Women
by Not Sure
Sun 9 Oct 2021
Scouring the news yesterday, I saw an article about life at Mark Cuban’s house. I had no idea who Mark Cuban was, but it turns out that he is an entrepreneur who owns a basketball team and he’s worth three or four billion. Poor by the Bezos/Musk/Page/Gates/Zuckerberg/Buffett standard, but that wasn’t what caught my attention in this piece. You see, Mark and his wife are pretty average folk, it turns out. They live in a 24,000 square foot house, but they don’t employ a butler or a cook and the nanny is only there for work days and weekend mornings. Meals are prepared by Mark’s wife and sometimes by Mark and they spend a lot of time trying to keep their children off cell phones. Parents with problems just like yours.
Ben Affleck and Jennifer Lopez (Bennifer) are back together again. They were engaged in 2002 and then Ben gave Jennifer a 6.1-carat pink diamond ring. A speck of dust compared to the 33.19-carat Elizabeth Taylor Krupp Diamond that Richard Burton bought Liz in 1968 which most recently sold for $8.8 million.
Britney Spears has kept busy fighting a string of personal legal battles, but she has made time to speak her mind about the times we’re living through. In 2020, amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Spears posted an image on Instagram stating, "During this time of isolation...We will feed each other, redistribute wealth, strike..." along with three emoji roses, "a symbol commonly used by the Democratic Socialists of America". She later voiced support for the Black Lives Matter movement and George Floyd protests. On September 15, 2021, Spears was named as one of the 100 most influential people of 2021 by Time magazine.
Last week, Miley Cyrus got raunchy on stage in a 'jailbait' tank top and hotpants during a sound check for Austin City Lights. Miley came out as pansexual to her mother at age 14. In June 2015, Time reported she is gender fluid. After her 2018 marriage to a man, Cyrus went on the record to state she still identified as queer.
Clara Bow, a silent film star, was the first young Hollywood star described as an “It girl.” She had “it.” Whatever “it” is that Hollywood wants to portray to the public as the most alluring qualities a young woman can possess. Bow was infamous in Hollywood for her many conquests and complete lack of sexual shyness. She even went so far as to make sure there were no restrictive morals clauses in any of her contracts. (Did she remove those morals clauses, or was that a publicity stunt?)
In one of her more infamous episodes, she flirted scandalously with a married ex-judge at a party thrown by B.P. Schulberg, the president of Paramount Pictures. The judge, who had lost his seat for coming out in favor of premarital sex, was at the party as a journalist to interview Bow for Vanity Fair magazine. Clara greeted the judge with a kiss — in front of his wife, no less — and then pulled him onto the dance floor, where she proceeded to unzip his pants. The judge was taken aback by her forwardness, but Bow, in typical no-nonsense fashion, questioned his cred: "If he likes all that modern stuff, how come he's such an old stick-in-the-mud?"
Clara married and retired from Hollywood, but showed signs of psychiatric illness, attempted suicide and was institutionalized. Upon her release, she did not return to her family, but lived alone in a small bungalow which she rarely left, until she died at the age of sixty.
Alan Watt has referenced a documentary made in 2005, Legendary Sin Cities: Paris, Berlin, Shanghai. Berlin cabaret dancer Anita Berber was featured in the film. In 1915, at the age of 16, Anita made her dance debut. "Scandalously" androgynous, she quickly made a name for herself.
On stage, she often danced with friend and sometime lover Sebastian Droste, who was skinny and had black hair with gelled up curls much like sideburns. Neither of them wore much more than lowslung loincloths and Anita occasionally wore a corsage, placed well below her breasts. Berber and Droste collaborated on a book titled Dances of Vice, Horror, and Ecstasy in 1923. Around 1,000 copies were published and even prominent artist Hannah Höch owned a copy. Remember Madonna’s book, Sex, from 1992?
In 1919, Berber entered into a marriage of convenience with a man with the surname Nathusius. She later left him in order to pursue a relationship with a woman named Susi Wanowski, and became part of the Berlin lesbian scene.
Berber's second marriage, in 1922, was to Sebastian Droste. This lasted until 1923. In 1925, she married a gay American dancer named Henri Châtin Hofmann.
