I APPRECIATED comments by readers on a video review I posted of the 1975 movie “The Stepford Wives.” As readers pointed out, the reviewer failed to mention the major plot twist in the movie. I don’t think this failure affected his basic point. It appears to have truly been a movie that portrayed housewives as conformist robots, but he didn’t mention that the men in the movie killed the housewife characters and replaced them with real robots.
For another reason, however, I removed the video. A possibly blasphemous comment in the review couldn’t be edited out by me.
I’ll have to review this movie myself. The later 2004 version probably was not as influential as the 1975 version. Stay tuned. And thank you to alert readers. Their comments are below.
Initial reaction to the film by feminist groups was not favorable,[8] with one studio screening for feminist activists being met with “hisses, groans, and guffaws.”[8] Cast and crew disagreed with the perceived anti-woman interpretations …, recalling “Bryan [Forbes] always used to say, ‘If anything, it’s anti-men!'”[8] Despite Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique being a major influence on the original novel upon which the film was based, Friedan’s response to the film was highly critical, calling it “a rip-off of the women’s movement.”[21] Friedan commented that women should boycott the film and attempt to diminish any publicity for it.[22]
Writer Gael Greene, however, lauded the film, commenting: “I loved it—those men were like a lot of men I’ve known in my life.”[22]
THE NEWYEAR is here and that means it’s the time of year to reprimand one of Europe’s most famous arts institutions: the Vienna Philharmonic, known for its famous New Year’s Day concerts.
This year, the philharmonic got hit from two directions: on one side, for long playing a particular arrangement of Johann Strauss’s famous Radetzky March. The arrangement was written by a member of the National Socialist Party. Leopold Weninger wrote it in 1914, decades before the National Socialists existed. Despite the immense, worldwide popularity of the march, which always ended the New Year’s concert, the orchestra’s most famous annual event, the philharmonic for the first time this year replaced it with another, less rousing arrangement. You can see the former version, with all that disgusting, patriotic clapping, in the video above. Unfortunately, I don’t have a clip of the new one.
That the famous orchestra prefer to disassociate itself from Nazism by undermining a jubilant celebration that has nothing to do with Nazism is not unreasonable, I suppose, but then could we have some balance please?
For instance, could the orchestra stop performing the works of Russian composer Sergei Prokofiev and other artists who had connections with the Soviet government, under which tens of millions of innocent people were sent to their deaths and killed in deliberate famines? Prokofiev voluntarily returned to Soviet Russia after living in the West for two decades; he wrote music meant to boost the morale of the Soviet army; won Stalin prizes and in 1937 composed a cantata celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Bolshevik revolution, featuring musical settings of texts by Stalin, Marx and Lenin.
Now I don’t believe Prokofiev’s beautiful compositions should be banished, but if musical works are to be judged by the political connections of musicians, then we have to roll up our sleeves and get to work, not just with connections to Nazism, but with connections to Soviet Communism, which killed far more people and is still alive today. (We hear far less about Soviet atrocities. Is that because they were so often committed under Semitic leadership?)
Sergei Prokofiev wrote for the Soviet government and never publicly resisted Marxist Communism.
The Vienna Philharmonic was also scolded, as it has been many times, for having once been an all-male ensemble. The New York Times, to its credit, admits in this year’s critical piece that women were not excluded from performing classical music in the last three centuries.
For the most part, however, women performed in private, not in public, except in all-female ensembles ….
Yes, that’s very true, and one could even say that through their informal role, women performed more than men and did more to promote classical music. However, Farah Nayeri, author of The Times piece, trivializes the reason for the exclusion from orchestras:
Entire sections of the orchestra remained male because their instruments were considered unladylike.
The cello was deemed indecorous because it had to be placed between a player’s legs. Flutes and horns were thought to make a woman’s face look funny; percussion instruments were viewed as exclusively male.
That’s ridiculous. Women do look undignified with a cello between their legs, but professional orchestras were entirely or primarily male because men had the duty to financially support their families, a burden which women did not have to the same degree. The main thing that distinguished the professional orchestras from the private groups in which women played was that the musicians were paid, often enough to support a family.
Women are now part of the Vienna Philharmonic. And we live in a world where the family struggles far more. The point never was that women were inferior musicians. Eventually, the arts decline, as does civilization in general, when the family does. If you read through the lives of famous musicians and composers, you will find that many of them were inspired by mothers who loved music. The burden of proof rests with the believers in equality. No society has produced great art without great sacrifices — and one of those sacrifices is female success in the world, rather than the home.
