Rogue Archives

in fact lots of things you don't even think of as a meaningful border today, like just traveling between adjacent villages were grounds for being subject to death or maiming let alone other punishment.

Historically, people's freedom of movement has been very often restricted, for starters because human societies very often featured some sort of bondage (slavery, serfdom, forced labour etc).

And historically, civilisation exists as we know it because people had enough freedom of movement to travel back and forth and relocate from one place to another. And this option wasn't exclusively available to wealthy tourists and actual armies.

Fishermen, sailors, merchants ranging from filthy rich to simple tradesmen to peddlers, refugees, diasporas, people moving from the country to the city, or from city to city, or within an empire or across empires, people traveling miles and miles to relocate with their kin and kith who lived far away, seasonal workers who went where the harvest or other agricultural temp work was, sometimes hopping from country to country, craftsmen and artisans who went where the jobs were, journeymen on their Wanderjahre, nomadic or transhumant pastoralists herding their flocks over vast distances in steppes and mountains and savannahs, itinerant workers always on the road, ships and caravans and processions crossing seas, valleys, and deserts, roads stretching across continents, do you think all that was for the privileged few?

Sometimes there were restrictions in place (at borders, or more often as internal control of the population), and they often targeted the marginalised even when they were legally free persons and not bound to land or masters. And sometimes states would decide as a matter of policy against the relocation of this or that group (though more often they would force people to relocate, which was another thing altogether). I'm not denying any of that, and in fact I'll always be mad at all of that, because freedom of movement is SO IMPORTANT.

But let's not get crazy here. My beloved criminal and criminalised underworld got the short end of the stick as usual, but on the whole, people who were not bound to land or masters WERE free to move, and didn't get summarily blocked or killed at borders. At worst they got summarily taxed.

Oh, and whatever you do, don't extrapolate anything from the exceptionally weird Britain. (It's always bloody Britain scrambling people's preconceptions, "oooh, the Middle Ages were like this", no they weren't, that's just Essex, "oooh, chivalry was like that", no it wasn't, that's just one guy from Wiltshire who excelled in a bloodsport and married above his station, "oooh, Europe was like this", absolutely not, "oooh, the whole world was like this", ABSOLUTELY THE FUCK NOT.)

"we had these great studies showing that pre-modern Europeans moved very little, that travel was dangerous, and that most people married someone born less than a mile from their birthplace. But those early studies were mainly of the British Isles, and later, when we looked at other places, we realized people in the British Isles were super way more stationary than most Europeans. Continental DNA mixed all over the place throughout the Middle Ages, so it’s only in Britain that you can dig up a 3,000-year-old bog body and compare its DNA to the person who lives nearest to the bog and it’ll tag them as first or second cousins." – Ada Palmer, Inventing the Renaissance: The Myth of a Golden Age (2025)

[2] Ibid.

Jon Bon Jovi - Blaze of Glory

I wake up in the morning and I raise my weary head I've got an old coat for a pillow and the earth was last night's bed I don't know where I'm going, only God knows where I've been I'm a devil on the run, a six-gun lover, a candle in the wind

When you're brought into this world, they say you're born in sin Well at least they gave me something I didn't have to steal or have to win Well they tell me that I'm wanted, yeah, I'm a wanted man I'm a colt in your stable, I'm what Cain was to Abel, Mister Catch-Me-If-You-Can

I'm going down in a blaze of glory Take me now but know the truth I'm going out in a blaze of glory And Lord, I never drew first but I drew first blood And I'm no one's son, call me young gun

You ask about my conscience and I offer you my soul You ask if I'll grow to be a wise man, well, I ask if I'll grow old You ask me if I've known love and what it's like to sing songs in the rain Well, I've seen love come, I've seen it shot down, I've seen it die in vain

Shot down in a blaze of glory Take me now but know the truth 'Cause I'm going out in a blaze of glory Lord, I never drew first but I drew first blood I'm the devil's son, call me young gun

Each night I go to bed, I pray the Lord my soul to keep No, I ain't looking for forgiveness, but before I'm six-foot deep Lord, I gotta ask a favor and I'll hope you'll understand 'Cause I've lived life to the fullest, let this boy die like a man Staring down a bullet, let me make my final stand

Frappé started gaining traction in the '70s, and by the '80s it had replaced turkish coffee (also known locally as greek coffee, or just coffee) as THE standard coffee, at least for young people. Old people don't change habits that easily.

