The single strangest reaction I’ve seen thus far to the devastation of Sandy comes from Laura Wood, the genteel bigot and feminism-hater who blogs as The Thinking Housewife. After looking through a gallery of photos on the Daily Mail showing some of the damage in New York city, Wood suggested that the real problem is that New Yorkers aren’t wearing cheerful enough clothing:
THESE Daily Mail photos of New York City after the hurricane remind me of just how ugly the streets of Manhattan are, with almost everyone dressed in drab, uninteresting clothes that rival the uniforms of Maoist China for their homogeneity and lifelessness. America is one of the most aesthetically impoverished nations in history. I wonder how many thousands of people are on medication because they are depressed by their own clothes and their ugly, hostile environments, surrounded as they are by impersonal denim, sneakers with tire treads, plastic-covered down jackets, billboards with oppressive smiles, and the austere, chilling cliffs of modern skyscrapers. This is the environment of a people that idolizes equality and sameness. The only way to survive amid such poverty is to possess an interior castle, a place of tapestries and mahogany where denim and sweat jackets are nowhere to be seen.
Just make sure this castle of yours isn’t reduced to rubble by 85 mile-an-hour winds and flying debris.
Speaking of New York, here’s an interesting (if a bit shaky) video of a walk through that city’s dark streets after the hurricane hit.
LOL I can just picture her meltdown at the very idea!
The commenters fail to note Twisting Housewife’s great innovation, this being a rebelling against feminist dogma. It takes a strong man and an even stronger woman to resist the fragrant pull of FEMINISM, the smell of roast duck, the immediate gains one may get from a hate movement in one’s favor. However, the men and women of the manosphere have looked at the long-term effects and they have seen that feminism leads to nothing but ruin. It is a divicions, slopped.
Retro dresses are pretty cool, and I own a few from pinupgirlclothing and the like, but they aren’t the be-all end-all for awesome clothes. Plus Tokyo – and I imagine New York and other large, busy cities – is updraft nation. Every time I went out in my Thinking Housewife approved faux-50’s dresses this summer, I felt like I was constantly Marilyn Monroe-ing the people around me, and not all of them appreciated it. Constantly batting your skirt down on the subway escalator isn’t exactly graceful. It also doesn’t combine well with the all-too-common urban creeper pastime of upskirt shots. Those big flouncy dresses give a guy more opportunity to get the picture without your noticing.
You don’t need colours. Black and white chiaroscuro is all your need.
Yeah, fashion is the first casualty of disaster… no wait it CAUSES it… No wait, women should be wearing dresses, no wait homosexuals cause huricanes, no wait… Ain’t got time to wait for your stupid rightwing brain to spit out something remotely comprehensible.
@ Kittehs
I was going to say, looking at the pics that she posted of her idea of a better way to dress in the wake of a disaster, the men’s suits were all pretty awful. Not the fault of the individual men – it’s just that most suits from that time period were ill-fitting and dull. With the women’s clothes she posted, none of them were particularly glam or exciting, they were just very clearly gender-coded.
So, like I said earlier, it’s a coded lament on the whole why-can’t-women-be-feminine-and-let-men-lead thing again, except this time she decided to piss all over a bunch of people who just lived through a hurricane to make her creepy little point.
(If she says anything about the way people were dressed after Katrina I’m going to lose what little remains of my patience.)
WTF is this mess?
I’m not sure which I despise more: the CONTENT they (the manosphere) write or the WAY they write it.
Well now I’m hungry for roast duck but I’m stuck in San Jose with no idea of where to get a good one. Back in LA there’s a place in Chinatown that I like…
She accused New Yorkers—New Yorkers!—of being “drab”?
New Yorkers. The only people in the world who rival Paris in their devotion to cutting edge, outrageous fashion. This is a city where people earnestly complain that they don’t feel right running down to the corner store without wearing something fashionable. This is a city where there are entire resales shops built around only reselling top dollar designer duds. Telling New Yorkers to dress better is like telling Jon Hamm to be handsomer.
Yes, people wear raincoats when it’s raining here. That’s because they don’t want a drop of water to touch their carefully arranged outfits.
