Time Warp

[fictional]

Time Warp Wives.

What do you lot think of this? I am at a loss. I never know what to make of these people. On the one hand, I admire their dedication to detail. For another, I am really into vanished worlds as well. (Hello, cosplay! Dressing up is awesome. Recreating lost worlds, equally so.) In addition, it's nice to live in a time, where people can be this weird, and not get, y'know, stoned to death or whatever. I support people's constructed, fictional lives, no matter what fashion, as long as they're not hurting anyone, - and it's great that they've been able to find people of like mind to live with etc.

BUT. They are crazy. tin. hats. Like, I get the desire, but not the 24/7 of it all, you know. Obsession can be taken too far.

Here's the other thing. It's like the male-dom thing in bdsm. Like, I've been known to find it really hot. BUT. in sex! Not in real life, right? Politically I find it to be repugnant and stupid. (Femme-dom too, for that matter, but you know what I mean.) For me, the great thing about recreation of these vanished times, means that we can keep the things we like for play, and lose the things we don't. Also I like running water, the internet, eyeglasses & contact lenses, etc etc.

I just don't know.

Thoughts?

Comments

[rm.livejournal.com]

Waiting to post until I am back home.

I think, aesthetics and personal preferences aside it's stupid. Never surrender your resources.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Word. Like, add to. Don't take away, yeah?

[fairyd123.livejournal.com]

I don't have an issue with the clothing (I've spent ages this past few weeks looking for 1940s designs for the 1940's night at the Hub convention) or the interior design but the attitudes are just plain insane. I have no patience with a woman who doesn't know who the prime minister is because she doesn't read the papers.

As for the BDSM thing - hell whatever floats your boat - we all like different things.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Oh, me neither. I love clothing from other eras - (although 40s I have to say is a new whim for me, and I blame Torchwood/Capt. Jack completely!).
And, I get (and love) cos play and role play and all that, but the keyword is PLAY. If you're totally cutting yourself off, that hardcore, from the real world, you're on about the level of people who don't use medicine for religious reasons. Also they're just following such god awful hetero normative traits that it just bothers me a bit. I mean, it's still a fetish, but DAMN, it's a stepford wife fetish! WTF?!?! I can get doing it for a weekend but all the time? Kinda freaks me out.

I guess, that was my connection to the BDSM thing. I get enjoying those things as play, and fun; my hackles go up when people are like, "oh, you're a submissive woman, so you think a woman's place must be in the home..." etc etc. Even if being a house-slave is like, a sexual fetish of yours, and you happen to be female.

[thebratqueen.livejournal.com]

Interesting article! I think for me it's not so much the conscious decision to live their lives like that - if you want to wear a bunny suit all day, go nuts - as it is the obvious cherrypicking of history. All of them kept saying how wonderful, caring, and friendly everyone was back then, and each time I kept filling in "...so long as you were white." Likewise all of the bits about how you didn't have these silly ideas about women working, which again only tended to apply if you were white and/or not of the lower classes.

Plus there's the aspect of how they don't want to read today's news because it's so unpleasant. Fine, but did they ever read history? I especially boggle at how the 1940s woman could claim such a thing, given, yanno, WORLD WAR II. I mean unless her antique-filled house also includes blackout curtains and a bomb shelter she's kinda doing it wrong.

Not that I'm saying that they have to, just be honest about what they're doing. They want to live in a happy fluffy world where they don't want to think about sad things and they like styles from the 30s/40s/50s. It's not that those were magical times where we all farted rainbows, yanno?

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Right! It's not like the history is authentic anyway; they're both ignoring the parts they don't like, and making the parts they do like rosier than they actually would have been. And also, the very fact of choosing to do something like this, and being allowed to do so, without being thoroughly condemned by society, is also a privilege of our time. I mean, what would they have thought in the 1940s of a nice, upper middle class lady who chose to live her entire life as if it were the 1890s?

The race thing. Word. WWII, also word. It's like living "history" out of a Harlequin novel.

