Nothing a good spanking won't fix.
Nothing a good spanking won't fix
Dan KaufmanNovember 24, 2006
"Be rough with me," demands Teresa di Vicenzo, who marries James Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. "Treat me like the lowest whore in creation."
And Bond obliges.
The Bond books are a misogynist's wet dream in which, as Ian Fleming writes in Casino Royale, "women were for recreation" and should be "brutally ravaged, never pandered to or pursued". As the novels progressed, this view of women became increasingly disturbed.
In From Russia with Love, Britain's secret service man in Turkey, Darko Kerim, regales Bond with a tale of how he won a girl in a fight and chained her naked under a table. "When I ate, I used to throw scraps to her ... like a dog," he says. "She had to learn who was master."
Bond, who considers Kerim as one of the few friends he's willing "to take to his heart", is rapt.
According to some accounts, Fleming's attitude to women was little different from Bond's. Anthony Storr, the psychiatrist whom Fleming's first biographer, John Pearson, consulted in the '60s, claimed Fleming's rampant promiscuity was an attempt to assert his own masculinity, as Henry Chancellor notes in James Bond and his World.
"Fleming was a Don Juan who was actually frightened of women, and felt potent only in a position of extreme dominance, when he was able to ravish them," Chancellor writes.
If so, it's no surprise Bond is so unhappy about sexual equality. When a lesbian called Tilly Masterton doesn't succumb to his charms in Goldfinger, Bond delivers a tirade against homosexuality, claiming that giving women the vote has led to a new generation of people, a "herd of unhappy sexual misfits", whose "hormones were all mixed up".
However, there was always the possibility that a real man could straighten them out - which is what happens to Goldfinger's other lesbian, Pussy Galore. Unlike Tilly, Pussy sees the light and, swayed by Bond's machismo, turns from a hardened, independent gangster into "an obedient child". Which, as far as Bond and Fleming are concerned, is exactly how a woman should behave.
Dan KaufmanNovember 24, 2006
"Be rough with me," demands Teresa di Vicenzo, who marries James Bond in On Her Majesty's Secret Service. "Treat me like the lowest whore in creation."
And Bond obliges.
The Bond books are a misogynist's wet dream in which, as Ian Fleming writes in Casino Royale, "women were for recreation" and should be "brutally ravaged, never pandered to or pursued". As the novels progressed, this view of women became increasingly disturbed.
In From Russia with Love, Britain's secret service man in Turkey, Darko Kerim, regales Bond with a tale of how he won a girl in a fight and chained her naked under a table. "When I ate, I used to throw scraps to her ... like a dog," he says. "She had to learn who was master."
Bond, who considers Kerim as one of the few friends he's willing "to take to his heart", is rapt.
According to some accounts, Fleming's attitude to women was little different from Bond's. Anthony Storr, the psychiatrist whom Fleming's first biographer, John Pearson, consulted in the '60s, claimed Fleming's rampant promiscuity was an attempt to assert his own masculinity, as Henry Chancellor notes in James Bond and his World.
"Fleming was a Don Juan who was actually frightened of women, and felt potent only in a position of extreme dominance, when he was able to ravish them," Chancellor writes.
If so, it's no surprise Bond is so unhappy about sexual equality. When a lesbian called Tilly Masterton doesn't succumb to his charms in Goldfinger, Bond delivers a tirade against homosexuality, claiming that giving women the vote has led to a new generation of people, a "herd of unhappy sexual misfits", whose "hormones were all mixed up".
However, there was always the possibility that a real man could straighten them out - which is what happens to Goldfinger's other lesbian, Pussy Galore. Unlike Tilly, Pussy sees the light and, swayed by Bond's machismo, turns from a hardened, independent gangster into "an obedient child". Which, as far as Bond and Fleming are concerned, is exactly how a woman should behave.
posted by Sassy Jane at 8:49 PM
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