Feminine Era Quotes

„Cum reușea să transforme un simplu vals într-o invitație la seducție pentru o sală de bal înțesată cu femei, era mai presus de puterea ei de înțelegere.

Being a good woman is old fashioned. This era is about being a sensual feminine woman.

I wish you'd let my missus introduce you to one of her available lady friends." "Absolutely not. I appreciate the thought, but no. I'm not lonely or starved for feminine companionship." "What if I guarantee Margaret won't pester you with matchmaker questions?" "You cannot guarantee such a thing. She will pester me. It is a woman's nature.

There were no gender assigned medieval colours, no pink for feminine or blue for masculine. It was in fact the reverse. Blue was associated with the Virgin Mary and conveyed gentleness. It was considered a weak colour in comparison to pink as pink came from red and red was the embodiment of power, passion, wealth and blood. White stood for purity, but was not worn by brides – whatever their station, people were simply married in the very best clothing they owned.

Children weren’t color-coded at all until the early twentieth century: in the era before Maytag, all babies wore white as a practical matter, since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them. What’s more, both boys and girls wore what were thought of as gender-neutral dresses. When nursery colors were introduced, pink was actually considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red, which was associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy, and faithfulness, symbolized femininity.

Perhaps "camp" is set in the 'twenties because after that differences between the sexes - especially visible differences - began to fade. This, of course, has never mattered to women in the least. They know they are women. To homosexuals, who must, with every breath they draw, with every step they take, demonstrate that they are feminine, it is frustrating. They look back in sorrow to that more formal era and try to relive it.

The concept “penis envy,” which Freud coined to describe a phenomenon he observed in women—that is, in the middle-class women who were his patients in Vienna in the Victorian era—was seized in this country in the 1940’s as the literal explanation of all that was wrong with American women.

The feminine mystique, elevated by Freudian theory into a scientific religion, sounded a single, overprotective, life-restricting, future-denying note for women. Girls who grew up playing baseball, baby-sitting, mastering geometry -- almost independent enough, almost resourceful enough, to meet the problems of the fission-fusion era -- were told by the most advanced thinkers of our time to go back and live their lives as if they were Noras, restricted to the doll's house by Victorian prejudice. And their own respect and awe for the authority of science -- anthropology, sociology, psychology share that authority now -- kept them from questioning the feminine mystique.

the urge toward suicide signals an edge of a new level of consciousness. If you can kill the right thing—the old way of adaptation—and not injure yourself, a new energy-filled era will begin.

How can I find my Twin Flame? The answer is you cannot. If he or she is physically born with you in the same era, they will appear in your life when the time is right. Even if you don’t want to or don’t expect it, it will happen.

where other conditions are equal, the children of mothers who work because they want to are less likely to be disturbed, have problems in school, or to “lack a sense of personal worth” than housewives’ children. The early studies of children of working mothers were done in an era when few married women worked, at day nurseries which served working mothers who were without husbands due to death, divorce or desertion.

During the last two decades of the nineteenth century and the first of the twentieth, France enjoyed an upsurge of artistic flourishing that became known as La Belle Epoque. It was a time of change that heralded both art nouveau and post impressionism, when painters as diverse as Monet, Cezanne and Toulouse Lautrec worked. It was an age of extremes, when Proust and Anatole France were fashionable along with the notorious Monsieur Willy, Colette's husband. On the decorative arts, Mucha, Gallé and Lalique were enjoying success; and the theatre Lugné-Poe was introducing the grave works of Ibsen at the same time as Parisians were enjoying the spectacle of the can-can of Hortense Schneider. Paris was the crossroads of a new and many-faceted culture, a culture that was predominately feminine in form, for, above all, la belle Epoque was the age of women. Women dominated the cultural scene. On the one hand, there was Comtesse Greffulhe, the patron of Proust and Maeterlinck, who introduced greyhound racing into France; Winaretta Singer, Princesse de Polignac, for whom Stravinsky wrote Renard; Misia Sert, the discoverer of Chanel and Diaghilev's closest friend. On the other were the great dancers of the Moulin Rouge, immortalised by Toulouse lautrec — Jane Avril, Yvette Guilbert, la Goulue; as well as such celebrated dramatic actresses as the great Sarah Bernhardt. It would not be possible to speak of La belle Epoque without the great courtesans who, in many ways, perfectly symbolized the era, chief of which were Liane de Pougy, Émilienne d'Alençon, Cléo de Mérode and La Belle Otero.

