The Victorian-livin’ couple, I am not yet done talking about them:
Neither my husband nor I have ever had a cellphone; I’ve never even had a driver’s license. 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.
Or the older, even nuttier piece:
Some people feel they were born in the wrong place, or in a body of the wrong gender. I have simply always felt that I was born in the wrong time, and there is no passport nor surgical procedure to help one of my particular condition.
NOW, A MERCH ALERT!
We’re gonna be selling tote bags! WHOO. Okay, there are three different tote bags, and I’m previewing the illos here (all by Toast reader artists!) so you can express GENERAL PREFERENCES so if people are just wild about a particular one, we can make extras of that one!
The first two are really pretty and lyrical and by Megan Piontkowski:
And the third is by our own icebergmama, and I suspect it will find favor with our male readers and also people who work in more conservative offices:
So, you know, are you gonna buy a tote bag? Two tote bags? Which ones? We’re thinking they’ll be about $20 plus a couple bucks for shipping.
Michelle Dean on literary drunkards and Ernest Hemingway being a real dick to Dorothy Parker about her abortion:
Artists have rarely wanted to correct the public on this point. This was especially true of writers in the middle of the twentieth century, laboring in the long interval between Prohibition—-when writing, celebrity and drink got tangled up at the Algonquin Round Table and in the lives of modernists—and the 1970s. (Hard drugs slipped in after that but began to signify a certain cynicism rather than angst in the writer.) The trite liquor-soaked romance of their craft suited these writers, it seemed; it gave them a handy excuse. However many degenerate nights were lost at a bar, however many times a person might be rushed to a hospital with a suicide attempt, it was worth it. The blackouts and bad marriages and every sordid bit of it could be explained away by art with a capital A. Who wouldn’t trade a few years of misery to write something like Gatsby? Or A Farewell to Arms? Or “The Swimmer”? Or “Fern Hill”? Put that way, the math of art and drink comes out looking attractive, glamorous, in spite of the death and in spite of the suffering.
My friend Carrie’s new puppy is having a contemplative moment:
I liked this narrative about having OCD:
For me, the only tactic that really works to control my OCD is grinding down the obsessive thought over a long period of time. To do that, I have to look at literally the worst possible scenario — say, how long I would be in prison if I actually ran over a kid — and just come to terms with it. This means I’m actually convincing myself that the worst thing will happen, then convincing myself that it’s something I can cope with. I’ll have to repeat these rationalizations over and over again sometimes, but they’ll eventually stick and allow me to relax.
My fav soap opera, which I watch every eight months and never get lost with:
When William J. Bell and wife Lee Phillip Bell created The Young And The Restless in 1973, networks were looking to get further into the daytime soap business, not running away from it. William Bell, a protégé of soap pioneer Irna Phillips, was a hot commodity in the soap world, having written ratings-boosting runs on Guiding Light, As The World Turns, and Days Of Our Lives. CBS was so eager to be in the Bell business that the network agreed to a show before it was even created, granting him practically a free pass to create exactly the show he wanted. What he created both respected the current conventions of the genre by focusing the story on two main families, but also revolutionized it, by making younger characters the story focus and bringing Hollywood production values to daytime. Although the show struggled to gain market share in its first few years, creatively it came out of the gate extremely strong, winning the Daytime Emmy Award for Outstanding Drama Series in 1975.
This is an incredible, brutally sad report on Lagos’ only rape support center, and you can follow the #SaveMirabel hashtag for more updates:
The Mirabel Centre has been open for two years and is funded by DFID, the UK’s Department for International Development. Juliet says they have seen more than 845 clients in that time. But having so many people pass through such a small space is a challenge.
“When we have to see two clients at a time, we have to vacate our admin room,” she explains.
The centre covers the cost of a victim’s medical tests – those for sexually transmitted infections and pregnancy among other things – and medication, like contraceptives and antibiotics, although the HIV test is free and the post exposure prophylaxis, an anti-HIV medication taken as soon as possible after possible exposure to HIV, is subsidised by another non-profit and then supplied and administered by the hospital.
The totes are tempting! I’d go for ‘take to the sea’, myself.
Carrie’s puppy’s contemplative moment appears to have happened either just before or just after the snake sighting from yesterday! Puppy sees snake, contemplates life. Someone should option the movie rights to this gripping tale.
I would buy ten million “take to the sea” tote bags. Or, probably, two.
Bergie’s ‘take to the sea’ is my first choice too!
Samesies! And I have a birthday coming up. 🙂
YEEESSSSS I WANT THAT ONE!!!! could it maybe have a Toast logo as well?
my thoughts exactly. It would be perfect with a toast logo.
I had assumed there would be a tiny “T” on one of the sails, actually!
Yes, needs a toast logo for rills
same same same!
☝🏾️☝🏾☝🏾☝🏾☝🏾☝🏾yes!
I just showed this to my husband who said “DON’T BUY THE SEA ONE” which means as soon as it’s for sale he plans on buying it and stashing it away as a Christmas present for me.
The mermaid misandrist one for the win. If it is within the dimensions that make it ideal to carry groceries on my bike, it will be getting a shit-ton of use.
In black though, please.
I really love this one too.
Oh yeah, that’s the one I would get! It’ll be a good companion for my tote that says “I’m a grown-ass lady and I do what I want.”
“Take to the sea” for me too, I think. On the other hand, you can never have too many tote bags, so perhaps a misandry mermaid too.
That’s my plan.
Same. I need the Take to the Sea, but I also really like the mermaid.
I LOVE BERGY’S! Would buy multiples.
I also love “Take to the sea” and the misandrist mermaid. Is there like a staff discount?
Ooh totes kewl! My fave is the mermaid tattooed lady I think. But I like the ship a lot too and have a question – is the Toast logo on the bag as well? Hope so.
Ditto to Toast logo on the Take to the Sea bag! I want the ship AND the sea AND the toast logo. YAAASSSSSSSS.
Thirded! I love the “take to the sea” design, and it would probably be a bit more appropriate for work/non-Toastie company, but I would still like to discreetly flash my Toast pride when I’m out and about.
It would be awesome if The Toast was the ship’s name! That bag is my second choice, after the misandrist mermaid.
Agreed!!
I do not need any more tote bags (I’m pretty sure mine are breeding new ones on their own) but if at some point in the future those designs could be put on mugs I would take both the mermaid and “take to the sea.”
Yes, Toast mugs are definitely something I could use in my life and my kitchen.
I would buy the mermaid tote bag, but I would also buy a mermaid mug so hard.
Yes! I too have many many totes (arts organizations give them away like whoa) but coffee mugs? Well, I know what everyone will be getting for gifts for the foreseeable future.
Medical research nonprofits, too – that’s where mine are from.
I’m pretty into the number of thermoses and t-shirts we’re accruing from nature orgs! It’s a nice change-up!
Ooh toast thermos??
Mugs, yes, definitely, and those would be my top choices too. Let’s face it, I’ll probably buy a tote (that’s why they multiply, lack of self-control on my part), but voting for future mugs here.
Yes! was just thinking that I don’t like any of the coffee mugs in my office and I would take both the mermaid and the “take to the sea” on a mug right quick
Me too!
YES I NEED MERMAID MISANDRIST MUGS.
And t-shirts!
I would love a Misandrist Mermaid mug.
MUGS! MUGS! Big mugs that can handle the amount of coffee it takes to get through reading all the entries in an Open Thread!
THIS. Those little mugs do NOT hold enough tea. I would buy the shit out of a big Toast mug.
I’m broke but I’m buying all three totes.
Love the idea of mugs. Also, t-shirts or tank tops, if that’s ever a possibility.
MISANDRIST MERMAID WITH A SQUID TATTOO!!!!!!!!!
I DON’T EVEN USE TOTE BAGS AND I’M GOING TO BUY LIKE SEVEN OF IT!!!!!
I saw that and immediately thought it looks like it was designed specifically for you! (She just needs a little “bi-furious” crown.)
I am very eager to purchase the misandrist mermaid tote.
I will give you ALL MY MONEY (‘m in publishing, so $20 plus a couple bucks for shipping is exactly all my money) for Bergy’s “take to the sea” bag. It is glorious.
I’m with you, too! But Bergy, add your “M” to the ship’s flag, that would take it from glorious to uber-glorious!
That Victorian article should be put into a time capsule and shot into space. This is how I want future lifeforms to remember us. This was what we are were the year twenty fifteen.
I have to say though, there was a very dumb trend on Twitter yesterday to the effect of: The Victorians?! Don’t you know they were RACIST. Like yeah dude, I think the historian is familiar with the racial attitudes of the people she studies. I highly doubt this was her fifth pitch to vox dot com after they rejected all of her anti-Irish lithographs.
I do wish we could do that with all enjoyment of the past:
“I like old-school hip hop”
“I bet you also love REAGONOMICS! Past-likers make me sick.”
A medieval historian friend of mine said he was once asked if his politics were feudal!
But yes, this, exactly. The Victorian era, when there was racism and imperialism, and people who benefited from those things, and people who suffered massively as a result. Much like… 2015.
“Yes, I believe those with horses and armour are better than those without. Everyone else can’t move 10 miles away from where they were born. That is my politics.” (my knowledge of the feudal system is a little sketchy)
I know, I had so many conflicting feelings about it. Yes, it’s fantastic to study the past through the objects they used, and especially by actually using those objects. Although reconstructing these as ‘more authentic’ objects is ridiculous when most things made in the American 1880s/90s were mass-produced and helped destroy hand-crafting. The Arts and Crafts movement was against the flow, not with it.
And describing living like this without exploring all the gender and racial and class divisions that shaped the society…? The whole description is very much about the things they have, which are awesome, and super interesting, and I feel jealous, but history isn’t just about objects.
Exactly. Like, are they structuring their relationship in a Victorian fashion? Does she stay home and tend the hearth while he goes out into the public sphere? What’s going on there?
To be fair to her, writing books about domestic subjects is *the most Victorian* way for a middle-class woman to make her living. Unless she wanted to be a governess.
Or a hereditary monarch. A sweet gig if you can get it.
Except that they aren’t just enjoying some cultural products and physical artifacts from the time period. She is saying she wants to live in that time period, while not showing the slightest modicum of awareness that not everything about it was quaint big-wheeled bicycles and kerosene lamps. She doesn’t for a minute acknowledge that she’s not just choosing to “live in the Victorian era,” she’s choosing to live (partially) as a middle class, white, Protestant, northerner in the Victorian era.
Also, I think calling her a historian is a bit of a stretch, given that she categorically rejected all secondary literature on the past. The fact that she could, with a straight face, claim that it was “a culture that believed in engineering durable, beautiful items that could be repaired by their users” shows that she is willfully ignorant of the fact that the late Victorian period was one that witnessed the tremendous expansion of mass production of cheap goods.
