This is so fringe for tumblr but it’s also completely hilarious so I’m gonna share with the group.
Background: Basically how marriage works in islam (and therefore in Islamic/Muslim majority countries) is that the groom and his family pay for everything, the house, the furnishings, the wedding, even the bride’s clothes. As in, pjs and underwear and outfits for different seasons, as well as giving the bride a monetary gift (Mahr). This is all well and good, but unrealistic for impoverished North African countries. So what Egyptians do instead is that these costs are split between the bride and groom (and their families). The groom acquires an apartment, and depending on which area of Egypt they’re in there’s a cultural knowledge of what furnishings fall to the groom vs the bride. Mostly things like actual furniture and the bulk of electronic items falls to the groom, while things like curtains and carpets and bedspreads and towels and cutlery falls to the bride, along with a few electronics like TVs, microwaves and, recently, dishwashers. The details are hashed out privately.
Now, the house is in the groom’s name and men started doing this thing where they divorce women and take all the shit the women had bought for the house. Which is like, a lot. To keep our rights protected, because lord knows the state won’t do shit to protect us, women started doing this thing where they write extremely detailed lists of all the things they bought for the marital home and how much it costs. A couple of witnesses and the groom would then sign this ‘list of purchases’ as proof that it’s debt payable to the bride in case of divorce (or death, if the late husband’s family tries to defraud her out of her things during the handling of the inheritance). Men, of course, have been opposed to this concept for decades and have launched multiple campaigns against it, the last of which went viral just a few days ago.
Egyptian women, fed up with the bs we’ve been taking from the least useful men on earth, kinda just went… okay then, buy everything your own damn selves, and started a social media campaign of memes about men rushing to stores for bargains on pots and pans, and arguing with their mothers about the number of towels they need to get to ‘not be seen as lesser than my cousin’. It’s very much an inversion of the humiliating bullshit women go through to get married in this country, but nothing on earth will be funnier to me than Egyptian men going ‘we wont sign lists of purchase anymore’ and this new generation of Egyptian women going ‘okay then we ain’t buying shit. Have fun arguing with the seamstress about the price of fabric per meter for living room curtains.’
PS: men came back with ‘we’ll do the absolute bare minimum of furnishings and you’ll have to just accept that and live with it’ in hopes of deterring women from not sharing in marriage costs, and women were just like ‘no, actually, Islam says marriage is for he who can afford it, if you cant afford it just fast like islam tells you to :)))))’
Men: ‘you’ll all become spinsters’
Women: ‘we’ll just start marrying foreign men’
Egyptian social media has been hilarious the last few days and i wish y’all spoke Arabic so i could share it with you
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Neptune's hydrophobia has made life difficult for him, to say the least. When he was only four, it became clear that he had a very strong water-related semblance. His parents would try to give him a bath, but whenever they put him into the water, all of the water would be displaced. Which meant that, in order to get him clean, they had to get creative if they didn't want to essentially torture their child.
Sometimes, they could manage to distract him enough by getting Jupiter to play games with him; other times, they all just had to grit their teeth and bear it and get through bathtime as quickly as possible.
Things got a lot worse after Jupiter decided that the best way to teach Neptune how to swim was to drag him to the beach and throw him off of a pier into the water. This idea was not entirely Jupiter's fault as it was something of a Vasilias family tradition; it had worked for him and their other siblings, but Neptune….was a different story.
One of the things his semblance does is allows him to move at great speed through the water (though he did not know this at the time), which was how he managed to burst back out of the ocean and onto the pier once more…..unfortunately bringing some of the water with him.
Neptune had unknowingly changed the cohesion of the water, causing it to stick to him. He couldn't see, couldn't hear, couldn't breathe because the water was stuck to him. In a panic, he pushed the water away from himself, and it stuck to the nearest thing….which happened to be his brother Jupiter.
Because Neptune had used his semblance, even though he couldn't yet control it, the water stuck to his brother. Even though Jupiter was able to use his own semblance to turn the water into vapour, Neptune panicked. He didn't have any idea how much time had passed between when the water had been surrounding him to when it had moved to Jupiter! The little boy thought he'd almost killed his brother!
And that made his hydrophobia that much worse. He refused to go outside on the off chance that it might rain (not to mention the fact that they lived basically right on the water), he refused to drink water, and he definitely didn't intend to ever learn how to swim.
Eventually, his parents made the decision to move further inland (something for which he still feels guilty), and they bought him his goggles, so that he'd at least go outside.
Being able to cover his eyes and plug his ears makes showering possible, but it's still not his favourite thing. He knows that he has to, though, because he also refuses to be gross. Which means that Neptune is very efficient when it comes to showering; he only does what he needs to in order to be clean, and he hates every second of it. There have definitely been times he's had to deal with an anxiety attack before he could actually shower, which usually means he showers at night, so he wouldn't have to worry about being late to class in the morning.
Neptune tries very hard not to advertise his hydrophobia; he got made fun of for it a lot when he was younger, and some of that teasing came from his siblings. How could a Vasilias be afraid of water? If he didn't look so much like their parents, he's pretty sure they might have tried to pull the "are you sure you're not the milkman's kid?" type of thing that kids sometimes do.
After he started at Sanctum and then Haven, he learned to have better control of his semblance, but he still has a crippling fear of water. He wants to try to work through it, but he knows it's going to be a long, hard road…, he's afraid he won't be able to overcome it.
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