Practical Definitions: Defining the Acceptable Fringe

Something that is important to keep in mind is the concept of the Acceptable Fringe.  This would be behaviors, beliefs and practices that are considered weird or fringey, but do not result in the person or family practicing them being considered “not one of us”.  It’s very important to distinguish acceptable fringe things from unacceptable fringe things mainly because if you don’t understand where the lines are, you can’t really work to combat truly dangerous fringe practices that are being protected by their acceptable-fringeness.

Vision Forum was acceptable fringe until the scandals exploded with Doug Philips’ sexual misconduct and abuse of authority.  Many conservatives didn’t buy into the whole shebang, but owned a few videos or books.  Bill Gothard/ATI was also acceptable fringe, along similar lines.

Quiverfull is (barely) acceptable fringe.  Christian Identity (white nationalist Christianity) is not acceptable fringe.  Interracial and international interracial adoption is acceptable fringe.  A lot of people aren’t really into it in conservativeland, but they don’t want to upset their friends and family who are.  It remains relatively uncommon and fringe in practical terms, though.

Homeschooling is acceptable fringe.  Homeschooling is an interesting case because it’s being successfully co-opted and drained of its fringeyness and, well, that’s another post for another day.

Acceptable fringe: homebirthing.  Unacceptable fringe: unassisted homebirthing.

Acceptable fringe: living off the grid.  Unacceptable fringe: not getting your kids Social Security numbers and birth certificates.

This post is also a work in progress.

The hourglassing of male income

True middle-income guys who might have married in the past are being squeezed out in favor of slackers and high achievers.  It’s an amplified version of “Yale or jail”, except it’s “xbox and living off your woman’s 35k/yr job or make 75k plus”.

Married men with SAHMs are making most of the taxable income, contrary to the narrative pushed about the “breadwinner mom”.  Direct from the very Pew data used for that narrative, the married man+SAHM household clears about 78k per year as the median, while the married “breadwinner mom” (plus husband with a job, carefully not worded that way though) clears about 80k per year as the median.  But because the “breadwinner mom” married households consist of two lower incomes and also get very favorable tax treatment for childcare expenses, they pay lower net taxes despite having a slightly higher gross income.  The American federal income tax system is structured to favor double-income married households earning about 75k who put the kids in daycare as far as tax breaks for broad swathes of the married population go.  It is not nearly so well set up to favor single-income married households as is commonly claimed because those households overperform economically and thus phase out of the tax benefits available to those married with children.

Needless to say, all this isn’t mentioned in any of the news articles riffing on said Pew data to declare the awesomesauce of breadwinning mothers.  But the current economic situation in America is that there’s a hourglass effect on male income, and female workforce participation increases aren’t sufficient to replace the lost male earnings, because as we can see from the jury-rigged comparison of earnings above, women just aren’t earning as much as men even if they earn the highest or the sole income for the household.  The result is a smaller and smaller number of married men who overperform and whose W2 wages provide the bulk of what tax base remains for the massive welfare edifice that the federal, state and local governments have built up in the last half century.

This hourglass effect is also mostly left out of the discourse on income inequality, along with its far-ranging effects on the long-term health of the current welfare state.  It’s also a pattern conservatives need to keep in mind when lamenting the decline of marriage and discussing ways to revive marriage as a social institution.

Fairy cloth is real, Grimm’s fairy tales were veiled nonfiction

This is astonishing but true. One of the more fascinating aspects of this is that it puts a strong pin in the idea that oral transmission is foolproof and highly reliable. Old women were repeating stories about an industry that existed, produced seemingly magical fabric, and which was essentially dead by the 19th century due to newly rich middle class people wanting it to be available at a price they could afford.

Fairy cloth, cloth so fine it could be shut up in a nutshell, but was warm and comfortable, was altogether real, immensely expensive, and required a near-army of women to harvest the fibers and process them into the cloth. It was demanding, painstaking work, and the families that produced the cloth did not receive nearly the wages of the middlemen hawking it to sultan’s daughters and the wealthiest of European aristocrats.

There have been some recent attempts to revive it, but the plant used centuries ago is kindasorta lost and the current efforts are inferior and there is no certainty that they can figure out how to grow the right kind of plant and also relearn or reinvent the necessary weaving and processing skills in the longer term.

