this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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I mean, that's part of it. Cottagecore (in the US) isn't just about living on stolen land, it's valorizing the settler culture that stole that land in the first place - a culture based on not just land theft but unpaid female labor, unpaid child labor, patriarchy, theocracy, slavery/servitude, and a whole host of other moral cultural toxins. Hopefully you can see the problem with living like an antebellum Southern plantation owner and calling it "plantationcore" while ignoring the whole, you know, slavery thing? Same principle.
Thing is, cottagecore as an aesthetic is just fine. Fill your mason jars with beans from your garden, knit yourself a lace tablecloth, draw little mushrooms on your wall, follow your bliss. The problem is where influencers take moral and cultural lessons from settler culture and are like "wouldn't it be wonderful if we all followed the old traditional ways and raised our children on books instead of screens and let them play outside in the fields with other kids and walked to the local market and farmed our own food and studied the Bible at night and lived in ethnically homogeneous communities and had the right to shoot migrants as trespassers". Because far right ideologues and traditionalists and so on love the idea of returning to the traditional life ways and traditional values of white American settlers and they use the aesthetic as a selling point in the same way that solarpunks use green aesthetic as a gateway drug to anti-capitalism.
Also, there is the issue of economic justice. How many people can afford a little cottage and an acre of land to farm? How many people can afford the time to do that traditional labor without worrying about earning money? Cottagecore influencers are mostly rich people playacting at an idealized version of poverty, which is classist and frankly insulting.
And a bunch of other stuff but this rant is long enough already.
yes. as an educator, let me repeat--yes. these are good things that are children would benefit from. doing the weird, rhetorical strategy of implying these ideas (or the people advocating for them) slide seamlessly into racism is just...weird. like, you can dislike cottagecore while also accepting that it wasn't..."cryptofacist propaganda"
a few years back when i was more online, i was in a few cottagecore kind of spaces. they tended to be dominated by queer women and there was nothing particularly conservative or propagandistic about it. to me at least, it seemed to come organically from women who wanted to uplift things that were seen as outdated or stiffing or gender-stereotyped (threadwork, baking, gardening, etc.) as solutions to artificial and consumerist life. why buy fast fashion when you could thrift, mend, or make? why buy processed food from megacorps when you could grow your own ingredients and make food yourself? etc. and yeah, a lot of them were taking inspiration from the old american transcendentalists and brittish romantics, which you could say are colonialist, etc., but nothing is without fault and generally there are a lot of beautiful ideas from that era that can be taken into and discussed in the modern day, as we navigate tensions between technology and pastoralism (the machine in the garden, by leo marx, is an interesting bit of lit crit on this if you're into that kind of thing). i'd say too that a lot of them were community minded, either through advocacy groups, spirituality (witches and theists alike), community gardens, etc.
maybe the vibes have shifted in the years since, as i feel like the "tradwife" has become a thing on tiktok. but like...the people i know irl who are cottagecorey aren't on tiktok? they're reading and spending time outside and crafting things. so if you're getting the "cryptofacist propaganda" angle from that kind of thing, then I think we're talking about two discreet movements that just have some aesthetic overlap. influencers are never gonna be authentic representations of any kind of group, but most of the cottagecore people i've known irl haven't been rich in the slightest, they've actually mostly been retail workers or biology or lit grad students lol.
but ultimately...it would be wonderful if we were raising our kids on books instead of screens. anyone working in education can tell you that. and yeah, playing outside is good, actually. having a garden is also awesome, and being able to walk to the local market is doubly so. and the awesome part is, all those things can be done in the city, or the suburbs, or in rural america. they can be done in diverse communities built on compassion.
anyway, there are a lot of good things to be drawn from that whole subculture, imo
I agree with you that there is a big difference between "cottagecore" the online movement - which I believe is full of cryptofascist poison - and ordinary people who live similar lifestyles within their own communities and have nothing to do with fascism.
I both agree and disagree that there's not a seamless slide from cottagecore aesthetic to racism. I agree, because there's not necessarily a direct link between storing beans in mason jars and living in a militia camp in Montana preparing for the racial holy war. I disagree, because online cottagecore influencers are deliberately using those beans in mason jars in order to recruit new racists.
Cryptofascist cottagecore influencers start with unobjectionable good like "limit screentime" and "let kids play outside" and "consume less, reuse more". Then they incorporate more of their "traditionalist" moral and social values into their work. Then they follow/share/point their viewers at other influencers and sources, who are a bit more traditionalist, a bit more religious, a bit more aggressively opposed to modern society, a bit more mask off. And those influencers point their viewers at even more aggressively conservative sources. And so on and so forth. And ultimately you're watching videos about tradwives churning their own butter and talking about how liberals want to ban raw milk and how lactose tolerance helped white Europeans conquer the world.
That's why cottagecore is cryptofascist instead of mask off fascism. Because a lot of cottagecore content is positive and unobjectionable but it's being used to build an audience of people who dislike modern society and technology in order to indoctrinate that audience into fascism.
See also Jordan Peterson, who starts with "clean your room and make a schedule" and ends up with "men sexually assault women because of feminism".
So you say raising kids off screens and so on is good. And of course it is. Because if there weren't good and appealing aspects to the cottagecore subculture, crypto-fascists would be recruiting in different subcultures and we wouldn't be having this conversation 😆
(And in passing, everything I just ranted about applies to the actual fascists in the online community. The fact that cottagecore presents an idealized version of 19th century American settler colonialism, so is, let's say, problematic from the start, is not necessarily related to fascism but is still a concern that the movement mostly ignores. But then, homesteading and back to the land movements in the United States mostly have the same problems.)
This explains a lot, thanks. My only exposure to cottagecore is as a hashtag on aesthetic photos that pretty much look like my broke country friends' houses, it sounds like there's a lot more to it and an insidious set of values underneath.
I didn't actually know aesthetics had influencers, turns out that I know even less about this than I thought.
It's the difference between people living a lifeway in their own community and people outside that community selling an idealized version of that lifeway.
Your broke country friends aren't fascists or colonialists for living the way they live. The rich white influencers selling poverty chic? I look at them a lot more suspiciously.
I do think the meat of cottagecore is people knitting and creating stuff, and trying to have a simpler life. Trying to put a philosophy around it is probably not fundamental to that community.