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welcome to Aristasia, the Feminine Empire

20:42 / 31.01.02

Aristasia
help me out, 'lithers, has any one encountered this site/zone/phenomenon? Or, indeed, any of the Aristasians? haven't finished going through it myself yet, but a stranger (a Brunette) is emailing me in connection with it and its ringing tinkly alarm bells - if anyone still has very early issues of Diva I'm sure there was an article in it about its dodginess vis-a-vis race esp.

04:08 / 01.02.02

Appears to be lesbian subculture organization...communitarian principles, "safe" communal space for women. Listed briefly on a few lesbian community sites, sappho.com, gaysearch, but no real details...repeated keyword emphasis on safe, open, and no men.

this guy mentions them briefly as part of a larger trend of traditionalism on the web: http://www.aucegypt.edu/faculty_staff/faculty_pages/sedgwick/trad/index.html

also, their home site: www.aristasia.org
which doesn't have a lot more than the one you posted

yahoo! search brought up lots of makers of vintage clothing: corsets, axfords, real 50s-style nylons.
also quite a few links to b/d fiction, spanking mostly.
and for some reason bits and pieces on Lippanzaner horses...weird....

Couldn't find any explicit references to race problems...but couldn't dig up Diva reference on web....

This site seems to be a community: http://www.geocities.com/Wellesley/Veranda/7780/
more general info here: http://belladonna.org/belladonna.html

Hope this helps.

04:12 / 01.02.02

The millenarian thing gives me the heeby-jeebies though...and the stuff about "The Pit" and whatnot...eesh.

And referring to non-Aristasians as "bongos" sounds far too Harry Potter.

Haus about we all give each other a big lovely huggle?

10:06 / 01.02.02

(First up, not sure if there is a place for a man, or at least something fairly man-looking, to be commenting on a female space in this manner; I acknowledge this may be undesirable but hopefully justified)

I have heard about Aristasia before, but in a fairly vague way, much like yourself, Blue, and with some of the same concerns expressed.

Phrases like "what is sound on Aristasia is usually the opposite of what is "politically correct in the Pit" disturb me, along with the fact that in Artistasian terminology everything went wroing with the "Hippies" - that political activism, free love, the civil rights movements &c are all examples of the total abandonment of sanity.

(Plus, why would you raze a city and sow its foundatiuons with salt? So they couldn't grow any new buildings)

Oh, and the fact that their are "mysterious lands to the East", populated by starnge unknowable peoples smacks of Orientalism.

One interesting approach to the question may be - let's assume hypothetically a lesbian BDSM fictiverse constructed along similar lines and involvinjg fierce racial segregation, non-white women being made to feel profoundly unwelcome "within the game", and so forth. Is this excusable on the grounds that it is a transgressive fictiverse?

(i.e. the individuals who gather together to participate in the fictiverse are not "out of game" racist, but the structure of the fictitious society they inhabit is. Could you have people playing rebels and acticists, or is there a tacit acceptance of the terms of the ethics of the game world within the game?)

No star here laces

10:49 / 01.02.02

That would be a fair point, Haus.

However in this case, one feels that these people believe very strongly that Aristasia is 'better' than the real world.

They also say "submission is a spiritual quality" and:

quote:Those unfamiliar with the Aristasian mind might fancy that they detect here a trace of the dogma of "social conditioning" so dear to the doctrinaire masculinists of your post-Eclipse.—The dogma, that is, that there are no real mental or psychological differences between the sexes (women being but men in differently-shaped bodies) and that everything we know by the name of femininity is only "social conditioning" forced upon women by men. It is a curious dogma, especially in view of the fact that the copious scientific research conducted in recent years in your world shows incontestably that the mental and psychological differences between men and women are inborn, ineradicable and if anything more wide-ranging than even the Victorians imagined. However, your post-Eclipse world never allows scientific facts to interfere with its official social mythologies.

A viewpoint which has been roundly castigated on this board several times...

16:15 / 01.02.02

I think that you guys maybe have taken this a bit more literally and seriously than the Aristarians themselves.

Less searchable M0rd4nt

17:50 / 01.02.02

Hey, I used to know a lass who was into this lot. Far as I could work out, there were about 3 of them and a part-timer living in a suburban house. Basically they like to pretend that men don't exist and the world stopped in the 50's. Very into cucumber sandwiches, dressing up like maids, listening to the Ovalteenies, and whupping with paddles. (Not in an S&M context tho'. Definately not. How could you even think such a thing?)

I belive they originally started out in Ireland, but did a runner after someone they'd non-consensually paddled complained to the police. Not sure how big the group is now.

Thier literature (novels and what-not set in Aristasia) turns up at fetish fairs and sometimes in adult bookshops, etc.

[ 01-02-2002: Message edited by: Mordant C@rnival ]

12:54 / 03.02.02

Oh God yes, I remember them! They ran a sort of quasi-SM 1950s School for Girls, didn't they? I remember the Irish incarnation because - ah nostalgia! - I was very into text-only adventure games for the Spectrum computer, and they'd produced a (quite good) Quill-written games called 'The Secret of St Brides'. The tongue-in-cheek nature of the game itself (escape from detention in Irish girls' school, investigate subterranean caverns, etc.) suggested they were able to poke fun at themselves - but when I read about them subsequently in 'Skin Two', it all seemed a little more... well, serious...

19:37 / 05.02.02

hey, thanks, sorry to take so long to get back to my virtual life here...
Infinite monkeys, did you check out their vocab page - 'silly monkeys' entry? Thought you might be some variant? I ask since I find myself, unsurprisingly perhaps, inscribed within Aristasia as abluestocking,i.e. a 'smart girl who likes to read'. I couldnt find any explicit statements about race - though 'blondes and brunettes' tends to summon up whiteness and all the images I saw were of white girls. Cannot find my old Divas! I am sure there was something specifically anti-semitic. And yeah, the traditionalists are not quite in the same boat as say, the St-Simonians.
no problems at all with your entry, haus, as it were, why pick the 60's? because genders became more visibly blurred thereafter, hence more difficult to ban 'men'? and yes you pinpoint a kind of unanswerable question in s/m's theatres, how one defines the game, knows when something only means 'x' when played *here* etc
It is odd on the sites - it does leap very suddenly from jolly naice gels to spanking 'em - but seemingly w/out any other sexual ends. Any more details on the paddling Mordance?

The Sinister Haiku Bureau

20:22 / 05.02.02

What I found most interesting was that, although all-women, they felt the need to maintain some sense of duality in their relationships (ie blonde/brunette). Would two blondes or two brunettes together be considered queer in their culture?

Less searchable M0rd4nt

20:31 / 05.02.02

quote:Originally posted by out of the bluestocking:
Any more details on the paddling Mordant?

Well, I didn't enquire too closely, but as far as I could make out it was literal corporal punishment, doled out for failing to perform one's "duties"- six of the best for not doing the laundry, that sort of thing. Not terribly harsh, and definately not supposed to be any kind of a turn-on.

Oh, and I think the paddle was something like a ping-pong bat.

[ 05-02-2002: Message edited by: Mordant C@rnival ]