Berber's dances – which had names such as "Cocaine" and "Morphium" – broke boundaries with their androgyny and total nudity, but it was her public appearances that really challenged social taboos. Berber's overt drug addiction and bisexuality were matters of public gossip. In addition to cocaine, opium and morphine, one of Berber's favourite forms of inebriation was chloroform and ether mixed in a bowl. This would be stirred with a white rose, the petals of which she would then eat. Aside from her addiction to narcotic drugs, Berber was also an alcoholic. Berber died in 1928 at the age of twenty-nine and was buried in a pauper's grave.
Anita Berber danced naked in the theatres of Berlin during the Weimar Republic, a time of crippling reparations, hyperinflation and “wheelbarrows” full of money for groceries. By 1923, it took a trillion marks to make one US dollar. From Legendary Sin Cities (which is more a celebration of depravity than a critique): “Its [Berlin) very name became synonymous with perversion, debauchery and creativity. Berlin in the 1920s was the sex capital of Europe.” In response to the hyperinflation of the 1920s, driven by poverty, the sex trade in Berlin exploded as a means to put food on the table. “Berlin was what sexual daydreams wanted to be. You could find almost anything there and maybe everything.”
How many times has Alan Watt talked about the creation of stars? These creations don’t sit down in front of their vanity dressers and say, “I think I’ll be outrageously provocative today. I’ll break every societal norm. I’ll challenge convention.” When a star is born, whether from the stables of Disney or the cabarets of Berlin, there are producers, managers and agents, directors and financiers who select the faces and bodies that best personify the zeitgeist, which itself is a creation. Alan Watt: “Entertainment. Programming. You watch it and enact it...Your life is already decided how it's going to be. You don't know that.”
Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers glide across the ballroom in tuxedo and gown. Inside the cinema, they’re “Puttin’ On the Ritz.” Outside, the Great Depression has ravaged lives.
Most magazines and marketing are aimed at women. As Alan says in this talk, they are more suggestible, more inclined towards change and anything new. Men are by nature more conservative and less willing to try new things. A man might be happy with the old gold refrigerator. It still keeps the beer cold. But the woman has learned from the magazines or on television that gold is old and olive green is this year’s color and all the better homes are olive green and all the stars waltz into kitchens... (never mind, stars don’t waltz into kitchens because kitchens are so very bourgeois.) No matter. They saw an olive green kitchen in Better Homes and Garden.
This magazine was founded in 1922 by Edwin Meredith, who had previously been the United States Secretary of Agriculture under Woodrow Wilson (the U.S. president during World War One, who presided in spirit over the Paris Peace Conference and the Treaty of Versailles and strongly advocated for the League of Nations, precursor to the United Nations.) Better Homes and Gardens is one of the "Seven Sisters", a group of women's service magazines.
Better Homes and Gardens (1922-)
Family Circle (1932-2019)
Good Housekeeping (1885-)
Ladies’ Home Journal (1873-2016)
McCall’s (1873-2002)
Redbook (1903-2019)
Woman's Day (1937-)
Go to Internet Archive and scroll through issues of Better Homes and Gardens from 1930 and you’ll find a completely different ideal woman and ideal home. Culture has never been “reflected” by the media, but always created by it. The issues from 1930 contain no advertising, but skip over to 1946 and nearly every page contains an ad. Discontent is being created in front of our eyes. “More Women Cook on Magic Chef Than Any Other Range.” Why don’t you have a Magic Chef range?
Here are a few of the ads from about ten pages of the May 1946 issue. That issue totalled 152 pages, full of advertising.
Clara Dudley says "You can bring quiet luxury to your home for as little as 50 cents a foot."
"I've quit being a furnace nurse. Stokermatic feeds your coal furnace for you."
"Visit Florida this summer."
"I say Irene, I saw the new 1947 Coolerator today! Isn't it wonderful! The frozen food locker holds 40 lbs. of food without removing the ice cubes!"
"Can you guess her age? Phillips Milk of Magnesia Creams."
"Kem-Tone! A Miracle Made Even More Miraculous by Wartime Paint Research!"
October 2021. No ads anymore, but you can subscribe for insider access and savings... on whatever. This month’s issue features several ways to decorate “tiny” homes and also has an article, “4 Ways to Make Sure Your Rental Portfolio Promotes Diversity and Inclusion.”
