First Cup of Coffee - January 24, 2025

I've been seeing the cyclical debates on "we need ratings for books like we have for movies!" so I'm doing a Brief History of Art and Censorship in the last 100 years, why movie ratings were developed, Communism, McCarthyism, and how housework was deliberately created to keep women at home.

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Transcript

00:01.18
Jeffe Kennedy
Good morning, everyone. This is Jeffe Kennedy, author of Epic Fantasy Romance. I'm here with my first cup of coffee.

00:14.88
Jeffe Kennedy
So good. ah Today he is, say it with me, people. It is Friday. January 24th. So closing out another week, next week's last week of January.

00:29.72
Jeffe Kennedy
And I'm trying to figure out what all I have to tell you today. I did have a few notes, so I went to look. I do want to talk about a little bit about movie ratings and how those came to be because I've been seeing people um talking about how we need book ratings. And let's see, I've also got, um well, I can do updates for you. We'll start with updates.

00:57.82
Jeffe Kennedy
ah I'm still not hitting consistently 3000 words a day. um I've gotten. Well, almost 9,000 so far this week. So I'm not doing terribly. And it is shaping up to be that this month will be my best word count month since October of 2023. So I mean, I'm definitely coming up there. And so I'm trying to give myself that grace and room to be improving and building up my ah ability, my endurance.

01:36.92
Jeffe Kennedy
It was funny because I was talking with a friend of mine who does these long distance hikes, who's like like the continental divide and this kind of thing. And I was explaining my whole method of, you know, like that I believe that the writing muscle is like training for a marathon.

01:54.38
Jeffe Kennedy
And he was saying, yeah, that he could absolutely see that because he has to do the same thing, you know preparing for a long hike. And there are just things that happen. you know If you don't get in shape for it, you can really mess yourself up.

02:15.14
Jeffe Kennedy
So that's always what I'm trying to do is not mess myself up. It's sort of like, em it's like the medical mantra or I guess it's a vowel or but I don't know, whatever. What are words? The first do no harm, right? ah This is like first don't mess yourself up. It's logical, right?

02:42.86
Jeffe Kennedy
So um yeah, so almost 9,000 words for the week. I'm at 36,000, closing in on midpoint. I think I've actually, for those of you who have been reading Bonds of Magic, Renegades of Magic, and now Warriors of Magic, I think I've figured out what happened. I think I know what the big conspiracy is, which is a big deal.

03:05.99
Jeffe Kennedy
because, of course, I don't know these things till I get to them. I know what the seminal text that caused all of the other books for House Phel to be hidden away. So, yeah, I'm feeling pretty pleased with myself. Still pretty much on target for March 2nd release. I think I can do it. I may have to really cram at the end, but in that case, I'll just really cram at the end.

03:36.55
Jeffe Kennedy
And let me show you all something cool.

03:47.75
Jeffe Kennedy
I asked if I could post these to social media and I didn't get an answer. So we'll just do the fleeting image for those on video. Let's look at this. Look at this. This is the Never the Roses tip-in sheet for the ah subscription box, the Owl Crate edition.

04:05.68
Jeffe Kennedy
um And you all haven't read Never the Roses yet, but I'll tell you since you're not on video, at the bottom there's this bunny chewing a book and it's perfect. that's perfect um One thing about the boxes that came, however, is they were ah totally crumbly and messed up and one was ripped open. So some of the sheets were damaged. This one that I'm using to show has kind of a bent corner. So they're going to have to send me some replacement pages. And no, I have not started

04:43.40
Jeffe Kennedy
signing the tip-in sheets. It's been a busy few days, geez, I don't know what the deal is. Casita is proceeding a pace. I've been making decisions on those. I'd go through all those boxes and I'll post a picture of all my stacks of tip-in sheets. So I'm still thinking if I can do 200 a day, I should be able to get through all of them.

05:07.94
Jeffe Kennedy
I also have to hand write a letter. So I was thinking I would start by handwriting that letter and sort of get myself into the groove.

05:19.91
Jeffe Kennedy
And let's see what else is going on. I mean, it's just, it's been a week of a lot of interruptions, but I've been more or less getting my work done. So yay me. I'm hoping that next week will be Even more productive, right? Not a lot planned for the weekend. I might just hang out, work on some projects and so forth. Try to get some need to do. You're in finances and taxes. Always a thing. um So let's talk about movie ratings.

