An even-handed, creative and concise way to look at the freedom we all hold so dear and take for granted. Yes, enforcing boundaries and the recognition of evil are two 21st century survival skills sorely needed to navigate this changing world we live in. I appreciate your candor and the time it took to put this together. Keep up the good work.
Great parsing of the current social matrix. I was never a fan of the Victorian (though enticed by the floral garnishes of Ian McShane’s Al Swerengen in Deadwood) but now I have to give it some respect. Perhaps I’ll don a black ensemble for my next Youtube video to keep the critics from mouthing off.
My takeaway is, No, I'm not co-signing on the return to Victorian attire. My titties are too big to be uncomfortable in those tight ass corsets and I'm not wearing those uncomfortable ass shoes with these size 10s. Nope.
Lmao I still have my Docs but it’s gotta be a stompy boot occasion to break em out. And heels… it better be a 5 star restaurant to get me to squeeze my toes in there
I used to have a serious boots addiction back in my 20s. Hoe boots, thigh high boots, zip up books, 70s boots. I had an entire closet of custom 10s. Those were in the days that I pray nobody writes a book about it, lol.
I'm currently reading through Pop Culture Heretic, which I've had in e-book for months, piecing together how you extract meaning from fiction. (Learning how people think is an interest of mine.) I read half of it last night, piecing values and sense-making from essays. This clarifies things really well -- as do some of your essays in blackmarketfiction.com
This essay is important enough that I'd say it's a companion-piece to your book, but your BMF essays on rebellion fit there too. Here's what I make of that.
I think you want a benign but firm social order where people can push, but the order pushes back so they can feel the boundaries. BUT you also know such order is made of people with ambitions and flaws, so you want the people holding those boundaries to be accountable.
That instinctively felt to me like Eisenhower Republican: fiscally conservative, pragmatically flexible. Suspicious of isolationism, but also of unilateral adventurism. Strongly anti-communist but without the McCarthyism. Institutional respect, business-friendly but not captured by corporatism. Socially moderate, temperamentally cautious, suspicious of ideological crusades from either wing.
Post WWII that would have been a moderate position. Among Republicans it largely evaporated by the 1990s -- some seem to have become "moderate Democrats", though they're almost invisible in media today too. Today both political wings have spread into metaphysics, which is why they have trouble locating conservative pragmatism (or any pragmatism.)
It's this position which I think makes PCH most interesting, because although almost none of the fiction you wrote about would have existed in the late 1950s, and although your attitudes to sex and relationships are of your era and not my grandmother's, you're occupying that position largely alone.
You're hanging with libertarians who often don't want the social order you aspire to, but are happy to accept the benefits of the freedoms you cherish. So you're quietly hoping they'll grow up and sacrifice something for freedom rather than just extracting. You're supportive of feminism in its earlier waves, but want it socially integrated and not an end in itself. You accept the 'manosphere' being frustrated and appalled, but want both sides to turn around and come back. You're hoping or once hoped that Jordan Peterson might offer that bridge.
So within your country, every tribal boundary must feel like a speed-bump to you; every identitarian conversation must feel like half a conversation, with the 'yes but' missing. But you don't want to force the 'yes but': you want people to find it instead.
If I have that right, then it's a very nuanced position in a world where nuance is sacrificed for flag-waving.
I'll write a review of your book when I can, so please correct me on what I've overlooked or inferences I've gotten wrong. In any case, very helpful: thank you.
Wonderful article, Kristin. It would be interesting to compare and contrast Victorian norms with Midwestern ones; frankly I’d love to bring back the introduction system.
Asked AI to generate a table, figured it would be fun given what prompted this all, to do this. It also provided a summary: Victorians lived under explicit rules.
On mourning, I've long had the thought that if the worst should happen and I find myself widowed some day, I might just shave my head and wear all black for a couple of years. By the time my hair grows back and looks normal-ish after that, maybe I'll be fit for company again.
All well said. Reminds me of why I don't "give my pronouns" or whatever. Pronouns are what I call other people for brevity. They're a linguistic convenience, not a value judgement. Most fast food employees call me ma'am, probably because my low frequency hearing loss makes me unaware when my voice is pitching up. I'm fine with it. I was fine when a young audio tech called me "girl" for a theatrical run. She even asked me about it and I told her it was fine.
