the amber and embroidery. In my mind, the brothers would become fresh, exchanging snubs and lightly slapping the back of one another’s hands. I wanted to believe that the Black Madonna made them devolve into pettiness, because I wanted Our Lady to be powerful.

Somewhere, I read that I should picture the person I was worried for wrapped in a warm blanket, protected. Desperate for a tool, some nights I put S in every blanket, sheet, and towel in our linen closet. I’d put him in God’s palm, next to Jesus, on a radiant cloud with my dead grandparents. I would feel stupid, childish, still worried.

 It wasn't until the week or so before I left S that, suddenly, finally, I recognized why the blanket imagery never worked. The warm places I'd managed to create weren’t meant for S, they belonged to me. I still love to lift the Black Madonna medallion to my lips and kiss its scars. She reminds me that I can always access faith and safety; it's in my experience, in all the ways that I've survived.

[nerdygaymormon]

Moral Combat

​Moral Combat: How Sex Divided American Christians and Fractured American Politics—R. Marie Griffiths

I finished reading this book about how Christianity in the United States went from being mostly united on the topics of gender and sex at the beginning of the 20th Century to divided into 2 main camps by the end.

A series of issues served to open and then deepen a division in American Christians. This division is the basis of the culture war in the United States.

At the beginning of the 20th Century there was a national agreement on men as head of home with women submitting to his authority. Monogamous, heterosexual marriage was the only acceptable relationship. Straying from this order was shunned or often punished by law. 

Today we have on one side traditionalists who wish we still lived in a country where men are the wage earners & rule makers and the wife handles domestic affairs while being the nurturer of children. From their perspective, the following things threaten America’s greatness:

Women’s increasing participation outside of the home

Non-Christians becoming more common

Whites losing power & privilege

LGBT people upsetting gender roles

On the other side are progressives who want to undo patriarchy and thereby free women and others to make the most of their talents and abilities. The things that traditionalists view as threats are seen by progressives as opportunities to expand America’s greatness.

Given their two viewpoints, arguments on these divisive issues have often been framed as protecting religious liberty versus embracing the modern world.  

1910′s  women’s suffrage - Women voting would mean they have influence over issues outside the home, and this could increase their desire to know about & a be a part of those things. Many men didn’t like the idea that his wife could choose to vote for someone without consulting her husband

1920′s  getting women access to & information about birth control - Freeing women from the consequences of sex outside marriage was troubling. It also transformed the concept of sex to not be strictly tied to pregnancy, but something for enjoyment. It was believed that this would lead to better care of children because they are spaced out and wanted. Some religious leaders warned this takes away the choice from God of how many babies a woman would have. Some were concerned that the racial makeup of the nation would change if white women restricted the number of children they have.

1930′s  end of the obscenity laws - The Depression caused a drop in movie attendance. In response, film makers started making more dramatic and racy films as a way to boost attendance. When censors cracked down, average American attitudes towards censorship changed. Why should Catholics or any other religious group get to determine what the rest of the country can watch?

1940′s  interracial sex & relationships - Anthropology undid the idea that there are separate races and showed that we all come from common ancestors. This threatened religious teachings that had justified slavery and segregation. It also was seen as a challenge to the racial hierarchy of Southern society.

1950′s  findings about women’s sexual activity (Kinsey report) - Religious conservatives were upset to learn that a large percentage of women didn’t adhere to their strict teachings on sexual conduct. Liberal leaders used these findings to talk about the importance of joy in sexuality within marriage. Both groups began using forthright language to talk about sex, a change from what had been social norms

1960′s  sex education in public schools - Traditionalists wanted abstinence-only teachings as a way to reinforce their religious doctrines. Progressives viewed sex education as a way to inform teens of ways to prevent pregnancy & disease

1970′s & 1980′s  abortion - Many women had sought for ways to end unwanted pregnancies. Some women were unable to use contraception due to religious beliefs & because their husbands opposed it. Providing access to legal, safe abortions early in pregnancy was seen as an extension of contraception by progressives. Traditionalists viewed aborting even a small clump of cells as murder and it also removed the husband from the decision which undermined his role as head of the family.