There is so much like this, because the beautiful things of the past required a lot of work and infernal machines cannot replicate this work.  I think it is not bad that you can find re-enactors painstakingly describing and giving examples of how people lived in the 18th and 19th century on video or streaming media.  But it is bad that we haven’t accepted the amount of manual labor involved in making the beautiful things of the recentish past enough to reclaim and restore some of those old glories.

 

Stay at home mother is a gift from 1970s feminists.

The story of the transformation of the “housewife” into the “stay at home mother” providing “mother-care, not DAYCARE” in American society in the wake of the Pill and Roe v. Wade is an interesting one and there’s not much information on the internet about it because the idea that there was a transition (and that this transition destroyed a substantial amount of soft power among married women) is not compatible with either right wing or left wing narratives about the topic.

We didn’t really have the term before motherhood could be conceivably viewed as entirely intentional/optional, even within marriage.  And nobody seems to ask why it bloomed so suddenly and took over, when by its nature it explicitly separates motherhood from marriage, while housewife emphasizes, well, property benefits of marriage for women foremost.  Homemaker, it’s worth noting, has begun to turn up as a transition away from stay at home mother, but it lacks that wilful connecting of property with marriage and in fact shifts the domestic world to something a woman must make/build, rather than something she is inherently part of and maintaining/managing.

Since this is just thinky thoughts, I will close with the little data point that over half of American SAHMs use center-based daycare for children aged 0-4 and that we hit that point about 10 years ago and this is in every region of the country, not concentrated in one place, it’s about half everywhere.  Employed or not, it’s 80% for BA or higher-possessing mothers.

Another hidden cost of modern parenting–the Mom Commute

Before I had kids, I used to look around at the fatigued SAHMs and working mothers around me and I thought (if I thought about it at all) that a lot of the things they did were optional and not really necessary to the kid-raising life.

Well, I was wrong.

The Mom commute has a long history in American society, but it wasn’t as broadly required in the first half of the 20th century. And there were still ways to avoid the worst of it in the second half via carpooling and roping in still-available neighbors, relatives and friends. And also, for a short window of time, nannies. During peak working mother, around the late 1980s and early 1990s, the first wave of amnestied Hispanic women made a labor pool for domestic work that included doing a lot of the driving. And contrary to the story about them, during that window of time, the wages they were paid were decent and many received real benefits as well. Minimum wage was very low and so (for that brief window of time), paying twice minimum wage was hard, but not completely brutalizing the old finances and the freshly amnestied immigrants were happy to get comparatively generous wages for the work. Things changed with the dotcom era, of course, but a roughly ten year window of being able to pay generously for childcare and still have a lot of money left over distorted perspective later.

Anyway, while a bit of a digression, the point is that now in the 21st century, all the social bonds and stuff have corroded and the mom commute is pretty much a requirement for all moms, even pretty rural ones. It’s not even about the dreaded activities, it’s that getting your kids around other kids and getting them the educational resources they’re supposed to have, even if they’re public schooled involves a lot of commuting (even if you can pop them on the bus in theory).

This is a pretty major fertility shredder and it’s also a reason a lot of married households want two very comfortable cars. They also need them because the Mom Commute tends to not be in the same directions as the Work Commute. The schools and kid stuff are in one part of the city/metro area/county, but the jobs (including mom’s if she works outside the home too) tend to be somewhere else. That includes teachers, who used to be able to easily work in the district their kids were in and now rarely can.

Giving up the Mom Commute really does mean for most married mothers agreeing to a truly astonishing level of isolation and dependence on mass media and social media for themselves and their children and hard limits on physical activity as well. But you never really hear about it, even though that much driving is health-damaging and poorly compatible with keeping the old figure in tiptop shape.

For the Love of Heyer: Snapshot Reviews #3 (books 11-15 in publication order)

11. Barren Corn (1930) read once as of 2021

This is a book notable for having an ending that made me laugh aloud because it was so absurd and ridiculous. The rest of the book is a rather involved story about a selfish aristocratic man, a beautiful but not very bright lower-middle-class girl and how disastrous their marriage is. There are many possible other books that could have happened that would have been more interesting and enjoyable to read, and reading it you think about them a great deal more than the plot in front of you. The issue is very much not the class dynamics, but the way in which Heyer chose to explore them. Of her modern-set books she desired to be suppressed, this is a case where I am in accord with her choice.