Yikes! The horror! An all-male Vienna Philharmonic, back in the ages when women were hated even though men spent all their working lives supporting them.
It was twenty years ago that my mother spent the last Christmas in her apartment at Maryville Gardens, on the property that had once been the site of Maryville College.
It was twenty years ago that I sat there with her as we talked about Christmas memories, listened to Christmas carols and songs, and watched Christmas movies from the 1940s and 1950s.
It was twenty years ago that it became unbearably clear to me and to her that her memory was beginning to fail. It was a preview of what has been called “death in slow motion.” What followed was a three-year nightmare of continued loss, worry, frustration, uncertainty, and regrets. If I felt all those things acutely, as I did, then it must have been so much worse for her. But she never talked much about it, and I never encouraged her to do so. The realization that it was happening was bad enough. She knew there was nothing we could do about it. I knew it too, and I hated it.
On that night, we sat there in the comfort and warmth of her apartment, admiring the beauty of the lights on her Christmas tree and the ornaments that she had made and placed upon it and the Christmas village that she had made and placed under it.
It was the penultimate chapter in her life. She still found pleasure in decorating her Christmas tree and the village beneath it, just as she did when I was a boy in the 1950s and when I must have absorbed some of the joy she felt in looking forward to what for us was the happiest time of year. (more…)
HUMAN mutilation looks like mutilation in a backward tribe. For a technologically advanced society, mutilation can be made to look normal. Three months later, the couple says they are confident their baby will thrive growing up in their hometown of Brighton, with support from both sets of grandparents. “It’s about having the right kind of community around us so they are able to see different kinds of family set-ups,” Jay tells the outlet. “All we can do is try to be really open from the start with them and other people around us — give them the best chance.” (Source) Ideas, not technology, determine how advanced a society. We live in a primitive world. But it's dazzling, and because it's dazzling people are fooled into thinking that high technology means a healthy, advanced culture that can sustain itself. In related news: This month, the first person to obtain a legal "non-binary" sex designation has successfully petitioned the court originally responsible for his "non-binary" status to order that the sex on his birth certificate be restored to "male." In documents exclusively provided to PJ Media, James Shupe's petition described his "non-binary" designation as a "psychologically harmful legal fiction." He told PJ Media he hopes this decision will prevent a woman currently seeking "non-binary" recognition from following the same lies. "The charade of not being male, the legal fiction, it's over," James Shupe told PJ Media on Tuesday. "The lies behind…
A philosopher seated at his desk may be able to distinguish the natural and supernatural aims of men, but in actual life, this distinction does not exist, and all education is worthless unless it enables a man to attain the end proposed for him by his Creator. What would it benefit an army to equip it with first-rate weapons, if it were left without leaders and without an object, so that each soldier could go wherever he chose? Every good teacher rightly expects his pupils to be grateful to him if they succeed in life. Those, however, who give instruction quite apart from all mention of religion, must expect to hear the children of this world reproach them at the last day, saying: "All that you taught us was vain; you never spoke to us of God; you showed us pictures of all kinds of things, but allowed the image of God to be obliterated in our souls; you made us learn the names of earthly kings in remote ages, but not the name of the King of Heaven, whose reign is everlasting; we know all about minute germs and fungi, and nothing at all about God." My Brethren, all creation exists for the glory of God: the earth, sea, and stars extol Him, the spirits in Heaven sing His praise; our lives belong to Him, and therefore we must teach our children to pronounce His Name; all our systems of…
NEW YEAR'S GREETINGS from The Thinking Housewife. May you have great hope and confidence in God during the year ahead. I will keep all the readers of this site in my daily prayers this year --- and every year. THANK YOU very much to those who have given to support this blog. This is a lovely carol based on the poem by Christina Rossetti -- and it's not bleak at all. IN THE BLEAK MIDWINTER ----- By Christina Rossetti In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan, Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone; Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow, In the bleak midwinter, long ago. Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain; Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign. In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ. Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day, Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay; Enough for Him, whom angels fall before, The ox and ass and camel which adore. Angels and archangels may have gathered there, Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air; But His mother only, in her maiden bliss, Worshipped the beloved with a kiss. What can I give Him, poor as I am? If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb; If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part; Yet what I can I…
