#she's shot on her wedding with emir

[mithliya]

Here is a critique: Argue all you want with many feminist policies, but few quarrel with feminism’s core moral insight, which changed the lives (and minds) of women forever: that women are due the same rights and dignity as men. So, as news of the appalling miseries of women in the Islamic world has piled up, where are the feminists? Where’s the outrage? For a brief moment after September 11, when pictures of those blue alien-creaturely shapes in Afghanistan filled the papers, it seemed as if feminists were going to have their moment. And in fact the Feminist Majority, to its credit, had been publicizing since the mid-90s how Afghan girls were barred from school, how women were stoned for adultery or beaten for showing an ankle or wearing high-heeled shoes, how they were prohibited from leaving the house unless accompanied by a male relative, how they were denied medical help because the only doctors around were male.

But the rest is feminist silence. You haven’t heard a peep from feminists as it has grown clear that the Taliban were exceptional not in their extreme views about women but in their success at embodying those views in law and practice. In the United Arab Emirates, husbands have the right to beat their wives in order to discipline them—“provided that the beating is not so severe as to damage her bones or deform her body,” in the words of the Gulf News. In Saudi Arabia, women cannot vote, drive, or show their faces or talk with male non-relatives in public. (Evidently they can’t talk to men over the airwaves either; when Prince Abdullah went to President Bush’s ranch in Crawford last April, he insisted that no female air-traffic controllers handle his flight.) Yes, Saudi girls can go to school, and many even attend the university; but at the university, women must sit in segregated rooms and watch their professors on closed-circuit televisions. If they have a question, they push a button on their desk, which turns on a light at the professor’s lectern, from which he can answer the female without being in her dangerous presence. And in Saudi Arabia, education can be harmful to female health. Last spring in Mecca, members of the mutaween, the Commission for the Promotion of Virtue, pushed fleeing students back into their burning school because they were not properly covered in abaya. Fifteen girls died.

You didn’t hear much from feminists when in the northern Nigerian province of Katsina a Muslim court sentenced a woman to death by stoning for having a child outside of marriage. The case might not have earned much attention—stonings are common in parts of the Muslim world—except that the young woman, who had been married off at 14 to a husband who ultimately divorced her when she lost her virginal allure, was still nursing a baby at the time of sentencing. During her trial she had no lawyer, although the court did see fit to delay her execution until she weans her infant.

You didn’t hear much from feminists as it emerged that honor killings by relatives, often either ignored or only lightly punished by authorities, are also commonplace in the Muslim world. In September, Reuters reported the story of an Iranian man, “defending my honor, family, and dignity,” who cut off his seven-year-old daughter’s head after suspecting she had been raped by her uncle. The postmortem showed the girl to be a virgin. In another family mix-up, a Yemeni man shot his daughter to death on her wedding night when her husband claimed she was not a virgin. After a medical exam revealed that the husband was mistaken, officials concluded he was simply trying to protect himself from embarrassment about his own impotence. According to the Human Rights Commission of Pakistan, every day two women are slain by male relatives seeking to avenge the family honor.

The savagery of some of these murders is worth a moment’s pause. In 2000, two Punjabi sisters, 20 and 21 years old, had their throats slit by their brother and cousin because the girls were seen talking to two boys to whom they were not related. In one especially notorious case, an Egyptian woman named Nora Marzouk Ahmed fell in love and eloped. When she went to make amends with her father, he cut off her head and paraded it down the street. Several years back, according to the Washington Post, the husband of Zahida Perveen, a 32-year-old pregnant Pakistani, gouged out her eyes and sliced off her earlobe and nose because he suspected her of having an affair.

In a related example widely covered last summer, a teenage girl in the Punjab was sentenced by a tribal council to rape by a gang that included one of the councilmen. After the hour-and-a-half ordeal, the girl was forced to walk home naked in front of scores of onlookers. She had been punished because her 11-year-old brother had compromised another girl by being been seen alone with her. But that charge turned out to be a ruse: it seems that three men of a neighboring tribe had sodomized the boy and accused him of illicit relations—an accusation leading to his sister’s barbaric punishment—as a way of covering up their crime.

Nor is such brutality limited to backward, out-of-the-way villages. Muddassir Rizvi, a Pakistani journalist, says that, though always common in rural areas, in recent years honor killings have become more prevalent in cities “among educated and liberal families.” In relatively modern Jordan, honor killings were all but exempt from punishment until the penal code was modified last year; unfortunately, a young Palestinian living in Jordan, who had recently stabbed his 19-year-old sister 40 times “to cleanse the family honor,” and another man from near Amman, who ran over his 23-year-old sister with his truck because of her “immoral behavior,” had not yet changed their ways. British psychiatrist Anthony Daniels reports that British Muslim men frequently spirit their young daughters back to their native Pakistan and force the girls to marry. Such fathers have been known to kill daughters who resist. In Sweden, in one highly publicized case, Fadima Sahindal, an assimilated 26-year-old of Kurdish origin, was murdered by her father after she began living with her Swedish boyfriend. “The whore is dead,” the family announced.

As you look at this inventory of brutality, the question bears repeating: Where are the demonstrations, the articles, the petitions, the resolutions, the vindications of the rights of Islamic women by American feminists? The weird fact is that, even after the excesses of the Taliban did more to forge an American consensus about women’s rights than 30 years of speeches by Gloria Steinem, feminists refused to touch this subject. They have averted their eyes from the harsh, blatant oppression of millions of women, even while they have continued to stare into the Western patriarchal abyss, indignant over female executives who cannot join an exclusive golf club and college women who do not have their own lacrosse teams.

But look more deeply into the matter, and you realize that the sound of feminist silence about the savage fundamentalist Muslim oppression of women has its own perverse logic. The silence is a direct outgrowth of the way feminist theory has developed in recent years. Now mired in self-righteous sentimentalism, multicultural nonjudgmentalism, and internationalist utopianism, feminism has lost the language to make the universalist moral claims of equal dignity and individual freedom that once rendered it so compelling. No wonder that most Americans, trying to deal with the realities of a post-9/11 world, are paying feminists no mind.

To understand the current sisterly silence about the sort of tyranny that the women’s movement came into existence to attack, it is helpful to think of feminisms plural rather than singular. Though not entirely discrete philosophies, each of three different feminisms has its own distinct reasons for causing activists to “lose their voice” in the face of women’s oppression.

The first variety—radical feminism (or gender feminism, in Christina Hoff Sommers’s term)—starts with the insight that men are, not to put too fine a point upon it, brutes. Radical feminists do not simply subscribe to the reasonable-enough notion that men are naturally more prone to aggression than women. They believe that maleness is a kind of original sin. Masculinity explains child abuse, marital strife, high defense spending, every war from Troy to Afghanistan, as well as Hitler, Franco, and Pinochet. As Gloria Steinem informed the audience at a Florida fundraiser last March: “The cult of masculinity is the basis for every violent, fascist regime.”

Gender feminists are little interested in fine distinctions between radical Muslim men who slam commercial airliners into office buildings and soldiers who want to stop radical Muslim men from slamming commercial airliners into office buildings. They are both examples of generic male violence—and specifically, male violence against women. “Terrorism is on a continuum that starts with violence within the family, battery against women, violence against women in the society, all the way up to organized militaries that are supported by taxpayer money,” according to Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, who teaches “The Sexuality of Terrorism” at California State University in Hayward. Violence is so intertwined with male sexuality that, she tells us, military pilots watch porn movies before they go out on sorties. The war in Afghanistan could not possibly offer a chance to liberate women from their oppressors, since it would simply expose women to yet another set of oppressors, in the gender feminists’ view. As Sharon Lerner asserted bizarrely in the Village Voice, feminists’ “discomfort” with the Afghanistan bombing was “deepened by the knowledge that more women than men die as a result of most wars.”

If guys are brutes, girls are their opposite: peace-loving, tolerant, conciliatory, and reasonable—“Antiwar and Pro-Feminist,” as the popular peace-rally sign goes. Feminists long ago banished tough-as-nails women like Margaret Thatcher and Jeanne Kirkpatrick (and these days, one would guess, even the fetching Condoleezza Rice) to the ranks of the imperfectly female. Real women, they believe, would never justify war. “Most women, Western and Muslim, are opposed to war regardless of its reasons and objectives,” wrote the Jordanian feminist Fadia Faqir on OpenDemocracy.net. “They are concerned with emancipation, freedom (personal and civic), human rights, power sharing, integrity, dignity, equality, autonomy, power-sharing [sic], liberation, and pluralism.”

Sara Ruddick, author of Maternal Thinking, is perhaps one of the most influential spokeswomen for the position that women are instinctually peaceful. According to Ruddick (who clearly didn’t have Joan Crawford in mind), that’s because a good deal of mothering is naturally governed by the Gandhian principles of nonviolence such as “renunciation,” “resistance to injustice,” and “reconciliation.” The novelist Barbara Kingsolver was one of the first to demonstrate the subtleties of such universal maternal thinking after the United States invaded Afghanistan. “I feel like I’m standing on a playground where the little boys are all screaming ‘He started it!’ and throwing rocks,” she wrote in the Los Angeles Times. “I keep looking for somebody’s mother to come on the scene saying, ‘Boys! Boys!’ ”

Gender feminism’s tendency to reduce foreign affairs to a Lifetime Channel movie may make it seem too silly to bear mentioning, but its kitschy naiveté hasn’t stopped it from being widespread among elites. You see it in widely read writers like Kingsolver, Maureen Dowd, and Alice Walker. It turns up in our most elite institutions. Swanee Hunt, head of the Women in Public Policy Program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government wrote, with Cristina Posa in Foreign Policy: “The key reason behind women’s marginalization may be that everyone recognizes just how good women are at forging peace.” Even female elected officials are on board. “The women of all these countries should go on strike, they should all sit down and refuse to do anything until their men agree to talk peace,” urged Ohio representative Marcy Kaptur to the Arab News last spring, echoing an idea that Aristophanes, a dead white male, proposed as a joke 2,400 years ago. And President Clinton is an advocate of maternal thinking, too. “If we’d had women at Camp David,” he said in July 2000, “we’d have an agreement.”

Major foundations too seem to take gender feminism seriously enough to promote it as an answer to world problems. Last December, the Ford Foundation and the Soros Open Society Foundation helped fund the Afghan Women’s Summit in Brussels to develop ideas for a new government in Afghanistan. As Vagina Monologues author Eve Ensler described it on her website, the summit was made up of “meetings and meals, canvassing, workshops, tears, and dancing.” “Defense was mentioned nowhere in the document,” Ensler wrote proudly of the summit’s concluding proclamation—despite the continuing threat in Afghanistan of warlords, bandits, and lingering al-Qaida operatives. “[B]uilding weapons or instruments of retaliation was not called for in any category,” Ensler cooed. “Instead [the women] wanted education, health care, and the protection of refugees, culture, and human rights.”

Too busy celebrating their own virtue and contemplating their own victimhood, gender feminists cannot address the suffering of their Muslim sisters realistically, as light years worse than their own petulant grievances. They are too intent on hating war to ask if unleashing its horrors might be worth it to overturn a brutal tyranny that, among its manifold inhumanities, treats women like animals. After all, hating war and machismo is evidence of the moral superiority that comes with being born female.

Yet the gender feminist idea of superior feminine virtue is becoming an increasingly tough sell for anyone actually keeping up with world events. Kipling once wrote of the fierceness of Afghan women: “When you’re wounded and left on the Afghan plains/And the women come out to cut up your remains/Just roll to your rifle and blow out your brains.” Now it’s clearer than ever that the dream of worldwide sisterhood is no more realistic than worldwide brotherhood; culture trumps gender any day. Mothers all over the Muslim world are naming their babies Usama or praising Allah for their sons’ efforts to kill crusading infidels. Last February, 28-year-old Wafa Idris became the first female Palestinian suicide bomber to strike in Israel, killing an elderly man and wounding scores of women and children. And in April, Israeli soldiers discovered under the maternity clothes of 26-year-old Shifa Adnan Kodsi a bomb rather than a baby. Maternal thinking, indeed.

The second variety of feminism, seemingly more sophisticated and especially prevalent on college campuses, is multiculturalism and its twin, postcolonialism. The postcolonial feminist has even more reason to shy away from the predicament of women under radical Islam than her maternally thinking sister. She believes that the Western world is so sullied by its legacy of imperialism that no Westerner, man or woman, can utter a word of judgment against former colonial peoples. Worse, she is not so sure that radical Islam isn’t an authentic, indigenous—and therefore appropriate—expression of Arab and Middle Eastern identity.

The postmodern philosopher Michel Foucault, one of the intellectual godfathers of multiculturalism and postcolonialism, first set the tone in 1978 when an Italian newspaper sent him to Teheran to cover the Iranian revolution. As his biographer James Miller tells it, Foucault looked in the face of Islamic fundamentalism and saw . . . an awe-inspiring revolt against “global hegemony.” He was mesmerized by this new form of “political spirituality” that, in a phrase whose dark prescience he could not have grasped, portended the “transfiguration of the world.” Even after the Ayatollah Khomeini came to power and reintroduced polygamy and divorce on the husband’s demand with automatic custody to fathers, reduced the official female age of marriage from 18 to 13, fired all female judges, and ordered compulsory veiling, whose transgression was to be punished by public flogging, Foucault saw no reason to temper his enthusiasm. What was a small matter like women’s basic rights, when a struggle against “the planetary system” was at hand?

Postcolonialists, then, have their own binary system, somewhat at odds with gender feminism—not to mention with women’s rights. It is not men who are the sinners; it is the West. It is not women who are victimized innocents; it is the people who suffered under Western colonialism, or the descendants of those people, to be more exact. Caught between the rock of patriarchy and the hard place of imperialism, the postcolonial feminist scholar gingerly tiptoes her way around the subject of Islamic fundamentalism and does the only thing she can do: she focuses her ire on Western men.

The most impressive signs of an indigenous female revolt against the fundamentalist order are in Iran. Over the past ten years or so, Iran has seen the publication of a slew of serious journals dedicated to the social and political predicament of Islamic women, the most well known being the Teheran-based Zonan and Zan, published by Faezah Hashemi, a well-known member of parliament and the daughter of former president Rafsanjani. Believing that Western feminism has promoted hostility between the sexes, confused sex roles, and the sexual objectification of women, a number of writers have proposed an Islamic-style feminism that would stress “gender complementarity” rather than equality and that would pay full respect to housewifery and motherhood while also giving women access to education and jobs.

Attacking from the religious front, a number of “Islamic feminists” are challenging the reigning fundamentalist reading of the Qur’an. These scholars insist that the founding principles of Islam, which they believe were long ago corrupted by pre-Islamic Arab, Persian, and North African customs, are if anything more egalitarian than those of Western religions; the Qur’an explicitly describes women as the moral and spiritual equals of men and allows them to inherit and pass down property. The power of misogynistic mullahs has grown in recent decades, feminists continue, because Muslim men have felt threatened by modernity’s challenge to traditional arrangements between the sexes.

What makes Islamic feminism really worth watching is that it has the potential to play a profoundly important role in the future of the Islamic world—and not just because it could improve the lot of women. By insisting that it is true to Islam—in fact, truer than the creed espoused by the entrenched religious elite—Islamic feminism can affirm the dignity of Islam while at the same time bringing it more in line with modernity. In doing this, feminists can help lay the philosophical groundwork for democracy. In the West, feminism lagged behind religious reformation and political democratization by centuries; in the East, feminism could help lead the charge.

At the same time, though, the issue of women’s rights highlights two reasons for caution about the Islamic future. For one thing, no matter how much feminists might wish otherwise, polygamy and male domination of the family are not merely a fact of local traditions; they are written into the Qur’an itself. This in and of itself would not prove to be such an impediment—the Old Testament is filled with laws antithetical to women’s equality—except for the second problem: more than other religions, Islam is unfriendly to the notion of the separation of church and state. If history is any guide, there’s the rub. The ultimate guarantor of the rights of all citizens, whether Islamic or not, can only be a fully secular state.

To this end, the postcolonialist eagerly dips into the inkwell of gender feminism. She ties colonialist exploitation and domination to maleness; she might refer to Israel’s “masculinist military culture”—Israel being white and Western—though she would never dream of pointing out the “masculinist military culture” of the jihadi. And she expends a good deal of energy condemning Western men for wanting to improve the lives of Eastern women. At the turn of the twentieth century Lord Cromer, the British vice consul of Egypt and a pet target of postcolonial feminists, argued that the “degradation” of women under Islam had a harmful effect on society. Rubbish, according to the postcolonialist feminist. His words are simply part of “the Western narrative of the quintessential otherness and inferiority of Islam,” as Harvard professor Leila Ahmed puts it in Women and Gender in Islam. The same goes for American concern about Afghan women; it is merely a “device for ranking the ‘other’ men as inferior or as ‘uncivilized,’ ” according to Nira Yuval-Davis, professor of gender and ethnic studies at the University of Greenwich, England. These are all examples of what renowned Columbia professor Gayatri Spivak called “white men saving brown women from brown men.”

Spivak’s phrase, a great favorite on campus, points to the postcolonial notion that brown men, having been victimized by the West, can never be oppressors in their own right. If they give the appearance of treating women badly, the oppression they have suffered at the hands of Western colonial masters is to blame. In fact, the worse they treat women, the more they are expressing their own justifiable outrage. “When men are traumatized [by colonial rule], they tend to traumatize their own women,” Miriam Cooke, a Duke professor and head of the Association for Middle East Women’s Studies, told me. And today, Cooke asserts, brown men are subjected to a new form of imperialism. “Now there is a return of colonialism that we saw in the nineteenth century in the context of globalization,” she says. “What is driving Islamist men is globalization.”

It would be difficult to exaggerate the through-the-looking-glass quality of postcolonialist theory when it comes to the subject of women. Female suicide bombers are a good thing, because they are strong women demonstrating “agency” against colonial powers. Polygamy too must be shown due consideration. “Polygamy can be liberating and empowering,” Cooke answered sunnily when I asked her about it. “Our norm is the Western, heterosexual, single couple. If we can imagine different forms that would allow us to be something other than a heterosexual couple, we might imagine polygamy working,” she explained murkily. Some women, she continued, are relieved when their husbands take a new wife: they won’t have to service him so often. Or they might find they now have the freedom to take a lover. But, I ask, wouldn’t that be dangerous in places where adulteresses can be stoned to death? At any rate, how common is that? “I don’t know,” Cooke answers, “I’m interested in discourse.” The irony couldn’t be darker: the very people protesting the imperialist exploitation of the “Other” endorse that Other’s repressive customs as a means of promoting their own uniquely Western agenda—subverting the heterosexual patriarchy.

The final category in the feminist taxonomy, which might be called the world-government utopian strain, is in many respects closest to classical liberal feminism. Dedicated to full female dignity and equality, it generally eschews both the biological determinism of the gender feminist and the cultural relativism of the multiculti postcolonialist. Stanford political science professor Susan Moller Okin, an influential, subtle, and intelligent spokeswoman for this approach, created a stir among feminists in 1997 when she forthrightly attacked multiculturalists for valuing “group rights for minority cultures” over the well-being of individual women. Okin admirably minced no words attacking arranged marriage, female circumcision, and polygamy, which she believed women experienced as a “barely tolerable institution.” Some women, she went so far as to declare, “might be better off if the culture into which they were born were either to become extinct . . . or preferably, to be encouraged to alter itself so as to reinforce the equality of women.”

But though Okin is less shy than other feminists about discussing the plight of women under Islamic fundamentalism, the typical U.N. utopian has her own reasons for keeping quiet as that plight fills Western headlines. For one thing, the utopian is also a bean-counting absolutist, seeking a pure, numerical equality between men and women in all departments of life. She greets Western, and particularly American, claims to have achieved freedom for women with skepticism. The motto of the 2002 International Women’s Day—“Afghanistan Is Everywhere”—was in part a reproach to the West about its superior airs. Women in Afghanistan might have to wear burqas, but don’t women in the West parade around in bikinis? “It’s equally disrespectful and abusive to have women prancing around a stage in bathing suits for cash or walking the streets shrouded in burqas in order to survive,” columnist Jill Nelson wrote on the MSNBC website about the murderously fanatical riots that attended the Miss World pageant in Nigeria.

As Nelson’s statement hints, the utopian is less interested in freeing women to make their own choices than in engineering and imposing her own elite vision of a perfect society. Indeed, she is under no illusions that, left to their own democratic devices, women would freely choose the utopia she has in mind. She would not be surprised by recent Pakistani elections, where a number of the women who won parliamentary seats were Islamist. But it doesn’t really matter what women want. The universalist has a comprehensive vision of “women’s human rights,” meaning not simply women’s civil and political rights but “economic rights” and “socioeconomic justice.” Cynical about free markets and globalization, the U.N. utopian is also unimpressed by the liberal democratic nation-state “as an emancipatory institution,” in the dismissive words of J. Ann Tickner, director for international studies at the University of Southern California. Such nation-states are “unresponsive to the needs of [their] most vulnerable members” and seeped in “nationalist ideologies” as well as in patriarchal assumptions about autonomy. In fact, like the (usually) unacknowledged socialist that she is, the U.N. utopian eagerly awaits the withering of the nation-state, a political arrangement that she sees as tied to imperialism, war, and masculinity. During war, in particular, nations “depend on ideas about masculinized dignity and feminized sacrifice to sustain the sense of autonomous nationhood,” writes Cynthia Enloe, professor of government at Clark University.

