I was too frustrated to frame this argument better. Here’s another try.
Discouraged with my inability to squeeze dollars from nickels, I decided that I should just educate myself on the basics of money. It seemed simple enough. I stopped skimming the financial section of the newspaper, and began — for the first time ever, mind you — reading about budgeting, saving, looking at long-term solutions for some of our financial troubles. Many of the solutions proffered for people looking to get ahead are troublesome: buy less Starbucks, remortgage your home, invest in an electric car, don’t plunder your 401K, fly coach. Fine solutions if you have money to begin with, smart solutions, even, but not so helpful for those whose belts cannot be tightened further. This was the reason I started the HUHO project way back when.
Yeah, and all that shit fell off when the job market in my town really tanked and our options started to run out. It became one of those situations where you just had to put your nose down and be thankful that you were still getting a paycheck. The national economic crisis, to me, was elsewhere until everyone in my department, except me and two others, was laid off. And then when another twenty were let go when their jobs were “relocated” right before the holidays. Then the local factories closed down for their annual holiday and it was announced that they weren’t going to reopen for awhile, and when they did it would be on a limited basis. There’s basically a hiring freeze for three counties in any direction, so everyone shuts the fuck up and stops complaining because there aren’t any other options, and moreover, you know that any job that opens up has 300 people clamoring for it.
You know, this is my landscape. This is not a thought exercise on the disappearing middle class. Take this,
One year ago, unemployment in Elkhart County was at 4.7%. Today, it’s the highest in the nation at 15.3%, fueled largely by the rapid decline in the recreational vehicle business.
…”People who have never had to ask for assistance are having to,” says Mayor Dick Moore, a Democrat in this largely Republican area.
Unemployment in the city of Elkhart (population 52,000) has hit 18%, he says.
“That’s a pretty tough number,” Moore says. “People are hanging in there, but … I don’t think we’ve hit the bottom yet.”
Or this,
[Gary, Indiana] looked like a goddamned war zone, and effectively, between the lack of industry and resulting poverty, the drug problem and attendant War on (Some People Who Use) Drugs, the thriving gangs and outsider fear, it is.
The people of Gary are attempting an urban renewal project, which is certainly a good thing, but… I don’t know who is expected to do and maintain the renewal project, unless we’re talking community outsiders, because the annual income is about $15,000 per household.
Michiganders spend a lot of time trying to outrun their surroundings, to make the bleak grayness as blurry as possible so certain things just aren’t noticed anymore.
So that the miles and miles of concrete grayness doesn’t swallow you whole.
The only places in town that ever stays busy are the bars. When I lived in Flint, a city more ravaged and abandoned that this one, it was the same way.
And compare these to, say, this article in the NYTimes about how hard it is as an investment banker to make it in NYC on $500,000 a year. Or compare them to Ms. Coastal Elite, who can’t grasp the irony of complaining about how trite and small her friends from Bumfuck, Plainstate, are while soliciting advice via a CARY TENNIS COLUMN about whether or not to FRIEND THESE HILLBILLIES ON FACEBOOK. I mean, you’ve got to be kidding me. Seeing your peers fall into the First World “keeping up with email is SO HARD!” sort of quandaries is frustrating.
But how do you say all this without sounding like Bill Kristol circa 2004? Or having people accuse you of drawing arbitrary, or ill-motivated, lines?
It’s similarly frustrating to have allies argue that you’re playing a maudlin, pseudo-political one-upmanship game for pointing out the absurdity in it. Or insinuating that you’re just jealous. To be fair, it really does sound nice to begin your day at noon and partake in a little yoga or sushi while crafting your own workday (or to only have the kinds of problems wherein you have to choose between private schools and nannies, or fret over how best to represent yourself on Facebook). But is it really so absurd to point out that this is not what the world is for most people? And more troublesome, is this where the feminist movement, or even just the feminist blogging movement, is going?
The other day, when I wrote, “a room of one’s own is a privilege most of us don’t — and won’t ever — have,” I wasn’t trying to score some dramatic rhetorical point, or punish a successful person for being happy or having fulfilling work. In today’s economic hierarchy some of us will be stuck on Maslow’s lower rungs while others celebrate their own impending self-actualization — this isn’t a debate. But only one of these climbers gets the microphone. As a friend wrote via email:
The problem with hearing the voices of working people is structural. Even if folks have the time and energy to write, it’s a lot to expect folks to self-educate so that they have the tools to express something about their experiences, even if they had the time. Some folks do; my mother was incredibly widely read coming from poverty and with only a high school education. But broad references and eloquence are going to be much more common among folks trained for them. That leaves the intelligentsia to speak for everyone else; but they’re not so good as seeing past their insular class experiences. I have no idea how to fix this.
