The Last True Conservatives

The very-online extreme right, in addition to its many other faults and failings, tends to have a crass, self-conscious masculinity to it. Either in the “pure” form of jacked douchebags who like yelling slurs or in the “inverted” form of resentful Shiraha-from-Konbini-ningen-type evolutionary-psychology-obsessed incels, an enormous proportion of the online rightosphere consists of people with heavily masculinity-inflected beliefs and concerns. I have not experienced this for myself because I only date women, but I’m told that in some quarters the synthesis of “masculinity in crisis” and far-right channer politics is so advanced that women who are interested in men date seemingly normal people whom they realize only later get their views on the great issues of the day from people with handles like “Bronze Age Pervert” posting screeds in the already-unfortunate “Twitter thread” format all day long. It goes without saying, at least among those in the know, that there is usually something homoerotic about this as well; witness the fixation on the deceased Japanese novelist, bodybuilder, and right-wing political commentator Mishima Yukio (whose output of novels and short stories, if nothing else, deserves better than being associated with these people), or the tendency to idolize early periods of Western cultural development in which many or most literate men were either so misogynistic they wrapped round to being gay or so gay they wrapped round to being misogynists. A recent article in The Atlantic about Bronze Age Pervert—a real person or, to make a distinction that Mishima himself would readily understand, at least a real persona, not just a name I made up as a stick to beat an ideal-type with—addresses this directly and at some length. According to Richard Spencer, the infamous former neo-Nazi leader who these days is happy to go on the record for essays in liberal newsmagazines, Bronze Age Pervert is obviously gay; the article’s author describes Spencer himself as a “homoerotic fascist” as well. But what if there were a distaff counterpart of sorts to all of this, a fringey rightist current heavily laden with lesbian cultural signifiers and preoccupied with the idea that femininity, rather than masculinity, is in crisis in weak, enervated, effete, androgynized modernity? I am not happy, but not not happy, to report that such a current does or did exist, and that it has or had surprising links to several other people, places, and things about which I have written before.

I want to make it clear from the outset that I do not write about this current, which in its classic form was named Aristasianism and called Web 1.0 chat groups and certain clubs in 1990s London home, from a place of ideological sympathy. I will be presenting it as a tacitly racist, avowedly elitist and class-snobbish movement that escapes being a form of fascism only through its commitment to pre-fascist ideas about subjects like culture, sexuality, authority, punishment, and the state. Much of what I have to say about Aristasianism may sound sympathetic and perhaps even approving, but the truth is much simpler: I think Aristasianism is funny, in a way that is not true of Bronze Age Pervert, the so-called manosphere, masculinity-obsessed fascist pseudointellectuals like Julius Evola, or frankly even Mishima outside a few specific stock jokes about him and deliberate instances of humor in his novels. Part of this is simply because a bunch of lesbian poshos, no matter how conservative they are, just do not have the pull within “real politics” that right-wing men tend to; part of it, however, is because of the uniquely complicated and surreal underpinnings of Aristasian political philosophy. Aristasian thought involves multiple layers of reality, a cosmic shift to degeneration and decay that happens to coincide with the culture shocks of the 1960s, and, most characteristically, a posited parallel world in some way “realer” than the immediately apparent world in which men do not exist and there are two feminine sexes, blondes and brunettes.