I think Rebecca Onion does a good job of responding to Chrisman. There are a lot of parts I’d love to excerpt, but I especially liked this:
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.
and this:
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.
SECONDARY SOURCES? You mean CHARLATANS who distort the purity of primary sources out of ignorance or for personal gain.
SO TRUE. I know most of my historian friends stuff their handsewn mattresses with the piles and piles of hundred dollar bills they made off the sale of 500 copies of their monographs, plus that sweet adjuncting bank we all make.
For reconstruction done well, have you seen the BBC series that include ‘Victorian Farm’ and ‘Edwardian Farm’? I *love* both those programmes, and the follow-ups ‘Secrets of the Castle’ ‘Tudor Farm’ and ‘Wartime Farm’ were interesting if not as good.
In one of them, they decides they needed to change the acidity of their fields, so they decided to make tons of quicklime using old-fashioned techniques. Which was AWESOME. In another episode, they wanted to rebuild the kiln at a blacksmith’s forge, so they made 1000s of bricks using two different Victorian techniques. No half measures here!
Although I have heard on the internet that the programme makers were not the best at hiring the craftsmen they needed. And sometimes their banter is a little thin.
I have such a crush on Ruth Goodman (and Peter Ginn) and I love all of those shows! I actually bought Ruth’s “How to be a Victorian” book and it’s really good at pointing out all the crappy things that you had to deal with actually living in the Victorian era and how bad lots of things really were.
I do historical reenactment every summer (1890s time period) and we get so many people saying “Oh, I would love to live in this time period, everything was so simply and so much better” Those of us who have actually done the research are thinking “um, we like vaccines and antibiotics and being female and having some rights….”
Also, washing machines. I have some laundry I do by hand, but having to do an entire household’s worth? Dear god in heaven, no.
Also vacuums! Beating rugs is a great way to release aggression for about 5 minutes and then it becomes annoying, dusty, and too much work.
And it’s cool on a little area rug, but on one that takes up an entire room, I have better things to do with my time than haul that shit outside and hit it with sticks. I also have asthma, so there’s that.
Oh God, I LOVE the Victorian & Edwardian Farm series, glad to know I’m not alone! Jeepers, I was even watching Victorian Pharmacy, come to think of it (didn’t grab me like the farm ones, though) and Medieval Farm (too “medieval-ly”).
OH, and wasn’t there a Canadian equivalent involving two separate families and a prairie province? I watched the hell atta that show! Off to Google to refresh my memory!
YES PIONEER QUEST IS THE CANADIAN VERSION AND I LOVED IT SO MUCH THAT MY MOM LET ME TAPE IT ON VHS! (And then, because I am not determined to live a previous era, I stopped being able to watch them because I no longer posess a VHS player.)
Yes, that’s it! OMG…I can still remember the drama: “When Mama’s happy, EVERYBODY’S happy”.
Sent from my iPad
Noooo the Tudor show was the best! Pig bathing! Sheep success! Beer brewing! Windmills! Mining and metalworking! And they had that amazing folklore expert, I really liked that guy. He was always beaming and charmingly dorky, and he taught them so many fun holiday rituals and how to think Tudor and enjoy the era. I feel like I learned so much about just being a Tudor era person, before modern times and industrialisation. Seriously, annual leaf fights? Why don’t I get annual leaf fights??
But that guy is on every. single. show. they did and I got so tired of him. I wanted them to find a lovely fun lady historian to come and tell them about folklore for once!
Have you watched the one where they’re helping to build a castle in France? That once is super fun.
I have not seen these shows (I am now seeking them out) but I just want to shill for ‘Lost Gardens’. They go in to modern patches of land that used to be historical gardens, figure out what used to be there, and recreate it. It’s linked in my mind because I became obsessed with the Tudor episode and got the ‘Tudor Farm’ book out from the library. There’s also a Victorian fern garden, an Edwardian Japanese garden, a canal keeper’s garden, an allotment, a Regency era ship captain’s garden in a port town, a Scottish laird’s manor garden, and a Welsh valley garden (with ancient ferns that they stole from Tasmania)
I am going to go home and rewatch it and then watch allll the history shows.
And it’s not even like she’s the Most Privileged and is therefore blind to all the inconveniences; she’s proud of baking all her bread from scratch and washing her clothes by hand and structuring her whole life around a bunch of outdated appliances. As if there’s something inherently noble about the objects and processes themselves, and the fact that they kept women of the era chained to their kitchens is nbd. The REAL injustice is the hate mail that she supposedly receives!
I wonder if she’s using modern birth control, or if she will soon be hand-washing nappies as well, like a real Victorian lady.
Assuming she doesn’t die in childbirth!
After her authentic corsets authentically crush her ribs. Or will she be getting her ribs surgically removed? You know, like a TRUE Victorian.
Purpureal fever: SO AUTHENTIC!
Those seem like weird things to choose as the markers of living a middle-class Victorian life, because I am pretty sure bakeries and laundry services both existed in Victorian times. Though the details of who did the work for laundry services are really depressing, so I assume she would ignore them.
Oh, wait, I’ve figured out an explanation. She may not have come across any bakery ads in the particular Victorian magazines that have made it into Google Books, so since she avoids secondary sources and common sense, she likely doesn’t know that bakeries existed then.
Buying in bread was really expensive, though. Much much cheaper to make it yourself, so boughten bread was 1) a luxury item and 2) distrusted, because of all the plaster and other adulterants that may or may not have been used.
I mean the other thing is she can’t really hire servants, so her experience of living is kind of suspended between classes. She’s living like an upper class lady but doing middle-to-lower-class house chores.
I mean, I’m upset that she recieves hate mail because that’s not cool. But also. PLENTY of Victorian women recieved worse than hatemail for trying to live like actual human beings, ya know? So she should just lean in to the authenticity of it, or something.
Oh, thank you! This beautifully articulates the problems with the piece.
There was a lot of incredulous discussion of them on twitter yesterday — I ended up feeling a little bit mean at the end; after all, why should cosplaying produce such a strong response? But it’s the claim to superior historical understanding completely divorced from any historical context or awareness which is mind-boggling …
You’re right, I took her at her word (and a vaguely recalled false memory) that she was a historian. Lord, this articles is so hilariously bad in so many perfectly crafted ways.
Yes! Also from Onion’s piece (emphasis mine):
[Chrisman’s attitude] 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.
Yessss that was another bit I thought about excerpting!
All of this, basically.
The entire first part of the article (her discussing her house and the “real quill pen” and etc) read almost like a ridiculous Onion article. I was actually laughing at one point.
(Does she get to vote, as a woman “choosing to live in the Victorian era?”)
RIGHT like, I bet a lot of Victorian industrialists would have LOVED our modern crap. Half their things are only so sturdy because they hadn’t worked out how to make them cheap and breakable enough yet, not because they’re morally superior or anything.
Related: I wonder how old a consumer good has to be before I don’t feel guilty and sad about the conditions it was made in, anymore? Like if the child that made it in terrible conditions has been dead for a hundred years rather than two, is that better?
I kinda feel like there’s a difference between “I am fascinated by this era that I study, and love many aspects of it,” and “I am doing my best to LIVE in this era because it’s so wonderful and has improved my life so much,” because the second of those is only available to her because of the privilege she enjoys in both this era and the one she’s trying to emulate. So watching her crow so delightedly about how great it was in the past feels much harder to take. (Granted, I’m someone with enough current privilege to do something like this in 2015, but wouldn’t get nearly so many advantages if I were in anything resembling Victorian history.)
I felt like the piece was full of Life Was Better Then (and the older one was even more so), and that’s the kind of sentiment that people DO, actually, use when defending racism and sexism and a variety of “old-fashioned values.”. So, yeah, I’m sure she’s aware of the kind of racism (sexism, etc.) prevalent in the era, and I think she should have included some of her thoughts on the subject in the piece.
Yes, definitely. I have no problem with people wanting to live in the material culture of another period – you do you! Everyone needs a hobby! And I don’t even give a shit if they’re inconsistent about it – please do take advantage of all those tasty tasty antibiotics and voting rights, even as you enjoy your handsewn feather mattress.
But that self-congratulation about it suggests an utter lack of awareness of the factors that allow her to feel like she was born to live in that time period and the reasons why most other people wouldn’t want to.
Yes, if she’d been like ‘here are the ways that it’s easy and also hard to live like this, in a practical sense, and the things that make it inconsistent’ and ‘here are the modern things that make this possible’ I’d be FASCINATED and full of respect. But the lack of examination, plus the smugness… no thx
Yes! I didn’t get the sense there was the tiniest bit of walkback or even signs of maturing from when as a kid she told her mom it would be “worth it” to live as a servant to be surrounded by “such beauty.”
I wonder exactly how hard she thinks servants worked??? Like that shit was HARD WORK YO and you basically never got to sleep. Beauty means much less when you’re chronically sleep deprived and haven’t bathed all year because there’s no time to.
The guy who wrote the novel that was the basis of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, Jack Finney, was seriously into the whole Life Was Better Then trip, and The Body Snatchers (the original title of the novel) makes a lot of sense as a metaphor for that mindset; people change, they get new ideas in their head and new priorities… it’s like they’ve been replaced by aliens, woo spooky! (I haven’t read the book myself, but Stephen King describes it in Danse Macabre and made the connection.)
He wrote Time and Again, about a twentieth-century man who goes back to the 1880s and falls in love with both the time period and a woman.
I Love Galesburg In The Springtime was one of my favorite books when I was younger!
……While I know little about either, I’m PRETTY SURE the principles of old-school hip hop and Reagonomics are completely at odds with each other. Whereas these people are idealizing a certain class, race, etc and generalizing them as “the Victorians,” i.e., the only Victorians who existed– that’s completely entwined with ignoring the racial problems of the era. Plus she states that writings by “the Victorians” are the bulk of her reading materials– she’s willfully shaping her ideologies based on those of people who had access to publication at that time (i.e., not the oppressed.) And she explicitly refers to them as her “teachers”.It’s more than fair to critique them, and frankly I’m of the opinion you’re presenting a strawman argument.
Well, as much as I don’t care to conform to gender-based expectations, I do pretty well like that Take to the Sea bag.
I was definitely drawn to the Take to the Sea bag too. But I would also buy the first one.
I would totally buy the mermaid AND the Take to the Sea tote! I need them in my life ASAP.
Same! They’re both perfect! The Big Hair No Heart warrior lady is good too, but I’m a sucker for a tattooed mermaid.
Seconding this comment! I want both of those, though I’ll get the misandrist mermaid first.
I love ALL the totes, but will probably buy the third because I love the Master & Commander series, so it’s sort of a twofer!