12. The Conqueror (1931) read twice as of 2021

I wasn’t that interested in this the first time I read it, but it grew on me the second time. It’s a straightforward historical fiction portrayal of William the Conqueror’s rise to power. The relationship between William and Matilda is extremely edgy. I like the way her women behave as women and the men always behave as men, as well. There is a great deal of fascination, as well, in her descriptions of what life involved a thousand or so years ago, and how in certain little ways nothing much has changed. The hook is a fictional friend of William’s, who ultimately writes his story.

13. Footsteps in the Dark (1932) read once as of 2021

Now we come to an interesting genre change by Heyer. She began writing mysteries in the thirties, and then quit during the forties, with just a quick return in the fifties to put out a sequel and a final mystery. This is her first one.

I must mention that Heyer tends to really dig into sibling dynamics in her books, and it’s refreshing to see those relationships considered a normal part of *adult* life. This early mystery is about siblings inheriting a weird haunted old house and, well, the usual-ish sort of country mystery elements follow. I was never given to country house mysteries, but according to Heyer readers who like them, she is above average with most of hers. This is a case in point.

14. Devil’s Cub (1932) read twice as of 2021

There is a girl, and you know her, perhaps even quite well, and she can save the sexy, sulky rake. She can *fix* him!

This is the story of that girl, that one time she was right. And to her immense skill and credit, Heyer plays it very straight and by the end you’re sold too. This is a direct sequel to These Old Shades, about the son of the reformed rake from that tale. He is not as mythopoetical as his dad, nor is the girl Mary as strange a blend of innocent and cynical as his mother, but they are of a similar kind.

My favorite part of this book is Mary’s devotion to her virtue. To say more spoils a very funny but also very emotionally resonant scene.

15. Why Shoot a Butler? (1933) read once as of 2021

When I read this, I was working through Heyer for the first time chronologically as much as possible. I was steeped in Georgian and medieval depictions of clothing and food and by the time I came to this modern-set detective story, it lacked verve. It was kind of weird, honestly. The mystery was definitely mysterious, but the romance was out of nowhere, so far as I could tell. Having said this, Heyer rewards re-reads, so perhaps when I return to it one of these days I’ll have something different to say. It was weird and that’s really all I remember of it.

For the Love of Heyer: Snapshot Reviews #2 (books 6-10 in publication order)

6. These Old Shades (1926) read twice as of 2021

This is the romantic tale that put her on the map, and was such a huge seller that her career went to the next level. And the interesting thing is that it’s not as though she was doing badly in sales before this book. But the story she tells here is mythical, with much of the structure of a folktale. It’s about an orphan and how the orphan is taken up as a servant by a very dark natured Duke. But they redeem each other. There is a lot to this one, more than even a snapshot can really delve into.

It’s also a reskinning or reimagining of The Black Moth. It also has, as a fairly major plot point, the young beautiful girl dressed as a boy.

7. Helen (1928) read once as of 2021

This is one of Heyer’s moderns she wanted suppressed. The usual argument from Heyer fans is that it’s just too autobiographical. I can understand that argument. It’s about a girl with a very close relationship with her father, as her mother dies bearing her. Her attachment to her father runs so deep it affects her ability to choose a suitable man to marry, and the book is the story of how she navigates her grief in order to find the right man (at least, who happens to still be alive, because it’s set around WW1 and afterwards).

8. The Masqueraders (1928) read twice as of 2021

This is a fun one. It is set around the Georgian era, same as These Old Shades, The Black Moth and Powder and Patch. Heyer began, after her first few books to center in on a specific historical period rather than casting about all over the past with no rime or reason. This set the stage for her to move into the Regency world, where she nestled into a clear and extended career. This one features her most hilarious crossdressing riff: a brother and sister swap sexes because they’re on the run as Jacobites and they both have the misfortune to fall in love with their same-sex (supposedly) best friends.

Their father, The Old Gentleman, is a character, in every sense of that word.

9. Pastel (1929) unread as of 2021

I scored a cheap copy of this hard to find modern that Heyer wanted suppressed. I haven’t got round to reading it yet because I own it.

10. Beauvallet (1929) read twice as of 2021

‘Reck not! It’s a rip roaring thrill ride kind of book, but spiced with a delicate romance. It is a sequel to Simon the Coldheart, about one of Simon’s descendants and his adventures in Spain during the era of Raleigh. The romance comes from Nick Beauvallet winning a sea battle and taking a Spanish lord prisoner, but his daughter is on the ship too…and one thing leads to another, and before you know it, Beauvallet is dodging French and Spanish efforts to take him alive or dead (mostly dead) while also trying to bring his lovely love interest back home to the family.