All of this comes from a quintessentially English-eccentric mishmash of 1. ideas taken from Dharmic religions (either 1a. directly or 1b. through motivated and often politicized interpretations in the writings of Western scholars like Mircea Eliade and René Guénon) and 2. classic prejudices of the British upper and upper-middle classes. Like many such trends and currents, it seems to have begun at Oxford. “A History of Aristasia-in-Telluria” by someone going by Miss Anthea Rosetti, a document on a website called aristasia.net which as of this writing must be accessed via Wayback Machine but is probably the closest thing extant to an official internal history of the movement, is my source for much of this, although I’ll discuss some other, more hostile witnesses later on. By Rosetti’s account, “at Lady Margaret Hall [one of Oxford University’s constituent colleges] in the early 1970s[, a] group of Sapphically inclined female students who sensibly disliked the modern world and admired the philsophical (sic) works of René Guenon (sic) found each other.” To the extent that I do have any unironic ideological sympathy for Aristasia, it is probably situated here; a political and philosophical framework for right-wing or traditionalist-conservative lesbians that is not just copying and pasting mainstream rightist politics into an incidentally-lesbian mind like Cynthia from Dykes to Watch Out for is something that probably needs to exist. History is full of examples of gay people whose orientation did not lead them to the broadly left-liberal value set that we associate with the LGBT community today, and in this respect these “Sapphically inclined” early-70s Oxonians were engaging with and advancing a worthy intellectual tradition. It isn’t even completely novel or outré that they were unhappy with the cultural changes of the preceding decade; gay writers like Mary Renault and Noël Coward were at best ambivalent about them as well, and memoirs of Hollywood actresses of the period often remark that their roles got worse in the first few years after the Hays Code fell. Indeed, I would argue that this first cohort of proto-Aristasians have a sincerity and courage of their convictions to them that one sees precisely in their not having had as much to gain from turning back the clock as many people who were not lesbians would have.

The early-stage Aristasians did not use that term yet; they went by a number of names that, according to Rosetti and other sources, included Lux Madriana (“Light of the Mother,” in an early phase that emphasized the religious dimensions of the movement, a form of monotheistic goddess-worship), Romantians, and the Silver Sisterhood. By the time of the Silver Sisterhood name, in the 1980s, they had moved to a compound in County Donegal, in the Republic of Ireland, which they ran in a way supposedly styled after a Victorian girls’ boarding school. This is the point at which some of the more hostile witnesses come in and at which another characteristic Aristasian preoccupation—physical discipline of a type that they (implausibly, in my opinion) insisted was not sexual in motivation—becomes prominent. Of the at least seven or eight meanings of the euphemism “the English vice,” sadomasochistic sexual practices in general and flogging in particular are among the most common, and the latter was a facet of Britain’s traditional educational culture that “St. Bride’s School” seems to have adopted with verve. There continued to be a strong religious and mystical element derived in large measure from Guénon’s “Perennial Philosophy” interpretations of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam, as was the case at every stage of the Aristasian subculture, but the surface-level aesthetics of the 1980s iteration were those of a posh girls’ school in the Home Counties, or perhaps in the Bombay Presidency, around a hundred years before. They kept casting about for pre-“Eclipse” (their term for the shocks of the 1960s) societies and ways of life to emulate, the consistent animating conviction seeming to have been that, wherever the society or culture that they wanted lay, it has to have been somewhere in the past—or in another world, since this was also probably around when the concept of “Aristasia Pura, the Feminine Empire,” with its blonde-brunette sexual binary, was introduced.

The disciplinarian penchant, the promiscuous borrowing from past ways of life, and an involvement in early video game culture unfortunately aroused the attention of overtly fascist movements like the British National Party and its leader, John Tyndall, who corresponded with St. Bride’s/Silver Sisterhood leaders in the 1980s. Accounts of the nature of this correspondence and of the proto-Aristasians’ reasons for engaging in it vary. Rosetti, an Aristasian or former Aristasian who is interested in a positive assessment of the movement and its legacy, insist that the subjects discussed were “boring stuff about Guenonian (sic) metaphysics” and that Aristasia was never a racist movement, but I recently found a thread on the British internet forum Mumsnet that was not so sure. According to the Mumsnet thread there was a certain amount of local news coverage in the northwest of Ireland at the time that suggested, among other things, the presence of a large amount of antisemitic literature in the community. I unfortunately don’t find this difficult to believe of people who came primarily from the traditionally very antisemitic upper echelons of British and Irish society and who corresponded with the leader of the BNP. It should be noted, however, that Mumsnet is not a solid investigate source and that, in keeping with the forum’s reputation for strident transphobia, many of the people making these claims seemed primarily interested in establishing whether or not the Aristasian leaders of this time were gender essentialists because they were trans. I am not interested in “transvestigating” these people and I consider the idea that this is relevant insulting, so all I will say for now is that, while Rosetti’s view that Aristasia was consistently non-racist is probably straightforwardly wrong, it doesn’t seem to have been motivated by racism or antisemitism in the same way that Evola, Bronze Age Pervert, et al are.