Neither do I.
And part of this is why I’m bothered with some aspects of the feminist movement, specifically the feminist blogging movement, as so many of the people who take part in it are beginning the tricky business of monetizing their writing. Most feminists are not Professional Feminists — they are Professional Something Elses and have to hang their feminism along with a whole host of other political beliefs at the door to pay the bills. And I wonder too if those making feminism their career change her message to remain marketable? Does the new Professional Feminist have to set aside some of her feminist beliefs to keep the paycheck rolling in? Will she self-censor?
The old argument was that Professional Feminists, aka academics, were out of touch with non-Professional Feminist women. Feminism has long been criticized for its inability to get off campus, and now that it has a bit, thanks to the work of bloggers and writers reviving feminist media, now what? We’ve widened our feminist economic circle, as it were, to include a whole host of actual jobs that actual feminists can fill to perform actual feminist work and get an actual paycheck. But most stable, paying work isn’t that. Will the professionals remember us?
No. No, they won’t. They will not remember us.
Maybe that’s dire and unfair, but that’s how I feel. And, frankly, fuck it. I AM jealous. Is it ugly? Yes, but there it is. Every day I’m afraid, because I’m the sole breadwinner in my house and the people down the hall at work all got told they’re losing their jobs and my brother, who lives with me, has been out of work since October and, if I lose my job, I don’t know what we’re going to do. I’m the first person in my family to own my own house. I’m the only one of my siblings with a college education. I’m supposed to be the safety net for the whole lot of them and I am not feeling very safe myself.
And I don’t even have kids who are depending on me. If I feel this bad and this scared, it must be twenty times worse for others.
And it pisses me off–it seems so “let them eat cake”-ish–to read feminists talking about a feminist day that is basically “La la la, here’s my wonderful life.”
And yes, I understand that she didn’t mean it that way and I understand that there’s a cultural imperative at work that demands women not appear too happy or too successful or we’ll tear each other down.
But it just seems so… I don’t even know the word to describe it. We’re afraid out here, we women, we feminists. And to hear someone who situates herself as a feminist leader and activist going on about her day like that…
I don’t know. It just reminded me in vivid terms of all the problems I have with how the feminist blogosphere shapes up. Because I feel like we have a lot of leading feminists, who seem eager to get their book deals and be on their way to bigger and better things, but we have very few real leaders, who are willing to get down here in the trenches and get their hands dirty and help us remake things. And not in some theoretical way, but in some “How do we keep a roof over our heads and food in our bellies” way.
I’m wondering if this has anything to do with the fact that “professional” feminists and women’s studies programs seem to rarely intersect with economics, so when the two are forced together, aka now, there’s a huge dearth of feminist analysis on the economy. Or maybe it was just my women’s studies program that didn’t know where the business school was.
Until the end of January, I was a professional feminist. I lost it because the funding came from a donor who lost obnoxious amounts of money from both the stock market and Madoff crap. And living in Kansas, the likelihood of finding another job like that is probably the same as my becoming the queen of England.
That was a hell of a post.
I know that you say you don’t know how to fix things, but if there is an answer out there, and if it is one that truly takes the lives of women seriously, I know it will come from your direction.
If you’re just now beginning to wonder whether a sort of average-person feminism that focuses on the non-trivial issues of everyday life in a majority of the country would ever get any sort of appreciable funding/corporate airplay, well… wonder no longer. See also: the most job-intensive portions of the stimulus bill being considered “unnecessary” by “reasonable centrists.”
But you can’t convert all national newspaper/online magazine writers to a state of empathy with a magic wand, just like you can’t get dumb reactionaries at the National Review to not write non-stop, asinine bullshit. I will hazard a guess that this line of posting, if pursued with one’s blogospheric allies, will not end well.
To be fair, it really does sound nice to begin your day at noon and partake in a little yoga or sushi while crafting your own workday (or to only have the kinds of problems wherein you have to choose between private schools and nannies, or fret over how best to represent yourself on Facebook). But is it really so absurd to point out that this is not what the world is for most people?
It’s not what the world is for most people in New York City or on the coasts, either. The one problem I have with your argument is that you’re setting up the same old Coastal Elites/Heartland distinction, as if the coasts were populated only with elites and the heartland with hard-working people. Courtney represents a certain type of person who may exist only in a big coastal city (or perhaps Chicago), but she’s not representative of the all of people in it. It may just seem like she is because she and people like her are the ones writing about life in the city.