But over the next decades, it lost the throne. We got some new local inventions, this time with Italian names: "freddo espresso" and "freddo cappuccino". (Italians who taste them are typically appalled, though usually they're thrown off by the name and outraged at the price, the coffee itself is alright. Possibly.)

Freddo espresso (or just freddo) is made with a double shot of espresso, which is aggressively iced (pour in a shaker with a bunch of ice cubes and shake aggressively; there are also power tools machines for mixing), and strained in a glass with a straw and even more ice cubes.

Freddo cappuccino is not a real cappuccino (hence all those baffled and outraged Italians). It's a freddo espresso with milk foam on top, where you can optionally sprinkle cinnamon or cocoa powder.

The rationale behind all this is that, unlike the whole point of espresso (drink fast and go go go!), the ideal coffee for greek climate and culture is:

cold: we got an 9-month summer over here, we're not trying to keep warm.

long: it's gotta last. the point is not to chug it, it's to slowly drink it (like turkish coffee is meant to be sipped in the Traditional Coffeeshop™), over like an hour, while you hang out and talk with your friends, or while you work or scroll on your phone or whatever.

quick to make: I'm sure that cold brew coffee is great, but NOBODY here can be arsed to wait a day to have a damn coffee; hardly anyone can be arsed to wait 5 minutes!

outdoor unit outside (the condenser), and you just drill a hole for the hose and cables.

There, problem solved. German windows have nothing to do with it. In places where AC units are uncommon, they are simply mostly unnecessary, or mostly unaffordable. Of course, the way climate is going, they are becoming less and less "unnecessary".

Meanwhile, there does appear to be some resistance to AC adoption. Some of it is for dumb reasons (aesthetics, "I'm not used to it so it's bad"), but there are also good reasons. By design, an AC unit cools an indoor space by emitting heat outside. There's no way around it. Add to that the energy consumption, and it's clear that a sudden large-scale adoption would make the streets hotter, and climate change worse. But that's for the long term. In the short term, people are already dying, so something's gotta give.

Topical example: one summer in the '80s, there was a freak heat wave in Greece, with many hundreds of casualties. At the time air conditioning was almost unheard of, and most people didn't even have electric fans. Well the fans immediately disappeared from all the stores because everyone bought one, and AC units started selling, and by now they are common. Not ubiquitous, but many residences have them, and at least public buildings and such are guaranteed to have them. Necessity conquers all. It would of course be better to do the necessary thing BEFORE the mass casualties. If only we could somehow predict them. :/

I think everyone should come to terms with the fact that AC is becoming necessary, and quickly equip, at the very least, public buildings and public transport, and any place where old people go. But also, ideally, we should be already making plans to radically rethink:

architecture

urban planning

work hours and labour rights

and rebuild cities from the ground up if that's what it takes. Because this is an emergency, and AC units alone won't cut it – they're a strain on the power grid, and they fail when it fails, and they can only improve indoor spaces. Tools at our disposal: trees, running water, roofed walkways, atriums, patios, fabric stretched from roof to roof to shield the streets from the sun, narrow streets, optimal orientation of streets and buildings and windows for better shade, materials science and technology, the careful study of tropical and subtropical architecture and urban planning, etc.

Review of The Fallen: The Lost Girls of Ireland’s Magdalene Laundries and a Legacy of Silence by Louise Brangan (Simon & Schuster, 2026)

"According to a 2013 Irish government report, more than ten thousand women and girls passed through Ireland’s Magdalene laundries. Primarily run by Roman Catholic orders in Ireland, the laundries were institutions where women and girls deemed “wayward” were incarcerated and subjected to forced labor. These included unmarried mothers, women who had been sexually abused, women considered too flirtatious or promiscuous, and girls referred simply for being poor, orphaned, or difficult to manage.