1990′s  sexual harrassment - When Clarence Thomas was nominated for the US Supreme Court, Anita Hill came forward with allegations that she had been sexually harassed by him in the workplace. When Bill Clinton ran for the presidency, several women came forward to share instances where he sexually harassed them. Later it was revealed that as president, Bill Clinton had inappropriate relations with an intern.

What was interesting wasn’t that the traditionalists and progressives lined up on opposing sides, but that they switched sides depending on whether it was a Republican or a Democrat who was being accused.

2000′s  gay marriage - people of the same gender who marry cannot follow traditional gender roles. together they have to negotiate how to divvy up all the things that need to get done. They can raise children, which also is a challenge to the traditionalist view that a child needs a father & a mother.

[malaysian-rants]

so what do we REALLY think of Sex Work?

If there’s one thing quarantine in Melbourne’s lockdown has brought me, it is the endless curiosity to understand our thoughts and unpack them. So at least once a week, I do a poll on my Instagram page feed into my nosiness and see what thoughts people around me have on different topics - exploring our stances on our mortality to orgasms to parenthood. Last week, I decided to understand where people placed themselves in regards to sex work and BOY, did the whorephobia jump out!!!!

“ Whorephobia can be defined as the fear or the hate of sex workers. Sex workers like me would argue that it also embraces paternalistic attitudes that deem us a public nuisance, spreaders of disease, offenders against decency or unskilled victims who don't know what is good for them and who need to be rescued.” - Thierry Schaffauser

Let’s rewind a little bit though. The people that responded to the poll were mostly friends from Malaysia and Australia. Malaysia being where I grew up and Australia where I’ve spent some of the most telling years of my young adulthood. Growing up, we have stignamised ideas of sex work, a very narrow-minded understanding of the various FORMS of sex work, and an even more warped perception of WHY people choose Sex Work (SW). The word of the day is choice - the agency to choose sex work. All the choices are worthy of our respect. In Malaysia, most view sex work in a very derogatory sense. We, unforunately, perceive sex workers as dirty, unsafe, in need of rescuing - saviour complexes, or an easy getaway card out of “real” work. It’s funny the amount of times teenage/young adult women will say, “should we just drop out and become strippers? hahahah” as if the sex work industry doesn’t involve immense skill and tact that is not necessarily a natural skill; it has to be learnt - like many of the skills a lot of us use in our jobs. Coming to Australia, the perception shifts. Some forms of sex work are decriminalised which create safer working conditions for SWs. It’s not perfect though, there still lies a lot of racism within the sex work industry especially against Indigenous SWs and there is still stigma in presenting as a sex worker in public situations.

SO LET’S SKIP AHEAD TO MY QUESTIONS AND DEBUNK SOME OF PEOPLE’S PERCEPTIONS ABOUT SEX WORK!

Question #1 Are Strippers Considered Sex Workers?

46% answered YES and 54% answered NO. *drumroll please* The answer is YES! Strippers/Dancers do fall under the umbrella of sex work. 

Let’s take a brief dive into this. SEX WORK actually an umbrella term coined by SW activist Carol Leigh to create an alliance between the marginalised groups of work & to counter the whorephobic second-wave feminism's derogatory terms.This term also helps to combat "lateral whorephobia" - another useful term to remember. SEX WORK as a term helps to unite a diverse range of workers. It combats strippers/dancers from saying "well at least I'm not a whore", cam girls from saying "at least we don't f*ck our clients", pornstars from calling escorts dirty - because ALL ARE SEX WORKERS. It takes away the stigma that people WITHIN the industry put onto different types of work - whorearchy as SWs call it! There are so many types of work that fall under the umbrella of sex work, a few to name being - strippers, dancers, cam girls, phone sex operators, pornstars, sugarbabies, people that work in brothels, pro-DOMMES, pro-SUBs, escorts, online workers, street workers, and the list goes on.....

(to flag: the next few stats may be inaccurate as more than half of the people that did this DID NOT PERCEIVE STRIPPERS AS SEX WORKERS - which may/may not change the future questions’ answers)

Question #2 Do You Know A Sex Worker Personally?

43% answered YES and 57% answered NO

Question #3 Should We Decriminalise Sex Work?

Around 75% answered YES and 25% answered NO. The real answer is YES! We 100% need to be decriminalising sex work and working towards unlearning our biases surrounding SW and sex workers.

Question #4 What Are Our Ideas of What Sex Work Involves?

