I would like to remind those folks younger than I that it was very few years ago when almost the entire planet Earth was run by and FOR the benefit of MEN.
Women have throughout history been the property of men.
Due to religious restrictions, teachings, and fundamentalist doctrines, women in the largest societies on Earth right now (Muslim, Chinese, N.Korean) have almost no human rights at all.
Next year, in June, women will, for the 1st time, be allowed in Arabia to drive---BUT--only if they are 30 years old or older, and for only a few hours per day!
The Old Testament laws (read through them sometime) are horrifying reflective of prejudice toward gender, bodily cleanliness, guilt-tripping, and anonymity. (What was Noah's wife's name? Lot's wife? Practically all the women we remember/who are named/ are "bad").
Eve, Delilah, Jezebel, Athaliah, etc.
In my childhood, wives knew nothing about how much money their husband earned, where he kept his insurance, or--often--who he banked with or what he invested in. Women stayed at home and worked as housekeepers, nanny's, cooks, errand runners, and concubines.
Law everywhere permitted husbands to beat their wives and it was deemed impossible (legally) to rape her.
The Atlantic magazine mentions:
"...those repressed and much pitied 1950s wives—their sexless college years! their boorish husbands, who couldn't locate the clitoris with a flashlight and a copy of Gray's Anatomy!—were apparently getting a lot more action than many of today's most liberated and sexually experienced married women. In the old days, of course, there was the wifely duty. A housewife understood that in addition to ironing her husband's shirts and cooking the Sunday roast, she was—with some regularity—going to have relations with the man of the house."
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The fact that Western society has rid itself of many evils (slavery, smoking, racial epithets) is miraculous.
The eventual purge of sexism adjustment is not complete and WILL NOT BE until everybody my age and slightly younger, has DIED and those who reared their children in sexist latent prejudices and mindsets have died also.
Sexual domination and white male superiority is everywhere in old movies and especially comedies.
Why? IT WAS NORMAL!
I didn't realize this completely until I sat my kids down one night long ago.
I wanted them to see a movie I "remembered" as being hilarious: HOW TO MURDER YOUR WIFE with Jack Lemmon.
As we watched it, I was suddenly horrified.
The movie not only wasn't funny AT ALL, it was so blatantly misogynist and mean-spirited, my kids were disgusted with it---and by extension--ME.
I say all the above to point out to those who aren't aware, the way Harvey Weinstein operated is NOT unusual for a wealthy man in power. It is in churches, it is in politics, it is in corporations, and just about anyplace Men of a certain age have the inclination and opportunity to cash in.
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The plot of the comedy is simple: A cartoonist gets drunk and married and immediately regrets the fact his bachelor days are over. He takes out his frustration by filling his cartoon panels with a plot to murder his wife by drugging her and dropping her body in the Pucketa pucketa machine. When his wife disappears, he is charged with murder. In the scene depicted below, he is defending himself in court by a very strange appeal to male attitudes toward women and marriage which are pretty cold-blooded by today's standards. Back then however, it was hilarious.
WATCH THIS CLIP
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yhoRLHUGBmE