Asia so degraded, so corrupted by the colonial era and by its own crowdedness that it can only choose between depravity and the puritan orgy of communIsm. The women of Thailand are so beautiful that they have become the hostesses of the Western world, sought after and desired everywhere for their grace, which is that of a submissive and affectionate femininity of nubile slaves - now dressed by Dior - an astounding sexual come-on in a gaze which looks you straight in the eye and a potential acquiescence to your every whim. In short, the fulfilment of Western man's dreams. Thai women seem spontaneously to embody the sexuality of the Arabian Nights, like the Nubian slaves in ancient Rome. Thai men, on the other hand, seem sad and forlorn; their physiques are not in tune with world chic, while their women's are privileged to be the currently fashionable form of ethnic beauty. What is left for these men but to assist in the universal promotion of their women for high-class prostitution?

But, of course, in real life, in the outside world, women do not have equality. They have been judged inferior to men -Adam's rib, his helpmate- with no soul of their own. This has been so since the beginning of Western civilization. Women may have been potent characters in plays by Aeschylus, Euripides, and Sophocles, but in classical Greek life, women were not allowed to leave their houses (except to go to the well or on certain feast days). Their names on all legal documents appear as "the daughter of so and so" or "the wife of so and so", They had almost no rights -"She is my goods, my chattels", as Petruchio says of Kate two thousand years later (Taming of the Shrew,3.2,220). And with the advent of Christianity we began the debate as to whether women had souls in their own right or whether they were an "add-on" to their husbands and fathers. What is clear is that the mother of Jesus had to be both a virgin and totally lacking in sexual desire. And she is the model for all women. By the time we get to Shakespeare's era, a widow would automatically inherit a third of her husband's possessions if he died (but those possessions became her new husband's if she remarried). Women probably had souls (but it was still being debated), and a woman was a monarch. But in neither classical Greece nor Elizabethan England could a woman portray a woman onstage [...]

These interpretations of Sor Juana's decision to join a religious order hold Sor Juana to feminine standards of piety. In other words, because Sor Juana did not express her faith in the manner typical of the women of her era (through mystical writing and mortification, for example), she is not interpreted as pious.

Bărbații nu se ceartă niciodată, pentru că le e lene. Ca să te cerți, trebuie să argumentezi, ca să argumentezi, tre’ să faci niște sinapse, ca să faci sinapse, tre’ să nu‑ți fie lene.Oferă‑i unui bărbat un milion de euro, ca să se certe cu altul. — Nu mai bine‑i rup falca? o să te întrebe. — Nu. Banii nu‑i iei decât dacă te cerți cu el. — N‑am nevoie de bani, tocmai am luat salariul, o să‑ți răspundă, în timp ce‑i trage adversarului un pumn în bot.Inițial, boxul și luptele greco‑romane au fost gândite ca niște lupte de idei între intelectuali.N‑a durat mult și comba‑ tanții s‑au luat la bătaie, și‑au dat borșul pe cămășuțele albe ca spuma, și‑au făcut franjuri papioanele și și‑au înfipt ochelarii în fund.Treptat, au fost înlocuiți cu intelectuali mai robuști, îmbrăcați numai în adidași și chiloți. Chiar și atunci când se hotărăsc să se certe, bărbații ajung să facă altceva. De exemplu, Gabriel Liiceanu s‑a enervat într‑o zi pe filozofie și a vrut să se ia‑n gură cu ea rău de tot. În loc să se certe, s‑a trezit scriind volumul Cearta cu filozofia, despre cum ar fi putut să se certe. Asta numai pentru că filozofia era de sex feminin și i‑a fost jenă s‑o bată

The new ideal of virginity and widowhood opened up a new era of sympathetic collaboration between men and women, and for male-female friendship. By establishing a category of women who were understood to be off-limits with respect to romantic entanglements, writers like Gregory were able to support and even celebrate a feminine version of Christianity without being afraid to seem as if they had fallen under the influence of feminine charms.

