Contemporary valentine cards (sample above) can get pretty nasty, but they don't compare in ferocity to Victorian cards. The Victorians were brutal!
So you thought those cards were all cherubs and swans. Well, think again!!!
Here (above) the girl ridicules her boyfriend for being a clerk. Ouch!
The sender of the card above appears to hold postmen in low esteem. I guess she's holding out for a Duke or an Earl.
Don't sell seafood if you want to win the heart of this woman (above)!
Maybe the seafood guy replied to the fish disdainer with a card like this one (above).
Yikes! Here the Battle of the Cards escalates to the final extreme (above)! The recipient is described as a dried-up old spinster who reads silly books all day. Ouch and double Ouch!
I wish I knew how people responded to cards like these. Did they laugh them off or resort to fisticuffs?
I can't believe I'm putting up a blog post only hours after I put up the previous one. I only just realized that Valentine's Day is coming up! Good Grief!
I'll post again on Monday morning!
Above, a poster for last year's Valentine's Ball. It's out of date, but I like the way it looks.
I started to write about femme fatales, but after thinking about it, I've decided to write instead about something similar in cinema, the phenomenon of the "strong woman."
I can't stand movies about what feminists call "strong woman." The strong concept doesn't bother me, but the term is usually applied to women who don't deserve it. They appear strong only because the story surrounds them with weak and ineffectual men. Surely a genuinely strong woman would seek out the company of strong men. A woman like that isn't relatively strong. She's strong because the word is meaningless if it doesn't apply to her.
Boy, imagine lungs that could hold all that smoke (above) inside!
Genuine movie strong women are sometimes crazy and evil, like the hitchhiker (above) in "Detour"....
...or like Gogo Yubari in "Kill Bill" (above).
Come to think of it, Kill Bill was full of strong women (above).
One strong woman who wasn't crazy was Angelina Jolie in "Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow." The film was horrible, but Jolie was great in it... as great as she could be, given the script.
She played the super-efficient commander of a private air force where the pilots were all women. Their propeller-driven aircraft carrier took them on adventures all over the world, mostly hidden in the clouds. The women were fanatically devoted to their leader, calling to mind the crew of the Nautilus, who would do anything for Captain Nemo. It's wonderful to imagine a world where adventures like that would be possible.
The amazing thing is that the writer could come up with a great idea like this, then fail to give it a context that would make it interesting to an audience. I felt sorry for Joli. She did a good job in "Tomb Raider" too, but once more she was the only good thing in an otherwise unwatchable film.
The last picture I saw which contained a genuine strong woman...as opposed to the phony feminist stereotype ...was "True Grit." Hailee Steinfeld was great as the single-minded kid who wouldn't be deterred from her mission. She instinctively sought out men she believed had noble qualities. Surely that's what real world strong women do. If you haven't seen it yet, give it a try.
