She didn’t say anything like that. She said financial dependence can lead to unhealthy relationships, and then, in the very next sentence (you know, the one you omitted from your quote?) said that healthy relationships are ones that work to minimize those sorts of disparities. So, clearly, she’s not assuming that all age-disparate relationships will have that sort of problem, because she immediately describes relationships where it isn’t.
Well, the problem ascertaining paternity there is that Mia Farrow is also the spitting image of Sinatra.
Except that we weren’t talking about age differences, so her second sentence about not having an issue with age differences was irrelevant. We were asking her why she thought that a partner having a paternal role was financially dangerous, and in her response, she added more assumptions about the other partner not being able to have a degree or not being able to work. I’m not mistaken about what she was talking about, you’re mistaken about what I was talking about.
She definitely said what I quoted, and I took her to task for that. She didn’t say she had an issue with age differences, and as a result I didn’t criticize her for what she hadn’t said.
Here’s the exchange :
She wrote :
I criticized this statement :
At which point she mentioned finances as an issue :
I asked where finances where coming from when I was talking about a partner having a paternal role :
Handsomeharry asked the same :
To which she responded :
Let’s walk through this.
Mr. Allen stated he “gifts” his wife decision-making.
That implies she does not have decision making power (you can’t be gifted something you already have, right?). And of course the nature of gifts is that they can stop being given at any time (if she permanently has decision making power, then it’s not a gift, right?).
What do couples make decisions about? Where to live. How to divide up household labor. How to spend the household’s money. Whether or not to have kids and how to raise them. Many, perhaps most, of these decisions are financial.
So, when we have one person who is able to make financial decisions and one person who cannot, or who are only able to on the other persons whims, can we agree that that second person is vulnerable? They may not be in trouble. They may not be miserable. But they are not in as stable and secure an environment as someone who had more input over household financial decisions.
This isn’t idle speculation. We have decades of history and plenty of places in the world where this is exactly how marriages work. And it always has left the less-empowered spouse vulnerable.
I would not want my daughter to be “gifted” decision making power or to be treated like a child by her spouse. Would you? Would you be comfortable with her being a dependent of some guy? And if you wouldn’t want it for your daughter, why would you want it for your partner?
(post shortened)
Please, Woody.
As noted earlier, there are technical reasons for believing that RF cannot be the son of FS, regardless of what some believe they see as a resemblence. Most notably:
I’m not much interested in what Allen said. I didn’t really understand what he means, in fact, and I don’t think I could without him expanding a lot on what he stated.
What I criticized is your general statement :* “Relationships that are not collaborative partnerships among equals are creepy”*
Yes, but over here (be it your here or mine), marriages (let alone relationships in general) don’t work that way. “Go fuck yourself” is always an option. As much as Allen thinks he gifts her spouse with decision making, she’s in fact perfectly free to make her own decision making as she sees fit.
I don’t think that people should be dependant, at least financially, on their spouse or partner. I don’t think that housewife is a sound career path, for instance.
Emotional dependance is a different matter. Disclosure : I’m into D/s (as a Dominant), so I’m a quite a bit familiar with people who want to be dependant or who want to have someone to look up to. I don’t think you’ll have a say in whether your daughter will want to be submissive, dependant, treated as a child, or whatever. In fact, I don’t think she’ll have a say in it. That’s something you long for or not, and no amount of rationale debate will make you stop desiring it. And you’re much better off clearly realizing that’s what you’re longing for. That’s the only way to control it, rather than consistently putting yourself into undesirable situation.
And it’s the same with the much milder and common “paternal role”. Some people want to give up the burden of decision making, or to have someone who will “watch” on them, or will keep them in check, or will push them, or will act as a teacher figure, or as a father figure. That’s in my opinion very generally a longing for safety, indeed the kind of safety you had (or at least should have had) when you were a kid. I guess it can be transitional, but many people want this out of a relationship, even at older ages. If you force them into independance, you’ll just make them unhappy, whether because they’re unequiped for it or just unwilling to assume it. Pull them out their “paternal” relationship, and they’re more likely to end up in an abusive relationship than in the independance you expected, because they’ll keep seeking for someone else to be in charge.
People are extremely different. They don’t all have the same aspirations you have, and you can’t change someone’s basic psychological needs. And even if you could, you shouldn’t, unless the effort involved clearly pales by comparison with the gain expected. If people are happy in their couple, the way it works is none of your business, and you should rejoice rather than condemn their way of life. Not everybody is happy, even in a “collaborative partnerships among equals”.