I don't have "my pronouns". In my opinion, nobody does. Pronouns should be the equivalent of pointing out someone in the crowd by the color of their shirt. In a sensible society, we would lock that in as a social convention.
Mind you, I'm a writer, so if somebody gives me "their pronouns" I can talk around giving offense. I'm fine with that, too, but I'd prefer the sensible society.
This is a problem that in essence became my masters thesis. Mine was when politics interferes with the church. There is an order and a place for all things and the root of the problem is that "politics" allows transgressive behavior to impose across those boundaries. In the 1960s Carol Hanisch coined the phrase, " the personal is political". The acceptance and promotion of that idea, in both society and academia has largely created this ground work. What is more personal than your subjective feelings? That then is your politics, and therefore how you seek to govern and be governed. It is just one element of the permission structure that is leading to this current decay of civility.
"I hate my pocket being picked to give to able-bodied people who simply don’t work."
Couldn't agree more with this statement, Kristin. Our taxpayer dollars are literally getting funneled faster than ever to billionaire layabouts who are consolidating more and more power. People like Trump, Musk, Thiel, the Ellisons, Bezos, etc. who have become the richest people in the world vamping off the value working people create through their labor, most of them rural, God-fearing Americans who can get laid off at the drop of a hat, left with crippling medical debt when they get sick (when insurance company death panels deny paying for even basic preventative and lifesaving treatments) and often have to rely on food stamps to get by when they are employed because the wages these corporate bastards pay are below the poverty line.
Most of our taxpayer dollars (that aren't overflowing the coffers of the corporate overlords of the military industrial complex) are funneled into corporate welfare and tax breaks for these rich pigs who promise to create jobs but only care about enriching themselves and their shareholders and shopping for their next yacht. It's sick.
They have their own money. And it’s not taxed so they can keep it. My money, on the other hand, is being given to foreigners and native born scum bags to bribe them and weaponize them against me
I think you've got the wrong end of the stick, friend. The billionaires (the real welfare queens), who are not paying taxes on their colossal hoards of wealth to the detriment of us all (and who have amassed their hoards by avoiding paying taxes and being offered all sorts of incentives from politicians to do business unimpeded) are weaponizing the news media and both the liberal and right-wing independent media ecosystems to make us villainize poor Americans and immigrants so we'll ignore the real villains--themselves--while they pick our pockets and chip away at our rights. Nine billionaires (many of them in the pockets of Israel) own almost the entire news media and social media of the US. They control the narrative. They are rapidly creating a world in which free speech will be guaranteed only for the richest and most powerful and where you and me and the rest of the masses are unemployed (thanks to AI), disenfranchised, and impoverished. It's already the case in a lot of ways. Democrats and Republicans in Congress are all bought and paid for and serve only their wealthy donors and foreign governments like Israel. We're just cattle and wage slaves for them, and it will only get worse now that their super-funded militia is stealing guns from American citizens and slaughtering them in the streets for dissenting and trying to help their neighbors. Marjorie Taylor Green did the right thing and peaced out when she realized how corrupt the whole system is.
Fantastic article. But there is an underlying contradiction in your desire to have socially enforced norms while also disliking the mob. I think the problem is that we don't have any other mechanism to establish said social norms accept by the mob mentality. How were victorian standards of behavior created in society? Did the king just decree one day that those were the rules?
I hate mob mentality too but honestly any kind of advocacy online looks like mob action because everything becomes a pile-on shouting match.
I guess I wonder where the fuck is our modern day internet etiquette manual? And who has the clout or authority to write it?
An even-handed, creative and concise way to look at the freedom we all hold so dear and take for granted. Yes, enforcing boundaries and the recognition of evil are two 21st century survival skills sorely needed to navigate this changing world we live in. I appreciate your candor and the time it took to put this together. Keep up the good work.
Great parsing of the current social matrix. I was never a fan of the Victorian (though enticed by the floral garnishes of Ian McShane’s Al Swerengen in Deadwood) but now I have to give it some respect. Perhaps I’ll don a black ensemble for my next Youtube video to keep the critics from mouthing off.
