So, I subscribe to this magazine called "Bitch." It's a magazine about feminist issues and pop culture.
And let me just get a little tangential here. Once, when I was working as an order representative for a clothing company that catered to old women, I had an old woman on the phone (occupational hazard) who flipped her shit because I called her Ms. instead of Mrs. I mean, it didn't say "Mrs." on her account, so I assumed that calling her that would be inappropriate. I was trying to avoid the whole I'm not married so don't assume that I am and blah blah don't need a man to complete my life blah biddy blah blah bull crapola that I figured a faux pas such as that would earn me. Instead, I got the opposite. Turns out that she was married but, even if she weren't, she informed me that the appropriate title for an unmarried woman was "Miss." This "Ms." garbage, she ranted, was for these feminist nut jobs who had no respect for the social and gender roles that made us who we are. Yeah. It was bizarre. Like, I got a fifteen minute lecture on how feminism has ruined this country and destroyed our youth and, essentially, resurrected Hitler and reinstated the world order of Satan.
Umm...I'm not sure where this woman learned about feminism, and I'm not sure why she hates her vagina so incredibly much, but that's not feminism. That's the establishment's response to feminism. Because feminism, to me, means a celebration of women and their accomplishments and the things that they've achieved through struggle and hard work. It means a celebration of all the things that women are, have been, and will become. It means a celebration of women as equal in importance and value to men. Not the devaluation of men in favor of women. Not the dismissal of institutions like marriage and home in favor of lesbian orgies involving honey and cannabis and abortions (although I have to say that I am opposed to none of those things in certain contexts, honey in particular).
So anyway, don't just click away assuming that I'm one of those people who actually wants to send all the men in the world to an island and keep them alive for the sole purpose of sperm harvesting. I'm not in favor of that. No ma'am. We need the dudes around too. They do things like kill the fast, scary spiders that I can't tolerate. And if they're good dudes, they are just as important in the day to day maintenance of the household as I am. So...yeah. Keep the dudes. Give them the same value as the ladies. Read Bitch.
Because when you read Bitch, you read fabulous articles. Like this here little number, which is all about how this whole Pinterest revival of things like canning and embroidery and gardening and what not is sort of creating an even bigger gap for people for whom there is already a gap - namely, the poor, or anyone who cans not because it is hip but because it is the only affordable means to support their family that they have.
Now, I' guilty of being a Pinterest addict. And I'm guilty of wanting to learn to can things and wanting to have a garden even though I am not in the poorest strata of economic classes in this country. We're down there. We could definitely use the savings provided by a healthy garden and a few homesteading skills. But they will not make or break us when it comes to actually eating. Eating well, yes. A garden will provide us with produce (while canning will provide us with that produce in the months when it is not affordable by any stretch of the imagination) that we may not be able to purchase in the swanky wooden bins that say "organic" at Wegmans. Now, we could use that money to buy a lot of the processed food that's on the shelves, but I want my family to eat as much real food as possible and the only way that we're going to be able to do that is if I become just a little bit more of a pioneer woman.
But there's this feeling in the arts and crafts community that it's just for fun. Like, "oh, isn't it cute how I grew these tomatoes and then canned them so I could make my own sauce in January." Right? I mean, it's a hobby. It's not a way of life. And there's this sort of Pinterest Pissing Contest that's simmering just below the surface where all of these artisans are constantly trying to have the craftiest crafts of all the crafts. But in their attempts to "rustify" things that are not naturally rustic, they are forgetting that there are people who use milk crates for storage because they can't just run out and buy new cupboards. Right here. Yeah. If this whole rustic revival weren't going on my house would not be as hip and artsy as people consider it. Our finances have forced me to get crafty, to repurpose, and to make things work that we might normally throw away.
If we lived in a place where it were legal (out of town, where I desperately long to move someday), I would own chickens not because it's hip to own chickens, but because owning chickens means being able to sell eggs to hipsters who don't live in places where they can raise their own chickens. See what I mean?
Anyway, the article says it better than I can, but I wanted to spread the word: Homesteading is a survival skill and will remain a survival skill long after it passes out of this "cool" phase in which it's found itself. When the Pinterest canner gets tired of canning and sells all her canning supplies for a vintage guitar, because the new thing will be a Bob Dylan revival, I'll be buying her cans and carrying on. Just keep that in mind when you're thinking about how you want to be more like the DIY blogger who does crafty things for more page views. Not that there's anything wrong with that. It's fine. Just don't forget about us po' folks down here who were doing all this shit before it was cool.
Love ya!
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