In almost all cultures around the world, mothers, and female relatives are responsible for the primary day-to-day care of young children.  American culture is no exception.  While we can think of many friends whose mothers paused their careers to care for them, or parents who hired nannies, many of us would be hard pressed to give an example of a family with a stay at home father.  As part of a “masculine” image, men are expected to be caring and doting fathers, but also strong and powerful breadwinners.  Oftentimes, me who elect to stay home are seen as less masculine, and less respected among their peers.  Despite social stigma and taboo, many men who find fault with this image as a promotion of restrictive and ill-fitting gender roles, are choosing to stay home.  

Today, nearly 2 million men across America are defining this gender role as a stay at home fathers, and their numbers are growing, doubling in the past two decades.  While a stay at home father could be defined simply as a father who provides a child’s primary care, this figure only accounts for “men who have not employed for pay at all in the prior year.”  If this definition was expanded, men who work from home or part time would demonstrate a more realistic figure.  Moreover, mens’ reasons for spending more time as their child’s primary caregiver have changed over the past twenty years, and become more voluntary and enthusiastic.  More fathers are choosing to stay home specially to provide care, while others use a period of unemployment to devote more time to their children.  

Many raise valid concerns when both women and men consider leaving the workforce.  It can be difficult to return, and maintain relevant skills.  However, given the benefits associated with a stronger father-child bond, a moderate alternative, such as part-time positions or work from home, could prove to strengthen families.

Over the past fifty years, smoking habits and attitudes in America have changed significantly.  While older generations are still finding it difficult to quit, younger generations grow more deeply entrenched in a war against smoking.  Since 1965, smoking rate have decreased by over 20%, many public places have become smoke free, smoking ads and commercials have been banned from television, and children have been given rigorous, antismoking educations in health classes as early as elementary school.  It seems certain that over these past fifty years, smoking has become a taboo in American culture, specifically among younger generations, and those who are more educated.  While we can conjure reservations or skepticism regarding some taboos, this is one we should hope everyone can agree on.

But other countries tell a different story.  The fourth largest cigarette consumers remaining today are Russians.  The Soviet government long produced propaganda to discourage smoking to no avail.  Moreover, times of tobacco shortage during the 1980s did nothing but strengthen the nation’s dependence.  And, while smoking is on the decline here, progress remains sluggish.  Ten years after the United States, the Russian government finally banned smoking in public places in 2014 with low confidence from the populous that such laws would be effective.  Laws like these will have to become more prevalent if the government wishes to save the 400,000 lives and $48.1 billion smoking causes Russians every year.

 

 

Russia’s neighbours to the east face similar issues.  Japan and South Korea have long outpaced China in cigarette consumption.  The rates in the latter two nations are predicted to rise as globalization and modernization takes hold of more of the countryside, opening up tobacco companies to new consumers.  

It seems that both a cultural significance and widespread ignorance to the dangers of tobacco facilitation physiological dependances worldwide.  If the governments of these large tobacco consumers want to save lives and money, they will need to pass strict laws and launch widespread educational campaigns.  Here at Penn State, perhaps we can help by shedding light on this issue for international students, who comprise a majority of student smokers on college campuses.  Whatever we choose to do, one day we can hope that we will not have to do anything at all.

What is the first thing that attracts you to a possible partner?  Is it his smile?  Her composed sense of style?  The progression of a typical American relationship can be separated into neat time frames.  Two people meet, initially attracted to one another’s appearance they explore their mutual interests through casual dating.  After socially acceptable periods of time, from one to two years, couples continue to follow this timeline, leasing housing together, popping the question, and finally, taking marriage vows.  While some may argue about the relative success or ineffectiveness of this model, we cannot deny that most of our ancestors, and millions of people around the world today, took an opposite approach: arranged marriage.

 

Despite widespread misconception, an arranged marriage is not the same as a forced marriage, though both are still prevalent in many related areas of the world.  Forced marriages often have the most negative effects on wives, who are often “sold” to a husband’s family at young age.  While groups such as the International Center for Research on Women and the United Nations are active in the fight to end this trend, the rate of child marriages in many nations is on the rise.  

In a true arranged marriage, the family of both the bachelor and bachelorette are highly involved.  Parents will select possible partners based on a laundry list of qualities, such as reputation, career, wealth, and religious affiliation.  In ancient times, horoscopes and caste or class status were some of the largest considerations.  Especially nuanced was art of Chinese matchmaking.  Each aspect of the partnership, from the individual’s date of birth to the bride’s wedding make up was the product of centuries of superstition and wisdom.

While an arranged marriage may seem to be based on trivial details to some, consider how this list of values stack up against western practices.  In western society, a marriage is the last step in a couple’s relationship, after they have seemingly passed a great number of compatibility tests.  If this is true, why, as we have seen in past blogs, is the American divorce rate so high?  Certainly, arranged marriages show greater success rates.  This is partially because entering into an arranged marriage is a different commitment.  These men and women are promising to intertwine lives, whereas western marriage is seen as a culmination of love, an ever fleeting and unstable phenomena.  