I’ve honestly found that wearing a black-on-black ensemble does warrant more cautious behavior from people when they approach you
But isn't it deception? Lying about one's status will diminish the norm, and there's precious little left already.
My takeaway is, No, I'm not co-signing on the return to Victorian attire. My titties are too big to be uncomfortable in those tight ass corsets and I'm not wearing those uncomfortable ass shoes with these size 10s. Nope.
We can always update the shoes lol https://sneex.com/products/the-blake?variant=49484265685301
I roll three ways. Timbos if it snows. New Balance Men’s all year, like the 990s. Nike Benassi’s. That’s it, that’s all.
Lmao I still have my Docs but it’s gotta be a stompy boot occasion to break em out. And heels… it better be a 5 star restaurant to get me to squeeze my toes in there
I used to have a serious boots addiction back in my 20s. Hoe boots, thigh high boots, zip up books, 70s boots. I had an entire closet of custom 10s. Those were in the days that I pray nobody writes a book about it, lol.
I prefer my basic bitch uggs 😆
Not the basic bitch uggs, lol😆. No fuck me pumps? No 70s stacks missing the fish tank?
I'm so glad you wrote this, Kristin.
I'm currently reading through Pop Culture Heretic, which I've had in e-book for months, piecing together how you extract meaning from fiction. (Learning how people think is an interest of mine.) I read half of it last night, piecing values and sense-making from essays. This clarifies things really well -- as do some of your essays in blackmarketfiction.com
This essay is important enough that I'd say it's a companion-piece to your book, but your BMF essays on rebellion fit there too. Here's what I make of that.
I think you want a benign but firm social order where people can push, but the order pushes back so they can feel the boundaries. BUT you also know such order is made of people with ambitions and flaws, so you want the people holding those boundaries to be accountable.
That instinctively felt to me like Eisenhower Republican: fiscally conservative, pragmatically flexible. Suspicious of isolationism, but also of unilateral adventurism. Strongly anti-communist but without the McCarthyism. Institutional respect, business-friendly but not captured by corporatism. Socially moderate, temperamentally cautious, suspicious of ideological crusades from either wing.
Post WWII that would have been a moderate position. Among Republicans it largely evaporated by the 1990s -- some seem to have become "moderate Democrats", though they're almost invisible in media today too. Today both political wings have spread into metaphysics, which is why they have trouble locating conservative pragmatism (or any pragmatism.)
It's this position which I think makes PCH most interesting, because although almost none of the fiction you wrote about would have existed in the late 1950s, and although your attitudes to sex and relationships are of your era and not my grandmother's, you're occupying that position largely alone.
You're hanging with libertarians who often don't want the social order you aspire to, but are happy to accept the benefits of the freedoms you cherish. So you're quietly hoping they'll grow up and sacrifice something for freedom rather than just extracting. You're supportive of feminism in its earlier waves, but want it socially integrated and not an end in itself. You accept the 'manosphere' being frustrated and appalled, but want both sides to turn around and come back. You're hoping or once hoped that Jordan Peterson might offer that bridge.
So within your country, every tribal boundary must feel like a speed-bump to you; every identitarian conversation must feel like half a conversation, with the 'yes but' missing. But you don't want to force the 'yes but': you want people to find it instead.
If I have that right, then it's a very nuanced position in a world where nuance is sacrificed for flag-waving.
I'll write a review of your book when I can, so please correct me on what I've overlooked or inferences I've gotten wrong. In any case, very helpful: thank you.
Strong words and a strong timely (timeless?) message. Thank you. (Note to self: Do not piss Kristin off.)
Wonderful article, Kristin. It would be interesting to compare and contrast Victorian norms with Midwestern ones; frankly I’d love to bring back the introduction system.
Asked AI to generate a table, figured it would be fun given what prompted this all, to do this. It also provided a summary: Victorians lived under explicit rules.
Midwesterners live under unwritten ones.
Maybe we could get our Midwestern ones explicit?
I love your ideas here. Well said.
On mourning, I've long had the thought that if the worst should happen and I find myself widowed some day, I might just shave my head and wear all black for a couple of years. By the time my hair grows back and looks normal-ish after that, maybe I'll be fit for company again.
Disagreeable? Vous?
