I've never seen the whole movie, though I have watched at least part of it at some point, more than just the clips I watch over and over from YouTube, like this fantastic scene about one of her best students choosing to get married and quit school so she can be a homemaker and full-time mom.
It resonates with me because I was a good student who made that choice and a lot of self-described feminists have been quite ugly to me in a way that suggests to me some women are jealous and would never admit it. Like the character in this scene who wanted to personally raise her own children and not try to also be a lawyer while shipping them off to daycare, I wanted to personally raise my own children and not ship them off to daycare.
I do NOT call myself a feminist and never have because to my mind that means "A woman who wants a real career and is willing to sacrifice the welfare of her children on the altar of that personal God."
To my mind, it's a woman who buys the idea that the heteronormative "real career" designed for a male breadwinner with a de facto chattel property wife taking care of all the women's work is the ONLY means to have a real career. It's the only means to have enough income, to be treated with real respect and to make a difference in this world.
It's a STEP in the right direction to believe WOMEN need their own income and their own careers. Their own TURF. Their own THING to be the focus of their identity, something OTHER THAN just wife and mom.
But believing the ONLY means to pursue that is to try to do it like a man is drinking the koolaid. It's not wondering what a world might look like if we dismantled this heternormative world and redesigned it to let people thrive on other terms -- ALL people, regardless of gender, INCLUDING the CHILDREN who are not always served well by shipping them off to daycare while both parents have OTHER priorities.
Women who call themselves feminists and pursue real careers and ALSO choose to have children are, generally speaking, NOT promoting the rights of women -- of ALL women. In most cases, lower class women are still doing the cooking, cleaning and child rearing and the nannies, childcare providers, maids and assorted other women doing the essential women's work for these very privileged women are women who will NEVER have the kind of privileges they have.
Women pursuing "real careers" and letting a nanny or similar raise their kids are promoting classism where RICH women get "full lives" -- get to live like MEN -- and other women get oppressed by wealthy WOMEN instead of by a husband who essentially owns them because she has no income of her own and America does a poor job of protecting her rights and liberty in the face of that.
My parents were both big believers in putting the children first. I rarely went to daycare because I had two older siblings, my mother was officially a full-time homemaker until I was eleven (while taking in sewing -- aka working from home and making surprisingly good money all things considered) and because my father retired from the military the summer I turned three.
My dad's real career -- 26.5 years in the Army -- was behind him. As a military veteran with blind spells and other issues, he had trouble holding down a job and worked an assortment of entry-level jobs and none of them turned into a second career. He was sometimes unemployed for months at a time.
When my brother got divorced and moved back home with an infant, my mother had just applied to college and been accepted. She had to forego her dreams of a college education to continue working to help support this baby because the children come first.
My father, who had never before changed a diaper in his life, is the one who officially retired to provide childcare while my mother and brother both worked. He never did learn to cook and my mother was talented at working full time while also cooking and cleaning, but he stayed home with his grandhild and changed diapers and raised the kid.
My sister had a real career. Thanks to the values my parents so strongly believed in and that I took to heart, with their support and my support, she managed to take five years off from her real career to be home with her child and then resumed her real career when the kid was old enough to start school.
I have no problem with women making good money, being taken seriously, etc. I have a big problem with the idea that the way women should seek "equality" is by falling into lock step and doing the career thing "like a man" while OTHER WOMEN who are less privileged continue to do the essential women's work of raising the kids, cooking the meals, etc.
I try to provide solutions, not ugly judgy lectures, so among other things I run a site called Nutrient Dense in hopes of helping people eat well without needing a full-time wife on hand to make that happen.
There is another scene in this movie that I think is just fantastic. Giselle has spent the night with an illicit lover and is telling her friends about it when Betty begins talking trash about her.
Ultimately, Giselle stops the abusive tirade by putting her arms around Betty and Betty falls apart and it finally comes out she's not REALLY talking about Giselle. Her angry words are really about how she feels about her own life in the face of learning her husband has been unfaithful and doesn't really want her. Betty asks "Does he pay you? For sex? At the rate you're going, you could make a fortune."
