Mega Victorian Meta part 1
Or why I set my legacy during the years 1837-1901.
(Alright strictly speaking that should be 1865-1901 since I'm not referencing the earlier part of the period, but hey).
The secret about me, my legacy and PB this week over atsimsecret got me thinking, mainly because the secretmaker's stupid was showing with regards to their perception of both the era and me. All of you who have spoken to me about the era know that I am fascinated by it and the people, but I have never really put down or said why I find it fascinating. I'm about to remedy that.
My original idea was to do one meta on the subject, but as I was writing it, it became apparent that I have far too much to say if I want to talk about what was happening, why if fascinates me and how it relates to what I do in my legacy. With that in mind, you are going to get a whole series of them, each one looking at just one theme. The posts will be kinda a cross between my thoughts and a full reply to the secret. Take from them what you want, oh and I warn you that they will more than likely become flaily at some point as I get caught up in my enthusiasm for the subject.
As you all know I am a very modern girl, with modern sensibilities. I much prefer to listen to heavy metal than Mozart, and the wit of Pratchett to the wit of Austen (I know, shocking). There is no other time period I would want to live in, but I adore history and learning about how people in the past lived.
My favourite modern era is the Victorian one. It was a time of huge social and technological changes, the two often intertwined as one drove the other. It was a time of new ideas, and those ideas would collide with existing ones to create other ideas and it was dynamic and exciting and dominated by an entirely new section of society: the middle classes. Before the industrial revolution there were two main sections in society, the landed gentry and aristocracy (ie the upper classes) and the labouring population (the working or lower classes). There were levels in these two sections, eg unskilled workers and artisans to name two, but society could be broadly divided into two. With the advent of the industrial revolution a whole new breed of society emerged: factory owners. These were men from the lower classes who had become rich through their endeavours thus elevating themselves above the working classes but didn't belong in the upper classes either. They tried (and succeeded) to assert their dominance onto society, and by doing so created the hypocrisy that fascinates me so much about the era.
The first thing to say about them is that they were so successful with asserting this dominance and ideals on society at the time that we still think of the Victorian era in these terms. Our view of Victorians as being very religious and prudish, and doing things in just the right way comes directly from the middle classes. I find this amazing: we define the era by the ideals they came up with, and yet a century before this class didn't even exist! Here's the thing too, society wasn't really like that, and the middle classes views were so extreme at times that they were verging on the ridiculous. This disparity is one of the things which just fascinates me.
Take sex for example. We Brits are, and always have been a very bawdy lot. Not only do we enjoy sex, we also find humour in it, and, up until the Victorian era, were very open about it.
The Victorian middle classes sought to change this previously free attitude. They tried to make sex something to be ashamed of and they relegated it to an animalistic instinct: male urges which could not be controlled. It became something which women had to endure as part of married life and the phrase "lie back and think of England" springs to mind, although its origins are often quoted as being slightly later.
Today this is the overriding attitude we think of when we think about the Victorians and sex, but the other social classes continued to think about, and accept sex and sexuality in much freer terms.
You can see this disparity between what the middle classes wanted everyone to believe and what was occurring in various ways. For example the era saw, thanks in part perhaps to the technological advances which improved photography and printing, and made them easier and cheaper to produce, an increase in pornography, both written and visual. All I can say is that there must have been a market for it. Linked to this you also had the increase in popularity of "What the Butler Saw" machines from the mid 1890s. These are known as Mutoscopes in America, and "What the Butler Saw" was the name of a soft-porn feature that could be viewed in the machine. The fact that we Brits still call them What the Butler Saw machines after this one reel, says a lot to me. The reels in them ran the gamut from risqué to soft porn and yet they were commonly found on the pleasure piers at the seaside, places of family entertainment. Such material being available in the open in such places jars slightly with the prudish image we have.