But like so much else about the laundries, that number is disputed. The Catholic orders that ran most laundries remain under no legal obligation to open their archives, and the 2013 figure excluded those who entered before 1922, among other gaps. Some researchers and advocacy groups estimate that it may have even exceeded 30,000. ...

Narrowing her focus to the lives of six women — Carmel, Nora, Catherine, Brigid, Katie, and Eileen — Brangan offers a granular, humanizing account of what it meant to be incarcerated within the laundries and, in some cases, to never leave. ...

In addition to the six women Brangan profiles, there is a seventh, always hovering just out of frame. In twentieth-century Ireland, the Mother Mary was venerated with such ardor that, as Brangan puts it, “Christ sometimes had the appearance of a second-tier messiah in his own religion.” When Pope Pius XII declared 1954 a Marian year, the Irish response was unmatched anywhere in the world. People painted their houses in shades of Marian blue. A craze for statue-building saw Marian grottos cut into rock faces and roadsides across the country. They portrayed her hands clasped, head bowed, blank and fair of face — each one an emblem of the “silent, mothering, virginal womanhood that Ireland had come to worship.”

Such prescriptive ideas of femininity were weaponized against women at every level of Irish society. Brangan traces how the new Irish Free State, after independence in 1922, became gripped by a fanatical fervor for social purity in which women’s bodies were the primary battleground. The 1931 Carrigan Report, a government-commissioned review of criminal law, declared that girls leaving industrial schools “drift into evil ways” and are “mentally and emotionally unstable,” incapable of resisting vice. Volunteer organizations like the Legion of Mary took it upon themselves to patrol streets and neighborhoods, identifying women and girls they deemed at risk of “pre-delinquency.” This category was so broad — and so subjective — that it could include almost anyone classed as female.

Women’s bodies have, of course, often been extolled with latent eroticism throughout history. But in twentieth-century Ireland, simply existing as a woman could be grounds for detainment, regardless of whether you had actually engaged in any acts of sexual “misconduct.” The laundries — also called penitentiaries, refuges, and asylums — were set up and run entirely on the conviction that women who had sex, or were perceived as sexual beings in any way, were mentally unstable and incapable of managing their own lives and were thus justly subjugated to external control by the state. Many were described as “mental defectives,” or “simplí” in Irish, sent in by families who “knew that the Magdalene Laundry was a place of last resort if they were beyond coping,” writes Brangan, “and maybe, on occasion, also beyond caring.” ...

The Purity Crusade

As Brangan details, the grounds for ending up in a laundry were, for the most part, capricious. Carmel ended up there because, at eighteen, she returned to the Good Shepherd nuns who’d raised her in an industrial school (the order ran institutions for orphaned and abandoned children) to ask for different work. They put her in a car and drove her to a laundry in another county without explanation. “The violence and neglect in the industrial schools were among the most heinously excessive of all these institutions; regimented beatings, force-feeding, sexual abuse,” Brangan writes. Still, the laundries were widely regarded to be far worse than the industrial schools themselves.

Brigid was sent to one at twelve for truancy. Catherine was deposited by her father on the crossbar of his bicycle at fourteen, regarding her as a surplus to requirements after he remarried. Eileen was brought by two women from the Legion of Mary who decided that the fifteen-year-old maid, spotted alone in a Dublin bed and breakfast on a Sunday evening, was in “imminent moral danger.” The eldest woman ever received at a laundry was ninety-eight, Brangan records; the youngest, nine. In an Internal Departmental Memorandum in 1973, some civil servants suggested that these institutions also provided “worthwhile services for a large no. of women who are unfit for work,” such as “OAPs [old-age pensioners], mentally or physically retarded women, mildly handicapped and delicate women and women who are unstable for social or moral reasons.”

