Heyer would like to thank everyone who made suggestions in the comments, especially reader Komsomoletz for finding snokhachestvo.Ĭome see Cracked editors talking post-apocalyptic movie worlds with scientists and special guests during a LIVE PODCAST at UCB on Dec.
Still, that's progress, right? Continue Reading Below um, as good as one-fourth of a man, in marriage. Well, just one thing, really, which can be paraphrased as "That's freaking crazy, please knock it off." The spread of Islam abolished the unholy practice and upgraded a woman's worth from "broodmare" to. We're of course talking about Muhammad, beard enthusiast and prophet extraordinaire, who had a thing or two to say about wa'ada.
This abysmal practice continued until a certain famous women's rights activist and perpetrator of reason came along and catapulted Arabic society into modern times. If the child was a girl, the mother would simply leave the girl in the ditch and unceremoniously fill it with dirt, burying the baby alive on the spot and thus avoiding the nasty social consequences of having produced female offspring. If the baby was a boy, she swaddled him up and returned proudly back to her friends and neighbors. When it came time to give birth, the expectant mother retreated to a ditch and waited there for her progeny to come screaming out of her vagina. Vladimir Dmitrievich Nabokov, a Russian journalist and newspaper editor, described snokhachestvo as such: "Nowhere, it seems, except Russia, has at least one form of incest assumed the character of an almost normal everyday occurrence, designated by the appropriate technical term." Now, in 2015, this sounds like the kind of thing that would be all over the news as part of a shocking expose, but back then it was just a part of life that everyone was resigned to accept. The sons couldn't provide much in the way of protection, because they were usually either still children or off serving in the military, so the father could have his way with his daughter-in-law to his creepy old heart's content. Many family patriarchs soon realized that having a young woman in the house who was basically required to do whatever you told her to do was an irresistible target for grotesque sexual assault. Make the fire, fix the breakfast, wash the dishes, do the father. Then, once you both made it out and into the icy wastelands, this sorry dupe became an unwitting slaughter animal, much like an actual cow.Ĭinderelly, Cinderelly, night and day, it's Cinderelly. We're referring, of course, to a korova: some simple-hearted, trusting (and preferably chubby) fellow inmate whom you invited to join your escape. While they couldn't exactly pack a boxed lunch for their escape, they could pack something even more nourishing that - best of all! - didn't even need to be carried. Resourceful inmates soon had a splendid solution for this, however. So even if you didn't get shot by snipers or torn apart by dogs while trying to escape, you would still wind up dying of exposure or starvation somewhere in the Siberian tundra like Jack Nicholson in The Shining. The problem with escape, beyond somehow getting past all the armed guards, was the fact that most of these camps were located out in the middle of frozen fucking nowhere. The point is, anyone stuck in these camps was probably thinking about escape more than half of the time. "Didn't you guys round-up like a billion Japanese people? Glass houses, comrade."