05:58.45
Jeffe Kennedy
um because this this seems to be one of those ongoing cyclical debates in the book community. And it's becoming out more and more, especially now that we're in this era of censorship and some people coming down on like smutty books or spicy books and people having fits because there's a trend right now to have like an illustrated cover that sometimes looks a little cartoonish.

06:30.51
Jeffe Kennedy
I don't quite get the cute thing. um Those of you who know me know that I don't love cute stuff. Like, I have this whole thing about Halloween decorations that they can only be scary or creepy or gothic, not cute.

06:46.22
Jeffe Kennedy
um And actually my friend Megan responded to the bunny on here saying she thought it looked a little too Beatrix Potter and she had conflicted feelings about that. But one thing I've noticed on a lot of the subscription boxes or special editions is that the art does go into a more animated, somewhat cuter ah depiction of the characters. And, you know, that makes people happy. Great.

07:13.76
Jeffe Kennedy
You know, we we can have we can have them all. You can have the cute Halloween decorations. I'll take the creepy gothic ones. We can all get along. Well, so there are people who are upset. And i you know, it's so hard to tell if people are really upset or if it's just like virtue signaling or rage bait for engagement. But there's these people out there saying, oh, you know,

07:37.54
Jeffe Kennedy
we It's misleading if there's like a cartoon cover and then you find that there's smut inside.

07:47.42
Jeffe Kennedy
And I don't know, what do they want? Like an eggplant emoji on the cover. I don't get it. Uh, maybe they do. Maybe they do. So anyway, um,

08:02.44
Jeffe Kennedy
part of this, I end up end up seeing people saying, why can't we have ratings for books like we have for movies? And so I wanted to talk to you all a little bit about that because ah I know some history on the whole thing about movie ratings, which I feel like not everybody knows a whole lot about because the movie rating system came out during the McCarthy era. okay So for those of you sweet summer children out there who don't know what that means, um in the wake of World War II, in the 50s in particular, which is often referred to as the Golden Age of Hollywood, where the studios were really making big movies and um you know they had their actors who were like,

08:55.16
Jeffe Kennedy
you know that They had a stable of actors, like each major studio had a few big stars and they would produce these movies that were star vehicles for them. And I know some of this because I was reading that book, Dorothy Parker in Hollywood, which talks a whole lot about this in that era, because Dorothy Parker was um very leftist, ah politically liberal, campaigned heavily to try to stop fascism in Spain.

09:28.23
Jeffe Kennedy
failed, continue to of advocate for you know so those horrible, horrible political... and but I'm not very articulate today, am I?

09:44.64
Jeffe Kennedy
um Where she was like thought that people should be paid money for their work right this very socialist perspective of paying money and so McCarthy was I think it was Joe McCarthy was a senator and Incredibly conservative and awful. He would have fit right in to today with all of the MAGA crowd and he sort of started this witch hunt looking for communists, ah particularly in Hollywood. I think in other places too, but ah part of what came out of this was the Hollywood blacklist, which was actors and directors, producers that

10:31.27
Jeffe Kennedy
nobody would work with because they were card-carrying communists um or accused of communism. If you watched Oppenheimer, which is also I mean obviously about Oppenheimer and creating the atomic bomb that more or less ended World War II,

10:51.47
Jeffe Kennedy
but also is about all of this McCarthyism era in the wake of World War II, where there was a lot of brainstorming, a lot of trying to crush people with differing political opinions. So when we look back at the 50s as being kind of a repressive era, we have the stereotype of the like 50s housewife. A whole lot of that was because during World War II, the men were off like so many of the men enlisted so they're off and you're out fighting and the women started working i you know they had to have people run the factories that's where that whole Rosie the Riveter thing comes from and in the 50s then when the men came back from war in the 40s

11:40.28
Jeffe Kennedy
they had to figure out a way to like have enough jobs for the men. And so the easiest thing to do was to take jobs away from the women. And one way to do that was to sort of conscript women into household activity. And so that's when you see this whole burgeoning of the kind of June Cleaver ideal ah of the woman wearing her pretty dress and her short skirt and her pearls as she vacuums.

