In Kyrgyzstan it’s common to kidnap your future wife
economist.com
economist.com
She said the only realistic thing, in the movie Borat, was the kidnapping scene, and even that was outlandish.
Gonna go read the article now and see if I need to make any updates.
As a boy whenever I heard a woman had been "stolen" I couldn't help but picture a man carrying her off on his shoulders in the middle of the night while she helplessly tried to get away. Took me a while to understand it was usually consensual.
In many cases, it is just preserving language describing the act given the prior assumption that the woman was property of the male head of household until disposed of by them in marriage, devoid of her own agency, while the man attempting to marry her without that consent was fully possessed of moral agency and thus had stolen her from her appropriate custodian.
So yes there are some serious problems there, but do take it with a grain of salt. Some people are lucky.
Yeah I'd say the murder the story centers on and several other stories recounted don't fit what you said too well. The article also calls into question how voluntary these "voluntary" kidnappings truly are in their social context.
I think with my first comment you got what was literally said to me.
My second comment is me recalling and re-reading between the lines.
"if you’re unwed at 25, you’re thought to be on the verge of spinsterhood, pretty much the worst failure imaginable"
This sentiment seems to be near-universal in all but the most "progressive" societies (and even in some parts of those). And it results in all manner of grotesque and absurd behavior that robs people - mostly women but also men - of their humanity and autonomy.
I applaud every young person with the courage to buck this trend in their own societies. The cost of doing so is often very high, but the pattern can only be broken by people brave enough to face those consequences and help craft a less restrictive world for the next generation.
Women get left behind by biological realities. Pretending this is just some form of social tyranny is clearly nonsense.
Almost certainly is. I wouldn’t be surprised if “most women I know” are women who work for corporations.
> you're acting as if a woman's value is decreased once she can't have children anymore. That sounds a lot like social tyranny to me.
A woman’s value as a partner would be decreased for anybody who wanted to have children, or who at least wanted the option of having children. The idea that if you want a partner, you’re going to have to attract one, is not a tyranny. There are some people who think that this is tyrannical, for instance the incel community, but they are clearly wrong.
Again, please explain why this is any concern of yours. If you want to seek out and help woman who voluntarily want help finding a partner and having children, get at it. Otherwise, supporting a system that coerces or forces young people into decisions against their will is a form of tyranny.
In what universe is this any of your concern? Not this one.
And of course it's tyrannical. People with little or no power (children, very young adults) are being forced, coerced, threatened by the power structures in their lives to make decisions they don't want to make. This is nearly a textbook definition of tyranny.
In what universe is this sentiment any of your concern? I presume you imagine this one?
I’m simply pointing out your mistake, which is that this is not simply some sentiment that can be modified with the appropriate social conditioning. It is the ordinary human reaction to undeniable biological realities. Nowhere in my comment did I suggest that this was an appropriate basis for actual tyrannical behaviour, so please don’t try to gaslight me into defending such a position, because it won’t work. As I have said elsewhere, even in the most progressive countries in the world, this is still a ubiquitous concern.
Here is a novel idea that apparently never occurred to you, let's allow each ordinary human to have their own reaction.
I disagree that “humanity” and “autonomy” belong together in that sentence. I’m pretty sure that having kids by roughly 25 is how the human species has evolved to function. That’s the nature of “humanity”—the human condition.
That “sentiment” you decry—the social pressure to marry and have children in your 20s—is probably necessary for a sustainable society to exist. As you acknowledge, it’s nearly universal. And I can’t help but notice that the exceptions—what you call “progressive” societies, where “autonomy” has vanquished “humanity”—are all in decline. They are all propped up in the meantime by immigration from societies like the one I’m from, where moms and aunties start hassling you to get married once you hit 25.
More seriously though, I don’t think it will be so bad. Evolution works. Blood lines of the autonomous people will perish, and the breeders will inherit the earth. For me, I’m doing my part.
The modern Western idea appears to be to treat life like an infinitely reconfigurable video game tuned to every individual. That will soon become a luxury for only the richest people. The rest of us need to get by as best we can, and that may mean young women and men will have to take what they can get and make themselves happy with it.
My wife dreams of winning the lottery and transforming our lives. Meanwhile we are genuinely content in our relatively hardscrabble existence… only because there is no alternative to it.
BTW I kidnapped my first wife (well she ran away from home to live with me, so her parents thought of it as kidnapping). She was 18, I was 17. But I had my own apartment, so… My second wife kinda sorta kidnapped me. Or at least she stalked me for a year before revealing herself and unleashing her plan to marry me. My son’s wife of eight years came for a visit from Canada and never returned home (for immigration reasons they were forced to get married sooner than they wanted to, so I guess America kidnapped her?).
And the "real" kidnapping is not just Kyrgyzstan thing, but plenty other countries:
I knew some Kyrgz who talked about this and they said the real thing was rare, illegal and still happened (almost exclusively in remote villages) but mostly it was a performative ritual done by couples who were dating.
I think the Economist is being intentionally obtuse here. 6% / 16% is about right.
Can’t say if the film is an accurate portrayal, but it really angered me to imagine people having to experience this.
Speaking seriously, cultural tolerance can only exist to a certain extent because each culture has some things it absolutely (or almost absolutely) prohibits and disdains, so when two incompatible in such a way cultures meet, something has to give.
Not that arranged marriages sometimes happen and honour killings too (albeit extremely rarely), but that there’s a “shroud of silence” around such things when they do happen.
There's plenty of help and support for it.
> In response, the Kyrgyz parliament raised the maximum sentence for bride kidnapping from three to seven years.
and the tale at the beginning of the story is rare and extreme enough to spark a national campaign of outrage. I'm not saying that this phenomenon does not exist, but I do wonder if the Economist is not up-playing this for curiosity/shock value.
"In a Kyrgyz government survey conducted in 2016 and funded by the UN, some 22% of the country’s women reported that their marriage had begun with an abduction, known as ala-kachuu, or “grab and run”. The researchers broke this figure down into those abducted “without consent” (6%) and those “with consent” (16%)."
6% is not routine, but I don't think it would be fair to call it "rare and extreme", either.
In order to capture the audience, it uses satire. It takes ideas about foreign people, exaggerates these ideas even further, and investigates how people react to these exaggerated ideas. It turned out that even when taken to ridiculous extremes, many people (as seen in the movie) were willing to buy the idea that Borat was a real person from a foreign country.
Borat does feel dated now. But perhaps that also means, the movie was effective on some level, in highlighting these beliefs? And perhaps even to help combat said beliefs?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kidnapping,_Caucasian_Style but note also https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Prisoner_of_the_Caucasus