Drugs are as old as time.  Addiction, however, is relatively new.  Opium, for example, was first cultivated by the Sumerians in 3,400 BC, but the United States, one of the first countries to make opium illegal, did not do so until 1909.  Heroin remained legal for another fifteen years.  Opioids were a contestant feature of many societies, across Europe, Africa, and Asia since the 1500s.  But abuse one a large scale was not recorded until the late nineteenth century, where mass opium consumption in China started a war.  In the past, psychoactive substances played a significant role in religious and spiritual activities, rather than widespread health or recreation usage in modern society.  However, since its appearance into the world, drug addiction has taken the ranks as one of mankind’s most taboo behaviors.

The stigma surrounding drugs has been sharpened in more recent history, as lawmakers everywhere attempt to control the spread and use of drugs.  Ronald and Nancy Reagan’s war on drugs program is one of the best examples of how drug laws and regulations can ruin lives and harshen societal attitudes. “Say yes to your life.  And when it comes to drugs and alcohol just say no,” the former First Lady famously said many times.  DARE, the programs prevention campaign, failed to change an adolescent’s willingness to dabble in alcohol or drugs.  Even more disastrous, however, was the laws passed under the program.

Zero tolerance policies, increased punishment and heightened police presence in school incarcerated American youth at an alarming rate, and minorities were especially vulnerable.  There has never been a significant difference in the frequency at which black and white adolescents use drugs.  However, the rate of arrests under the program for drug possession was not proportional, as the majority of those arrested were black adolescents.  This resulted in at 236.5% increase in black youth incarceration over a decade.

Across the Atlantic, one country has successfully introduced positive change through drug regulations, and is winning it’s war on drugs by changing legislative goals.  In 2001, Portugal decriminalized all drugs.  Rather than arrest, drug users now face state mandated rehabilitation and occasionally small fines.  While this system has not decreased the rates of drug use in Portugal, it has freed drug addicts from fear of seeking help.  With the taboo ended, those who develop severe drug addictions know where to go for help, and do not have to feel ashamed.  Additionally, Portugal has seen a number of other benefits, rates of sexually transmitted diseases, including HIV and AIDS, have significantly reduced, as well as deaths from overdose.

What do Pretty Woman, Taken, and Requiem for a Dream all have in common? Illegally practicing escorts, trafficking victims, and troubled substance abuse addicts are all groups that represent different facets of modern prostitution. While Hollywood often gets poor reviews for authenticity, the way these movies have shaped American perspectives on prostitution does not completely misrepresent the world’s 42 million sex workers.  

Prostitution is often termed the world’s oldest profession.  While it may not sound as unifying or beautiful as the love between a mother and a child, prostitution is a phenomena that has manifested in almost every society throughout history and constitutes shared human experience.  Our question, then, regarding prostitution is not what cultures engage in this taboo activity, but how different cultures address the taboo of sex work.

Navigating world prostitution laws can be complicated; different definitions of brothels, specific acts, and prostitution itself all cloud ideas of how to classify countries and understand what is legal where.  The United States is classified in the charts below as “Limited Legality” because of eleven counties in Nevada which allow regulated sex work and brothel ownership.  In fact this label is given to many countries, including Australia, that have some of the world’s most liberal prostitution laws.

There are many reasons countries have chosen to legalize prostitution.  Few have to do with ending the taboo surrounding the sex industry, though they still tackle important issues.  Some believe legalizing sex trade helps women and men in difficult situations by freeing them from concerns of jail time, reduces trafficking, and keeps customers and proprietors safe from diseases and other health concerns.

Two European Nations, however, have taken steps not only to address all these concerns, but end the taboo surrounding prostitution.  Germany and Greece have a unique set of laws that help free prostitutes from a cultural taboo.  This same stigma causes their counterparts in other developed nations, such as Australia and Ireland, to keep their source of income a secret.

Since legalization in 1927, Germany has passed legislation  that continues to expand rights for sex workers and women across the nation.  Legal contracts between prostitutes and clients must be established, requiring health checks and defining what acts the worker is willing to perform.  More significantly, the government recognizes prostitution as a professional trade by withholding a portion of earnings to pay social benefits such as pensions and health insurance and guarantees a standard forty hour work week.

A 2004 statement from the United States State Department captures the opposite perspective, “State attempts to regulate prostitution by introducing medical check-ups or licenses don’t address the core problem: the routine abuse and violence that form the prostitution experience and brutally victimize those caught in its netherworld.”  While many positions diverge on the subject of the sex industry, all legislators can agree that it is the routine abuse and violence we must stop.  Only after we accept the reality of prostitution, and eliminate the cultural taboos imprisoning sex workers, can we work towards ending cycles of cruelty and victimhood.