[thebratqueen.livejournal.com]

That's actually a good question. B/c part of our time is just how much things changed over the decades. I don't know what it was like in the UK, but certainly in the US you had folks living like the 1890s for a while, simply because technology neither evolved nor spread that fast.

And, as you say, it's a benefit of our time that these women can make the choice. Feminism today says that if you want to have this kind of arrangement with your partner, go nuts. But back then you didn't have the choice. Ignoring obvious issues like what if you wanted to work or wanted a divorce to get away from your abusive husband, what about that one woman who said she's purposefully not having children? Did she think that would've been an allowable choice back then given the state of birth control then vs now?

(Also I am amused by the 1950s woman who says she doesn't drink. If she's living the 50s sans alcohol, she's definitely doing it wrong ;) )

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Good point. I forget that the quick rush through of period per decade is also new! I wonder if the 1950s woman also smokes? If you take it to the logical extreme, then also all new knowledge that we've discovered should also be taboo, no?

[jbs-teeth.livejournal.com]

I was going to say something to this affect, myself. Feminism *should* be about choices, not about ascribing the opposite choice of what has historically been available. So, if you're fulfilled and happy ironing and wearing lipstick, have at it.

But, the living in the definitive fantasy that not only was the past better than the present but also having no concept of what the present reality actuality is... well, that's seriously not cool.

"The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing." Being ignorant of current events like that is dangerous, in my opinion.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

I could never do this on so many levels. For one thing, housekeeping, shall we say, is not my forte.

Living in a fantasy world seems - I dunno, it can seem oddly attractive. Like taking both your feet off the ground and jumping in. I envy, on some level, their willingness to do it, and also their committedness. I am far too flightly and fickle to wholly embrace any one kind of lifestyle. On the other hand, all those things I just mentioned - the detachment from reality - I find myself kinda despising.

Hence my confusion.

"...so long as you were white."

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

And Anglo, native born, of a narrowly acceptable range of Protestant Denominations, straight, and not too intellectual or at all Bohemian. And at all leftist. And not too hard up.Or divorced, single or childless.
Or in any way eccentric.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

???????
Well. I reckon it takes all kinds. My daddy tole me that.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Diff'rent strokes for diff'rent folks, I guess.

[stardragonca.livejournal.com]

I 'pose.

[semyaza.livejournal.com]

Their worlds will come crashing down the moment one of them gets sick. Has the woman dedicated to the 30s lifestyle ever taken antibiotics? Do the ones living in the 40s and 50s observe strict rationing? I notice that they've chosen eras which are relatively comfortable. They're not, for example, living in cottages in rural late 18th century Yorkshire.

I love the aesthetic, but...

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I kinda want to tell them that life is not, in fact, a buffet, from which you can choose all the nice bits, and forgo all the nasty bits. Or at least, if that's what you're gonna do, then freaking own up to it! It's not all pretty dresses and bakelite, y'know?

[darthhellokitty.livejournal.com]

God, but the stuff... the room design, the dresses... do we know that they really do have those authentic period attitudes they're claiming, or did they just want to show off their super-snazzy setups in a photo-shoot?

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

I know, right? They seem really staged. But if your whole life is a performance? I dunno. Strangely, that is the part I oddly envy. I always wanted to be part of a group that had some kind of uniform, but I am a) commitment phobic, and b) too sloppy

[sanginmychains.livejournal.com]

Notice how, for most of these women, fully living in their chosen time period seems to come down to dresses and cake baking? If you're going to inhabit a time period, inhabit it. This is living in a dollhouse in the worst way. I don't object to a lot of choices, but I object to an adult without mental illness or disability choosing to be a child, permanently.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Yeah. I get the impulse, I suppose. But I think these people fail at the social contract.

Again, though, I keep coming back to the bdsm world. Like, people who want to be infantilised completely? Age-play, etc etc. I mean, I really do advocate for people to pursue their desires in performance and play, especially deviant desires, because I really believe that anything that doesn't cause harm to others, and is found fulfilling and joyful should be pursued. But at the same time, 24/7? But then who am I to cast stones at other people's lifestyle choices? And yet, I can't keep from having some degree of contempt about it. Hence my dilemma.