Children weren’t color-coded at all until the early twentieth century: in the era before Maytag, all babies wore white as a practical matter, since the only way of getting clothes clean was to boil them. What’s more, both boys and girls wore what were thought of as gender-neutral dresses. When nursery colors were introduced, pink was actually considered the more masculine hue, a pastel version of red, which was associated with strength. Blue, with its intimations of the Virgin Mary, constancy, and faithfulness, symbolized femininity. (That

Revolutionary theory also enshrined the living utopian hope that the State would wither away, and that the political sphere would negate itself as such, in the apotheosis of a finally transparent social realm. None of this has come to pass. The political sphere has disappeared, sure enough - but so far from doing so by means of a self-transcendence into the strictly social realm, it has carried that realm into oblivion with it. We are now in the transpolitical sphere; in other words, we have reached the zero point of politics, a stage which also implies the reproduction of politics, its endless simulation. For everything that has not successfully transcended itself can only fall prey to revivals without end. So politics will never finish disappearing - nor will it allow anything else to emerge in its place. A kind of hysteresis of the political reigns. Art has likewise failed to realize the utopian aesthetic of modern times, to transcend itself and become an ideal form of life. (In earlier times, of course, art had no need of self-transcendence, no need to become a totality, for such a totality already existed - in the shape of religion.) Instead of being subsumed in a transcendent ideality, art has been dissolved within a general aestheticization of everyday life, giving way to a pure circulation of images, a transaesthetics of banality. Indeed, art took this route even before capital, for if the decisive political event was the strategic crisis of 1929, whereby capital debouched into the era of mass trans politics, the crucial moment for art was undoubtedly that of Dada and Duchamp, that moment when art, by renouncing its own aesthetic rules of the game, debouched into the transaesthetic era of the banality of the image. Nor has the promised sexual utopia materialized. This was to have consisted in the self-negation of sex as a separate activity and its self-realization as total life. The partisans of sexual liberation continue to dream this dream of desire as a totality fulfilled within each of us, masculine and feminine at once, this dream of sexuality as an assumption of desire beyond the difference between the sexes. In point of fact sexual liberation has succeeded only in helping sexuality achieve autonomy as an undifferentiated circulation of the signs of sex. Although we are certainly in transition towards a transsexual state of affairs, this has nothing to do with a revolution of life through sex - and everything to do with a confusion and promiscuity that open the door to virtual indifference (in all senses of the word) in the sexual realm.

El eterno feminino, la mujer infantil, el sitio de la mujer es el hogar. Eso es lo que les decían. Pero el hombre estaba cambiando; su lugar se hallaba en el mundo y el mundo se estaba ampliando. La mujer se estaba quedando atrás. La anatomía era su destino; podía morir al dar a luz o vivir para llegar a los treinta y cinco o parir a los doce, mientras que el hombre controlaba su destino con esa parte de su anatomía que ningún otro animal posee: su mente. Las mujeres también tenían mente. Y también tenían la necesidad humana de crecer. Pero el trabajo que alimenta la vida y que hace que avance ya no se hacía en casa, y a las mujeres no se las formaba para comprender el mundo y trabajar en él. Recluida en el hogar, como una niña más entre sus niños, pasiva, sin que ninguna parte de su existencia estuviera bajo su control, una mujer sólo podía existir agradando al hombre. Dependía totalmente de la protección de éste en un mundo en cuyo diseño no participaba. El mundo masculino. Nunca pudo crecer para plantear preguntas humanas tan sencillas como ¿Quién soy? ¿Qué es lo que quiero?

Pentru bărbat, femeia a fost mai întâi o pradă - un trup ce poate fi luat cu forţa. Acestei emoţii cinegetice îi succedă un sentiment mai delicat şi de semn opus, pe care grecul nu l-a cunoscut bine. Ceea ce în femeie poate fi obiect de pradă şi jaf şi e însuşit cu forţa nu creează satisfacţie. Un mai mare rafinament îl face pe bărbat să nutrească dorinţa ca prada să devină astfel dintr-o pornire spontană. Captura feminităţii, în ultimă analiză, nu e posedată dacă nu e câştigată. Prada devine răsplată. Şi pentru a o dobândi, trebuie să te faci vrednic de ea, să te adecvezi idealului masculin care dormitează în femeie. Prin acest curios mecanism rolurile se inversează: agresorul cade prizonier. Dacă în epoca instinctului sexual pur atitudinea bărbatului era predatorie şi consta în năpustirea asupra frumuseţii aflate în trecere, în această etapă de entuziasm spiritual el se situează, dimpotrivă, la distanţă, se orientează de la depărtare asupra înfăţişării feminine pentru a surprinde în ea aprobarea sau dispreţul.

The era of just being a feminine woman is over. This is an era to step into something more potent called being a sensual woman.

A new feminine figure is thus emerging: a cold, competitive agent of power, seductive and manipulative, attesting to the paradox that 'in the conditions of capitalism women can do better than men' (Badiou): contemporary capitalism has invented its own ideal image of woman.