The first laundry was Protestant-run, intended as a “program of reform with prostitutes and other ‘fallen women’, as well as the homeless and alcoholics — all of whom were deemed in need of moral and spiritual recovery, heroically described as ‘rescue work.’” They were so named after Mary Magdalene: a follower of Jesus who, through centuries of ecclesiastical interpretation, was transformed into an emblem of female sexual transgression. While the Gospels never describe her as a prostitute — she instead appears as a woman from whom Jesus cast out seven demons, a disciple present at the Crucifixion, and the first witness to the Resurrection — Pope Gregory the Great identified her with the unnamed “sinful woman” of Luke 7, likely a prostitute. Though this conflation was not accepted everywhere in Christianity, it became dominant in Western Catholicism for more than a millennium, including in Ireland. In the Bible, Mary Magdalene and the Virgin Mary are both beloved intimates of Jesus, both integral to his divine arc. But in twentieth-century Ireland, they were polar opposite icons of feminine virtue or lack thereof.

By the 1950s, more women were held in laundries than men in prison: for every one hundred thousand Irish women, seventy were detained in a laundry, while for every one hundred thousand men, only twenty-seven were in prison. In many cases, the laundries’ living and working conditions were comparable to, if not indistinguishable, those of the British-run penal colonies from the nineteenth century, though what took place inside there was strictly “spoken about in taut euphemisms — charity, redemption.”

On arrival, the women and girls imprisoned in the laundries were generally shorn of their hair and stripped of their given names and given a saint’s name — or, more heinously, just a number. Subjected to a strict rule of silence, they worked six days a week — washing, ironing, packing — using mostly heavy, unwieldy machines. They cleaned the vestments and uniforms of priests and prisoners, and “the linens of hotels, restaurants and family dining rooms passed through these women’s hands. They endured Ireland’s stench and dirt, the stains that wanted removing, to be made pristine, and professionally transformed.”

The women and girls received no pay for this work, nor was there any clear prospect of release. The smallest infractions were met with physical punishment and solitary confinement. Sinéad O’Connor, who was sent to a laundry as a teenager, recalled in a 2013 interview being “locked in, cut off from life, deprived of a normal childhood.” It was little wonder, then, that many women believed they were going to die inside the laundries, and many did. ...

Ireland’s Moral Conflicts

“Rosaries and ovaries,” wrote Edna O’Brien in her 1997 novel, Down by the River; “I don’t know which does the most damage to this country.” Released only a year after the country’s last laundry permanently shuttered its doors, O’Brien was writing from a lifetime of experience. Her Country Girls trilogy, published between 1960 and 1964, was banned by the Irish censor for its lewd content, scandalizing the country with its unflinching portrayal of female sexual desire, and was later burned in her home county of Clare. “There was something didactic about this whole pitiless fiasco with O’Brien and her condemned novel,” Brangan tells us. “Women’s voices and women’s lives that could be seen or heard were to be handled with contempt. If a woman wanted to belong, she must contain herself — those were the rules.”

The controversy surrounding O’Brien became a national cause célèbre — and a damning indictment of the Catholic Church’s prurient authority over women’s sexual and reproductive lives. Throughout the twentieth century, Ireland’s rigid abortion laws, coupled with its constitutional ideal of the family, had extended control over women’s bodies to sex itself: an act only socially permissible if it was for procreation. Contraception remained illegal until 1979, and only then was allowed for married women; sex education was virtually absent from church-run schools; women who reported sexual abuse were as likely to be institutionalized as believed. The 1937 Irish Constitution, still in use today, declared that “the State recognizes that by her life within the home, woman gives to the State a support without which the common good cannot be achieved.” Women who refused this role, or who simply failed to perform it with sufficient virtue, were seen as a problem to be managed.

While The Fallen’s attentiveness and compassion to its subjects is remarkable, perhaps Brangan’s greatest achievement is her portrait of a fractured nation. The state that enshrined the sanctity of motherhood simultaneously built a system for disappearing the mothers it found inconvenient, and many other women along the way. And Ireland’s singularly punitive brand of Catholicism — a faith that supposedly affirms the universal dignity of all human life — ran institutions that abused and incarcerated tens of thousands of women and girls.