“prostitution, escort services, massage services with happy endings, bartering”

“stripping, escorting, phone sex operating, sexting services, online entertainment”

“paid services for cash” 

“using your body as entertainment for another’s pleasure/enjoyment”

“people that sell any form of body pics (eg nudes) to escorts”

“exchanging sexual activites for something eg. cash, benefits”

“anything that involves direct touching from both parties” “lap dances”

“consensual services provided by adults”

Now.... there were HEAPS of people that replied with prostitution. Now that’s the first word to DELETE from your vocabulary. Sex workers don’t appreciate when people call them this. Below are more helpful ways to refer to SWs

Question #5 What Are Your Opinions of Sex Work?

“if you’re that comfortable in your body and feel safe at work then all the power to you”

“it needs to be acknowledged as an actual industry” “it’s work and should be protected and provided benefits as all jobs receive”

“I’m here for all women getting their coin! why it’s a taboo, I will never understand”

Sex work is Work. 100%, scream it from the rooftops! Here’s a response that I think is quite commonly held across the board.

“It depends on why they’re (sex workers) doing it. If they want to then YAS if they have to/no other options then :(” At the end of the day, whatever reason people go into sex work - we must give them ALL THE RESPECT and continue to advocate for safer working conditions to prevent exploitation,abuse and assault. There are a multitude of reasons why people go into sex work:

It’s a side job to earn more income

It's survival work

Sex workers also play a HUGE role in disability support. Having access to sex work services can assist with building self-esteem and give people with disability a greater degree of autonomy in being able to fulfil their desires independently.

Our work structures (because of capitalism) are INHERENTLY ABLEIST - people with chronic illnesses and disabilities that need FLEX work seek out SW as an option 

Question #6 Would You Date Someone That is Currently A Sex Workers?

It was a clean 50/50 split and THIS is truly where the internalised whorephobia jumped out because look at the next answers

Question #7 Would You Date Someone That Was Previously A Sex Worker?

82% answered YES whilst 18% answered NO. Here are some of the reasons why people answered NO for either of the questions and let’s debunk some of these!

MYTH #1 - “Cause I believe in monogamy” You can still be monogamous and date a sex worker. Way back when, monogamy was described as one person for LIFE and nowadays it’s evolved to one person at a time. This where the distinction that sex work is WORK becomes important. Sex workers are working when they interact with their clients/members in whatever form. 

MYTH #2 - “I’m a selfish boyfriend” This isn’t really a myth per say but it’s a popular line of thought. It interesting that we internally perceive our partners as ours/our property/someone we have onus over. I loved the honesty in this answer because like they say, it’s selfish. So yeah some people see dating a sew workers as “sharing” - as if SWs were engaging in the same capacity to their partners as they were to their clients. Well fam, I’m here to tell you that sex workers can make that distinction and if anything, are BETTER at establishing boundaries than the most of us. 

MYTH #3 - “I just think I wouldn’t feel safe having sex with them” This rhetoric only continues the damaging narratives that are projected onto sex workers which perpetuated the stigmatisation and discrimination sex-workers receive on the daily. Take a step back and unpack why you feel this way. What about sex workers do you perceive as dirty? In regions where sex work is decriminalised and destigmatised, workers have safe access to medical check-ups which means they’re probably getting tested more often than your average joe!

MYTH #4 - “I would feel less experienced (sexually) which would make me less comfortable” this.... well, is pretty common and stems from our own personal insecurities. some of us have felt this way REGARDLESS of whether our partner is a sex worker. It’s important to note that not all SWs work in the same way - some forms of sex work don’t require you to be physically present with another human, some just require a lot of imagination, creative and emotional intelligence ie phone sex operators.

So that’s all the questions! 

I’ve decided to start a #SexWorkSeptember series to talk about sex work across the globe to probe more open conversations!

Here a some phrases that are WHOREPHOBIC and we’ll unpack them in the coming weeks!

“I respect them and power to them but personally.... I couldn’t cause I have principles and morals ya know”

“I just couldn’t date someone that’s a sex worker :/”

“It’s alright if my friends and peers do it but oh no my mother/sister/niece/aunt could never! no that’s not okay!”