Sidney provides the commentary on the DVD, and he tells us that he wanted “a train song.” Warren and Mercer gave him much more than that, for “On the Atchison, Topeka and the Santa Fe” is really an “entire town song.” It starts in the saloon—an important location, as it will be at war with the restaurant the Harvey girls wait table in—then moves to the train’s passengers, engineers, and conductor as it pulls in and the locals look everyone over, especially the newly mustered Harveys themselves. Warren’s music has imitated the train’s chugging locomotion, but now comes a trio section not by Warren and Mercer (at “Hey there, did you ever see such pearly femininity … ”), and the girls give us some individual backstories—one claims to have been the Lillian Russell of a small town in Kansas, and principals Ray Bolger and Virginia O’Brien each get a solo, too. The number is not only thus detailed as a composition but gets the ultimate MGM treatment on a gigantic set with intricate interaction among the many soloists, choristers, and extras. But now it’s Garland’s turn to enter the number, disembark, and mix in with the crowd. According to Sidney, Garland executed everything perfectly on the first try—and it was all done in virtually a single shot. Fred Astaire would have insisted on rehearsing it for a week, but Garland was a natural. Once she understood the spirit of a number, the physics of it simply fell into place for her. In any other film of the era, the saloon would be the place where the music was made. And Angela Lansbury, queen of the plot’s rowdy element, does have a floor number, dressed in malevolent black and shocking pink topped by a matching Hippodrome hat. But every other number is a story number—“The Train Must Be Fed” (as the Harveys learn the art of waitressing); “It’s a Great Big World” for anxious Harveys Garland, O’Brien, and a dubbed Cyd Charisse; O’Brien’s comic lament, “The Wild, Wild West,” a forging song at Ray Bolger’s blacksmith shop; “Swing Your Partner Round and Round” at a social. Marjorie Main cues it up, telling one and all that this new dance is “all the rage way

Athena in her armour can be understood as a sign that women can and must be protected. The Goddess herself needs protection, if she is to survive the perils of a patriarchal era. Athena’s skills of strategic protection and clever defense are vital to women who—like Athena herself—are prisoners of patriarchy. She is the Goddess of protected spaces: the walled city, the castle, the acropolis, and the women’s wisdom and culture contained therein. As guardian and protectress, Athena in antiquity was ‘envisaged as a caring and feminine, not to say maternal, figure.

Femininity is being integrated into sensuality. It can no longer stand as its own entity in this new era.

Femininity is now being integrated into the sensual world. It can no longer stand as its own entity in this new era. Being a feminine woman is the old paradigm, being a sensual woman is the new paradigm.

Many other things relate also to this production of the Other - a hysterical, speculative production. Racism is one example, in its development throughout the modern era and its current recrudescence. Logically, it ought to have declined with progress and the spread of Enlightenment. But the more we learn how unfounded the genetic theory of race is, the more racism intensifies. This is because we are dealing with an artificial construction of the Other, on the basis of an erosion of the singularity of cultures (of their otherness one to another) and entry into the fetishistic system of difference. So long as there is otherness, alienness and a (possibly violent) dual relation, there is no racism properly so called. That is to say, roughly, up to the eighteenth century, as anthropological accounts attest. Once this 'natural' relation is lost, we enter upon an exponential relation with an artificial Other. And there is nothing in our culture with which we can stamp out racism, since the entire movement of that culture is towards a fanatical differential construction of the Other, and a perpetual extrapolation of the Same through the Other. Autistic culture posing as altruism. We talk of alienation. But the worst alienation is not being dispossessed by the other, but being dispossessed of the other: it is having to produce the other in the absence of the other, and so continually to be thrown back on oneself and one's own image. If, today, we are condemned to our image (to cultivate our bodies, our 'looks', our identities, our desires), this is not because of alienation, but because of the end of alienation and the virtual disappearance of the other, which is a much worse fate. In fact, the definition of alienation is to take oneself as one's focus, as one's object of care, desire, suffering and communication. This definitive short-circuiting of the other ushers in the era of transparency. Plastic surgery becomes universal. And the surgery performed on the face and the body is merely the symptom of a more radical surgery: that performed on otherness and destiny. What is the solution? There is no solution to this erotic trend within an entire culture; to this fascination, this whirl of denial of otherness, of all that is alien and negative; to this foreclosing of evil and this reconciliation around the Same and its multiple figures: incest, autism, twinship, cloning. All we can do is remind ourselves that seduction lies in non-reconciliation with the other, in preserving the alien status of the Other. One must not be reconciled with oneself or with one's body. One must not be reconciled with the other, one must not be reconciled with nature, one must not be reconciled with the feminine (that goes for women too). Therein lies the secret of a strange attraction.