You can't talk about sex and the Victorians without mentioning prostitution. It is commonly claimed that there were more prostitutes living and working in London during Victoria's reign than at any time before. It was known as the whorehouse of the world and it is claimed that it was possible for every man in the city to visit a different prostitute each night. Figures I've seen claim anything from 8,000 to 50,000, girls working as prostitutes so it's tough to know how accurate this is. Regardless given the fact that the middle classes held the belief that women became prostitutes because they and their clients were morally depraved and the girls should be earning a living working in a factory or other honest profession, that is a lot of morally corrupt women and men. The truth of the matter is more likely to be that extreme poverty forced women to make money how they could, and if that meant selling their body, that's what they did. This point is one made by George Bernard Shaw in "Mrs Warren's Profession" part of his "Plays Unpleasant" collection, the collection is so called because GBS aimed to hold a mirror up to nature and show society of the time how ridiculous their notions were.
Even something as innocuous as women's clothing had sexual overtones. Women covered up from neck to toe, and it was considered scandalous to show an ankle in male company, yet clothing was designed to draw attention to a women's figure, one might even say it distorted it into unrealistic proportions, making a woman all boobs, waist and bum. (I did also once read a short paper where the author was arguing that one function of the bustle was to draw men's eyes to the bum, thus promoting anal sex and helping to control the population). I'm going to talk a bit more about the very stylised shape clothes gave women in a future meta, so I'll leave it here.
All of this goes to show to me, that despite their protests the Victorian middle classes were obsessed with sex, and their prudish attitude was a veneer showing what they thought was right, whilst reality continued unabated beneath it, the other classes having much more relaxed attitudes towards sex. It's this dichotomy found throughout the era that fascinates me.
Oh and the idea that table legs were covered because they could be perceived as sexual in someway? In my opinion this is total bollocks. It seems to me that they were covered for two reasons and two reasons only: decoration and protection. Victorian houses were filthy, with coal fires, candles, oil lamps and gas lights all creating dirt and residues. Covering tables, mantelpieces and other objects protected the furniture and kept it clean. It also stopped day light from fading the wood, although curtains were often drawn in rooms with expensive carpets because the dyes in them could also fade. Writers such as Mrs Panton were also of the opinion that a nicely draped table was more aesthetically pleasing than the bare wood frame.
So that's a little bit about the attitudes of the Victorians towards sex, and some of the reality, but how do I use this with my sims? Let's start by looking at everyone's favourite legacy couple, William and Beth. To me William and Beth represent, in a very small way, the stuffy middle class attitude and the freer attitudes of the other classes. Right at the start of the marriage I made the point that Beth was upset at the thought that her husband did not desire her sexually, but it had never crossed William's mind that Beth would even be interested in woohoo, and thus had neglected to inform her about the strict family values handicap. William is behaving very typically here by thinking that sex is something that Beth will have to endure, not realising that she craved such intimacy with him. In their relationship (as well as A&A's) woohoo is the physical manifestation of their feelings for each other. In game Beth actually rolls the want to wohoo a lot. The other day she rolled the want to buy a tent. I thought that this would be lovely for the boys to play in as they got older. As soon as I had bought it, she rolled the want to woohoo in it.
I again used the two of them representing different attitudes when Alexandra revealed she was pregnant. We had Beth with her freer attitude understanding why Alexandra acted as she had, and William behaving as if she had shamed the family and was wilfully stupid.
Moving onto their eldest daughter, I've always thought of Alexandra as being very sexual, even though I can't put my finger on why. That is one reason why I found it very easy to think of her sleeping with Joe before the wedding. There's also a little bit of the male urges idea in this situation, with Joe wanting to bed her, and the freer idea of Alexandra going to that bed willingly because she thought he loved her.
The relationship Alexandra has with Anthony is certainly very physical, and if you may recall I had her initiate the first time they had sex. This is partly due to the fact that Anthony would never have taken that initiative because he wanted her to share his bed through love not matrimonial commitment, and partly because of that sexuality I see in Alexandra. Gosh these sims really don't follow the middle class attitude at all do they? Maybe it's because Anthony is actually an honourable and therefore is a member of the upper classes thus Alexandra is too?