12:10.46
Jeffe Kennedy
of I read a fascinating essay once about how a lot of our ideas of housework of keeping a clean house came from this era because they literally manufactured the idea that you had to keep your home a particular way and this was not It was not part of the social consciousness. And I'm really speaking about U.S. I don't know a whole lot about what it was like in other parts of the world, but, you know, some of this also had to do with the Cold War, right? You know, with USSR coming up in the wake of World War II and so forth, the fight communism thing. ah But, you know, like back to women being in the house, it was like,

13:03.57
Jeffe Kennedy
There was this whole ethic created of all these things that needed to be done, you know like daily vacuuming and you know immaculate this and that, then ring around the collar. I saw someone asking the other day, like, whatever happened to ring around the collar? like In the 70s, that was such a huge thing, all of these ads. And I was like, do people not get ring around the collar anymore? but and there's a number of answers to that one we won't necessarily go into. But one thing that advertising does, and I realize I'm kind of rocketing from topic to topic here, but one thing that advertising does is they want to sell you something, right? So advertisers, their primary purpose or

13:49.12
Jeffe Kennedy
um their model right their business model is to convince you that you have a problem so that you will then buy their product to solve it. okay So if you don't think you have the problem already, that's their first task is to convince you that you have a problem. So they're not going to be able to sell you the stain remover for men's dress shirts ah until they convince you that first that ring around the collar is a problem, that that yellow stain that wicks into the material is a major problem.

14:25.57
Jeffe Kennedy
you know, so they would have those ads where the neighbors would be looking on or the kids would be making fun of the man going, he's got ring around the collar. And then the housewife would be all, Oh, no, I am ashamed before my people. ah It's really interesting, you know, sort of back to this essay that I read long ago, and I don't remember how or why or when. But you know, talking about how in the wake of World War II that there were so many household conveniences being developed, right? You know, your washer and dryer, and your dishwasher, and you had these vacuum cleaners, and all of these really great conveniences, and yet women's domestic responsibilities went up. So even though there were all of these labor-saving devices, let's put that in air quotes,

15:19.48
Jeffe Kennedy
introduced, it actually didn't save labor, it increased labor. And it was because of this, in part, this ethic that there was all of this work that must be done ah in ways that had never needed to be done before. And there's a lot of people out there right now looking at ways to fight the billionaire oligarchy and that one of the things that we can do is to reduce consumption, right? But We have been in this pattern of increased consumption for nearly, you know, like, well, probably more than 100 years. Someone who knows more about history than I do can weigh in on this. But, you know, it's, again, this advertising pattern of that you have a problem, you need to buy the thing, right? So now we have so many more clothes, we have bigger houses, we have all of these things that we have to put more and more effort into maintaining.

16:19.19
Jeffe Kennedy
And it's um it's it becomes this endless cycle, right, where you have to keep feeding the machine.

16:30.78
Jeffe Kennedy
So I realize I got a little off topic there, but I feel like it's all of a piece. ah Back to movies and book ratings, though. ah Back in this day when there were these witch hunts going on ah and this very conservative government trying to interfere and they were becoming very concerned with the advent of television in the 50s and the moral influence of TV and movies and they were threatening to ah to censor Hollywood. They wanted to control Hollywood.

17:09.31
Jeffe Kennedy
ah and and control TV. And so Hollywood voluntarily created it the motion picture rating system and created their own review group to self monitor in order to avoid government control.

17:26.94
Jeffe Kennedy
And there's some really cool stuff that you can read up on about movie censorship and like how they decide the difference between PG and R or R and X and how those things are appealed. And you know, like it's a certain number of swear words. And um and then there's like the whole double double standard of that you can show um full frontal female nudity and have a PG rating, but full frontal male nudity is R.

17:57.32
Jeffe Kennedy
Why is that?

18:01.55
Jeffe Kennedy
Anyway, it's all very interesting. So I think it's important to keep in mind that a rating system is not meant to serve the community so much as it was meant to avoid government control. And we're already dealing with things like book banning,

18:25.94
Jeffe Kennedy
and other kinds of censorship. And I'm not sure that we want to get into creating a rating system for books. And the thing is, is oh there's probably so much more to ah unpack here, but you can read the back of the book blurb um and i think that that's why this whole argument feels disingenuous because these people are claiming that they happily started reading something that had a cartoon cover and so they just thought horror and shock shock and horror it turned out to have actual smut in it

19:08.17
Jeffe Kennedy
um it's not that hard to figure out, right? So, and they're trying to claim, it's always comes back to this thing, what about the children? You know, what if a kid picks this up thinking it's a kid's book and they read this and it's like, well then put your smutty books where your kids can't reach them, right? It's it's not that freaking hard people. so So anyway, those are my thoughts on all of that. um I think I am going to get to work.

19:37.01
Jeffe Kennedy
And I will talk to you all on Monday. You all take care. of Bye-bye.