Imagine a society where the number of children born to single parents is small, the number of divorces even smaller, and horrible acts of violence against women are shocking, rare, and almost unprecedented.  To many of us, this may sound like a utopian impossibility.  Every day in our own society, teen mothers struggle to find support, marriages end while second or third marriages begin, and sexual assault and rape victims suffer injustice.  In search of solutions for these issues, where can we look?  A tiny country in southeast Asia may provide insight.

The northeastern province of Ratanakiri, Cambodia has been a refuge for Cambodians who have maintained traditional cultural practices for decades and declined to participate in the country’s modernization.  Making up less than one percent of the nation’s population, small villages composed of various ethnic groups dot the province’s forests.  The Kreung People, like most of their neighbors, hunt, farm, and live in close-knit, multigenerational families.  What sets these Cambodian’s apart are quaint, little huts that sit several meters away from many family homes, dubbed, by many westerns, “Love Huts.”

The Love Huts have been a staple of Krueng society for countless generations, and serve as a symbol of responsibility and sexual independence.  Fathers build the huts for their daughters once they reach puberty, typically around the age of thirteen, and after the structures are completed, young women are given sexual autonomy.  Adolescents are encouraged by parents to engage in relationships that resemble western dating to find a spouse on their own.  Unlike many westerner parents, Krueng parents do not see it as their obligation to safeguard their daughters virginity, but rather, villagers see a sexual connection between a couple as an essential prerequisite to an engagement.  Without judgement or taboo, Krueng girls are free to invite whomever they choose to spend nights with them in the huts.

 

Contrary to the potential dangers many westerners might see in the love hut custom, it’s benefits in Kreung society seem to be numerous. “I’ve never heard of this kind of action,” a Kreung girl states in an interview with national geographic, “forcing a girl to have sex. When a girl says no, the boy won’t try [to have sex].”  While real data on these issues in Krueng society is lacking, many villagers voice similar disbelief surrounding divorce and domestic violence, and many tell stories of boys who married pregnant girls because they were in love, regardless of the baby’s father.

Today, the Krueng tradition of building separate huts for girls is diminishing, but the values behind their construction are not.  Now that many villagers can afford to build houses with brick, rather than bamboo and straw, families build rooms for their daughters where the girls can experience the same sexual freedoms as those with huts.  Certainly, the love huts are not the only element of Krueng society that discourages violence against women and fosters healthy relationships, but they do ask us to reflect on aspects of our culture that encourage the opposite.  

The aromas of Thai food are a tantalizing reminder of the cuisine’s diverse flavors. Savory produce, sweet rice, sour sauces, and spicy noodles are staples of the region that can be found across Asia at some of the world’s most famous street markets. These markets provide income to locals, but also serve as cultural meeting grounds and carry communities’ cuisine traditions. While millions of Americans squeamishly avoid bugs, nearly 2 billion people around the world are making our crawling enemies a meal. In Southeast Asia, Latin America, and Central Africa, edible insects are as common as New York street pretzels, and as traditional as Thanksgiving turkey.

In these entomophagy practicing cultures, beetles, caterpillars, bees, wasps and ants are among the most popular choices. But if none of these peek your interest, there are well over 1,900 documented edible insect species, each with a unique taste that construct a vast palette of flavors. Roasted insects typically have a nutty flavor created by a cocktail of natural fats and a mineral-rich exoskeleton. Crickets, your class pet’s go-to snack, taste like nutty shrimp. Larvae are reminiscent of mushrooms, while bee larvae imitates savory bacon.

Almost all popular bug species are high in protein.  By the numbers, the average insect is nearly half protein when dried, still others can weigh in at 75% protein in their whole, natural form. Besides protein, these crawly critters are high in essential fatty acids such as omega-3s, not to mention a wide array of essential vitamins. As a comparison, an American favorite, dried beef, is about 50 percent protein. Not to mention there are many other health and environment concerns tied to American beef consumption.

Grossed out yet? Not surprisingly, many Westerners have learned a strong negative association with insects from a young age, often linking them to the spread of disease, or trapping bugs in the role of agricultural antagonist. Across cultures where incorporating this nutrient rich protein source was essential to survival, this association does not exists, and someday soon we may have to shed the prejudice as well. Farming insects emits far less greenhouse gas and ammonia, and requires less land and water than the farming of American’s prefered protein sources such as cows, pigs, and chicken.

Given their amazing sustainability and health benefits, many startups across the United States have already began exploring how bug bits will do in our markets. Six Foods, a snack food company started by Harvard roommates in 2013, is trying to subtly introduce insect protein our diets through cricket flour. Their most popular product, Chirp Chips, are made from just that and come in three tempting flavors: aged cheddar, hickory barbecue and sea salt.

Snack time anyone?