Finally no discussion about my sims and sex is complete without talking about my red-headed lothario Stanley. On the face of it Stanley is the poster child for the male urges attitude of the middle classes. He has never met a woman he didn’t want to bed, and is open about his intentions with them. He can get away with sleeping with all those women, his reputation in tact, whereas a female would be reviled. I know that there are readers of mine who don’t like him because of this, and yet, is Stanley really like that?
To me the answer is no. Stanley has so much love to give, plutonic, familial and erotic, he can't help but want to give that love to as many people as possible. I've said before he loves the chase, and he does: the thrill of falling for those women, and the thrill of seeing if they will fall for him. He falls in love easily, he makes every woman he is with feel like the only woman in the world, and he wants to show her that. Also subtly isn't necessarily his strong point, which is why his intentions are so clear. He is a microcosm of the Victorian attitudes towards sex: seemingly uncontrollable urges on the surface, but beneath that there is so much more going on. He loves and he loves deeply; woohoo is the ultimate expression of that love. Sure he's cocky and an arse at times, but you'll notice that he doesn't openly brag about his conquests. He responds honestly when asked, normally by Eddie and Theo. In fact Theo and Eddie are the only two he really discusses his relationships with, and that is due to how close they are.
I'm going to end this by saying a little bit about the strict family values handicap. This was a last minute decision of mine to try for it, and I decided to try it only for the point I'd get. You see I'd intended to make my sims try for a baby only to simulate the fact that contraception was still in its infancy and that it wasn't necessarily all that effective. It was only when I reread the rules and found the handicap list that I realised that I could get a point for it. It would mean that all my heirs would have to be faithful and that there would be no shotgun weddings, but I thought it was worth it. I still stand by that although part of me, now that I've moved to the point where I am telling a story, wishes I could write plots involving illiegitimate children of the heir. Nevermind, I'm happy playing the game as I do.
I think that I'll leave this here for now: I've already written enough. As I say I will be writing more of these, but I have an overdue out-takes post and some comments to catch up with. I also have some playing to do, so the next one might not be up for a bit. I hope that you enjoyed me going on though and that it has given you a bit more insight into the sort of things I think about when writing my legacy.
(Alright strictly speaking that should be 1865-1901 since I'm not referencing the earlier part of the period, but hey).
The secret about me, my legacy and PB this week over atsimsecret got me thinking, mainly because the secretmaker's stupid was showing with regards to their perception of both the era and me. All of you who have spoken to me about the era know that I am fascinated by it and the people, but I have never really put down or said why I find it fascinating. I'm about to remedy that.
My original idea was to do one meta on the subject, but as I was writing it, it became apparent that I have far too much to say if I want to talk about what was happening, why if fascinates me and how it relates to what I do in my legacy. With that in mind, you are going to get a whole series of them, each one looking at just one theme. The posts will be kinda a cross between my thoughts and a full reply to the secret. Take from them what you want, oh and I warn you that they will more than likely become flaily at some point as I get caught up in my enthusiasm for the subject.
As you all know I am a very modern girl, with modern sensibilities. I much prefer to listen to heavy metal than Mozart, and the wit of Pratchett to the wit of Austen (I know, shocking). There is no other time period I would want to live in, but I adore history and learning about how people in the past lived.
My favourite modern era is the Victorian one. It was a time of huge social and technological changes, the two often intertwined as one drove the other. It was a time of new ideas, and those ideas would collide with existing ones to create other ideas and it was dynamic and exciting and dominated by an entirely new section of society: the middle classes. Before the industrial revolution there were two main sections in society, the landed gentry and aristocracy (ie the upper classes) and the labouring population (the working or lower classes). There were levels in these two sections, eg unskilled workers and artisans to name two, but society could be broadly divided into two. With the advent of the industrial revolution a whole new breed of society emerged: factory owners. These were men from the lower classes who had become rich through their endeavours thus elevating themselves above the working classes but didn't belong in the upper classes either. They tried (and succeeded) to assert their dominance onto society, and by doing so created the hypocrisy that fascinates me so much about the era.
