A Hot Take On That Old-Timey Couple

by Alexandra Molotkow

Today, Vox posted a personal essay by a woman explaining how and why her husband live like it’s 1880:

I buy my ink from a company founded in 1670. My sealing wax for personal letters comes from the same company, and my letter opener was made sometime in the late Victorian era from a taxidermied deer foot.

Did those lines upset you? Not surprising! They’ve upset a lot of people, including me, sort of, even though honestly who cares.

Intense ambivalence is why I’m blogging about this storm in a bone china teacup. I’m bothered by whimsy and affectation; I also believe very strongly, in the abstract, that you should pursue the good life however it looks to you, as long as you’re not doing harm. Irking bloggers does not count as harm, although I once sublet an apartment across from a psychobilly car shop, and they blared their precious antique motors all hours of the day and then sped off with their hair all impeccable, and I hated them way more than I could possibly hate these two.

There is a flavor of human vitriol specially reserved for those who try too hard to be different, especially when they seem to be whining about it, or asking for special treatment, or even just attention. Attention is a limited resource! Also, because some people don’t choose to be different, and there’s a significant difference between someone who decides to encase themselves in a Victorian snow-globe world and someone for whom the real world hasn’t made any space. But it doesn’t necessarily follow that people who choose to be different are callous, or deserve scorn.

A natural response to the first part of this passage is to roll your eyes:

The truly hard part is dealing with other people’s reactions.

We live in a world that can be terribly hostile to difference of any sort. Societies are rife with bullies who attack nonconformists of any stripe. Gabriel’s workout clothes were copied from the racing outfit of a Victorian cyclist, and when he goes swimming, his hand-knit wool swim trunks raise more than a few eyebrows — but this is just the least of the abuse we’ve taken. We have been called “freaks,” “bizarre,” and an endless slew of far worse insults. We’ve received hate mail telling us to get out of town and repeating the word “kill … kill … kill.” Every time I leave home I have to constantly be on guard against people who try to paw at and grope me. Dealing with all these things and not being ground down by them, not letting other people’s hostile ignorance rob us of the joy we find in this life — that is the hard part. By comparison, wearing a Victorian corset is the easiest thing in the world.

…and the instinctive follow-up thought is, Well, you signed up for this, but… they did not! They signed up to live like it’s olden times, and that’s hokey, but there’s nothing inherently disdainful with it.

This response, which I’m as susceptible to as anyone, disturbs me a little, because it reinforces the fact that while we can be socialized to accept certain forms of difference, we remain basically uncomfortable with deviation. Certain forms of kookiness remain free-for-alls, and whatever, it’s fun to make fun of people, and the stakes here are very low, but these guys aren’t stand-ins for everything wrong with X — they’re just easy targets.

I get the impulse to scorn those who don’t really mean it and pursue self-distinction in lazy, entitled, performative ways. But these freaks heat their home with 19th-century gas heaters, and sleep with water bottles when it gets cold, not to dabble in hardship, but because they like living this way, and what more do you need as proof of commitment? I say “freaks” because they are freaks, and I like freaks! I wouldn’t want to live in a world without them.

And I like to see people put care and effort into their lives and appearances. There’s nothing all that deviant about organizing your world around an aesthetic principle or rarefied interest; since time immemorial, people have been finding hokey things to take seriously. Maybe there’s a line between the authentic and the inauthentic lifestyle, but I don’t know where that line is.