What Bernays knew is that women are suggestible. If you want women to smoke, just get some famous, glamorous and/or wealthy women to have their pictures taken with a cigarette. Want hemlines shorter? Put a short dress on a Clara Bow and call her a flapper. Want young girls to try other young girls? Give Lindsay Lohan a girlfriend.
There’s always backlash against cultural upheaval especially when it becomes apparent that the upheaval is being orchestrated. Here are a few things Hitler said about women:
“The goal of female training is, without deviation, to be the coming mother.”
“Marriage cannot be an end in itself. It must serve a greater end, the increase and maintenance of the species and the race. That alone is its meaning and its task.”
“The granting of so-called equal rights to women, as demanded by Marxism, does not confer equal rights at all. It constitutes the deprivation of rights, since they draw women into a zone where they can only be inferior. It places women in situations where they cannot strengthen their position with regard to men and society.”
Here are a few things Joseph Goebbels (chief propagandist for the Nazi Party, and then Reich Minister of Propaganda from 1933 to 1945) said about women:
“German women have been transformed in recent years. They are beginning to see that they are not happier as a result of being given more rights but fewer duties. They now realise that the right to be elected to public office at the expense of the right to life, motherhood and her daily bread is not a good trade.”
“Looking back over the past years of Germany’s decline, we come to the frightening, terrifying conclusion that the less German men were willing to act as men in public life, the more women succumbed to the temptation to fill the role of the man. The feminization of men always leads to the masculinization of women.”
One starts to understand how the Frankfurt School's book, The Authoritarian Personality, chose to indict innocent “American” values such as love of family, community and God as the seedbed of fascism. According to the Frankfurt School, the traditional family is the birthplace of fascist ideology.
When Alan spoke of the destruction of the bond between men and women and the destruction of the family unit, he was in fact talking about a fait accompli, a done deal. But in the talks he put out from early 2020 and the onset of Covid, he implored his listeners week in and week out to form strong little groups of family and close friends, telling us that it was this kind of cohesion, this unity at the micro level that would see us through the tough times ahead.
In this excerpt which comes from his November 15, 2020 talk entitled, “All Hail The Elect, Self-Anointed, Self-Appointed,” Alan talks about planned crises, austerity and the use of starvation, privation, and rationing. Here’s the poem that goes along with that talk:
"See
the World in Flux, Layered Realities, Spinning,
The Rich Ones Celebrating, Placing Bets on Winning,
A Warfare Campaign of Terror Waged Upon our Sanity,
Achieving True Domination, Feeding Master's Vanity,
We're the New-Clear Generation, Nothing to be Hidden,
Full-Spectrum Dominance, Facts, Thoughts Forbidden,
Out of Directed Chaos, Their New Order Will Arise,
They'll Only Rule to Help, With Father of All Lies."
Just take a look at some of the articles from the past week or so as hunger and food shortages are being normalized in the mainstream media. We’re always given a plausible explanation, e.g. supply chain disruption, labour shortages, Brexit. Never will we hear about monopolization; true fascism. Instead, we are to worship the very people who monopolize our resources and services. We’re to follow their careers, watch them at their parties and take little peeks inside their fabulous homes.
Google co-founder Sergey Brin’s wife, Nicole Shanahan, threw a lavish Studio 54-style party at hot New York members club Zero Bond a couple of weeks ago. The bash was a “celebration of life post-pandemic” but it was also to celebrate the birthday of Shanahan, who is an attorney and the founder of Bia-Echo Foundation, which fights for reproductive equality, criminal justice reform and a healthy planet. Guests including Elon Musk, Shawn Mendes, and Jared Leto dined at a caviar, oyster and lobster bar.
Here’s one entry describing Brin’s wife’s foundation: The Bia-Echo Foundation and the Buck Institute for Research on Aging today announced the formation of the Global Consortium for Female Reproductive Longevity and Equality. The Consortium will engage a worldwide network of top researchers to advance knowledge in the field of female reproductive aging and accelerate the development of strategies to prevent or delay ovarian aging.
This is probably just one of dozens of foundations working to ensure that women can delay childbirth and motherhood well into their forties and fifties.