A final thing to remember is that sex work IS NOT easy nor the easy way out! Sex work can be difficult. Sex work requires marketing skills, assertiveness, confidence and a sales-like hustle. It’s as easy and difficult as your own jobs!

Over and out,

Lama :)

[chsamuseum]

The Sick Men of the World: Assessing Yan Fu’s Metaphor

1895 was not a good year for China. China had just lost the first Sino-Japanese War, the latest in a century of humiliation at the hands of foreigners. Amidst this chaos, Chinese scholar and later reformist Yan Fu described China as “the sick man of Asia.” In his article “On Strength,” he compared the country to a sick man in dire need of help. Traditional government, opium, and foot-binding were the maladies which were killing China. Overtime, Westerners would adopt his phrase as a metric to measure Chinese progress. The current COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on several maladies which plague both Western and Chinese societies. Rather than work together, both sides have elected to pursue tit-for-tat spats which have placed millions of lives in harm’s way and make both sides the sick men of the world. Understanding this history is the first step to combating the stereotypes that are being spouted by leaders in both the U.S. and China.

The “sick man of Asia” phrase was first applied by the West during a century-long outbreak of bubonic plague in China. Between 1894 and 1950, 15 million people died in the pandemic, decimating China’s dense population. Efforts to stop the virus were limited to local charities with minimal oversight from the imperial government. Western commentators believed that the reason why China suffered so dramatically at the hands of the plague was due to the country’s poor sanitation practices. Who was to blame for the poor sanitation? Who else but the Qing government, they argued. The government’s inability to provide for adequate sanitation was proof of China’s deteriorating health. Westerners therefore built off Yan Fu’s idea in order to develop an interesting metric which would be used throughout history to gauge China’s progress in modernization: China’s ability to respond to pandemics. 

To be fair, the West’s assessment was pretty accurate. Ironically, during the Black Death in the 14th century, China could say the same thing of medieval Europe, whose utter lack of clean drinking water and sanitation poisoned the country. While the plague was a global event, Europe was its epicenter, losing an estimated one third of its population.  While China was damaged by the plague, it did not suffer losses nearly as catastrophic. This has been largely attributed to the much more organized government and public sanitation practices of the much richer and much more powerful China. 

But late 19th century China was not as clean or as powerful. It was at the bottom of the international food chain. With the new view of China as unsanitized and inadequate, propaganda began to be spread within Western countries portraying Chinese immigrants as unclean and unfit for citizenship. Posters depicting Chinese living in decrepit conditions popularized the media. New Chinese arrivals at Angel Island were given rigorous health screenings; even a common cold could send one back to China. American society began doing everything it could to keep the Chinese out, and in 1882, passed the infamous Chinese Exclusion Act. Chinese in America? No! No! No!

In the 20th century, China awakened and recognized its dire need to modernize. With the fall of the Qing dynasty, the period between 1911 and 1949 was marked by economic, press, and social freedoms.  In the spirit of Yan Fu’s metaphor, the country was beginning to self-medicate. This change was distinctly felt in the health sector, which saw Chinese participation at international health meetings, expansion of medical schools, and new opportunities for women to enter the health profession. It also saw the creation of the Ministry of Health in 1928. China’s modernization efforts captured the attention of the Western countries. On a trip to China during the 1910s, one Western diplomat remarked that he had never seen a nation so promising and full of potential.

Then Mao came along. 

In 1949, Mao’s Chinese Communist Party (CCP) took control of China. While the CCP did care about public health, it came second to political considerations. This mindset was put on display during the period immediately preceding the Cultural Revolution and during the Cultural Revolution. In 1964, Mao began an attack on the Ministry of Health, arguing that it represented elitism and bourgeois thought. During the Cultural Revolution, doctors and scientists were targeted; as a result, hospitals dried up. The Revolution itself also spread infectious diseases. In 1966, at the very start of the Cultural Revolution, there was an outbreak of meningitis in Beijing. Students who championed Mao’s revolutionary cause spread it across the country. No one stopped them either, because political considerations came first. Stop the students, and you’d stop the revolution. The death toll was 160,000. 