The laundries were, as John Banville describes, an open secret; they ran as long as they did because the public was all too willing to turn a blind eye. This was, in effect, Ireland’s parochial moral order in miniature: a system that hid women away for transgressing codes of its own invention and proclaimed it salvation."

Writes MacDougall, “Bell’s early managers sought to limit frivolous telephoning, especially undignified activities like courting or gossiping over the telephone, and to control certain groups of users, like women, children, and servants, who were thought to be particular offenders.”

Appropriately nicknamed ‘the devil’s rope,’ barbed wire is made from steel (later coated in zinc, a zinc-aluminum alloy, or a kind of polymer coating such as polyvinyl chloride) and single or double barbs placed roughly four to six inches apart. To erect a fence, one only needs barbed wire, posts, and materials to afix the wire to the posts. [...]

They are the earliest painted portraits that have survived; they were painted whilst the Gospels of the New Testament were being written. Why then do they strike us today as being so immediate? Why does their individuality feel like our own? Why is their look more contemporary than any look to be found in the rest of the two millennia of traditional European art which followed them? The Fayum portraits touch us, as if they had been painted last month. Why? This is the riddle.

The short answer might be that they were a hybrid, totally bastard art-form, and that this heterogeneity corresponds with something in our present situation. Yet to make this answer comprehensible we have to proceed slowly.

They are painted on wood – often linden – and some are painted on linen. In scale the faces are a little smaller than life. A number are painted in tempera; the medium used for the majority is encaustic, that is to say, colours mixed with beeswax, applied hot if the wax is pure, and cold if it has been emulsified.

Today we can still follow the painter’s brushstrokes or the marks of the blade he used for scraping on the pigment. The preliminary surface on which the portraits were done was dark. The Fayum painters worked from dark to light.

What no reproduction can show is how appetising the ancient pigment still is. The painters used four colours apart from gold: black, red, and two ochres. The flesh they painted with these pigments makes one think of the bread of life itself. The painters were Greek Egyptian. The Greeks had settled in Egypt since the conquest of Alexander the Great, four centuries earlier.

They are called the Fayum portraits because they were found at the end of the last century in the province of Fayum, a fertile land around a lake, a land called the Garden of Egypt, eighty kilometres west of the Nile, a little south of Memphis and Cairo. At that time a dealer claimed that portraits of the Ptolemies and Cleopatra had been found! Then the paintings were dismissed as fakes. In reality they are genuine portraits of a professional urban middle class – teachers, soldiers, athletes, Serapis priests, merchants, florists. Occasionally we know their names – Aline, Flavian, Isarous, Claudine …

They were found in necropolises, for they were painted to be attached to the mummy of the person portrayed, when he or she died. Probably they were painted from life (some must have been because of their uncanny vitality); others, following a sudden death, may have been done posthumously.

They served a double pictorial function: they were identity pictures – like passport photos – for the dead on their journey with Anubis, the god with the jackal’s head, to the kingdom of Osiris; secondly and briefly, they served as mementoes of the departed for the bereaved family. The embalming of the body took seventy days, and sometimes after this, the mummy would be kept in the house, leaning against a wall, a member of the family circle, before being finally placed in the necropolis.

Stylistically, as I’ve said, the Fayum portraits are hybrid. Egypt by that time had become a Roman province governed by Roman prefects. Consequently the clothes, the hairstyles, the jewellery of the sitters followed the recent fashions in Rome. The Greeks, who made the portraits, used a naturalist technique which derived from the tradition established by Apelles, the great Greek master of the fourth century BC. And, finally, these portraits were sacred objects in a funerary ritual which was uniquely Egyptian. They come to us from a moment of historical transition.

And something of the precariousness of this moment is visible in the way the faces are painted, as distinct from the expression on the faces. In traditional Egyptian painting nobody was seen in full-face, because a frontal view opens the possibility to its opposite: the back view of somebody who has turned and is leaving. Every painted Egyptian figure was in eternal profile, and this accorded with the Egyptian preoccupation with the perfect continuity of life after death.

