Domesticity, the right, and rightness

A funny thing happens when I read this article. A few things.

I realize how much liberal hipster feminists and Mormon mommies have in common. And then I wonder if we of the former are somehow doing it wrong.

First, a Mormon blogger says of the dark side of conservative domestic bliss: "'In any highly homogeneous culture we all feel pressure to be and look and think and act a certain way,' she says. 'You start to think you need to be absolutely perfect in every area.'"

Wait--shit. Who CAN'T relate to this? The hipster anxiously seeking the perfect fashion and music tastes. The careerist flogged by numbers and networking. The academic lulled into groupthink or driven mad by the impostor complex. Even groups that pride themselves on their heterogeneity end up converging around some pretty homogeneous norms.

Then there's the near-indistinguishability noted in the article between the Mormon bloggers and the "Hipster Mommy Blogger" archetype. "Cupcakes and crafts" sure sounds like an evening in Williamsburg, or Allston, or Dupont...is there such a thing as hipsterdom without ennui or sexual liberation?

And then I have my expectations and biases knocked at a funny angle by actually checking out a few of the bloggers. Reading the article initially, I think: I don't see it, but can see where somebody else might get off on it, like celebrity gossip. I'm unfairly imagining an authorial voice for these women that sounds like Facebook updates: chirpy, banal, top-of-the-head chatter, cute and uncompelling. But no--some of these gals can write. They have arc and flow and freshness. I'll leave the question of whether they're propaganda machines; there ARE a lot of suspiciously professional-looking photos, but the writing feels authentic.

I've observed, I remind myself, that the awesomeness and sweetness of individual Mormons is inversely proportional to the awfulness and repressiveness of their religion. (This is of course true for many oppressive faiths but seems disproportionately true here. It's similar in that way to my childhood faith, Christian Science, which attracts a startling number of very sensible people using some very bizarre metaphysics. But that's another post entirely.)

And domestic happiness can, dammit, CAN BE AND IS enjoyed equally by liberal feminists and traditionalists.

But we seem to take a lot more time and trouble to get to it. Agonies over careers, and cities, and above all, finding The Right Guy. We have more time to hem and haw over the latter, free of the rush to get hitched so we can finally be allowed to just bang already.

Are we too concerned with rightness? Right guyjobplacetime. Right tastes--being cool, attaining status. Our greater breadth of choice may choke us for fear of making the wrong one.

LDS is concerned with rightness of its own, a stifling level of propriety and chastity that I don't covet one bit. But don't they kinda have it right on an evolutionary scale, even if for the wrong reasons? Fertility...and biology...and LALALA I'M NOT LISTENING! I'LL HAVE BABIES! I'LL BE FINE!

OK, calm down. I could've married my college boyfriend, and even been pretty happy, but neither of us really knew who we were or what we wanted then. I value taking the extra time to figure out what a sexually compatible partnership that suits my best heart and highest goals might look like.

The appeal of these blogs, says Matchar, is that they make motherhood look joyful and uncomplicated. I think they also make it look well-integrated with their social and creative lives. And...wholesome. Not old-fashioned and cute, but whole. Positive, yes, but also grounded deeply in love.

That, right there. That's what I want.

I wonder if the other side sees emptiness and debasement in liberal culture because they think that we are too busy searching for ourselves to be devoted to others. Trying to be right instead of good.

Of course, we could say they're too busy being righteous to care about people's rights, and neither characterization would be totally fair. (Incidentally, I wonder if the small-government stinginess that tends to accompany such views is actually less about "individual freedom" than a focus on the very small group.)

There's another disturbing wrinkle. A former-Mormon-blogger commenter at Jezebel says that for all the niceness, "the culture often doesn't really allow women to be honest about imperfections, unhappiness, etc."

It seems intuitively obvious that repressing your problems is psychologically damaging. But that requires being aware of your problems on some level. What if...what if this dishonesty actually makes them happier? Shit, you know, maybe it does. We may be right about the realities of our lives and the world, but is that good?

Of course, being right, or rather being certain of being right, is also very satisfying. We and our Mormon sisters each have a certain amount of either freedom or security that we're unwilling to trade--in a non-9/11 sense--and we're certain that's the right amount. At the same time, we all cast a curious or longing glance now and then at the lives we might have lived but for different choices or value patterns.

What I come back to is this: if you can manage to do whatever it is you're doing for the love of it, then right gives way to good. "Should" becomes "is" and "is becoming." What we liberals might be reacting to in these blogs is deep love, embodied in a way familiar yet foreign. It's certainly idealized, and it may spring from not-so-right treatment of women. (We should always be attuned to what good our right is or isn't doing.) But the love--the purpose--is primal, and all of us have access to that. So we don't really need to fear doing it wrong.

Coda: what I really want is Elizabeth Barrett Browning's marriage. Dominick Argento, you destroy me.