the anti-aging industry is disgusting. we will inevitably age, you don’t have to inject your face with botox and drink from specialized straws when you can just face reality.
aging is beautiful. God created us this way, and we should allow ourselves to feel life to its full extent instead of fearing our beauty being lessened.
when your worth is placed on character instead of outer-appearance, you will glow with happiness, and that’s what truly makes someone gorgeous forever.
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Men 60 and over are purchasing g babies through surrogacy yet the average life span of men in England is 78.8 years. What plans do they have in place if they die before the babies are legally adults?
By Sanchez Manning 14 September 2024
Almost 300 men aged over 50 have applied to become the legal father of a surrogate child over the past five years – and 43 of them are over 60, new figures reveal.
And a total of 95 single men applied to become a parent, reflecting a growing trend in men, especially older men, having babies alone with the help of surrogates.
Since the law changed in 2019 to give single people the same surrogacy rights as couple, there have been 2,162 applications from intended parents in England.
A total of 293 would-be fathers are over 50, both solo and in couples, according to figures released following a Freedom of Information Act application from The Mail on Sunday.
Older women turning to surrogacy has already sparked debate, with high-profile figures such as Naomi Campbell using a surrogate to have children in their 50s.
And in June, a 72-year-old man was granted permission in Scotland to become the legal father of a three-year-old boy, born to a surrogate, despite the death of his wife.
Commenting on the new figures from the Children and Family Court Advisory and Support Service, fertility and family law expert Louisa Ghevaert said: ‘The numbers of single men and men over 50 applying for parental orders reflects wider trends in solo and later-life parenting that are set to continue.’
She added that the numbers also reflected ‘the fact there’s no legal upper age limit for a parental order’.
However, the latest disclosure has caused anger among some campaigners. Helen Gibson, of Surrogacy Concern, said: ‘We are appalled to see such high numbers of single men and older men pursuing surrogacy, often abroad and in commercial arrangements which are banned in the UK. This is a worrying trend in which mothers are erased from the lives of their children.’
But Alan White, of Surrogacy UK, said: ‘As a society, perhaps we’re more used to considering maternal instinct than we are paternal instinct, but the desire to become a parent can be strong whether you’re a man or a woman.’
The UK ranks as one of the worst countries to bring up twins and triplets, a shocking report has revealed.
Research from the Twins Trust found parents of such children are at least £20,000 worse off in the first year after birth, compared with those who have had two babies in succession.
In a ranking of developed nations that looked at financial help such as maternity pay, mental health support and childcare provision, the UK came 23rd out of 27.
Shauna Leven, chief executive of the Twins Trust, said: ‘This report lays bare the grim reality facing families with multiples – the financial burden, mental health toll and lack of support.’
The charity is calling on the Government to change maternity pay so it is paid per baby instead of per mother.
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not sure how to put this into words. but buddhism (literature, figures, history, etc.) is queer and has been queered over the years. and when a chinese story embarks on a daoism-buddhism-confucianism study, there are echoes of similar themes, devices, techniques, allusions. by nature of being a chinese story, the frequent heart of it is a daoism & buddhism vs. confucianism ideological battle where the latter is rules and conventions and social expectations. and the former is liberation, a queered deviancy because it advocates for plurality and fluidity.
the lotus sutra has a prominent gender-change motif so as to present freedom... the buddhist ideal to emancipate oneself from mainstream society is often realized as a release from the gender hegemony. non-duality teachings in buddhism encompasses all of this.
in the lotus sutra, the dragon girl turns into a male and then proceeds to attain enlightenment - in direct response to the men telling her she cannot do so, that women are spiritually disadvantaged. transitioning is a queer act but also a buddhist achievement: an entity letting go of their body and subsequently their confucian identity of "father", "son", "wife", "mother", "daughter", etc. through this they learn non-duality & non-self & abandoning illusions, the primary concepts to buddhism.
