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    Monday, July 31, 2006

    Farts and Crafts

    I do not want to be a domestic goddess.

    I am pretty domestic. I enjoy all kinds of domestic things: making my home nicer to look at and live in, fixing things, painting things nice colours, shopping for stuff to eat or for my home, cooking fancy little meals, even sewing (as I discovered this past weekend). I have throw pillows, fer fucksakes. All in all, I'm a pretty bourgeois little person. But I do not ever want to be one of those people who actually make a virtue out of their domesticity. As if being able to whip up the most divine chocolate fondant or being able to sew a bag for your yoga mat makes you a good person. In fact, I think these people are - how do you say? - assholes.

    Don't get me wrong, I don't hate the domestic arts, obviously. I am not filled with self-reproach simply because I get excited about figuring out how to french hem... but I just don't want to get too self-congratulatory.

    I like the idea of home. I like the idea of home being beautiful. Although I know it was naive and kind of awful, I have a soft spot for the Arts and Crafts movement and William Morris and his whole concept of "have nothing in your home which you do not know to be useful or believe to be beautiful". Sort of like the whole Slow Food movement today, the Arts and Crafts movement was supposed to be about preserving the goodness of simple things, valuing something other than novelty or status - but sadly, in the end all either movement really amounts to is an affectation to which most people cannot afford to subscribe. And yet, and yet - the original intention wasn't so bad. It's just that in a mechanized age, "organic" and "homespun" and "handcrafted" have come to mean "unnecessarily expensive," whether that be in terms of dollars or time.

    I don't know, but it seems to me that there ought to be some sort of middle-ground between - for example - the elitist snobbery (not to mention inhuman tastefulness) of Martha Stewart and the stark despairing ugliness of a Soviet-era apartment block. I mean, these are two quite distant poles of a spectrum. It should be possible to believe in beauty in a way that lends dignity to human domesticity, without going overboard. I should be able to enjoy mucking about in my apartment, trying to be creative and make things attractive, without it having to be either crass or obsessive.

    I guess what I'm trying to say is that there is a point where domesticity can become indulgent and even wasteful (this is the person with the throw pillows talking), but it doesn't have to be. Like anything, it has to serve a higher purpose. Like, it's good to want to salvage materials and find creative new uses for them, but it's bad when those creative new uses are so stupid that they just generate more waste. Like it's fine to want to shop organic, but not when you drive all the way across town to buy your groceries. I think there is a valid case to be made that many traditional domestic arts make efficient use of materials and produce things of greater quality than are available commercially. But when it gets out of control, it just degenerates into frivolity. Frivolity disguised as practicality. It's gross.

    So I don't want to be a domestic goddess, and I don't want to wander around in a smug little bubble, content that I am saving the world one silk-screened hand-sewn skirt or four-dollar organic red pepper at a time. I don't think knowing what a bisque is makes you a better person. Women who obsessively knit and crochet and think it is a feminist statement are in my opinion sadly deluding themselves. But at the same time - it's ok to care about stuff. It's ok to want things to mean something, and to want them to be produced in a thoughtful manner, and to want them to be pretty, dammit.

    So those are my thoughts on that.