I know someone who, in my opinion aptly, described the pre-fascist racism of the British Empire as “the 1910s equivalent of ‘white people drive like this and black people drive like this,’ only backed up by the armed machinery of the State.” Any movement that tries to replicate British imperial aesthetics and lifeways, even in a radically different context (like, for example, one in which lesbianism is normative and men are at best peripheral), is going to take up at least some of this through osmosis, in addition to, as I’ve stressed, whatever prejudices these women had before they were Aristasians. I have no difficulty believing that this school-cum-compound-cum-vacation-destination (yes, really, for a while it was, further calling the insistence that the flogging wasn’t meant to be erotic into doubt) was happy to communicate with racist politicians and had at least some members who read a lot of antisemitic screeds in their spare time, and one does not actually have to conceive of the movement as predicated specifically on racism—I believe Rosetti that it was and is not—in order for this to make sense. This should inspire some soul-searching on the part of people who are not motivated by racism themselves but who have ideas that are amenable to racist impulses. Mary Renault, whom I mentioned earlier, left England in part because of the widespread homophobia of the time and settled in, of all places, apartheid South Africa; what does that tell us?

In any case, the association with Tyndall was short-lived mostly because the sojourn in Ireland was itself short-lived and, whatever the relationship between Aristasia and the BNP may have been, the former do not appear to have left the latter any forwarding address. In spite of this the next stage, comprising the 1990s and early 2000s and focused in the London area, was probably Aristasia’s period of greatest public presence and political involvement, not that this is saying much for a group of radical traditionalist kinky lesbian separatist Perennialist mystics that probably never numbered more than a few dozen committed members.

I have not named any individual Aristasian leaders so far because of the community’s Potemkin village quality; prominent Aristasians cycled through personae and pseudonyms over the years and occasionally used more than one at a time, depending on the situation. Rosetti says that Hester St. Clare, the name used by the earliest of the Lux Madriana leaders at Oxford around 1970, was “probably not her real name.” Donegal-era community leaders included someone going by Sister Angelina (the figure “transvestigated” by the people on Mumsnet) and someone going by Miss Martindale. Martindale is a particularly bizarre and multivalent figure who may have retained far-right political associations, ended up with an assault conviction in 1993 in connection with the flogging and disciplinary practices (which she strongly advocated and, again, insisted were not sexually motivated), and made numbers of media appearances as a sort of sideshow in the 1990s British press. The period of her prominence, and perhaps dominance, within the movement is what Rosetti and others depict as what we might call “classic” Aristasia. The axis mundi here is London, the historical references of choice tend towards interwar rather than Victorian, the “Feminine Empire” aspect of the movement with its posited or theorized or longed-for all-female blonde-brunette world is especially emphasized, and the disciplinary practices are, despite or perhaps because of Miss Martindale’s run-in with the law, kept in the foreground as well. Documentary crews film the insides of Aristasian homes—not many of which exist, of course, but there are a few—as human-interest curiosities, women associated with the movement participate in various low-stakes culturally conservative causes such as opposing metrication, and the group expands onto the early internet. As far back as the Donegal phase the Aristasians had a somewhat hypocritical attitude towards computers; because they thought that they improved focus and concentration (which admittedly may have been true of 1980s computing technology but is certainly not true now), they treated them as exceptions to the general eschewal of post-1914 (in Donegal) or post-1965 (in London) technological forms. Thence came the involvement in the early PC game industry and thence also the very-online quality of the current remnants of the Aristasian movement, which mostly go by different names and lack or have deemphasized things like discipline, fringey rightist politics, and the stark blonde-brunette gender binary. (“What about redheads?” is one of the first questions most people ask about “Aristasia Pura.” The answer, admittedly a cogent and even thoughtful one, is that redheads in Aristasia have a hormonal or chromosomal ambiguity a bit like intersex people in our world. Relatedly, most Aristasians are “straight” in the sense that blondes go for brunettes and brunettes for blondes. Readers familiar with lesbian cultural history might find this reminiscent of butch-femme roles, but in fact the blonde-brunette binary is much more consciously tied conceptually to heterosexuality than the butch-femme binary ever was, even though it is more distinct aesthetically.)