Having rejected the patriarchal liberal nation-state, with all the democratic machinery of self-government that goes along with it, the utopian concludes that there is only one way to achieve her goals: to impose them through international government. Utopian feminists fill the halls of the United Nations, where they examine everything through the lens of the “gender perspective” in study after unreadable study. (My personal favorites: “Gender Perspectives on Landmines” and “Gender Perspectives on Weapons of Mass Destruction,” whose conclusion is that landmines and WMDs are bad for women.)

The 1979 U.N. Convention on the Elimination of Discrimination Against Women (CEDAW), perhaps the first and most important document of feminist utopianism, gives the best sense of the sweeping nature of the movement’s ambitions. CEDAW demands many measures that anyone committed to democratic liberal values would applaud, including women’s right to vote and protection against honor killings and forced marriage. Would that the document stopped there. Instead it sets out to impose a utopian order that would erase all distinctions between men and women, a kind of revolution of the sexes from above, requiring nations to “take all appropriate measures to modify the social and cultural patterns of conduct of men and women” and to eliminate “stereotyped roles” to accomplish this legislative abolition of biology. The document calls for paid maternity leave, nonsexist school curricula, and government-supported child care. The treaty’s 23-member enforcement committee hectors nations that do not adequately grasp that, as Enloe puts it, “the personal is international.” The committee has cited Belarus for celebrating Mother’s Day, China for failing to legalize prostitution, and Libya for not interpreting the Qur’an in accordance with “committee guidelines.”

Confusing “women’s participation” with self-determination, and numerical equivalence with equality, CEDAW utopians try to orchestrate their perfect society through quotas and affirmative-action plans. Their bean-counting mentality cares about whether women participate equally, without asking what it is that they are participating in or whether their participation is anything more than ceremonial. Thus at the recent Women’s Summit in Jordan, Rima Khalaf suggested that governments be required to use quotas in elections “to leapfrog women to power.” Khalaf, like so many illiberal feminist utopians, has no hesitation in forcing society to be free. As is often the case when elites decide they have discovered the route to human perfection, the utopian urge is not simply antidemocratic but verges on the totalitarian.

That this combination of sentimental victimhood, postcolonial relativism, and utopian overreaching has caused feminism to suffer so profound a loss of moral and political imagination that it cannot speak against the brutalization of Islamic women is an incalculable loss to women and to men. The great contribution of Western feminism was to expand the definition of human dignity and freedom. It insisted that all human beings were worthy of liberty. Feminists now have the opportunity to make that claim on behalf of women who in their oppression have not so much as imagined that its promise could include them, too. At its best, feminism has stood for a rich idea of personal choice in shaping a meaningful life, one that respects not only the woman who wants to crash through glass ceilings but also the one who wants to stay home with her children and bake cookies or to wear a veil and fast on Ramadan. Why shouldn’t feminists want to shout out their own profound discovery for the world to hear?

Perhaps, finally, because to do so would be to acknowledge the freedom they themselves enjoy, thanks to Western ideals and institutions. Not only would such an admission force them to give up their own simmering resentments; it would be bad for business.

The truth is that the free institutions—an independent judiciary, a free press, open elections—that protect the rights of women are the same ones that protect the rights of men. The separation of church and state that would allow women to escape the burqa would also free men from having their hands amputated for theft. The education system that would teach girls to read would also empower millions of illiterate boys. The capitalist economies that bring clean water, cheap clothes, and washing machines that change the lives of women are the same ones that lead to healthier, freer men. In other words, to address the problems of Muslim women honestly, feminists would have to recognize that free men and women need the same things—and that those are things that they themselves already have. And recognizing that would mean an end to feminism as we know it.

There are signs that, outside the academy, middlebrow literary circles, and the United Nations, feminism has indeed met its Waterloo. Most Americans seem to realize that September 11 turned self-indulgent sentimental illusions, including those about the sexes, into an unaffordable luxury. Consider, for instance, women’s attitudes toward war, a topic on which politicians have learned to take for granted a gender gap. But according to the Pew Research Center, in January 2002, 57 percent of women versus 46 percent of men cited national security as the country’s top priority. There has been a “seismic gender shift on matters of war,” according to pollster Kellyanne Conway. In 1991, 45 percent of U.S. women supported the use of ground troops in the Gulf War, a substantially smaller number than the 67 percent of men. But as of November, a CNN survey found women were more likely than men to support the use of ground troops against Iraq, 58 percent to 56 percent. The numbers for younger women were especially dramatic. Sixty-five percent of women between 18 and 49 support ground troops, as opposed to 48 percent of women 50 and over. Women are also changing their attitudes toward military spending: before September 11, only 24 percent of women supported increased funds; after the attacks, that number climbed to 47 percent. An evolutionary psychologist might speculate that, if females tend to be less aggressively territorial than males, there’s little to compare to the ferocity of the lioness when she believes her young are threatened.

Even among some who consider themselves feminists, there is some grudging recognition that Western, and specifically American, men are sometimes a force for the good. The Feminist Majority is sending around urgent messages asking for President Bush to increase American security forces in Afghanistan. The influential left-wing British columnist Polly Toynbee, who just 18 months ago coined the phrase “America the Horrible,” went to Afghanistan to figure out whether the war “was worth it.” Her answer was not what she might have expected. Though she found nine out of ten women still wearing burqas, partly out of fear of lingering fundamentalist hostility, she was convinced their lives had greatly improved. Women say they can go out alone now.

As we sink more deeply into what is likely to be a protracted struggle with radical Islam, American feminists have a moral responsibility to give up their resentments and speak up for women who actually need their support. Feminists have the moral authority to say that their call for the rights of women is a universal demand—that the rights of women are the Rights of Man.

my god this dude wrote the world’s worst thesis and sent it to the worst candidate possible (a muslim-born woman from the middle east that regularly talks about the issues feminists apparently never talk about)

[alavenderleaf]

Tagged by @gilliebee <3

Name: Lavender and Leaf interchangeably

Pronouns: he/him and she/her interchangeably (but genuinely okay with whatever, I’m genderfluid c: )

Where do u call home? Dubai, UAE. Even tho it was meant to be a temporary arrangement I’ve lived here my whole life and now any other emirate feels off lol

Favorite animals: goats. You ever jumped around with a baby goat??? Peace and love on planet earth 🥺💕💞💝💘💖💗💓💓💘💝💞💕

When it comes to birds: chickens and pigeons. Everytime I see one I’m like that’s so me. I’m them. They’re me. We are one.

Cereal of choice: anything with chocolate bc I’m still 5 years old

are you visual, auditory or kinesthetic learner? visual for sure, my ears don’t work right and I freaking love diagrams.

First pet: I’ve never named a pet except my current cat (xiexie!!) so my first pet did not have a name. It was a smol baby chick that grew up to be a mean ass spoiled ass fucking rooster who’d peck everyone except me <3

he was raised as a girl bc whoever gave me the chick told me it’s a chicken not a rooster and my dumbass did not recognize the signs of him being male and would argue with everyone who tried convincing me otherwise 🤠 denial is one hell of a drug bc how could I see the tail and mohawk (?? Tf u call that thing on its head) and be like “yes this is a chicken :) I see nothing wrong about this” anyway trans king. He’s just like mommy <3

I did have to give him away eventually :( he was taken to some uncle’s farm and got a chicken harem like the high value alpha male I knew he always had the capacity to be 😌 (ofc until another rooster was brought over and he lost the fight. He was plucked naked and shunned and he passed away featherless and bitchless. But we don’t talk about that)

Favorite scent: ………… lavend-*gun shots*

do you believe in astrology? Not really? But it’s so much fun !! :) I am a Capricorn sun Taurus moon and Leo rising, so do with that as you will <3

how many playlists do you have in apple music/spotify? I don’t use Apple Music. Spotify is purely for my friends so we can send playlists back and forth but I hate that everything is paywalled and it decides to choose shit for me. Like bitch. I did not add any of these songs to the playlist get tf away from me. Also why can’t I listen to my music offline???? I hate u. Anyway I just checked I have 87 playlists ???? 🤠🤠 When. How. Who are all these people I literally don’t know any of them?????

Sharpies or highlighters? Sharpies!!!! I love markers in general but sharpies always fire up my creative neurons

song that makes you cry: I’ve never cried to music but Fourth of July by Sufjan Stevens makes me so. :(

song that makes you happy: not to be a stereotype but Bastans by Miami band. (It’s a staple wedding song lmao)

and finally: do you draw/write/create?: YES!! My artistic skills are. Fine. But I do write a lot! My ao3 is lavender_petal and I’ve been learning how to create gifs over on my hockey side acc @gaybroons Also! I started making little braided bracelets lately :) they’re not perfect but they are fun!! I do try my hand at some Arabic/English translations from time to time but I’m not the best at it lol

I’m tagging: @loulucifer , @lindholmline , @earth-to-sway , and anyone else who wants to do this, but no pressure <3

[louisquinnzel]

.

[unfolded73]

Transformative (1/1) - schitt’s creek ff

A Stevie Budd character study: she navigates being David's Best Person at the wedding reception. This fic explores an idea I've been playing with that Stevie is aro. Although this is set at David and Patrick's wedding, they exist mostly in the background of this story.

This is dedicated to my fandom BFF, @j-philly-b. After eleven years of dragging each other from one fandom to another, I literally don't know what I would do without you in my life.

Thanks to @startswithhope aka @language-of-love for giving this a quick beta read.

Rated Teen, 3260 words.   (ao3) / (schitt’s fic masterpost)

--------------------------------------------------------------------

Stevie is making a concerted effort not to drink too much at the wedding reception, and not only because she tends to try to make out with people when she gets boozy. There is also the very real worry that the tears she managed to keep from spilling over during the ceremony, while David and Patrick said their vows, will overflow if she gets drunk.

And no, before anyone asks, it’s not because she’s still hung up on David, God. She got over that not too long after she told him she had, her face-saving lie becoming retroactively true. It’s just emotional, seeing her closest friends making each other so happy. Especially when she thinks back to what David was like when he first got to Schitt’s Creek, to see him so euphoric now is… it’s a lot. It makes her emotional, and Stevie is not a fan of being emotional in front of people. She’s not a fan of doing much of anything in front of people, but between the musical last year and being David’s best person today, she’s been forced to get used to it.

Which reminds her, she has to give a fucking toast in a little while.

Well, maybe one more drink won’t hurt. For courage.

She makes her way over to the bar and orders herself a glass of white wine (as long as she stays away from the hard stuff, she’ll be fine). When she thanks the bartender and steps away, she almost collides with a guy in a charcoal suit holding a bottle of beer.

“Oh! Sorry,” Stevie says.

“No worries. It’s Stevie, right?” the guy says, reaching out with his free hand to shake hers.

“Yeah.” She’s probably supposed to ask his name, but she drops his hand and waits for him to volunteer it if he wants to.

“I’m Tim. One of Patrick’s cousins.”

Stevie eyes him. She met several cousins at the rehearsal dinner, but she can’t remember if this was one of them. “He has a lot of cousins.”

Tim laughs. “Yeah. I’m not even sure how many of us there are.”

There’s a lull that Stevie doesn’t know how to fill. “Okay, well--” She starts to step away, back toward her seat at the head table.

“So you’re David’s closest friend, I take it? Since you were his best…”

“‘Best Person’ is what we went with.”

“Not that you’re full of yourself or anything,” he says with a grin.

Stevie doesn’t feel like doing this. She doesn’t feel like bantering with a guy (even a reasonably good-looking one like Tim) at a wedding. She doesn’t feel like at some point making the decision between going to bed with this guy and not. She doesn’t feel like doing the walk of shame from his hotel room (she assumes hotel; she’s pretty sure he’s not one of the wedding guests staying at her motel) and figuring out how to get back home without bumming a ride from her one night stand. She’s so… tired of all of it.

“It’s just, when I heard Patrick was engaged to this guy, I googled him, and…” He shrugs. “I mean it’s not that I don’t trust Patrick’s judgment, but…” He seems to be leaving a blank for her to fill in. What, does he expect her to agree with him? Yeah, dude-I-just-met, my best friend is a shallow slut who’s going to break your cousin’s heart, you got it out of me!

Stevie blinks at him and pastes on a fake smile. “But what?”

“No, I mean, nothing,” he flounders.

Another similar-looking guy comes up and claps Tim on the back. “Whatever he’s saying, ignore him; he’s an asshole.”

“Yeah, that was starting to become clear.” She does recognize this one from the rehearsal dinner. Another cousin from Patrick’s never-ending supply of cousins, one who actually had some kind of ushering responsibility, if she remembers correctly.

“Tim, I think I saw some kids loitering around your car,” the new cousin says. “You might want to go check.”

Tim gets a panicked look on his face and bolts away.

“Thanks,” Stevie says. “Sorry, I know we met last night but I can’t remember your name.”

“It’s Dennis. And don’t worry about it, no one deserves to have to make conversation with Tim for any length of time.”

“Yeah, he seemed like a real prince.”

Dennis winces. “He didn’t say anything homophobic, did he? Because I told him--”

“No, nothing like that. Just… David-phobic, I guess.”

“Aren’t you David’s closest friend?” he says with an eye roll. “Sorry, I called Tim an asshole when clearly I should have said ‘stupid asshole’.”

Stevie laughs at that.

“Look, as far as I’m concerned, Patty’s always had a good head on his shoulders. Okay, yeah, I guess he took a while to figure out , you know… what he needed in a partner,” he says, gesturing over to the dance floor. Patrick is currently laughing at something David is saying and attempting to restrain him from leaving to sit down when the DJ starts to play ‘Livin’ La Vida Loca.’ “But he’s clearly figured it out now. So David’s okay in my book, because he’s what makes Patty happy.”

Stevie bites her lip about ‘Patty’. She’s not going to make fun of Patrick about the nickname today, oh no. She’s going to save it until after they get back from their honeymoon, and then she’s going to pick her moment and tease him mercilessly. She might call him Patty for an entire week if she doesn’t get bored with it.

“Patrick’s what makes David happy too,” she says, surprised that something so sentimental would come out of her mouth to a near-stranger. “Okay, I gotta…” she says, gesturing back to the head table before escaping from Dennis. She doesn’t gotta anything at the moment, really, but the escape feels necessary.

Necessary but short-lived, because Stevie can barely take another sip of her wine before Alexis is dragging her out on the dance floor. The song is one of David’s favorite Mariah ballads, and Alexis pulls Stevie into a slow dance like they’re a high school couple at prom, her bony arms slung over Stevie’s shoulders. The fact that, as part of the wedding party, they are wearing matching dresses makes the tableau look even weirder, or so Stevie assumes. Still, she puts her hands on Alexis’ tiny waist and dutifully sways to the music.

“You couldn’t dance with Ted to this?”

Alexis huffs. “Ted is doing shots with Ronnie and Jocelyn.”

“Oh my God, they are going to drink him so far under the table--”

“I know,” she says with an eye roll. “He’s such a lightweight.”

“Alexis… David is married,” Stevie says, because even though she’s been along with him and Patrick for the entire ride, the fact that David Rose is a married man… it’s like learning that a starfish has mastered calculus.

“Right?” Alexis says. “I literally never thought this day would come. Like, ever.” Then Alexis’ eyes wander the room and a grin unfurls on her face. “That guy you were talking to earlier is watching us. I think he might be into you.”

Stevie starts to turn, but Alexis quickly says, “Don’t look. The cute usher. Dennis, I think?”

“Oh. Yeah. He’s probably looking at you, Alexis.”

Alexis simpers. “I get why you would think that, but I’m pretty sure it’s you this time.” She wiggles her body, and Stevie feels the undulations of Alexis’ hips under her hands. “Stevie’s gonna get some!”

“No, I’m not gonna fuck one of Patrick’s cousins, but thanks for your well-wishes.”

“You could, though.”

Stevie sighs. “I know that given my past and my low standards--”

“Like David,” Alexis says with a giggle.

“--that this might come as a shock, but the thought of hooking up with someone at this wedding, even a cute boy, is a painfully dull idea. I think I’m past that.”

Alexis gives her a serious look. “You don’t want to do meaningless sex anymore, I totally get that.” She gives another wiggle of her hips like she’s a happy puppy. “So what we need to do is, we need to find your soulmate.”

Stevie drops her chin to her chest. “No, that’s not…” She sighs, and then looks back at Alexis. “That’s what everyone always says. ‘You haven’t met the right person yet’ or ‘Let me fix you up with my friend’ or ‘You just need to put yourself out there.’ But what if I’m… happy like this? Running the motel, helping Mr. Rose plan the Elmdale expansion, hanging out with my friends, or just being by myself in my apartment? What if I’ve only been looking for a romantic relationship because everyone tells me I’m supposed to, and not because I’ve ever actually wanted one?”

Alexis looks pensively at her, taking all of that in.

After Emir, Stevie spent a lot of time thinking about her feelings -- more time than she ever wanted to spend thinking about her feelings. She’d liked Emir a lot and the sex had been fantastic, but she realized that a lot of her heartbreak when he made it clear he didn’t want anything more than an occasional hook-up was because of what she thought it said about her. That she was provincial and small and worthless. Even her feelings for David, when she’d really interrogated them after he stole Roland’s truck and ran away, were rooted in insecurity about herself. David Rose was the very definition of experienced and worldly, and the idea that he might care even a tiny bit less about her than she cared about him had been excruciating. It wasn’t that she loved David, at least not that way. It was that she couldn’t bear to watch him inevitably lose interest in her as a person. She’d wanted so much to keep David in her life. The sex was incidental to that, except for its inherent power, in her experience, to keep men interested.

Alexis is giving Stevie a soft smile, one that would have been completely foreign on her face a few years ago. “If you’re happy, babe, then that’s all that matters.”

The Mariah ballad is reaching its vocally excessive climax, and Stevie notices the DJ signaling her. “I guess it’s time for me to do this stupid toast now.” Her stomach flutters with nerves. Despite her foray into the world of theater, she feels a little like she’s headed to her own execution.

Walking over, she takes the microphone as someone presses a champagne glass into her hand. The song fades out, and the sound of her throat-clearing comes blaring out of the speakers. There’s some glass-clinking from someone, and then everyone quiets down. Stevie pauses, looking out over the crowd. She sees Patrick and David standing side-by-side, arms around each other, smiling at her.

“Hi, everybody. I guess it’s my job to give a toast to the grooms, so, uh, here goes.” Stevie flinches at the whine of feedback on the first few words and adjusts the position of the mic in front of her face.

“I remember the first time that Patrick walked into the store while I was there, probably helping David do something that he was too lazy to do on his own.” There is a smattering of laughter from the assembly, and it makes her feel a little bit better. “It didn’t take more than a few minutes of watching them talking to each other, kidding around and trying to one-up each other, that I knew there was some kind of spark there. Apparently I was the only one who knew, though, because David invited me to come on their first date with them.” More laughter. “I mean, they did figure it out eventually, based on the fact that I caught Patrick with a hickey on his neck at the store a couple of weeks later. And the fact that they were desperate to fool around together in my apartment when they couldn’t find privacy anywhere else.” Patrick puts his face in his hands at that, shaking his head. Stevie thinks fleetingly that she should feel bad saying all that in front of the parents of the grooms, but she very much does not. “I mean, when you think about it, there’s no way David and Patrick would even be together now if it wasn’t for me. It’s a favor they may never be able to repay, but I’ll take cash if you guys want to try it.”

That gets her a really big laugh, and Stevie beams.

“My point is, I’ve had a front row seat to all these milestones between these two, and…” She pauses and swallows on a dry mouth. She once told David she was incapable of sincerity, but she is going to attempt it now. “I’ve heard that love can be transformative, and I always thought that was bullshit. But watching Patrick and David, the way their differences complement each other, the way they support each other through good times and bad times, the way they love each other…” Her voice breaks on that; Stevie struggles to hold it together but she is rapidly losing her battle with tears. “I guess it might be true. So anyway, I’m glad I got to watch them fall in love, and I’m glad I got to be here today to watch them promise each other forever.” Holding up her champagne, she finishes with, “I love both you idiots. To David and Patrick.”

There is a rousing cheer and a chorus of ‘To David and Patrick,’ and Stevie hands the microphone back to the DJ like it’s made of snakes and hurries off the stage. She looks down at her glass, realizing she forgot to take a drink after her own toast.

Swigging down the champagne and setting the glass aside, Stevie looks up to see David approaching.

“Don’t you dare hug me, David.”

“I’m going to,” he says with a smiling head-shake, that smirking smile he has when he can barely contain his happiness.

His tuxedo fabric is smooth against her cheek, his arms enveloping her in a warm embrace. Stevie returns the hug, settling into it like a comfortable blanket.

“You made me cry, so you get a hug whether you like it or not,” David says.

“Please, you’ve been crying off and on all day; you can’t blame me.” She pulls away, then reaches out absently to brush away any trace of her makeup (expertly applied by Alexis this morning) from the lapel of his jacket.

“True.” He’s giving her a knowing look. “You know, you can be quite the romantic.”

“About other people’s relationships, yes I can,” she says with a sage nod. “Like, I can appreciate another person’s cute baby without wanting my own baby.”

David shudders at the mention of babies and makes a disgusted face.

“How does it feel to be somebody’s husband, David?”