It’s a notable feature of Heyer’s early work, before she shifted almost entirely into pure Regency writing, that she did sequels and linking novels. This all disappears after 1940 with a single exception, but I’ll get to that eventually.

For the Love of Heyer: Snapshot Reviews #1 (books 1-5 in publication order)

I have read nearly everything Heyer wrote, and these are very short bagatelles rather than deep reviews of what I’ve read. Where I haven’t got to a book yet I will say.

1. The Black Moth (1921) read twice as of 2021

This was Heyer’s first book, published when she was 19. It would read like a photocopy of an Errol Flynn movie to many, but it was a template for such scripts. It’s a simple, surprisingly nuanced story of a disgraced young Earl, a wicked Duke who goes by the nickname Devil and of course a beautiful and innocent young girl both of them want to marry.

Much of the nuance comes less from the love story of the disgraced Earl and more from the family dynamics of the Earl’s family and the Duke’s family. The Earl’s brother is the reason for his disgrace and is consumed with guilt about it, and he’s married to the bad Duke’s sister. Yet the bad Duke is rather a good brother in his way, and his relationship with his sister and other brother (a side character) are part of how the teenaged Heyer makes him an object of some sympathy despite his badness. He is quite ill behaved with women and is a mischief-maker in general on top of that.

But he does show signs of possible salvage. Again, one would have to be told a young girl wrote this (she originally came up with the story at 15) to really believe it, the book is well formed and carries some assurance more common to older authors with longer publishing histories.

2. The Transformation of Phillip Jettan (republished as Powder and Patch with slight edit) (1923) read twice as of 2021

This is very light and fluffy. A country mouse of a young squire finds his childhood friend and future wife drifting from him because he’s not got town polish and is cloddish and overproud about it. Phillip, the namesake clod squire, responds to the rebuff of his sweetling by heading off to France to learn to dress, to converse and to duel. The results impress the girl and all ends happily for both, but with some obstacles both intentional and unintentional along the way to overcome. This was republished without the last chapter many years later. Interestingly, the last chapter is heavy on the Francais, which had more than a little to do with that. That chapter does shift the tone of the ending a bit, but this is such a light little book one can get a complete ending out of either version.

3.The Great Roxhythe (1923) read once as of 2021

Some books Heyer wrote and requested be suppressed. This is one of them. It is an interesting book because again, this is a very young woman really stretching herself artistically and thematically. It’s a love story, but not in a homosexual sense. It is about a man (Roxhythe) with perfect hero-devotion to his king, and the young man serving as Roxhythe’s secretary who is imperfectly devoted to him for a time. It is a book set during the exile of Charles II, and Heyer would return to this period fifteen years later in a book called Royal Escape. The fascination arises because Roxhythe is ruthless and cunning, but remarkably charming and she succeeds in selling the reader on it, just a remarkable accomplishment in youth. Many Heyer fans feel this book was rightly suppressed, but I think they shew merely a distaste for a book entirely about male bonding and its complexities.

4. Instead of the Thorn (1923) read once as of 2021

This book is so aflame with erotic charge I am nervous about picking it up again for a second read, yet I will inevitably do so. A virgin girl hardly past 20 with no dating/courting experience wrote this book and somehow she managed to write one of the most intense depictions of two married people learning to desire each other I’ve ever read. And people have the gall to complain about this book as sexist or dull. I can’t even understand that.

The story is about a girl raised strangely and sexlessly, brought up by a man-hating spinster, who drifts into a marriage with a writer who is enchanted beyond anything by her sheer, pristine beauty. Her family loves the social climb, his family is terrified his heart will be broken by a confused and spoiled ice maiden. What happens is not quite what one would expect, but it ends as it should. This is a book that captures certain tensions between a man and a woman that, frankly, are most understandable to women who have lived life without chemical birth control and who have some experience in pastoral life for extended periods of time, actually caring for animals.

That is to say, women who are, such as it may be, less altered by modernity. It’s not a requirement, but the book is more likely to make sense if you have that background. There are reviews of this book around and about and they mostly denigrate the husband, who is basically Saint Bohemian. He gives his cameo-perfect wife all the space she needs and the dance they undertake has slips and shuffles, but the book draws you into their world and their navigation of her neurosis. The wife makes a lot of mistakes, but nothing fatal. Out of all her early work, this is radical, beautiful and sweet. I suspect but cannot prove that she might have been influenced by the slightly older Margaret Kennedy, who wrote a book the same year on pretty much the same topic. I have not read it, but these sorts of coincidences aren’t exactly unheard of.

