FWIW, those lyrics were written by the champion impregnator among 1960s rock stars. What Mike Love is saying is “Don’t go steady or marry them or you might have to pay child support.”
The technologists had from countless generations of their machines taking care of them had their intellects atrophied, to the point where they had to use a temporary IQ boosting machine to accomplish anything vital. Which itself is a valid sci-fi concept of a previously accomplished civilization having fallen into a dead end; but unfortunately it gave us a Planet of the Bimbo Women: “Brain? What is brain?”
There may be films of this type - I haven’t seen any, but it would meet a certain type of fantasy that I could see being popular on Hallmark or similar channels. But I put the emphasis on the “fantasy” elements.
See the long discussion in the GD thread on whether thoughts/fantasies can be morally evil for a lot of discussion. Sure, if you’re an overworked, stressed single mom / student / entry level worker, it can be a pleasant day-dream for someone to come sweep you off your feet for a life of leisure and just get to turn off your worries for a few days, weeks or so. But I think almost all of us realize that would be a dream that would quickly become a nightmare for most women. You’d come out of the dream and get bored, want more control, more stimulation, and the like. Which is why I suspect most of those movies end with the proposal, engagement, or wedding.
The reality of such a thing would be quite different, and a LOT darker. Heck, that exact sort of setup applies in quite a few horror/thriller novels and movies!
Can you give us some examples of such films?
Half the romance industry is built on this premise. Women are tired, you guys.
Being taken care of is an attractive idea. Shutting off my brain, not so much. The problem with being “taken care of" in real life is it leaves you vulnerable and dependent which is a high stakes game for women.
I wrote a long article titled “Brides of the Id Monster” on those photos in movie posters. I traced them back to silent firms and also pulp science fiction magazine covers. There were so many in the 1950s that I had to break them down into sub-genres.
The operative word is “1950s”. WWII glorified strong women taking over for the men overseas. Then the men came back. They didn’t want strong women; they wanted sex, followed by marriage, babies, and homes they could return to after work, where good-paying secure jobs were available after they kicked all the women out. Wives were whores, mothers, and maids rolled into one. Movies and television reflected that image, always with the subliminal reminder that men had slayed the enemy/monster while their women stayed safely at home. That empowerment of men stuck, with today’s undoing of women’s rights a return of the dominance of such thinking.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
That’s just true for everyone. There’s the whole slew of lawyers that took up work for the President and, subsequently, got disbarred, fined, and jailed out of a desire to be special and taken care of.
It’s, as said, just a human condition. Not for everyone, but a significant chunk.
If I’m not mistaken that was the premise of the original script for “Pretty Woman”.
Women are more likely than men to be in situations where they don’t work outside the home, and when they do work outside the home, they have reduced earning power relative to men. Being dependent on a man has been a defining feature of women’s experience throughout most of history, often with violent and traumatic consequences, so a lot of women of my generation (elder Millennial) want to avoid that sort of situation in our own lives.
It’s a nice fantasy, though.
I always thought “He Hit Me" was purposefully made to sound like a horror movie soundtrack. It certainly doesn’t sound romantic or sweet, and you can’t dance to it.
Some women probably wanted to strangle Florencia Vicenta de Casillas-Martinez Cardona a.k.a. Vicki Carr in 1967, for recording “It Must Be Him”, as parodied by Dave Barry:
Let it be him
oh dear God it MUST be him
or I will stick my head in the oven again
I think the women Austen wrote about were arguably better off.
They knew the issue going in. You couldn’t inherit. You had to marry. Then your dowry was given to your husband. Entailments were rampant. You went from brutal circumstances or monster Fathers to an older man. With, who knows what predilection. Proprietary kept them from asking.
But these women knew it. They were very clever about making a life. Jane Austen, herself had to use the “written By a Lady…” as her name, to get published.
I’m not saying it was right or wrong or if it was real life, per se.
In all those novels the women are strong in their own way.
If a woman was very lucky she was the beneficiary of a trust established explicitly to give her a source of money her future husband couldn’t confiscate.
Well to be fair, Heinlein was probably writing for teenage boy nerds who never got close to establishing a relationship with a real woman. It’s not entirely his fault that adult men take his works so seriously.
I think one reason that book was so provocative is that people of the time were well aware of those stakes, and Elizabeth still rejected Darcy (initially.) She was effectively saying, “I’d really rather die than be with you" and not in the figurative way.
Likewise he basically destroyed his reputation for her.
The idea that a woman’s emotional fulfillment mattered in this kind of transactional society was a radical one, and those romantic notions persist to this day.
Yup. Definitely something to be avoided.
In some ways, these upper class women were worse off than poorer ones, who could earn a living and support themselves, if not very well. Spending your life dependent on others, with little control over your own fortunes sucks. And pure luck whether your particular skills matched up to your situation, since you didn’t get to choose a profession, but had to adapt to the requirements of your husband’s.
Reminds me of a particular fictional archetype that has almost disappeared: the ambitious woman married to an unambitious man. He just wants a quiet life, she pushes him to put in extra hours, network, and advance in his profession, leading to frustration for both of them. It’s much better that women can now channel their ambition into their own careers.
And those women were basically expected to have constant dinner parties and always be climbing the social ladder which sounds like my worst nightmare. I wouldn’t have fared well in that environment.
My grandmother did what you were supposed to do in 1960. She got married and had three kids, and lived for eighteen years in an insanely abusive relationship before finally getting a divorce and going to get a teaching degree. (I just found out she had a full ride scholarship to a major university at the start of their marriage, so she effectively abandoned her career prospects once she got pregnant, cuz that’s just what you did.)
It wasn’t only her that suffered; all three of her kids had severe trauma from growing up that way (and one, my mother, passed it along.)
This is why whenever I’m tempted to leave the work force for whatever reason, I don’t. Even if we could survive financially (I’m skeptical we could) it wouldn’t be worth the risk of being trapped in a relationship. I have a very nice husband but I’m taking no risks.
Wife haranguing her husband, as their son looks on, in a 1930s New Yorker cartoon: “So he doesn’t get the highest grades in his class! Do you earn the highest salary in your office?”
Concerning “He Hit Me (And It Felt Like a Kiss),” according to Wikipedia:
Goffin and King wrote the song after discovering that their babysitter and singer “Little Eva” [Boyd] was being regularly beaten by her boyfriend. When they inquired why she tolerated such treatment, Eva replied, with complete sincerity, that her boyfriend’s actions were motivated by his love for her.
They said that they did not condone her attitude, but rather were documenting it.
It also didn’t help that she was apparently an über-LIbertarian (just short of a Randite), which seeped into his later writing.
As for his female characters, the one that I find most interesting is Her Wisdom CCIV (primarily in Glory Road, but she shows up elsewhere in passing). She seems to be modeled a bit after Queen Victoria, especially when Albert was still alive: warm in her personal life, but steely in her professional life. There’s one incident in GR where she listens to a dispute between two delegations, then says the whole problem will resolve itself if one of the disputants is taken out and shot. She orders his entourage to do it; they do.