Narcissus; detail from Narcissus and Echo by John William Waterhouse

JANE S. writes:

Reading the article by Janet Benton made me think about the explosive popularity of homemaking blogs in recent years. It took me by surprise. I never would have guessed that there are millions of women out there who love cooking and handicrafts, and blog about sewing aprons out of vintage handkerchiefs or making rugelach. Sites like Pinterest and Foodgawker give you an idea of the magnitude of this phenomenon. The software tutorial site lynda.com even has a tutorial showing you how to set up your own food blog.

I was also reminded of a discussion at VFR about that unfortunate family, the Krims, whose nanny murdered two of their children. Lawrence Auster commented that there was something prideful about Marina Krim’s mommy blog, noting that in today’s society, people are so full of themselves, so transported by the wonderfulness of their lives, that they have lost any sense of propriety when it comes to boasting about it publicly. Laura subsequently pointed out that Mrs. Krim’s blog was modest by current standards.

Every time I look at one of those homemaking blogs, I am reminded of Auster’s words. The blogs all seem alike. There’s a narcissism about them that is annoying.

If feminism’s goal was to snuff out women’s love of domestic activities, it has plainly not succeeded. At the same time, I sense that the legions of blogging homemakers are not a counterweight to feminism. Laura referred to homemaking as an “invisible anchor that holds all in place.” If women in my mother’s and grandmothers’ generation had had Internet technology available to them, I can’t picture them producing anything like these blogs.

Laura writes:

The Internet offers lots of useful ideas and instructions for homemaking. It’s wonderful to have ideals to aspire too. But, it depends on how this stuff is used. Generally, I think if imagery makes a woman very excited or if a blog makes her envious, she should stay away from it. Of course, if she finds images of herself especially stimulating, well, it goes without saying, she has a problem.

I define pornography for women as indulgent and highly stimulating images of domestic perfection. The Internet offers an unprecedented amount of feminine pornography. Half an hour of looking at an interior decorating magazine or website can make a woman positively angry at the state of her own home. It can also stultify creativity because the important thing with decorating is to work with what you have, to examine it closely, to understand what it is and then figure out how it can be beautified. One can also get a lot done in the time it takes to look at photos of other people’s ideas.

Imagery in magazines, books or on the Internet can lead a woman to care excessively for appearances and to become enslaved to unrealistic standards. Displaying photos of friends and family can also become a habit-forming way of showing off. I realize this has been said before, but it can’t be said too often. I know a woman who posted photos of herself and her new boyfriend on Facebook. All looked perfectly happy and she included cutesy little quotes about following one’s dreams. Meanwhile, her husband was contemplating suicide. I sometimes wonder whether the woman’s entire rejection of her former life wasn’t caused by her desire to offer photos of herself excited and happy. Like Narcissus in the ancient myth, she was mesmerized by images of herself. The Internet was a glassy pool and she could not pull herself away from what she saw.

Feminism encourages this self-love; everything a woman does is worthy of praise. The female ego has never been more arrestingly bloated.

— Comments —

Grateful Reader writes:

The September/October issue of Touchstone Magazine touches on your point about the self-centeredness of the modern woman (and man). In a book review of Thomas de Zengotita’s Mediated, Ken Meyers reinforces Marshall McLuhan’ adage, “The medium is the message,” by calling internet use a “Communicable Dis-ease.”  The way people communicate with each other not only forms the structure of their own thinking, the ordering and organizaiton in their brains, and the metaphors that shape their desires,  but changes the structure of society as a whole.

Myers concludes that what you and your readers see in the narcissism of housewives parallels the advent of the new instant communication media; he writes, “it’s all about flattery and options…rather than representing higher realities, these everyday experiences [in the virtual world of mediated life] seem to confirm the absence of reality.”

Myers goes on, “[Zengotita] makes a powerful (if allusive and indirect) case that the narcissism and nihilism of postmodern culture is an effect, not of French literary critics or German philosophers, but of the tone and texture of mediated life. ‘Mediated people in a world of effects aspire to elude all genuinely tragic visions of the human condition.’ In a world of media-flattered selves, ‘ we experience any limit, even a purely logical limit, on what might be possible as an unjustified imposition on our freedom…The idea that everyone has their own reality, constituted by their own experiences and perceptions, comes almost automatically.”

He finishes, “Our media hygiene must be guided by principles and practices not sustainable by the virtual means of electronic communication, which is to say that media must serve rather than shape our face-to-face encounters in real, bounded, limited communities.”

Jane A. writes:

I love your blog!

I just wanted to state that for many of my generation (I am in my early 40’s), the homemaking arts were simply not taught.  I am a child of the seventies, and many skills that my grandmother’s generation had were simply not passed down.  Home economics class was dropped from my high school curriculum, many mothers went back to work, and women of my generation failed to learn practical skills.  My generation is realizing how important and rewarding these skills are (cooking from scratch, gardening, mending) but lack older mentors to teach us these skills directly.  The women who have these skills are passing away, and the generation underneath them (people in their sixties) tend to be more careerist and less available to my generation.  Therefore, we are trying to build community and share skills in person and online.  I probably consult one of these household blogs or another every day as I attempt to teach myself basic skills.  I find blogs to be “quicker” than books, though my Joy of Cooking tome comes in handy too! I guess my argument is that these seemingly self indulgent blogs have a use.  My grandmother could have asked her neighbor what to do with acorn squash, while my neighbor is never home.

Thank you for your wonderful blog.

Laura writes:

Thank you.

I agree. There’s nowhere to learn many of these things. And the Internet fills the void.

Sometimes, however, it overfills the void.

 Jane S. writes:

Here’s what mainly bothers me about these blogs. In order to get to the recipe, or the DIY instructions, or whatever, you have to scroll past the blogger blathering on about her adorable kids, her joyous lifestyle, etc. This information is intended to enhance your visit to the blog, but it does not, not for me anyway. It used to be, you had to get to know someone pretty well, in person, before you knew that kind of stuff about them. By then, usually, you had seen them on their bad days, too.

If there’s a bottom line for me here, it’s the way that the Internet seems to be reinforcing happy talk as de rigueur for public discourse. There’s something about the way these bloggers all sound alike that carries a whiff of totalitarianism. It gives me the creeps.

Jane adds:

And these blogs are addictive. I can get sucked in the way a 14-year-old boy gets sucked in by video games. I would rather look at food blogs than cook. I’d rather look at pictures of crafts than actually do them. Very dangerous.

Marleigh writes:

My husband and I both enjoy reading your blog very much. The topics you cover are a welcome respite from all the ear-covering and choruses of “la-la-la-everything-is-awesome” that surround us so much of the time.

On the topic of the New Domesticity, I think it’s important to remember the underlying purpose of many of the blogs that are out there. While I don’t doubt that the women who write them love their families, their homes and their handiwork, many of those blogs exist as businesses whereby women are selling the image of domestic perfection to others. They make their revenue from advertising while readers queue up to gush over their beautiful projects, their beautiful photos, their beautiful children—in short, their beautiful lives. And while there certainly are blogs that offer useful information, I don’t know that it’s possible to run a blog that has enough visitors to earn a quantifiable second income without accepting that most of those hits are simply people who come for the eye candy. These are wives and mothers, but their families and homes have also become their business in a way that deviates pretty significantly from traditional home economics.

Laura writes:

Thank you.

I feel sorry for women who get swept into blogging when their children are young.

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