That Victorian living couple made my day. I’m like, I shouldn’t make fun of their harmless silly privileged lifestyle choice! But also, haha nerds on their nerd bikes!!
I was reeeeally hoping for a picture of them on their goofy bikes and I was so happy when there was one.
I am so glad that I am not the only one who made the Master and Commander connection! I saw that bag and immediately went “tall ship! perfect for imagining that it is Totally Supposed To Be the Surprise!”
That Xojane article has this little sidenote:
“I’ve even had the experience of a customer in a café — a woman whom I had never seen before in my life — demanding the owner that I be thrown out, simply because I wouldn’t let her fondle me!”
Okay, that sounds bad BUT it is eerily–EERILY–similar to an anecdote she tells over here, in which some dude tries to tell her to leave a farm because, again, she didn’t want a woman to grab her.
http://www.thisvictorianlife.com/blog/-daily-chal…
I wouldn’t outright say she’s massaging the facts or anything, but count me as skeptical.
I’m a little more distracted by the “hate mail” she says she supposedly receives: “we’ve received hate mail telling us to get out of town and repeating the word “kill… kill… kill…” over and over again.”
KILL KILL KILL
Hate mail written by Arlo Guthrie?
I lost a mouthful of water laughing over this.
This is the greatest comment.
& that would be the greatest hate mail.
I think we should make her sit on the Group W bench.
Miss Hannigan loves XoJane.
Is that an instruction or a threat?
As someone who, at times, winds up in public space dressed in some form of period clothing (including Victorian) that part of her story sounds completely believable. People feel free to come up and grab you, try to put their hand down your bodice (to ‘test’ that you are wearing a corset?!), try to climb under the skirt, etc. And while most people are just curious and ask questions, sometimes it does feel like you are being hostilely interrogated, for sure. Since most of the time I am there to answer questions, I have to try to be polite, but it is not always fun.
And if/when we are just trying to get dinner at a restaurant we have been asked to leave more than once because we were ‘disturbing’ other patrons (because some of us had objected to being grabbed/someone trying to climb under a girl’s skirt or just because we weren’t dressed in modern shorts and tshirts). I would also not be surprised if the couple did get some serious hate mail. I know people who *don’t* live as Victorians, but live in a small town and inadvertently offended the wrong person and were more or less stalked online and sent some very nasty letters.
I don’t get the wanting to ‘live’ in the past; I do have friends who do some of the same things as the couple in the article, and they all compromise with their ‘lifestyle’ in some way or another. Most of them have cellphones, and they don’t see the humor in wearing their period clothing and constantly using their cellphones.
Many of my friends are quite skilled reenactors (I’m… less skilled) and we DO see the humour in wearing period clothing while using cellphones. Wearing a complete, wellmade costume and reenacting stuff is only the second best part. The best part is the happy, creative sacrilege!
Seriously. If you’re a reenactor with any sense of how to live whatsoever, there will come a moment when you cheerfully hike up/remove your authentically made 14th century dress/jacket, roll down your hose to your ankles and add whatever ridiculous, made-up, blinged-out, cheekily unhistorical show-off piece you’ve invented lately, your look being completed when you put on your sunglasses. Then, just grab your beverage of choice, take a slow, meandering walk through the historical environment with your equally stupidly dressed friends, happily lying about history to each other, possibly getting slightly drunk even though it’s only the early afternoon. And that. That is the best moment.
Ah, I wasn’t referring to reenactors at events, I was referring to friends who, to one degree or another, try to live ‘in their period’. They all make compromises of one sort or another, not because of historical accuracy, but because there are some parts of modern culture they are unwilling to give up. And they are unwilling/unable to grasp that they are mostly playacting, not ‘going back in time’ or whatever catchphrase they use.
One of my favorites was a guy who built a mud hut to live in. Seriously. He was going to live like someone in the Iron Age? Not sure, actually, as he talked a lot about Celts, but I could not say for sure what he was going for. He had the smokehole in the middle, no stove or fireplace, etc. and wouldn’t have a cellphone and *walked* into town to his job, but wore Teva sandals with various tunic/kilt/trouser type outfits, ha! He made it through one Midwestern winter, but was lured back to the modern day when his girlfriend flat refused to live in the hut with him. Overall, many of these ‘back in time’ people are very Thoreau-like. ‘Yes, I live a good and simple life, but I go visit my girlfriend for a hot meal, and have my laundry done.’ ha!
Though even at events, I tend to be one of the grumpy ones about really blatant stuff like cellphones. Especially when we are there for a public demo, trying to give at least a vague sense of what people dressed like and what they did. But I always have to wear modern glasses, so in any period pre-Victorian, I have a big blatant anachronism from the getgo. 😛 My cellphone, though, is always in a basket or box or something, turned off, and only checked when I’m ‘behind the scenes’.
oh, and @Dee, below, I only skimmed the linked article, and didn’t read the earlier one, so was just commenting on the possibility of being kicked out and/or fondled while in period clothing. It happens, even when one isn’t being an overly precious person. 🙂
Really? I think on this very site there have been very credible stories about cretins – lots – taking all sorts of idiotic and intrusive liberties with people in period clothes.
See also “cosplay is not consent”.
Except she was NOT kicked out. It was wildly, wildly inappropriate and wrong for the dude to tell her that the woman should just be allowed to grab her, but she was the one who said “are you kicking us out?” and chose to leave. There is a difference.
I just want to reiterate that A Farewell To Arms contains absolutely nothing that in any way resembles human emotion or human interaction. The dialogue most resembles lone sentences drawn out of a hat. It says nothing about war or love beyond “war is bad” “love is good”.
The Sun Also Rises is the only very good Hemingway novel. This is the hill I will die on, like several characters in an admittedly very good chapter in an otherwise not very good Hemingway novel.
I agree on The Sun Also Rises. Brett is a great example of a complex, flawed, realised female character. Then I read A Farewell to Arms, during which I kept stopping and wondering ‘Is this a joke?’ I can’t remember if I finished it. Then I read some short stories, and was sickened by a racist description of an African-American character, and put aside all Hemingway things for good.
Moral of the story: if you must read Hem, start and finish with A Farewell to Arms (Or A Moveable Feast for the bitchy, mostly made-up but sporadically entertaining gossip)
The Sun Also Rises is a great, complicated novel about gender and the pitfalls of masculinity. And I imagine readers told him how much they liked the bullfights and the fishing and Hemingway said “yes, that is what I will write about from now on forever.”
Kind of liking some Hemingway is my most controversial opinion on The Toast Dot Net. But I totally understand why people think he’s an overrated bore (not to mention a boor with the politics of a boer)
I have to own a certain love for Hemingway.
It is like this: My AP English teacher was really, seriously into Hemingway, in a way larger than I can possibly explain. Everything we readh – Shakespeare, Tolstoy, Fitzgerald, ALL OF IT – was “more crap we have to get through before we can get to Hemingway.” And then, with Hemingway, he did amazing things. He dove into issues of creativity and process. When the class didn’t get “Mr. and Mrs. Elliot,” (with obtuseness that would be impossible in anything but a room full of high school students), he read it out loud, and managed to completely blow my mind. It changed the way I read.
The short declarative sentences in FtA cover a lot of sex. The book almost deliberately says nothing about war or love. There are serious questions about whether there’s love in it at all, or just a lot of sex.
The cap of the year in this class was a trip to see Hemingway’s manuscripts. The ending of FtA appears to have frustrated him a lot. There’s one page where he just scrawled “Catherine DIES and the baby DIES and that’s how it ENDS,” (or something like that – this was a long time ago).
That is awesome! I had a high school English teacher who did that for my class with Beowulf.
I would like to say that the most assholey interactions I have ever had with strangers on public transit has been when I’m reading Hemingway.
Not. A. Coincidence.
Hate would be far too strong word to describe my opinion of Hemingway. He has never struck me as a particularly exceptional writer.
Toastbergmama is still around? I always wondered how she and the bergy bits were doing…
She is on toastie twitter for sure.
wait how do i get in on toastie twitter??
You go to the Toast Connections spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_26MiL9WN…
And you put your info there, and you follow who you want to follow
Or you go find embryoconcepts’ Twitter list: https://twitter.com/embryoconcepts/lists/toasties
I dig all of them, but the ship would probably be most practical. Will they say “A willing foe, and sea room” anywhere? And have a Toast logo?
I love the spear lady and the mermaid.
Also, can’t get enough of the insufferable Victorian couple. I think it would have been very easy to write a much more charming version of that article, where they acknowledge that not every aspect of their lifestyle is Victorian and also that the late 1800s was not that great of a time for a million reasons, and that they just like wearing old-timey clothes and using an icebox. But the tone, guys, the TONE!
“We live in a world that can be terribly hostile to difference of any sort”
I know, that technically that does not state that middle class victorians were more accepting of difference… but still.
She sounds like she would be similarly obnoxious no matter what her weird hobby was. The affected manner of speaking! The smug certainty and sense of persecution!
No, you see, that’s part of her determination to live into her Victorian ideals.
YES. IT IS THE MOST SMUG.
When I first read it, I seriously had to do a double take and make sure it wasn’t a parody article, because REALLY?!
Case in point, this: “Whenever I’m inside my house I have an antique chatelaine hanging from my waist — a marvelous 19th-century accessory that combines elements that would remind a modern person of a charm bracelet, multi-tool, and organizer all in one. Mine usually holds a notebook, pincushion, and scissors, but I also have attachments for it ranging from a thimble holder to a matchbox, a coin box, or a pair of tweezers.”
Just..TOO MUCH.
I would like tote bags! But I have Opinions on tote bags (the handles need to be long enough to comfortably shouldered for long errand runs), so I can’t say whether I’d actually be able to use these 🙁
Me too – I would gladly pay a premium for a tote that does not have short straps and cloth that will tear under the weight of all my books!
Just in case the Toast tote does not end up fitting these specifications, Tom Bihn’s Shop Bags (made out of an ultralight, durable fabric called Dyneema) are awesome in that regard. Padded handles, even!
http://www.tombihn.com/TOTE/TB0608.html
P.S. I vote for “Take to the sea.”
Seconding this! I want all of them (the Piontkowski for library runs! The undercover Toastie for bible study! The misandrist mermaid for LITERALLY everything!) but short handled totes are an abomination.
Agree on strap length! I also like a small pocket in there. But I love totes, so even if not, I’ll absolutely buy one.
Agree – long handles, and for me, a smaller body, so it can double as a purse.
One more humble request, please consider Canadians when deciding on a shipping provider? Our dollar has already tanked to the point that USD20 is CAD27 (this morning, anyway), so hefty shipping fees would really put this out of reach for some of us. Thank you!
