That link mentions most of the inspirations for the Austin Powers characters but not Some Girls Do.
I’m sure some guys were only saved by the answer to the question “Do I really want to go to jail for this asshole?”
He got so close. He could imagine women doctors, engineers and politicians who were highly competent- but couldn’t quite see them keeping their jobs after getting married (or not getting married at all).
I have a great deal of respect for the Silent Generation; for the independent-minded among them, at least. That’s a wider topic than this OP, but I think that’s what we’re discussing here: the non-independent-minded men who accepted its “take care of my corporation and my corporation will take care of me,” and their wives who bought into the downstream philosophy. As for the concomitant Hugh Hefner “Playboy Philosophy,” that held that successful men (childhoods tempered by the Great Depression but hitting their stride during the American apogee) would enjoy the best from adoring women also products of those two extremes. Suffer a girdle and a blowjob and everything otherwise will be well
A worldview long since turned to shit, but a legacy; and its shit headed adherents, we still contend with.
It hasn’t happened that much in reality either. Two women have had babies in any period while president or prime minister of their country. One was Benazir Bhutto of Pakistan and the other was Jacinda Ardern of New Zealand.
I’m amazed it could be anyone at all. Babies are freaking hard.
So I’ve experienced. If guys really wanted to shock women they should send unsolicited baby photos
I once worked for a high-achieving man, very well-respected in his field - and he was extremely formal and polite.
I formed the impression that he may at heart have been a very shy man, and used formality as his way to move in his career.
Irma Bunt was pretty formidable though. Although perhaps coded as a lesbian (?? Open for debate??) and therefore ‘not a real woman’ (outdated attitude, not mine).
Irma Bunt reminds me an awful lot of Rosa Klebb in From Russia with Love. Although in neither the film version of From Russia with Love nor that of On Her Majesty’s Secret Service are we given any clear indication that Klebb or Bunt are lesbians (Klebb just seems creepy), it’s made clear in Fleming’s novel that Klebb definitely is. There’s no such indication for Bunt. She shows up in the literary sequel to OHMSS, You Only Live Twice, where she appears to be romantically involved with Blofeld, or at least in love with him, so it seems likely she is bisexual, if not heterosexual.
The movies in the 1960s had to tread carefully, so you generally get hints, at best. In the movie Goldfinger, Pussy Galore and her pilots are all evidently straight, but in the novel they’re lesbians. And so is Tilly Masterson, the sister of the gold-covered woman, and the one who tries to shoot Goldfinger. The closest the movie comes to suggesting this is having them immune to Bond’s supposed charms. It’s always annoyed me that Bond essentially triumphs by raping Pussy and this “converting” her. When I first saw the film it bothered me because it seemed unlikely to the point of absurdity, but I’ve come to see the whole idea as repugnant.
Yeh you’ll hear some Bond fanboys dismiss it as Bond just using his charms and that she was ‘up for it’ but it’s clearly just wrong. It’s ok guys, Bond (the film series) is far from perfect. It’s ok to criticise it and still like the series.
Do you mean Project Moonbase?
How is it that women didn’t all strangle men in the 1960s?
Despite the misogamy of the media, the average woman was probably not treated that way. However, my wife is ever vigilant for such things. In the middle of a movie she has been know to yell out, “ALL MEN ARE PIGS!”.
With me sitting right there.
Rock lyrics have a thread already.
That’s why. Women came out of WWII not interested in going to work, answering to the man, and responsibility without authority. Their girls wanted to kick back and let somebody else carry the load their mothers had been so unhappy about.
You hear about all those women who reveled in the autonomy, but ‘autonomy’ is not the way normal working-class people experience their life, now or then, and the record is that post WWII, women turned away from education, authority, and meaningless 40-hour work-weeks.
I’ve seen citations saying that in the US (when polled), the majority of working women wanted to keep their jobs after WW2. Though certainly I would expect the better paying the job, the more they wanted to keep it. Also, we know there was a wide-spread (even by government entities, but I was thinking more of private media) push to tell women the stay-at-home life was what they wanted. And, of course, they were typically viewed as temporary by employers and were laid off based on sex alone (not just most recent hiring) and deprived of the ability to make said choices. Because I will say what people do when presented with a choice matters more than what they say they’d do. Women mostly didn’t get that choice.
Then it’s about class, not sex. Different barriers
Betty Friedan wrote the bestseller about middle class, smart, motivated women who were stuck in a rut. No matter how cushy, a life can still be wasted if it’s not fully meeting its potential.
Jane Addams was in Germany when she saw women brewery laborers lugging barrels of boiling beer on their backs. She saw the beer slosh and scald the women, a situation she saw through her lens as a Socialist as well as a woman.
Franz Kafka saw women ceramics factory workers expected to carry piles of dish-ware up and down stairs, who’d fall and suffer terrible injuries. Kafka saw it through his kafKaesque lens, as how humans are made to be fodder for a meat grinder.
You may decide for yourself which take is the most reliable.
(Sorry, this is hard to address just as a Cafe Society topic)
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 enough to make a guy want to escape into an idyllic 19th-century small town that’s nowhere on the train route…
Yeah, I’m not convinced that the “re-domestication” of women after WWII was entirely voluntary on their part. I mean, of course a lot of women during the war years didn’t like their de facto single-parent or dateless-spinster status due to the absence of so many men. And a whole lot of them didn’t particularly like their wartime jobs either. There was definitely a widespread postwar sense of life returning to the way it was “supposed” to be.
But that wasn’t totally spontaneous, either. Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique describes how pre-war pop culture, in the form of women’s magazine stories and the like, was actually more supportive of female autonomy, careers, etc., than its postwar counterpart. This expansion of women’s horizons was getting some pretty strong pushback from patriarchal tradition in the postwar years, as these passages from a 1947 work called Modern Woman: The Lost Sex indicate:
Her work develops aggressiveness, which is essentially a denial of her femininity, an enhancement of her girlhood-induced masculine tendencies. […]
The effect of this “masculinization” on women is becoming more apparent daily. Their new exertions are making demands on them for qualities wholly opposed to the experience of feminine satisfaction. As the rivals of men, women must, and insensibly do, develop the characteristics of aggression, dominance, independence and power. [Horrors!] These are qualities which insure success as coequals in the world of business, industry and the professions. […]
The woman who is to find true gratification must love and accept her own womanhood as she loves and accepts her husband’s manhood. Women’s rivalry with men today, and the need to “equal” their accomplishments, engenders all too often anger and resentfulness toward men. Men, challenged, frequently respond in kind. […]
As a wife she is not only often ungratified but ungratifying and has, as we have noted, a profoundly disturbing effect upon her husband. Not only does he find himself without the satisfactions of a home directed and cared for by a woman happy in providing affection and devotion, but he is often confronted by circumstances of even more serious import for his own emotional integrity. His wife may be his covert rival, striving to match him in every aspect of their joint undertaking. Instead of supporting and encouraging his manliness and wishes for domination and power, she may thus impose upon him feelings of insufficiency and weakness.
There was a very strong reactionary tendency to maintain that female autonomy wasn’t just unnecessary but actively bad for women, and in the process depriving men of happiness. All those male chauvinist pig asshole characters in 1960s movies and TV really believed (at least, their creators believed) that they were genuinely helping women to avoid the self-destructive path of unnatural independence and find their true happiness as “real women”.