Mao’s death in 1976 began a period of reform. China’s new relatively liberalized economy was put to the test with an outbreak of HIV/AIDS in the 1990s. Unfortunately, the outbreak exposed the awkward relationship between the country’s underregulated markets and overregulated government. The 1990 HIV/AIDS pandemic established the response to future pandemics: rumors of a public health crisis, government attempts to cover up, whistleblower, reluctant admittance, and draconian remedies. This pattern would appear again in the early 2000s with the outbreak of the SARS virus, COVID-19’s predecessor. When SARS (2002) was first discovered in Guangdong, the government initially downplayed the problem, trying to make sure that no foreign country would discover the true extent of the outbreak. However, Jiang Yanyong, a Beijing physician, leaked the full extent of the pandemic to the West. The international panic triggered a highly-publicized effort to fight the virus by Beijing. SARS 2002 greatly jeopardized China’s newly found status on the world stage, having just joined the WTO the previous year and scheduled to host the 2008 Olympics. The entire world watched in suspense to see whether the modernizing nation could handle a pandemic, as well as handle its new status as a world power.

This brings us to COVID-19. Not surprisingly, many comparisons have been made between COVID-19 and SARS 2002. For starters, China’s initial reaction to COVID-19 was very similar to 2002. Local officials in Wuhan attempted to keep a lid on the outbreak, but were exposed by doctor Li Wenliang, who later died of the disease, which triggered a reversal of Beijing’s policies. However, China has matured greatly since 2002. While China’s initial reaction was not the greatest, it was still very fast at sharing the genetic information of the novel virus to health centers around the globe, a much-needed headstart for the world to get working on a cure/vaccine. Chinese officials also shared as much information as was available for best practices to handle the spread of the virus, including quarantine, mask-wearing, and social-distancing, practices we are all more than familiar with. 

Moreover, it is not only China who has a reputation for covering up the effects of the virus. United States officials, since the outbreak started, have elected to use racially-charged language and a wide array of diversion tactics to draw attention away from the ballooning COVID situation in the United States. Racially-charged language has resurfaced Sino-phobia and xenophobia among many Americans, which has led to a drastic increase in the number of hate crimes being committed against Asian, specifically Chinese Americans. Meanwhile, the United States leads the world in new infections (assuming China’s numbers are actually true). Many American politicians have placed politics over lives, placing a much larger emphasis on economic recovery rather than the need to prevent new infections. Despite these theories being largely rebuked by Sweden’s situation (a country which elected to keep everything open as an experiment and is now suffering huge infection rates without any noticeable benefit to the economy), many in Washington continue to downplay COVID. Both Washington and Beijing have elected to instead lock out each others’ news organizations in an endless tit-for-tat political spat that has placed millions of lives in harm's way. Both countries exhibit a high degree of immaturity, choosing to fight each other rather than work together as the world’s dominant superpowers. They are both sick, and need to seIf-medicate. 

COVID-19 has left the world in strange, and dare I say it, unprecedented times. Unfortunately, the pandemic is far from over. Not only will COVID-19 never truly be eradicated (it will continue to exist just as Ebola and smallpox do), the problems it has exposed in our world will remain as blueprints for future generations to solve. Many of those problems lie in how governments respond to global disasters in an increasingly globalized world. In addition to keeping each other safe, we must also be informed by learning the history and misinterpretations of the past in order to strive for a better future and not be dictated by the politics of sick men.

Submitted by CHSA’s Summer Education and Research Chris Ying. Chris is a sophomore at UC Berkeley where he is majoring in History and Mathematics. His writing is based on his research and lectures from his history class.

[lgbtqueeries]

Intersectionality: A Necessary Tool

TL;DR Intersectionality plays a role in our everyday life as we deal with the weaving of our identities in various institutions and situations. Intersectionality is also a pivotal tool in creating frameworks that analyze and attempt to fight against system oppression, in which intersectionality has multiplicative effects on individuals. While focused on Black women feminists in this post based on the articles I was provided this concept extends so much further. 

NOTE: Written with help from a fellow student Brennan Ventura taking Intro to WGSS Studies via our College. Feel free to reach out and chat with us about your feelings, understandings, comments, and questions!

Another day, another project in the name of awareness and activism. While this blog may seem to center on only queer rights I want to make it very clear that that is not the case. This blog speaks about and stands up for the many types of injustices present in our current systems and institutions. They do not have to intersect with Queer rights and advocacy but it’s time we focus on the fact that many actually do. Oppression doesn’t seem to go one at a time. You don’t generally deal with the racism inherent in all systems from simply being followed by shop owners in stores to a higher likelihood of police brutality one day and the next day dealing with inaccessible public places and buildings. This doesn’t take into account the discrimination you face from inside your own “safe” communities. 

