French crooners like Maurice Chevalier and Jean Sablon came across as leering sexual predators, even on the radio.
Though it outlasted the reality of corporal punishment by an unexpectedly long time. I was among the first kids to avoid it (in state school at least, in the UK), my older siblings faced it but not me, but it was a feature of kids comic books until I outgrew them.
I’m suprised that nobody has mentioned Little Girls by Oingo Boingo yet.
(This song was parodied just a few years back In a My Little Pony comic!)
Sort of like Pepe Le Pew?
However the “Ol’ Number Six” gag would definitely have to go.
But I think the cultural context only tells us that there may not have been anything sinister about Carroll specifically, since he wasn’t violating a taboo. It does not imply that there was anything really okay with Victorian attitudes. It’s not like pedophilia and abuse is a recent invention, or that the modern taboo on pictures of naked children is some kind of prudish overreaction, and there really was some more innocent time when monsters did not exist.
Well, “kept woman” if that is marginally less heinous.
Most of the movie would have to go
No pun intended, but a lot of Airplane! wouldn’t fly today either.
I am not offended by the concept of an adult choosing to be a prostitute, use any other word for the practice you want. Gigi is not about women having such a choice. The plot tries to redeem itself by having Gigi marry the man who would have “kept her”, but that was his choice to make, she had already conceded to the business arrangement worked out between him and her “procurer”.
Yes, it was a different time with different sensibilities in Europe prior to the WWI, but the movie was made in 1958. I don’t believe that prostitutes were thrilled with their lives in involuntary servitude because one day they would be portrayed by pretty actresses in fancy dresses and in 1958 people should have realized that and not glorified it.
What am I missing about “Hobo Kelly”? The clip seems dated, but it’s just a white lady with a British accent in an exaggerated clown/hobo costume encouraging kids to read books, no? What about it “wouldn’t fly now”?
But that’s not important right now.
The Victorians thought they were the most modern, most sensible, most worthy group ever put on the planet. Exactly as we think of ourselves today. The only prediction we can make about society 150 years from now is that they will think of themselves in that way as well and find our thoughts and mores horrifying.
Understanding that this way of thinking is omnipresent throughout time is the basis of understanding history. It doesn’t mean that we have to accept and approve everything in history: we live in our moving present and must respond to that reality. Still, modern historians have to delve deeply enough to absorb why older cultures thought and lived the way they did or else their work is drivel and bigotry.
A closer, non-sexual attitude is the way atomics post WWII were going to be incorporated into every aspect of life, and propagandized in books, magazines, and children’s works. Take Marvels of Science #2 from 1946. One of the marvels would be “The Atomic Age” which contains the immortal line “Junior, please put an atomic wafer in the power box, will you, dear?”
Everybody knew about the bomb, yet the techno-optimism after the war meant that the wonders of cheap, unlimited energy were going to transform society for the better in every way. We recoil from that, yet the climate crisis is bringing back the idea of atomic power as a far better alternative to fossil fuels. Nobody knows where that attitude will lead, but it’s cutting edge, and future societies will judge us whichever way we go.
Surely you can’t be serious
I don’t disagree, but it does not imply that all cultural values are equal, and that we are no better than Victorians. If (for example) there is a long term trend toward greater compassion and tolerance, every generation will always look back on the last as inferior, and it will always be true that they were inferior.
I of course disagree, one could easily make Blazing Saddles and Airplane today (assuming of course they hadn’t been made already and therefore the jokes in them haven’t been worn out).
In junior high and high school in the mid 80’s we played a game called Killer which involved students trying to assassinate each other with toy guns. I don’t think the administration approved of it very much, but I don’t recall it being specifically prohibited. Now days…
I said as much in another thread not long ago, and a poster responded with outraged denial.
Some things don’t fly. then or now.
It wasn’t about Caroline at all, it was about his wife, and he was inspired by a picture of Caroline in a certain dress that reminded him of innocence and first meeting his wife.
No. Groomed to become a rich man’s mistress. Not many choices back then for women who were not wealthy. Married to a man your parent pick, as a “good marriage”, factory worker or indeed prostitute.
Yeah, the irrational fear of Atomic power may doom us all.
Yep, we did that too. They now do Airsoft and paintball and Nerf.