And international shipping? Will that be possible? I would very much like one but I am in Brighton (UK).
Or maybe there will have to be surreptitious Toast meet ups when Americans come to the UK thus delivering precious merchandise to our thirsty shores. In exchange for reimbursement and tea and cake and such?
I love the idea of a Toastie smuggling ring.
“Anything to declare?” “MISANDRY!”
Ooh. This is even better than the mug suggestion. Curling up with misandrist mermaid by a fire with a good book #dreams
Ha! It’s morning and I read “smuggling ring” as “snuggling rug” Oops, but also, it still sounds like a nice idea to me.
GIVE US SCOOOOOONES and I will totally do it.
Well that seems fair.
CONFIRM: WILL MAKE SCONES FOR MERCHANDISE DELIVERY
Yo! I can’t guarantee the swiftness of the delivery, but I get all my stuff shipped to my mom in CA and I pick it up when I go back once or twice a year. I live in Oxford and go to Brighton/Hove frequently, so if shipping and VAT is pants here, I could be your mule! Are you in the London Toasties group?
I’m not! Is it on Facebook? If so I shall join.
Your offer is an extremely kind one – let’s see how the shipping looks but I’d def be up for that if its steep..!
Heck yes! Just search for “London Toasties” (sorry my phone is being garbage and not copying the group link properly). I’m in that group and it might be easier to discuss shipping logistics there if the time comes (there are other Brighton toasts there too!). Otherwise, email me at balcasaurus at gmail
Lately for me, as much as I adore tote bags and they appear to be breeding in my closet, I’ve found that those drawstring backpacks are a LOT more practical/useful. But I’ve been doing more errands via bike, and drawstring backpacks are easier to wear on a bike than a totebag.
I really want a misandry ship on the back of a drawstring backpack that I can wear while carting my fat self around on my cute white bike.
So did the pseudo-Victorian lady write the article longhand and mail it to Vox for a poor intern to transcribe?
Does the husband work outside the home and if so, does he use a computer or any modern technology or did he request special accodomodations because they go against his beliefs?
Do they get real medical care? Like, imagine this woman going to the dentist with a set of antique dentistry tools because she doesn’t abide by this wasteful Waterpik nonsense.
I’m sure other questions will come to me in time.
Not gonna lie, though, I would love an adult-sized tricycle of my very own.
I just want to know if they poop in a hole or not.
Don’t we all?
My conclusion: they don’t. If they were dealing with outdoor toilets and old-school plumbing, they would become *obsessed* with it. If they were chipping ice off the outhouse seat on winter mornings, it would be in that piece.
(In the words of the Dowager Duchess of Denver, “What about DRAINS?”)
Of course, the 1890s had flush toilets (because of course the Victorians would invent the flush toilet)….so they could use a normal bathroom and claim accuracy.
I don’t know if it was available in the late 1800s, but I have an outhouse instead of a bathroom and there is this marvelous foam for the seat that doesn’t get cold or iced over, even at -40.
Outhouses would be the easiest thing about that lifestyle, if they were in a low population density area.
We really need to get a lovely foam cover for our outhouse — it’s for a summer cabin, and I’m the only one who uses it in the winter, and get stuck chipping ice off the seat.
The outhouse would be relatively easy to maintain, if they were up for the daily buckets of water to keep it fresh. Also, what would they use for treatment? Would they use modern treatments like septoclean? Corn husks? Empty the hole every six months?
We do none of those things! We add ash from the stove, and it just sort of breaks itself down. In a past cabin where we didn’t have a wood stove, we added lime. Other than that, we’ve never done anything maintenance wise… maybe because it doesn’t get that hot here, so things get less gross? I’ve never even heard of the buckets of water thing!
::nod:: We used lime in the pit latrines at my old Girl Scout camp. I am not sure if they got emptied during the off-season, but I camped there for winter activities and they smelled about the same so probably not.
Ours gets pretty heavy usage (like, 6-8 adults) so it does start to smell — we use this stuff called “septoclean” once a week which helps everything break down faster. A bucket of water a day also keeps it smelling fresh (according to my mum).
Before we used septoclean, my grandfather would dig out the hole once a summer … it was a pretty unpleasant task.
Also, I really really love the the Toast that we get to have these discussions 🙂
Me too! It makes me so happy that we can flow from an annoying pseudo-victorian to the finer points of outhouse maintenance!
I want to know whether or not she votes.
Do either of them have official government ID beyond birth certificates and SSNs? I’m assuming they don’t have passports since they wouldn’t travel anywhere except by coach and ship (only with the most authentic rigging and sails).
Depending on the particular year she’s going for, possibly! Women in Washington were able to vote pre-statehood, starting in 1883, according to a friend of mine who is a) an actual historian and b) a resident of Washington. (ETA: also via this website https://www.sos.wa.gov/elections/timeline/suffrag…
Yeah this is my question too. How do these people get money for all of their old-fashioned pursuits? By selling the books that are linked at the bottom of the article?
Yeah and apparently they’re available for speaking gigs too. I hope they don’t get booked anywhere that they can’t reach by buggy.
“$250 within Jefferson County, $250 plus travel expenses (including tranquilizers for our horses) for a horse and buggy on a state ferry for outside Jefferson County”.
Someone else has found that at least the husband comes from real money, so probably mostly they live off a trust fund.
Oh, so they *are* Gilded Age enthusiasts!
They have a book you can read that answers these questions! Unfortunately the books make them less lovable goofs and ten times more obnoxious. She differentiates from the good law abiding suffregettes and the nasty ones who got arrested and got their hatpins taken away. She hates modern feminism, uses hospitals but not painkillers, talks about how she’s providing temporal ‘off brand’ diversity, as opposed to the on brand diversity people ‘are focused on’ and is generally condescending and kind of a twat.
uses hospitals but not painkillers
k but… wouldn’t painkillers be one of the easiest aspects of modern medicine to dupe with Victorian-era means? All she would have to do is ask for morphine or something, they loved their opiates back in the day. You’d think she would object more to pretty much anything else about a hospital, like women in scrubs, or even the fact that hospital staff wash their hands on a regular basis (germ theory? what the hell is that?). Imagine a receptionist asking for her medicare card and her being all, “My what? Here is the entry on my family in the Almanach de Gotha.”
You could get some real good drugs right over the counter back in the day. Laudanum, anyone? (And coca-cola with real cocaine in it I mean come on.)
oh my GOD this just keeps getting better and better.
If you are curious about this book but not inclined to read it, @ImAmandaNelson storified her own hate-read of said book here.
“Real diversity is a blonde white girl in Washington state with a nostalgia fetish and a kooky outfit.”…”elaborate fetish game”…”Well now she’s taking about how evil pants are and I have to agree with her there”
This was an excellent hate-read-storify. Many thanks!
That was AMAZING. And horrifying. Can someone create a one woman show out of this? Because I would go every night. \
Oh my goooooood that was awful! She’s… she’s really terrible. I didn’t get all that from the linked article. (Bless Amanda Nelson for hate-reading so I don’t have to.)
Yeah seriously. I started this whole thing like “uuggh weirdos but whatever” and now I’m like “FUCK YOU LADY, YOU’RE A POX ON HUMANKIND.”
That was awesome. Plus I have heart eyes for Amanda Nelson because she shares my love and mild worship of Ruth Goodman (I need to purchase Victorian and Edwardian Farm so I can rewatch them whenever I want to)
Huh, from that incident with the bus driver I guess she IS embracing the classism and (maybe?) racism, not just ignoring it.
Bless Amanda for her hate-reading and her tweets.
Faux Victorian Woman Drowning in her White and Class Privilege and Superiority Complex can sod off with her ignorance.
oh, wow. Just… wow.
I want to reshare this on social media but I know I’ll just end up dealing with a bunch of complaining from people who don’t think we should be “judging her because she is different”. It’s like… that’s not why I’m judging her.
Oh my god I think I just had a rage blackout.
These are GREAT QUESTIONS. She blogs, so I feel like the answer to your first question is that she does use a computer and the internet.
(also, did I miss this, or does she tell us where her $$$ is coming from at any point? Do they have jobs? How do the jobs fit in?)
The worst thing I read about them: for their reading, they PRINT OUT Google books to read by the light of kerosene lamps.
….
They don’t use libraries. They don’t purchase used books. They don’t search lovingly and long for books of that period to fill their shelves.
Nope. Instead, printing off books at home from Google is the way to go.
Well, that explains why they get so much hate mail/death threats.
They already upset the historians; now they’re coming for the librarians.
Well GOD, the library is frequented by such SHALLOW people who live in the FUTURE. And the library offers ebooks! And doesn’t charge money or ban POC from using it!
I…WHAT? This is…I just…WHAT?!
Wow I feel like that is kind of the exact opposite of the whole project
except that Victorians were kind of oblivious to conserving natural resources, from what i understand, so maybe it’s exactly in keeping with the theme
She does seem to embody the particular brand of middle-class complacency that so categorizes the Victorian period.
They make adult-sized tricycles for regular people (as opposed to historical re-enactment), too! I have balance issues that make riding a normal bike impossible, so I’m saving up for one. (They’re a bit more expensive than a bike, but not too bad. Unless you’re me, who needs a recumbent trike [knee problems] that can hold a larger person. In which case, they’re expensive as hell, but I’ll save enough eventually.)
The majestic Kate Davies rides a great tricycle. https://needled.files.wordpress.com/2012/05/sneak…
Also, not to be pretentious, but it really annoyed me that the dude was in his shirt sleeves in all of the photos. Put your jacket on, sir.
And WHERE are the antimacassars to protect their furniture from his pungent hair products?
And stop embracing your wife in your photo. It’s obscene.
Ernest Hemingway is the biggest sack of shit in the world that has ever fooled a critical mass of the public into thinking he had something interesting to say and I believe all his traction came from using words that were small and repetitive enough that his books could appeal to the sort of semi-literate brutish manchildren who need ‘literary’ justification for their propensity to confound their cranky incontinences with manhood.
That is all.
So it’s generally a safe bet every year that if there is a movie about how Hollywood saves lives/makes great art/actors are mensches etc. then that movie will win best picture. Hollywood LOVES Hollywood myth-making.
Hemingway was literature myth-making.
My general theory on Hemingway is that because he was in a war and shot elephants and did manly — capital M — things that he was widely fellated as a way for literary critics to vicariously claim that they too were manly and potent and not at all a bunch of nebbish bookworms.
You can see a similar dynamic in computer programmers comparing themselves to rockstars, ninjas, cowboys, artists… really anything at all that seems to have more social capital than “writing SQL queries all day”.