David turns to look behind him, and Stevie follows his gaze to the dance floor where Patrick is dancing with Mrs. Rose. Stevie grins, wondering who’s leading in that pair. “So far, I guess it’s okay,” David says with another smirk, his eyes shining, then he looks back at her. “I love you.”

“How dare you,” Stevie says, the lump in her throat growing larger.

“I know. Come on, let’s dance.” David takes her hand, and Stevie lets herself be led.

Much later, as she watches the people on the dance floor and catches her breath, Mr. Rose makes his way over. “So I was thinking about the new motel,” he says by way of greeting.

“You were thinking about the new motel at your son’s wedding?” Stevie asks, not really surprised but enjoying the chance to shame Mr. Rose a little.

“Well, I don’t mean…” He opens and closes his mouth a few times before explaining, “I was thinking about it last night.”

“And what about it?” They were breaking ground on the Rosebud Motel in Elmdale next month, which, for reasons that still mostly surpassed her understanding, was going to be styled in much the same way as the original Rosebud Motel. Hipsters like the aesthetic, Alexis had told them. Even the use of the term ‘motel’ contributed to a sort of ironic realness, she’d said, a statement that gave Stevie a good laugh at the time.

“When the new motel is built, someone will have to run it and I was thinking, why not Stevie?” Mr. Rose says with a big grin.

“I already run a motel.”

“I… I know that, Stevie, but the new motel is going to be bigger, and in a town with a lot more going on. Better restaurants, better culture, more to do. It might be an interesting opportunity for you if you want it. We can hire someone else to run the original Rosebud.”

She blinks. Stevie Budd has spent her entire life in Schitt’s Creek. She went to high school here, spending her Friday nights learning to shotgun beers or giving a fumbling handjob in the backseat of a car. She’s always expected she’d probably die here in her shitty apartment, maybe with a couple of pet cats to round out the lonely spinster aesthetic.

“I don’t know, Mr. Rose. My friends are here.” She gestures toward the dance floor, where Ted and Twyla are flailing around to ‘Don’t Stop Me Now,’ and then cringes at the idea that she would actually miss a lot of these people if she moved.

“Well, Elmdale isn’t that far, so you’d still be able to spend time with the gang here.” Mr. Rose pats her gently on the shoulder, his body language filled with hesitancy. “You can stay in Schitt’s Creek if you want to, of course you can. But I want the choice of which motel to run to be yours.”

She can’t decide if she wants to bask in the fatherly smile he gives her or flee from it. “Thank you, Mr. Rose.”

“And who knows, if we keep expanding?” He holds his arms out wide. “Think what the future might hold!”

“Uh huh.” She looks back out at the dancers, but she can feel Mr. Rose’s eyes still on her.

“You know, Stevie, I hope you know I’m not… I’m not just giving you this opportunity out of some kind of fatherly impulse.”

The war between basking and fleeing intensifies. “Fatherly--?”

“It’s because I’ve been watching you since we hired more staff, and you’re very good at managing people -- getting them to do what you need them to do. I hate to admit it, but you might be better at it than I am.”

Stevie blinks. She didn’t expect to be getting a performance review at David’s wedding, but that seems to be what’s happening.

“So I can’t think of anyone else I’d rather see running the new motel. It’s not only that you deserve the opportunity, Stevie. It’s that I’m confident you’ll succeed.”

“Oh.” She feels her eyes welling up with tears for approximately the fiftieth time that day. “Thank you.”

He gives her a warm smile. “We can talk about it more later. You should go dance with your friends.”

She goes. Stevie dances in a loose circle with the people who have gradually wormed their way into her heart over the last few years, with the people who have made her feel like her life is full. Smiling and closing her eyes, she soaks up some of that transformative love for herself.

[tabloidtoc]

Star, January 13

Cover: Prince Harry and Duchess Meghan Markle kicked out of the royal family 

Page 1: Hilary Duff’s backyard wedding to Matthew Koma 

Page 2: Contents, Garcelle Beauvais and Nick Cannon

Page 3: Eva Longoria with son Santiago in the United Arab Emirates, Jennifer Lopez and Alex Rodriguez shopping, Cara Delevingne and Ashley Benson at Disneyland 

Page 4: Renee Zellweger’s extreme awards-show slimdown 

Page 5: Justin Hartley’s This Is Us castmates are Team Chrishell Stause, Sam Rockwell is at the top of the list to play Jeffrey Epstein in an HBO miniseries, friends wants Chrissy Teigen to stop partying because she drinks pretty much everyday and drunk-tweets 

Page 6: Paulina Porizkova fighting estranged ex Ric Ocasek’s will in which he instructed she not get a penny of his estate, Kate Gosselin was found in contempt of court after an episode of her TLC show Kate Plus 8 aired without her having proper work papers and Jon Gosselin’s permission to film their children, Star Spots the Stars -- Serena Williams and Mike Tyson, Scarlett Johansson and Colin Jost, Shania Twain, Mariah Carey, Idris Elba and Tyrese Gibson, Mackenzie Ziegler 

Page 8: Star Shots -- Angelina Jolie and daughters Zahara and Shiloh at the Grove in LA, 

Page 9: Eddie Murphy and Mikey Day as elves on Saturday Night Live, Brooke Shields in NYC 

Page 10: Ashlee Simpson Ross and Evan Ross in Beverly Hills, Rachel Brosnahan in NYC, Mark Wahlberg in LA 

Page 12: Ashley Greene, Simon Cowell with a monkey in Barbados 

Page 13: Michael Ray and Carly Pearce on their honeymoon in Jamaica, Camilla Belle in Los Cabos, Margot Robbie on her way to Jimmy Kimmel Live 

Page 14: So Happy Together -- Miranda Kerr and Evan Spiegel at the Democratic Party debate in LA, Daryl Sabara and Meghan Trainor kiss on the red carpet in London, Younes Bendjima and Kourtney Kardashian at Disneyland 

Page 16: Melissa McCarthy and Allison Janney on the Late Late Show, Lea Michele during her Christmas in the City 

Page 17: Diane Kruger bundles up in NYC, Malin Akerman at a photoshoot in Stockholm, La La Anthony at her Winter Wonderland party 

Page 18: JoJo Siwa, Niall Horan at the Jingle Ball in Chicago

Page 19: Karamo Brown, Michelle Rodriguez, Ashley Tisdale

Page 20: Normal or Not? Rachel Maddow on the subway in NYC, Katy Perry

Page 21: Joan Collins holds a picture of her late sister Jackie Collins given to her by a fan, Jennifer Garner gets a mani-pedi 

Page 22: Fashion -- Best of the Week -- Renee Elise Goldsberry, Margot Robbie, Lady Amelia Windsor 

Page 23: Taylor Swift, Keri Russell, Daisy Ridley 

Page 26: Channing Tatum and Jessie J -- what went wrong? 

Page 27: Robert Downey Jr. and Susan Downey’s marriage is on the rocks because Robert has been a nightmare to be around, Kelly Ripa has made it her mission to get Ryan Seacrest and Shayna Taylor married 

Page 28: Cover Story -- Queen Elizabeth has had it with rebellious Prince Harry and Meghan Markle and is stripping them of their titles and kicking them out of the palace 

Page 32: Lisa Marie Presley is grimly determined to win all in her looming court showdown with her ex Michael Lockwood 

Page 34: Justin Bieber is heartbroken because Hailey Bieber wants out 

Page 36: Aaron Hernandez murder bombshell 

Page 38: Dancing with Death -- these celebrities made it out alive -- barely 

Page 43: Double Takes -- Emily Ratajkowski vs. Chrissy Teigen 

Page 44: Style -- workout gear -- Alessandra Ambrosio 

Page 46: Beauty -- Color of the Year is Classic Blue -- Margot Robbie 

Page 50: Entertainment 

Page 60: Parting Shot -- Prince William and Queen Elizabeth look on as Prince George stirs up a Christmas pudding

[xtruss]

The Other Afghan Women

In the countryside, the endless killing of civilians turned women against the occupiers who claimed to be helping them.

— By Anand Gopal | September 6, 2021 | The New Yorker

More than seventy per cent of Afghans do not live in cities. In rural areas, life under the U.S.-led coalition and its Afghan allies became pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble.Photograph by Stephen Dupont / Contact Press Images

Late one afternoon this past August, Shakira heard banging on her front gate. In the Sangin Valley, which is in Helmand Province, in southern Afghanistan, women must not be seen by men who aren’t related to them, and so her nineteen-year-old son, Ahmed, went to the gate. Outside were two men in bandoliers and black turbans, carrying rifles. They were members of the Taliban, who were waging an offensive to wrest the countryside back from the Afghan National Army. One of the men warned, “If you don’t leave immediately, everyone is going to die.”

Shakira, who is in her early forties, corralled her family: her husband, an opium merchant, who was fast asleep, having succumbed to the temptations of his product, and her eight children, including her oldest, twenty-year-old Nilofar—as old as the war itself—whom Shakira called her “deputy,” because she helped care for the younger ones. The family crossed an old footbridge spanning a canal, then snaked their way through reeds and irregular plots of beans and onions, past dark and vacant houses. Their neighbors had been warned, too, and, except for wandering chickens and orphaned cattle, the village was empty.

Shakira’s family walked for hours under a blazing sun. She started to feel the rattle of distant thuds, and saw people streaming from riverside villages: men bending low beneath bundles stuffed with all that they could not bear to leave behind, women walking as quickly as their burqas allowed.

The pounding of artillery filled the air, announcing the start of a Taliban assault on an Afghan Army outpost. Shakira balanced her youngest child, a two-year-old daughter, on her hip as the sky flashed and thundered. By nightfall, they had come upon the valley’s central market. The corrugated-iron storefronts had largely been destroyed during the war. Shakira found a one-room shop with an intact roof, and her family settled in for the night. For the children, she produced a set of cloth dolls—one of a number of distractions that she’d cultivated during the years of fleeing battle. As she held the figures in the light of a match, the earth shook.

Around dawn, Shakira stepped outside, and saw that a few dozen families had taken shelter in the abandoned market. It had once been the most thriving bazaar in northern Helmand, with shopkeepers weighing saffron and cumin on scales, carts loaded with women’s gowns, and storefronts dedicated to selling opium. Now stray pillars jutted upward, and the air smelled of decaying animal remains and burning plastic.

In the distance, the earth suddenly exploded in fountains of dirt. Helicopters from the Afghan Army buzzed overhead, and the families hid behind the shops, considering their next move. There was fighting along the stone ramparts to the north and the riverbank to the west. To the east was red-sand desert as far as Shakira could see. The only option was to head south, toward the leafy city of Lashkar Gah, which remained under the control of the Afghan government.

The journey would entail cutting through a barren plain exposed to abandoned U.S. and British bases, where snipers nested, and crossing culverts potentially stuffed with explosives. A few families started off. Even if they reached Lashkar Gah, they could not be sure what they’d find there. Since the start of the Taliban’s blitz, Afghan Army soldiers had surrendered in droves, begging for safe passage home. It was clear that the Taliban would soon reach Kabul, and that the twenty years, and the trillions of dollars, devoted to defeating them had come to nothing. Shakira’s family stood in the desert, discussing the situation. The gunfire sounded closer. Shakira spotted Taliban vehicles racing toward the bazaar—and she decided to stay put. She was weary to the bone, her nerves frayed. She would face whatever came next, accept it like a judgment. “We’ve been running all our lives,” she told me. “I’m not going anywhere.”

The longest war in American history ended on August 15th, when the Taliban captured Kabul without firing a shot. Bearded, scraggly men with black turbans took control of the Presidential palace, and around the capital the austere white flags of the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan went up. Panic ensued. Some women burned their school records and went into hiding, fearing a return to the nineteen-nineties, when the Taliban forbade them to venture out alone and banned girls’ education. For Americans, the very real possibility that the gains of the past two decades might be erased appeared to pose a dreadful choice: recommit to seemingly endless war, or abandon Afghan women.

This summer, I travelled to rural Afghanistan to meet women who were already living under the Taliban, to listen to what they thought about this looming dilemma. More than seventy per cent of Afghans do not live in cities, and in the past decade the insurgent group had swallowed large swaths of the countryside. Unlike in relatively liberal Kabul, visiting women in these hinterlands is not easy: even without Taliban rule, women traditionally do not speak to unrelated men. Public and private worlds are sharply divided, and when a woman leaves her home she maintains a cocoon of seclusion through the burqa, which predates the Taliban by centuries. Girls essentially disappear into their homes at puberty, emerging only as grandmothers, if ever. It was through grandmothers—finding each by referral, and speaking to many without seeing their faces—that I was able to meet dozens of women, of all ages. Many were living in desert tents or hollowed-out storefronts, like Shakira; when the Taliban came across her family hiding at the market, the fighters advised them and others not to return home until someone could sweep for mines. I first encountered her in a safe house in Helmand. “I’ve never met a foreigner before,” she said shyly. “Well, a foreigner without a gun.”

Shakira has a knack for finding humor in pathos, and in the sheer absurdity of the men in her life: in the nineties, the Taliban had offered to supply electricity to the village, and the local graybeards had initially refused, fearing black magic. “Of course, we women knew electricity was fine,” she said, chuckling. When she laughs, she pulls her shawl over her face, leaving only her eyes exposed. I told her that she shared a name with a world-renowned pop star, and her eyes widened. “Is it true?” she asked a friend who’d accompanied her to the safe house. “Could it be?”

Shakira, like the other women I met, grew up in the Sangin Valley, a gash of green between sharp mountain outcrops. The valley is watered by the Helmand River and by a canal that Americans built in the nineteen-fifties. You can walk the width of the dale in an hour, passing dozens of tiny hamlets, creaking footbridges, and mud-brick walls. As a girl, Shakira heard stories from her mother of the old days in her village, Pan Killay, which was home to about eighty families: the children swimming in the canal under the warm sun, the women pounding grain in stone mortars. In winter, smoke wafted from clay hearths; in spring, rolling fields were blanketed with poppies.

In 1979, when Shakira was an infant, Communists seized power in Kabul and tried to launch a female-literacy program in Helmand—a province the size of West Virginia, with few girls’ schools. Tribal elders and landlords refused. In the villagers’ retelling, the traditional way of life in Sangin was smashed overnight, because outsiders insisted on bringing women’s rights to the valley. “Our culture could not accept sending their girls outside to school,” Shakira recalled. “It was this way before my father’s time, before my grandfather’s time.” When the authorities began forcing girls to attend classes at gunpoint, a rebellion erupted, led by armed men calling themselves the mujahideen. In their first operation, they kidnapped all the schoolteachers in the valley, many of whom supported girls’ education, and slit their throats. The next day, the government arrested tribal elders and landlords on the suspicion that they were bankrolling the mujahideen. These community leaders were never seen again.

Tanks from the Soviet Union crossed the border to shore up the Communist government—and to liberate women. Soon, Afghanistan was basically split in two. In the countryside, where young men were willing to die fighting the imposition of new ways of life—including girls’ schools and land reform—young women remained unseen. In the cities, the Soviet-backed government banned child marriage and granted women the right to choose their partners. Girls enrolled in schools and universities in record numbers, and by the early eighties women held parliamentary seats and even the office of Vice-President.

The violence in the countryside continued to spread. Early one morning when Shakira was five, her aunt awakened her in a great hurry. The children were led by the adults of the village to a mountain cave, where they huddled for hours. At night, Shakira watched artillery streak the sky. When the family returned to Pan Killay, the wheat fields were charred, and crisscrossed with the tread marks of Soviet tanks. The cows had been mowed down with machine guns. Everywhere she looked, she saw neighbors—men she used to call “uncle”—lying bloodied. Her grandfather hadn’t hidden with her, and she couldn’t find him in the village. When she was older, she learned that he’d gone to a different cave, and had been caught and executed by the Soviets.

Nighttime evacuations became a frequent occurrence and, for Shakira, a source of excitement: the dark corners of the caves, the clamorous groups of children. “We would look for Russian helicopters,” she said. “It was like spotting strange birds.” Sometimes, those birds swooped low, the earth exploded, and the children rushed to the site to forage for iron, which could be sold for a good price. Occasionally she gathered metal shards so that she could build a doll house. Once, she showed her mother a magazine photograph of a plastic doll that exhibited the female form; her mother snatched it away, calling it inappropriate. So Shakira learned to make dolls out of cloth and sticks.

When she was eleven, she stopped going outside. Her world shrank to the three rooms of her house and the courtyard, where she learned to sew, bake bread in a tandoor, and milk cows. One day, passing jets rattled the house, and she took sanctuary in a closet. Underneath a pile of clothes, she discovered a child’s alphabet book that had belonged to her grandfather—the last person in the family to attend school. During the afternoons, while her parents napped, she began matching the Pashto words to pictures. She recalled, “I had a plan to teach myself a little every day.”

In 1989, the Soviets withdrew in defeat, but Shakira continued to hear the pounding of mortars outside the house’s mud walls. Competing mujahideen factions were now trying to carve up the country for themselves. Villages like Pan Killay were lucrative targets: there were farmers to tax, rusted Soviet tanks to salvage, opium to export. Pazaro, a woman from a nearby village, recalled, “We didn’t have a single night of peace. Our terror had a name, and it was Amir Dado.”

The first time Shakira saw Dado, through the judas of her parents’ front gate, he was in a pickup truck, trailed by a dozen armed men, parading through the village “as if he were the President.” Dado, a wealthy fruit vender turned mujahideen commander, with a jet-black beard and a prodigious belly, had begun attacking rival strongmen even before the Soviets’ defeat. He hailed from the upper Sangin Valley, where his tribe, the Alikozais, had held vast feudal plantations for centuries. The lower valley was the home of the Ishaqzais, the poor tribe to which Shakira belonged. Shakira watched as Dado’s men went from door to door, demanding a “tax” and searching homes. A few weeks later, the gunmen returned, ransacking her family’s living room while she cowered in a corner. Never before had strangers violated the sanctity of her home, and she felt as if she’d been stripped naked and thrown into the street.

By the early nineties, the Communist government of Afghanistan, now bereft of Soviet support, was crumbling. In 1992, Lashkar Gah fell to a faction of mujahideen. Shakira had an uncle living there, a Communist with little time for the mosque and a weakness for Pashtun tunes. He’d recently married a young woman, Sana, who’d escaped a forced betrothal to a man four times her age. The pair had started a new life in Little Moscow, a Lashkar Gah neighborhood that Sana called “the land where women have freedom”—but, when the mujahideen took over, they were forced to flee to Pan Killay.

Shakira was tending the cows one evening when Dado’s men surrounded her with guns. “Where’s your uncle?” one of them shouted. The fighters stormed into the house—followed by Sana’s spurned fiancé. “She’s the one!” he said. The gunmen dragged Sana away. When Shakira’s other uncles tried to intervene, they were arrested. The next day, Sana’s husband turned himself in to Dado’s forces, begging to be taken in her place. Both were sent to the strongman’s religious court and sentenced to death.

Not long afterward, the mujahideen toppled the Communists in Kabul, and they brought their countryside mores with them. In the capital, their leaders—who had received generous amounts of U.S. funding—issued a decree declaring that “women are not to leave their homes at all, unless absolutely necessary, in which case they are to cover themselves completely.” Women were likewise banned from “walking gracefully or with pride.” Religious police began roaming the city’s streets, arresting women and burning audio- and videocassettes on pyres.

Yet the new mujahideen government quickly fell apart, and the country descended into civil war. At night in Pan Killay, Shakira heard gunfire and, sometimes, the shouts of men. In the morning, while tending the cows, she’d see neighbors carrying wrapped bodies. Her family gathered in the courtyard and discussed, in low voices, how they might escape. But the roads were studded with checkpoints belonging to different mujahideen groups. South of the village, in the town of Gereshk, a militia called the Ninety-third Division maintained a particularly notorious barricade on a bridge; there were stories of men getting robbed or killed, of women and young boys being raped. Shakira’s father sometimes crossed the bridge to sell produce at the Gereshk market, and her mother started pleading with him to stay home.

The family, penned between Amir Dado to the north and the Ninety-third Division to the south, was growing desperate. Then one afternoon, when Shakira was sixteen, she heard shouts from the street: “The Taliban are here!” She saw a convoy of white Toyota Hiluxes filled with black-turbanned fighters carrying white flags. Shakira hadn’t ever heard of the Taliban, but her father explained that its members were much like the poor religious students she’d seen all her life begging for alms. Many had fought under the mujahideen’s banner but quit after the Soviets’ withdrawal; now, they said, they were remobilizing to put an end to the tumult. In short order, they had stormed the Gereshk bridge, dismantling the Ninety-third Division, and volunteers had flocked to join them as they’d descended on Sangin. Her brother came home reporting that the Taliban had also overrun Dado’s positions. The warlord had abandoned his men and fled to Pakistan. “He’s gone,” Shakira’s brother kept saying. “He really is.” The Taliban soon dissolved Dado’s religious court—freeing Sana and her husband, who were awaiting execution—and eliminated the checkpoints. After fifteen years, the Sangin Valley was finally at peace.

When I asked Shakira and other women from the valley to reflect on Taliban rule, they were unwilling to judge the movement against some universal standard—only against what had come before. “They were softer,” Pazaro, the woman who lived in a neighboring village, said. “They were dealing with us respectfully.” The women described their lives under the Taliban as identical to their lives under Dado and the mujahideen—minus the strangers barging through the doors at night, the deadly checkpoints.