Just a pet peeve of mine, the erasure of anyone who doesn’t fit the perceived average of where I live, as if there is no one in between Park Avenue and the ghetto. I know the middle class is rapidly disappearing here, but in a city of 8 million, you’re going to find someone there.
But the thing is, you don’t live here; Courtney does. And if she isn’t seeing those people in between Park Avenue and the ghetto, and considering that they may have different experiences than she does (and different experiences from each other), and she’s a professional feminist, then there is indeed a problem with the (small, narrow) world of professional feminism.
Oh, and if you’re looking for a good writer on finance who tells it like it is and doesn’t try to shame you for wanting a latte every now and again, try Elizabeth Warren.
And Your Money or Your Life is another good resource, which focuses on changing your relationship to money rather than just offering the same tips you know already.
Thank you.
Thank you for putting this out there. I certainly consider myself a feminist; albeit not a professional one. I work for a Vermont college and live in the only big city; Burlington. Of course, big, by Vermont standards is a difficult choice of words. I believe that our population is around 40,000. We’ve been fortunate so far; the layoffs that people have experienced aren’t hitting large groups of people; a couple of hundred here, twenty there, ten at a smaller business.
But we’ve never had any real industry to speak of. Our economy revolves around agriculture and tourism. Our dairy farmers are all in danger of losing their farms because the price of milk is so low at their end, but too expensive in the stores. People don’t go on vacation when they’re thinking about how to meet the mortgage or whether or not they can send their kids back to whatever University they had been attending before the market bottomed out. We haven’t been hit as hard here as elsewhere, but we too are feeling it.
Yes, feminists do talk from a place of theory. We forget that the real challenges are how to continue to educate ourselves when navigating a landscape of despair; lost jobs, no health care, little food in the pantry. Which portion of the education is more pressing- to realize that women are still not given equal pay for work; are still treated with contempt and disrespect by men who emotionally and physically brutalize them, or to learn how to balance a check book, write a resume that means something in today’s market, or be taught hands-on skills that will find a better job with more pay?
Personally, I’d like someone to show me how to fix a television; build a house; harness the sun’s energy or transform a gas burning car to one that runs on corn. At least with those skills I’d be making a better living. What do I do now? My current skill set is that I can paint a pretty picture, I know how to express myself in writing, or I can read a spreadsheet. That’s what feminism gave me.
“The one problem I have with your argument is that you’re setting up the same old Coastal Elites/Heartland distinction, as if the coasts were populated only with elites and the heartland with hard-working people.”
I didn’t read it this way, but I’m from one of those flyover states. I’m just glad that someone is talking about us and not in the context of the elections (Iowa, Michigan, Indiana, etc). I think Lauren is articulating how some “elites” get far more time in the press to talk about their problems, but when it comes to middle class and lower class folks we don’t get that same air time, whether it’s in the press or blogs. The NY Times and other major papers are on the coasts so they tend to represent certain voices and as zuzu pointed out…they’re even missing the voices of those in the coastal cities who are “in between Park and the ghetto.” There are major problems with the Coastal Elites vs. Heartland argument but some of those articles posted here speak for themselves about how some people on the coasts view those of us in the middle states. I’m not articulating this well, but Lauren’s post resonates with me and I’m glad she started this conversation.
“And if she isn’t seeing those people in between Park Avenue and the ghetto, and considering that they may have different experiences than she does (and different experiences from each other), and she’s a professional feminist, then there is indeed a problem with the (small, narrow) world of professional feminism.”
This. Completely.
I wasn’t trying to say “just” jealous. I tried to clarify in the other post. I agree her post was tone deaf. But I also don’t like it one bit when privileged progressives put on this front about not having privileges they do have. Which I get that you don’t. But if someone’s rich, they shouldn’t crash on couches of their allies in order to seem more street.
And as all of this has been unfolding (the economic ‘crisis’ on the verge of being choas) I’m sitting here still waiting for someone to say it. The two great “social” experiments of the 20th century have failed – communism and consumerism/capitalism. Where do we go from here? Let’s hope feminists keep blogging and start expanding their view. Getting paid the same as HIM is something to be happy about, feel achievement for, but the framework within which we get that pay is broken – let’s say that too.
“I have no idea how to fix this. – Neither do I.”
Neither do I. I do appreciate your efforts to expand the discussion though and it may be the way we get to a fix.
