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ORIGINAL: sravaka


Hi ranja,

I sincerely hope I gave no offense with my thumb twiddling comment--  I know there are women (and I'm sure men too) for whom what I perceive as stressful and ill-fitting is, as you say, "absolute bliss," and I know too that there's more than a full time job involved in keeping a household running smoothly.  I'm actually quite jealous sometimes.... I wish I had better homemaking skills to bring to the table.  (Working on it, but.... ::sigh::  )

June Cleaver, for the record, was the absurdly perfect mom/wife on "Leave it to Beaver," a 1950s US sitcom.  See posts by Mistress DeVito and Otter below for a taste...

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ORIGINAL: DesFIP

Being older than dirt NZ, my memories are that the men didn't usually look forward to seeing their families and interacting with them. Many of the women I knew when I was a youngin in the 50s and 60s had only high school diplomas if that. The men had the higher degrees yet helping with homework was relegated to the woman despite her lack of ability to do so. The men I knew came home, ate dinner, and watched tv. They didn't seek interaction with their wives and offspring.

They set up relationships with women where the women didn't work, didn't have higher education and then they had nothing in common with these women except to look down on them for lacking those things despite deliberately choosing women who didn't have careers and college educations.

One of these women I had known for over 30 years before I discovered she actually had a brain. If her husband was there, she simpered and played up to him. She played the dumb blonde to the hilt because that's what he demanded. She played that with him alone and in public for their entire married life. She was not allowed to be her authentic self most of her adult life. And that's sad.

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ORIGINAL: DesFIP

Being older than dirt NZ, my memories are that the men didn't usually look forward to seeing their families and interacting with them. Many of the women I knew when I was a youngin in the 50s and 60s had only high school diplomas if that. The men had the higher degrees yet helping with homework was relegated to the woman despite her lack of ability to do so. The men I knew came home, ate dinner, and watched tv. They didn't seek interaction with their wives and offspring.

** To the red part: why would a woman with a high school diploma not have the ability to do homework? She was trained by her mother, aunts, etc. In my background homemaking was brought to perfection: cleanliness is next to godliness.

They set up relationships with women where the women didn't work, didn't have higher education and then they had nothing in common with these women except to look down on them for lacking those things despite deliberately choosing women who didn't have careers and college educations.

One of these women I had known for over 30 years before I discovered she actually had a brain. If her husband was there, she simpered and played up to him. She played the dumb blonde to the hilt because that's what he demanded. She played that with him alone and in public for their entire married life. She was not allowed to be her authentic self most of her adult life. And that's sad.

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ORIGINAL: sravaka


Somewhere, ages ago, I read something that likened a slave to a bonsai tree.  They can be twisted in any manner of ways, some quite thoroughly unnatural-seeming....  but each tree has its own structure and own <cough> limits, points or directions beyond which they cannot be trained to grow, however assuiduously you attempt to make them do so.  The trick, in this metaphor, would be to bring out the possibilities inherent in the individual tree, and to go seek another tree if this one doesn't suit your specific purposes.  That is what I intend when I say no (as a seeker, not an incumbent) to 50s household.

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So maybe TPE could be found in 50's household, if there was a dominant, aware, male, and a submissive, aware, female. The question would then be, how many couples were like that? To idealize the '50's household' as if it only comes in one shape, to me, is not doing justice to reality. And again, it seems that people are going to adjust their lives to a 'label', an 'idea', in the hope of being respected in BDSM circles. To me this is useless.  

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ORIGINAL: sravaka

In the recent "let's see if this will work" situation I alluded to here and have written a bit about elsewhere, the way this played out over the course of a week is that I sat home all day, all alone, in a godforsaken suburb, partly doing things for work and partly tidying up, preparing dinner, generally being domestic.  He came home, consumed the dinner with me (that part was nice enough), and then retired to watch tv, play on his computer, etc.  Lather, rinse, repeat.  I imagined this stretching out into the future ad nauseum and could not help envisioning throwing myself under a bus.  The net effect was that I felt lonelier there with him than I would have felt doing exactly the same combination of work + domestic stuff in my own home, with no one else around.  I certainly didn't feel "enslaved" (though I might have felt potentially obedient or pleasing.)

There were other things that were probably wrong with that connection.... but I came to recognize that in his view (which was billed as TPE long before the fact that "50s HH" appealed to him), a woman enslaves herself.  His role is pretty much just to sit back and be served. 

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ORIGINAL: allthatjaz

I do understand what your saying happylittlepet. Trying to fit into a label is a little difficult for me to comprehend but thats probably because I have never done it.
All and every kind of lifestyle on these boards could be perceived as a label. 50s style living is really no different.
'Stephen just asked me one day 'what do you think about 50s lifestyle?' and I answered 'well I think it pretty much sums up a lot of our lifestyle'.
He works hard and I look after him. He makes the rules and remains consistent within those rules and I follow them because I happen to think his rules are productive and never unreasonable. We don't have a tv (our choice) and I have to budget carefully because we don't have a lot of money.
He is not a miserable old git that gets home from work and demands his dinner on the table. He gets home from work with a big smile on his face because he's coming home to me and I equally feel a rush of happiness every time he walks through our door.
My perception of 50s lifestyle is my grandparents who lived a blissfully happy life but never came out of the 50s. Our lifestyle just simply evolved and the nearest thing we relate it to is 50s style. Thats not to say we don't party and we fit in with modern living too when we need to.