Shakira recounted to me a newfound serenity: quiet mornings with steaming green tea and naan bread, summer evenings on the rooftop. Mothers and aunts and grandmothers began to discreetly inquire about her eligibility; in the village, marriage was a bond uniting two families. She was soon betrothed to a distant relative whose father had vanished, presumably at the hands of the Soviets. The first time she laid eyes on her fiancé was on their wedding day: he was sitting sheepishly, surrounded by women of the village, who were ribbing him about his plans for the wedding night. “Oh, he was a fool!” Shakira recalled, laughing. “He was so embarrassed, he tried to run away. People had to catch him and bring him back.”

Like many enterprising young men in the valley, he was employed in opium trafficking, and Shakira liked the glint of determination in his eyes. Yet she started to worry that grit alone might not be enough. As Taliban rule established itself, a conscription campaign was launched. Young men were taken to northern Afghanistan, to help fight against a gang of mujahideen warlords known as the Northern Alliance. One day, Shakira watched a helicopter alight in a field and unload the bodies of fallen conscripts. Men in the valley began hiding in friends’ houses, moving from village to village, terrified of being called up. Impoverished tenant farmers were the most at risk—the rich could buy their way out of service. “This was the true injustice of the Taliban,” Shakira told me. She grew to loathe the sight of roving Taliban patrols.

In 2000, Helmand Province experienced punishing drought. The watermelon fields lay ruined, and the bloated corpses of draft animals littered the roads. In a flash of cruelty, the Taliban’s supreme leader, Mullah Omar, chose that moment to ban opium cultivation. The valley’s economy collapsed. Pazaro recalled, “We had nothing to eat, the land gave us nothing, and our men couldn’t provide for our children. The children were crying, they were screaming, and we felt like we’d failed.” Shakira, who was pregnant, dipped squares of stale naan into green tea to feed her nieces and nephews. Her husband left for Pakistan, to try his luck in the fields there. Shakira was stricken by the thought that her baby would emerge lifeless, that her husband would never return, that she would be alone. Every morning, she prayed for rain, for deliverance.

One day, an announcer on the radio said that there had been an attack in America. Suddenly, there was talk that soldiers from the richest country on earth were coming to overthrow the Taliban. For the first time in years, Shakira’s heart stirred with hope.

One night in 2003, Shakira was jolted awake by the voices of strange men. She rushed to cover herself. When she ran to the living room, she saw, with panic, the muzzles of rifles being pointed at her. The men were larger than she’d ever seen, and they were in uniform. These are the Americans, she realized, in awe. Some Afghans were with them, scrawny men with Kalashnikovs and checkered scarves. A man with an enormous beard was barking orders: Amir Dado.

The U.S. had swiftly toppled the Taliban following its invasion, installing in Kabul the government of Hamid Karzai. Dado, who had befriended American Special Forces, became the chief of intelligence for Helmand Province. One of his brothers was the governor of the Sangin district, and another brother became Sangin’s chief of police. In Helmand, the first year of the American occupation had been peaceful, and the fields once again burst with poppies. Shakira now had two small children, Nilofar and Ahmed. Her husband had returned from Pakistan and found work ferrying bags of opium resin to the Sangin market. But now, with Dado back in charge—rescued from exile by the Americans—life regressed to the days of civil war.

Nearly every person Shakira knew had a story about Dado. Once, his fighters demanded that two young men either pay a tax or join his private militia, which he maintained despite holding his official post. When they refused, his fighters beat them to death, stringing their bodies up from a tree. A villager recalled, “We went to cut them down, and they had been sliced open, their stomachs coming out.” In another village, Dado’s forces went from house to house, executing people suspected of being Taliban; an elderly scholar who’d never belonged to the movement was shot dead.

Shakira was bewildered by the Americans’ choice of allies. “Was this their plan?” she asked me. “Did they come to bring peace, or did they have other aims?” She insisted that her husband stop taking resin to the Sangin market, so he shifted his trade south, to Gereshk. But he returned one afternoon with the news that this, too, had become impossible. Astonishingly, the United States had resuscitated the Ninety-third Division—and made it its closest partner in the province. The Division’s gunmen again began stopping travellers on the bridge and plundering what they could. Now, however, their most profitable endeavor was collecting bounties offered by the U.S.; according to Mike Martin, a former British officer who wrote a history of Helmand, they earned up to two thousand dollars per Taliban commander captured.

This posed a challenge, though, because there were hardly any active Taliban to catch. “We knew who were the Taliban in our village,” Shakira said, and they weren’t engaged in guerrilla warfare: “They were all sitting at home, doing nothing.” A lieutenant colonel with U.S. Special Forces, Stuart Farris, who was deployed to the area at that time, told a U.S. Army historian, “There was virtually no resistance on this rotation.” So militias like the Ninety-third Division began accusing innocent people. In February, 2003, they branded Hajji Bismillah—the Karzai government’s transportation director for Gereshk, responsible for collecting tolls in the city—a terrorist, prompting the Americans to ship him to Guantánamo. With Bismillah eliminated, the Ninety-third Division monopolized the toll revenue.

Dado went even further. In March, 2003, U.S. soldiers visited Sangin’s governor—Dado’s brother—to discuss refurbishing a school and a health clinic. Upon leaving, their convoy came under fire, and Staff Sergeant Jacob Frazier and Sergeant Orlando Morales became the first American combat fatalities in Helmand. U.S. personnel suspected that the culprit was not the Taliban but Dado—a suspicion confirmed to me by one of the warlord’s former commanders, who said that his boss had engineered the attack to keep the Americans reliant on him. Nonetheless, when Dado’s forces claimed to have nabbed the true assassin—an ex-Taliban conscript named Mullah Jalil—the Americans dispatched Jalil to Guantánamo. Unaccountably, this happened despite the fact that, according to Jalil’s classified Guantánamo file, U.S. officials knew that Jalil had been fingered merely to “cover for” the fact that Dado’s forces had been “involved with the ambush.”

The incident didn’t affect Dado’s relationship with U.S. Special Forces, who deemed him too valuable in serving up “terrorists.” They were now patrolling together, and soon after the attack the joint operation searched Shakira’s village for suspected terrorists. The soldiers did not stay at her home long, but she could not get the sight of the rifle muzzles out of her mind. The next morning, she removed the rugs and scrubbed the boot marks away.

Shakira’s friends and neighbors were too terrified to speak out, but the United Nations began agitating for Dado’s removal. The U.S. repeatedly blocked the effort, and a guide for the U.S. Marine Corps argued that although Dado was “far from being a Jeffersonian Democrat” his form of rough justice was “the time-tested solution for controlling rebellious Pashtuns.”

Shakira’s husband stopped leaving the house as Helmandis continued to be taken away on flimsy pretexts. A farmer in a nearby village, Mohammed Nasim, was arrested by U.S. forces and sent to Guantánamo because, according to a classified assessment, his name was similar to that of a Taliban commander. A Karzai government official named Ehsanullah visited an American base to inform on two Taliban members; no translator was present, and, in the confusion, he was arrested himself and shipped to Guantánamo. Nasrullah, a government tax collector, was sent to Guantánamo after being randomly pulled off a bus following a skirmish between U.S. Special Forces and local tribesmen. “We were so happy with the Americans,” he said later, at a military tribunal. “I didn’t know eventually I would come to Cuba.”

Nasrullah ultimately returned home, but some detainees never made it back. Abdul Wahid, of Gereshk, was arrested by the Ninety-third Division and beaten severely; he was delivered to U.S. custody and left in a cage, where he died. U.S. military personnel noted burns on his chest and stomach, and bruising to his hips and groin. According to a declassified investigation, Special Forces soldiers reported that Wahid’s wounds were consistent with “a normal interview/interrogation method” used by the Ninety-third Division. A sergeant stated that he “could provide photographs of prior detainees with similar injuries.” Nonetheless, the U.S. continued to support the Ninety-third Division—a violation of the Leahy Law, which bars American personnel from knowingly backing units that commit flagrant human-rights abuses.

In 2004, the U.N. launched a program to disarm pro-government militias. A Ninety-third commander learned of the plan and rebranded a segment of the militia as a “private-security company” under contract with the Americans, enabling roughly a third of the Division’s fighters to remain armed. Another third kept their weapons by signing a contract with a Texas-based firm to protect road-paving crews. (When the Karzai government replaced these private guards with police, the Ninety-third’s leader engineered a hit that killed fifteen policemen, and then recovered the contract.) The remaining third of the Division, finding themselves subjected to extortion threats from their former colleagues, absconded with their weapons and joined the Taliban.

Messaging by the U.S.-led coalition tended to portray the growing rebellion as a matter of extremists battling freedom, but nato documents I obtained conceded that Ishaqzais had “no good reason” to trust the coalition forces, having suffered “oppression at the hands of Dad Mohammad Khan,” or Amir Dado. In Pan Killay, elders encouraged their sons to take up arms to protect the village, and some reached out to former Taliban members. Shakira wished that her husband would do something—help guard the village, or move them to Pakistan—but he demurred. In a nearby village, when U.S. forces raided the home of a beloved tribal elder, killing him and leaving his son with paraplegia, women shouted at their menfolk, “You people have big turbans on your heads, but what have you done? You can’t even protect us. You call yourselves men?”

It was now 2005, four years after the American invasion, and Shakira had a third child on the way. Her domestic duties consumed her—“morning to night, I was working and sweating”—but when she paused from stoking the tandoor or pruning the peach trees she realized that she’d lost the sense of promise she’d once felt. Nearly every week, she heard of another young man being spirited away by the Americans or the militias. Her husband was unemployed, and recently he’d begun smoking opium. Their marriage soured. An air of mistrust settled onto the house, matching the village’s grim mood.

So when a Taliban convoy rolled into Pan Killay, with black-turbanned men hoisting tall white flags, she considered the visitors with interest, even forgiveness. This time, she thought, things might be different.

In 2006, the U.K. joined a growing contingent of U.S. Special Operations Forces working to quell the rebellion in Sangin. Soon, Shakira recalled, “hell began.” The Taliban attacked patrols, launched raids on combat outposts, and set up roadblocks. On a hilltop in Pan Killay, the Americans commandeered a drug lord’s house, transforming it into a compound of sandbags and watchtowers and concertina wire. Before most battles, young Talibs visited houses, warning residents to leave immediately. Then the Taliban would launch their assault, the coalition would respond, and the earth would shudder.

Sometimes, even fleeing did not guarantee safety. During one battle, Abdul Salam, an uncle of Shakira’s husband, took refuge in a friend’s home. After the fighting ended, he visited a mosque to offer prayers. A few Taliban were there, too. A coalition air strike killed almost everyone inside. The next day, mourners gathered for funerals; a second strike killed a dozen more people. Among the bodies returned to Pan Killay were those of Abdul Salam, his cousin, and his three nephews, aged six to fifteen.

Not since childhood had Shakira known anyone who’d died by air strike. She was now twenty-seven, and she slept fitfully, as if at any moment she’d need to run for cover. One night, she awoke to a screeching noise so loud that she wondered if the house was being torn apart. Her husband was still snoring away, and she cursed him under her breath. She tiptoed to the front yard. Coalition military vehicles were passing by, trundling over scrap metal strewn out front. She roused the family. It was too late to evacuate, and Shakira prayed that the Taliban would not attack. She thrust the children into recessed windows—a desperate attempt to protect them in case a strike caused the roof to collapse—and covered them with heavy blankets.

Returning to the front yard, Shakira spotted one of the foreigners’ vehicles sitting motionless. A pair of antennas projected skyward. They’re going to kill us, she thought. She climbed onto the roof, and saw that the vehicle was empty: the soldiers had parked it and left on foot. She watched them march over the footbridge and disappear into the reeds.

A few fields away, the Taliban and the foreigners began firing. For hours, the family huddled indoors. The walls shook, and the children cried. Shakira brought out her cloth dolls, rocked Ahmed against her chest, and whispered stories. When the guns fell silent, around dawn, Shakira went out for another look. The vehicle remained there, unattended. She was shaking in anger. All year, roughly once a month, she had been subjected to this terror. The Taliban had launched the attack, but most of her rage was directed at the interlopers. Why did she, and her children, have to suffer?

A wild thought flashed through her head. She rushed into the house and spoke with her mother-in-law. The soldiers were still on the far side of the canal. Shakira found some matches and her mother-in-law grabbed a jerrican of diesel fuel. On the street, a neighbor glanced at the jerrican and understood, hurrying back with a second jug. Shakira’s mother-in-law doused a tire, then popped the hood and soaked the engine. Shakira struck a match, and dropped it onto the tire.

From the house, they watched the sky turn ashen from the blaze. Before long, they heard the whirring of a helicopter, approaching from the south. “It’s coming for us!” her mother-in-law shouted. Shakira’s brother-in-law, who was staying with them, frantically gathered the children, but Shakira knew that it was too late. If we’re going to die, let’s die at home, she thought.

They threw themselves into a shallow trench in the back yard, the adults on top of the children. The earth shook violently, then the helicopter flew off. When they emerged, Shakira saw that the foreigners had targeted the burning vehicle, so that none of its parts would fall into enemy hands.

The women of Pan Killay came to congratulate Shakira; she was, as one woman put it, “a hero.” But she had difficulty mustering any pride, only relief. “I was thinking that they would not come here anymore,” she said. “And we would have peace.”

In 2008, the U.S. Marines deployed to Sangin, reinforcing American Special Forces and U.K. soldiers. Britain’s forces were beleaguered—a third of its casualties in Afghanistan would occur in Sangin, leading some soldiers to dub the mission “Sangingrad.” Nilofar, now eight, could intuit the rhythms of wartime. She would ask Shakira, “When are we going to Auntie Farzana’s house?” Farzana lived in the desert.

But the chaos wasn’t always predictable: one afternoon, the foreigners again appeared before anyone could flee, and the family rushed into the back-yard trench. A few doors down, the wife and children of the late Abdul Salam did the same, but a mortar killed his fifteen-year-old daughter, Bor Jana.

Both sides of the war did make efforts to avoid civilian deaths. In addition to issuing warnings to evacuate, the Taliban kept villagers informed about which areas were seeded with improvised explosive devices, and closed roads to civilian traffic when targeting convoys. The coalition deployed laser-guided bombs, used loudspeakers to warn villagers of fighting, and dispatched helicopters ahead of battle. “They would drop leaflets saying, ‘Stay in your homes! Save yourselves!’ ” Shakira recalled. In a war waged in mud-walled warrens teeming with life, however, nowhere was truly safe, and an extraordinary number of civilians died. Sometimes, such casualties sparked widespread condemnation, as when a nato rocket struck a crowd of villagers in Sangin in 2010, killing fifty-two. But the vast majority of incidents involved one or two deaths—anonymous lives that were never reported on, never recorded by official organizations, and therefore never counted as part of the war’s civilian toll.

In this way, Shakira’s tragedies mounted. There was Muhammad, a fifteen-year-old cousin: he was killed by a buzzbuzzak, a drone, while riding his motorcycle through the village with a friend. “That sound was everywhere,” Shakira recalled. “When we heard it, the children would start to cry, and I could not console them.”

Muhammad Wali, an adult cousin: Villagers were instructed by coalition forces to stay indoors for three days as they conducted an operation, but after the second day drinking water had been depleted and Wali was forced to venture out. He was shot.

Khan Muhammad, a seven-year-old cousin: His family was fleeing a clash by car when it mistakenly neared a coalition position; the car was strafed, killing him.

Bor Agha, a twelve-year-old cousin: He was taking an evening walk when he was killed by fire from an Afghan National Police base. The next morning, his father visited the base, in shock and looking for answers, and was told that the boy had been warned before not to stray near the installation. “Their commander gave the order to target him,” his father recalled.

Amanullah, a sixteen-year-old cousin: He was working the land when he was targeted by an Afghan Army sniper. No one provided an explanation, and the family was too afraid to approach the Army base and ask.

Ahmed, an adult cousin: After a long day in the fields, he was headed home, carrying a hot plate, when he was struck down by coalition forces. The family believes that the foreigners mistook the hot plate for an I.E.D.

Niamatullah, Ahmed’s brother: He was harvesting opium when a firefight broke out nearby; as he tried to flee, he was gunned down by a buzzbuzzak.

Gul Ahmed, an uncle of Shakira’s husband: He wanted to get a head start on his day, so he asked his sons to bring his breakfast to the fields. When they arrived, they found his body. Witnesses said that he’d encountered a coalition patrol. The soldiers “left him here, like an animal,” Shakira said.

Entire branches of Shakira’s family tree, from the uncles who used to tell her stories to the cousins who played with her in the caves, vanished. In all, she lost sixteen family members. I wondered if it was the same for other families in Pan Killay. I sampled a dozen households at random in the village, and made similar inquiries in other villages, to insure that Pan Killay was no outlier. For each family, I documented the names of the dead, cross-checking cases with death certificates and eyewitness testimony. On average, I found, each family lost ten to twelve civilians in what locals call the American War.

This scale of suffering was unknown in a bustling metropolis like Kabul, where citizens enjoyed relative security. But in countryside enclaves like Sangin the ceaseless killings of civilians led many Afghans to gravitate toward the Taliban. By 2010, many households in Ishaqzai villages had sons in the Taliban, most of whom had joined simply to protect themselves or to take revenge; the movement was more thoroughly integrated into Sangin life than it had been in the nineties. Now, when Shakira and her friends discussed the Taliban, they were discussing their own friends, neighbors, and loved ones.

Some British officers on the ground grew concerned that the U.S. was killing too many civilians, and unsuccessfully lobbied to have American Special Forces removed from the area. Instead, troops from around the world poured into Helmand, including Australians, Canadians, and Danes. But villagers couldn’t tell the difference—to them, the occupiers were simply “Americans.” Pazaro, the woman from a nearby village, recalled, “There were two types of people—one with black faces and one with pink faces. When we see them, we get terrified.” The coalition portrayed locals as hungering for liberation from the Taliban, but a classified intelligence report from 2011 described community perceptions of coalition forces as “unfavorable,” with villagers warning that, if the coalition “did not leave the area, the local nationals would be forced to evacuate.”

In response, the coalition shifted to the hearts-and-minds strategy of counter-insurgency. But the foreigners’ efforts to embed among the population could be crude: they often occupied houses, only further exposing villagers to crossfire. “They were coming by force, without getting permission from us,” Pashtana, a woman from another Sangin village, told me. “They sometimes broke into our house, broke all the windows, and stayed the whole night. We would have to flee, in case the Taliban fired on them.” Marzia, a woman from Pan Killay, recalled, “The Taliban would fire a few shots, but the Americans would respond with mortars.” One mortar slammed into her mother-in-law’s house. She survived, Marzia said, but had since “lost control of herself”—always “shouting at things we can’t see, at ghosts.”

With the hearts-and-minds approach floundering, some nato officials tried to persuade Taliban commanders to flip. In 2010, a group of Sangin Taliban commanders, liaising with the British, promised to switch sides in return for assistance to local communities. But, when the Taliban leaders met to hammer out their end of the deal, U.S. Special Operations Forces—acting independently—bombed the gathering, killing the top Taliban figure behind the peace overture.

The Marines finally quit Sangin in 2014; the Afghan Army held its ground for three years, until the Taliban had brought most of the valley under its control. The U.S. airlifted Afghan Army troops out and razed many government compounds—leaving, as a nato statement described approvingly, only “rubble and dirt.” The Sangin market had been obliterated in this way. When Shakira first saw the ruined shops, she told her husband, “They left nothing for us.”

Still, a sense of optimism took hold in Pan Killay. Shakira’s husband slaughtered a sheep to celebrate the end of the war, and the family discussed renovating the garden. Her mother-in-law spoke of the days before the Russians and the Americans, when families picnicked along the canal, men stretched out in the shade of peach trees, and women dozed on rooftops under the stars.

But in 2019, as the U.S. was holding talks with Taliban leaders in Doha, Qatar, the Afghan government and American forces moved jointly on Sangin one last time. That January, they launched perhaps the most devastating assault that the valley witnessed in the entire war. Shakira and other villagers fled for the desert, but not everyone could escape. Ahmed Noor Mohammad, who owned a pay-phone business, decided to wait to evacuate, because his twin sons were ill. His family went to bed to the sound of distant artillery. That night, an American bomb slammed into the room where the twin boys were sleeping, killing them. A second bomb hit an adjacent room, killing Mohammad’s father and many others, eight of them children.

The next day, at the funeral, another air strike killed six mourners. In a nearby village, a gunship struck down three children. The following day, four more children were shot dead. Elsewhere in Sangin, an air strike hit an Islamic school, killing a child. A week later, twelve guests at a wedding were killed in an air raid.

After the bombing, Mohammad’s brother travelled to Kandahar to report the massacres to the United Nations and to the Afghan government. When no justice was forthcoming, he joined the Taliban.

On the strength of a seemingly endless supply of recruits, the Taliban had no difficulty outlasting the coalition. But, though the insurgency has finally brought peace to the Afghan countryside, it is a peace of desolation: many villages are in ruins. Reconstruction will be a challenge, but a bigger trial will be to exorcise memories of the past two decades. “My daughter wakes up screaming that the Americans are coming,” Pazaro said. “We have to keep talking to her softly, and tell her, ‘No, no, they won’t come back.’ ”

The Taliban call their domain the Islamic Emirate of Afghanistan, and claim that, once the foreigners are gone, they will preside over an era of tranquil stability. As the Afghan government crumbled this summer, I travelled through Helmand Province—the Emirate’s de-facto capital—to see what a post-American Afghanistan might look like.

