I’m Bloody Tired of the Classism Inherent in the Election

Is the darn thing over yet?

No?

Damn.

American politics are deeply, fundamentally classist.

Those who want to sound high-class (or are) adopt the rhetoric of the liberals. The working class go Republican.

You know what? Screw it, I don’t even want to pull up data on this. If you don’t believe me, go stick your head back in the sand and believe whatever you want. Tell yourself that you despise conservatives because they are Bad People and not because they are Low Class and not Good People Like You. And conservatives can tell themselves that they hate liberals because liberals are Bad People who Hate Americans.

In reality, of course, most people are good people (except for the one who work in HR, who should all be shot–NAHRALT, of course.)

When people hear that I write about “politics” they tend to assume that this means that I enjoy reading/debating about electoral politics. The truth is that I basically hate electoral politics.

Most of what passes for “political debate” is really just tribal signalling. Tribal signaling need not be wise, thoughtful, or factually correct; it need only signal “my tribe is better than your tribe.” I might be able to stand this kind of inanity if I felt comfortably a member of one of the big tribes and basically hated (or had no friends in) the other tribe. Of course, I have to have friends from across the economic system.

Working class and prole whites are convinced that elite whites hate them. Elite whites are convinced that prole whites hate just about everyone. And blacks, Muslims, etc., are probably pretty concerned about proles hating them, too. Family members are voting for the people they think are on their side against those bad people on the other side. Friends are voting for different people whom they think are on their side against those bad people on the other side.

Almost no one I’ve talked to is voting for a particular side because they’ve undertaken a careful study of the particular issues under discussion and decided that one of the candidates has the best policies. How many Democratic voters agree with Hillary’s stance on the Iraq War? How many Republicans agree with Trump’s opinion on the same?

The most vocal Trump supporter I know was talking about how we need to do more for immigrant children coming from Latin America just last year, and has told me that they don’t actually want to see anyone deported. They just hate liberals, and they are voting for Trump to stick it to the liberals.

No matter how I vote, someone gets fucked.

Pasting on our Plastic Smiles

Yes, my friends, I went out and socialized this weekend.

It was awful.

Don’t get me wrong. I can socialize. I can paste on a plastic smile and make appropriate small talk. I’ve been to dinner parties with professors and hung out with hobos. I just don’t necessarily enjoy socializing.

The area I stayed in is one of the whitest in the country, an island accessible only by a ferry ride on which I saw a woman wearing a dress so ugly it could only have been horribly expensive and a Rolls Royce, the kind of place where a little cabin in the woods is worth a million dollars. The folks I stayed with commented on how nice it was that the $25 ferry boat toll “keeps the riff-raff off the island” and have framed pictures of Obama in their house.

Well, there is no $25 toll to my community, so the riff-raff comes here. The folks I visited can vote for more immigration and bussing and section 8 housing, and it has no effect on them, because they live in an all-white million dollar community accessible only by ferry. And if some poor or middle class person says, “Hey, this has bad effects on me!” they look down their noses a and call that person racist.

Rich and poor alike are barred from stealing bread and sleeping under bridges, and rich and poor alike may only avoid crime, environmental destruction, and their wages being driven into the toilet by purchasing million dollar homes on exclusive islands.

These people have no fucking shame.

Femininity as Fashion

My androgyny theory run up against the obvious complication of how you measure androgyny/dimorphism. Height? Hormones? Behavior? The latter is obviously affected by a ton of environmental factors.

Slate Star Codex has an excellent post analyzing fashion (and politics) via cellular automata. Other people have written really insightful things using this same model, so I recommend you shoving it into whatever spare theories you have lying around.

BTW, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, you should read Scot’s post before finishing mine.

Anyway, does the performance of femininity itself follow this model?
I propose yes.

Let’s go back to 1900 or so. Most people are farmers, and farmers have to work damn hard. The wives of farmers are not delicate wilting flowers, but extremely hard workers themselves, with very little excess time or money to spend on things like closets full of shoes. The traits we associate with femininity and gender role performance were largely luxuries available only to the wealthy, a situation that had probably been largely true for centuries.

Then came industrialization, the shift to the cities, and the rapid growth of the middle class. By the 1920s, the middle class could aspire to ape upper class behaviors, spending their new wealth on clothes and shoes and stay-at-home-motherhood. It is probably no coincidence that at the same time, fashionable women began dressing and acting like men, even aspiring to “boyish” figures.

Then came the Depression and WWII, and people went back to eating spare shoes instead of wearing them. By the fifties, femininity was once again a symbol of luxurious good living, complete with the magical wonders of modern technology like vacuums and Jello.

Of course, as soon as the middle class (and even, god forbid, proles,) started aspiring to vacuum in their pearls, such things became horribly retrograde. Poors might aspire to have enough money that one of them might be able to take off a little time to care for their children, but rich people had much better things to do with their time. No self-respecting career woman would be caught dead in public with a parcel of screaming brats; if they must breed for the sake of some horribly chauvinist husband, the actual care and upkeep of the children must be farmed out to suitably low-class (often non-white) nannies. Nor would she deign to humiliate herself by cooking meals or doing laundry. (Such work can also be done by low-class non-white women, to allow rich white women to keep up their masculine lifestyles.)

(Note: it’s not employing people that’s problematic. It’s believing that certain types of work are beneath you, but perfectly acceptable for other sorts of people. If you think women shouldn’t cook and clean, then don’t hire other women to cook and clean.)

Of course, poors and proles never quite got the message and continued buying their daughters Barbies and Bratz and whatnot, despite all of their betters’ constant harangues about the dire moral dangers of such toys.

As the economy continues to suck and the middle class shrinks, will femininity become again the domain of the super-rich?