Because of this, I want to want to bring to people’s awareness a couple of concepts that have been pivotal in sharing such eye-opening perspectives on the mix of oppressions. Intersectionality and system oppression are very important terms that can help in analyzing the lives and situations different people or groups of people across the world may be experiencing.  First off is intersectionality, intersectionality is a fairly new idea and a lot of different authors and people across multiple areas of interest such as activism, politics or science the answer to, “what is intersectionality”, would vary greatly. Most simply put, intersectionality is basically the differences and intricacies that humans in the world face in their daily lives. According to Sirma Bilge, and Patricia Hill Collins, sociology professors at Université de Montréal and the University of Maryland, say that intersectionality is “a way of understanding and analyzing the complexity in the world, in people, and in human experiences”(Collins and Bilge 2020, 1). But more so, intersectionality is a lens that helps to analyze the different situations and dilemmas that people across the world go through and how many times, issues such as gender violence, racism, sexuality, discrimination are connected through underlying strings and the issues that involve these systemic problems typically overlap as well. Kimberlé Crenshaw, an American lawyer, and civil rights activist, uses intersectionality to unveil the hidden binds in cases that deal with race and gender discrimination. Crenshaw views intersectionality as a way of showing that issues such as race and gender that may only seem as racial discrimination or gender prejudice are often overlapped in their issues. In a 2016 TEDWomen speech by Crenshaw she stated “in the same way that intersectionality raised our awareness to the way that black women live their lives, it also exposes the tragic circumstances under which African-American women die ”(Crenshaw 2016). And this leads us to system oppression or systematic oppression through the lens of intersectionality. 

System oppression is the unwritten societal standards and traditions that are discriminatory towards certain races, ethnicities, genders or groups of people in general. For instance, in the United States African-Americans have undergone systematic oppression for generations and still continue to be oppressed today due to the societal standards grandfathered in by millions of people across the United States. Although explicit discrimination against African-Americans or explicit discrimination of any kind towards a specific group was made illegal by the Civil Rights Act of 1964, system oppression and the unwritten discrimination of certain groups throughout the United States are still as prominent as ever. And through the lens of intersectionality, it is evident that more often than not, an issue that may seem only racially charged or motivated is often intersectional and involves problems and perspectives from many other areas of oppression such as gender discrimination, xenophobia, homophobia, misogyny, etc. and just looking at the issue as one caused by racism will not solve the issue and lead towards more problems later on down the line. Looking at system oppression through intersectionality it is evident a vast majority of issues do not merely involve one aspect of oppression and discrimination but multiple aspects like race, gender, homophobia and many more. According to a case by Kimberlé Crenshaw a young girl was in a lawsuit against a  company that did not hire her due to what she thought was racial discrimination, however, the judge overseeing the case did not agree with the girl’s pleas. When analyzing the lawsuit, Crenshaw noticed that the judge was not looking at the case through the right lens, and because of this, the young girl lost the lawsuit. Crenshaw described this case through a lens of intersectionality and how the young African-American girl could not get helped because she was suffering through both racial and gender charged systematic oppression. As we can see, system oppression and intersectionality play a big role in the world today, and intersectionality, seeing an issue through multiple perspectives, can help to solve so many of the issues brought about by system oppression and discrimination in the United States and other nations across the world that face similar issues and problems. 

