Lady Lydia wants a booth at career day

[Hane]

Re the career of homemaking:. In no other career is a woman made to be 100% financially dependent on her sexual partner. To do it, you have to find a guy willing to buy in. This not an easy thing for many women.

I'm reminded of an Onion article titled something like "Area woman the long-term beneficiary of sex-for-money scheme." In sensationalistic language, the article told about a woman who was receiving complete financial support from a man in return for a two-decades-long exclusive sexual relationship. Her duties included cleaning the house  , doing laundry, and cooking, and she was compensated with shelter, clothes, food, medical care, a vehicle, and spending money. Shockingly, the woman gave birth to several children by the man.

 

[Sobeknofret]

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I do not know what has happened to our generational humor and our sense of irony and wit. It was a delight and a relief to enjoy this little humorous exchange with strangers. Do people still get a good chuckle from such friendly banter?

As God is my witness, I have no idea what to say to this. YES! Of course! You're in your late 50's, for fecks sake, not 93! This is the kind of stuff that happens every day. Know how I know? I.Leave.My.House.And.Do.Stuff. despite your theories that every woman is a fragile flower who wilts outside of their homes.

[Mercer]

Do people still get a good chuckle from such friendly banter?

No, Lydia, no one laughs anymore.  Does she even go outside?

I mean, to be fair, that particular conversation was 1.) not actually funny, and 2.) pretty crass and rude making fun of people with mental health concerns.

In general, though, I'm pretty sure friendly banter is always going to be a thing among human beings. 

 

[alba]

Yes, Lydia, people still laugh and banter. As a society, however, we're starting to learn it's cruel, not funny, to mock mental illness.

Honestly, though, I suspect that might be her point. The whole thing came across to me as a rather veiled riff on the "Political correctness means I can't tell jokes anymore, because all my favourite jokes are ableist/sexist/racist/homophobic" theme.

[formergothardite]

In this video Lydia bitches about homeschooling parents saying "No you can't come over in the middle of the day, we are doing school work." Lydia advises grandparents who hear this to disregard the wishes of their child and show up anyway. She bemoans how people are making such a "god" out of educating their kids. 

I do agree that you shouldn't neglect the older people in the family, but there is a difference between completely abandoning them and saying "please don't come over during school hours, it is a distraction." She keeps saying grandparents are complaining that they want to come over and the kids say not now, we are teaching,  but I'm wondering if it is her children saying "We can't have a tea party now, mom, we need to do school." 

 

 

[Palimpsest]

On 10/14/2016 at 8:03 PM, Mercer said:

No, Lydia, no one laughs anymore.  Does she even go outside?

I mean, to be fair, that particular conversation was 1.) not actually funny, and 2.) pretty crass and rude making fun of people with mental health concerns.

In general, though, I'm pretty sure friendly banter is always going to be a thing among human beings. 

Did she take this post down?  I can't find it.

23 minutes ago, formergothardite said:

Lydia advises grandparents who hear this to disregard the wishes of their child and show up anyway.

Lydia, it extremely rude to barge into someone's home uninvited.  It is even ruder when you have been specifically dis-invited!  And she sniffs almost as much as Trump in that video.

She's also getting kickbacks from Walmart for all those ads for Waverley fabric.

[Mercer]

Re: Keeping Children's Education in [Its] Place:

Not really getting the logic of that video. If the parents made the opposite choice, would they be making a "god" of grandparent visits? Not every prioritization of time is making a "god" of that activity. The majority of the time, it's just parents making the choices they feel are best for their kids.

Children need routine, including homeschooled children. They will do much better with some sort of structure to their days and weeks, not just a free for all when a guest could show up or something unexpected could happen at any moment. Obviously some flexibility is required, but I think parents are making the right choice when they say that in general - barring special circumstances - school time isn't visit time. Having things like school time that they can count on helps kids feel secure.

It sounds like Lydia is just bored, but she needs to find something more productive to do with her time than drop in to disrupt her grandchildren's school time.

[mango_fandango]

God, I'd hate someone turning up unannounced, even if I wasn't doing anything specific. If someone turned up during my kids' homeschool hours (not that I even have kids, and I'd never homeschool) I'd be seriously pissed off.

Shut up Lydia.

[Mercer]

9 minutes ago, Palimpsest said:

Did she take this post down?  I can't find it.

No, it's still there. It's dated October 13th and titled "This Will Amuse You." (Spoiler alert: It didn't amuse me.)

[Palimpsest]

@Mercer, many thanks.  I hadn't scrolled far enough back.  No, it isn't funny.

