stupid bihet

1890 a wet towel to wrap her in grains of rice and sand in the nose a mother shares the trick with her daughter-in-law i had to do it she says as did my mother and her mother before her

1990 a newspaper article reads a hundred baby girls were found buried behind a doctor’s house in a neighboring village the wife wonders if that’s where they took her she imagines her daughter becoming the soil  fertilizing the roots that feed this country

1998 oceans away in a toronto basement a doctor performs an illegal abortion on an indian woman who already has a daughter one burden is enough she says

2006 it’s easier than you think my aunties tell my mother they know a family who’ve done it three times they know a clinic. they should get mumma the number.  the doctor even prescribes pills that guarantee a boy. they worked for the woman down the street they say now she has three sons

2012 twelve hospitals in the toronto area refuse to reveal a baby’s gender to expecting families until the thirtieth week of pregnancy  all twelve hospitals are located in areas with high south asian immigrant populations

There was one on tv. I wasn’t even paying attention to it, I had my headphones on and was actively trying to tune the show out. My ears picked up on the sound of the garage door, and a jolt of adrenaline shot through my body as I grabbed my laptop and moved to get out of my seat and run to my room.

I realized what happened after about two seconds.

The sound is gone from my ears, but my heart is still racing and I’m waiting for the door to the house to open, to hear the jingling of my mother’s keys and her footsteps moving through the house. My muscles are still tense and I’m fighting the urge to run to my room and stick a board in front of the door.

For years, the sound of a garage door was my warning to pack up what I was doing quickly and retreat to my room if I was out of it.

these were products i had chosen myself because i liked the smell. and they got connected to the medical phobia because i was using them to wash off the hospital reek and the fear sweat and so forth. i don’t know why they became a trigger. maybe because washing off the hospital smell didn’t make me not in pain. maybe because their ‘fresh pine ocean breeze bluegreen spicy stuff’ smell didn’t really replace the hospital stench, just mingled with it.

but for whatever reason, smelling these objectively nice soaps made me do flashbacks and get all hopeless and wobbly. so they had to go.

triggers are random. they’re often something that was simply present during a trauma, and you can’t guess what they’ll be. no one who hasn’t heard me explain this would ever associate suave naturals ocean breeze body wash with unbearable abdominal pain. so i guess the takeaways here are twofold:

- if you have triggers, remember other people can’t predict them, and don’t expect to be protected from them all the time. that’s up to you.

The women who were in the ancient Greek sex trade - whether pornai, hetairai, musician/dancing girls, etc - were in there out of necessity and compulsion. Most of them were slaves: war captives, orphans, baby girls exposed after birth and enslaved. Others were forced into it by their families, ie a prostituted woman has children and trains them (usually the daughters) to pick up the trade. (These situations are now sometimes called “family businesses” in scholarship.)

And those who weren’t enslaved or forced into it were usually impoverished widows or metic women who had little other choice if they wanted to survive.

And yet these clear instances of trafficking are referred to as “sexual labour” or “unfree sex work” in academia. Pimps are sanitized into “operators of a sex business” despite the ancient Greek term, pornoboskos, literally translating to “whore-herder” or “shepherd of pornai”. If you ever wanna rip out your eyes, read anything by Edward E. Cohen or Konstantinos Kapparis.

(Funnily enough, one of the words for punter was pornokopos, which means “whore-striker”. Now, striking/hitting was sometimes a euphemism for intercourse in ancient Greek but even then the association of sex with violence is rather interesting.)

Bristol photographed a young crewman of a US Navy “Dumbo” PBY rescue mission, manning his gun after having stripped naked and jumped into the water of Rabaul Harbor to rescue a badly burned Marine pilot. The Marine was shot down while bombing the Japanese-held fortress of Rabaul.

“…we got a call to pick up an airman who was down in the Bay. The Japanese were shooting at him from the island, and when they saw us they started shooting at us. The man who was shot down was temporarily blinded, so one of our crew stripped off his clothes and jumped in to bring him aboard. He couldn’t have swum very well wearing his boots and clothes. As soon as we could, we took off. We weren’t waiting around for anybody to put on formal clothes. We were being shot at and wanted to get the hell out of there. The naked man got back into his position at his gun in the blister of the plane.”

She made an onlyfans and cashed in one million $ in the first 24 hours + she's making a "documentary" about it

It’s almost as if, just like any other thing, the rich and privileged benefit from exploiting it, where poor people are exploited.

The commenter above is correct; not only would the men who paid for Bella’s photos never have paid for the other women, but the company itself is to blame for their own change in policy. These women are getting mad at Bella for gaming a rigged system, instead of getting mad at the rigged system, and particularly at men who control the rules and the men who control the money.