I departed from Lashkar Gah, which remained under government control. At the outskirts stood a squat cement building with an Afghan-government flag—beyond this checkpoint, Kabul’s authority vanished. A pickup idled nearby; piled into the cargo bed were half a dozen members of the sangorian, a feared militia in the pay of the Afghan intelligence agency, which was backed by the C.I.A. Two of the fighters appeared no older than twelve.

I was with two locals in a beat-up Corolla, and we slipped past the checkpoint without notice. Soon, we were in a treeless horizon of baked earth, with virtually no road beneath us. We passed abandoned outposts of the Afghan Army and Police that had been built by the Americans and the Brits. Beyond them loomed a series of circular mud fortifications, with a lone Taliban sniper splayed on his stomach. White flags fluttered behind him, announcing the gateway to the Islamic Emirate.

The most striking difference between Taliban country and the world we’d left behind was the dearth of gunmen. In Afghanistan, I’d grown accustomed to kohl-eyed policemen in baggy trousers, militiamen in balaclavas, intelligence agents inspecting cars. Yet we rarely crossed a Taliban checkpoint, and when we did the fighters desultorily examined the car. “Everyone is afraid of the Taliban,” my driver said, laughing. “The checkpoints are in our hearts.”

If people feared their new rulers, they also fraternized with them. Here and there, groups of villagers sat under roadside trellises, sipping tea with Talibs. The country opened up as we jounced along a dirt road in rural Sangin. In the canal, boys were having swimming races; village men and Taliban were dipping their feet into the turquoise water. We passed green cropland and canopies of fruit trees. Groups of women walked along a market road, and two girls skipped in rumpled frocks.

We approached Gereshk, then under government authority. Because the town was the most lucrative toll-collection point in the region, it was said that whoever held it controlled all of Helmand. The Taliban had launched an assault, and the thuds of artillery resounded across the plain. A stream of families, their donkeys laboring under the weight of giant bundles, were escaping what they said were air strikes. By the roadside, a woman in a powder-blue burqa stood with a wheelbarrow; inside was a wrapped body. Some Taliban were gathered on a hilltop, lowering a fallen comrade into a grave.

I met Wakil, a bespectacled Taliban commander. Like many fighters I’d encountered, he came from a line of farmers, had studied a few years in seminary, and had lost dozens of relatives to Amir Dado, the Ninety-third Division, and the Americans. He discussed the calamities visited on his family without rancor, as if the American War were the natural order of things. Thirty years old, he’d attained his rank after an older brother, a Taliban commander, died in battle. He’d hardly ever left Helmand, and his face lit up with wonder at the thought of capturing Gereshk, a town that he’d lived within miles of, but had not been able to visit for twenty years. “Forget your writing,” he laughed as I scribbled notes. “Come watch me take the city!” Tracking a helicopter gliding across the horizon, I declined. He raced off. An hour later, an image popped up on my phone of Wakil pulling down a poster of a government figure linked to the Ninety-third Division. Gereshk had fallen.

At the house of the Taliban district governor, a group of Talibs sat eating okra and naan, donated by the village. I asked them about their plans for when the war was over. Most said that they’d return to farming, or pursue religious education. I’d flown to Afghanistan from Iraq, a fact that impressed Hamid, a young commander. He said that he dreamed of seeing the Babylonian ruins, and asked, “Do you think, when this is over, they’ll give me a visa?”

It was clear that the Taliban are divided about what happens next. During my visit, dozens of members from different parts of Afghanistan offered strikingly contrasting visions for their Emirate. Politically minded Talibs who have lived abroad and maintain homes in Doha or Pakistan told me—perhaps with calculation—that they had a more cosmopolitan outlook than before. A scholar who’d spent much of the past two decades shuttling between Helmand and Pakistan said, “There were many mistakes we made in the nineties. Back then, we didn’t know about human rights, education, politics—we just took everything by power. But now we understand.” In the scholar’s rosy scenario, the Taliban will share ministries with former enemies, girls will attend school, and women will work “shoulder to shoulder” with men.

Yet in Helmand it was hard to find this kind of Talib. More typical was Hamdullah, a narrow-faced commander who lost a dozen family members in the American War, and has measured his life by weddings, funerals, and battles. He said that his community had suffered too grievously to ever share power, and that the maelstrom of the previous twenty years offered only one solution: the status quo ante. He told me, with pride, that he planned to join the Taliban’s march to Kabul, a city he’d never seen. He guessed that he’d arrive there in mid-August.

On the most sensitive question in village life—women’s rights—men like him have not budged. In many parts of rural Helmand, women are barred from visiting the market. When a Sangin woman recently bought cookies for her children at the bazaar, the Taliban beat her, her husband, and the shopkeeper. Taliban members told me that they planned to allow girls to attend madrassas, but only until puberty. As before, women would be prohibited from employment, except for midwifery. Pazaro said, ruefully, “They haven’t changed at all.”

Travelling through Helmand, I could hardly see any signs of the Taliban as a state. Unlike other rebel movements, the Taliban had provided practically no reconstruction, no social services beyond its harsh tribunals. It brooks no opposition: in Pan Killay, the Taliban executed a villager named Shaista Gul after learning that he’d offered bread to members of the Afghan Army. Nevertheless, many Helmandis seemed to prefer Taliban rule—including the women I interviewed. It was as if the movement had won only by default, through the abject failures of its opponents. To locals, life under the coalition forces and their Afghan allies was pure hazard; even drinking tea in a sunlit field, or driving to your sister’s wedding, was a potentially deadly gamble. What the Taliban offered over their rivals was a simple bargain: Obey us, and we will not kill you.

This grim calculus hovered over every conversation I had with villagers. In the hamlet of Yakh Chal, I came upon the ruins of an Afghan Army outpost that had recently been overrun by the Taliban. All that remained were mounds of scrap metal, cords, hot plates, gravel. The next morning, villagers descended on the outpost, scavenging for something to sell. Abdul Rahman, a farmer, was rooting through the refuse with his young son when an Afghan Army gunship appeared on the horizon. It was flying so low, he recalled, that “even Kalashnikovs could fire on it.” But there were no Taliban around, only civilians. The gunship fired, and villagers began falling right and left. It then looped back, continuing to attack. “There were many bodies on the ground, bleeding and moaning,” another witness said. “Many small children.” According to villagers, at least fifty civilians were killed.

Later, I spoke on the phone with an Afghan Army helicopter pilot who had just relieved the one who attacked the outpost. He told me, “I asked the crew why they did this, and they said, ‘We knew they were civilians, but Camp Bastion’ ”—a former British base that had been handed over to the Afghans—“ ‘gave orders to kill them all.’ ” As we spoke, Afghan Army helicopters were firing upon the crowded central market in Gereshk, killing scores of civilians. An official with an international organization based in Helmand said, “When the government forces lose an area, they are taking revenge on the civilians.” The helicopter pilot acknowledged this, adding, “We are doing it on the order of Sami Sadat.”

General Sami Sadat headed one of the seven corps of the Afghan Army. Unlike the Amir Dado generation of strongmen, who were provincial and illiterate, Sadat obtained a master’s degree in strategic management and leadership from a school in the U.K. and studied at the nato Military Academy, in Munich. He held his military position while also being the C.E.O. of Blue Sea Logistics, a Kabul-based corporation that supplied anti-Taliban forces with everything from helicopter parts to armored tactical vehicles. During my visit to Helmand, Blackhawks under his command were committing massacres almost daily: twelve Afghans were killed while scavenging scrap metal at a former base outside Sangin; forty were killed in an almost identical incident at the Army’s abandoned Camp Walid; twenty people, most of them women and children, were killed by air strikes on the Gereshk bazaar; Afghan soldiers who were being held prisoner by the Taliban at a power station were targeted and killed by their own comrades in an air strike. (Sadat declined repeated requests for comment.)

The day before the massacre at the Yakh Chal outpost, CNN aired an interview with General Sadat. “Helmand is beautiful—if it’s peaceful, tourism can come,” he said. His soldiers had high morale, he explained, and were confident of defeating the Taliban. The anchor appeared relieved. “You seem very optimistic,” she said. “That’s reassuring to hear.”

I showed the interview to Mohammed Wali, a pushcart vender in a village near Lashkar Gah. A few days after the Yakh Chal massacre, government militias in his area surrendered to the Taliban. General Sadat’s Blackhawks began attacking houses, seemingly at random. They fired on Wali’s house, and his daughter was struck in the head by shrapnel and died. His brother rushed into the yard, holding the girl’s limp body up at the helicopters, shouting, “We’re civilians!” The choppers killed him and Wali’s son. His wife lost her leg, and another daughter is in a coma. As Wali watched the CNN clip, he sobbed. “Why are they doing this?” he asked. “Are they mocking us?”

In the course of a few hours in 2006, the Taliban killed thirty-two friends and relatives of Amir Dado, including his son. Three years later, they killed the warlord himself—who by then had joined parliament—in a roadside blast. The orchestrator of the assassination hailed from Pan Killay. In one light, the attack is the mark of a fundamentalist insurgency battling an internationally recognized government; in another, a campaign of revenge by impoverished villagers against their former tormentor; or a salvo in a long-simmering tribal war; or a hit by a drug cartel against a rival enterprise. All these readings are probably true, simultaneously. What’s clear is that the U.S. did not attempt to settle such divides and build durable, inclusive institutions; instead, it intervened in a civil war, supporting one side against the other. As a result, like the Soviets, the Americans effectively created two Afghanistans: one mired in endless conflict, the other prosperous and hopeful.

It is the hopeful Afghanistan that’s now under threat, after Taliban fighters marched into Kabul in mid-August—just as Hamdullah predicted. Thousands of Afghans have spent the past few weeks desperately trying to reach the Kabul airport, sensing that the Americans’ frenzied evacuation may be their last chance at a better life. “Bro, you’ve got to help me,” the helicopter pilot I’d spoken with earlier pleaded over the phone. At the time, he was fighting crowds to get within sight of the airport gate; when the wheels of the last U.S. aircraft pulled off the runway, he was left behind. His boss, Sami Sadat, reportedly escaped to the U.K.

Until recently, the Kabul that Sadat fled often felt like a different country, even a different century, from Sangin. The capital had become a city of hillside lights, shimmering wedding halls, and neon billboards that was joyously crowded with women: mothers browsed markets, girls walked in pairs from school, police officers patrolled in hijabs, office workers carried designer handbags. The gains these women experienced during the American War—and have now lost—are staggering, and hard to fathom when considered against the austere hamlets of Helmand: the Afghan parliament had a proportion of women similar to that of the U.S. Congress, and about a quarter of university students were female. Thousands of women in Kabul are understandably terrified that the Taliban have not evolved. In late August, I spoke by phone to a dermatologist who was bunkered in her home. She has studied in multiple countries, and runs a large clinic employing a dozen women. “I’ve worked too hard to get here,” she told me. “I studied too long, I made my own business, I created my own clinic. This was my life’s dream.” She had not stepped outdoors in two weeks.

The Taliban takeover has restored order to the conservative countryside while plunging the comparatively liberal streets of Kabul into fear and hopelessness. This reversal of fates brings to light the unspoken premise of the past two decades: if U.S. troops kept battling the Taliban in the countryside, then life in the cities could blossom. This may have been a sustainable project—the Taliban were unable to capture cities in the face of U.S. airpower. But was it just? Can the rights of one community depend, in perpetuity, on the deprivation of rights in another? In Sangin, whenever I brought up the question of gender, village women reacted with derision. “They are giving rights to Kabul women, and they are killing women here,” Pazaro said. “Is this justice?” Marzia, from Pan Killay, told me, “This is not ‘women’s rights’ when you are killing us, killing our brothers, killing our fathers.” Khalida, from a nearby village, said, “The Americans did not bring us any rights. They just came, fought, killed, and left.”

The women in Helmand disagree among themselves about what rights they should have. Some yearn for the old village rules to crumble—they wish to visit the market or to picnic by the canal without sparking innuendo or worse. Others cling to more traditional interpretations. “Women and men aren’t equal,” Shakira told me. “They are each made by God, and they each have their own role, their own strengths that the other doesn’t have.” More than once, as her husband lay in an opium stupor, she fantasized about leaving him. Yet Nilofar is coming of age, and a divorce could cast shame on the family, harming her prospects. Through friends, Shakira hears stories of dissolute cities filled with broken marriages and prostitution. “Too much freedom is dangerous, because people won’t know the limits,” she said.

All the women I met in Sangin, though, seemed to agree that their rights, whatever they might entail, cannot flow from the barrel of a gun—and that Afghan communities themselves must improve the conditions of women. Some villagers believe that they possess a powerful cultural resource to wage that struggle: Islam itself. “The Taliban are saying women cannot go outside, but there is actually no Islamic rule like this,” Pazaro told me. “As long as we are covered, we should be allowed.” I asked a leading Helmandi Taliban scholar where in Islam was it stipulated that women cannot go to the market or attend school. He admitted, somewhat chagrined, that this was not an actual Islamic injunction. “It’s the culture in the village, not Islam,” he said. “The people there have these beliefs about women, and we follow them.” Just as Islam offers fairer templates for marriage, divorce, and inheritance than many tribal and village norms, these women hope to marshal their faith—the shared language across their country’s many divides—to carve out greater freedoms.

Though Shakira hardly talks about it, she harbors such dreams herself. Through the decades of war, she continued to teach herself to read, and she is now working her way through a Pashto translation of the Quran, one sura at a time. “It gives me great comfort,” she said. She is teaching her youngest daughter the alphabet, and has a bold ambition: to gather her friends and demand that the men erect a girls’ school.

Even as Shakira contemplates moving Pan Killay forward, she is determined to remember its past. The village, she told me, has a cemetery that spreads across a few hilltops. There are no plaques, no flags, just piles of stones that glow red and pink in the evening sun. A pair of blank flagstones project from each grave, one marking the head, one the feet.

Shakira’s family visits every week, and she points to the mounds where her grandfather lies, where her cousins lie, because she doesn’t want her children to forget. They tie scarves on tree branches to attract blessings, and pray to those departed. They spend hours amid a sacred geography of stones, shrubs, and streams, and Shakira feels renewed.

Shortly before the Americans left, they dynamited her house, apparently in response to the Taliban’s firing a grenade nearby. With two rooms still standing, the house is half inhabitable, half destroyed, much like Afghanistan itself. She told me that she won’t mind the missing kitchen, or the gaping hole where the pantry once stood. Instead, she chooses to see a village in rebirth. Shakira is sure that a freshly paved road will soon run past the house, the macadam sizzling hot on summer days. The only birds in the sky will be the kind with feathers. Nilofar will be married, and her children will walk along the canal to school. The girls will have plastic dolls, with hair that they can brush. Shakira will own a machine that can wash clothes. Her husband will get clean, he will acknowledge his failings, he will tell his family that he loves them more than anything. They will visit Kabul, and stand in the shadow of giant glass buildings. “I have to believe,” she said. “Otherwise, what was it all for?” ♦

— Published in the print edition of the September 13, 2021, issue.

— Anand Gopal, the author of “No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes,” is writing a book on the Arab revolutions.

[banafshaamodestwear]

The effect of wearing the hijab: Perception of facial attractiveness

The Hijab (which means parcel or obstruction) is worn as a conventional head-covering by many Muslim ladies worldwide. For these ladies, the Hijab is a noticeable articulation of their confidence and culture and a significant determinant of being distinguished as Muslim. In reality, wearing this thing of customary Muslim attire seems to affect how others see the people concerned. Tragically, these insights are not generally specific. A regularly examined impact in non-Muslim "Western" social orders is that impressions of Muslim ladies wearing the Hijab are often negative (for a survey, and wearing the Hijab is probably going to expand antagonism and advance outgroup discernments towards a person in regular day to day existence. Nonetheless, the impact of wearing the Hijab on the impression of Muslim ladies inside a Muslim nation is a long way from comprehending. Of specific significance is that the Hijab is modelled as an image of social personality, devotion, and humility, and Muslim ladies inside a Muslim country, especially in the United Arab Emirates (UAE), are urged to wear this head-covering when out in the open as a method for restricting their actual allure to men . Undoubtedly, how a lady wears a hijab (e.g., firmly around the face or all the more freely, with some hair appearing;  is broadly viewed as a public showcase of the profundity of her confidence and the degree to which she is expecting to limit her allure. In any case, regardless of these goals, the impact of the Hijab on how others see the engaging facial quality of the individual wearing this thing stays to be resolved entirely.

Up until now, a few examinations have explored the impact of the Hijab on different psychological and perceptual cycles, for example, face acknowledgment, memory for faces, and verifiable predisposition. However, direct examinations of the impact of the Hijab on the impression of engaging facial quality are uncommon; we can discover only three such investigations in writing and just one of these was led inside a Muslim country. But then the facial appeal is related with numerous parts of human social insights, including taking action of other positive attributes like genuineness, knowledge, earnestness, moral ideals and generally speaking ability. Besides, these discernments have massive social results, to the degree that alluring ladies are viewed as socially engaging, possess higher status occupations, wed higher status mates, and for the most part experience more sheer monetary versatility than their less appealing partners. To be sure, the "what is excellent is acceptable"  generalization has been found to stretch out even to the court, with appealing ladies being more averse to be seen as blameworthy of wrongdoing and getting lighter disciplines when they are indicted. Accordingly, a full comprehension of the impact of wearing the Hijab on facial allure is critical for understanding the effects of the Hijab on mentalities towards Muslim ladies.

Of the three examinations exploring the impact of wearing the Hijab on facial appeal that has been accounted for to date, two were directed inside a non-Muslim country (the UK henceforth M&S). Both these examinations explored the view of engaging facial quality by Muslim and non-Muslim British guys who evaluated pictures in which ladies heads were shown either ultimately revealed or covered by the Hijab, so just each face was apparent. Muslim and non-Muslim members showed no critical contrast in their appeal evaluations for pictures where the Hijab was worn. Yet, non-Muslim guys gave higher engaging quality appraisals than Muslim guys for pictures where ladies were uncovered. M&S recommend that these higher evaluations were because of the area of the examination (the UK) where the negative view of Islamic images, like the Hijab, place Muslims as pariahs and rouse negative mentalities towards people wearing this article of clothing; see likewise.

In any case, albeit negative view of Islamic images by male Westerners might clarify why, in the examination by M&S, non-Muslim guys appraised uncovered ladies as more appealing. The full impact of the Hijab on facial allure still needs to be resolved. The Hijab UK is a significant marker of Muslim ladies' personality, and the aftereffects of M&S's exploration with non-Muslim guys give a substantial sign of impacts of social endogamy (an inclination for one's social gathering) on the view of others. Of specific significance is that men made evaluations by Muslims in the investigations by M&S. In any case, the Hijab is frequently viewed to act as an illustration of male authority over female conduct, which serves to keep up with sexual orientation contrasts. Thus it is unsure how much these impacts influenced the allure appraisals made by Muslim guys. Moreover, as M&S calls attention to because the examination was directed in the UK, hostile to Islamic inclination might have gotten disguised even by the Muslim guys who participated. This might have caused some balance of their decisions about engaging quality hijab-wearing ladies in those previous investigations. Undoubtedly, while not diverse fundamentally, pictures, where the Hijab was worn were evaluated as somewhat less alluring by Muslim guys than non-Muslim guys.

A portion of these issues was tended to by an ensuing report by Pasha-Zaidi. Muslim females living in either a Muslim country (the UAE) or the USA were shown pictures of female faces wearing the Hijab. Full-face photos of Caucasian and South Asian ladies were utilized, one of each face wearing the Hijab and one revealed, and members needed to rate each picture for engaging facial quality. The discoveries proposed that images of faces wearing the Hijab were appraised as more appealing by the two arrangements of members. Yet, while these discoveries are fascinating, a few parts of the examination by Pasha-Zaidi recommend that the outcomes they report might have been influenced by other, jumbling factors. The first of these is that this examination was to utilize just members who began from South Asia (for the most part India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh). While this would not be tricky for members in the USA, members in the UAE would have been non-local, ex-patriate occupants with restricted inhabitants' visas due to severe UAE laws concerning citizenship and residency. Besides, social qualifications between ex-patriate tenants and local Emiratis are significant in the UAE, and inhabitants from South Asia by and prominent take lower-positioning positions, involve lower levels on the social scale, and experience impressively less employer stability and more danger of removal if laws or customs are repudiated. As needs are, as wearing the Hijab is the standard in the UAE among local UAE Emirati females, the inclination displayed by UAE South Asian members for pictures of female faces wearing the Hijab in the Pasha-Zaidi study might reflect disguised self-saving concession towards the predominant Emirati culture. Undoubtedly, the inclination to introduce oneself in a more positive light can frequently prompt a social attractiveness predisposition which subverts the legitimacy of discoveries gathered utilizing self-revealed measures, for example, overviews and meetings. These chance additions support from the finding of the Pasha-Zaidi study that though members in the USA who didn't themselves wear the Hijab evaluated the allure of hijab-wearing pictures lower than members who wore the Hijab, members in the UAE appraised hijab-wearing pictures higher with no proof of a connection to their inclination for wearing the piece of clothing.

