Jezebel 
Enter your username and password.
New York, 8:50 AM
Thu Nov 12
67 posts in the last 24 hours
Tip your editors:
tips@jezebel.com
Editor-in-Chief:
Anna Holmes
Email | Twitter
Deputy Editor:
Dodai Stewart
Email | Twitter
Senior Contributing Editor:
Tracie Egan
Email | Twitter
Contributing Editors:
Anna North
Email | Twitter
Sadie Stein
Email | Twitter
Reporter:
Irin Carmon
Email
Editorial Assistant:
Margaret Hartmann
Email | Twitter
Contributors:
Jenna Sauers
Email
Rich Juzwiak
Email | Twitter
Lizzie Skurnick
Email
Interns:
Katy Kelleher
Twitter
Original material is licensed under a Creative Commons License permitting non-commercial sharing with attribution.
10/22/09
Love is love, sex is sex, money is money. But marriage has represented all these things and more. At times the ideal has been to marry for love, or to marry to move up in life, to make an advantageous power-play for the sake of your family. To keep the family name going within itself. Now it seems the ideal is to marry for love, but also to seek all fulfillment from the person you marry - you're supposed to find your "soul mate." It's funny, isn't it, that it's just another arrangement that we've told ourselves is the one right choice, when we've had several "right choices" throughout history and across cultures?
I'm not advocating for a return to marriage where women were treated like property, but I do think it's interesting to see how much the expectations of marriage have changed across time. In some ways, it seems like there would be less pressure if we weren't encouraged to find "THE ONE" and live "HAPPILY EVER AFTER" only to have our dreams shattered when we find our expectations were set too high. #whenyoumarry
10/21/09
The 50's housewife 'tradition' is just a re-tread of that rather Victorian ideal. #whenyoumarry
10/22/09
It was more "what work was good for each gender" that ruled the day as opposed to "women shouldn't work."
It was really the generation after WW2 that decided it needed to go back to a "simpler time" that never really existed. #whenyoumarry
10/22/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
I've been married to my husband for 10+ years and sometimes the thought of sex with him really is revolting. Not all the time, just sometimes. Am I a terrible wife? #whenyoumarry
10/21/09
Just to clarify I mean about a week before the event and the week after I totally am NOT in the mood.
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
I love my husband. We have sex quite often but sometimes the thought of sexual intimacy is actually disgusting. I feel kind of awful about this but the one other person I spoke to it about (also married 10+) said she feels the same way sometimes. It isn't personal. #whenyoumarry
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
It's easy to forget that for women, sex drive really is cyclical, whereas men's is fairly constant. For some reason, we tend to just assume that women have a low sex drive and then we read all of those awful magazine articles about how to "fix" it. Yuck. #whenyoumarry
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
it appears this 50's suburban WASPs did as well! #whenyoumarry
10/21/09
I have a weird fascination with them. I find them interesting and kind of hate that they get thrown into the "wacky news" category, when they're this cool little peek into social controls of the past. It's like letters from Big Brother. Maybe I'm just a geek about source material type stuff.
If you're looking for more fun go to archive.org and search for "Boys Beware!" to learn about the homosexual and his disease.
10/21/09
I have a DVD series-- The Educational Archives-- that has all those old film clips. I got it after being captivated by the hygiene films that MST3K used to mock. One that I remember vividly was about the importance of having good posture, and that you should have a "posture pal" at school to help each other remind to stand up straight. #whenyoumarry
10/21/09
10/22/09
BTW, the "Girls Beware!" rebuttal is all sorts of horrific (though not about lesbianism) as well.
I got a collection of cult classics off of Amazon a bit back and it was a great collection of awesome scare films from the 30's-50's.
10/22/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
10/21/09
08/25/09
My granny, when she was very old and knew she didn't have much time left - I was about 6 - told me the story of a family in her village in Ireland (this is practically the turn of the 20th century) A big farm family, all sons, all big and strong. and then a little girl was born, and they were so happy to finally have a girl...but she was sick, a congential heart problem. She lived a few years, and then she finally died. And my grandmother told me "and you know, it was a blessing, because she just would never have had a very good life....sometimes, babies just shouldn't be born, or if they are, they shouldn't live because they won't have a good life. Do you understand me?".
I didn't then. I do now.
Whatever.
08/25/09
"It is said that a fish as large as a man has a brain no larger than the kernel of an almond. In all fish and reptiles where there is no great brain development, there is also no conscious sexual control. The lower down in the scale of human development we go the less sexual control we find. It is said that the aboriginal Australian, the lowest known species of the human family, just a step higher than the chimpanzee in brain development, has so little sexual control that police authority alone prevents him from obtaining sexual satisfaction on the streets.[17]"
eeeh...kinda racist.
I don't see anything about "individual" aboriginals, as if that would help.
[en.wikipedia.org]
08/25/09
08/25/09
Labeling someone a Nazi is suggesting that violence against that person is somehow justified. So it makes sense to have those who misuse the term face legal consequences.
Nazism should be used to specifically refer, well, to Nazism. In other cases, people should simply describe why a phenomenon they are criticizing is morally objectionable. Describe, not compare. Because if you overuse the term "Nazi," you act as if inspired by Nazi propaganda tactics.
08/25/09
08/25/09
Damn, I worry I'm like that friend sometimes...passionate about things without knowing all the details and likely to end up with egg on my face....I almost feel sorry for her.
That's why this angry lapsed Catholic will never...well...use religion to spearhead a point. as so many complacent assholes (far more powerful than your friend) do, so glib to discuss how important family planning is.
The intellectual dishonesty of the equation of birth control and "eugenics" at face value is criminal and enrages me. Do the people who argue against it and slander those like Sanger know how important birth control is in changing how we look at health, at the amount of parenting we should put into our children now that we can have smaller families but still be intimate? What's wrong with being conscientious about children (without having to totally abstain from sex)? Do thy give a shit what BC means to women--the ones who usually bore the brunt of sex when it results in conception (and considering we're the ones who get pregnant....still do)?
Nope.
Fuck 'em.
08/25/09
Yes, some of her language is appalling by today's standards, but times have to be taken into account. If you look past it she was really astonishingly ahead of the curve