Marriage, most women quickly discovered, liberated them from their parents but made them dependent on a man who might or might not treat them well and then saddled them with the responsibilities of homemaking and child rearing. It gave women of this era what was described at the time by Betty Friedan in her best-selling book The Feminine Mystique as “the problem that has no name.

ATHENA SPEAKS Ô mighty Athens I watch over thee from my mighty throne arraigned in gold and pomp Deep in my heart, I await a new era When the real Goddesses will rule equal with men

The whole set of stylizations that are known as 'camp' (a word that I was hearing then for the first time) was, in 1926, self-explanatory. Women moved and gesticulated in this way. Homosexuals wished for obvious reasons to copy them. The strange thing about 'camp' is that it has become fossilized. The mannerisms have never changed. If I were now to see a woman sitting with her knees clamped together, one hand on her hip and the other lightly touching her back hair, I should think, 'Either she scored her last social triumph in 1926 or it is a man in drag.' Perhaps 'camp' is set in the 'twenties because after that differences between the sexes—especially visible differences—began to fade. This, of course, has never mattered to women in the least. They know they are women. To homosexuals, who must, with every breath they draw, with every step they take, demonstrate that they are feminine, it is frustrating. They look back in sorrow to that more formal era and try to re-live it. The whole structure of society was at that time much more rigid than it has ever been since, and in two main ways. The first of these was sexual. The short skirts, bobbed hair and flat chests that were in fashion were in fact symbols of immaturity. No one ever drew attention to this, presumably out of politeness. The word 'boyish' was used to describe the girls of that era. This epithet they accepted graciously. They knew that they looked nothing like boys. They also realized that it was meant to be a compliment. Manliness was all the rage. The men of the 'twenties searched themselves for vestiges of effeminacy as though for lice. They did not worry about their characters but about their hair and their clothes. Their predicament was that they must never be caught worrying about either. I once heard a slightly dandified friend of my brother say, 'People are always accusing me of taking care over my appearance.' The sexual meaning of behaviour was only sketchily understood, but the symbolism of clothes was recognized by everyone. To wear suede shoes was to be under suspicion. Anyone who had hair rather than bristle at the back of his neck was thought to be an artist, a foreigner or worse. A friend of mine who was young in the same decade as I says that, when he was introduced to an elderly gentleman as an artist, the gentleman said, 'Oh, I know this young man is an artist. The other day I saw him in the street in a brown jacket.' The other way in which society in the 'twenties was rigid was in its class distinctions. Doubtless to a sociologist there were many different strata merging here and there but, among the people that I was now getting to know, there were only two classes. They never mingled except in bed. There was 'them', who acted refined and spoke nice and whose people had pots of money, and there was 'us', who were the salt of the earth.

If we wish to move into a better era, women need to step away from their unfeminine behavior and once again use our natural inclinations to guide men back to sanity.

Mariana mă studia printre gene cu o nedisimulată scârbă. La fel ca atunci când încercam să-i spun chestia cu rouă ori alte lucruri în acelaşi gen. Şi a fost un timp când am crezut că numai ea mă poate înţelege, că e deajuns să ne culcăm împreună ca să avem acelaşi vis, care să ne ţină loc de lună, mai ales în nopţile întunecoase. Asta era pe vremea când încă mai spera şi ea în ale ei, minţin-du-mă frumos, constant, cu oarecare patimă. Îndura totul ca o martiră, zâmbea la orice oră. Însă după ce l-a născut pe Mihai şi a înţeles că nici cu acest prilej nu am de gând să-mi refac viaţa, să-mi reiau leafa şi demnitatea de profesor, justificându-i astfel chinul şi îndelungata aşteptare, a început să se înegrească. Într-o noapte a izbutit chiar să devină atât de întunecată încât n-am mai putut-o găsi în pat. După această întâmplare, în rarele momente când reuşeam s-o descopăr, era la fel de trist. Făcea adevărate tururi de voinţă pentru a-mi suporta atingerea. Închizând ochii ca pentru un supliciu, atunci când încercam să o mângâi. Începusem chiar să cred că nici nu am dreptul s-o fac. Am căutat să-i explic, să mă justific cu exemple din clasici, i-am adus mormane de flori, parfumuri, sandale, rochii şi inele, am izbucnit în confesiuni punctate cu ţipete oratorice, i-am recitat din Coşbuc, Regina Ostrogoţilor, m-am bătut cu pumnii în piept, am plâns. Cu timpul, cuvintele s-au smochinit, rămânându-mi de multe ori în gât, mă înecam, tuşeam, deveneam mut şi roşu la faţă, aşa că tot ce mai puteam face era să mă reped şi să o răstorn cu fustele în sus, direct pe covor, atunci când mă lovea copita dorinţei. Adică de treizeci de mii de ori pe zi. Adevărul este că-i plăcea şi ei. Nu se putea abţine să nu-i placă. Însă se străduia să-mi lase impresia că nu participă la acest soi le viol conjugal, că fac dragoste de unul singur. Din păcate, o dădeau de gol cearcănele viorii, carnea fierbinte şi altele. Gemea, se zvârcolea. Ei bine, nu! Până la urmă făcea în aşa fel încât să rămân cu o senzaţie de eşec. De înstrăinare. Uneori, cu o adevărată panică. Ca şi cum aş fi intrat într-o rezervaţie ocrotită prin lege, fără permis. Nu-mi dau seama cum izbutea să se transforme într-o rezervaţie, cert este că reuşea. Secretul feminin.

