[apocalypstyx]

The real issue I find with stuff of this nature is one of aesthetic distance. It's similar to BDSM in a way: certain people fantasies about being a 'slave' but to actually enact the thing beyond the bounds of fantasy, to go from aesthetic to actuality, requires the relinquishment of the thing that allows the engagement in the fantasy in the first place -- consent.

There is an interview series on youtube, can't remember where, of people who grew up in the 50s. It sounds like a miserable place. There is a reason that housewives were prescribed quaaludes in record numbers and consumed so much alcohol. In most places, women wouldn't be allowed to open bank accounts or get a credit card alone for another two to three decades.

If people want to live one place or another, wear this or that clothing, engage in various aesthetic enactments, etc, that is one thing, but when we whitewash the underlying conditions that were the milieu in which the adopted proto-aesthetic formed, we have to be careful that this does no rehabilitate those underlying conditions.

BDSM is at little risk of this due to the nature of consent that is welded into the community, the attempt to maintain a firm division between fantasy and reality. Palingenetic fantasies of bygone eras, however, seem to have much less of a check in place against their actualization; in fact, their actualization, I would say, is exactly the goal of a certain minority who holds such views. It is the difference between a safe practitioner of BDSM and someone who uses BDSM language as a cover for abuse.

[zozbot234]

> people who grew up in the 50s. It sounds like a miserable place.

You could literally replace "50s" there with any other time in the not-so-recent past, without affecting the truth of that statement. Technological progress is such a nice thing, isn't it? (In the case at hand, home appliances was what freed women from having to do all that house work. Not politics.)

[apocalypstyx]

50s women had washing machines (unless they were poor Appalachians, like my grandparents). But really when we're speaking of the 50s we're almost explicitly formulating it in terms of white suburbia.

I am speaking solely of the social situation, the psychology of the times, which in part can be summed up in one word 'conformity' (oh, and not to forget segregation, anti-gay and anti-communist hysteria, etc).

Technologically speaking, if I had the New York Library (or equiv) and a typewriter, I wouldn't take it as too much of a step down.

[ohCh6zos]

> conformity

This sounds ideal. Today we are largely missing the shared society.

[zozbot234]

I hate to break it to you, but suburbia are still around in the 2020s, and still very conformist. (PG has lots of essays describing how the residential segregation of suburbia - quite aside from any specificity about race or ethnicity - ends up creating and enforcing conformity.)