I was speaking with a woman in her late fifties not too long ago. She is childless and opted for career over family. I do not know how she feels about that choice, but she did tell me something interesting about her mother and the mothers of all her classmates in elementary school and high school during the mid to late 1970s. “My mother worked and so did all the mothers of all my classmates. They didn’t just work; they had careers. They were teachers and nurses and dietitians. Some were college professors. A few were attorneys and physicians. In theory, family might have been their highest priority, but in practice, their careers came first...It’s interesting to note that most of my female classmates are childless. Those few that did have children had them later and had only one or two.”
Maybe Alan is right and the destruction of the Western family unit is a fait accompli, but in this New Dark Age we’ve entered, I still see the woman as the heart of the family; the warm center. Somehow, through some miracle, there are women who didn’t buy the programming, who didn’t succumb to the idea of love as a “feeling”, a romantic notion dressed in a ballgown. They are not dependant on champagne and roses to survive a marriage. These are the women who understand that love is a verb, an action, a state of being. A commitment that survives boredom, fashion and whim.
We are going to hear more about austerity, shortages, supply chain disruption, long waits for basic goods, rationing and hunger. Mature women committed to love-as-an-action are going to feed their families because as Scarlett O’Hara said in Gone With the Wind, “As God is my witness, as God is my witness they’re not going to lick me. I’m going to live through this and when it’s all over, I’ll never be hungry again. No, nor any of my folk. If I have to lie, steal, cheat or kill. As God is my witness, I’ll never be hungry again.”
© Not Sure
Additional reading:
Roman Scandals (pre-Code musical film, 1933)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_Scandals
Keep Young and Beautiful (Song from Roman Scandals - Part 1)
https://youtu.be/VrW9lEDxI74
Keep Young and Beautiful (Song from Roman Scandals - Part 2)
https://youtu.be/8rSN9x84eIs
Just Imagine (Full Sci-Fi Fantasy Musical, 1934)
https://youtu.be/8aJPUbNkvko
The Office Wife (Trailer, pre-Code romantic drama, 1930)
http://www.tcm.com/video/138323/office-wife-the-original-trailer/
WEF: Covid worsened the gender gap, it will take 135 years to close
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/04/01/wef-covid-worsened-the-gender-gap-it-will-take-135-years-to-close.html
Economic empowerment is key to women empowerment: YGLs
https://dailytimes.com.pk/824258/economic-empowerment-is-key-to-women-empowerment-ygls/
Women and the UN: a new history of women’s international human rights
https://www.openglobalrights.org/women-and-the-un-a-new-history-of-womens-international-human-rights/
Our Approach | OpenGlobalRights
https://www.openglobalrights.org/about-us/
Partnerships | OpenGlobalRights
https://www.openglobalrights.org/partnerships/
On Earth Day, Open Society Foundations Announce Climate and COVID-19 Fund
https://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/newsroom/on-earth-day-open-society-foundations-announce-climate-and-covid-19-fund
George Soros to start $1 billion university to fight authoritarianism and climate change
https://fortune.com/2020/01/23/george-soros-open-society-university-network-davos/
Soros to Donate $1 Billion for Global University Network
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-01-23/soros-starts-new-global-university-with-1-billion-commitment
Everything you need to know about the environment this week | World Economic Forum
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2021/10/environment-climate-change-cop26-this-week-1-october/
The 10th Victim
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_10th_Victim
The Hunger Games
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Hunger_Games_(film_series)
The Pandemic's New Faces Of Hunger And Food Insecurity
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2021/09/17/1020805885/photos-they-could-put-food-on-the-table-until-the-pandemic-struck
Food Security and COVID-19
https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/agriculture/brief/food-security-and-covid-19
Why is the cost of food prices rising? | World Economic Forum
https://theconversation.com/why-global-food-prices-are-higher-today-than-for-most-of-modern-history-168210
How has COVID-19 impacted food security in the US? | World Economic Forum
https://www.statista.com/chart/25741/food-insecurity-us/