This is set in the 1920s, so was a “modern” for its time, and was also among the books Heyer requested be suppressed.

5. Simon the Coldheart (1925) read twice as of 2021

To end this first set of reviews, we have a book that introduces a topic that was to flicker throughout Heyer’s oeuvre for a good 15 years: a young beautiful girl dressing as a boy to escape…whatever. This early work is again, on the “suppressed” list, but she reconsidered this particular one later in life. It’s a medieval, set during the Hundred Years War. The hero, Simon, is known for his stonelike heart regarding the ladies. But he is gentle and extremely patient with children.

Anyway the book is again a remarkable exploration of a young girl writing with some true insight about a young man seeking to establish himself in a rough and tumble world where the sword’s gifts can take a man very far, as can sheer strength of will. Her upbringing by a history loving father reaped many rewards in the form and structure of her fiction.

Along the way as Simon the Coldheart rises in power and status, he finds a woman to melt the ice. A willowy, slim-built one…who dresses as a boy to escape…whatever. To say more spoils much of the joy of the book, it’s very charming to go in reading it knowing very little about the boy and the girl.

I like Heyer’s early work quite well, for the most part, even, as I go through her backlist, several books I didn’t expect to like.

Expectant Pause

I like this blog, I think it’s profitable to post the things that I post, but I have limited energy and it’s better served for now doing more offline stuff as best I can.  So I may post now and again, or I may leave this thing idle for months or weeks at a time.  I may turn up to comment here and there, but mostly I’m just taking pressure off myself to fret, since I could fret for the gold medal if it were an Olympic event.

I continue to hope and pray that more conservatives become serious about normal living and undertake the painful and necessary steps to help make it more likely for their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren (yep, it might just take that long).  I also more importantly hope and pray that the Christian conservatives specially might put on the holy armor of Our Lord and be the best Christians grace grants them the strength and perseverance to be.  It is hard out there, we are being persecuted in America and the wider West.  But we must pray for those who are actually being martyred right now for Christ and not forget that we can still worship in public spaces and carry Bibles around freely.  We still have it and we can still use it.

It’s hard to remember sometimes that the bolder in Christ we are, the worse it will go for us with the secular world.  If we do excommunicate adulterers and don’t bake wedding cakes for multiple divorcees and refuse chemical and physical birth control except for the direst medical need, it will not be easier.  If we teach our children the Narrow Way, the True Word, public schools will not rejoice and cheer us on in the PTA.  If we hold fast to what is lovely, true and real, things will not be light and cheerful.  The secular world will not go “How amazing to see you live your values, it’s so wonderful you are living near each other, building communities of blood, Christ and love, working with and supporting each other in economic, spiritual and collective ways!”

They would instead start looking longingly at the countries that kill Christians.  But we could yet count it all joy, for it would be, then.

For the love of Heyer: A beginning

Georgette Heyer is a very popular writer whose works were converted to ebook form around ten years ago. She is the mother of the Regency Romance, and is one of the mothers of swashbuckling historical action with a dash of romance, though this is less obvious because she wrote most of her swashbuckling when she was quite young, and so was film production. So people will randomly read/stumble across some of hers and think they are the derivative work when it’s quite the other way round.

Long story short, I bucked up and dove in during Our First Year of Covid when my local libraries closed and all I could get from them was ebooks. I’d been intimidated out of reading her in the long long ago, and was still as scared that it would be intimidatingly erudite or something. Instead I found a world of charm and madness, of love and beauty, all from a woman who was but a few decades removed from Queen Victoria herself’s reigning peak. Heyer loved Jane Austen, but she also loved the rather more obscure Emily Eden, and Fanny Burney. And boy did she love writers like Fielding. Heyer is herself such a fascinating woman she spawned two separate biographies that I haven’t read but have heard are quite thorough.

So, much like I put off reading Heyer, I’ve put off discussing her books and the wonders they’ve held for me.  I’ve been intimidated by the lengthy, though not erudite reviews at Tor.com, among other spots around and about online.  But so what, my take on Heyer’s work is worthy in itself to be seen and heard and considered.

Anyway, off to the races!  This post will be updated as new Heyerposts are written up.