I've been catching up on the book club episodes so I just listened to that George Sand episode yesterday + was also really stricken by that Raymon quote you mentioned and the comparison to the Jane Austen fantasy of an oppressive-yet-happy marriage. Also made me think of the way you can effortlessly spot a contemporary misogynist by how mad he is about no-fault divorce (looking at you, steven crowder!!!)
I have to say that I respect "Unafraid and Unashamed." It's the perfect encapsulation of a certain message (right down to the painter coming to despise his subject but still wishing for his own personal vengeance-success). Hang it up next to the Kehinde Wiley!
Whit Stillman made & released a Jane Austen adaptation some years ago, Love and Friendship, based on Austen's Lady Susan. Its not one of his better films or even one of the better Austen adaptations out there but it does depart from a lot of them in that the ruthlessness of Austen's world - the arranged marriages, the competitions between families, the doltishness of men, the way young girls are traded like currency - becomes front and center, not the cozy romances so many young women respond to and why these period pieces become such fetishized objects for the tradwife types.
There's a Spanish-language show on Netflix which is somewhere between a telenovela and a light-hearted comedy with Brigerton overtones called The Lady's Companion that I sometimes enjoy when I don't want to watch anything particularly "deep". This show, too, shows more of the dark stuff about the realities of 19th century arranged marriages and women-as-property.
I've never understood why the common popular imagination conceives of a feminist as a woman who both wants a family & children (as if this is necessarily hypocritical/irreconcilable with feminist ideals) but has trouble acquiring them (not, actually, the most difficult thing for a woman to achieve with her life, broadly speaking - happens all the time, I've seen it). There's also something weirdly dick-ish about treating struggling IVF patients as moral or personal failures of some kind, isn't there? As if only people who have fallen out of god's favor and swallowed horrible evil Marxist Feminist Ideas have trouble conceiving. I do think tradwives and trad-minded women also prefer a vision of the world as defined by this kind of mean-spirited providence, too - it alleviates them of the responsibility to make the world better, more equitable, cleaner, sustainable, etc.
Thanks for the pointer to the Horowitz piece on opera, I learned a lot there!
That essay was so good it nudged me into finally renewing my subscription to nyrb!
I've been catching up on the book club episodes so I just listened to that George Sand episode yesterday + was also really stricken by that Raymon quote you mentioned and the comparison to the Jane Austen fantasy of an oppressive-yet-happy marriage. Also made me think of the way you can effortlessly spot a contemporary misogynist by how mad he is about no-fault divorce (looking at you, steven crowder!!!)
I have to say that I respect "Unafraid and Unashamed." It's the perfect encapsulation of a certain message (right down to the painter coming to despise his subject but still wishing for his own personal vengeance-success). Hang it up next to the Kehinde Wiley!
Whit Stillman made & released a Jane Austen adaptation some years ago, Love and Friendship, based on Austen's Lady Susan. Its not one of his better films or even one of the better Austen adaptations out there but it does depart from a lot of them in that the ruthlessness of Austen's world - the arranged marriages, the competitions between families, the doltishness of men, the way young girls are traded like currency - becomes front and center, not the cozy romances so many young women respond to and why these period pieces become such fetishized objects for the tradwife types.
There's a Spanish-language show on Netflix which is somewhere between a telenovela and a light-hearted comedy with Brigerton overtones called The Lady's Companion that I sometimes enjoy when I don't want to watch anything particularly "deep". This show, too, shows more of the dark stuff about the realities of 19th century arranged marriages and women-as-property.
I've never understood why the common popular imagination conceives of a feminist as a woman who both wants a family & children (as if this is necessarily hypocritical/irreconcilable with feminist ideals) but has trouble acquiring them (not, actually, the most difficult thing for a woman to achieve with her life, broadly speaking - happens all the time, I've seen it). There's also something weirdly dick-ish about treating struggling IVF patients as moral or personal failures of some kind, isn't there? As if only people who have fallen out of god's favor and swallowed horrible evil Marxist Feminist Ideas have trouble conceiving. I do think tradwives and trad-minded women also prefer a vision of the world as defined by this kind of mean-spirited providence, too - it alleviates them of the responsibility to make the world better, more equitable, cleaner, sustainable, etc.