There are SO many eye-rolling quotes in there, but here's the one that made me laugh out loud: This is why more people don't follow their dreams: They know the world is a cruel place for anyone who doesn't fit into the dominant culture.
No. People don't "follow their dreams" because they don't have the fucking privilege and entitlement that you do, you damn idiots. "Look at us! We're Victorians! (except for when I publish my writing on the internet - then I'm just a cool kid.)"
Earlier this year I read How to Be a Victorian and if I had ever expressed a desire to live in that area it would have been squleched about 50 pages in. I'm far too lazy and used to regular bathing to live like that.
"This prick is asking for someone here to bring him to task Somebody give me some dirt on this vacuous mass so we can at last unmask him I'll pull the trigger on it, someone load the gun and cock it While we were all watching, he got Washington in his pocket."
Gabriel's workout clothes were copied from the racing outfit of a Victorian cyclist, and when he goes swimming, his hand-knit wool swim trunks raise more than a few eyebrows — but this is just the least of the abuse we've taken. We have been called "freaks," "bizarre," and an endless slew of far worse insults. We've received hate mail telling us to get out of town and repeating the word "kill ... kill ... kill." Every time I leave home I have to constantly be on guard against people who try to paw at and grope me.
I wonder where does he go swimming, if I am at the indoor pool at the gym and he is in his Victorian swim trunks I probably would raise my eyebrows.
The second part is just odd, where do they live? Who are those people sending death threats and trying to grope her every time she leaves the house? It almost sounds made up or like an exaggeration of the fact that people might wanna touch her clothes.
On Vox Wednesday, Sarah A. Chrisman writes about the decision she and her husband have made to conduct their lives as if they were late-19th-century Americans. The couple lives in their home, which was built in 1888, without the benefit of 21st-century conveniences, eschewing refrigeration and modern electric lighting. They also wear period dress, happily pedal around town on reproduction bicycles, and clean their teeth with a toothbrush made of “natural boar bristles.”
There are many irritating things about this article. The irony of congratulating yourself on sticking to 1880s technology in a piece circulated on the Internet is an obvious place to start. The author has also published two books, and will publish a third this fall; this feat was presumably accomplished with at least some assistance from computers and the Web. Certainly the note at the bottom of the Vox article directing readers to her website provoked its share of raised eyebrows.
More irritating still is Chrisman’s apparent confidence that avoiding certain contemporary technologies, and dressing in period garb, has provided her with a palpable sense of what it was like to live in the 19th century. Chrisman writes about the physical sensations she gets from living in Victorian clothing:
Features of posture, movement, balance; things as subtle as the way my ankle-length skirts started to act like a cat's whiskers when I wore them every single day. I became so accustomed to the presence and movements of my skirts, they started to send me little signals about my proximity to the objects around myself, and about the winds that rustled their fabric—even the faint wind caused by the passage of a person or animal close by. Chrisman may well have a better sense than you or I about how it feels to wear such a skirt. But donning antique clothing doesn’t transport the wearer to times past—it doesn’t even necessarily give you a great sense of what it was like to wear such clothes in the 1880s. Wearing a corset as an adult, out of choice, as Chrisman does, will come with a particular set of physical sensations. Wearing a corset from girlhood on; being told you must wear a corset or you won’t be womanly; or wearing a corset while you have tuberculosis—all of these Victorian relationships to this garment were particular to their time. Chrisman doesn’t say so, but I assume that she and her husband avail themselves of modern medicine; in any event they’d be hard pressed to catch many of the now-rare diseases that afflicted the Victorians. The re-creation of the physical feeling of living in the late 19th century can only ever be a partial one.
The question of health brings me to perhaps the greatest fallacy inherent in the Chrismans’ method of “living history.” The “past” was not made up only of things. Like our own world, it was a web of social ties. These social ties extended into every corner of people’s lives, influencing the way people treated each other in intimate relationships; the way disease was passed and treated; the possibilities open to women, minorities, and the poor; the whirl of expectations, traditions, language, and community that made up everyday lives. Material objects like corsets or kerosene lamps were part of this complex web, but only a part.
The Chrismans also take a preposterously rosy view of their favorite era, choosing to recall the quaint elements of Victorian life and ignore its difficulties. Chrisman complains that people are sometimes cruel to her and her husband for their period predilections: “We live in a world that can be terribly hostile to difference of any sort. Societies are rife with bullies who attack nonconformists of any stripe.” This was true for their precious late-19th-century decades as well. Ask Ida B. Wells, driven out of Memphis in 1892 for protesting lynching, or a Chinese laborer prohibited from entering the United States under the terms of the 1882 Exclusion Act.
