I periodically check in on the website known The Thinking Housewife to see what issues are concerning her and her readers. The site espouses quite appalling views but in the most genteel and proper language. That site has a strange fascination for me, like entering a time warp where I find myself in a world that never really existed except in the imaginations of those who think that we have become a decadent, hedonistic society that has abandoned all moral standards largely because we have lost contact with our religious, especially Roman Catholic, roots. They see warning signs of the decline everywhere.
So what is worrying the Thinking Housewife these days?
One is the fear that attempts to increase awareness of the need for affirmative consent before sexual encounters so as to avoid rape are precursors to all of us being sent to sex re-education camps.
Of course, Bruce Jenner’s transition to becoming Caitlyn Jenner is derided and mocked as blurring the lines between genders and is seen as a symptom of degeneration from a time when everyone knew their proper place in society.
Another post sees the adoption by women of some forms of dress that used to be exclusively masculine (like trousers) as a sign of an inferiority complex among women. Oddly, the authors seem to never see the other side of their argument. The site has a very traditional Roman Catholic perspective (they despise the current pope as some kind of Marxist subversive out to destroy the church) and yet the fact that its clergy wear dresses traditionally worn by women is not seen as being a sign of inferiority complexes in men.
The danger for me is that I can spend too much time wandering in a fascinating but strange world where a never-existent past is sanctified and yearned for.
I used to read Conservapedia for the same reason. As a physicist, you may be interested to know the political implications of the theory of relativity.
I notice The Thinking Housewife puts quotation marks around “Pope” when she uses the term before Francis. Does that mean she is a sedevacantist?
You know, Mano, it doesn’t look as funny when one reads experiences of people who were raised in such a sub-culture and escaped from it. For instance Libby Anne, former FTB blogger, or the women at No Longer Quivering.
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anat, Mano wrote “… The site espouses quite appalling views but in the most genteel and proper language. That site has a strange fascination for me […]
…
The danger for me is that I can spend too much time wandering in a fascinating but strange world where a never-existent past is sanctified and yearned for.”
That’s not being amused, but rather being bemused.
At least we aren’t naming our kids ‘Beaver’ any more.
jimmyfromchicago@1
Looks like. I browsed that blog a while ago and found some rather obvious posts on the subject.
MS, you won me over. I just could not resist reading “Sexual Re-Education Camps Coming Soon”. It’s a bit of a disappointment that she didn’t mention the Hitler-Youth:
http://www.salon.com/2004/12/03/kater/
“Following the now-infamous 1936 Nazi Party rally in Nuremberg, for instance, 900 BDM girls came home pregnant.”
But the first comment is priceless.
“This is something Orwell warned against in 1984.”
Yeah, Orwell was a fanatic supporter of catholic morals.
So please, MS, for the sake of our entertainment, don’t give up your strange fascination!
Can I go to one of those camps for a summer vacation? They sound fun!
Ugh. When they get that stupid I usually need to water it down a bit. I tend to prefer my fantasies wrapped in other fantasies. Like Faith of the Fallen from Terry Goodkind’s Sword of Truth series was rather entertaining. It’s set in what I tend to think of as Caricature World where there are few complex characters and most people, especially the villains, are based on very simple archetypes. And anyone who does anything bad is usually an incredibly exaggerated caricature of a human being. Makes me think of the bizarre looking villains you see in comic books sometimes. But anyway, that bbook is by this point the third in the series where he rails against the bad guys who are caricatured “moochers and looters” that insist on some weird and pointless form of communist helping each other which somehow ends up with some people getting everything. Without giving anything away really, in the end the main character solves the problem of people helping each other by helping people… but in a selfish way! Or something. Because the author is into Ayn Rand’s Objectivism. Originally it all hurt my head until I started reading it the same way I would someone casting a magic spell: as a convenient plot point where something just happens to allow the author to continue the story.
With some context to dilute it these things are funny. Straight up they just seem horrible, self-serving, delusional and/or tremendously misguided.