The increasing preoccupation with online, virtual, constructed, and imagined worlds is, in my interpretation, what ultimately led to the movement’s current moribund state. In 2005 or 2006 a few newer and mostly internet-based community leaders announced something called “Operation Bridgehead,” in which they claimed to have received orders from Aristasia Pura that the this-worldly sector of the movement was to absent itself from participation in affairs of the world. For a group that thrived online and as a media curiosity in the infamously sensationalist and gawking-oriented British press, this would have been a serious blow no matter what. In Operation Bridgehead’s case the problem was compounded by a somewhat prudish new-look policy of stripping Aristasia of its overtly lesbian and quasi-sadomasochistic aspects. What was left therefore lost much of its unique appeal; Operation Bridgehead left a group of internet-dwelling fantasists who were most comfortable around other women and liked Perennialism, vague knee-jerk conservatism, and, increasingly, anime and Japanese pop culture more generally. I should stress that I do not mean most of this pejoratively. I know and like many people of whom some or most of these things are true. The problem is that there are tons of women like this in the world and one really does not need to subscribe to an idiosyncratic lesbian separatist interpretation of the Perennial Philosophy in order to be one.

In its own way, Aristasia ended up with the same problem that the “disappearing center” has in the developed West’s mainstream religious culture. If there aren’t many people retaining a set of cultural forms anyway, there is not much reason for one to retain them oneself absent a strong motivating drive to find something in them of substance that one cannot find anywhere else. You don’t go to an Episcopalian church on the Twenty-second Sunday of Ordinary Time unless you strongly believe in God and in moderate-to-progressive Anglican theology, because there is no longer much social infrastructure around doing so, especially for younger people; you no longer style yourself an Aristasian and treat it as a moral and political imperative to dress like Greer Garson unless you have a strong belief in a system of behavior that not even the remnants of the organized Aristasian community advance any more. Even if you do, you are left basically to do it on your own. I first found out about Aristasianism years after its collapse via the YouTube comments on a video of a scene from a mid-2000s anime, probably not in any objective sense the best way to find out about it. I’m writing about it now mostly because not many other people are, although it does show up in an academic book or two about Perennialism and, of course, in the Mumsnet thread.

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What is one to make of a culture, or subculture, or movement, with this kind of limited and constrained and, it’s difficult to avoid concluding, ultimately failed history? “Learning from failed experiments” is a pat and somewhat insulting concept here; former Aristasians have not necessarily abandoned all the value and importance they placed on their ideals. These days some of the old Aristasian leadership is based in Southern California and is involved in goddess spirituality and (more conventional) LGBT activism there. Are the radically conservative political or quasipolitical or historiographical tendencies still there? I am not sure; I don’t know these people. But even if they are not, it is instructive to think on the fact that they were. In other words, the goddess spirituality and the strident lesbian activism did and thus could coexist with some deeply strange and even dangerous rightist or rightist-tending ideas. It is again tempting at this point to talk about “internal contradictions” or the Aristasian ideology falling apart under its own weight because it contained elements that could not practically exist alongside each other, but this too strikes me as too easy, somewhat along the lines of Adorno’s dubious “right-wing authoritarian personality” concept in which authoritarianism was constructed as 1. self-evidently a personality trait rather than something else and 2. concentrated exclusively among people who disagreed with Adorno politically. It is easy to write off Aristasia as incoherent and doomed to fail if one starts from the premise that Aristasia was incoherent and doomed to fail and then simply begs the question.