Hahaha fwiw I write SQL queries all day and it’s others who refer to me as a rockstar or magician or what have you. Hiring managers and HR types put those sorts of things in job descriptions. And coworkers use such analogies to flatter us into getting to their tasks quickly. I get kind of annoyed when my hard brain work is referred to as “magic” — I wish it were magic! I would have so much more time to browse the internet if I could literally wave a magic wand and my job was done.
One of the things I love to do when in the company of men who love Hemingway, is talk about how A Moveable Feast is my favorite because he was so petty and bitchy. (I choose “bitchy” for this specific audience.) Visible discomfort generally ensues.
I ‘liked’ (read: was grimly amused by the predictability) that in that shitty ‘poem’ about Dorothy Parker, Hem appears to assume that when she had an abortion, she was pregnant with a male foetus.
My brother and I had to read Big Two-Hearted River in high school and we dragged Hemingway soooo hard for this passage:
“He crawled inside under the mosquito bar with various things from the pack to put at the head of the bed under the slant of the canvas. Inside the tent the light came through the brown canvas. It smelled pleasantly of canvas.”
The canvas smelled like canvas?!?!?!? Talk about a plot twist!
Always here for Hemingway hate. He is the wooooorst. The only good thing he wrote was that 6-word short story, which is genuinely affecting. Clearly he should always have been so limited.
….I bet he would have been verrrry interesting on Twitter.
the crazy thing is that that story probably wasn’t even written by him! https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_sale:_baby_shoe…
hemingway just gets credit for anything that is vaguely minimalist because reasons
AAAA THANK YOU. Now I don’t have to have even the eench squeenchiest amount of respect for him. The hatred is complete!
Also, those Victorian people are goofy, because man there was so much nonsense / bullshit during Victorian Dayes that they are conveniently overlooking — I mean, I don’t know, but I don’t THINK they’re going to spend ten hours every weekend doing their laundry by hand, or incorrectly identifying the disease vectors for cholera and flushing all their sewage into their drinking water — but on the other hand, they’re just a couple of goofs. As long as they’re not trying to actually elect Whigs into office or something, is it such a big deal that they wear fancy clothes and ride around on old-timey bicycles?
I submit that it is not.
(I further submit that it is such not a big deal that there was no point for internet essays about them to exist in the first place, though really that’s more of a Vox problem than a temporally-displaced weirdo problem.)
I rolled my eyes for the first two paras of the Vox piece, then found myself thinking, “Well, that’s nice, dear. Run along.” LARP as lifestyle if that floats your boat, pay your tailor a decent wage, and otherwise don’t expect me to care. (The temporally-displaced-Victorian-as-trans thing was gross, though.)
Pursuant to the “wear a bustle if you want to, who cares” argument is that nothing about this lifestyle at all qualifies these folks to have opinions on anything other than just how high your pennyfarthing can be before it becomes dangerous.
“I don’t THINK they’re going to spend ten hours every weekend doing their laundry by hand”
How many housemaids do they employ, I wonder? It’s the vintage thing to do!
“Your wages will be $2 a week, plus room and board, but we will expect you to attend church regularly. Curfew is seven o’clock, and gentleman callers are completely out of the question.”
Can’t beat that, girls. It’s (mostly) safer than the factory!
“We WILL be checking your period garments monthly to make sure you haven’t been impregnated (by our footman, the Master of the House, or anyone else).”
You get one Sunday off every three months to visit your mother. Otherwise, you’re on call 24/7.
Don’t be silly, they send it down to the washerwoman.
I mean heck, in the time and place they’re into, they probably could have sent it all out to the Chinese laundry down the street for super cheap, because that’s not problematic AT ALL.
Exactly!
They know of a Home for Wayward Girls, where the washing is done cheaply, and those unfortunate young women who have been led into error are given a chance to learn the value of hard work and Christian duty.
I could forgive her a lot if she ever walked back from her assertion in the older piece that it would be “worth it” to live as a servant surrounded by “such beauty.” It’s not a GOOD thing when your understanding of historical and cultural nuances hasn’t evolved since the age of nine.
WTF.
She actually *said that*.
My immediate reaction is COAL DUST ON EVERYTHING, followed by incoherent mumblings.
By the 1880s/90s cholera was solved and sewage was basically modern, so that wouldn’t be an issue. Which begs the question, how do you decide which decade to go to??? The 1880s/90s feel quite modern, they’ve got all kinds of technology that we’d recognise (telephones, typewriters, etc) but not got a lot of others (such as many labour saving devices in the home). I would be tempted to go big, to go back to the seventeenth century, and live without plumbing, use tallow candles, and wash my clothes in ash and piss rather than 1880s/90s soap. Or to wimp out and go to the 1930s — no internet, no antibiotics, but mostly similar to today (apart from all the fascism).
Oh, yeah, I guess that Broad Street cholera outbreak was the 1850s.
Though it seems to me that the best of both worlds remains the present, since we’ve got antibiotics, sewers, and the internet, but ALSO you can wear bustles and tophats and ride pennyfarthings around if you want to. It’s like they were actually born in the ideal time!
Yes!!! You’ve solved their problem, they definitely should have been born today. I’m trying to imagine what would have happened to a couple in the 1880s/90s who said “We really feel we should have lived in the 1760s/70s, so we’re going to wear big wigs and panniered skirts and embroidered waistcoats and get rid of this new-fangled telegram and gas lighting and mains drainage”.
It seems intuitive to me that every era has had some knucklehead wishing he’d been born a hundred years earlier. Some guy wandering around renaissance Florence all, “but I just think the serf lifestyle is so much more authentic“.
Then there are the paleo people. But wasn’t our diet so much better, really, when every time the hunt or the harvest failed the weak starved to death?
if neanderthal diets were so great how come there are no fucking neanderthals around anymore!?!?!?
Well, not to be pedantic but we are all a little bit neanderthal, according to recent research (i.e., early humans and neanderthals clearly interbred). Sorry, I’m sorry. I’m such an asshole.
exactly we cannibalized the neanderthal population
and we’d do it again
It was essentially a widespread human diet.
I’m not gonna say everyone should eat that way, or that some people aren’t faddish about it, but there is a lot of evidence for it being quite similar to the diet of most humans for hundreds of thousands of years. And the evidence is that (except for relatively high infant mortality), by and large life was NOT nasty, brutish, and short back then (most of the timespan of human existence). Things really started to suck for most people, for thousands of years, after civilization started, grew, and virtually destroyed all other cultures and ways of life.
I’ve got lots of thoughts and feelings about this, I apologize if I’m taking it too far for this venue. I’m just really sick of caveman stereotypes, when we have the resources and need to know better now.
That was really more of a civilization thing.
That was basically the point of the (dumb) movie Midnight in Paris.
However, I got to say I am down with embroidered waistcoats.
There’s nothing holding you back!
And find lead-based cosmetics/cosmetics made with essence of deer hooves to wear! (got to love Jonathan Swift’s poetry).
I want to upvote this a trillion times.
Yeah, my attitude toward those people is sort of an indulgent “Well, we all need hobbies, dear.”
And privately thinking that if they are practicing Victorian-Era birth control (Mostly douching and withdrawal, as I understand it, given the Comstock laws…), they’re soon going to have too many kids to have the energy to keep playing with oil lamps and iceboxes.
She’s cagey about anything medical (say, I bet her wallpaper isn’t arsenical green), so it seems likely that they’re making a lot of undocumented exceptions. I also hope that her feller isn’t following the example of ur-Victorian Isabella Beeton’s husband, who gave his wife the syphilis he contracted pre-marriage and thereby led to a string of miscarriages. Continual advances in medical care are SUCH a good argument for not living la vida antigua.
I personally will welcome the second coming of William Ewart Gladstone.
Vox itself is a Vox problem.
They’re harmless enough til they start having unvaccinated mini-Victorians. Then I want them Shut Down.
I don’t realllllly need any tote bags but I do need new additions to my wall of misadrist art so I’ll for sure throw money money at whichever are printed and turn them into wall art. UNLESS you happen to make prints available too…
Yes! I don’t need a bag or a mug, but I really like all these designs and would be SO into small prints or postcards of them…or buttons…or just something petite and affordable.
I like the Take to the Sea and the Misandrist Mermaid. I will need two of each (one of each for me and my daughter)
Def going to buy a tote bag! Probably one of the “office friendly” options even though I love love love that mertoastie.
I read that Victorian article holding my breath, waiting for the other shoe to drop– the other shoe being some high-horse justification for her lifestyle, a la it’s better for the environment, I’ve lost a lot of weight living this way, my gut bacteria are much happier now that I subsist on mutton and tea. I was relieved that the only justification she really gave was “I want to do this.”
I agree. I was waiting for “Life is so much more rich without all these Distractions of the Modern Age,” but she didn’t say that, and I was glad.
EDIT although that earlier quote where she claims to be some sort of trans… time… person– that made me uncomfortable.
Well, there was a little bit of “Distractions of the Modern age” with the stuff about how “life these days is just a bunch of shiny boxes with buttons, none of you will ever know the joy of trimming the wick on your kerosene lamp” which – Teddy Kent’s disfigured mother would like a word with you about that.
I did take serious offense to the implication that people these days don’t know how a lamp works. I think even the least technologically inclined among us could make an LED illuminate with a wire and battery. And as for the more complicated stuff, it’s not like your average Victorian could reverse-engineer a gearbox or a revolver, so why should modern laypeople be able to build a cell phone from scratch?
Well, this guy did try to build a toaster from scratch.
:hearts: Aileen Kent reference!
And yeah, I thought there was a lot of implied smugness about her/their appreciation of simpler things.
oof did not notice that quote earlier–despite it not being as bad as I expected, I didn’t want to read a second article–that’s not a good thing to compare your fairly minor and self-inflicted “plight” to…
I 100% agree – I mean, they are clearly very odd, but they seem to be happy and aren’t hurting anyone? It’s not like they’re trying to persuade everyone to join them in their historical reenactment. They don’t talk about social or political stuff – they just seem to be really really into the aesthetic and day-to-day lifestyle. Which is still bananas (washing machines! The internet! Underwire bras! Not writing by hand!), but harmlessly bananas, and certainly not worth even jokey death threats on Twitter.
But I am also 100% willing to be corrected, as I am English and there may well be some American Context that I’m emotionally missing; English people generally seem to look back on the Victorians as ‘grimy, repressed, utterly harmless’, (which is actually kind of ridiculous considering the colonial bullshit we were up to), and, also, while I have skimmed their blog, I haven’t read their book.
Not sure the American context differs from the English, except that I more often hear about the 50s/60s in this “born in the wrong era” talk rather than Victorian times. Maybe because America was doing/recovering from the Civil War during that period?