Previously, Betty tried to leave her husband and her own mother sends her back to her husband, telling her to not divorce. In her conservative family, the only acceptable means for a woman to pay her bills is by whoring herself out under the polite euphemism of marrying well.
Betty bitterly says "They say you're a whore...they will toss you aside like a used rag...the men you love don't even want you."
When Giselle puts her arms around Betty and she breaks down, those words morph into "He doesn't want me." She's projecting her own pain onto a woman who refuses to play by the rules, a woman it is socially acceptable to hate, a woman who "should" be punished for refusing to play by the rules.
The subtext is "I played by the rules. I'm a good girl. This can't be happening to ME. It should be happening to YOU. My life is supposed to WORK. Why doesn't it?"
Betty says even more bitterly and bitingly "It must be torturous running after a man who doesn't want you, who is in love with someone else." Giselle stops trying to politely avoid the confrontation and simply leave and throws her arms around Betty over Betty's objections.
Giselle has spent all night making love with a man she is not supposed to be with, a married man she has no "right" to be loved by. She describes it politely as "we stayed up all night not talking" and as "divine exhaustion" and Betty is a woman not getting her sexual needs met whose husband makes excuses for not coming home while he pretends his work is keeping him too busy for her and in reality he's making love to another woman.
The scene is brilliant. Giselle has the love to give her friend because she's full up on love. She's been making love all night. She's gotten a great deal of positive, physical attention and she saw Betty's husband with another woman. She knows what's really going on, that this tirade isn't about Giselle. It's Betty's anguish pouring out of her.
It's a remarkable scene and much of it goes uncommented on. It's generally not socially acceptable to talk about ideas like "not getting your sexual needs met has significant psychological and emotional consequences and getting them met does too and in the opposite direction."
These two women are friends and the Wikipedia page says Betty leaves her husband and she and Giselle rent an apartment together. They are GOOD friends who have known each other a while.
This incident is ONE of MANY shared experiences, a single detail in a larger fabric of a significant personal relationship.
If you are a woman who is talented at being compassionate, at LITERALLY understanding why people do the stupid shit they do -- like engage in a tirade about someone else because they can't directly face their own pain -- and have the potential to play the part Giselle played of the person who met her good friend's verbal abuse with love and compassion, addressing the REAL issue behind it because she knew her well enough to KNOW what that was, do not let the world try to tell you that you somehow are REQUIRED to do similar things for random strangers or mere acquaintances in response to their intentionally abusive shit.
A lot of people will likely recognize that you have the capacity to do that and many people will WANT you to do that and some of them will be Christians who have been drinking the koolaid from birth about warped interpretations of the Bible. They will not want to recognize that church is supposed to be moral instruction for how they are supposed to comport themselves and some people will do their damnedest to INSIST you MUST let them abuse you while you "turn the other cheek"[1] and "love thine enemy."
They will refuse to hear that it makes no sense for you to give that much to every random stranger while they do NOTHING for you. They will refuse to hear that rewarding their intentionally abusive behavior only encourages them to remain selfish, narcissistic and awful.
They will refuse to hear that there is a social contract and when you do something BIG like that for someone, it is supposed to be rewarded and not by heaping more abuse on you so they can extract more feel-good moments from you against your will. Having "compassion" for a random stranger who is being intentionally abusive and expecting your "sympathy" makes you part of the problem in this shit world because it means you are helping to create monsters with your misguided "compassion."
So supposedly "turn the other cheek" really meant "Don't AGREE to be their bitch. Do NOT go along with their assertion they have a right to slap you around because of your station in life. MAKE them hit you on the cheek that signals that you are their social EQUAL or NOT hit you if they don't want to inadvertently agree with the implicit claim that you are as deserving of respect as they are."
Jesus Christ lived around two thousand years ago in a completely different social context from what we have today and my understanding is that NONE of his teachings were written down until like seventy years after his death. There are a zillion different Christian sects and MANY of them seem to be a means to spoonfeed homophobia, misogyny and assorted other evil shit to people from birth IN THE NAME OF GOD, which means "Don't you DARE question this SHIT."
I do NOT call myself a feminist and never have because to my mind that means "A woman who wants a real career and is willing to sacrifice the welfare of her children on the altar of that personal God."
