Or maybe that’s just how it looks from this modern vantage. Because after Ma and Laura narrowly escape a run-in with a giant bear and Pa gets back from town and plays everyone a ditty on his fiddle, my two girls step over a sea of plastic toys to get to their beds, and I remove the sealed top from my tapioca and proceed to become agitated over ladies with surgically redesigned bodies who weep an endless river of tears over casual slights. Eleven hours later, I’ll be pouring my girls’ breakfast out of a cereal box and walking them to their respective concrete schoolyards, where they will play with Disney-princess action figures and eat off-brand Oreos at snack time, while I spend my day squinting at a computer screen until my head throbs in sync with the drumbeat piped into my earbuds. Being stalked by wild panthers sounds sort of refreshing, compared to this. This is why the pastoral narrative needs sharp teeth: it’s not that we crave suffering so much as we crave suffering for valid reasons, in contrast to our laments that our supposedly ergonomic chairs make our backs ache, or the Twitter apps on our iPhones don’t load fast enough.

Wouldn’t it be better if I were breaking a sweat from hacking chunks off a bear carcass right now? (I ask myself this while working out on the elliptical trainer at the gym.) Wouldn’t I be more serene if I spent my days pickling beets or hunching over a laundry pail? And shouldn’t my children be right here with me, sewing on their nine-patch quilts? Wouldn’t we all be happier if we spent our time together, just us and no one else, learning about what’s really important, never getting distracted by what isn’t? The fantasy enabled by “Little House in the Big Woods” goes beyond the pastoral’s focus on communion with nature and with your own instincts or even with the satisfaction of muscles that ache from a day of hard work. At its heart, “Little House” is also a fantasy of total isolation and total control.

If Laura Ingalls Wilder’s nostalgic tour through a simpler time has a modern equivalent, it’s The Pioneer Woman, the personal blog of Ree Drummond, who traded in her shallow big-city existence for life on an Oklahoma ranch. It takes only a few minutes of voyeuristically perusing Drummond’s pastoral pleasuredome, with its gorgeous photographs of Drummond cooking dinner for her rugged cowboy husband or home-schooling her four towheaded children, before you realize that you are a failure. Gazing at photos of Drummond’s kids riding their horses under a cloud-dappled Maxfield Parrish sky, you can see that, in comparison, you fail your brood every day. Because as you grumble and boil mac and cheese from a box and your kids beg to watch the latest Katy Perry video on your laptop, this woman fries chicken and teaches her children algebra and shakes her luscious mane of red hair in the Oklahoma sunshine. Her pioneer children dream of tornadoes and prairie grass and lassoing cows. Your kids dream of “Kung Fu Panda 2” and Space Mountain and frozen yogurt covered in gummi bears.

But the best pages of The Pioneer Woman concern Drummond’s cowboy husband, who is a cowboy and therefore wears a cowboy hat and leather chaps, just like that guy from the Village People. Seemingly aware that her husband’s entire life is an elaborate, semipornographic work of performance art derived from pop images of the American West, Drummond refers to him as Marlboro Man and shamelessly pimps her golden goose, shooting photographs of him wearing 10-gallon hats, propping his cowboy boots on metal gates and squinting grittily into the midday sun. Under these photographs she writes captions that land somewhere between William Carlos Williams and Playgirl: “My husband. He’s still waiting on the calves. And wearing a vest. And lighting my fire.” Elsewhere she writes, “He’s rugged and virile,” apparently prepping his dossier for his next national Chippendales tour.

Even so, the core of Marlboro Man’s appeal — like Pioneer Woman’s, and Ma and Pa’s before them — rests in this blurry backdrop of constant toiling under pressure from the ever-changing seasons. Set in contrast to the photographs of windblown prairies and luminous skies and dinner tables arranged for 20, there are captions about reading lessons and vaccinating calves and doing five loads of laundry every day. Even though readers are well aware that The Pioneer Woman may not be a portal into a simpler, better life so much as a carefully art-directed, commercially sponsored fantasy, they are happy to suspend their disbelief. Even as the Web site’s popularity grows beyond 23 million page views per month, and Drummond shills for Babycakes Mini Treat Makers and shoots spots on the “Today Show” and wraps her cooking show for the Food Network, the blog continues to outline the unending tedium of home-schooling and cooking and housework (with an occasional episode of “The Real Housewives” mixed in for good measure). The fantasy presented here is a nostalgic vision of hard work in isolation, far from the curses of urban life, with its concrete playgrounds and its indifferent teachers and blind institutions. Physical labor, exposure to the elements: these are the things that free you from the compromises, the distractions, the mediocrity of city living. With The Pioneer Woman, all of these urban indignities dissolve into a haze of homemade doughnuts and pretty sunsets and a house packed with mothers-in-law and uncles and cousins.