The other night, I watched The Duchess and it reminded me of some of the reasons I'm glad I wasn't born a woman in the mid-18th century (now, Regency England on the other hand would still be fun, I think). I've always found it interesting...intriguing...ironic, even...that men get so mad at women for not bearing sons when it turns out that it's the men who determine the sex of the baby. So the Duke only had himself to blame for the fact that he was only siring daughters. As good as the movie was, and I quite enjoyed the costumes and thought Kiera Knightley did a fabulous job (she's much better suited to Duchess of Devonshire than she was to Elizabeth Bennet), it made me very upset on the Duchess' behalf because how could her husband be such an ass as to a) take up with her best friend (less surprising) and b) force her to live with his mistress (seriously, that is beyond the pale even for the time period, at least from my research and study). If she were my friend, I'd totally have gone balistic on his ass for treating her that way. Of course, I also think that she could probably have been slightly happier and been able to conduct her own liasons if she hadn't announced them to her husband at the dinner table. If she'd waited until he had an heir and then been discrete about it, she probably would have pulled it off. Not that I can really blame her for announcing it with the way he continued to rub her face in his affair until her death, but there was a way to play the game during the time period and it was played by wives as well as husbands during the Georgian era as well as the Regency period that followed. It really just goes to show that men have not changed much in the past couple hundred years. (And it did not help me overcome my swearing off of boys for the time-being.) They're (yes, it's a generalization that doesn't apply to the entire sex, but in my experience, it applies to more than enough of them) still unwilling to grow up, commit and treat women with respect.
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