NO BELLE PRIZES
That Belle de Jour regards Jordan and her exploits with affection is to be expected, considering her own claim to notoriety. While I do not dispute many of her opinions, to suggest that Jordan’s cultural importance overrides that of Garbo and Monroe is silly, and to imply that she represents real success and real womanhood sets a dangerous path.
Belle celebrates Jordan’s success as a triumph of “attitude over talent”, yet why should that be applauded? Only the profoundly untalented could aspire to such dismal accolades. The assertion that Jordan’s career is of merit because it has made her enough money to obtain the best medical help for her son sickened me. Why should the route of medical mutilation, cheap sex and mass objectification be the only failsafe way that a woman like Jordan can ensure the funds to aid her sick child? In Jordan, we have a woman of a certain intelligence who not only seeks to conceal it, but who continuously panders to the worst type of misogynist stereotype, all the while being held up as a bona fide 21st-century success story.
Lucy McCarthy, by e-mail
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COLD WAR CONTINUES
Susan Butler states that Antony Beevor “is wrong to insist that Stalin wanted the cross-Channel invasion”. It was not only at their first meeting in Moscow in 1942 that Stalin berated Churchill for the absence of a “Second Front”. It became his persistent complaint. As interpreter for the British Chiefs of Staff and one of Churchill’s interpreters at the Teheran Big Three Conference in 1943, I, like others present, could clearly see that Stalin’s main preoccupation was the opening of the Second Front. Roosevelt and Marshall went along with Stalin for the sake of gaining his promise to enter the war against Japan.
Hugh Lunghi, by e-mail