The first thing to say about them is that they were so successful with asserting this dominance and ideals on society at the time that we still think of the Victorian era in these terms. Our view of Victorians as being very religious and prudish, and doing things in just the right way comes directly from the middle classes. I find this amazing: we define the era by the ideals they came up with, and yet a century before this class didn't even exist! Here's the thing too, society wasn't really like that, and the middle classes views were so extreme at times that they were verging on the ridiculous. This disparity is one of the things which just fascinates me.
Take sex for example. We Brits are, and always have been a very bawdy lot. Not only do we enjoy sex, we also find humour in it, and, up until the Victorian era, were very open about it.
The Victorian middle classes sought to change this previously free attitude. They tried to make sex something to be ashamed of and they relegated it to an animalistic instinct: male urges which could not be controlled. It became something which women had to endure as part of married life and the phrase "lie back and think of England" springs to mind, although its origins are often quoted as being slightly later.
Today this is the overriding attitude we think of when we think about the Victorians and sex, but the other social classes continued to think about, and accept sex and sexuality in much freer terms.
You can see this disparity between what the middle classes wanted everyone to believe and what was occurring in various ways. For example the era saw, thanks in part perhaps to the technological advances which improved photography and printing, and made them easier and cheaper to produce, an increase in pornography, both written and visual. All I can say is that there must have been a market for it. Linked to this you also had the increase in popularity of "What the Butler Saw" machines from the mid 1890s. These are known as Mutoscopes in America, and "What the Butler Saw" was the name of a soft-porn feature that could be viewed in the machine. The fact that we Brits still call them What the Butler Saw machines after this one reel, says a lot to me. The reels in them ran the gamut from risqué to soft porn and yet they were commonly found on the pleasure piers at the seaside, places of family entertainment. Such material being available in the open in such places jars slightly with the prudish image we have.
You can't talk about sex and the Victorians without mentioning prostitution. It is commonly claimed that there were more prostitutes living and working in London during Victoria's reign than at any time before. It was known as the whorehouse of the world and it is claimed that it was possible for every man in the city to visit a different prostitute each night. Figures I've seen claim anything from 8,000 to 50,000, girls working as prostitutes so it's tough to know how accurate this is. Regardless given the fact that the middle classes held the belief that women became prostitutes because they and their clients were morally depraved and the girls should be earning a living working in a factory or other honest profession, that is a lot of morally corrupt women and men. The truth of the matter is more likely to be that extreme poverty forced women to make money how they could, and if that meant selling their body, that's what they did. This point is one made by George Bernard Shaw in "Mrs Warren's Profession" part of his "Plays Unpleasant" collection, the collection is so called because GBS aimed to hold a mirror up to nature and show society of the time how ridiculous their notions were.
Even something as innocuous as women's clothing had sexual overtones. Women covered up from neck to toe, and it was considered scandalous to show an ankle in male company, yet clothing was designed to draw attention to a women's figure, one might even say it distorted it into unrealistic proportions, making a woman all boobs, waist and bum. (I did also once read a short paper where the author was arguing that one function of the bustle was to draw men's eyes to the bum, thus promoting anal sex and helping to control the population). I'm going to talk a bit more about the very stylised shape clothes gave women in a future meta, so I'll leave it here.
All of this goes to show to me, that despite their protests the Victorian middle classes were obsessed with sex, and their prudish attitude was a veneer showing what they thought was right, whilst reality continued unabated beneath it, the other classes having much more relaxed attitudes towards sex. It's this dichotomy found throughout the era that fascinates me.
Oh and the idea that table legs were covered because they could be perceived as sexual in someway? In my opinion this is total bollocks. It seems to me that they were covered for two reasons and two reasons only: decoration and protection. Victorian houses were filthy, with coal fires, candles, oil lamps and gas lights all creating dirt and residues. Covering tables, mantelpieces and other objects protected the furniture and kept it clean. It also stopped day light from fading the wood, although curtains were often drawn in rooms with expensive carpets because the dyes in them could also fade. Writers such as Mrs Panton were also of the opinion that a nicely draped table was more aesthetically pleasing than the bare wood frame.