The more I’m reading about her (I had not heard about this couple until Mallory tweeted yesterday but apparently they’re pretty internet famous so I was under a rock) the less harmless she seems– well, still “harmless” maybe, but very guilty of appropriating the language and ideas of truly oppressed peoples to whine about how people don’t support her obsession.
I just read through this and ugggghhh https://storify.com/ImAmandaNelson/in-which-i-hat…
Yeaaah that was where I realized the “appropriating the language of the oppressed” thing was a BIG problem.
Just read through this one, too: https://storify.com/Knitting_Kninja/ranting-about… and she makes the point I was trying to express about the Civil War, but much more eloquently and better informed.
…yeah, the language in the earlier piece was Seriously Not Good on that front, I agree.
ETA after rereading: She has clearly changed style since then, because the new piece also does not sound so awkwardly pseudo-Victorian on a sentence-to-sentence basis.
(“…my husband knew that the most delightful gift, the dearest treasure when an occasion of merit approached, was an artifact from that past we both adored: a book with its pages yellow but its tale still bright and merry…”)
Man, can you imagine being their kid? They are going to end up with the broiest of bros and it is going to be very confusing for all parties.
I want all 3 toast totes!! They are lovely & I can’t wait to spot a toastie in the wild with one.
Agreed. Will definitely buy each and every one, and cuddle them close.
Where does the Victorian woman keep her computer to maintain her website?
In her bustle.
This piece hits the nail on the head for me w/r/t that damn Victorian couple: https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/2…
One of the uses of eccentrics is that they are not harming you personally but you can still disapprove of them.
Yeah….
Every time I read a WaPo piece these days that I thoroughly love, agree with, laugh out loud during or think, “what a wonderful and yet measured way to deconstruct this problem!” I scroll down and it’s Alexandra Petri. Love her writing.
edit: THIS SENTENCE THO. “I suspect if we dragged a Victorian inventor with us and he saw that someone was painstakingly blending whipped cream by hand to be more authentic and Victorian, he would tear his top hat into pieces and scream “DON’T YOU UNDERSTAND? WE ONLY DID IT LIKE THAT BECAUSE WE HAD TO! FOR THE LOVE OF PETE, GO TO CRATE & BARREL.”
It’s like this “my grandmother made food lovingly by hand, from fresh ingredients, because she cared about her children and used food to show her love.” Well, no, it’s mostly that there was very little prepared food available, nor did she have labor-saving devices like food processors and microwaves. I’m sure that if we all asked our grandmothers and great-grandmothers if they’d like to skip a few hours of that food prep, they’d be very excited about it. And were, as we can see from the advertising of the time.
Love the Misandrist Mermaid and Take to the Sea. But would definitely like the Toast logo on there somewhere!
Can the Take to the Sea bag also have the Toast logo on it please? I want it, but I also want to make sure I am loudly proclaiming my love of The Toast with it.
If you think for a moment I’m not taking to the sea and holding a tote bag to prove it, then you know me not at all. Which is totally fair since I’ve only posted here about five times, but NOW you know so make a note of it.
Real Question: Does Carrie/Carrie’s puppy have an instagram/twitter/myspace etc? Because I WOULD FOLLOW UNTO THE END OF DAYS.
Carrie Pup is getting so big! *sniff, sniff* They grow up so fast. 🙁 I’m also glad to see that it appears Carrie Pup’s celebrity hasn’t ruined her. Childhood fame can be disastrous.
I love the misandrist one. I’d buy one of those.
One Take to the Sea for meeeeeeee, several for presents for my sea-faring friends and family! Lovely job, Bergy!
I did a lot of eyerolling and incoherent ranting at the pseudo-Victorians, but this piece covers a lot of the, uh, concerns I had while reading: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2015/0…
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.
OMG, yes. The essay’s takedown of the way these two jokers (who apparently think they invented looking at primary texts?) view historians is a thing of beauty.
I have so many questions about that Victorian couple, but I’m too busy laughing hysterically to type them.
Hysteria! See, you’re more like a proper Victorian lady already.
I’ll just be over here on my fainting couch.
We all know what the cure for hysteria is. *buzzzzz*
Involuntary hysterectomy? Is that buzzing coming from flies in the recovery and/or quietly exsanguinating ward?
I am just realizing if we buy these totes, we could spot each other in the wild. My brain must be very slow this morning, but it’s also very excited. Could we agree on a secret handshake or signal?
“Are you a friend of Carrie’s puppy?”
This just made my entire week.
I motion that we toast each other.
I hope this involves shouting something like, “To Updog!”
You may know me by my secret signal, which is unsustained non-creepy eye contact, a small smile or head nod, and a continuing on of my way without interrupting your reading/exercising/existing.
*clink*
re.Victorian lady: “I quickly drank all of the bottle of water she had given me then I burst into tears, overwhelmed at the abrupt change from hostility to gentleness.
Gabriel put a gentle hand on my back. “We’ve had a rough day,” he explained to the woman.
“It’s—just—so—nice to be treated kindly,” I told her, fighting hard to stop my tears.”
i want this woman for my president she is spinning around this story so fast she could power a small city
I love Take to the Sea and the Big Hair No Heart one. The idea of grocery shopping with them is delightful.
Team Warrior Stomps on the Mens forever! I enjoy a misandrist mermaid and all, but already have the t-shirt version that’s been going around. And I’m a bit more interested in spear-fighting than mermaid-ing, is just me. Of course, Sea-Taking is also quite elegant and may be my second purchase.
Speaking of puppies, Toast friends, mine has gotten spooked by lightning and gone hiding, which she does periodically but it is really freaking me out so good thoughts for my baby girl to bring her butt home please.
I regret NOTHING about the amount of time & tweeting I spent on the Victorians yesterday (and inevitably will today). My conclusion was pretty much:
1. cmon victorian lady, don’t be such a dick about it, and don’t sound so shocked at your harassment like you’ve never heard anyone talking shit about people who have no choice but to look “different”
2. well of course she’s being a dick, it’s hate-read clickbait
3. ugh Vox, probably editing this to maximize hate-read clickbait, at the word count expense of THE ANSWERS TO MY 50 QUAZILLION QUESTIONS ABOUT HOW THEY LIVE
4. damn it there is sooooo much more story here, I want interviews with her and her friends and neighbors and I want non-Instagrammy photos of their house and I want to know why she feels so persecuted tell me mooooore
5. omg now my twitter is full of people sharing facts about the victorian era, I <3 the internet (but maybe not Vox)
I want to know how they do laundry! By hand, with carbolic soap, in a huge washbasin? Or are washing machines (like computers) one of the modern conveniences they deign to use?
I want to know about the cooking! And she briefly mentioned that they like to read old books, I would love to know how they get them. Also, their budget, I’m way curious about how their spending compares to most Americans’. Like, does buying a couple Victorian outfits = buying a lot of cheap fashion? How do they get their cooking/heating/lighting fuel and what does that look like next to my electric/gas bill?
SO MANY QUESTIONS
Does she make their clothes? His “hand-knit” swim trunks, did she knit them? (Wouldn’t those be itchy??)
I suspect they fill their antique kerosene heaters with kerosene they bought at the gas station, and the idea of that juxtaposition is hilariously entertaining to me.
According to this (http://www.thisvictorianlife.com/frequently-asked-questions.html), they get their old books/magazines/newspapers from…
…
…
…
Google Books.
Oh, 2015.
Yes to the cooking! I read Consider The Fork a couple months ago and was reminded of how much WORK cooking has been historically. Is she whipping her eggs in one direction by hand for three hours and in the other direction for another three?
Recipes from that era are equal parts amazing and horrifying (I do not ever again want to read about how to properly clean half a calf’s head in preparation for making soup, not ever again). Even cook books from just 50 years ago show a massive shift in how we cook.
Someone has already said this I’m sure but how on earth are they making enough money to just chill and be Victorian- off of book sales?
I’m living in this time period and sometimes I can make rent and groceries and when that happens I congratulate myself.
yeah, I remember we had a similar rant going in the link roundup where there was a guy living happily off $11k/year in a communal housing thing or something. You just can’t boast about your happy, simple life and encourage others to join you without talking about your budget….beyond the scope of an internet essay, sure, but so. many.questions.
Do they have day jobs? Do they dress like that when they’re at said jobs? “Never had a drivers’ license” wait– did you start living like this as a teenager or something?
“..push another button and heat happens…It’s impossible to watch fuel disappearing when it’s burned in a power plant hundreds of miles away, and convenient to forget there’s a connection.” Yes because no one in modern times has ever been able to forget there’s a connection when they can’t afford to pay their heating bill.
Also, and just a guess here, the heating concerns of Washington State are somewhat less than those of, say, the Canadian Prairies or the American Midwest, where the second people had the option of not freezing to death with inefficient heating technologies they took it.
Also if this is an environmental concern: it is way easier to control emissions and increase efficiency at a centralized power plant than individual sources all over. Also burning a bunch of kerosene in your home all the time sounds deeply unpleasant.
It’s all fun and games until you’re living in an authentic Victorian pea-souper.
And it isn’t as if the Victorians whose lives she’s trying to imitate were really intimately involved with the details of how their households were run. Coal and kerosene simply appeared, and if they didn’t, whichever member of staff was responsible for procuring them would have a very bad day indeed.
Pooping. I need to know about the pooping. Do they buy toilet paper? or use an old Sears & Roebuck?
I like all three designs, but I really shouldn’t buy any more Tote Bags. (And also, the shipping to Europe would be too expensive for “just” a bag.) Any chance you’ll be putting the designs on t-shirts? If so, I’d definitely buy the third design and quite possibly the first as well.
Also, will there ever be Ronbledore designs again??
Are any of you following the “fake penis sex assault trial”? http://www.chesterchronicle.co.uk/news/chester-ch… – I’m not okay with the fact that they published the full name of and even the street where the defendant lives!, but am still so intrigued that I can’t stop reading the news on this trial. I wonder what really happened, and feel so sorry for both of these women since it seems that something went really wrong in their youth.
I would absolutely buy the “take to the sea” bag, especially since I know it’s designed by Bergy!
I will buy totes (quite possibly all three) but if you wanted to get more of my money I would also buy coffee mugs and maybe an art print of one or two of them. I know these ideas would greatly increase complexity of shipping so I understand why it might not be possible.
I love the Misandrist Mermaid and the Take to the Sea ones, and I echo the requests to have them available on t-shirts (or throw pillows, or phone covers, or basically anything).
Throw pillows! I didn’t know it but I need them! (ok, I legit might buy them and turn them into pillows)
Brilliant.
Phone covers! Brilliant!
Now I NEED a phone cover w a misandrist mermaid, and I can’t even look at my boring-ass blue phone cover anymore.
