RT seizing the day to mock the West:
It’s true, though. Perhaps there really was some kind of millennial change in the year 2000, because this stuff has not aged well.
Incidentally, for those in the UK, is Sandy Toksvig the best thing to happen to QI? Or is it just that she reminds me of the best teacher I ever had?
I think the Austin Powers stuff is still funny because he’s mocking the James Bond stereotype. I mean, yeah, all the women in the film wear booty shorts, but I think it’s a great send up of the trope. I think goofy Austin Powers himself seems to really adore women in a way that misogynistic James Bond does not.
Well. MY mom’s mom hung up the female underthings in pillowcases to dry outdoors - when they lived on a farm, not somewhere lots of people would pass by and see them. Mom also had five older sisters, most of whom “had to” get married, who didn’t pass along the facts of life to her; when her first period started, she thought she was dying, so obviously Grandma told her nothing.
When she got married the first time, in 1948, her husband told her he was sterile. When she got pregnant, he accused her of infidelity and wanted a divorce. In the meantime, he’d gotten another woman pregnant - who worked in the same building as my mom - so he obviously wasn’t sterile, and she was able to turn the tables and sue him for divorce. She had a miscarriage (due to then-undiagnosed endometrosis one one of her ovaries, which would eventually cause three more with my father); he married the other woman, and she had their baby.
In 1949, my dad was carrying mail and saw my mom trying to get into her second-story apartment, as she’d locked herself out. He admired her ankles. Eventually, they got married in 1951. In later life, she told me he said he wouldn’t have married her if she’d had another man’s child. In the early 1970s - probably around 1973, but I don’t know for sure - when she was in her late 40s and he in his early 50s, he started having an affair with the wife of one of his bowling buddies. Again, she later told me that my dad got “funny” after he’d had his vasectomy around that time. She also told me that he was still having sex with her.
Have times really changed, or do we not keep quiet about these things? I only learned these details when I was an adult, but growing up I knew something was wrong. And oddly enough, I wasn’t pushed into a feminine role - yes, I had Suzy Homemaker toys and Barbie dolls, but I also did tomboy things. In fact, if I was steered away from anything, such as college, it was about money (I was told my dad made too much for me to get a Pell grant, when he simply didn’t want to disclose any financial information), not about me being female.
And I personally think Betty Friedan and her crew, as well as Gloria Steinem, made a BIG mistake in alienating stay-at -home moms from the Women’s Movement. Who in the bloody hell raised them, chickens? I stayed at home with my son for quite a few years, and I found that raising a child - especially a boy with me being a single mom - was one of the most fulfilling and frustrating experiences I’ve ever had. And it got harder when I did work outside the home. But like everything else in the world, mistakes got made; I can only hope we’ve learned from them.
Fair enough. It just amused me the hypocrisy of a Russian publication taking on Western sexism - though Disney (for instance) grinds many of my gears from cultural appropriation on.
Sandi’s fantastic, I’ve always looked out for her ever since seeing her in Saturday morning kids TV (No. 73.)
I think times changed… a little?
I don’t have to wear a skirt or hose to work like my Mom did.
But I think the expectation is that it changed a lot more than it actually has.
And we’ve grown up with the message that we should be thankful for the changes and stop complaining.
I think the #metoo and #timesup is the frustration finally coming out that things have not changed enough and dammit we’re going to start talking about the shit that is wrong and that hasn’t changed!
I read a tweet somewhere that said something along the lines that men didn’t realize that women wanted to tear down everything about sexual and relationship power imbalances, which is why its still going, and why we’re onto nebulous topics like “bad sex” and “bad dates” instead of rape and sex assault. I do think this is a watershed moment. And all the Aziz Ansari’s of the world need to be afraid, because we’re naming names now, and people are going to be held accountable.
And I’m watching “Comrade X” with Hedy Lamarr and Clark Gable, and he just told her to change into a slinky nightgown in order to spread Communism in the US, which is what she wants to do. 1940 - what a wacky year!
I was way ahead of everyone. I didn’t like Friends then, I don’t like it now. It’s not that it didn’t age well, but it was never good. We were just inculcated to think it was okay.
Eh. I like her, I like QI, and I like her on QI, but I still prefer Stephen Fry.
Austin Powers is okay. Wonderbra is also okay. The rest were bad, and we knew they were at the time.
I know the tone in the article was supposed to be sarcastic, but I agree with it.
I felt that towards the end Fry was phoning in, and his gay jokes were beginning to get sufficiently stereotypical to be offensive. Whereas ST is witty and subtle, e.g.
“You should get a woman in to do that”
“Oh I do, twice a week.”
You may have a point. She seems friendlier, and her gay jokes are actually funny 
This is a really really good take:
That it’s happening at a time when the far right seems to be gaining power is especially important, I think. Men have certainly not managed to liberate the world. I’m afraid that it’s now up to women to do the job.
Lysistrata 2018?
I guess I am one of those chickens! Even over Christmas (which I don’t particularly celebrate) dinner, a relative called me out hinting that I have a terrible work ethic because homemaking and parenting somehow “isn’t work”. And how “we sometimes need to do things we don’t want to do”… whatever that was supposed to mean. Without taking them to task too directly at the table, I explained that I have actual duties here which are necessary, and if I don’t do them, simply aren’t done. They weren’t convinced, but they weren’t able to explain how else we might have a functioning household.
Another related issue I think is that of framing this “domestic sphere” strictly in terms of the nuclear family, which IMO has never made much sense from a labor or economic perspective, when something like kibbutzim or communes are an option. There is no way to take turns or divide work when those duties always fall upon the same single person.
Don’t I know it! My son, despite being ASD (which I didn’t know till he was a teen, he’d been misdiagnosed with various behavioral disorders since he was five; I blocked out the memory of when it took like four people to restrain him when they took his blood for the first time), was much better off being raised by myself, my mom, his paternal grandpa, and his paternal aunt. My father, to a degree, helped out, but as he got older, his patience wore and a noisy, active child didn’t work out. Don’t even get me started on his dad, LOL! And it was a two-household upbringing because I lived with my mom and dad, and his aunt lived with her father.
It doesn’t take a village; it takes at least one dedicated person to raise a child.
With all the conversations going on around the topic, this is a good thread. What we’ve been conditioned to do is not necessarily what we want to do.
I thought Friends was slightly more clever than the usual sitcom fare but not particularly. It just seemed to work harder than most.
True story: my mom taught Courtney Cox in the 7th grade. She was called CeeCee back then. When Friends was on the air, one day a bunch of her students asked her if she taught Courtney Cox. She was like ??? How do you know that??? and they were like, she was in a PSA and she talked about you. I have looked and looked for that PSA to show my mom but I can’t find it. Thought it was a The More You Know but it’s not one of those.
It was far from insightful, and a little contrived, but it could be clever and funny at times.
In the 1990s the place where I worked still required all women, even those behind the scenes who would never see a customer, to wear a skirt or dress, pantyhose, pumps, and makeup. They also gave gendered holiday gifts to only the women, while allowing the men to choose from a general catalog.
The past isn’t even all that past.