Miss Martindale
Coming here is like entering into a completely different world, rather like going through the looking-glass in Alice, or through the back of the wardrobe in Narnia.
– Miss Martindale on Aristasia
Miss Martindale (Marianne Martindale, Catherine Tyrell, Mari de Colwyn) is an English writer and columnist. As Miss Martindale, she is the public face of Aristasia (see below). Miss Martindale received national attention in the British press in the 1990s.
Miss Martindale is known for her 1950s style of dress and her traditional Queen's English diction. These are in keeping with the aristocratic ideals of Aristasia, which include the idealization of femininity and the belief that an "Eclipse" of the 1960s marked the end of Western culture. She refers to the world outside of Aristasia as "The Pit".
Miss Martindale is known for her practice and advocacy of corporal punishment. This led to criticism from some Aristasians, who felt that in the public eye she was associating the movement too much with its minor disciplinary aspect. Some non-Aristasians have characterized Aristasia as an "S/M fantasy group" as a result of this. However, Miss Martindale's recorded statements and interviews made clear her dislike of S/M, and her belief in discipline as spiritual and purifying.
Aristasia
Aristasia is a largely imaginary all-female society existing primarily in England, but with adherents in other parts of the world, notably the United States. Also known as the Feminine Empire, it's partly a "micronation," partly a role-playing game related to separatist feminism.
The Aristasian concept was founded in Oxford in the 1970s in reaction to what its founders saw as the collapse of cultural values following the 1960s. They called this collapse "the Eclipse," a term occasionally used by other writers. The founding girls were mostly students of Hester St. Clare, and all attended Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford.
Aristasians dress in clothes recalling styles from the 1920s to the early 1960s. The stricter ones avoid contact with modern music, television and periodicals, while engaging in activities such as watching old films and listening to music from the 1920s-1960s, and driving classic cars. They also strive to create art, culture, and dress of their own.
- Aristasia Pura is a fictional world in which men do not exist. Instead, there are two feminine sexes, blonde and brunette (with hair color being a secondary sex characteristic).
- Aristasia-in-Telluria is an attempt to create Aristasia in "Telluria" (the real world); that is, an all-feminine counter-culture in response to the perceived death of mainstream Tellurian (Earth) culture.
Aristasian language
Aristasians place a heavy emphasis on proper usage of the English language. In general Aristasians insist on proper grammar, capitalisation, punctuation and spelling in even the most casual communications. The Aristasian English also incorporates many words of potentially proto-Indo-European, Hindu or Sanskrit origin.
In addition there exist some peculiar words unique to Aristasia. Many are technological terms such as ordinator (computer, akin to French ordinateur), elektraspace (the feminine aspect of the Internet or cyberspace), lightgame (computer or video games) and chattery (chat room). Other words express Aristasian metaphysical and social concepts-words such as raihira (roughly the Aristasian equivalent of "aristocracy") and racination (the act of undoing the emotional and cultural damage done by the "Eclipse").
Despite the Aristasian belief in "correctness", there are a large number of Aristasian slang terms, such as bongo (a post-Eclipse person); guzz (to look); zippy (used in much the same way as cool in non-Aristasian circles), rivermouth (a speaker of Estuary English) and Quirrie (pertaining to the 1950s). Among younger Aristasian speakers pre-war school slang-words like ripping are widely used, as well as shortenings like "mome" for "moment." Informal Aristasian speech can often seem to an outsider like an arcane mixture of ultra-correctness and obscure slang.
Writings
Miss Martindale has written Disciplined Ladies: A Cornucopia of Feminine Discipline (1997). She contributed to The Female Disciplinary Manual: A Complete Encyclopaedia of the Correction of the Fair Sex (1997) by Regina Snow and Standing Committee on Female Education. And, she wrote the introduction to The District Governess and Other Stories (1996), also by Regina Snow. All of these books were published by The Wildfire Club, which Martindale co-founded. From 2003 to 2005, Miss Martindale wrote the Ladies' Column in The Chap magazine and was Aristasia's media representative. She discontinued this in accordance with the then-nascent Bridgehead Doctrine, which discourages Aristasians from publicly commenting on "foreign" (i.e. Earth) culture and politics.
Controversies
Miss Martindale has been accused of links with the late John Tyndall, a former leading figure in the National Front and British National Party, but she has replied that all that happened was that more than ten years ago he wrote to a member of her (large) household in Ireland on matters not concerning politics. Paradoxically, Aristasian theory has also been associated by some critics with Frankfurt School Marxism. Alice Lucy Trent, an author and Aristasian theorist, has said that fascism is "an aberration of late-patriarchy."
In another controversial incident, Miss Martindale was convicted of actual bodily harm by birching another woman. The judge expressed surprise that the woman who brought the case had remained in Miss Martindale's household for eighteen months of her own free will, where consensual corporal discipline was known to be part of the regime. However as Miss Martindale was out of the country (in Ireland) and therefore unable to present a defence she was fined a nominal £100.
Documentary
A Weekend at Miss Martindale’s (1996) is a British documentary about three young women who role play as schoolgirls with Miss Martindale as their strict disciplinarian. The program can be viewed on YouTube (see links below).
Fetish film based on Disciplinary Manual
In 2002, MIB Productions released The Female Disciplinary Manual, a corporal punishment video partly inspired by Regina Snow's book of the same name.
Professional domina and MIB founder Irene Boss and “Goddess Claudia" play strict teachers at a private school who must correct a misbehaving schoolgirl (played by “Whisper"). The student is supposed to be studying from her textbook The Female Disciplinary Manual (the actual book is clearly seen on camera). After the teachers discover she has been secretly looking at a pornographic book, Boss opens the manual and recites from a passage on the use of rulers for punishment. She decides that striking the palm of the hand as recommended in the book is not severe enough.
The girl is bent over her desk for two sets of 50 ruler smacks across her jeans. The manual is placed between her shoulders and she is threatened with extra punishments if she flinches, causing the book to fall.
After the ruler session is over, the girl is left alone to study the manual's section on “detention" for a proposed quiz. But, once again, she is caught looking at pornographic photos. The rest of the story is a series of conventional corporal punishment scenes that make no further reference to the Regina Snow book.
Further reading
- Sedgwick, Mark J. (2004). Against the Modern World: Traditionalism and the Secret Intellectual History of the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press. ISBN 0195152972.
- Snow, Regina (1995). Feminine Regime. The Wildfire Club
- Snow, Regina (1997). Children of the Void: The astonishing true-life novel of women who created an all-female world of glamour and discipline. The Wildfire Club
External links
- Official site
- Aristasia Central
- A World Without Men - an essay about Aristasia by Don Passantino
Video links
- A Weekend at Miss Martindale’s part 1 (video)
- A Weekend at Miss Martindale’s part 2 (video)
- A Weekend at Miss Martindale’s part 3 (video)
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This page may use content from Wikipedia. The original article was at Miss Martindale. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. |
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This page may use content from Wikipedia. The original article was at User:PatGallacher/Aristasia. The list of authors can be seen in the page history. |
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