These concepts are far-reaching but I think it important to first analyze them in the concepts that they were emphasized in. The frameworks for viewing interlocking systems of power, in this case, focus on weaving feminism and anti-racism together. In the introduction of the book But Some of Us Are Brave we see this eloquently spoken by Gloria T. Hull and Barbara Smith, “Because of white women’s racism and Black men’s sexism, there was no room in either area for a serious consideration of the lives of Black women. And even when they have considered Black women, white women usually have not had the capacity to analyze racial politics and Black culture, and Black men have remained blind or resistant to the implications of sexual politics in Black women’s lives” (Cooper, Hull, Bell-Scott, and Smith 2015, xxi). It is out of absence for this framework that these movements are born. Because of the interlocking identity, instead of being embraced by both communities, they are cast aside and their needs are not spoken for nor are their experiences being shared. Kimberly Crenshaw on her TedTalk about “The Urgency for Intersectionality” spoke about how pivotal that these voices are heard. Her example also focuses on the lived experiences of Black women, mentioning that with the trickle-down sense of social justice that we have currently, people are slipping through the cracks and being left at crossroads of communities, alone and vulnerable (Crenshaw 2016). Social justice movements, despite their call for equality only tend to mention the story of those with other privileges, for instance, feminism speaking mostly for the equality of white women. In this manner, those with intersecting identities have multiplicative effects of oppression and discrimination. As Crenshaw states, Black women brought down by police violence are not covered in the media as breaking news like that of their fallen brothers because of their status as women that are Black and the media simply doesn’t have a frame for how to portray that. 

Of course, Black women are not the only intersectionality groups to have created such frameworks, demanding they be heard for their experiences. Similar movements have happened with queer people of color, disabled queer people, and indigenous people of nonbinary gender identities. Each of these groups speaks out against injustices of racism, homophobia, transphobia, colonialism, and ableism at the crossroads of where they interact, the very spot they were abandoned at. This is a commonality of all of those groups. They have formed communities based on this separation from not only the dominant, privileged culture but also the groups that are supposed to help them as well. This is by far not a new concept. These groups have been standing up for themselves for decades, creating liberation groups like the Salsa-Soul Sisters, a group made for and by Queer women of color. Just because their history has been erased, covered up, and ignored doesn’t mean that they haven’t been there fighting back. These groups are taking a stand for their stories and would love for allies to help spread their cause. Stay safe and stay educated and don’t forget to stand up for what you believe in!

Work Cited

Collins, Patricia Hill, and Sirma Bilge. Intersectionality. Cambridge, UK: Polity Press, 2020.

Crenshaw, Kimberlé. “TEDWomen 2016.” TEDWomen 2016.

Cooper, Brittney C., Akasha Hull, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Barbara Smith. But Some of Us Are Brave Black Womens Studies. New York: The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2015.

[wodezhenxin]

Andrea Bomo on A Fatherless Child

When my dad left- a shift happened not only in my life but also in my mind: I had to create a new paradigm where being strong was the only choice I had. The only way to survive. I was fortunate enough to still have my mother at this critical time. But this void my dad left, this painful and timeless trauma, remained unchanged. I was fatherless and broken, no matter what I would do to hide or forget it. “Daddy’s issues” ruined a big part of my life, but I was too busy being strong to notice. What started as a defense mechanism became my personality. A few years later, the young woman I have become is changed, for better and for worse. My strength, resilience and courage became my greatest allies. My vulnerability, insecurities, fear of abandonment became my demons. My story is perhaps painful, but far from being isolated.

Many teenage girls and young women around the world suffer from emotional trauma due to father loss whether it’s caused by death, abandonment, divorce, imprisonment, addiction, emotional or physical absence. Whatever the circumstances causing the absence of the father are, the impact is critical as the father-daughter relationship strongly influences key factors of personal development among young women such as: relationships, self-esteem, aspirations, confidence and self-love. Over the years, they become vulnerable young women who find it harder to build healthy personal and professional lives as they are building their lives, relationships, aspirations, and self-representation on the basis of this trauma, especially when it occurs during adolescence. They suffer from trust issues, low self-esteem and fear of abandonment which create the unhealthy need to be accepted and loved at all costs. Most of the time, these symptoms usually go unnoticed and unacknowledged as these young women do not necessarily understand the root issue causing their behavior, and build a façade around themselves. From dysfunctional behaviors, unhealthy relationships to chronic depression, the fatherless daughter syndrome can take several forms over the years and even be forgotten for some time, without actually disappearing. Rather, it gives rise to a vicious cycle of self-destruction mechanisms, self-doubt, and unhealthy or abusive relationships in their lives. Because we feel unloved and unworthy, we search for love and validation in all the wrong places, which make us vulnerable and exposed to both physical and emotional abuse. The social and economic environment as well as the family structure are factors that influence or reinforce the impact of fatherlessness in the lives of girls and young women. Having a support system is crucial in this context as girls often feel vulnerable and struggle to open up about what they experience, yet millions of children around the world go through the same thing. A survey of the U.S. Census Bureau estimated at 24.7 million the number of children who live without the physical presence of their biological father in the United States. While in Canada, over 80% of single-parent families are led by women (www.imfcanada.org / Statistics Canada). Fatherlessness is the greatest social problem in North America according to 72.2% of the U.S. population (National Center for Fathering). Other studies show that 71% of teenage pregnancies comes from fatherless homes and 92% of girls who come from fatherless home are more likely to divorce. These statistics demonstrate that children thrive with the active and meaningful participation of both parents, and fathers play an important role in child and teen development. Understanding the impact of fatherlessness in young women’s lives specifically, the emotional trauma caused by father loss and the consequences on society is key if we want to build a healthier society.