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ORIGINAL: happylittlepet

** To the red part: why would a woman with a high school diploma not have the ability to do homework? She was trained by her mother, aunts, etc. In my background homemaking was brought to perfection: cleanliness is next to godliness.

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ORIGINAL: sravaka

This is somewhat inspired by, though not really relevant to, the "what is vanilla" thread, which I just read with great interest.

Historical background:  I've been bouncing around in BDSMland for about 12 years.  I started out on usenet (does anyone here remember usenet? [feeling elderly]), already in its latter days by then, I guess, and 12 years ago the place for these things on usenet was soc.subculture.bondage-bdsm, the successor group to alt.sex.bondage, which had by then been abandoned to spam.  There were other places for perverts to congregate, I'm sure, but this was distinctive as far as I could tell for being a serious discussion forum, where other places were more about chatrooms and socializing.

Circa 1999 there had come to be enough noisy conflict on s.s.b-b between TPE types (I believe the term TPE was coined on alt.sex. bondage, actually?) and everyone else that M/s people formed their own usenet group.  Before long this too was overrun by spam and everyone fled again to various more manageable yahoo-type-groups, (before pervy yahoo groups became unfindable-- there were also other group hosting sites at that time which yahoo later acquired), a particularly notorious one of which was run by Jon Jacobs... another of which was spun off from there and became Internal Enslavement...   and so on and so forth.  I wasn't taking notes at the time, so I can't be trusted to reproduce the details accurately. 

During the years when I was reading this stuff devotedly (maybe 99-02) I remember precisely One Guy, out of gajillions of TPE-inclined guys (and girls) whose stuff I read, who identified as a devotee of "50s household."   Somehow, for all those people, even though they were overwhelmingly maledom/femsub, given the way those particular groups had defined themselves, only this One Guy was defining his relationship as a fulfillment of traditional gender roles.  (I leave aside here a couple of Goreans who also used to frequent these venues, only because while they were clearly interested in traditional roles, they were (obviously) not in the least rooting them in the 1950s.)  Everyone else was defining things in terms of essentially subly/slave-y nature vs. masterly nature, plus all the other usual stuff that comes up when TPE is discussed.

Now, by contrast...  I perceive that some (to me) weird convergence has happened, whereby some proportion of seekers (and doers?  I'm less sure about that) conflate TPE and 50s household.  I recently listed 50s hh as a hard limit in my profile (I am not June Cleaver and cannot be made into her), and have been accosted by people who wonder how I can even tentatively think of myself as someone enslaveable if I give that as a limit.  (not because as a slave I should have no limits, but because that particular limit makes no sense in any slavery context).  I've also been temporarily seduced by persons who sound like they "get it" in the same way I do, but, again, for whom "slave" = housekeeper + sex, at the bottom of things. 

I'm not in the least suggesting that 50s hh and TPE don't potentially overlap, or that there aren't couples out there beyond that One Guy of long ago who are blissfully happy with traditional gender roles.  But since when does TPE *equal* June Cleaver??  Even if you give her some some kinks??

Has any one else noticed such a trend over the past 10 yrs or so?  What do you think of it?  What do you think led to it?  Or is this not a phenomenon at all, and I just attract June-Cleaver-seekers?

Grateful for any/all replies, to any part of the above.

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Has any one else noticed such a trend over the past 10 yrs or so? What do you think of it? What do you think led to it? Or is this not a phenomenon at all, and I just attract June-Cleaver-seekers?

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ORIGINAL: MrRodgers

Neither hh need display any outward D/s let alone M/s and might have nothing whatever to do with BDSM and the various kinky, sexual fetishes. Both hh's could be strictly vanilla. Many subs and rightfully so...look for the 50's household as a benevolent M/s or D/s affair where power is determined, service rendered and the rest...is pleasure.

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ORIGINAL: mixielicous

all this thread did for me was create the urge to do the dishes in my new heels.

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To me, this gets to the core of it. You had a bad experience with an insensitive lout. Avoiding him (and his type) in the future is a really good idea, I think, but I believe that with the right person, a lot of what you describe (and all the rest of the 50s household or tpe stuff) might have been a very positive experience, because the person's responses to you would have been very different. You don't strike me as a person who would be unhappy in a TPE. In fact, from the things you say and the ways in which you phrase them, I believe you'd thrive in one. You seem extremely open-minded and flexible as well which are needed qualities in a master-slave relationship. Just my 2 cents!