Even if an 1890s version of Chrisman, or of her husband, would have lived a comfortable and privileged life, they could not have lived it in a vacuum, as the 2010s Chrismans are attempting to do. The social world around them would have demanded that they take some kind of a stance on the mores and ideologies dominant at the time. Would you accept the fact that immigrant children in your town worked in a factory, or protest against it? If you’re female, would you drop your education when your family thought you’d had enough? These are choices that the sealed world of the Chrismans’ re-enactment doesn’t demand of them.
Chrisman writes that she and her husband have retreated from the present in part to escape the incomprehensible technologies that now govern our lives, and to avoid the disconnection from the natural world that comes with modernity. As historian Shirley Wajda noted on Twitter, these are—ironically enough—quite similar to worries that late-Victorian Americans also had. In his influential book No Place of Grace: Antimodernism and the Transformation of American Culture, 1880–1920, historian T.J. Jackson Lears describes the way that elites of the era were increasingly anxious about the pace and demands of modern life. The Chrismans are, in fact, more Victorian than they realize.
That’s because Chrisman probably hasn’t read T.J. Jackson Lears. She argues that primary sources are better than “commentaries” for a person wanting to know what the late Victorian period was like in the United States. This might seem to be an admirable stance—what historian would object to the impulse to go straight to the source?—if it weren’t paired with a confused disdain for the historical profession. She writes:
There is a universe of difference between a book or magazine article about the Victorian era and one actually written in the period. Modern commentaries on the past can get appallingly like the game ‘telephone’: One person misinterprets something, the next exaggerates it, a third twists it to serve an agenda, and so on. Going back to the original sources is the only way to learn the truth. This is an unfair characterization of professional historians, who generally acknowledge the impossibility of total objectivity while trying hard to be as clear-minded and fair as possible. It also betrays a hopelessly naive understanding of the historical record, which is, itself, incomplete and “twisted” by the agendas of those who have produced, saved, and recirculated its texts. The primary sources the Chrismans choose to read made it to the present day because they held some kind of value for the intervening generations. The couple finds its period magazines on Google Books, that redoubtable Victorian technology. It seems not to have crossed their minds that a series of human decisions resulted in the digitization of those magazines and not others, and that those decisions are themselves a type of commentary.
On the contrary, the Chrismans seem to deny that their experience of the past is mediated in any way, preferring to cast themselves instead as pure vessels of late-19th-century life. But everyone who reads about, thinks about, and writes about the past is, inevitably, an interpreter. There are good and careful interpreters, and bad ones. Part of the job of the person who is in love with history is to recognize the difference.
Please to be seeing my post about how these times were NOT GREAT FOR THOSE OF THE NON-CAUCASIAN DENOMINATION.
STOP IT, WHITE PEOPLE.
Lol maybe they don't care.
I just saw someone sharing a post yesterday about a woman who placed an ad looking for black people to play slaves at her husband's Django themed birthday party , so, I'm going to say some people don't GAF.
What. The. Fuck. I have read a lot of things on these boards but holy shit. I swear all white people are not dicks like this. Who the fuck thinks this is ok?
Post by omgzombies on Sept 10, 2015 7:40:20 GMT -5
No. Just no. I love period garb as much if not more than the next gal. I've done the SCA thing, and frequent ren faires. Huzzah! Do not start with the holier than thou shit because you like playing pretend. Nope.
AND What the HELL is that Django themed birthday party nonsense. Please dear god tell me that this is some weird onion type satire shit. Cause my jaw is still in on the floor.
Please to be seeing my post about how these times were NOT GREAT FOR THOSE OF THE NON-CAUCASIAN DENOMINATION.
STOP IT, WHITE PEOPLE.
Lol maybe they don't care.
I just saw someone sharing a post yesterday about a woman who placed an ad looking for black people to play slaves at her husband's Django themed birthday party , so, I'm going to say some people don't GAF.
No. Just no. I love period garb as much if not more than the next gal. I've done the SCA thing, and frequent ren faires. Huzzah! Do not start with the holier than thou shit because you like playing pretend. Nope.
AND What the HELL is that Django themed birthday party nonsense. Please dear god tell me that this is some weird onion type satire shit. Cause my jaw is still in on the floor.