All well said. Reminds me of why I don't "give my pronouns" or whatever. Pronouns are what I call other people for brevity. They're a linguistic convenience, not a value judgement. Most fast food employees call me ma'am, probably because my low frequency hearing loss makes me unaware when my voice is pitching up. I'm fine with it. I was fine when a young audio tech called me "girl" for a theatrical run. She even asked me about it and I told her it was fine.
I don't have "my pronouns". In my opinion, nobody does. Pronouns should be the equivalent of pointing out someone in the crowd by the color of their shirt. In a sensible society, we would lock that in as a social convention.
Mind you, I'm a writer, so if somebody gives me "their pronouns" I can talk around giving offense. I'm fine with that, too, but I'd prefer the sensible society.
This warms my coal black heart. Lol
I didn't expect to read the whole thing. Well said.
This is a problem that in essence became my masters thesis. Mine was when politics interferes with the church. There is an order and a place for all things and the root of the problem is that "politics" allows transgressive behavior to impose across those boundaries. In the 1960s Carol Hanisch coined the phrase, " the personal is political". The acceptance and promotion of that idea, in both society and academia has largely created this ground work. What is more personal than your subjective feelings? That then is your politics, and therefore how you seek to govern and be governed. It is just one element of the permission structure that is leading to this current decay of civility.
But, a red hat would look good on you.
"I hate my pocket being picked to give to able-bodied people who simply don’t work."
Couldn't agree more with this statement, Kristin. Our taxpayer dollars are literally getting funneled faster than ever to billionaire layabouts who are consolidating more and more power. People like Trump, Musk, Thiel, the Ellisons, Bezos, etc. who have become the richest people in the world vamping off the value working people create through their labor, most of them rural, God-fearing Americans who can get laid off at the drop of a hat, left with crippling medical debt when they get sick (when insurance company death panels deny paying for even basic preventative and lifesaving treatments) and often have to rely on food stamps to get by when they are employed because the wages these corporate bastards pay are below the poverty line.
Most of our taxpayer dollars (that aren't overflowing the coffers of the corporate overlords of the military industrial complex) are funneled into corporate welfare and tax breaks for these rich pigs who promise to create jobs but only care about enriching themselves and their shareholders and shopping for their next yacht. It's sick.
They have their own money. And it’s not taxed so they can keep it. My money, on the other hand, is being given to foreigners and native born scum bags to bribe them and weaponize them against me
I think you've got the wrong end of the stick, friend. The billionaires (the real welfare queens), who are not paying taxes on their colossal hoards of wealth to the detriment of us all (and who have amassed their hoards by avoiding paying taxes and being offered all sorts of incentives from politicians to do business unimpeded) are weaponizing the news media and both the liberal and right-wing independent media ecosystems to make us villainize poor Americans and immigrants so we'll ignore the real villains--themselves--while they pick our pockets and chip away at our rights. Nine billionaires (many of them in the pockets of Israel) own almost the entire news media and social media of the US. They control the narrative. They are rapidly creating a world in which free speech will be guaranteed only for the richest and most powerful and where you and me and the rest of the masses are unemployed (thanks to AI), disenfranchised, and impoverished. It's already the case in a lot of ways. Democrats and Republicans in Congress are all bought and paid for and serve only their wealthy donors and foreign governments like Israel. We're just cattle and wage slaves for them, and it will only get worse now that their super-funded militia is stealing guns from American citizens and slaughtering them in the streets for dissenting and trying to help their neighbors. Marjorie Taylor Green did the right thing and peaced out when she realized how corrupt the whole system is.
An excellent piece. You've defined yourself as someone I would like to know.
May God bless and keep you.
Fantastic article. But there is an underlying contradiction in your desire to have socially enforced norms while also disliking the mob. I think the problem is that we don't have any other mechanism to establish said social norms accept by the mob mentality. How were victorian standards of behavior created in society? Did the king just decree one day that those were the rules?
I hate mob mentality too but honestly any kind of advocacy online looks like mob action because everything becomes a pile-on shouting match.
I guess I wonder where the fuck is our modern day internet etiquette manual? And who has the clout or authority to write it?
Ayn Rand said it so *very* well in Rearden's Trial:
https://thebonnieblueblog.blogspot.com/2011/01/trial-of-hank-rearden-from-ayn-rands.html