So that's a little bit about the attitudes of the Victorians towards sex, and some of the reality, but how do I use this with my sims? Let's start by looking at everyone's favourite legacy couple, William and Beth. To me William and Beth represent, in a very small way, the stuffy middle class attitude and the freer attitudes of the other classes. Right at the start of the marriage I made the point that Beth was upset at the thought that her husband did not desire her sexually, but it had never crossed William's mind that Beth would even be interested in woohoo, and thus had neglected to inform her about the strict family values handicap. William is behaving very typically here by thinking that sex is something that Beth will have to endure, not realising that she craved such intimacy with him. In their relationship (as well as A&A's) woohoo is the physical manifestation of their feelings for each other. In game Beth actually rolls the want to wohoo a lot. The other day she rolled the want to buy a tent. I thought that this would be lovely for the boys to play in as they got older. As soon as I had bought it, she rolled the want to woohoo in it.
I again used the two of them representing different attitudes when Alexandra revealed she was pregnant. We had Beth with her freer attitude understanding why Alexandra acted as she had, and William behaving as if she had shamed the family and was wilfully stupid.
Moving onto their eldest daughter, I've always thought of Alexandra as being very sexual, even though I can't put my finger on why. That is one reason why I found it very easy to think of her sleeping with Joe before the wedding. There's also a little bit of the male urges idea in this situation, with Joe wanting to bed her, and the freer idea of Alexandra going to that bed willingly because she thought he loved her.
The relationship Alexandra has with Anthony is certainly very physical, and if you may recall I had her initiate the first time they had sex. This is partly due to the fact that Anthony would never have taken that initiative because he wanted her to share his bed through love not matrimonial commitment, and partly because of that sexuality I see in Alexandra. Gosh these sims really don't follow the middle class attitude at all do they? Maybe it's because Anthony is actually an honourable and therefore is a member of the upper classes thus Alexandra is too?
Finally no discussion about my sims and sex is complete without talking about my red-headed lothario Stanley. On the face of it Stanley is the poster child for the male urges attitude of the middle classes. He has never met a woman he didn’t want to bed, and is open about his intentions with them. He can get away with sleeping with all those women, his reputation in tact, whereas a female would be reviled. I know that there are readers of mine who don’t like him because of this, and yet, is Stanley really like that?
To me the answer is no. Stanley has so much love to give, plutonic, familial and erotic, he can't help but want to give that love to as many people as possible. I've said before he loves the chase, and he does: the thrill of falling for those women, and the thrill of seeing if they will fall for him. He falls in love easily, he makes every woman he is with feel like the only woman in the world, and he wants to show her that. Also subtly isn't necessarily his strong point, which is why his intentions are so clear. He is a microcosm of the Victorian attitudes towards sex: seemingly uncontrollable urges on the surface, but beneath that there is so much more going on. He loves and he loves deeply; woohoo is the ultimate expression of that love. Sure he's cocky and an arse at times, but you'll notice that he doesn't openly brag about his conquests. He responds honestly when asked, normally by Eddie and Theo. In fact Theo and Eddie are the only two he really discusses his relationships with, and that is due to how close they are.
I'm going to end this by saying a little bit about the strict family values handicap. This was a last minute decision of mine to try for it, and I decided to try it only for the point I'd get. You see I'd intended to make my sims try for a baby only to simulate the fact that contraception was still in its infancy and that it wasn't necessarily all that effective. It was only when I reread the rules and found the handicap list that I realised that I could get a point for it. It would mean that all my heirs would have to be faithful and that there would be no shotgun weddings, but I thought it was worth it. I still stand by that although part of me, now that I've moved to the point where I am telling a story, wishes I could write plots involving illiegitimate children of the heir. Nevermind, I'm happy playing the game as I do.
I think that I'll leave this here for now: I've already written enough. As I say I will be writing more of these, but I have an overdue out-takes post and some comments to catch up with. I also have some playing to do, so the next one might not be up for a bit. I hope that you enjoyed me going on though and that it has given you a bit more insight into the sort of things I think about when writing my legacy.