Yet the Fayum portraits, painted in the ancient Greek tradition, show men, women, and children seen full-face or three-quarters full-face. This format varies very little and all of them are as frontal as pictures from a photo-mat. Facing them, we still feel something of the unexpectedness of that frontality. It is as if they have just tentatively stepped towards us.

Among the several hundred known portraits, the difference of quality is considerable. There were great master-craftsmen and there were provincial hacks. There were those who summarily performed a routine, and there were others (surprisingly many in fact) who offered hospitality to the soul of their client. Yet the pictorial choices open to the painter were minute; the prescribed form very strict. This is paradoxically why, before the greatest of them, one is aware of enormous painterly energy. The stakes were high, the margin narrow. And in art these are conditions which make for energy.

I want now to consider just two actions. First, the act of a Fayum portrait being painted, and, second, the action of our looking at one today.

Neither those who ordered the portraits, nor those who painted them, ever imagined their being seen by posterity. They were images destined to be buried, without a visible future.

This meant that there was a special relationship between painter and sitter. The sitter had not yet become a model, and the painter had not yet become a broker for future glory. Instead, the two of them, living at that moment, collaborated in a preparation for death, a preparation which would ensure survival. To paint was to name, and to be named was a guarantee of this continuity.

In other words, the Fayum painter was summoned not to make a portrait, as we have come to understand the term, but to register his client, a man or a woman, looking at him. It was the painter rather than the ‘model’ who submitted to being looked at. Each portrait he made began with this act of submission. We should consider these works not as portraits, but as paintings about the experience of being looked at by Aline, Flavian, Isarous, Claudine …

The address, the approach is different from anything we find later in the history of portraits. Later ones were painted for posterity, offering evidence of the once living to future generations. Whilst still being painted, they were imagined in the past tense, and the painter, painting, addressed his sitter in the third person – either singular or plural. He, She, They as I observed them. This is why so many of them look old even when they are not.

For the Fayum painter the situation was very different. He submitted to the look of the sitter, for whom he was Death’s painter or, perhaps more precisely, Eternity’s painter. And the sitter’s look, to which he submitted, addressed him in the second person singular. So that his reply – which was the act of painting – used the same personal pronoun: Toi, Tu, Esy, Ty … who is here. This in part explains their immediacy.

Looking at these ‘portraits’, which were not destined for us, we find ourselves caught in the spell of a very special contractual intimacy. The contract may be hard for us to grasp, but the look speaks to us, particularly to us today.

If the Fayum portraits had been unearthed earlier, during, say, the eighteenth century, they would, I believe, have been considered as little more than a curiosity. To a confident, expansive culture these little paintings on linen or wood would probably have seemed diffident, clumsy, cursory, repetitive, uninspired.

The situation at the end of our century is different. The future has been, for the moment, downsized, and the past is being made redundant. Meanwhile the media surround people with an unprecedented number of images, many of which are faces. The faces harangue ceaselessly by provoking envy, new appetites, ambition, or, occasionally, pity combined with a sense of impotence. Further, the images of all these faces are processed and selected in order to harangue as noisily as possible, so that one appeal out-pleads and eliminates the next appeal. And people come to depend upon this impersonal noise as a proof of being alive!

Imagine then what happens when somebody comes upon the silence of the Fayum faces and stops short. Images of men and women making no appeal whatsoever, asking for nothing, yet declaring themselves, and anybody who is looking at them, alive! They incarnate, frail as they are, a forgotten self-respect. They confirm, despite everything, that life was and is a gift.

There is a second reason why the Fayum portraits speak today. This century, as has been pointed out many times, is the century of emigration, enforced and voluntary. That is to say, a century of partings without end, and a century haunted by the memories of those partings.