As for the Times Square photo: Uh, those are the poorly dressed tourists that natives make fun of, a group I can imagine Thinking Housewife has more in common with.
@amavra: The weirdest thing is that if you want to go to a place where all the men are in suits and all the women are in dresses, you can find that, no problem, in NYC. It’s when I go to red states where I see people who live in T-shirts and khakis.
What we have here is a good example conservatives reflexively believing everything has to be wrong and evil about the big urban centers they’ve learned to hate. “Drab” is a negative word, and NYC is all things negative, so it must be drab. Evidence and reality don’t penetrate.
As for Day-Glo, Williamsburg hipsters made that a mini-trend a few years ago, but got over it and are now into earthier tones.
Roast duck? Am I missing a reference, or is this just word salad?
In any case, isn’t pretty shitty to be making fun of people for what they’re wearing? Aside from reams of classist overtones, it is well beyond juvenile.
The “Thinking” Housewife is being incredibly self-important by psychoanalyzing a whole city by how people are dressed in one photo. That kind of sweeping generalization is either a.) untrue, as in this case, or b.) totally trivial, e.g., “New Yorkers breathe.”
@princessbonbon: You know what’s bizarre about the exchange in that link you gave?
Everything. EVERYTHING ABOUT THAT EXCHANGE IS BIZARRE. Holy ever-living fuck.
I’m just glad the terrible twos acknowledges that FEMINISM smells pretty.
Actually, speaking of the previously unknown connection between ducks and FEMINISM, I did find this gem in a post titled “Feminism is a Bitch”
Didn’t we have a discussion about ducks on another thread, say, two or three weeks ago? Is someone trolling us with waterfowl?
Fitzy, I vaguely remember that conversation. I think it started out with duck rape and then transitioned to parasites.
Nepenthe, that’s what I thought. I seem to remember necrophilia came up briefly, too. Whatever the case, it made me start giving the poor little feathered friends who live in our community pond the gimlet eye every time I take the kids for a walk.
I don’t often come across other people whose views are quite so alien to me. I mean, I do catch myself judging people based on how they’re dressed at times, but then I understand that that’s a pretty stupid thing to do. I’m just not willing to assume someone is less smart because they like to wear hats or denim or baggy clothes, on account of how those notions just utterly fail to hold up in real life. If anything, personal experience (especially in retail) has led me to think men who wear suits are more likely to be assholes and idiots, but that’s another prejudice I’m trying to outgrow. There are some really amazing people in the world who have better things to do with their lives than worry about fashion, even when there isn’t a giant hurricane around.
Duck rape (and the resulting trauma to humans) is kind of a meme on my campus, because we have a stream, a couple of ponds, a lot of ducks. We also have squirrels, but their sex lives aren’t as interesting (so far as I can tell, they chase each other around the trees for a bit before settling down).
What the ducks do like to do is screw with my ecology class. We went out to feed them to test optimal foraging theory (we had two feeding stations, 1 at 1 bread piece/five seconds, the other at 1 bread piece/ten seconds) and the ducks just didn’t cooperate. They didn’t seem to be too hungry.
But the pond we chose was right behind a dorm, so I wonder if they were just overfed…
Ducks are such bitches. God.
Wordsp1nner, in my experience ducks (and squirrels) anywhere on a college campus are full to the point of bloating from dropped sandwich halves and the usual dribblings undergrads leave. I loved fall at my old campus because the squirrels were so pudgy they could barely leap about properly.
We had Canada geese, squirrels, and nutria on my college campus. The geese pretty much ignored everyone, but the squirrels and nutria were little beggars (I had a squirrel come and clamber onto my knee one morning while I was eating a biscuit on an outdoor bench). It was always fun watching newbies feed the nutria. They’d toss stuff into the pond, saying “Do beavers like bread? Awww, he’s eating it! Good beaver! C’mere, boy!” Then the nutria would waddle out of the water, and as soon as the feeders saw that long, thin tail they’d scream “OMIGOD, it’s a giant RAT!” and scramble like they were going to get plague. Meanwhile, the nutria would stand there looking confused and abandoned. Poor thing.
@Fitzy: Nutria?! Holy cow!