Aristasia

Aristasia was a British female-focused subcultural group--or shared worldbuilding project and role-playing setting--that combined Guénonian Traditionalism with elements of lesbian separatism. The group had its origins in the Oxford area in the 1960s or 1970s. They received the most media attention in the 1990s. Rejecting the modern world (and post-1960s culture in particular), Aristasians sought to recreate the lifestyles of the 1920s-1950s, wearing period clothes, watching period movies, etc. The writer Marianne Martindale was a prominent member, acting as the face of the movement. Her previous group, the Silver Sisterhood, had similar beliefs and practices.

Aristasians created an elaborate cosmology and lexicon in which different temporal periods were re-conceived as geographical locations within the imagined world of Aristasia--the Victorian period became "Arcadia," the 1930s became "Trent," etc. Men did not exist in Aristasia; instead there were two sexes, "blondes" and "brunettes." These labels roughly mapped onto the categories of butch and femme, with "brunettes" being considered more masculine--although still more feminine than the average woman in the present-day "real world." At one point there was an "Aristasian Embassy" in London (a private house) that held "Embassy balls" and cocktail parties, to which guests were sometimes driven in a refurbished 1930s car (the "Embassy car"). Aristasians began creating websites and forums in the mid-1990s and used the internet (including Second Life) to engage in similar forms of creative writing and role-playing. In the mid-1990s Aristasia also incorporated practices reminiscent of BDSM, though Martindale publicly denied that Aristasian "discipline" was sexual in nature. Connections to far-right politics were another source of controversy. One anonymous member explained the group: "Aristasia is a game. But then schools, corporations, armies, nations are all games. They happen to be bigger and wealthier games than ours. But ours is better."