The sudden anguish of missing what is no longer there is like suddenly coming upon a jar which has fallen and broken into fragments. Alone you collect the pieces, discover how to fit them together, and then carefully stick them to one another, one by one. Eventually the jar is reassembled, but it is not the same as it was before. It has become both flawed and more precious. Something comparable happens to the image of a loved place or a loved person when kept in the memory after separation.

The Fayum portraits touch a similar wound in a similar way. The painted faces, too, are flawed, and more precious than the living one was, sitting there in the painter’s workshop, where there was a smell of melting beeswax. Flawed because very evidently hand-made. More precious because the painted gaze is entirely concentrated on the life it knows it will one day lose.

And so they gaze on us, the Fayum portraits, like the missing of our own century.

— John Berger, Portraits : John Berger on artists (Verso, 2015)

What a red flag actually means: something here is an indicator of a potential problem (but might be fine with a reasonable explanation)

What people have now decided it means: abuse

I've lost count of the number of times I've now had to read variants of "My partner takes all my money and gives me back an allowance because he says it's a man's job to control finances, but he's racking up gambling debts" being met with "Wow this man is a walking red flag" no Becky that is abuse. That is not an indicator. He is an abuser. Call the police. We have lost the concept of a proxy: a thing that indicates a more important thing. And it's relevant to this conversation because I'm actually going to go out on a limb here:

With the obvious exception of paedophilia, age gaps themselves aren't a problem at all - they are a proxy for the actual harmful phenomenon. Hea me out, let me explain

The reason we don't like age gaps is because of the implied power dynamic. If one partner, usually male, is older than other - particularly if the other is still quite young - the risk is that what we're seeing is a worldly wise predator who is exploiting the lack of life experience of a young beautiful woman by mentally abusing her until she's no longer young and pretty enough to satisfy, at which point he'll move on to the next. There have been enough examples of this in human history. It's unfortunately not an uncommon pattern. Genders can also be diverse in this scenario

We can't necessarily see that dynamic from the outside. But we CAN see an inherent element of it: the ages of the people involved. So age becomes a proxy for the abuse. And, hey, it's often correct.

But here's the thing: the ages themselves are not causing harm.

The power dynamic is. The abuse is.

Plenty of age gap relationships are loving, healthy and steadfast. Two people met and genuinely fell in love regardless of the outer packaging, and have a relationship with all the highs and lows and challenges and rewards as any more traditional pairing. This happens all the time

Is the age gap a red flag? Sure! It indicates a potential issue.

Is it inherently abusive? Absolutely fucking not.

OP is right - we need to stop focusing just on the numbers and twisting the facts to fit by infantilising the younger partners, and start focusing on the actual harms. The DiCaprio Pattern of only dating under 24s repeatedly is itself a proxy, too, actually - but a much stronger one than the simple presence of an age gap.

(Even so, in DiCaprio's case, until any of his former partners come forward and describe him as abusive, actually, even that is up in the air - my personal interpretation, given how strong a pattern it is, is that he's a loser who views women as trophies (consciously or not). If any have come forward and I don't know about it, of course, fair enough. But those women were adults capable of making their own decisions, even if they might later come to regret it. And regretting poor decisions is part of life! That's how it goes, particularly with relationships. As long as they weren't abused, there's no biggie. And just as he was looking for young-and-beautiful, there's no way they weren't, on some level, looking for rich-and-famous; it goes both ways.)

Also, another element of this: I think a lot of modern extreme puritan discourse on this is actually ironically down to the age of those taking part. Up until your late 20s, ten years is actually a huge span of time to you, because in your own life you were in a completely different developmental phase ten years ago (teenager), and a completely different phase again ten years before that (child). That skews your sense of what a ten-year gap means. Whereas once you're in your 30s and beyond, ten years is like. Yeah I was an adult ten years ago, and I still am now. That's two adults. Who cares.

For reference and vibes, I liberally (but not arbitrarily!) translated this passage from the 15th c. Towneley Mystery Plays, where the demon Titivillus welcomes sinners to hell. [I was only able to do that after @tuulikki helpfully gave me an accurate translation, otherwise I'd still be staring at the original Middle English in utter bafflement.]