To my mind, it's a woman who buys the idea that the heteronormative "real career" designed for a male breadwinner with a de facto chattel property wife taking care of all the women's work is the ONLY means to have a real career. It's the only means to have enough income, to be treated with real respect and to make a difference in this world.
It's a STEP in the right direction to believe WOMEN need their own income and their own careers. Their own TURF. Their own THING to be the focus of their identity, something OTHER THAN just wife and mom.
But believing the ONLY means to pursue that is to try to do it like a man is drinking the koolaid. It's not wondering what a world might look like if we dismantled this heternormative world and redesigned it to let people thrive on other terms -- ALL people, regardless of gender, INCLUDING the CHILDREN who are not always served well by shipping them off to daycare while both parents have OTHER priorities.
Women who call themselves feminists and pursue real careers and ALSO choose to have children are, generally speaking, NOT promoting the rights of women -- of ALL women. In most cases, lower class women are still doing the cooking, cleaning and child rearing and the nannies, childcare providers, maids and assorted other women doing the essential women's work for these very privileged women are women who will NEVER have the kind of privileges they have.
Women pursuing "real careers" and letting a nanny or similar raise their kids are promoting classism where RICH women get "full lives" -- get to live like MEN -- and other women get oppressed by wealthy WOMEN instead of by a husband who essentially owns them because she has no income of her own and America does a poor job of protecting her rights and liberty in the face of that.
My parents were both big believers in putting the children first. I rarely went to daycare because I had two older siblings, my mother was officially a full-time homemaker until I was eleven (while taking in sewing -- aka working from home and making surprisingly good money all things considered) and because my father retired from the military the summer I turned three.
My dad's real career -- 26.5 years in the Army -- was behind him. As a military veteran with blind spells and other issues, he had trouble holding down a job and worked an assortment of entry-level jobs and none of them turned into a second career. He was sometimes unemployed for months at a time.
When my brother got divorced and moved back home with an infant, my mother had just applied to college and been accepted. She had to forego her dreams of a college education to continue working to help support this baby because the children come first.
My father, who had never before changed a diaper in his life, is the one who officially retired to provide childcare while my mother and brother both worked. He never did learn to cook and my mother was talented at working full time while also cooking and cleaning, but he stayed home with his grandhild and changed diapers and raised the kid.
My sister had a real career. Thanks to the values my parents so strongly believed in and that I took to heart, with their support and my support, she managed to take five years off from her real career to be home with her child and then resumed her real career when the kid was old enough to start school.
I have no problem with women making good money, being taken seriously, etc. I have a big problem with the idea that the way women should seek "equality" is by falling into lock step and doing the career thing "like a man" while OTHER WOMEN who are less privileged continue to do the essential women's work of raising the kids, cooking the meals, etc.
I try to provide solutions, not ugly judgy lectures, so among other things I run a site called Nutrient Dense in hopes of helping people eat well without needing a full-time wife on hand to make that happen.
There is another scene in this movie that I think is just fantastic. Giselle has spent the night with an illicit lover and is telling her friends about it when Betty begins talking trash about her.
Ultimately, Giselle stops the abusive tirade by putting her arms around Betty and Betty falls apart and it finally comes out she's not REALLY talking about Giselle. Her angry words are really about how she feels about her own life in the face of learning her husband has been unfaithful and doesn't really want her. Betty asks "Does he pay you? For sex? At the rate you're going, you could make a fortune."
Previously, Betty tried to leave her husband and her own mother sends her back to her husband, telling her to not divorce. In her conservative family, the only acceptable means for a woman to pay her bills is by whoring herself out under the polite euphemism of marrying well.
Betty bitterly says "They say you're a whore...they will toss you aside like a used rag...the men you love don't even want you."
When Giselle puts her arms around Betty and she breaks down, those words morph into "He doesn't want me." She's projecting her own pain onto a woman who refuses to play by the rules, a woman it is socially acceptable to hate, a woman who "should" be punished for refusing to play by the rules.
The subtext is "I played by the rules. I'm a good girl. This can't be happening to ME. It should be happening to YOU. My life is supposed to WORK. Why doesn't it?"