I think the problem I have with this approach, though, is that, while the author obviously means it to be descriptive, in my life (growing up small-town Midwestern white Protestant), “descriptive” is often used as “proscriptive.” And all kinds of “descriptive” things are used as a way to try to establish and enforce societal norms for how we women should behave, especially as a means of separating ourselves from the bad poor people. This isn’t Courtney’s fault, obviously, but to me feels like a glaring pot-hole in online feminism that I keep stepping in. (So, Amanda, I guess I actually have the opposite problem of the one you describe. I also think it’s obnoxious when progressives with privilege crash pretend to be poor, but I was raised to pretend to be middle-class, so what room do I have to complain?)
In my experience, we feminists don’t do a good job of talking about class. I mean, yes, we talk about it and we talk about privilege and we’re aware that there’s a working class, etc. etc. But I mean, the way that I, as a rural Protestant white woman was brought up to aspire to middle-class and the ways in which I was trained and socialized in to behave properly. I don’t know how to talk about that in a way that gets at how stifling and oppressive it was and how it wasn’t real middle class stuff they were teaching us anyway, as I quickly found out upon going to college. I don’t quite know how to talk about my experience without it becoming either fake pseudo-academic bullshit designed to protect me from being too vulnerable or becoming just one long mess of anger and embarrassment and pride and laughter. I feel like I’m being embarrassingly inarticulate here.
I read Lauren, and I feel like she’s wrestling with the same stuff, though, and it makes me feel better.
But if someone’s rich, they shouldn’t crash on couches of their allies in order to seem more street.
Of course they shouldn’t, because that would be both disingenuous and a disavowal of privilege, rather than a confrontation and interrogation of privilege.
But this doesn’t mean that rich people shouldn’t stop and think for a minute about the fact that there are many many many people out there who crash on couches because they have to prior to posting something on the internet that openly stakes a claim as being a representation of a day in the life of a feminist/activist.
Lauren,
This was an extremely well-written post. Also, for what it is worth, your first shot was equally good, even if not as elaborate.
I don’t think there is anything wrong in telling privileged people to be more aware of their privilege when they speak. If women are told this more often than men are, then the corrective measure is to start telling men the same thing more often as well, not to stop pointing it out to privileged women.
(Came here via Rana’s link to this post on FB. I’m an old fan of your writing from your feministe days, although I haven’t been checking out this blog. Will correct that starting right now)
I interpreted it somewhat differently, though I can see your point, zuzu. It’s worth reminding folks that there’s considerable class diversity in so-called “elite” coastal cities. Lauren’s argument struck me as not in of itself setting up the coastal/heartland dichotomy, but in some way pointing out how even progressive people can sometimes perpetuate it.
Having grown up with a working-class family in a Midwestern state and now living as a (part-time) graduate student in a “hip” coastal city, I feel like I have feet in both worlds. That can be enriching and unnerving at the same time. I’ve been surprised how many of my progressive friends accept the flawed coast/heartland dichotomy, but have invertit: the coasts are where the best Americans are, and the heartland is an unalloyed wasteland where no intelligent person would want to live.
(An oversimplication, yes, but you get the idea).
Regarding class as an issue of analysis, one speculation of off the top of my head is that it’s faded in importance partially maybe because it’s deemed as ephemeral or less “real” than gender or race. It’s true that gender and race as concepts are socially constructed to a massive extent, but they have referents that are physically manifest, whereas it’s harder to make the same argument about class.
Plus class adds further difficulty to doing intersectional analysis, so I suspect some simply throw it out or deemphasize it because they’re less interested in it.
As for how to fix the problem of disconnect, one way is precisely through conversations like this. They’ll cause a lot of discomfort, and they won’t always end well, but they help bring us closer to a better movement. I don’t think there’s an achievable endpoint anyway; social just movements are “permanently beta” in the sense that they are constantly changing and improving.
Amanda, I think we are all in agreement with this, but that’s not what Lauren is advocating (or anyone else I’ve seen in this conversation). As I read Lauren, she is saying that those us who are privileged should keep in mind that we are privileged. As I stated in her original post, I am totally in agreement with this, though it’s easier said than done.
As it is right now, a lot of privileged progressive bloggers seems obvious to the fact that they are privileged, and that some people are facing some very real problems out there. This is something worth pointing out, and I think Lauren did it in a very constructive way (I’ll be honest and say that if I had been in her position, I’d be much less constructive about this).
But how do you say all this without sounding like Bill Kristol circa 2004?
Bill Kristol? Fuck Kristol. How about Karl Marx?
