It's a bad faith criticism through and through, and the criticisms are also from an extremely ignorant understanding of art, imagery and this aesthetic throughout history. All visual imagery in a racist society has a history of white supremacy, and rural imagery has been around forever without any sort of criticism like this. The double standards against women are clear here. With all the travel instagrams enjoying their vacations on a lake, mountain climbing tumblrs, hiking bloggers, camping twitters, and more it isn't until women like something that people grasp for straws based on an ignorant understanding of what cottages are.
To me this is no different than people suddenly picking up the issue of single use plastics against straws because that's the one normalized single use plastic that is a disability device. Of all the plastics they could of have picked they choose the one that accounted for .2% of single use plastics and is the one that allows disabled people to live more integrated with others in our society. Which meant the push for that alone was ecofacism, and to me these arguments against cottagecore are a combination of misogyny and urbanfacism because they are using the language of discussing issues like racism to create a hierchy of urban>rural that creates a false narrative that the problems exist only in rural american when they exist everwhere. It doesn't suddenly not exist in cities, and in fact cities usually have the most violent histories especially against native americans. Look at how native americans have been treated in san francisco.
There is also a deep history in our country of discouraging or preventing women from owning land, and to me this double standard roots far more heavily in that history than any sort of white supremacy history because no one took up issue with these images until women were enjoying it. Which makes the criticisms propaganda against women owning land just as the criticisms against straws became ecofascism propaganda.
"Over the river and through the woods to grandfather's house we go" is perhaps the most iconic line about a cottage, and it was written by an abolitionist. The cottage escapism is actually rooted in the rebellion against white supremacy and in feminism. And it doesn't take a lot of looking to find many many other examples. It is also insulting to the WoC who have long been using this imagery because it erases their very existence and implies that the only imagery that ever mattered was the imagery that served white supremacy. Segragating what racism we will talk about depending on if it discourages other marginalized people from things like owning land is not anti-racism, but simply using racism as a tool for another form of oppression.
Arguing about what is racist or not from a place of ignorance doesn't help anyone. I think it's fine to make a case and talk about it, but my concern is with newspapers taking these things seriously without consulting any experts. I fear that in the future ignorant people will lead the way in finding a reason to be bigoted and conversations that should be about how racism exists in every corner of our society will instead be about things like rich vs poor, urban vs rural, and anything that allows some people to avoid responsibility while at the same time putting the pressure of making sacrifices to fix thigns on more marginalized people than themselves.
The people criticizing this aesthetic just don't actually know their history. They're making shallow judgements based on their own stereotyping. To me this reveals a DEEP ruralphobic sentiment from the critics. White supremacy is EVERYWHERE.
You can live anywhere you want. You can want to dream about living anywhere you want. What matters is you are working in your community and in your every day life to remove the systems of racism in place. Living in a cottage is just as racist as living in an apartment on the 100th floor of a city.
Once upon a time coming out meant leaving a religious community that was not anti-slavery. The term means something else now. Language changes. There is a deep history in "women art" and most of what cottage core is about this sort of folk art that was women's only mode of expression for a long time. I think we should let them have their thing and not insert our noses into it just because we're triggered some women might own land.