Betty says even more bitterly and bitingly "It must be torturous running after a man who doesn't want you, who is in love with someone else." Giselle stops trying to politely avoid the confrontation and simply leave and throws her arms around Betty over Betty's objections.
Giselle has spent all night making love with a man she is not supposed to be with, a married man she has no "right" to be loved by. She describes it politely as "we stayed up all night not talking" and as "divine exhaustion" and Betty is a woman not getting her sexual needs met whose husband makes excuses for not coming home while he pretends his work is keeping him too busy for her and in reality he's making love to another woman.
The scene is brilliant. Giselle has the love to give her friend because she's full up on love. She's been making love all night. She's gotten a great deal of positive, physical attention and she saw Betty's husband with another woman. She knows what's really going on, that this tirade isn't about Giselle. It's Betty's anguish pouring out of her.
It's a remarkable scene and much of it goes uncommented on. It's generally not socially acceptable to talk about ideas like "not getting your sexual needs met has significant psychological and emotional consequences and getting them met does too and in the opposite direction."
Make love, not war.Many women are taught from birth that they are explicitly NOT allowed to even TRY to meet their own sexual needs. Their sexuality exists for the pleasure of men and TRYING to get their own needs met would make them "a whore."
-- some song line
These two women are friends and the Wikipedia page says Betty leaves her husband and she and Giselle rent an apartment together. They are GOOD friends who have known each other a while.
This incident is ONE of MANY shared experiences, a single detail in a larger fabric of a significant personal relationship.
If you are a woman who is talented at being compassionate, at LITERALLY understanding why people do the stupid shit they do -- like engage in a tirade about someone else because they can't directly face their own pain -- and have the potential to play the part Giselle played of the person who met her good friend's verbal abuse with love and compassion, addressing the REAL issue behind it because she knew her well enough to KNOW what that was, do not let the world try to tell you that you somehow are REQUIRED to do similar things for random strangers or mere acquaintances in response to their intentionally abusive shit.
A lot of people will likely recognize that you have the capacity to do that and many people will WANT you to do that and some of them will be Christians who have been drinking the koolaid from birth about warped interpretations of the Bible. They will not want to recognize that church is supposed to be moral instruction for how they are supposed to comport themselves and some people will do their damnedest to INSIST you MUST let them abuse you while you "turn the other cheek"[1] and "love thine enemy."
They will refuse to hear that it makes no sense for you to give that much to every random stranger while they do NOTHING for you. They will refuse to hear that rewarding their intentionally abusive behavior only encourages them to remain selfish, narcissistic and awful.
They will refuse to hear that there is a social contract and when you do something BIG like that for someone, it is supposed to be rewarded and not by heaping more abuse on you so they can extract more feel-good moments from you against your will. Having "compassion" for a random stranger who is being intentionally abusive and expecting your "sympathy" makes you part of the problem in this shit world because it means you are helping to create monsters with your misguided "compassion."
Footnote
[1] I have read that "turn the other cheek" does NOT mean "let people heap more abuse on you" as is popularly believed. Supposedly, slapping someone on one cheek meant they were low class servants and it was okay to abuse them and slapping them on the other cheek meant they were your high class social equal and it had a completely different meaning.So supposedly "turn the other cheek" really meant "Don't AGREE to be their bitch. Do NOT go along with their assertion they have a right to slap you around because of your station in life. MAKE them hit you on the cheek that signals that you are their social EQUAL or NOT hit you if they don't want to inadvertently agree with the implicit claim that you are as deserving of respect as they are."
Jesus Christ lived around two thousand years ago in a completely different social context from what we have today and my understanding is that NONE of his teachings were written down until like seventy years after his death. There are a zillion different Christian sects and MANY of them seem to be a means to spoonfeed homophobia, misogyny and assorted other evil shit to people from birth IN THE NAME OF GOD, which means "Don't you DARE question this SHIT."
21 “Not everyone who says to Me, ‘Lord, Lord,’ shall enter the kingdom of heaven, but he who does the will of My Father in heaven. 22 Many will say to Me in that day, ‘Lord, Lord, have we not prophesied in Your name, cast out demons in Your name, and done many wonders in Your name?’ 23 And then I will declare to them, ‘I never knew you; depart from Me, you who practice lawlessness!’