It might have been a matter of attracting or pursuing the wrong allies. Orwell points out in his excellent essay on Rudyard Kipling that “Kipling’s outlook is pre-fascist (sic; Orwell usually, but not always capitalizes these kinds of terms),” a term I have used for Aristasia before. People claiming to be conservatives at the time that Orwell was writing this were always in fact, he said, “either Liberals, Fascists or the accomplices of Fascists.” If we take Orwell at his word—it is not self-evident of course that we ought to, but I think that he has a solid point here—we see that even a generation before Aristasia was a twinkle in Hester St. Clare’s eye the pristine pre-Eclipse world, and ideologies predicated on it, were no longer anywhere to be found. No doubt someone writing a generation before Orwell could have said the same, and so on, and so on, like the ancient writers on Sparta who always situated the golden age of Spartiate equality at some point in the past, relative to themselves. Confucianism and Taoism, similarly, project their ideal pasts arbitrarily far back; the Tao Te Ching seems to long for something pre-agricultural, whereas Confucius—more “progressive” than Laozi in that his cutoff point is right after neolithic river delta state consolidation rather than right before—pinpoints the days of Yu the Great, who invented flood control. This seems like a pat progressive argument (in the historiographical sense) but I think something equally damning can be said of people who are always looking to a more and more more distant, yet somehow always-any-minute-now, future for a world without devastation and woe. Once upon a time petroleum was the one neat trick that would fix the world’s conservation problems, because it spared the whales. This sounds utterly deranged to us today—we have by and large saved the whales and yet the whole biosphere is in peril in ways that would have been unimaginable in 1860 when the first commercial petroleum exploration was getting underway—but the documents, the editorials and political cartoons and policy papers and correspondence, are right there to consult. “Atoms for Peace” were meant to save us all too, once.

It should go without saying that the present sucks as well, particularly since it doesn’t exist; only the past has any demonstrable existence, and the present is a mere moving front between that demonstrable past and the undemonstrable future. So an attitude towards time is never going to be a cogent basis for political action. An attitude towards history might be, but at that point we are in the realm that cannot support something fantastical along the lines of Aristasia. So the invested Aristasian looking for kindred spirits outside her clique is left casting around for the next best thing, and the next best thing, unfortunately, is in most cases fascists—which makes the Aristasians the accomplices of fascists whereof Orwell spoke, perhaps.

Yet lack of care with the company they kept was not, actually, what did Aristasia in. It was, in my opinion, lack of care about venue and context and situation-in-life. Rosetti quotes one woman’s admission that Aristasians tended to be “‘somewhat overbalanced’ on the side of imagination, intellect and the fantastical”—hence the nonsexual component of the reasons for the violent discipline. These were people who need to, to us the parlance of our times, touch grass, and in Donegal and earlier at Oxford they did. The urban setting of London and the penchant for the early internet probably were not good for keeping them grounded—and one does need to be kept grounded even if one truly believes that one’s true home, heaven or Aristasia Pura or the Western Paradise or whatever else, is a great Somewhere Else, because until then we still must live in this world, unremitting Benjaminian shitshow though it is. I cannot blame people for not wanting to accept this, but the wages of not accepting that one must function in the world is, put simply, not being able to function in the world. I wish I could decide I was no longer interested in functioning in the world and let the chips fall where they may. I do not think that I actually can, and if I could I think that I would be obliged to choose otherwise.

Could a version of Aristasia that chose otherwise have had some staying power? Ought it to have had any?