The father-daughter relationship has a strong impact on the mental construct of teenage girls. If this relationship is broken for various reasons whatsoever, the young woman suffers and it has an impact on almost every aspect of her life.

Since childhood, fathers have a critical impact on their daughters’ lives as they are both their first guides to the outside world and their first reflections of themselves, symbol of recognition of their own value. A healthy and uninterrupted relationship between a father and a daughter greatly helps to create a positive self-image and therefore will have a positive influence on her aspirations and relationships. When this relationship is suddenly broken for some reason, the daughter’s cycle of identity development is also interrupted. Adolescence and preadolescence are critical times where young women build themselves: their body change, they make a transition from girls to young women, and in this transition, the father’s role is important. The emotional trauma caused by father loss not only weakens the girl, but creates a void she will somehow try to fill by all means possible.

Consequently, she becomes exposed to all forms of danger and abuse. Fatherless young women often become self-destructive, violent, vulnerable, sexually promiscuous, prone to abuse, unstable and develop a conflictual relationship with their femininity and sexuality. They find it difficult to trust and live in constant fear of abandonment which sometimes lead them to make unhealthy choices for themselves in order to please others and feel accepted. In their professional and social lives, the absence of a paternal figure, that of a guide and protector, manifests itself through a lack of self-worth and consequently create more difficulties for them to be stable and become autonomous. Or conversely, they become obsessed with their professional achievements that give them the illusion to fill that void.

Romantic relationships is undoubtedly the area in which the impact of father loss is felt the most in young women’s life. Growing up, a father figure is similar to that of the “Prince Charming”, a sort of masculine ideal in a girl’s mind. It’s her first male reference, one that embodies the values necessary for her to build her identity: guidance, protection, authority, discipline, kindness, confidence and absolute love. When they become adults, women’s choices of partners are highly influenced by this ideal (and illusory) image of the father figure and the relationship they had or would have loved to have with him, thus causing unhealthy and often abusive relationships. Many of these women will particularly struggle during separation and break-ups as they make an emotional projection of their dads on their partner, while others experience more difficulties to trust, express their feelings and commit. It is common that fatherless young women unconsciously repeat the same relationships patterns that manifest through a constant fear of abandonment, insecurities, difficulties to open up, a conflictual relationship to male authority and defense mechanisms. They usually create a shell around themselves that seems strong on the outside, but deep inside, they remain extremely vulnerable.

But relationships could also be where healing happens. I believe I’m a proof of that. After several chaotic relationships, being with the right partner finally helped me understand my trauma — a trauma I didn’t even know existed and patterns I never paid attention to. I became more aware, and it was the beginning of my healing journey. Being in a healthy relationship where you feel safe, you can trust and open up without the fear of being vulnerable can really be therapeutic. On the other hand, a lot of (broken) men take advantage of vulnerable young women with the Fatherless Daughter Syndrome: because they can see their wounds, they will use it against them. And that’s when relationships become abusive.

In this growing social issue, I believe everyone has a role to play. Mothers play a fundamental role in building a positive identity and self-esteem in young women and girls, but most of the time, they lack the tools to understand their daughter’s critical needs triggered by their father’s absence. And since they are not aware of it, they are not be able to fix it. In certain cases, the presence of a stepfather or a strong male figure can be positive in the lives of fatherless young women, without necessarily filling the void nor healing her wounds, it can provide the guidance, trust and safety they need. But the real work is within as it takes a real introspection and emotional support to undo self-destruction patterns caused by years of emotional suffering and denial. A trauma remains like an open wound as long as it is not addressed.