But if anyone needs a ride, she'll totally pick them up. She's just cool like that.
No. Just no. I love period garb as much if not more than the next gal. I've done the SCA thing, and frequent ren faires. Huzzah! Do not start with the holier than thou shit because you like playing pretend. Nope.
AND What the HELL is that Django themed birthday party nonsense. Please dear god tell me that this is some weird onion type satire shit. Cause my jaw is still in on the floor.
But if anyone needs a ride, she'll totally pick them up. She's just cool like that.
I have no words, so I'm going to let Castle speak for me....
PS - Can we have her brought up on hate charges???
No. Just no. I love period garb as much if not more than the next gal. I've done the SCA thing, and frequent ren faires. Huzzah! Do not start with the holier than thou shit because you like playing pretend. Nope.
AND What the HELL is that Django themed birthday party nonsense. Please dear god tell me that this is some weird onion type satire shit. Cause my jaw is still in on the floor.
But if anyone needs a ride, she'll totally pick them up. She's just cool like that.
No. Just no. I love period garb as much if not more than the next gal. I've done the SCA thing, and frequent ren faires. Huzzah! Do not start with the holier than thou shit because you like playing pretend. Nope.
AND What the HELL is that Django themed birthday party nonsense. Please dear god tell me that this is some weird onion type satire shit. Cause my jaw is still in on the floor.
But if anyone needs a ride, she'll totally pick them up. She's just cool like that.
I really just don't know what to say about that. That's awful. Just awful.
No. Just no. I love period garb as much if not more than the next gal. I've done the SCA thing, and frequent ren faires. Huzzah! Do not start with the holier than thou shit because you like playing pretend. Nope.
AND What the HELL is that Django themed birthday party nonsense. Please dear god tell me that this is some weird onion type satire shit. Cause my jaw is still in on the floor.
But if anyone needs a ride, she'll totally pick them up. She's just cool like that.
Post by irene adler on Sept 10, 2015 9:05:28 GMT -5
Apparently they haven't gotten to the research on how difficult it was to clean clothes. The clothes look off the rack--too clean and pressed. This (among other things) makes me punchy.
No. Just no. I love period garb as much if not more than the next gal. I've done the SCA thing, and frequent ren faires. Huzzah! Do not start with the holier than thou shit because you like playing pretend. Nope.
AND What the HELL is that Django themed birthday party nonsense. Please dear god tell me that this is some weird onion type satire shit. Cause my jaw is still in on the floor.
But if anyone needs a ride, she'll totally pick them up. She's just cool like that.
Apparently they haven't gotten to the research on how difficult it was to clean clothes. The clothes look off the rack--too clean and pressed. This (among other things) makes me punchy.
She says on her website that she makes all her daily wear clothes except her corsets. They're probably so clean and pressed because she uses a modern washing machine and modern steam iron, but I believe she makes the clothes. You're not going to find those "off the rack."
I think her article is super pompous and hipstery and full of privilege and look-at-me-AW, BUT her website has a lot of interesting links and I am pretty impressed at her hand sewing (though Singer has been making machines since 1865 and it's not hard to find a Victorian era Singer on craigslist so she should use that, but I digress...)
Anyway, the history component and her research is something I could fall down the rabbit hole after. Her put-a-bird-on-it-Portlandia tone is obnoxious.
On special outings when Gabriel and I go cycling together, I ride a copy of a high-wheel tricycle from the 1880s. Gabriel has three high-wheel bicycles, and he has ridden them hundreds of miles. On our vacation just last week, we rode our high-wheel cycles more than 75 miles along a historic railroad route between abandoned silver mines. I kept thinking of an article we had read in an 1883 cycling magazine about wheelmen riding bikes just like Gabriel's when they took a trip out to a mine.
Also, notice the ironic and maddening juxtaposition in this thread -- actual human beings being objectified and dehumanized with that racist ad and yuppie privileged fools who are whining about being objectified and dehumanized, while willingly and purposefully playing dress up as old-timey yuppie, privileged fools.
There's a whole blog entry about how her day riding her old timey bike to the lavender fields was ruined because someone touched her skirt.
Post by Skyesthelimit1212 on Sept 10, 2015 9:45:42 GMT -5
Do you think the husband is looking at Fingerhut catalogs like a it's porn. "Ohhh baby, ya, let me look at your curved lines, ya, you're fully functioning toilet. God ya, flush, flush for me."