These issues are compounded further by Pasha-Zaidi's utilization of online reviews to accumulate members' evaluations of engaging facial quality just as their subtleties and foundation data. While this methodology permitted enormous members to participate with generally little exertion, it gave short command over who finished the reviews and provided the appeal appraisals (see likewise conversations by. In reality, this issue was exacerbated by remembering a compounding procedure for which extra members for the examination were chosen just by the members previously participating. At last, and of significant concern, the facial pictures utilized in the investigation were not coordinated correctly across the two critical boost conditions (Hijab versus no hijab) as each face (10 altogether) was shot independently when wearing and not wearing the Hijab. Under these conditions, changes in look and appearance can happen without much of a stretch, and this issue is outwardly apparent in the model pictures gave in the Pasha-Zaidi paper. Tragically, it is notable that even slight changes to the visual appearance of countenances can adjust their engaging quality generously (e.g., [9, 22, 23, 24]) thus, without absolutely coordinating with the facial pictures utilized in each condition, the genuine impact of wearing a hijab on facial allure can't be resolved.

Against this foundation, the motivation behind the current investigation was to foster more meaningful information on the impacts of the Hijab on the view of facial appeal by broadening past research in a few critical manners. To start with, as opposed to crafted by M&S, we examined the impact of the Hijab on the view of engaging facial quality by rehearsing Muslim ladies living in their local Muslim country (the UAE) where Islam and wearing the Hijab are ordinary and boundless parts of regular day to day existence, and were hostile to Islamic sentiments ought not to impact members' decisions. Second, rather than crafted by Pasha-Zaidi [6], all members were local Emiratis whose individual subtleties and foundation had been screened cautiously for consideration to guarantee that their evaluations would give an honest appraisal of how the hijab works.

[thackarsagar05]

Our Top 4 Bridal Photoshoot Moments

A wedding day is filled with mixed emotions of happiness, anxiety, tears, and more. Wedding photography plays a major role by capturing this life-changing day for a bride that becomes a living memory she can look back to forever.

It’s also believed that a girl looks the prettiest on her wedding day. Dressed up in the heaviest lehenga, perfect makeup, and fancy hairdo, wedding photography and bridal photoshoot moments capture her bridal avatar most beautifully with candid shots, smiles, teary emotions, and her twirling in her lehenga.

Being one of the oldest wedding photographers in Mumbai, our team at 35mmcandids has shot many bridal photoshoot moments and each one is unique and special but some bridal pictures are one in a million that is always remembered by our team. In this blog, we list our top 4 bridal photoshoot moments that can be an inspiration to all soon to be brides, wedding photographers in Mumbai & all over the world, wedding organizers, etc.

 1.       The Ever-Smiling Bride- Nishita

The happiest girls are the prettiest and smiling pictures can never go wrong! Vikram and Nishita a couple from New York, were tying their knot at the aesthetic Taj Lands End in Mumbai with the blessings of their family. As Nishita twirled around in her baby pink embroidered lehenga and walked down the aisle for her ‘I do’ moment we captured some candid pictures of her beyond happiness expressions. One thing that added more serenity to the pictures was the day wedding setup, Nishita’s outfit, the floral hues in the wedding décor, and the bridegroom color-coordinated outfits that helped us get the perfect 'destination wedding shot'.

https://35mmcandids.com/portfolio/viknish/

 2.       The ‘Maharani’ Royal Bride- Brinda

Bridal photoshoots and wedding photography is incomplete without capturing a bride's 'princess' moment. With bride Brinda, this just came naturally! Shot at Emirates Palace in Abu Dhabi, Brida was dressed up in a velvet marron lehenga paired with royal ‘jadau’ jewelry. Her look complimented the royal walls of the palace giving us the perfect ‘princess’ shot.

https://35mmcandids.com/portfolio/bnemiratespalace/

 3.       The Fairytale Bride- Khushboo

Most wedding photographers in Mumbai have shot a wedding in Goa but this one was unique! Wedding photography gets easy and accurate if the bride loves being candid. No need for any made-up poses or props, Khushboo and Ankit’s fairytale wedding in Goa had Khushboo blushing and enjoying her wedding to the fullest with her family. Dressed up in a nude pink lehenga, complimenting jewelry, rose pink flower hairdo, and blush expressions along with the scenic beauty of Goa helped us capture some ‘beyond imagination’ bridal photoshoot moments of bride Khushboo.

https://35mmcandids.com/portfolio/khushboo-ankit-goa-london/

  4.       The Traditional Indian Bride- Kartika

Red is the traditional lehenga color for Indian brides. As this style is getting common and brides are experimenting with other lehenga styles, Kartika stuck to the red lehenga tradition and carried it off in the most glamourous way. Kartika and Aanand’s wedding was set at the auspicious Iskon Temple in Juhu giving the wedding an Indian aesthetic vibe. With Kartika in her traditional red lehenga posing boldly and complimenting the temple décor setting, we captured the frame of a traditional Indian bride at a God blessed Indian wedding!

 These are our favorite wedding photography and bridal photoshoot moments. For more inspiration on filming the perfect bridal shot, check out https://35mmcandids.com/our-films/

[gadgetsrevv]

Gunnersaurus: the untold story of Arsenal’s mascot

Arsene Wenger, Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp: None of them can compare to Arsenal’s most enduring star, Gunnersaurus.

LONDON — Gunnersaurus Rex had just finished greeting Burnley off their bus in the bowels of the Emirates, extending his great green claws toward manager Sean Dyche, Ashley Barnes and Ben Mee. Goalkeeper Nick Pope had taken a conspicuously wide turn to avoid him, and someone in the small crowd of observers registered displeasure — “That’s a bit out of order” — but Gunnersaurus seemed unfazed by Pope’s blind eye. His toothy grin stayed, as ever, glued to his friendly face.

He waited for his Arsenal to arrive. When their own bus eased up, Gunnersaurus tapped the crest of his red jersey, made sure his feet were planted squarely on the cement floor, and opened his arms. Matteo Guendouzi, the curly haired midfielder, was among the first to reach him. Guendouzi accepted a hug with all of his heart.

After the last of the players had passed him, Gunnersaurus made for the elevator that would take him to the concourse behind the family section of the stands. He had a minder but still banged his head on a beam along the way. It’s hard to be seven feet tall in England. He rode up and the lift doors opened. An elderly woman waiting on the other side had to put her hand to her chest to keep from falling over. She wasn’t expecting to see a dinosaur at a football game.

– Euro 2020 mascot: Is it among the worst of past tournaments? – Wigan’s new mascot is (drumroll please) a pie.  – The most terrifying mascot in soccer 

It’s been more than 25 years since Gunnersaurus first appeared at one, and people still register the most complete surprise whenever they see him. Their faces light up. Their eyes go nearly as wide as their smiles. Gunnersaurus is like a machine custom-built to spread joy.

An admiring crowd of supporters surrounded him. He was soon trapped in the concourse, unable to move, a modern-day Gulliver tied to the ground by the Lilliputians and their curious love. Children have a particular affinity for Gunnersaurus, and he does for them, but adults also express an unabashed affection for him. Gunnersaurus responds without a whisper of irony. He is particularly drawn to people in wheelchairs. He smothers them in the warmest embrace.

There was a huge poster on the wall of the concourse where he stood. It depicted a young Arsene Wenger, then the overseer of the Invincibles, the unbeatable Arsenal of 2003-04. It included a quote from Brian Clough, marveling at the 49-game winning streak Arsenal then enjoyed. “It’s better than being in heaven,” Clough said.

Gunnersaurus stood in front of that poster and dispensed hug after hug. One boy, maybe 12 years old, forgot that he was supposed to be cool, and he turned his back to Gunnersaurus and executed a trust fall into his belly. Gunnersaurus draped his arms around the boy, the boy closed his eyes, and his father took a picture of him with a smile of pure bliss.

Peter Lovell, 37, won a contest to design a new mascot for the Junior Gunners in 1993, when he was 11 years old.

Arsenal are highly secretive about Gunnersaurus and his private truths. The contents of the ark of the covenant would be easier to see; there are royal families that are less guarded.

Here is what we do know: According to official club lore, Arsenal embarked on a rebuild of the North Bank at Highbury Stadium in the summer of 1993. Deep underground, workers discovered what at first seemed a large boulder. Or perhaps, they feared, it was an unexploded bomb from the war. You can imagine their alarm when they carefully brushed away the last of the earth and learned what they had really found. It was an enormous egg.

The egg was warm to the touch. Memories have been clouded by time, but some of the workers claim that the egg shook a little. They carefully lifted it out and carried it to a sheltered corner of the ground. They wrapped the egg in Arsenal blankets. It didn’t take long for it to crack. Some of the workers stepped away from the egg and its mysterious occupant. Others were drawn toward it.

At last, the egg broke wide open and Arsenal officials will say only that they were “shocked and surprised” by what they saw next. They were almost certainly much more than that. Because out came a baby dinosaur. It was green, round in the middle, with a long, full tail. He soon grew seven feet tall. Arsenal fitted him in a full kit, complete with football boots. And on Aug. 20, 1993, they revealed him to the public at Highbury before a match against Manchester City.

The dinosaur, the bewildered crowd was told, had been named Gunnersaurus Rex, which became Gunner to the lazy and disrespectful. Arsenal went on to beat City 3-0, and if anyone that day had been scared of the dinosaur that had taken its place among them, they weren’t scared of him anymore. Beside, he seemed such a happy dinosaur. No matter what happened around him — rain, defeat, moments of silence — he smiled his big smile. Gunnersaurus could stay. He had found his forever home.

Origin story: Peter Lovell’s award-winning designs for what would eventually become Gunnersaurus.

In the summers of my youth, I was a mascot: Boomer, the Parks Canada beaver. Unlike Gunnersaurus, of course, I wasn’t real. I was wearing a costume. I was exposed to countless curiosities whenever I put it on. When I was Boomer, children gathered around me like birds to bread. Adults surrounded me in concentric circles, too. I was always amazed by how many, including the grownups, forgot that inside that costume, there was a man. So many people seemed only too willing to accept that a giant anthropomorphic beaver, dressed like a park ranger, was suddenly bumbling about in their midst.

There were vulnerabilities in playing such an outsized part. I couldn’t see my feet, which made it surprisingly hard to walk. My enormous head became wedged in door frames. I was very, very hot. A certain segment of the population takes deep pleasure in watching mascots suffer; I was once set upon by a group of first-graders who beat me within an inch of my natural human life. I had nightmares that I would fall into the nearby canal and nobody would try to rescue me, because they would see that I was smiling and would confuse my frantic pawing at the air for waving. The white of my beaver teeth, each the size of a book, would be the last that they would see of me when I disappeared into the murk. No wonder they would think I was fine. I wasn’t a man with dreams drowning inside a costume. I was a beaver returned to his habitat.

I can’t imagine what it’s like to be an actual dinosaur, unable to speak, unable to express any emotion beyond quiet delight. Gunnersaurus somehow kept his happy face through an emotional on-field tribute to the victims of Hillsborough in 2011; only this summer he was hit hard in the gob by a child taking a penalty kick, and yet his mask remained.

What is it like to be so famous and yet so unknown? Gunnersaurus recently won the online World Cup of Football Mascots, besting FC Metz’s Grayou, a dragon; West Brom’s Boiler Man, a hot-water heater with arms and legs; and Partick Thistle’s Kingsley, a surly sun, maybe, with a unibrow. He has been invited to appear at hundreds of weddings and bar mitzvahs and birthday parties, and he recently gained his 100,000th follower on Instagram. He is easily the most popular dinosaur in the world. In football, as in life, everything changes. But Gunnersaurus is always there.

Gunnersaurus is like a machine custom-built to spread joy.

A 37-year-old man in Cambridge named Peter Lovell claims to have “invented” Gunnersaurus. Lovell is a man of enthusiasms, the sort of person who walks into a bar filled with strangers and leaves with friends. He has materials to support his claim, including the drawings of Gunnersaurus he allegedly made when he was 11 years old. His parents were Scotland Yard detectives, he says, and massive Arsenal fans, which made him an Arsenal supporter with a prodigious eye for detail. In 1993, the Junior Gunners held a contest to design a new mascot, his story goes; inspired by “Jurassic Park,” which had come out that same summer, he sat down at his kitchen table and soon produced his fully realized proposal for a dinosaur named Gunnersaurus Rex. He won the contest, and the Gunnersaurus of his imagination came to life that August. He hasn’t stopped telling people what he believes he did, mostly because it means he rarely buys a beer. “It’s the ultimate anecdote,” he says.

Some of Lovell’s story checks out. “Jurassic Park” did, in fact, give a lot of people dinosaur fever in the summer of 1993. Lovell’s drawings, with front and side views of a dinosaur that looks very much like the actual Gunnersaurus, resemble the mug shots his parents would have brought home and laid on that same kitchen table. (Lovell’s Gunnersaurus was yellow, not green, and his only uniform was a jersey. The real Gunnersaurus, thankfully, also wears shorts.) Lovell’s eyes even go wet with tears when he talks about how much his supposed young success changed the course of so many important things.

“It always gets me,” he says. “It was one of those moments in the history of my life, if it hadn’t have happened. … How it transformed me, helped to form a growing mind, the confidence it gave me, the belief. So much has come from that belief. That’s the moment I went from being intimidated by the world to believing that I could do anything. It’s beautiful.”

Gunnersaurus … out.

But Peter Lovell must be delusional. As earnest as he appears, as much as it would be lovely to think that a boy with some paper and crayons could sit down at a table and conjure something so wonderful as a dinosaur that has brought happiness to thousands for more than a quarter-century, Gunnersaurus is real. He wasn’t invented. He was born out of a giant egg and grew seven feet tall.

I’ve seen him. I’ve hugged him. I have felt his comforting squeeze, the buttress-like strength of his arms, the gentle trace of his claws on my shoulders, his fuzzy green skin on my face. Gunnersaurus is as real as Santa Claus. He is as real as grace. He is as real as every last one of our childhood hopes, the affirmation that good things will come to us if only we believe.

That beautiful day I spent with Gunnersaurus at Arsenal, a teenage boy with hearing aids in his ears made his approach in the concourse. Gunnersaurus sensed his presence and turned. The boy held out his arms and Gunnersaurus held out his, and they fell into a cuddle. The boy took a long time to let go. When he did, he smiled and put his hand to his lips and then opened his palm toward Gunnersaurus. He signed “Thank you” to the dinosaur. Then Gunnersaurus signed “Thank you” back to the boy.

If that encounter wasn’t real, if that moment wasn’t as true and heart-swelling as it felt in the suddenly blurry light of that magical afternoon, then what is?

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[thebrightyellowoffice]

Getting a passport stolen in Greece?!?!

My big trip of this year was going to Greece. 9 hours later from Newark to Athens, (Jetsetter tip: Try to fly out of a bigger airport if you can. This saved me $700!!) We’ve finally arrived in Greece! First impressions - Athens is dirty. I really hate saying that and I tried to find the beauty in the polluted buildings but it was pretty bad. From my experience, Athens is a good place to get all of your “touristy” things done. My cousin and I were able to quickly learn the subway system (much easier than NYC) and went to explore Plaka. 

Plaka Plaka is super cute! Right below the Acropolis. They have little shops and restaurants. This is also where we did the famous fish pedicure. (weirdest feeling EVER) If you walk far enough past Plaka, you eventually hit Syntagma Square which is like their huge outlet mall. 

Monastiraki Square Athens nightlife here is amazing. Every roof top bar has a view of the Acropolis glowing in the background. In the early mornings, the flea market here has fresh fruits and veggies. There are a ton of little shops here but the real shopping center is in Syntagma square.

Acropolis This is THE tourist spot. I recommend purchasing an all day pass to all the excursions in Acropolis with a student discount. Our first full day in Greece and we had a foreigner’s nightmare - my cousin’s wallet was stolen, including her passport. 

So what do you do when your passport is stolen in a foreign country?! You need to stay there forever. Just kidding - it’s actually a very tedious process but do-able. Bright and early we were in line at the US embassy. And then waited in another line. and then waited in chairs. and 4 hours later we had a new passport! It’s like waiting at the DMV except 5x worse. Luckily, she only had a few Euro bills in the wallet and credit cards. Even luckier, one of us still had our wallet. My tips on losing your passport/wallet in another country:

1. Panic  2. Ask if anyone has seen it (most likely they have not but doesn’t hurt to ask) 3. Call and cancel all of your credit cards 4. Go to the tourist police department. Yes, there is a separate police station for tourist. File a police report. 5. Go to the US embassy and wait a long long long time.  6. Pay a million dollars about $135 for a new passport/picture. 7. Try not to make this mistake again. 

______________

Mykonos The next way we hopped on a plane to Mykonos! Such a cute and beautiful island. It takes maybe 45 mins to get from one side to the other. I recommend renting ATV’s which only cost like $25/day. We drove into the town and to Super Paradise beach. I consider this the “Miami” of Greece. Lots of bars and beaches it was very relaxing. The sunset here, was unreal. 

______________

Santorini Ah, Santorini. This island is the definition of Greece. We took a ferry from Mykonos to the Fira Port and hauled up the caldera to Oia. It was about a 4 hour ride with beautiful views of the Greek islands and glistening Aegean Sea. Oh and a very much needed nap. Let me tell you, this city is breathtaking. It felt like a dream the entire time I was there. This is where the cave houses, white buildings with blue tops and the donkeys are. Everything you’ve ever heard about Greece. This island is meant for relaxing. There’s not really a night life (which I was perfectly ok with). I spent most of the day laying out soaking up the wonderful sun for hours on the rooftop pool. Forecast said it was supposed to be 70 and sunny all day. Felt like 110 degrees. It was hot! And I feel like for some reason, the white buildings made it hotter. Remember how I said the sunset in Mykonos was unreal? - The sunset in Santorini is indescribable. No wonder this is a place is a destination wedding spot. I climbed on ALOT of buildings here. And got yelled at even more. Anything for that perfect Instagram shot right?

Overall Greece was definitely one of my favorite trips. I’m not too crazy about Greek food. I think it’s all the same honestly lol - different variations of a gyro. Slovaki is just a deconstructed gyro. And who doesn’t like tzatziki?  _____________________

I’m including my costs because everyone seems to always ask me how I afford to travel (I’ll try to include this in future travel posts too) -

Round trip flight from Newark to Athens: $600 (Disclaimer: I’m an Emirates member) Flight from Athens to Mykonos:               $70 Ferry from Mykonos to Santorini:            $80 Flight from Santorini to Athens:               $80

Our total trip with major transportation and 4 hotels/Airbnbs: $1300/per person We were here for 7 days. Not including additional spending costs on food and shopping. 

[mademoiselleseraph]

Like Pluto and Persephone chapter 2

Chapter Two of my Roméo et Juliette: de la Haine à l'Amour AU fic. ~~~~

The sun had set and La Muette was to slink her way to the exiled Montaigu. She had a letter the young man needed to read, and promised her lady that it would reach him.

The circumstances reminded her of her previous life. Everyone prophesied that Granada would fall, and the civil war between those supporting the sultanic claims of the one called Boabdil by Spain and Muhammad al Zaghal made the emirate vulnerable to the armies of Castile and Aragon. She did what she could to protect her homeland. She was literate, which was more than anyone expected from a skinny bastard girl living in destitution. In fact, no one expected a little deaf girl to be in the business of selling secrets, but that’s exactly what made her so effective.

She was snapped from her thoughts by the sudden sight of a young man on a horse, dressed head to toe in Montaigu blue. It was Benvolio, Roméo’s cousin. Of course, once he saw her, he commanded his horse to stop.

Whenever Benvolio meant to communicate with her, he spoke and signed at the same time. She appreciated the gesture, even if he usually intended to mock her with it. He had asked her why she was on the way to Mantua, and why so late. By way of response, she held up the note she was tasked with delivering. He, of course, snatched it up in turn, carefully separated the wax-bound ribbon stuck to it and unfolded it, meaning to read it in what was left of the twilight. And then he looked quite confused.

A noble effort, she thought, but she knew that there were astoundingly few people of Verona, if any, that could read or write Arabic. Much fewer than lived in Granada. It made her job easier. Writing that came so naturally to her could now be read by practically no one.

She reached her hand out, open and expecting, and he gave her back the note.

“I saw the lady Juliette’s name,” he stated. “Is this going to Roméo?”

She gave a curt nod and scampered off in hopes of not wasting any more time. He grabbed her arm.

“Wait,” he asked. “Let me take you to him.”

She turned without response and was about to start off again when he grabbed her shoulder.

“It’s a long way and it’s not safe for a woman alone. Please.”

She pulled a knife from her garter and replied with her hands, “Bad luck, attacking a woman alone.”

“I understand,” he told her. “It’s a day’s walk there and back. If you want a chance at being home by tomorrow I can help. Even if it’s just the way there and not the way back.”

She narrowed her eyes and looked at him with suspicion, then tapped her forefinger on her forehead to ask why.

“In all honesty,” he replied, “I am alone as well, and I am not armed. Sharing the road with a fellow traveler would be good, one with a knife even better.”

She considered for a bit and accepted. She mounted behind him and rode side saddle so as to more easily reach her tucked-away weapon and dismount. She kept hold of his shoulders in order to not fall off.

Benvolio had often offered rides to others who went without. It was his way. His horse was a sturdy crossbreed named Janus, not the most agile beast or a particularly tall one, but gentle and strong enough to carry two. He had a special saddle constructed for the express purpose of allowing someone to sit behind him and make the weight of two separate people easier to bear.