Why is class awareness so “dirty” to young people–is it because the neocons were the people who used such terminology during your generation’s coming-of-age? Of course they did, they all used to be Trotskyists (Bill’s daddy, Irving Kristol, was).
The overall question I have after reading your post is: WHY SO APOLOGETIC about what you have learned? Will somebody please tell me WHO IS TO BLAME for this “I don’t want to sound like I’m jealous” vibe–Ronald fucking Reagan? Why not be resentful when some activists (who have attended the right schools) are doing so well at THE EXPENSE of others, exploiting the fact that there IS oppression and making their living off of it? The Yippies used to call them “shit liberals”–while the Black Panthers (who always got straight to the point) called them “poverty pimps”–isn’t that the phenomenon we are discussing?
You are talking Class Consciousness 101, and according to THAT, the people on top will never be nice to those of us on the bottom, because they are too busy congratulating themselves that they are not us. Why would they listen to people that they believe are inferior?
And, what Aunt B said.
But the thing is, you don’t live here; Courtney does. And if she isn’t seeing those people in between Park Avenue and the ghetto, and considering that they may have different experiences than she does (and different experiences from each other), and she’s a professional feminist, then there is indeed a problem with the (small, narrow) world of professional feminism.
Zuzu, great comment… and you reminded me:
About 22 years ago, I was reading (feminist newspaper) OFF OUR BACKS when collective member Carol Anne Douglas (yes, I remember who it was), then studying for her doctorate, wrote something pretty good about feminist organizing, then ended it with something like, “Why aren’t there any feminists in the welfare offices?”
You know the punch line, right? I was sitting in the welfare office when I read it.
Why did she assume none of us were there already?
i have been reading and re-reading this all day, and i still don’t know precisely what to say. except that this is why i value your voice so much lauren.
This is a great post. I’m so glad I found this site. I think that, overall, feminsiting has become less meaningful. There’s always been an “introduction to intersectional feminism for comfortable college students” feel to the blog, which is probably due, at least in part, to the fact that it is a blog, and, as such, is very much bound up in the lives of the people who write there (almost all of whom seem to come from very comfortable backgrounds, have MAs, and are getting their names out as a way of getting their books published). I can’t fault them for the upper middle class horizon too much–and this post isn’t the first that has struck me as alienating–but it also means that I have little interest in continuing to visit the site or recommend it to others. But, reading that post, I just wanted to shout, “You’re a writer, and it never occurred to you that describing how you had to “drag” yourself out of bed after 8.5 hours of sleep might strike a false note?”
But I also don’t like it one bit when privileged progressives put on this front about not having privileges they do have. Which I get that you don’t. But if someone’s rich, they shouldn’t crash on couches of their allies in order to seem more street.
Where did Lauren require Courtney to slum in order to be authentic? Considering how you come across when you’re discussing your life, and taking into account your privilege, is not at all the same thing as pulling the kind of shit a lot of the Trustafarians at UM did and stand on the corner among the actual homeless begging because it made them feel more real.
In addition, the first sentence I quoted doesn’t really lie in your mouth very well, considering how you put on a front about not having privileges you do have when your book came out.
“As it is right now, a lot of privileged progressive bloggers seems obvious to the fact that they are privileged, and that some people are facing some very real problems out there”
True, but Femisting is in my opinion, much more attuned to class differences than other progressive bloggers. Have you ever read say, Ezra Klein? Look the guy is great on things like health care policy, but man he lives on another planet! Sometimes Femisting might make me cringe, or even laugh, most especially at what I consider their youth-obsessed focus, but they at least try. They at least mention class!
“Why aren’t there any feminists in the welfare offices?”
You know the punch line, right? I was sitting in the welfare office when I read it.
Why did she assume none of us were there already?”
Well, this is probably the same disease that the peace movement has. I can’t tell you how many times I have listened to members of my peace group gripe about it being all white. (and, I have to say, majority middle class and above). why aren’t black people in our group? Why aren’t poor people in our group? Umm, maybe they have other, more pressing things to worry about? Maybe they are wondering, how come we aren’t at the protest of the latest cop-killing of an unarmed black male youth. Maybe, black people in particular are wondering why they, who were already against the iraq war long before most white people caught on, should be marching to stop that, when very few if any white people, are marchign to stop something that is much more insidiously destructive to many black communuties; the drug war, and instituionalized and racist sentencing disparties.
It’s total class and race blindness. It’s really pervasive within the activist left, and from what I read, always has been.