Will definitely be buying at least one Take to the Sea (love that IceBergMama!) for myself, possibly also a Misandrist Mermaid for myself, and a very good chance I’ll buy some others for prezzies.
ETA: I missed out on hoodies, so if it’s ever possible to bring hoodies back, I WILL GIVE YOU ALL MY MONEY.
Here is an excellent Storify taking down the “Victorians.”
Will be ordering Take To The Sea (x2) and Misandry Mermaid (x1).
That takedown is everything. “Back to what I said earlier, though, I mostly own rich people buttons, and nice buttons aren’t better than the right to vote.”
This is the best comment ever.
ALSO I like the mermaid, I like that most people would never read the tattoo but Toasties in the wild would know!
Also also I have no problem with Victorian Woman picking and choosing tech, like, I would want to blog about living like that if I were her. But the rant about modern magic boxes with no discussion of HOW she chose what [not] to use just makes her sound silly and hypocritical. And I would loooove to read her* rules/process for deciding what current tech she can use and when. that might be my favorite part of any living experiment essay/book.
*the version of her in my imagination who is thoughtful and geeky and not comparing herself to trans folks!
I mean, Amish and other plain-living people have to choose all the time what kinds of tech their community will use, so that’s totally a thing already. One which Victorianish Woman chooses not to acknowledge, apparently. Maybe it’s not pretty enough? Anyone who likes corsets and buttons and ruffles that much probably doesn’t have much use for the Ordnung.
Both OT and gross, but I’ve been composing modern haiku and needed a semi-anonymous home for it:
Smartphones are the best thing to happen to diarrhea
Diarrhea is the worst thing to happen to periods (until the next thing)
Periods are the worst
In other news, I look forward to being able to announce when I find a doc that will maybe actually listen to my suggestion that switching IUDs is the way to go. Has anyone else switched between them before?
Anecdata: I have a friend who switched from Mirena to a copper IUD and was very happy with her choice. I have only been on Mirena, have no useful data for you.
That’s interesting, why did she switch? I’m looking to go the other way. I got the paraguard in 2011 to be done with hormones, but those had been fairly high pill-level and quite frankly, the new and horrifying side effects my body keeps inventing to go with my period are so much worse.
Ugh, I kinda just wish I could go from 95% I never want to gestate to 110%, so I could convince myself to skip to the permanent stuff.
I would get the take to the sea one to match with my take to the sea tshirt. Also please please have international shipping..
I’m torn between Take to the Sea and Big Hair No Heart. It will depend on my mood at moment of purchase.
TOTES! ALL OF THEM!
but especially take to the sea
I want a Take to the Sea Poster. I want to hang it right behind my desk so that when undergrads get snarky or colleagues get too chatty – I can just point to the poster..
I adore them all and will purchase many and would also really like a mug and a tank top.
ALERT ALERT JESSICA JONES ANNOUNCEMENT!!!!!! NOVEMBER 20!!!!
(also I very much want a take to the sea tote please and thank you, i shall use it while wearing my Ronbledore shirt)
SO… I just realized that every time I saw the name Jessica Jones in the Marvel press releases I have been replacing it in my head with Misty Knight and now I’m not as interested.
Ooooh, yeah, I can see how that could be a major bummer because Misty is the SHIT. But the good news is they cast her for the Luke Cage series and we should most definitely be getting a LOT of her once they get around to Iron Fist! And Jessica is pretty fucking awesome herself, so…
Today I doff my hat to the women who helped excavate the new hominid specimens at the Rising Star Cave, after the guys who spotted the bones in a deep chamber realized they needed wee BAMFs to actually get into the space. I would never in a bersquillion years answer an ad like the one they posted–“the person must be skinny and preferably small. They must not be claustrophobic, they must be fit, they should have some caving experience. Climbing experience would be a bonus” NOPETOPUS AWAAAAAY–but I salute the 60 who did and the six who actually got the job done. (Tim Hunt should be careful in viewing this picture, lest their sexiness distract him.)
Be fair, that’s distracting. I want to buy all of those women a drink and hear EVERYTHING they have to say.
The Venn diagram of “sexy” and “awesome” is not a circle, is the thing that people like Hunt miss. I hope their team all gets drinks bought–but for what they’ve done, not because of how fetching they look in their caving bunny suits.
This. Is. So. Cool.
I KNOW!!
That article was absolutely fascinating but I would like to know so, so much more about each of those badasses and their TEAMWORK getting those fossils out. Not to criticize the article itself per se, but would have liked to learn 1000% more about them. I hope they collectively write a book or something.
If folks want to learn more about their experiences, Jon Mead did some great interviews with members of the team!
Trowelblazers (an organization for recognizing and promoting women in archaeology and anthropology, both historical and current) also interviewed the team members!
This is so awesome!
I have climbing experience and would love to help with cool archaeology but alas I am The Most Claustrophobic.
I’m definitely buying all three; possibly multiple of each. I don’t care if I have to skimp on the comics budget to do it.
I like all three!!! I think Big Hair Spear Lady is my favorite!!
Drunk Confessions is open in a tab now. I do love F. Scott Fitzgerald and I read a bio about him. It talked about how he basically “discovered” Hemingway and they were friends for a long time (like so close that when Zelda was mean to F. Scott about his penis size, he showed Hemingway his penis and Hemingway was like “nah, you’re good”). However, when F. Scott was in the later part of his life, Hemingway totally jumped on the “F. Scott is washed up and awful” bandwagon. Rude.
to be fair to Hemingway (as though there is some compelling reason to do that), F. Scott sounds like he was pretty annoying.
Mmmhhmm that is also accurate!
Will purchase multiple Take to the Sea totes. Hooray!
I love all three totes! I kind of wish the “take to the sea” one was in color, though. Also seconding the ideas to sell the illustrations as prints and on mugs.
Also, will the motto “A willing foe, and sea room” be on any of them? As far as design goes, I’d love for the totes to have the illustration on one side and The Toast’s logo and motto on the other side.
Thirding the request for the illustrations on mugs-I would buy all three.
I am interested in Take To The Sea. Perhaps, maybe, instead of the toast logo on it the name of the ship could be The Toast and it could be on there in small letters?
Does anyone remember the book Running Out of Time, by Margaret Peterson Haddix?? That pretty well cured me of my desire to live “in the past”, and I think I’m stronger for it.
See, I read that book around the same time that I discovered Colonial Williamsburg was a thing, so my reaction was more like ‘you can pretend you live back in history times and people come see you, like you’re an actress,’ so I really think I grossly misunderstood the message of that book.
well, to be fair, the main problem in the book was the whole “lying to your children their entire lives about it being the 1840s” thing, as well as letting a closed population be infected with diphtheria for the sake of an experiment when we already have a perfectly good cure that you refuse to give them for the sake of ‘authenticity’
So I definitely better understood the value of just pretending it’s the past, bc I don’t think the actors in Colonial Williamsburg or Plimoth Plantation really have these same concerns.
omg me too, 100%, i ADORED that book and fully missed the message
i do think about how they weren’t permitted to say “ok” (“oll korrect”) reg-u-lar-ly
YES.
Yeees, I love history but I also love not dying of diphtheria. (Also, never trust crazy rich people.)
All of the tote bags are lovely, but I am more on the conservative side when it comes to flashing my credentials, and would buy the Take to the Sea tote bag. Of course, I would also love mugs of all three! Put me down for everything on mugs. Mugs mugs mugs.
Also, just a brief #FreddieGray update:
-The hearings have begun for a number of motions that the defense and the prosecution filed; to date there were motions to remove SA Mosby from the prosecution (filed by the defense), and to try the six cops as two separate trials (filed by the prosecution). Both were heard and denied on September 2. Today there is a hearing for the defense’s motion to hold the six trials for each of the cops outside of Baltimore City.
-On both September 2nd and today there have been protests calling for justice for Freddie Gray; on the 2nd, Bmore activist Kwame Rose was hit by a car and then arrested by BPD. Last night BPD also arrested Rev. West for “attempting to incite a riot” which, quite frankly to this Toastie, is BS.
-Apparently another protester this morning was arrested for.. holding a sign? I’m trying to follow Twitter now to find out.
The push for justice for Freddie Gray and other Bmore victims of police brutality (I saw some chatter that the Tyrone West case might be reviewed by the Feds?!?) marches on, my friends.
Any chance these will be available before the end of the month? I’m seeing a friend in London on Oct 1, and I’d love to bring her one.
Thanks ever so for linking the OCD article. I wasn’t diagnosed until I was in my 30s and every time I read a “this is what OCD REALLY looks like” article I feel slightly less crazy and alone, because man oh man is this form of anxiety just embraced in the most flippant way (aren’t they all though? sigh). This one I read and my heart just kept leaping, yes! Yes! There it is! My broken brain in another persons head!
Yes, yes, yes! I lived with undiagnosed OCD for a long time as well. I knew I had anxiety and had struggled with depression in the past, but none of my symptoms matched the stereotypical portrayals of OCD you see in fiction, so I never even considered it. When I was finally diagnosed a couple of years ago, it ironically took a huge source of anxiety AWAY, because at last I had some answers and some clues for how to deal with my constant intrusive thoughts and behaviors. I’m lucky that my own OCD is fairly mild and mostly controlled with medication and therapy, but the article perfectly describes the way you feel like you’re fighting against your own mind. You KNOW you’re being irrational but that doesn’t make any of the thoughts or compulsions go away.
I’m delurking to say I fucking love tote bags and I would buy the shit out of the misandry mermaid version!
A+ delurking comment!
Hannah Hart said at one point that she feels like being able to make food from scratch is a kind of privilege, and I feel like that couple have sort of taken that idea to its extreme.
Also, count me in for the mermaid and ship bags. I’m really loving the mermaid’s squid tattoo.
I will send my child to kindergarten with the lady conqueror bag.
i sincerely hope you are not jesting
Of the three of them, Take to the Sea is the one I’d be most likely to get, but like other commenters, I’d prefer A Willing Foe and Sea Room and/or the Toast logo! (I’m not hip enough for the other two designs)
That first illustration is bomb as hell, I want it on everything, but I’m Nth-ing that I’d prefer non-tote options. My stupid washer ruined my dirtbag Hamlet shirt, so I would be in the market for Toast shirts/hoodies or mugs.
I like all three, but have lots of totes. Long handles would be great, and I’d order them for sure if the international shipping isn’t crazy. And mugs! Also pens. I am always needing pens. And art prints would be great too. I also would really like ‘Take to the Sea’ in colour..
In summary I am happy to have anything with The Toast written on it. TAKE MY MONEY.
