I’ve been watching and listening to movies and music from the 1960s (and earlier), and it’s hard to believe how women are depicted condescendingly and as essentially brainless.
Operation Moonbase – The first astronaut into space is female – Colonel Briteis, which everyone insists of pronouncing “Bright Eyes”. They treat her like a child, despite her rank. The female reporter is a silly “maiden aunt” type who you can’t believe in that role. The film gets a few points for making the President of the US a woman, and not treating her like an idiot, but that’s a rare exception. And Heinlein is the one responsible for this. Grrr.
Women of the Prehistoric PLanet (1966) – women and people of Asian background treated pretty badly.
On Her Majesty’s Secret Service (1969) – all of Blofeld’s “angels” appear to be childlike “bimbos”. Scenes with them are almost painful to watch. Diana Rigg and some of the other women women in Draco’s group are clearly savvier, but you get the feeling they’re still being condescended to (“Spare the rod and spoil the child, eh?”)
Beach Boys I get Around
We always take my car 'cause it’s never been beat
And we’ve never missed yet with the girls we meet
None of the guys go steady 'cause it wouldn’t be right
To leave their best girl home now on Saturday night
Don’t let your “best girl” know you call her that. Especially don’t let your subsidiary girls know that ou’ve got a Best Girl, and they’re not it.
Of Neil Simon’s first hit play, Come Blow Your Horn, one reviewer characterizes the women Allan and Buddy date as brainless and interchangeable.
Don’t even start with the Bachrach/David 1963 song “Wives and Lovers”. Or Dusty Springfield’s 1964 Wishin’ and Hopin’.
Maybe next time I’ll complain about how racist my 1960s comic books were, even when they thought they were being enlightened.
Especially since the women of the previous generation had been so formidable. Joan Crawford, Susan Hayward, etc. Play that Matt Helm grabass on Barbara Stanwyck and you’d draw back a stump.
Isn’t the point of those lyrics precisely that they don’t have a Best Girl, and they don’t have one explicitly “cos it wouldn’t be right” to leave her at home while they get around on Saturday night not missing with girls they meet. They want to play the field, they recognise cheating is hurtful, they don’t get into relationships. It’s arguably shallow and indulgent, and suggests that they regard the girls they do meet as fairly interchangable but they’re not doing the dirty on anyone.
That sentiment never gets old. Although now it’s updated for gender equality.
Try this on for size:
And once you know the words, the actual music vid is pretty clear that everybody, male & female, is a playah with maybe somebody steady back home, or maybe not, but who the hell cares?
Well of course film and music are the products of the commercial culture machine, which from the beginning of advertising and mass media has pushed agendas on the public as much as followed them. In the 1930s and 1940s women had to be strong, times were too tough for them not to be. Then in the postwar period the big push was that women should all be domestic helpmeets. In the 1960s oral contraceptives were introduced and the new message was “Hooray! Now that women don’t have to worry about getting pregnant they can be limitlessly sexually available!”. Which led to the feminist pushback in the 1970s when women got tired of being treated as walking party favors. Although that may have been as much that one-income households weren’t sustainable anymore and the commercial culture machine made a virtue of necessity.
Why didn’t they? Because they have weak upper body strength, the poor dears, and strangling someone to death isn’t as easy as TV shows. Also, they are too polite.
I recently posted about the blatant sexism in an otherwise excellent Forbidden Planet (in whose poster Robbie is carrying Alta like some damsel in distress), but this is a good thread to mention one of my favorite TOS episode, “Mudd’s Women”, which is a very good episode…if you ignore the 60s sexism that is the reason for the episode’s plot to move along. Poor, homely, lonely women can’t get a man, so they use “performance enhancing drugs*” and sign up to marry strangers rather than suffer life’s travails alone, alas!
*the show tried to have it both ways, that the drugs work, and that you don’t need them. I’m still wondering how a drug can straighten and comb your hair almost as much as wondering how a placebo does it!
I’ll just say that the most sexist films that I’ve ever seen in modern day were female written and directed. E.g. “Oh no, I’m just a dumb girl. Won’t some handsome rich boy swing in to take care of me so I never have to work again?”
Some of that may be a simple continuation of a past culture that keeps getting passed on from generation to generation. But there probably is some allure to the idea of being taken care of and simply being able to shut off your brain. We’re engineered to conserve energy. The success of lotteries and casinos is entirely down to the persistent desire of the average man to want to get enough dough that they can stop having to care about anything anymore and just sit on their couch, eating microwave food for the rest of their life.
But so, while we know that there were women who liked to be active and push themselves, in the past, I’d expect that most people (of either gender) would gladly use any cultural excuse to take it easy and be taken care of, if it popped into being. The desire to know more, do more, etc. tends to be conserved in a smaller set of individuals.
I like that song. I think you’re taking it the wrong way.
All of us (well, I know I do) day dream about what we used to be, what other paths we could have taken,. And the singer isn’t superior to his wife, he’s happy she “gave up the good life for” him. He knows he married up.
I haven’t read a lot of Heinlein. I read the most at one time when a co-worker was touting him, and I was supporting Philip K. Dick. We exchanged about five books apiece. I read all his. They were … o.k. But something I’d noticed when I’d read Stranger in a Strange Land years earlier came back to me. Heinlein couldn’t write a believable woman character to save his life.
Oh, and the co-worker didn’t read any of the books I lent him.
I take on exception with that essay (and I know it was not serious):
“According to a recent survey I’ve just made up, 90% of males like horror movies because it makes them feel protective towards their partners.”
I’m reminded of a quote about detective magazine and their penchant for basically being torture porn: “there are two types of men that read these, ones that want to rescue the girl, and ones that want to be the killer”. I think monster movie posters elicit the same responses from guys.
I feel stranglin’ a male at least 5 times a day. All way into year 2025.
So it’s not 60s centric.
It was up to, what?, the 80s when the daytime talk shows were big. Oprah, Sally Jesse and about 20 more told women “physical abuse, controlling behavior, terror is Not love” .
Forrest J. Ackerman’s Famous Monsters of Filmland had a regular feaure entitled “Carry On, Monsters”, in which they reprinted all those publicity photos of monsters carrying unconscious women in their arms. There were a lot of them – it was a standard pose. It conveyed danger to the woman without any overt violence or sexual threat. It’s kind of annoying that the poster for Forbidden Planet used the same damned thing for their poster, as if Robby was a threat (and the poster actually arranged those gyros – or whatever they were – that rotated in his clear paraboloidal dome so that they looked like evil, leering eyes. In fact, Robby never carries Altaira, although he DOES carry the unconscious form of the male Doc Ostrow. I guess they thought that wouldn’t make for a good poster.
Star Trek also gave us a planet where the women lived in technological luxury while the men wore animal skins and lived outside subjected to the elements. The women would occasionally lure men into traps with food, and outfit their captives with belts that would cause excruciating pain with the press of a button, so it was a bit of a mixed bag, gender-sensitivity-wise.
I think of Heinlein’s women as “Brainy Nerd’s Dream Girls”. They’re super-intelligent and super-competent and witty and unrealistic. It didn’t help things that Heinlein’s real-life third wife, Virginia, practically WAS a Brainy Nerd’s Dream Girl.
But my wife, Pepper Mill (who is this Brainy Nerd’s Dream Girl), who is a huge fan of science fiction and fantasy, can’t stand Heinlein’s women.