It’s not that privileged women are told this more often, but privileged *progressive* women, and I think, progressives of all stripes who adopt beliefs that are conscious of privilege and interact in communities that are conscious to privilege. I doubt anyone called out John Thain or Madoff for their privilege- until they had lost billions. It is like the 60s counterculture where a lot of activists on the left would have shunned things like “monetizing” their intellectual work because it would have put them in the establishment.
The bigger a microphone you have, the more you are in a position of privilege, and the more your own personal experiences potentially conflict with the majority of people your advocacy is supposed to represent for. And yet the alternative is often not having much of a public voice at all. That’s just the way it is and always will be.
Lauren, this is a fantastic post. I though the first version was good too. I think one of the things that feeds into the ‘coastal elite’ mentality is that so much of the discussion about the crisis is centered on the coasts (because that’s where Wall Street is, that’s who has power in Congress, etc) and the discussion in the national newsmedia is so detached. Every time I hear a Congressperson or some financial guru say something like “If we don’t do X, we’ll have a disaster on our hands” when over here, in the Midwest, we already have a disaster on our hands, and have had one for awhile. And it seems like nobody’s actually noticing because, hey, we’re flyover country. If New York had double-digit unemployment right now, it would be a ‘crisis’, but in Detroit and Flint and Muskegon and Elkhart, it’s hardly worth bothering Congress about. Bankers can make six figures and own three houses and that’s just their right, but if a unionized factory worker happens to make enough to buy a house and send his kids to college, well, his wages are ‘inflated’ and he has to take pay and benefit cuts as a condition of getting help from Congress. Yeah, I live in southeast Michigan, and I’m angry. It sounds like a lot of us are angry. I see a lot of the snobbery that Linnaeus mentioned, and I honestly think it’s one of the reasons that so much of the country seems ready to write us off.
If New York had double-digit unemployment right now, it would be a ‘crisis’, but in Detroit and Flint and Muskegon and Elkhart, it’s hardly worth bothering Congress about.
Um…spent much time in Harlem or Yonkers in the past, say, 30 years? There’s no “if” regarding double-digit unemployment. The projects are not basking in Congressional largesse. This isn’t a battle between coast and continent; class lines cross those geographical categories.
Kathryn, you’re disappearing everyone in New York other than the bankers. And what Kai said — there *are* places in the city where the unemployment rate is in double-digits.
Erasing those places is no better, or different, than erasing the people where you live. The question is, how do we *not* do that? And keeping the focus on class rather than geography is a good place to start. You probably have more in common with someone in Harlem or Yonkers than either of you do with the elites in Washington — who are resisting making the MOTU types pay for their own malfeasance and dragging their feet on measures to make life better for people in Muskegon and Yonkers.
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More on feminism and class
This. Oh, all of this.
Yeah, I’m so tired of people whose idea of getting through a recession is..what? I mean, they still have the same job and salary they always had. So they might not get their raise? I get out of school in May (and yes, it’s an MA) and I will just have more debt and not even close to a promise of a job.
And I’m still a lucky one.
And Daisy, it often seems to me that the only thing a lot of feminists learned from Marx is to group women into an oppressed class, and completely to miss the economic points.
This is a great post, Lauren. Glad you’re not backing down.
Amanda: You really might do well to give it a rest on the “just jealous” bullshit. It’s really unflattering. And anyway, “I bet you think this song is about you, don’t you, don’t you?”
Daisy:
“Why is class awareness so “dirty” to young people–is it because the neocons were the people who used such terminology during your generation’s coming-of-age?”
*waves* I’m 29. I don’t see this as a “young people” problem per se, but a class privilege one. Older people have class privilege too. And people who are bound and determined to keep it are not likely to “get it” about this. At all. The blogosphere is populated by a majority of young people, sure, but well… Feminism is dominated by well-off white women of all ages and always has been. A few people have picked up on the idea of “intersectionality,” but yeah… What Sarah J said about feminism and Marx.
Anyway, Lauren… Keep on keeping on. You’re exactly right about all of this. Well done.
Thanks for posting this, Lauren. And the thing is–we *do* live in a society; even if I happen to be relatively privileged at any given point, it ultimately doesn’t–I don’t want to see my friends suffering. I don’t think it’s a healthy or good state of things where only a tiny tiny percentage of us can even take the basics on Maslow’s pyramid (thanks for that cite) for granted, and increasingly tinier. It isn’t a tenable situation, even if you’re not concerned about the other people, and…yeah, the layoffs are fucking scary, when they’re you.