A friend on facebook linked to this series of tweets on the “neo-Victorians” by someone who is actually studying the Victorian era: https://storify.com/Knitting_Kninja/ranting-about… To wit, they are not even really living as Victorians (because they’re America, and the nineteenth century was not “Victorian” in the States) and furthermore, they are living as the “Victorian” 1% rather than the sharecropping/tenement sweatshop/seven-day work week life most people were living. I admire her restraint: personally, I would have started flinging the Jacob Riis photos a lot sooner.
DEFINITELY a Take to the Sea one, and one for all my friends, and probablyyy the mermaid one too, especially if it’s a good size to replace my swim bag. The first one is beautiful too, I have a friend in mine for that one too so basically….all of them. Give me all of them.
I knew there was an Onion article that perfectly characterizes these Victorian people: http://www.theonion.com/article/grueling-househol…
A rueful thumbs up to that article, because I am one of those crafty people. Nobody is making me knit the sweater, I swear! I’m doing it because I want to! I respect the hell out of the production knitters of the Shetland Islands, etc. who were cranking out a Fair Isle sweater in a week for grocery money!
Oh I enjoy being crafty myself although I’m a crocheter not a knitter (and the only things I can make are blankets and scarves because I refuse to learn anything more complicated). But the fact that I enjoy making stuff doesn’t mean I feel like I was born in the wrong century. I will happily keep my modern conveniences!
——————————————–
“It’s so fun to make quilts and do different crafts,” said Brinkworth, removing a hand-sewn quilt from the washing machine and tossing it into the dryer.
Ok, Onion, now your satire goes too far.
I will be buying AT LEAST the Take to the Sea. So excited!
I want that mermaid misandrist image as a shirt.
I feel that a ‘take to the sea’ on one side, ‘misandry mermaid’ on the other side would win for me. OTOH I am in Canada and don’t want to pay duties on the 4 million dollars in shipping costs, so probably ignore this.
I second calls for mugs; I will buy ALL the mugs.
I prefer to live in a pre-internet time, where I couldn’t feel judged by complete strangers from a small town on a distant coast.
Take to the Sea!!!! Misandrist Mermaid!!!!!! AAAAHHHHH the talent of these delightful ladies knows no bounds…Anyhoo, those two were my favorites! So very on brand and appropriate for different occasions!!! 😀 (tiny bit excited about tote bags over here, don’t mind me…)
I am not OCD but that is exactly how I get over any fear I need to squash, glad to see it isn’t just me! I can remember as a tiny girl being afraid of monsters under the bed and thinking “the worst they can do is kill me, and then they can’t hurt me anymore” and in high school it was “the worst that can happen is I flunk all my exams and then I’ll go work in a cafe”. So much better to face the fear than to deal with amorphous dread.
I’ve got a theory that I’m working on about fears, and how many of our attitudes towards fears actually makes them worse — like, if you’re anxious about having left the door unlocked, and so you get up in the middle of the night to check on it, it alleviates the anxiety but does it in a way that encourages both the anxiety and the getting up at night. Getting up to check on the door becomes a kind of talismanic behavior that’s reinforced through repeated action; am trying to see if I can deal with anxieties in this other way, the kind that you describe, through creating a kind of imaginary framework with which to deal with them.
Albert Ellis started this form of therapy called Rational Emotive Behavioral Therapy (it’s kind of like CBT) and the process is basically exactly what you described! It’s the only thing that worked for me re: panic attacks. “Well, if I puke and pass out in front of these strangers I’ll be really embarrassed and then go home or maybe to the hospital. THE END SO WHAT.” It’s hard to convince yourself of those things sometimes but when you do it’s super effective.
I LOVE the first two and would buy either (leaning towards the mermaid but I’m indecisive)!
I will buy the heck out of a tote bag with the misandrist mermaid on it.
“Some people feel they were born in the wrong place, or in a body of the wrong gender. I have simply always felt that I was born in the wrong time, and there is no passport nor surgical procedure to help one of my particular condition.”
This couple’s going to start a creepy town a la M. Night Shyamalan’s The Village, aren’t they.
I dunno, there are so many things to hate about those Victorian people, so I’m going to go a different direction and say that this:
Some people feel they were born in the wrong place, or in a body of the wrong gender. I have simply always felt that I was born in the wrong time, and there is no passport nor surgical procedure to help one of my particular condition.
is some fucking gross ass shit.
THE GROSSEST
:hurling:
It’s so sad that she lacks the resources available to trans people! It’s a cruel, cruel reality of our world.
Whoop there goes another rage blackout! My trans friends who are struggling to get adequate health care in the US while dealing with the serious psychological issues surrounding gender dysphoria will no doubt love this comparison.
But they can just, like, get surgery to solve all of their problems! Unlike women who deeply and profoundly adore the steampunk aesthetic, for whose temporal displacement there is no such easy fix as tens of thousands of dollars of surgery and hormone treatment. It must be tragic to be so alone and without recourse.
Oh totes! You can tell it’s a reasonable suggestion that everyone should take by the use of the word “just!” Such a bummer that all my friends and I are so stupid and devoid of this lady’s vast wisdom!
I swear, just reading the word “just” gets me like, halfway towards a rage blackout.
TBF to her, “just” was my own addition to her offhanded reference to surgical solutions to dysphoria.
So many great critiques already of these “victorians” here. I would just add that the writer seems to think that she is supremely unique in this endeavor but there was a whole reality television program about this called 1900 House in the late 90s (though there is was more a temporary social experiment than lifestyle choice). That show did a much better job of showing the class and gender issues as well as how dirty the Victorian era was.
Yes! I got to watch that in school! And I was the only one interested, so my teacher let me borrow the VHS tape to finish watching on my own time, aha.
The best thing about this whole “Victorians” kerfuffle is so many people mentioning 1900 House, which I had never heard of and am now devouring on youtube! Thanks, Victorian lady!
Frontier house was also pretty good with multiple families( some of whom were awful)!
The 1900 House was the first thing that popped into my head after I read that Vox article. Now I’m going to have to rewatch it on Youtube.
1: I find I go through lots of tote bags, so would buy both the first design, and a take to the sea.
2: Normally I’m pretty live and let live about re-enactors (and I’m convinced that this victorian couple is mostly a sex thing that has gotten completely out of hand) but since this internet writer (ahem) has, on multiple occasions, distained my entire profession, I’m just going to leave Rebecca Onion’s delightful takedown here: http://www.slate.com/articles/life/history/2015/0…
Hoo boy, I have lots of thoughts about the links today!
That Victorian one-ugh. I felt weird about it, but was having trouble articulating why, so big thanks to all the commenters here for parsing it out and sharing excellent links. I now feel secure in telling that lady to sod off.
….Although that antique chatelaine thing sounds awesome, and I want one.
Toast totes! I will buy any and all of them, yes thank you, but especially Misandry Mermaid.
That OCD piece was really interesting. It reminded me that I should go reread some of Allie Brosh’s stuff because, really, I should always be reading that. Also that bit at the end “The last thing someone ridden with self-doubt and anxiety needs is more doubt” is so beautiful and true and wonderful. I don’t have OCD but I do have depression and anxiety hardcore, and it’s a really good way of putting it that I am definitely stealing.
MUGS YES. Also I’ll buy whatever design the tote bag eventually gets made in, and we all know it.
http://electricliterature.com/speak-up-a-graphic-…
Speak Up!: A Graphic Account of Roxane Gay and Erica Jong’s Uncomfortable Conversation by a friend of the woman who asked the question that started it all.
Edit: Why does HTML only work sometimes :
I have a lot of trouble using HTML when I’m posting from my iPad. Don’t know why.
OH BOY I am super interested in this. Thank you.
I LOVE the first warrior woman illustration. I would carry that tote 24/7/365, literally rub it in my enemies’ faces, etc
I think the big hair no heart lady is my most likely tote purchase (I really want that) but I love all three!
I need a new tote/bag to send with my toddler to daycare. DONE AND DONE. So much of my life is all about inside jokes that are only funny to myself. I can always add another 🙂
I’m all about the Take to the Sea bag, however I would love the misandrist mermaid on something else… a sticker? Mug? Notebook? Should that awesome day ever come to pass. Kudos to both ladies- the art is fabulous!
I’m in love with Spear Lady.
Also, let’s be serious, the mermaid’s tattoo should really be Nopetopus.
How did you know my favorite tote bag was developing holes in it? I would like a Misandry Mermaid and a Take to the Sea tote.
I will 100% buy the first tote (Big Hair No Heart), and, who am I kidding, 85-90% will buy one or both of the others as well.
Also add my voice to those who expressed a hope for long straps—it helps those of us who are fat, with fat arms.
I _need_ a mermaid with a misandrist tattoo.
I might get that misandrist tattoo. Would the artist be ok with that?
ALSO. Long handles are super important for those of us who need to wear winter gear. And put them on T-shirts, stickers, buttons, greeting cards… I WILL BUY THEM ALL. But mostly the buttons.
Can anyone see this? It’s my logo riff on “Big Hair No Heart”
I see it! I like it!
Yay!
Sent from my iPad
can you make me one? Seriously.
Yeah! Let’s talk: my email address: laurie (dot) merlo (at) gmail (dot-com). So happy you like it!
Sent from my iPad
I would buy the first two for sure, possibly multiple copies. I’m also voting for coffee mugs and clothing options!
Big Hair No Heart!
I would buy all three. And coffee mugs, yes indeed.
Ernest Hemingway was the worst.
Misandrist mermaid for the win!!
I’m going to need one of each. They’re all completely glorious. And I never have a tote bag when I need one.
I will definitely buy the mermaid and the ship, and also probably the other one. What can I say, I love totes.
Same.
I love them all, but I’ll probably just buy the Take to the sea one because I have more totes than I need right now.
Totes! I am in the market for a new tote bag, and I love them all, but especially Big Hair No Heart.
Mermaid bag and/or Take to the Sea bag!
Definitely one for the woman with the spear (Boudica?) and the mermaid.
I like Misandrist and Take to the Sea. Kinda equally?
Take to the sea!
ah, but the Big Hair No Heart lady is growing on me. Hmm. Tough one, guys. I’m glad it is not my decision.
I’ll be buying at least a Take to the Sea and also possible the mermaid misandrist!
want bergy’s and potentially misandrist one. also, I miss reading icebergmama’s updates and stories. Bergy, I hope things are ok for you.
can you make me one? Seriously.
These tote designs are the bees knees. I am not a big tote-r but would tote the heck outta these. Will absolutely buy one, only trouble will be choosing (though I am on a mermaid kick this year). Also, IF THESE WERE LATER MADE INTO T SHIRTS, you would have at least 1 very interested customer. (Me. It’s me.)
I will order at least one misandrist mermaid toast tote, because that is all four of my favorite things. Would also make a great tat;)
I will definitely buy at least one ‘take to the sea’ tote, and probably a misandrist mermaid also!