in the lotus sutra, bodhisattva guanyin also notably underwent a male to female transformation. back in the day, guanyin's male form was at first more popular and their masculine image dominated. today it's an androgynous woman in white robes that's become iconic. this gender fluid nature again stands for liberation; guanyin is a beloved figure for women because they depict a breakaway from male-oriented society and the patriarchy. from the sanskrit name "avalokitesvara" (lord who looks down) to the chinese "guanyin" (one who observes the sounds). the chinese symbol of mercy is necessarily linked to a male to female trajectory, described to have a total of 33 male and female forms. for artistic depictions, guanyin has a feminine face but a masculine body (typically an exposed flat chest) too.
even when imagined as a girl without a history of gender swaps, they were still an antithesis to the male-dominated confucian scene. 妙善 miao shan is guanyin's other popular myth: the princess at odds with her royal father. she refuses his demands to marry until he ultimately executes her. it is a narrative negating the confucian relationships, (a) father/son or child, (b) ruler/subject, and (c) husband/wife. this is the constant of guanyin. a direct challenge to chinese patriarchal ideals.
as an aside, post-execution miao shan becomes a bodhisattva in the mountains through one spiritual miracle or another. in the mean time her father grows ill and the only cure is the eyes and arms of a person without anger. they seek out miao shan, not knowing who she is, and she gives up both arms and eyes for her father. after his recovery, the true identity of the bodhisattva is revealed and the father changes his ways. and miao shan ascends to become guanyin. related because an elusive figure amongst nature, blind and physically impaired, is also.... a prevalent trope for enlightened peoples.
overlapping the feminine and the masculine, a presence that has one foot in both categories, is the buddhist language for enlightenment + a manifestation of core buddhist teachings. when you are outside the gender regime and when you are outside human society, when you're beyond a cogent and organized identity, you are free. you are happy. which also means you are queer!
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Women were burned with remarkable lack of compunction throughout the Middle Ages. If statistics were kept they have been very successfully concealed; but evidence indicates that the proportion of women to men who were burned alive from about 800 to 1800 was as much as ten thousand to one. Men were sometimes burned as heretics after having been mercifully strangled to death. But women were burned alive on countless pretexts: for threatening their husbands, for talking back to or refusing a priest, for stealing, for prostitution, for adultery, for bearing a child out of wedlock, for permitting sodomy, even though the priest or husband who committed the sodomy was forgiven, for masturbating, for lesbianism, for child-neglect, for scolding and nagging, and even for miscarrying, even though the miscarriage was caused by a kick or a blow from the husband. We read in the old chronicles of women in the last weeks of pregnancy being burned until the heat burst their bellies and propelled the fetus outward beyond the flames. The infant was then picked up and flung back into the fire at its mother's feet. We read of the little daughters of burnt women being forced to dance with bare feet one hundred times around the smoldering stake, through their mothers' ashes and through the still glowing embers in order to "impress upon them the memory of their mothers' sins." And all of this in an age when the only law of the land was the law of the church, when civil courts were merely the agents of the Christian hierarchy.
-Elizabeth Gould Davis, The First Sex
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the most outdated aspect of btvs isn't the special effects. it's b*ngel. it feels like a relic of what tropes were popular at the time. the codependency, age gap, tortured man, soap opera drama... all as old as the hard candies in a grandmother's petri dish.
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I'm so excited to see what I'll look like as I get older!
I hope that I'll be able to eat bread and desserts without worrying about my figure, that when I exercise it'll be focused on mobility instead of how I look in a swimsuit.
I hope that I can go to the beach when I'm middle aged or elderly without feeling self conscious.
If I have children and gain weight I want to be happy that I had a baby, and not upset that my waist is gone.
I want to see my hair go white, to get laugh and smile lines, etc.
I hope that my money goes to books, pets, gardens, and vacations instead of the beauty industry that doesn't give a sh*t about me.
I'm so happy that my older relatives always cast "aging out of beauty" as such a freeing time of life. Nobody is staring anymore, there's no expectation that you put effort into being sexy. It's just you!
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Literally dying of laughter inside seeing ‘Total Eclipse of the Heart’ being toted as a perfect DM song in Marius anti territory.
Like… who wants to tell them that if they watch the original music video, that there’s a PrObLemAtIc AgE GaP and uneven power dynamics in an all boys school as the music video plot? 🤣
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