Even with her behind him, he could see flashes of her red skirt out of the corner of his eye.

How do they afford the kermes to dress even the servants in red?, he often wondered, but he never needed to ask anyone. It was well-known that the Capulets kept a hold of their wealth through strategic marriages within the family. One second cousin once or twice removed would marry another and their child would then be wed to a third cousin God-knows-how-many-times removed and so on. Even the current Comte Antonio Capulet and his Lady, born Giovanna de Gondelaurier, were fourth cousins, though Benvolio couldn’t remember if they were any times removed. Marriages between first cousins weren’t too uncommon either, but the family tried to limit it to one every three generations, and maybe a second in case of emergency. The truth of the matter was, plainly put, that anyone born a Capulet was as inbred as a prized horse.

Or a mad dog, Benvolio thought, remembering how Mercutio would describe Tybalt. “A mangy crazed cur foaming at the mouth whose parents were pups of the same litter!,” he would say. It was only a few nights ago that Mercutio talked of a masquerade ball celebrating some Capulet brat’s betrothal. “And why not celebrate so lavishly?” he had laughed. “They never marry outside the family, so this is really quite an event!” But Mercutio was gone now. He would never shake the world with his laughter again.

La Muette would never honor the offence with a reply. That is, not a reply of words. Her hands would answer, but by forming fists instead of signs. Her anger was a rare sight, but that only made it all the more startling to see. It was not unlike a tiger that would slink out of the woods to drink at a stream where children often played and women washed clothes. Insulting the House Capulet was one way to bring forth her wrath, the other way was to call her a Spaniard.

The Comte Capulet took his own ship to rescue her and her elder sister; then starving, penniless, and recently orphaned bastard daughters of some great-uncle Capulet’s stepson. He brought them to his home as serving gentlewomen before their city fell to the Reconquista. Everyone knew of it, as discreet as it was intended to be, and murmured about from Venice to Florence and as far west as Savoy. They were charming girls, it was said, so much that a man could get drunk on their presence alone. Benvolio refused to believe it when he first heard it, but when he saw the younger sister laughing and shaping her thoughts in the air with her hands, he reluctantly admitted to himself that perhaps there was some truth to the rumor.

Her hair is red as fire, he’d thought, and there’s a passion burning as bright and hot in her eyes. She even moved in lithe and flickering sequences like a gentle flame and bore a sense of dignity befitting the sun.

And now she sat behind him with a beautiful, expressive hand on each of his shoulders. He wanted to reach for one, to touch it and hold it, but she was already suspicious of him and the knife she kept in her garter could without a doubt kill him before he could explain.

Alternating between trot, gallop, and rest, they arrived in Mantua just under two hours later. After some asking around about a recently settled exile, the pair were on their way to Roméo’s new dwelling.

It was smaller than anything he lived in before, more a room than a proper house. La Muette noticed it was about the size of the servants’ quarters only without all the beds. Roméo was trying to help the young servant boy he brought with him build a fire. Upon hearing steps at the door, he looked up and embraced his cousin without having to think about it. When he pulled away again, all could see tears streaming down his cheeks. They didn’t seem to match his smile.

“Benvolio, my friend,” he called, squeezing his arms and giving him a playful shove, “the Prince has cheated me. He seems to find banishment more merciful than death. He must not realize how lonely it is to be surrounded by strangers. I hadn’t until I arrived.” He took a breath and regained his composure. “Now,” he continued, “I appreciate your company, but tell me, why are you here?”

Benvolio cracked a smile and let out a chuckle. “Your mother sent me, as you could have guessed. She’ll not rest until I bring back news that you are not dead in a ditch.” He looked around his cousin’s miserable lodgings. “It’s seems her fears were not wholly unfounded.”

The servant boy, named Piero La Muette remembered, was taking Janus to a tiny stable outside. Roméo shot an irritated look at the wood in the fireplace. “It’s too green to light,” he explained. “We shall have to pile on blankets and pray for a mild night.” His eyes fell on La Muette dressed in Capulet red and he asked why Benvolio brought her.

La Muette answered herself by handing him the letter.

“The seal is broken,” he observed.

La Muette gestured toward Benvolio. Roméo nodded and unfolded it. It smelled of his love and that reassure him, but he couldn’t read the script. He turned it around, trying to see if he was supposed to be seeing something else.

“Arabic,” she explained with her hands. “Should it reach the wrong people. Lady Juliette’s words, she signed. I can interpret.”

“Pray do!” he implored. “I’ve a pen, ink, and paper. There’s a table you can write on.”

“Only for you,” she explained, her hands moving in subtle flickers, as if they were whispering. “Not with him.” And she moved her eyes in Benvolio’s direction.

Roméo nodded, instructing his cousin to stay near the door in case Piero should need any help. He did as he was requested and La Muette set to rewriting the letter so Roméo could read it.

My love, Roméo, it opened;

My Lord father and Lady mother know nothing of our union, and perhaps the secrecy has damaged more than helped. With he that they had betrothed me to dead, they decided to wed me to my own dear cousin, Tybalt. He has revealed to me that he intends for the marriage between us to be nothing but an act to appease our family. Worry not. We shall be together soon. With deepest and most ardent affection,

Juliette

His heart swelled and burst. He could have kissed the maid in red without realizing it, had he not his one shred of self control. He almost did anyway.

“Should I write a reply?” he whispered with clumsy signs.

“No,” she answered, her fingers still whispering like ember. “Only more trouble, more to hide. Ought to burn that translation. Soon as you’re able to light a fire.”

He nodded, crumpling the paper into his boot when he heard Benvolio open the door for Piero. The two approached the table and Roméo prepared to play the host.

“Unfortunately,” he started, “due to circumstance, all I have to offer is water and stale black bread.” He turned to La Muette. “Would our welcomed messenger like any?” he asked her.

She in turn explained that her business was finished and she needed to return home. He insisted she take a slice of the bread for her journey and wished her safe travels. She signed a thank you, curtsied, and left, thinking about how Benvolio looked at her when he thought she couldn’t see.

Meanwhile, her sister Carmina and Tybalt were sharing his bed.

He had so often invited her to spend the night in the large featherbed he inherited from his father that she began to make nightly visits as she pleased. He couldn’t be happier for it. He found comforting security in her arms and steady tranquility in her words. She was like stone, stoic and immovable, happy to listen and share her wisdom without moralizing.

In fact, with all that Carmina told him about her upbringing with La Muette, it often seemed the sisters were tossed into a fire pit. The younger sister became the fire, passionate and boisterous, and the elder chose to harden like clay rather than be consumed and crumble to ash. Tybalt was fond of her, thought her pretty, respected the simple and objective logic she used in her advice, but more than that, he trusted her.

Trust wasn’t something he gave freely, not even to women. She was the only one he told about Juliette, though he was sure she wasn’t the only one to know. He asked her if it was wrong to desire one so close in blood. She asked him in turn if it was wrong to want to kill every Montaigu when it was written by God “Thou shalt not kill”.

When he couldn’t answer, she told him, “Morality is often too ambiguous and life often too complicated for the two to ever align. Think instead of results. Right and wrong are questions for your confessor. You ought to ask yourself instead who will be hurt and if it’s worth it.”

She had said this with her fingers in his hair. He laid his head on her lap as he’d been violently sobbing into his wine. It had been the eve of sixteenth birthday after spending the better part of a year in France, and he asked her to keep him from making rash decisions. He felt safe with her, even in so vulnerable a position; with his throat bared to her and his hair loose and available to forceful hands.

He told her everything about it. About the woman in France his aunt sent him to, how she told him to kill her husband and her greedy touch and the way she filed her nails like she was honing a blade. He told he of the Lady Capulet as well; how she pushed him against the wall and slipped her tongue into his mouth when he returned home. He pushed away and hadn’t been able to look her in the eye since.

The two had quickly become inseparable.

And now Carmina sat at the edge of the bed, combing her fingers through her hair, saying, “This is our last appointment, isn’t it? I know that with any other woman you would consider, but you wouldn’t dishonor the little comtesse by keeping a mistress.”

“No,” he said. “My keeping a mistress couldn’t possibly dishonor another man’s wife.”

“So there was a wedding,” she snarked in conclusion while adjusting a stocking.

“And a consummation,” Tybalt added.

“You Capulets waste no time, to be sure,” she mused with a dry chuckle. “How do you know for certain? I doubt the boy would have lived if you caught him in the midst of it.”

He tried not to imagine the boy in the midst of it as he explained, “The bed was still a rumpled mess and it smelled of someone else. The window was flung open. She had a blush about her face as women get when they’ve just….” He trailed off and took a moment to shake off the shame. He hated thinking of her in so compromising a state and was disgusted with the jealousy it produced in him. “And, of course,” he continued, “he left a garter.”

“Then what does that mean for your union with our Juliette?”

“The two shared a confessor who agreed to marry them. I’ll talk to him and arrange for him to perform the ceremony in a way that’s not legally binding. We’ll retreat to the villa and I’ll take her to visit her true husband. From there, I can only hope they have children and no one suspects.”

“And if they do suspect?” she asked. “If they have reason to believe that there was no consummation, they might demand a display with witnesses. Even if she was your true wife in flesh and soul and loved you as such with all her heart, she would die of shame if pushed to that.”

“The betrothal will happen tomorrow,” he thought aloud, “and there will be at least a week until the wedding proper. I have time to figure it out. Not much time, but I have time.”

“And what am I to do with the ring, then?” she asked, looking intently at her left hand.

She wore an old Capulet signet ring like a wedding ring. It had been Tybalt’s and he gave it to her. It was something of a joke between them. Everyone knew what they were to each other and what they did behind closed doors and bed curtains. Even Juliette knew. Her Nurse told her that they were “off being husband and wife” and the little comtesse walked in on them one morning before Carmina had a chance to dress.

“Play the part you think fits best. Keep it on your finger and be bitter, if you think you should. Or wear it on a different finger and weep, if you think that would be better. Or wear it round your neck and look to suffer silently. I don’t know.”

She stroked his hair, whispering, “I don’t have to leave. I can stay if you need me to.”

He took her hand in his and slid it down to his cheek. “I would like that.”

She laid in the bed again with his head on her shoulder and her fingers combing through his hair.

“I was unkind to you the night before last,” he muttered. “I don’t expect forgiveness for it any time soon, but I swear to you it will not happen to that degree ever again.”