For what remains veiled in one era comes back, as a ghost, to haunt us in another.

It shouldn't even be up for discussion, in a perfect world. The rights of women should be sacrosanct. If men bore children, there would be no need for law; the right would simply exist. As a woman, I take great exception to my rights being used as a political platform by greedy and dishonest politicians to gather voters to their side. It reinforces the fact that women--in general--are viewed as lesser beings in our society. That being said, I appreciate your thoughts on this subject, Tom. As men go, you're exceptional. I hate what most people view as feminism these days. It's become ugly and combative, and the movement has lost its focus. It's become a man vs. woman "blame game", and it has to stop before we can evolve further. To me, feminism is simply equal rights--HUMAN rights. I will always thank a guy for those lovely gestures like holding my door and helping me with my coat. I'm old-fashioned that way. However, I realize that if I want to be respected, I have to give a man something to respect. I treat him and his feelings with equal care. A lot of my "new feminist" friends hate me because I actually THINK that it's okay to be pretty, to shave my legs and under my arms, to have long hair and to smile...and I choose to keep my bra, not burn it. Like Bukowski said, "I have little time for things for things that have no soul." That sums up our government, our politicians and their shameless manipulation of my rights as a woman. I saw my Grandmother and my Mom destroyed by the way that it was back in the good old days. I'll always be grateful for the strong and quiet femininity that they've passed on to me, and for the passionate blood in my veins manifested as a child born in the era of revolution.

Most men from the Common Era tried to, consciously or otherwise, feminize their appearance and personality to adjust to the new feminine society. But the six men in front of Cheng Xin all stubbornly held on to their outdated masculine appearance and personality. If Cheng Xin had met them a few days ago, she would have found them comforting, but now, she felt only a sense of oppression.

See--she forced laughter into her thoughts--I took care of the problem all by my little feminine self. Amazing, isn’t it? From the other side of a grove of trees, out of her sight, Jacob suddenly screamed in terror, the sound fading to a thin wail. The roar of an enraged bear mingled with Jacob’s second scream. Something heavy crashed through the underbrush in the opposite direction of Raven. She felt Mikhail’s laughter, low, amused, very male. Very funny, Mikhail. Jacob was broadcasting fear, but not pain. You have a questionable sense of humor. I need sleep. Quit getting into trouble, woman. If you wouldn’t stay up all night, you might not need to sleep the day away, she reprimanded. How do you get work done? A computer. He said it with a note of pride in his voice. A computer? So you are one of the lucky few. Yes. It takes up the entire desk but is quite handy. Now for certain she knew he was bragging. She found herself laughing at the thought of him with a computer. He didn’t seem to belong in an era with cars or computers. He seemed more like the villagers with their carts and horses, yet he knew more of the modern world than she did. Go back to sleep, you big baby. I can handle things just fine, thank you very much, without any great big he-man to protect me. I would much prefer that you return to the safety of the inn until I rise. There was the merest hint of command in his voice. He was trying to soften his manner with her, and she found herself smiling at his efforts. It isn’t going to happen, so learn to live with it. American women are very difficult. She continued on her way up the mountain, his laughter still playing softly in her head.

Generally speaking, and as unflattering as this may be, when women yearn for some other cultural moment, their knowledge of that era comes from fiction in some form—either films or historical novels.