#aiisa

[selpuku]

open up and say thank you

[batri-jopa]

There's a very interesting story about Aiisa (აიისა) - the first condom-producing company in conservative Georgia that I learned from a book Pokazucha. Na gruzińskich zasadach by Stasia Budzisz. You better fasten your seatbelts:

The first Georgian company that produces condoms was founded in 2017 and immediately became famous. Aiisa has set itself the goal of fighting stereotypes about sex and sexuality - that what is declared on its Facebook profile. It encourages potential buyers with Georgian accents. On the packaging there are: a statue of Mother Georgia, which towers over the capital with the inscription: I do not want to be your mother!, two fingers in a condom folded as if for an Orthodox blessing; Queen Tamara in ecstasy with the inscription: Tamara's Royal Entrance and the slogans Sex with ex, Say no to hand job.

There is also a political series: Stal In, Kim Chan In or Put In. By the way, the latter politician has several variations: with an umbrella and the slogan Every dick needs protection (this is an occasional condom, introduced on the market on the 10th anniversary of the so-called Five-Day-War) and on a horse with the slogan: Old Russian athletic man riding many dirty ways.

Aiisa did not get away with battling the monotony of the condom market. On March 20, 2018, the Patriarchate of the Georgian Orthodox Church accused the company of offending the feelings of believers, blasphemy and immoral behavior. The Tbilisi City Hall, at the instigation of the right-wing nationalist group Georgian Idea, took the case to court. In April, students from the Georgian Theological Seminary came out to protest against "obscene" condoms. They gathered outside the former parliament building on Rustaveli Avenue and called on the state to protect Christian society from insults. The inhabitants of Kutaisi in the western part of Georgia came to the rescue and demanded that the owners of the company be punished. In May, a court in Tbilisi ruled that Aiisa's company offends national morality and dignity. He imposed a fine of 500 lari on it for using the image of Tamara, whom the Georgian Orthodox Church included among the saints, and ordered the withdrawal of several iconoclastic designs from sale.

The company has not recalled any of the models and continues to sell them online for 3.30 lari, but for a while safe sex became an ideological battlefield in Georgia.

That's all I got. It's like the last thing I'd expect happening in a conservative country. And I'd say it's a good theme for a book if not for the fact that I read it in a book😆 Now you can easily Google for more about it! And also check out Aiisa facebook profile, their stuff would make great collectibles😉

Anyway I can't imagine anything of this scale in Poland (we also have Blasphemy Law but it's just enough to put a rainbow halo on the Mother Mary from Częstochowa to get arrested at 6:10 a.m. Final verdict of District Court's is that - what a surprise! - "rainbow is not offending" but still it took almost 3 years and a lot of shit on the way: see this article on oko.press and links inside it too)

[aandrezel]

I do not know much about gods; but I think that the river Is a strong brown god--sullen, untamed and intractable, Patient to some degree, at first recognised as a frontier; Useful, untrustworthy, as a conveyor of commerce; Then only a problem confronting the builder of bridges. The problem once solved, the brown god is almost forgotten By the dwellers in cities--ever, however, implacable, Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder Of what men choose to forget. Unhonoured, unpropitiated By worshippers of the machine, but waiting, watching and waiting. His rhythm was present in the nursery bedroom, In the rank ailanthus of the April dooryard, In the smell of grapes on the autumn table, And the evening circle in the winter gaslight. The river is within us, the sea is all about us; The sea is the land's edge also, the granite Into which it reaches, the beaches where it tosses Its hints of earlier and other creation: The starfish, the horseshoe crab, the whale's backbone; The pools where it offers to our curiosity The more delicate algae and the sea anemone. It tosses up our losses, the torn seine, The shattered lobsterpot, the broken oar And the gear of foreign dead men. The sea has many voices, Many gods and many voices. The salt is on the briar rose, The fog is in the fir trees. The sea howl And the sea yelp, are different voices Often together heard: the whine in the rigging, The menace and caress of wave that breaks on water, The distant rote in the granite teeth, And the wailing warning from the approaching headland Are all sea voices, and heaving groaner Rounded homewards, and the seagull: And under the oppression of the silent fog The tolling bell Measures time not our time, rung by the unhurried Ground swell, a time Older than the time of chronometers, older Than time counted by anxious worried women Lying awake, calculating the future, Trying to unweave, unwind, unravel And piece together the past and the future, Between midnight and dawn, when the past is all deception, The future futureless, before the morning watch When time stops and time is never ending; And the ground swell, that is and was from the beginning. Clangs The bell.

T. S. Eliot, "The Dry Salvages: Part I" from Four Quartets