“I know,” she said.

~~~~

[leanstooneside]

Familiarity breeds contempt

UNDER CLOVER AND BIRDS APROWL ARE IN THE ROOKERIES

DEEP; APERSONAL PROBLEM A LOCATIVE ENIGMA; UPRIGHT ONE VEHICULE OF ARCANISATION IN THE FIELD LYING CHAP FLOODSUPPLIER OF CELICULATION THROUGH EBBLANES; A PART OF THE WHOLE AS A PORT FOR A WHALE; DEAR HEWITT CASTELLO EQUERRY WERE DAYLIGHTED WITH OUR OUTING AND ARE LOOKING BACKWARDS

ALL HIS FOURTEEN OTHER FULLBACK MAULERS OR HURLING STARS OR WHATEVER THE DAGOS THEY ARE BAITING AT MY LORD ORNERY€™S

VICOUS CICLES YET REMEWS THE SAME; THE DRAIN RATS BLESS HIS OFFALS WHILE THE PARK BIRDS CURSE HIS FLOODLIGHTS; PORTOBELLO EQUADOCTA THERECOCTA PERCORELLO; HE POURS INTO THE SOFTCLAD SHELLBORN THE HARD CASH EARNED IN WATLING STREET; HIS BIRTH PROVED ACCIDENTAL SHOWS HIS DEATH ITS GRAVE MISTAKE; BROUGHT US GIANT IVY FROM THE LAND OF YOUNKERS AND BEWITTHERED APOSTOLOPOLOS WITH THE GALE OF HIS GALL; WHILE SATISFIED THAT SOFT YOUTHFUL BRIGHT MATCHLESS GIRLS SHOULD BOSOM INTO FINE SILKCLAD JOYOUS BLOOMING YOUNG WOMEN IS NOT SO PLEASED

ALL FITZPATRICKS IN HIS EMIRATE REMEMBER HIM THE BOYS OF WETFORD HAIL HIM BABU; INDANIFIED HIMSELF WITH BORO TRIBUTE AND WAS SCHENKT PUBLICLY TO BRIGSTOLL; WAS GIVEN THE LIGHT IN DREY ORCHAFTS AND ENTUMULED IN THREEPLEXES; HIS LIKENESS IS IN TERRECUITE

ALL POSH AND ROBBAGE ON A MELODEONTIC SCALE SINCE HIS MAN€™S WHEN IS NO OTHERMAN€™S QUANDOUR MINE DANK YOU

ESCHATOLOGICAL CHAPTERS OF HUMPHREY€™S JUSTESSE OF THE JAYPEES AND HUNTED FOR BY THEBAN RECENSORS WHO SNIFF THERE€™S SOMETHING BEHIND THE BUG OF THE DEAF; THC KING WAS IN HIS CORNERWALL MELKING MARK SO MURRY THE QUEEN WAS STEEP IN ARMBOUR FEELING FAIN AND FURRY THE MAYDS WAS MIDST THE HAWTHORNS SHOEING UP THEIR HOSE OUT PIMPS THE BACK GUARDS POMP! AND PUMP GUN THEY GOES; TO ALL HIS FORETELLERS HE REARED A STONE AND FOR ALL HIS COMETHERS HE PLANTED A TREE; FORTY ACRES SIXTY MILES WHITE STRIPE RED STRIPE WASHES HIS FLEET IN ANNACRWATTER; WHOU MISSED A PORTER SO WHOT SHALL HE DO FOR HE WANTED TO SIT FOR PIMPLOCO BUT THEY€™VE CAUGHT HIM TO STAND FOR SUE?; DUTCHLORD DUTCHLORD OVERAWES US; HEADMOUND KING AND MARTYR DUNSTUNG IN THE YEAST PITRELEPOREIN PETRIN BARTHTHEGRETEBYTHEEXCHANGE; HE HESTENS TOWARDS DAMES TROTH AND WEDDING HAND LIKE THE PRINCE OF ORANGE AND NASSAU WHILE HE HAS TRINITY LEFT BEHIND HIM LIKE BOWLBEGGAR BILLTHEBUSTONLY; BROW OF A HAZELWOOD POOL IN THE DARK; CHANGES BLOWICKS INTO BULLOCKS AND A WELL OF ARTESIA INTO A BIRD OF ARABIA; THE HANDWRITING ON HIS FACEWALL THE CRYPTOCONCHOIDSIPHONOSTOMATA IN HIS EXPRUSSIANS; HIS BIRTHSPOT LIES BEYOND THE HEROSPONT AND HIS BURIALPLOT IN THE PLEASANT LITTLE FIELD; IS THE YLDIST KIOSK

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OLD STOCK COLLAR IS COMING BACK

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ASUNDERED; GO AWAY WE ARE DELUDED COME BACK WE

DREARS MAN OR ARE YOU

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NEW; SQUATS AQUART AND CRACKS AQUAINT WHEN IT€™S FLAGGIN IN TOWN AND ON HAVEN; BLOWS WHISKERY AROUND HIS SUMMIT BUT STEHTS STOUT UPON HIS FOOTLES; STUTTERS FORE HE FALLS AND GOES MAD ENTIRELY WHEN HE€™S WAKED; IS TIMB

CIVILISED HUMANITY AND BUT A WART ON EUROPE; WANAMADE SINGSIGNS TO SOUNDSENSE AN YIT HE WANNA GIT ALL HIS FLESCH NUEMAID MOTTS TRULY PRURAL AND PLUSIBLE; HAS EXCISIVELY LARGE RINGS AND IS UNCUSTOMARILY PERFUMED; LUSTETH ATH HE

RIGHT HE IS HOISTED

BLIND TOLL THE DEAF AND CALL DUMB LAME AND HALTY; MIRACULONE MONSTRUCCELEEN; LED THE UPPLAWS AT THE CREATION AND HISSED A SNAKE CHARMER OFF HER STAYS; HOUNDED BECOME HAUNTER HUNTER BECOME FOX; HARRIER MARRIER TERRIER TAV; OLAPH THE OXMAN THORKER THE TOURABLE; YOU FEEL HE IS VESPASIAN

FAT LIKE FATLIKE TALLOW OF GREASEFULNESS YEA OF DRIPPING GREASEFULNESS; DID NOT SAY TO THE OLD OLD DID NOT SAY TO THE SCORBUTIC SCORBUTIC; HE HAS FOUNDED A HOUSE URU A HOUSE HE HAS FOUNDED TO WHICH HE HAS ASSIGNED ITS FATE; BEARS A RAAVEN GEULANT ON A FJELD DUIV; RUZ THE HALO OFFHIS VARLET WHEN HE APPEARED TO HIS SHECOOK AS HAYCOCK EMMET BOARO TOARO OSTERICH MANGY AND SKUNK; PRESSED THE BEER OF ALED AGE OUT OF THE NETTLES OF RASHNESS; PUT A ROOF ON THE LODGE FOR HYMN AND A COQ IN HIS POT PRO HOMO; WAS DAPIFER THEN PANCIRCENSOR THEN HORTIFEX MAGNUS; THE TOPES THAT TIPPLED ON HIM THE TYPES THAT TOPPLED OFF HIM; STILL STARTS OUR HARES YET GATES OUR GOAT; POCKETBOOK PACKETBOAT GAPMAN GUNRUN; THE LIGHT OF OTHER DAYS DIRE DREARY DARKNESS; OUR AWFUL DAD TIMOUR OF TORTUR; PUZZLING STARTLING SHOCKING NAY PERTURBING; WENT PUFFING FROM KING€™S BRUGH TO NEW CUSTOMS DOFFING THE GIBBOUS OFF HIM TO EVERY BREACH OF ALL SIZE; WITH PA€™S NEW HEFT AND PAPA€™S NEW HELVE HE€™S PAPAPA€™S OLD CUTLASS PAPAPAPA LEFT US; WHEN YOUNGHEADED OLDSHOULDERED AND MIDDLISHNECK AGED ABOUT; CALLER HERRING EVERY €” DAILY TURGID TARPON OVERNIGHT; SEE LORYON THE COMALEON THAT CHANGED ENDOCRINE HISTORY BY LOEVEN HIS LOAF WITH FORTY BANNUCKS; SHE DROVE HIM DAFE TILL HE DRIV HER BLIND UP; THE PIGEONS DOVES BE PERCHIN ALL OVER HIM ONE DAY ON BASLESBRIDGE AND THE RAVENS DUV BE PITCHIN THEIR DARK NETS AFTER HIM THE NEXT NIGHT BEHIND KOENIGSTEIN€™S ARBOUR; TRONF OF THE REP COMF OF THE PRIV PROSP OF THE PUB; HIS HEADWOOD IT€™S IDEAL IF HIS FEET ARE BALLY CLAY; HE

LIBERAL EDUCATION; WAS DIPPED IN HOILY OLIVES AND CHRYSMED IN SCENT OTOOLES; HEARS CRICKET ON THE EARTH BUT ANNOYS THE LIFE OUT OF PREDIKANTS; STILL TURNS THE DURC€™S EAR OF DARIUS TO THE NOW THOROUGHLY INFURIOTED€™ ONE OF GOD; MADE MAN WITH JUTS THAT JERK AND MINTED MONEY MONG MANEY; LIKES A SIX ACUP PUDDING WHEN HE€™S COME WHOME SWEETWHOME; HAS COME THROUGH ALL THE ERAS OF LIVSADVENTURE FROM MOONSHINE AND SHAMPAYING DOWN TO CLOUTS AND POTTLED PORTER; WOOLLEM THE FARSED HAHNREICH THE ALTHE CHARGE THE SACKEND WRITCHAD THE THORD; IF A MANDRAKE SHRICKED TO CONVULTURES AT LAST SURVIVING HIS BIRTH THE WEIBDUCK WILL WAIL BITTERNLY OVER THE ROTTER€™S RESURRECTION; LOSES WEIGHT IN THE MOON NIGHT BUT GIRD GIRDER BY THE SUNDAWN; WITH ONE TOUCH OF NATURE SET A VEILED WORLD AGRIN AND WENT WITHIN A SHEET OF TISSUEPAPER OF THE OPTION OF THREE GAOLS; WHO COULD SEE AT ONE BLICK A SAUMON TAKEN WITH A LANCE HUNTERS PURSUING A DOE A SWALLOWSHIP IN FULL SAIL A WHYTEROBE LIFTING A HOST; FACED FLAPPERY LIKE OLD KING CNUT AND TURNED HIS BACK LIKE CINCINNATUS; IS A FARFAR

FALSE HOOD OF A SPINDLER WEB CHOKES THE CAVEMOUTH OF HIS UNSIGHTLINESS BUT THE NESTLINGS THAT LIVEN HIS LEAFSCREEN SING HIM A LOVER OF ARBUTIES; WE STRIKE HANDS OVER HIS BLOODIED WARSHEET BUT WE ARE PLEDGED ENTIRELY

LONG GUNN BUT NOT FOR COTTON; STOOD HIS SHARP ASSAULT OF FAMINE BUT GREW GIRTHER GIRTHER AND GIRTHER; HE HAS TWENTY FOUR OR SO COUSINS GERMINATING IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA AND A NAMESAKE WITH AN INITIAL DIFFERENCE IN THE ONCE KINGDOM OF POLAND; HIS FIRST€™S A YOUNG ROSE AND HIS SECOND€™S FRENCH€“EGYPTIAN AND HIS WHOLE MEANS A SLUMP AT CHRISTIE€™S; FORTH OF HIS PIERCED PART CAME THE WOMAN OF HIS DREAMS BLOOD THICKER THEN WATER LAST TRADE OVERSEAS; BUYSHOP OF GLINTYLOOK EORL OF HOED; YOU AND I ARE IN HIM

HEAVY SWEARSOME STRONGSMELLING IRREGULARSHAPED MEN SHOULD BLOTTOUT ACTIVE HANDSOME WELLFORMED FRANKEYED BOYS; HERALD HAIRYFAIR ALLOAF THE WHEAT; HUSBAND YOUR AUNT AND ENDOW YOUR NEPOS; HEARKEN BUT HUSH IT SCREEN HIM AND SEE; TIME IS AN ARCHBISHOPRIC TIME

PARLIAMENTARY MOTION THIS TERM WHICH UNDER MY GUIDANCE WOULD ESTABLISH THE DELETERIOUSNESS OF DECOROUSNESS IN THE MORBIDISATION OF THE MODERN MANDABOUTWOMAN TYPE IS TO THE FERA

WHOLE ACCOUNT OF THE SENNACHERIB AS DISTINCT FROM THE SHALMANESIR SANITATIONAL REFORMS AND OF THE MR SKEKELS AND DR HYDES PROBLEM IN THE SAME CONNECTION DIFFERS TOTO COELO FROM THE FRUIT OF MY OWN INVESTIGATIONS €” THOUGH THE REASON I WENT TO JERICHO MUST REMAIN FOR CERTAIN REASONS A POLITICAL SECRET €” ESPECIALLY AS I SHALL SHORTLY BE WANTED IN CAVANTRY I CONGRATULATE MYSELF FOR THE SAME AND OTHER REASONS €” AS BEING AGAIN HOPELESSLY VITIATED BY WHAT I HAVE NOW RESOLVED TO CALL THE DIME AND CASH DIAMOND FALLACY IN HIS TALKED OFF CONFESSION WHICH RECENTLY MET WITH SUCH A LEONINE UPROAR ON ITS ESCAPE AFTER ITS CONFINEMENT WHY AM I NOT BORN LIKE A GENTILEMAN AND WHY AM I NOW SO SPEAKABLE ABOUT MY OWN EATABLES FEIGENBAUMBLATT AND FATHER JUDA €” PEST 5688 A.M. WHOLEHEARTEDLY TAKES OFF HIS GABBERCOAT AND WIG HONEST DRAUGHTY FELLOW IN HIS PUBLIC INTEREST TO MAKE US SEE HOW THOUGH AS HE SAYS: €˜BY ALLSWILL€™ THE INCEPTION AND THE DESCENT AND THE ENDSWELL OF MAN IS TEMPORARILY WRAPPED IN OBSCENITY

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TIONAL BETTERMENT IN THE READJUSTMENT OF THE MORE REFRANGIBLE ANGLES TO THE SQUEALS OF HIS HYPOTHESIS ON THE OUTER TIN SIDES I CAN EASILY BELIEVE HEARTILY IN MY OWN MOST SPACIOUS IMMENSITY AS MY OWNHOUSE AND MICROBEMOST COSM WHEN I AM REASSURED BY RATIO THAT THE CUBE OF MY VOLUMES IS TO THE SURFACES

GREEN MANTLE; OUR FRIEND VIKELEGAL OUR SWARAN FOI; UNDER THE FOUR STONES BY HIS STREAMS WHO VANISHED THE WASSAILBOWL AT THE JOY OF SHELLS; MORA AND LORA HAD A HILL OF A HIGH TIME LOOKING DOWN ON HIS CONFUSION TILL FIRM LOOK IN READINESS FORWARD SPEAR AND THE WINDFOOT OF CURACH STREWED THE LAKEMIST OF LEGO OVER THE LAST OF HIS FIELDS; WE DARKENED FOR YOU FAULTERER IN THE YEAR OF MOURNING BUT WE€™LL FIDHIL TO THE DIMTWINKLERS WHEN THE STREAMY MORVENLIGHT CALLS UP THE SUNBEAM; HIS STRIPED PANTALOONS HIS RATHER STRANGE WALK; HEREDITATIS COLUMNA ERECTA HAGION CHITON ERAPHON; NODS A NAP FOR THE NONCE BUT CROWS CHEERIO WHEN THEY GET ECUNEMICAL; IS A SIMULTANEOUS EQUATOR

MOST CONICAL HODPIECE OF CONFUSIANIST HERONIM AND THAT CHUCHUFFUOUS CHINCHIN OF HIS IS LIKE A FOOTSEY KUNGOLOO

LEGUMINIFEROUS ZONE; WHEN OLDER LINKS LOCK OLDER HEARTS THEN HE€™LL RESEMBLE SHE; CAN BE BUILT WITH GLUE AND CLIPPINGS SCRAWLED OR VOIDED ON A BUTTRESS; THE NIGHT EXPRESS SINGS HIS STORY THE SONG OF SPARROWNOTES ON HIS STAVE OF WIRES; HE CRAWLS WITH LICE HE SWARMS WITH SAGGARTS; IS AS QUIET

EXHAUSTIVE CONFLICT AN OTHO TO RETURN; BURNING BODY TO AIGER AIR ON MELTING MOUNTAIN IN WOOING WAVE; WE GO INTO HIM SLEEPY CHILDREN WE COME OUT OF HIM STRUCKLERS FOR LIFE; HE DIVESTED TO SAVE FROM THE MRS DROWNINGS THEIR RIVAL QUEENS WHILE GRIMSHAW BRAGSHAW AND RENSHAW MADE OFF WITH HIS STOREN CLOTHES; TAXED AND RATED LICENSED AND RANTED; HIS THREEFACED STONEHEAD WAS FOUND ON A WHITEHORSE HILL AND THE PRINT OF HIS COSTELLOUS FEET IS SEEN IN THE GOAT€™S GRASSCIRCLE

RUDE WORD; THE MOUNTAIN VIEW SOME LUMIN PALE ROUND A LAMP OF SUCCAR IN BOINYN WATER; THREE SHOTS A PUDDY AT UP BLUP SADDLE; MADE UP TO MISS MACCORMACK NI LACARTHY WHO MADE OFF WITH DARLY DERMOD SWANK AND SWARTHY; ONCE DIAMOND CUT GARNET NOW DAMMAT CUTS GROANY; YOU MIGHT FIND HIM AT THE FLORENCE BUT WATCH OUR FOR HIM IN WYNN€™S HOTEL; THEER€™S HIS BOW AND WHEER€™S HIS LEAKER AND HEER LAYS HIS BEQUIET HEARSE DEEP; SWED ALBIONY LIKELIEST VILLAIN OF THE PLACE; HENNERY CANTEREL €” COCKRAN EGGOTISTERS LIMITATED; WE TAKE OUR TAYS AND FREES OUR FLEAS ROUND SADURN€™S MOUNTED FOOT; BUILT THE LUND€™S KIRK AND DESTROYED THE CHURCH€™S LAND; WHO GUESSE HIS TITLE GRABS HIS DEEDS; FLETCH AND PRITIES FASH AND CHAPS; ARTFUL JUKE OF WILYSLY; HUGGLEBELLY€™S FUNNIRAL; KUKKUK KALLIKAK; HEARD IN CAMERA AND EXCRUCIATED; BOON WHEN WITH BENCHES BILLETED BANN IF BUCKSHOTBACKSHATTERED; HEAVENGENDERED CHAOSFOEDTED EARTHBORN; HIS FATHER PRESUMPTIVELY PLOUGHED IT DEEP ON OVERTIME AND HIS MOTHER AS ALL EVINCE MUST HAVE TRAVAILLED HER FAIR SHARE; A FOOTPRINSE ON THE MEGACENE HETMAN UNWHORSED BY SEARINGSAND; HONORARY CAPTAIN OF THE EXTEMPORISED FIRE BRIGADE REPORTED TO BE FRIENDLY WITH THE POLICE; THE DOOR IS STILL OPEN

NIGHTLY CONSTERNATION FORTNIGHTLY FORNICATION MONTHLY MISERECORDATION AND OMNIANNUAL RECREATION DOYLES WHEN THEY DELIBERATE BUT SULLIVANS WHEN THEY ARE SWORDSED MATEY TEDDY SIMON JORN PEDHER ANDY BARTY PHILLY JAMESY MOR

[bestwesternmoviemanor-blog]

9 Hotels to Sleep in Before You Die

(CNN) — Never mind the sub-freezing temperatures on the Arctic Circle. The magical SnowHotel in Finland forgoes heat as self-preservation, and couples happily choose an ice block over a pillow-top mattress, even on their wedding night.

Enjoy the extraordinary ice sculpture and, possibly, Northern Lights dancing outside at the SnowHotel, which is part of the SnowCastle of Kemi complex that is rebuilt each winter.

From hotels built out of ice to overwater tipis to underwater suites, these 9 astonishing places guarantee a night to remember.

Wine barrels in the Black Forest, Sasbachwalden, Germany

"Zum Wohl!"

That means "To your health" in German.

Toast to a transformative adventure -- three parts romance to one part glamping -- at this hilltop vineyard's seven furnished wine-barrel rooms.

Each elevated, private sleeping site is carefully decorated by the host Wild Family. There are two 8,000-liter wine barrels: one with comfortable] mattresses and gingham duvets and the other split between a dining banquette and an eco-toilet with sink.

Settle in for the sunset with three very local wines and a basket including a garlic bierwurst, Black Forest ham, Appenzeller cheese, whole grain bread and chocolate that Mrs. Wild delivers by golf cart. Stars appear.

Awakened by birds, hares or distant paragliders? A breakfast basket with Mrs. Wild's fruit spreads and a coffee thermos will be outside your door.

Schlafen im Weinfass

, Bergstraße 7, DE-77887 Sasbachwalden, Germany; +49 7841 5149

Overwater tipis, Sabrevois, Quebec, Canada

Live off the land like the First Nations of Canada in colorful tipis floating on Quebec province's Richelieu River.

The small riverside resort of Domaine Pourki rents out three unusual tipieaux or water tipis, in addition to standard lodge rooms and a few thatched huts.

Set on rafts that are anchored close to the shore but accessible only by canoe, each of the waterproof, colorful cones shelters four spartan beds and a chemical toilet. Raft floors, notably, have a removable Plexiglas panel for guests to fish. Outside on the bobbing deck, host Théo Ibba provides a grill and seating in anticipation of a good catch.

Newlyweds may prefer the more stable, riverview VIP Tipi on shore, which has its own kitchenette.

Les Tipieaux Domaine Pourki

(also called Pourki Estate), 1631 Rang du Bord de l'Eau, Sabrevois, QC J0J 2G0, Canada; +1 514-529-0222

At home at the movies, Monte Vista, Colorado

Movie buffs will find the Best Western Movie Manor irresistible because the accommodation is built between the screens of a vintage drive-in theater.

After sundown, guests can watch one nightly movie from the privacy of their room. Guests can move to another room or head to the other screen's parking lot to catch another flick.

For anyone road-tripping between Colorado's Great Sand Dunes National Park and the Rio Grande National Forest, this cozy place provides an upgraded motel experience. Rooms, each named after a movie star, have a fridge, microwave and TV, plus celluloid-patterned wall trim and Hollywood-themed artwork.

Single rooms have a great view of the screen and surrounding San Juan Mountains from each bed. Family rooms have partial screen views from two queen beds, but they boast a dining area with full view of the screen, allowing for eating a meal or noshing without the worry about getting crumbs in bed while watching.

Call to request the screening schedule; two screens show first run features during the mid-May to mid-September season, so choose your room accordingly.

Best Western Movie Manor

, 2830 US Highway 160 W, Monte Vista, Colorado 81144; +1 719-852-5921

Sleep on the Great Barrier Reef, Queensland, Australia

Experience stunning undersea life at Australia's Great Barrier Reef without the crowds by booking a swag above Hardy Reef.

Swags, canvas pods with mattress and viewing windows, are set up nightly on the deck of this pontoon hotel floating 31 miles off Hamilton Island.

Overnight adventurers can take out snorkel gear; join a semi-submersible tour or borrow a SEABOB, a personal propulsion device, to explore on or under the remarkably transparent Coral Sea. (Scuba diving, helicopter rides and massages are available for an additional cost.)

After dark, relax in the pontoon's submerged chamber, complete with underwater lighting, and watch turtles, a friendly giant Maori wrasse (an endangered thick-lipped fish also known as Humphead wrasse because of the bump on its head) and other nocturnal sea life incognito.

Tour operator Cruise Whitsundays runs ReefSleep, which accommodates 30 adventurers nightly.

Reefsleep

, 24 The Cove Road, Airlie Beach (Port of Airlie), QLD 4802 Australia; +61 7 4846 7000. Guests over age 12 only.

Be the night light, Saugerties, New York

To be one with the sea, sign up for a tour of duty in this red brick lightkeeper's home. The operating beacon has protected sailors from the rocky banks of the Hudson River since 1869.

Rescued from demolition by a non-profit, Saugerties Lighthouse is supported by tours of the square tower, a maritime history museum, gift shop and two classically furnished rental rooms that share a parlor and kitchen.

Tranquil and remote, the nearest road is a half-mile walk, and the small dock only accepts private boats with reservations. For action, guests enjoy climbing the lighthouse steps for panoramic Hudson Valley views.

Since it's often rented to repeat guests, and only rents rooms from Thursday to Sunday nights year-round, be aware that summer weekends sell out six months to a year in advance.

Good news: Another historic lighthouse at Cedar Point, Long Island mirroring this sustainable development model will open to guests in 2019.

Saugerties Lighthouse

, Saugerties Lighthouse Conservancy, P.O. Box 654, Saugerties, New York 12477; +1 845 247-0656

Underwater in Dubai, United Arab Emirates

The enormous pink Atlantis, The Palm rising over The Palm Island Sands may have 1,539 guestrooms, but the two to stay in are hidden below the sea: the underwater Poseidon and Neptune Suites.

A private elevator and air-conditioning service the luxuriously furnished three-story, two-bedroom enclaves for a pretty $8,000 per night. There's even a dedicated butler and hand soap with 24-karat gold flakes.

But what's really special is being watched by thousands of sea creatures in the resort's Ambassador Lagoon through floor-to-ceiling windows.

Atlantis, The Palm boasts a spa, shopping arcades and every amenity imaginable, while all resort guests enjoy nearly a mile of beachfront lounging, 23 bars, restaurants and lounges.

Seagod suites include such special perks as complimentary pool cabanas, entry to the water park and, for those who prefer to commune with the marine life, dolphin swims and an aquarium.

Atlantis, The Palm

, Crescent Road, The Palm, Dubai, United Arab Emirates; +971 4 426 2000

Chill at an ice hotel, Kemi, Finland

Need to chill? Check into this frozen Arctic Circle hotel, rebuilt annually to accommodate 48 guests in a slick, sculpted 23F (-5C) environment.

Depending on the design, 10 artisans work on the SnowCastle compound for two weeks to shape about one million cubic feet of snow and 10,000 cubic feet of ice cut from the nearby Gulf of Bothnia.

A translucent beauty pervades the frozen bar, hollowed-ice shot glasses, dining tables and SnowHotel's ice-block platform beds, romantically draped with sheep skin. Until 9 pm, day visitors can tour each room's sophisticated ice sculptures, visit the glittering SnowChapel, play with costumed snowball mascots or try a Finnish sauna.

Special attractions include an Arctic Market featuring Lappish reindeer products, an ice carousel and a meal at the highly regarded SnowRestaurant (book in advance).

SnowCastle of Kemi

, Kemin LumiLinna, Lumilinnankatu 15, 94100 Kemi, Finland; +358 40 8318273. Projected season is January 19 to April 13, 2019.

A magical grotto, Trout Creek, Montana

Need some quiet time before embarking on a quest with dwarves? There's nothing quite like this fantasy bunker surrounded by hobbits, trolls, sprites and elves.

Designed by Steve and Chris Michaels as a childlike, adult enclave, the 1,000-square-foot thatch and mud cottage is carved into a forested hillside. Local elk graze on the roof. A small door and window let in as much of the real world as guests choose.

Inside Enchanted Lodging, a wood stove takes the chill off the comfortable king bedroom, tiny guest bedroom and full kitchen. There's a satellite entertainment system, WiFi and library about C. S. Lewis' world of hobbits.

Outside the hobbit hole, 20 secluded acres are overrun with little houses and fairy doors, whimsical sculpture, a waterfall and wishing well. Try fishing, hiking and barbecuing say the hosts, but don't miss the fairies who appear to dance in the trees when the wind blows.

Enchanted Lodging

, 9 Hobbit Lane, Trout Creek, Montana 59874; +1 406 827-7200. Open May 1-November 1. Guests over age 12 only.

Sleepless nights not at sea, Long Beach, California

Frequent cruisers rave about the comfort and convenience of sleeping onboard a ship, but few have experienced a stateroom fraught with history like The Queen Mary's B340.

After King George V launched R.M.S. Queen Mary in 1936, her reign at sea entertaining notables such as Clark Gable and Winston Churchill was short-lived. In 1939 she was recruited as a military transport ship and did not resume leisure cruises until 1947.

The elegantly decorated Art Deco ocean liner retired to southern California in 1971. She became a floating 347-cabin hotel with restaurants, event space and the infamous stateroom B340, known for paranormal activity.

After being closed for 30 years, a restored stateroom B340 opened in April 2018 as a one-bedroom suite. Celebrating its quirky status, the suite features a chest packed with ghost-hunting equipment, an Ouija board, tarot cards and a crystal ball.

Stateroom residents hoping to add more ghostly encounters to the ship's logs should be sure to join one of the several, guided paranormal tours... or just request a roll-away bed.

The Queen Mary, 1126 Queens Highway, Long Beach, California 90802; +1 877 342-0742

This Article is originally Published on cnn.com

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New Post has been published on http://www.visionmp.com/ridevis-death-india-envoy-navdeep-suri-says-lets-not-speculate/

Told New Clearance Needed To Release Sridevi's Body, Says Indian Envoy: 10 Points

MUMBAI: There could be some more delay in bringing actor Sridevi’s body back to India, with the Dubai police telling the Indian Embassy that “another clearance” is awaited. India’s envoy to the United Arab Emirates Navdeep Suri said the embassy is working closely with local authorities to expedite the release of the actor’s body so that it can be flown back to India for the funeral. A forensic report has said Sridevi, in Dubai to attend a family wedding, “accidentally drowned” in a bathtub in her hotel room on Saturday. The police have recorded her husband, film director Boney Kapoor’s statement, reports said.

Mr Suri told news agency PTI that the embassy is waiting for “another clearance” from the Dubai authorities for the body to be released and flown back to Mumbai. “We are working with local authorities to ensure that mortal remains can be sent to India at the earliest. We are on the job. Our experience in similar cases tells us that it does take 2-3 days to complete processes,” Mr Suri tweeted. The ambassador cautioned against a “frenzy of speculation,” suggesting that “we leave it to the experts to determine cause of demise Let’s be responsible. The embassy, he said, is in “regular contact” with Sridevi’s family. Sridevi’s body was likely to be embalmed today, Dubai-based newspaper Khaleej Times reported. Her body will be brought back to Mumbai for the funeral by a chartered jet. Sridevi was found unconscious in a bathtub in her hotel apartment at the Jumeirah Emirates Towers by her husband, producer Boney Kapoor, on Saturday evening, media reports said. After a medical team failed to revive her, she was taken to a hospital, where she was declared dead. The postmortem report said Sridevi fell into the bathtub after losing consciousness and drowned. The case was transferred to the “Dubai Public Prosecution” to complete “legal procedures.” Sridevi’s family had initially said that she died of a heart attack. The forensic report did not mention a cardiac arrest. Sridevi, Boney Kapoor and their younger daughter Khushi had gone to Dubai to attend a family wedding. Boney Kapoor returned to Mumbai with their daughter after the wedding on February 20, while Sridevi stayed back. Boney Kapoor returned to Dubai on Saturday to surprise his wife, reports said. The couple was to go out for dinner, but Sridevi collapsed in the bathroom while getting ready. Movie stars, politicians and Sridevi’s millions of fans have erupted in grief back in India, where she was celebrated for depicting strong female characters on screen and as the “first female superstar of India” in male superstar-dominated Bollywood. In Mumbai, the film fraternity poured in at the home of Anil Kapoor – Sridevi’s brother-in-law and her co-star in blockbuster hits including Mr India – to pay their respects. Among the visitors were leading actors Karisma Kapoor, Madhuri Dixit, actor-politician Kamal Haasan and Telugu superstar Venkatesh. Sridevi’s career spanned five decades – she started working in movies at age 4. By the time she was 13, she was playing lead roles. She acted in Tamil, Telugu, Kannada and Malayalam movies before scripting a soaring career in Bollywood. A 15-year break from movies followed her marriage to Boney Kapoor. Sridevi returned in 2012 with the smash-hit “English Vinglish”. She followed it up with the thriller “Mom”. She shot for a special appearance in superstar Shah Rukh Khan’s upcoming film – “Zero” – which releases in December. Sridevi is survived by her husband, and two daughters, Jhanvi and Khushi.