Yes, being dependant to a significant level, emotionally or otherwise, is a risky proposition. If you want to adress that, you can try to figure out how to make it less risky. “That’s creepy, stop wanting what you want and look up to me instead to teach you how a proper relationship works”, on the other hand, won’t help the slighest bit.
I’d be leery of any statements made by either of Frank’s two daughters. They’re both friends with Mia and Ronan and I doubt that either of them would have qualms fibbing about Frank having a had vasectomy to try to protect them.
There’s also the possibility that Frank told them he’d gotten one when he hadn’t, for whatever reason existed at the time.
Or that he had gotten one but it failed. Vasectomies aren’t 100% successful and sometimes guys who had one still wind up fathering a child.
In other words, I’m afraid I’d need more than Tina’s word to discount Frank as to Ronan’s paternity.
Exactly.
Plus it appears to me that once again Woody was guilty of clumsy phraseology in “gifting” her more responsibility and important decision-making ability. I’d say by his doing that, that he was indeed attempting to make the relationship more equal. You could hardly expect a twenty year old girl to come into a relationship with a highly successful 50-year-old filmmaker and start contributing 50/50 in terms of decision making as she would have no idea what to do in terms of his finances, associates, real estate holdings and business investments, etc. So by gradually turning over control of more of his life to Soon-Yi (probably as he felt she had become able), he was indeed attempting to make her more of an equal in their relationship.
There’s a documentary on Woody Allen that’s pretty illuminating regarding their relationship. If anything, he seems to kowtow to Soon-Yi rather than the opposite. She ribs and teases him a lot, and in one scene had no qualms making him swap with her when she was unhappy with the room service meal she’d gotten in a hotel while they were traveling. If anything, he seems to play a go-along-to-get-along roll in their relationship.
Ahem…make that the go along to get along role in their relationship. :smack:
Because you know better. OK, cool.
No, because of the reasons I already mentioned.
Like I said, Tina and Nancy are very friendly with Mia, and they’re very fond of Ronan. They’ve said so publicly. Plus they’re understandably protective of their father’s image and probably aren’t too keen on the idea Frank was continuing to have illicit sex with Mia for a couple of decades after they divorced. They were probably also trying to insulate Mia from the fallout of having had a kid by Frank but making Woody Allen think the kid was his and then forcing him to pay child support for a kid that wasn’t his.
All in all, there are lots of compelling personal reasons for Tina and/or Nancy to lie or make up things about whether Frank could have fathered Ronan Farrow.
But…it’s dangerous???
Wild Man Blues (1997). That really is a great documentary.
On a side note, do you remember the scene in Italy where Woody’s jazz band was supposed to play in a historic venue, but the venue had burned down, and the mayor of the city was showing Woody around the rubble? A few months after this film came out, I read in the paper that this same mayor was co-indicted for arson in that case. It was apparently an insurance-money scam.
Wow! No, I’ve forgotten that part. I’m gonna have to see if I can find the documentary and watch it again. It’s been a while.
But yeah, it really was a good documentary. I think if more people saw it they’d look at Woody in a different light.
I could be wrong, but I think the venue was the same opera house that featured in the 1963 Burt Lancaster film The Leopard and that this was at least the second time in history it burned down.
Very interesting. Your comments have motivated me to look at it again and I thank you for that. 
My job is done.
I was wrong. The venue was not the opera house featured in The Leopard but rather the one featured in the 1954 Luchino Visconti film Senso. The city was Venice, and in his Great Movies essay on the film, Roger Ebert says: “Visconti films on location inside the city’s La Fenice, that beloved music box of an opera house, destroyed by fire in 1836 and 1996, rebuilt both times.” It was the aftermath of the 1996 fire that is seen in Wild Man Blues.
What kind of deal do people think went down with the young ‘urchin’ type Farrow?
I can only speak of my relationships but I’ve never had a particular desire for a paternal/who’s the daddy role - pretty content with a peer-to-peer deal, but it’s always cropped up.
While varying from person to person, it does seem to be a female staple. I guess ultimately it’s mostly about approval or something, but it so often manifests as a parental deal.
Took me a pretty long time to feel comfortable with some of that stuff.