[AmazonGrace]

Well I'm sure most grandparents are going to be most welcome during the school hours if they're able and willing to chip in and help with the homeschooling. If they're martyrs for attention and bitch because the children's needs are a priority then maybe it's not just the homeschooling that is the problem. 

Don't let a future spouse to put a wedge between your parents? I thought you were supposed to cleave and leave 

[formergothardite]

In this video Lydia discusses the Christian feminists who send their wives to work long hours on a computer. She doesn't seem to realize that women might not be forced to go work and will choose it. She then tells us about the nature of a woman. A woman's heart is very distracted and can be pulled away, but she is very loyal to whatever it is that she does. 

Lydia then goes off on a bit of an odd rant about Proverbs 31. I've never heard anyone translate those verses like Lydia. According to her "she seeketh wool and flax and worketh wilingly with her hands" means that women should be demanding nice sewing machines and the money to buy expensive material so they can sew whatever they want. 

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she bringeth her food from afar She riseth also while it is yet night, and giveth meat to her household, and a portion to her maidens.

According to Lydia there should be sermons saying "provide your wife with servants so she can function properly." Men should also be giving their wives enough money to only buy the most high quality food.

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She considereth a field, and buyeth it: with the fruit of her hands she planteth a vineyard.

Men should give women money to buy a field so they can sell it and plant a vineyard. 

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 She girdeth her loins with strength, and strengtheneth her arms

Men should make sure that women can have a car and the money to go to exercise. 

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She maketh fine linen, and selleth it; and delivereth girdles unto the merchant.

Since this lady had servants, she could make items and give them to the merchant to sell. She of course, never went to sell them. But there should be sermons about this so that men will not want their women to work. 

Lydia then rambles on about how so many women are worried that they would not be able to make it if something happened to their husband, but they shouldn't  because she doesn't know any godly woman who ended up living under a bridge. She says women are being disenfranchised of everything they have worked for because they are told women can work outside the home. Please let her know what you think, but she disabled comments, so I really don't think she wants to know. 

Can you imagine Lydia meeting Lori? 

 

[VooDooChild]

To Lady Lydia:

NUTS!

 

 

[formergothardite]

@Lydia, could you pop in to explain how the servant thing would work? I'm assuming the servants will be women, so shouldn't employing servants mean that you are making it so women work? 

[AmazonGrace]

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she bringeth her food from afar 

A Proverbs woman eats food that was imported from abroad. Bananas are more godly. 

[Mercer]

For a long time I've suspected that there's a major element of classism as well as sexism in this anti-feminist stuff, but I'm kind of surprised that Lydia is outright admitting that in this video. They don't just want to pretend to be women from the past; they want to pretend to be ladies of the leisure class, which has always been a small minority of the population and is a lifestyle that relies on other people being less fortunate.

Lydia blithely talks about how "women" should have servants, but obviously that can't mean all women - some women have to be the servants. Because she's not imagining herself in the servant position, she doesn't seem to recognize that household employees are also human beings. (For example, saying a husband should "provide" them as if you can purchase household staff at the grocery store.) She seems to be counting on her audience accepting the fact that she's demanding that some women will work outside the home... it just won't be her or her friends, so it doesn't matter. In a world where Lydia's rules applied to everyone, there would be no female servants available because all the women and girls would be in their own homes - so she's admitting here that the "godly" rules don't apply to everyone, only to women of a certain class.

She goes on and on about how the husband should provide this and that, and repeats the phrase "the best quality" a bunch of times, but doesn't address the possibility that not every husband can have a large income. Barring some kind of income redistribution - which I'm sure Lydia is very against - some jobs simply pay more than others, and the lower paying jobs need to exist. (This being the woman who wants servants, after all, she should be well aware of that.) But of course "husbands" doesn't really mean all married men, it means men of a certain class. Other men don't seem to matter, just as other women don't.

I'm baffled that she's claiming "godly" women don't ever end up extremely poor if they follow her advice. I realize she doesn't get out much, but that seems like a weird claim to make. There are plenty of very poor Christian women all over the world. Sure, Lydia soft pedals it a bit by talking about how women may be poor due to other circumstances, but that seems like a pretty illogical cop out; the reasons for poverty are indeed often complex, but one adult in the family being unwilling or considering herself unable to contribute an income stream is not an irrelevant factor in the family's finances even if there are other issues involved.

It's interesting that she just completely skips over the parts of the Bible verses that she doesn't like (such as not eating the bread of idleness) rather than even trying to explain them away.

My surprise is less that Lydia is envisioning herself as the lady of the manor and considers people lower on the socioeconomic ladder as not quite human, but that she's being so open about it and not really trying to hide it.