All harlots and whores, and bawds that procure and pimp them and lure, welcome to my See!

Ye ne'er-do-wells, liars beggars and thieves, vagrants and brawlers that all men reproach, despoilers, extortioners, welcome, my loves!

Perjurers, usurers, and oath-breakers who get paid lies to tell, gamblers and forgers, backbiters and slanderers, all welcome to Hell!

And then I got distracted, because although I couldn't make it rhyme perfectly, I was AMAZED at how much the whole vibe, and even some vocabulary, reminded me of "God's gonna cut you down".

Go tell that long-tongue liar, go and tell that midnight rider, tell the rambler, the gambler, the back-biter, tell 'em that god's gonna cut 'em down

Leslie Fish - Lucifer

Let me teach you to wonder and worry Permit me to tell you how to wage war A creature's reach should exceed its grasp Or what's a heaven for?

I'll show you the way to take thought for tomorrow To struggle for dreams and to hunger for more A creature's sight should outrun its might Or what are the heavens for?

Taste of the fruit of the tree that is knowledge Of good and of evil and all the world's lore A creature's thought must exceed what it's taught Or who is heaven for?

One thing that surprised me in the play/ritual was that the orc afterlife was restored (well, rebuilt with a new blueprint, because the previous one fucking sucked), but for now, not all orcs can get to it. Only the renegades – KoTher'ai. The specific people in that specific failed rebellion that the play was about. So only those invoked by the ritual. Called by name, if you will, though not individually – I don't suppose history managed to record the name of every single rebel and priest, and there were a lot more souls than cast members in the Hallowed Round.

And now we know it's not because the ritual was less successful or less expansive than planned, on the contrary it was more! The idea was to build a small escape tunnel for the souls, as proof of concept more than anything, and that incredibly powerful play created a whole-ass King's Highway. Still, not all orcs are passing through.

So what will it take? Now that the full plan is revealed – repeat 6 times, for 7 afterlives in total – what will it take for ALL trapped souls to pass through, orcs and halflings and humans and the rest of them?

And my vision is, once all 7 bridges are built and all the afterlives are technically accessible, they stage a second play. A play so epic in scope that it will make KoTher'ai look like a kindergarten sketch, a play that manages to invoke all mortals who have ever died, all species, in all of Aramán, in all of time. Wrapped in a ritual that connects all the bridges, scattered as they are across the land (hey, remember that Tachonis fuckery of long distance rituals?), and with a story so powerful, so symbolic, and so universal, that it effectively calls by name every single trapped soul, and liberates them all.

"Democrats and Republicans in Congress have struck a deal on a bill they say will help keep children and teens safe online. The KIDS Act could pass on the House floor as soon as next week; if enacted, it would fundamentally change the way everyone — not just kids — accesses the internet.

At stake is your ability to use many social media platforms without revealing your identity. 

That’s because the KIDS Act at least strongly incentivizes — and, for some services, outright requires — age verification. Many platforms will turn to age verification to avoid potential liability under the law. Companies like X, video-sharing services like Vimeo, and others with a history of users’ populating social feeds with edgy content may be required to verify users’ ages because they host a certain amount of content deemed “sexual material harmful to minors,” a term that the KIDS Act defines broadly. 

That’s a big problem for people who need to be able to use the internet anonymously, since, as Taylor Lorenz has previously written about in The Intercept, “there’s no way to reliably verify someone’s age without verifying who they are.” 

Threats to online anonymity harm everyone, but one group is often overlooked: journalists and the sources who talk to them. Age verification requirements will help the Trump administration carry out its vendetta against the press by creating new avenues to identify journalists’ confidential sources. [...]

This homeless person is making me uncomfortable. Should I call [a man with a gun]?

My neighbor is having a loud party. Should I get [a man with a gun] involved?

There are some teenagers skateboarding. Do you think [a man with a gun] would get rid of them for me?

  Countries and territories with routinely unarmed police officers [x]