this post was submitted on 07 Aug 2024
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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 to me at least, it seemed to come organically from women who wanted to uplift things that were seen as outdated or stiffing or gender-stereotyped (threadwork, baking, gardening, etc.)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.)