Aristasia is an all-female society existing primarily in England but with adherents in many other parts of the world, notably the United States. It is also known as the Feminine Empire.
Introduction
Aristasia was founded at Oxford in the 1970s in reaction to what its founders saw as the collapse of cultural values following the 1960s. They called this collapse "the Eclipse", a term that has since been adopted by other writers.
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The cultural Eclipse ... took place in [the] 1960s, leaving all values inverted, replacing the love of beauty with the love of ugliness, the love of order with the love of chaos and giving over all normal human loyalties, decencies and truths to vilification or to mockery. [1]
Aristasians dress in clothes recalling styles from the 1920s to the early 1960s. The stricter ones avoid contact with modern music, television and periodicals, while watching old films and listening to 20s - 60s music, driving classic cars, and so on. They also strive to create art, culture, and dress of their own.
Aristasia
Within the movement, the word Aristasia refers to two different things:
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Aristasia Pura is a fictional world in which men do not exist. Instead, there are two feminine sexes, blonde and brunette (with hair colour being a secondary sexual characteristic).
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Aristasia-in-Telluria is an attempt to create Aristasia in "Telluria" (the real world); that is, an all-feminine counter-culture in response to the perceived death of mainstream Tellurian (Earth) culture.
Aristasia Pura
Aristasia Pura is an empire of seven provinces, which correspond very loosely to real-world temporal eras, mainly those in the Western (and, in particular, British) parts of Earth. For instance, the province of Quirinelle has a culture based loosely on the 1950s, while Trent is based on the 1930s. However, Amazonia represents both the ancient world and "non-Westernised" Asia, because Aristasians believe that non-Westernised Asia preserves a worldview similar to the ancient West. Such a worldview is respected by Aristasians and has far greater influence on the Aristasian West than on its real life counterpart.
Because there was no "Eclipse" in Aristasia Pura, there are no provinces equivalent to the Eclipsed decades (which run from the 1960s to the 2040s), though there is the island of Infraquirinelle, which is a protectorate of Quirinelle representing the acceptable aspects of the 1960s.
Blondes and brunettes
In Aristasia Pura, blondes (always spelt with the "e") and brunettes are two different sexes. Both are feminine, but blondes are "ultra-feminine". They differ biologically and are capable of reproduction. Sexual attraction between the two sexes works in the expected way: blondes are typically attracted to brunettes, and vice versa. However, "homosexual" (i.e. blonde-blonde or brunette-brunette) attraction is not unheard of, and even a heterosexual blonde (i.e. one attracted to brunettes) will tend to have a best blonde-friend. Brunettes tend to see this as non-threatening.
In Aristasia-in-Telluria (the real world), the language of blondes and brunettes as sexes is maintained, but has no actual relation to hair colour, being purely based on personality type. Thus Aristasians tend to institutionalise the stereotypical view of blondeness while dissociating it from physical hair colour. Blondeness for an Aristasian is a choice - yet, she would also argue, it is the way she is - the way she was made.
Aristasians consider blondes impractical and vain. However, it is entirely acceptable for blondes to hold positions of authority, and the intellectuality of blondes is not disputed. Many blonde Aristasians find the concept of blondeness liberating, giving them a way of positively identifying themselves in a world that is generally hostile to ultra-femininity especially in women who prefer women.
Aristasia-in-Telluria
Aristasia-in-Telluria is the name given to the attempt to realise Aristasia on earth. It is a loose-knit organisation consisting of autonomous households of Aristasians (often with just two or three members) which are loosely organised into "Districts".
The concept of "secession", or rejection of the modern, late-patriarchal, world is central to Aristasian thought. They do not, however, reject technology which they use freely, according to the belief that "technical advance does not cause cultural collapse. The coincidence of the two is merely an historical accident."
How "seceded" any Aristasian is, however, is purely a personal choice. Aristasians recognise a number of "concentric circles", ranging from an "outer ring" consisting of women who simply wish to have Aristasia as a minor part of their lives to an "inner circle" of fully committed and seceded Aristasians. There is no pressure to move inwards; rather women are encouraged to find the level of commitment that best suits their particular needs. The innermost circles of Aristasia appear in any case to be "by invitation only".
In the inner circles Aristasians are "bonded" by various relationships - not only the bond between a blonde and a brunette, but bonds of sisterhood and even mother-and-daughter bonds between particular individuals, so that most inner Aristasians are "related", at one or more removes, to each other.
Another feature of Aristasia-in-Telluria is the development of "personae"; many Aristasians have more than one personality, each known by a different name, performing a different function and fully accepted within Aristasia as a different individual. Within the Aristasian hierarchy one may hold a high place and another a low one. Some Aristasians have personae in both sexes (blonde and brunette). Aristasians believe that this allows women to express their various facets.