‘People are not starving, they’re being starved’: millions at risk of famine, NGOs warn
https://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2021/apr/20/millions-at-risk-of-famine-without-urgent-help-governments-warned
The Sweetgreen CEO's Cruel, Dangerous Pandemic Plan
https://www.theatlantic.com/health/archive/2021/09/sweetgreen-ceo-salad-pandemic/620038/
Covid Pandemic Deepens Global Hunger
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/06/world/africa/covid-19-global-hunger.html
World in the midst of a ‘hunger pandemic’: conflict, coronavirus and climate crisis threaten to push millions into starvation (2021-09-21
https://www.oxfam.org/en/world-midst-hunger-pandemic-conflict-coronavirus-and-climate-crisis-threaten-push-millions
Gates Foundation annual report says Covid pushed 31 million into dire poverty, child vaccine rates fell
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/09/13/covid-gates-foundation-annual-report-says-31-million-pushed-into-dire-poverty-child-vaccine-rates-fell.html
Supply chain issues, labor shortages make serving school lunches a struggle
https://www.nbcnews.com/news/education/supply-chain-issues-labor-shortages-make-serving-school-lunches-struggle-n1280516
Food Shortages, Pandemic Supply Chain Disruptions Create Challenges for Schools
https://www.nbcconnecticut.com/news/local/food-shortages-pandemic-supply-chain-disruptions-create-challenges-for-schools/2593710/
Alabama Schools Facing 'Unprecedented' Food Shortages Brought on by COVID
https://www.newsweek.com/alabama-schools-facing-unprecedented-food-shortages-brought-covid-1633560
School districts across the Carolinas report supply chain issues have caused food shortages for lunch programs
https://www.wcnc.com/article/news/education/school-districts-carolinas-supply-chain-food-shortages-lunch/275-7930e4be-0e0d-4048-ac82-5653bdce7388
Britain shortages will be permanant
https://www.bbc.com/news/business-58519997
After causing chaos in the UK, truck driver shortages could soon hit the rest of Europe
https://www.cnbc.com/2021/10/04/truck-driver-hgv-shortage-in-uk-could-soon-hit-the-rest-of-europe.html
Brexit minister says ‘British Renaissance has begun’ as nation hit by petrol and food shortages
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/lord-frost-brexit-b1931586.html
Farmers begin culling pigs as Britain’s labour shortage, exacerbated by Brexit, hits food processing plants
https://www.theglobeandmail.com/world/article-british-army-starts-fuel-deliveries-to-ease-energy-crisis-as-brexit/
International energy shortages impact food prices in Canada
https://globalnews.ca/video/8239987/international-energy-shortages-impact-food-prices-in-canada
Canada's drought forces canola importers to turn elsewhere
https://news.yahoo.com/canadas-drought-forces-canola-importers-103257718.html
Meat packers call for changes to foreign worker cap to address labour shortage - Canada
https://www.lakelandtoday.ca/alberta-news/meat-packers-call-for-changes-to-foreign-worker-cap-to-address-labour-shortage-crisis-4455723
Worker shortage? Or poor work conditions? Here’s what’s really vexing Canadian restaurants
https://theconversation.com/worker-shortage-or-poor-work-conditions-heres-whats-really-vexing-canadian-restaurants-167614
Some gains, some losses for restaurants on first day of vaccine passport program
https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/london/some-gains-some-losses-for-restaurants-on-first-day-of-vaccine-passport-program-1.6186346
Toronto restaurant hires security to deal with customers without vaccine passports
https://www.blogto.com/eat_drink/2021/10/toronto-restaurant-hires-security-customers-vaccine-passports/
Mark of the COVID Beast: Store Denies People Food, Water Without Vaccine Passport
https://www.westernjournal.com/mark-covid-beast-store-denies-people-food-water-without-vaccine-passport-report/
France to Require Proof of COVID-19 Vaccination to Enter Shopping Malls
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/france-to-require-proof-of-covid-19-vaccination-to-enter-shopping-malls/ar-AAM4fkr
France Is Offering Free Therapy To Its Citizens | World Economic Forum
https://www.weforum.org/videos/23960-france-is-offering-free-therapy-to-its-citizens
France to offer state-funded therapy as COVID sharpens focus on mental health
https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2021-09-28/france-offers-state-funded-therapy-tackles-mental-health
A New York City subway rider ripped OkCupid ads off the train car in a rant where she called the ads 'propaganda'
https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10029437/Fed-New-York-City-subway-rider-rips-suggestive-OkCupid-dating-ads.html