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Comment by Brakenshire | Hacker News Reader

The most interesting quote, from a Russian magazine in 1966:

> Philistine pragmatism takes over in Fleming’s novels. They tend to be indiscriminate, to combine elements of all sorts of sensationalism — political action and thriller, science fiction and advertising brochure, a fashion magazine and nudist film… This, briefly, is the secret of the genre, of popularity in its modern shape. Still, had it not been for the screen, Bond would have been lost among all the other spy characters out there. A nobody. It was the film industry that made him a myth.

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This is all true, as far as it goes, but it is all because Fleming did a couple of things differently, which, perhaps accidentally, made his stories appealing as movie vehicles.

Firstly, unlike most other (and in some cases better) writers of espionage and sabotage fiction of the time, he set his stories in the Cold War rather than WWII.

Secondly, he cast Bond as an adroit womanizer. That term alone signals that we are talking about a different era.

Fleming also indulged his audience’s fascination with the lifestyles of the wealthy, though the Bond of his novels exhibited a certain prissiness that the movie makers wisely dropped.

Finally, that ‘license to kill’ nonsense was pure theater, but effective.

I think it was also the timing that the books came out, and that they were more or less travel blogs with card games and shoot outs. To quote a post on a forum where they read every james bond novel, there was this interesting tidbit:

"[The books] serve as a looking glass into life in the 50s and 60s. The Bond series was a form of escapism for red-blooded British men still living under rationing until 1954. In a world where the average reader has probably never left smoggy England except for war service and is still living off of Spam and brown bread while puttering around in a used Morris, James Bond gets to travel to exotic locations from sea to shining sea, eating all the local cuisine that the audience may have never even heard of and driving rare sports cars in breakneck chases."

I always thought that was an interesting take. It might explain why a set of books that were not widely regarded as the most well written, with multiple pages dedicated simply to how certain drinks or food in a certain region are made and taste, took off precisely for the same reasons that it might be classically regarded as "bad".

“adroit”

Isn’t that term kind of handist in that suggests lefties lack womanization?

https://blog.oup.com/2010/09/left-hand/

Yes, but only if we go down the road of deconstructing these kinds of words --of which we have enough of already. It's bad enough as is. It's as if people have lost the ability to contextualize things.

I think you may have missed a joke. Your parent is poking fun at the tiahura's similar comment about the term "womanizing"

Just a bit gauche.

which is a step up from sinister

“womanizer”

Isn’t that term sort of sexist in that it suggests women lack agency?

Have you ever watched a Bond film?

Isn’t it sexist to suggest that women don’t have the agency to allow themselves to be womanized?

There is quite a lot of non-consensual kissing in those films.

I recently watched "Live and let Die", and indeed it is in there. You do not have to look far. It is a common Bond method of seduction.

A better example would be Pussy Galore. Moreso in the novel she's hinted as being leasbian --but Bond never the less takes her despite her protest in the flick.

I guess it depends on how you define womanizing. I take it to mean pump and dump of naive women. My recollection of Bond is that the women may not have completely appreciated who Bond was, but they didn’t think he was going to settle down and marry them. They knew he was a philanderer.

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