Many would call Aristasia-in-Telluria an elaborate game, and Aristasians agree with this. However they say that: "schools, corporations, armies, nations are all games. They happen to be bigger and wealthier games than ours. But ours is better." An apparently flippant response that nevertheless sums up the Aristasian philosophy on the matter: one which is ultimately akin to the Hindu doctrine of lila - the universe as Divine "play".
Aristasian organisation is an unusual mixture of looseness and strictness. For a movement renowned for its "discipline", its organisational approach is surprisingly relaxed. This is partly because discipline is based on consensuality. An Aristasian is under discipline because - and only if - she chooses to be; but at the same time the discipline, if she chooses it and to the extent that she chooses it, is very real.
Aristasians would argue that this is a particularly feminine approach to organisation: soft but strong, yielding but steadfast, subtle but secure.
Political alignment
Aristasia has been viewed as a branch of the Guénonian Traditionalist current. (Mark Sedgwick in his history of that school, Against the Modern World, sees Aristasia in this context.) Others have associated it with lesbian separatism. Aristasians assert femininity as the superior principle and strongly attack the "social conditioning" theory which considers femininity a device for the subjugation of women. While Aristasians adduce biological evidence for the actuality and primacy of "conventional femininity", their view of femininity is ultimately metaphysical and spiritual.
Controversies
Aristasia emerged into the public eye in Great Britain in the 1990s with the publication of books like Children of the Void and The Female Disciplinary Manual, and its leading public figure Miss Marianne Martindale (formerly known as Miss Marianne Scarlett, Mari de Colwyn, and Catherine Tyrell) became a minor media personality. To some outsiders, its views on discipline and corporal punishment would seem like the main aspect of Aristasia, but Aristasians would argue that this is a distortion.
As an opponent of conventional feminism and the post-60s world in general, Aristasia has attracted the wrath of the liberal press and a number of criticisms have been made of the movement. It would appear to some to have fascistic undertones. Recently (as of February 2005) the Celtic cross (also known as the cross of Odin) which is used by some white nationalist groups has surreptitiously appeared on their website, becoming visible when the cursor is held over links. (Aristasians have issued a reply to this point on their website. [2]). Their story "A Speech Lesson" [3] condemns "the manipulators of international finance" [this is in fact a misquotation. The phrase used is "international capital"; one frequently employed by Marx, who was himself Jewish] for destroying traditional culture, this sort of phrase has often traditionally been used as coded reference to Jews; however Aristasians have replied claiming that many of them are Jewish, as is Miss Martindale's mother. Miss Martindale has been accused of links with John Tyndall, a former leading figure in the National Front and British National Party, but she has replied that all that happened was that more than ten years ago he wrote to a member of her (large) household in Ireland on matters not concerning politics. Paradoxically, Aristasian theory has also been associated by some critics with Frankfurt School Marxism. Miss Alice Trent, the leading Aristasian theorist, has said that fascism is "an aberration of late-patriarchy", and that fascism and communism are "the deformed offspring of democracy".
In another controversial incident, Miss Martindale was convicted of actual bodily harm by birching another woman. The judge expressed surprise that the woman who brought the case had remained in Miss Martindale's household for eighteen months of her own free will, where consensual corporal discipline was known to be part of the regime. However as Miss Martindale was out of the country (Ireland) and therefore unable to present a defence she was fined a nominal £100.
Some outsiders are not sure how seriously Aristasians take all this themselves - is this all just a form of elaborate sado-masochistic role-playing games? A more subtle critique would be that, although Aristasians present themselves as trying to go back to the 1950s or earlier, they are very much a product of the 1990s and later. Some have argued that that is something contradictory about a lesbian movement condemning the 1960s as the "first decade of the Eclipse", when an important aspect of the abandonment of traditonal values then was the legalisation of male homosexuality in 1967; although this did not directly affect lesbians it did implicitly confer a degree of legitimacy on them. Aristasians would counter that one is not obliged to accept the wholesale abandonment of civilised values as the price of the repeal of a piece of wrongheaded (and relatively recent) legislation.
Despite superficial and sensationalist media coverage — and the often whimsical approach of Aristasians themselves — a serious and thoroughly worked-out philosophy lies behind Aristasia. This is summarised in The Feminine Universe [4] a book which outlines Aristasian thinking on world-history, metaphysics, gender theory, spirituality and many other subjects.
See also
Further reading
- Sedgwick, Mark J. (2004). Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195152972.
External links
Last updated: 08-02-2005 20:32:27
Last updated: 08-18-2005 03:02:24