[sanginmychains.livejournal.com]

I agree with you, but I guess what I'm quibbling about is whether they're causing anyone harm. This is the socialist in me talking: I have trouble with someone who has the means to contribute to society but doesn't. Mind you, I'm making assumptions. These women don't talk about kids or charity work, so I'm assuming they're not contributing labour of any kind except to their own homes, which is more vanity than social contribution, but they may well have both of these things.

Anyway, I only judge with the full knowledge that my judgment is probably worthless. I don't know all the facts, and I'm not sure someone else wouldn't judge me unfavourably according to the same principles.

I also distrust people who are perpetually playacting. A little is good, healthy even. But all the time strikes me as a mental disorder more than a lifestyle.

Oh well. Judgmental me. They *do* have lovely frocks.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

"Other people knit. I judge. What? Everyone needs a hobby..."

I agree with every point you raise, but I'm a socialist too. ;-) And the ability to do this kind of thing is so related to socio-economic status. I mean, it's the kind of thing you don't have the luxury to do unless you're of a certain class, right?

I wish I looked good in 40s outfits. Or, in fact 20s and 30s. I adore playing dressup but am always depressed by how I look in vintage fashions.

[sanginmychains.livejournal.com]

That's exactly it! They're talking like they're making a moral choice, to live in a certain way to support their politics, but they are so incredibly bourgeois. It's like people who refuse to shop at Walmart. Now, I'm all for the refusal, but really poor people? Don't actually have much of a choice there. Scratch a Walmart abstainer, and you probably find someone who is firmly middle class. ('Cause the rich people weren't shopping at Walmart to start with.)

I judge *and* knit. Is that bad? Sometimes I judge while I knit. It's a good combination, though -- knitting keeps me just busy enough that I don't experience the urge to judge out loud.

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Too right about the walmart thing. I sometimes feel that way about a certain school of vegan. I have a number of vegan friends, but sometimes, certain sects practice it, and the accompanying moral high ground in such a way that makes no allowance for the practicality of eating whilst poor.

I've tried knitting before, but I suck; I have a lot of trouble managing the needles. And I think I pull on them too tightly, and everything just gets really tight, and then I can't get the needle back in, and it is terrible.

I really love handcrafts, but I am bad at them. In college, I and a gaggle of friends used to sit in the lounge and watch Buffy and cross stitch. It's...uh... never managed to prevent me from judging out loud though. Probably I am doing it wrong ;-)

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

I think they are way creepy, less because of the 24/7 thing than because of the Gratuitious Social Commentary. If you want to say "hey, you know I love bakelite and I hate Velcro and my hubby loves it when I cut the crust off his sandwiches, you may think it's wacky but it works for us" then I might not really want to hang around it and I worry a little about your kids, but what the hell, more power to you.

But when it turns into "these days are just so terrible because women want equality" then I start to get tetchy. To put it at the most schoolyard level possible, they dissed me first. :)

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

Word. I found the whole "I don't know who the PM is; it's just too disturbing" incredibly creepy. I also wonder what the menfolk think of this? I notice none of them were interviewed, and also they were completely spoken for by their wives. I mean, first of all, non period. Second, is it that they really believe in all this, and simply can't say it, because due to political correctness, if their wives say it, it's just a kooky choice, but if they say it, it comes across as misogynism? Or are they just along for the ride; you know, the wife's a little crazy, what can you do...etc etc.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

You're totally right, it's off how none of the guys have a word to say for themselves. And what if these blokes get laid off or go on disability, are they still going to be glad for a wife who doesn't know how to pump her own gas?

[kalichan.livejournal.com]

You know, I sometimes get the same feeling from regency stuff, i.e. how is it possible that one thing can spawn such degress of heteronormativity, while at the same time, being such a logical home for queerness.

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

*nodsnods* Some of that I think is that the Regency aesthetic of (presumed) heterosexual maleness included things which now read as queer. Plus it is all so performative now, functionally *everyone* is in drag, and I got into it through such a queer-inclusive social context...