AIBU to wonder what is wrong with being middle class?

[Cadders1]

I am a fairly new Mnetter and on a number of threads I have seen people using 'middle class' as derogatory term. Can I ask why or will I be called a troll?

P.s what is a troll? And can I be one with rainbow hair - as I always wanted that one when I was 12!

Have you seen the featherdown thread? Much sneering on there, mostly at MC from what I can see.

It's easy/ ok to sneer and poke fun at Featherdown/ Boden/4x4s etc, I must admit I do it myself sometimes.

But the rule seems to be, sneer upwards by all means. But if you sneer downwards you are using stereotypes and assumptions.

Are you sure it's upwards or downwards sneering morris? I suspect it might be sideways sneering.

I'm going to say slightly upwards, certainly in terms of income.

I'd love to be able to go to featherdown myself, or to have a wardrobe full of Boden equivalent stuff.

But although I have the aspirations, I don't have the income. So it is all the more fun for me isn't to slag off the Boden classes etc, as if to say 'I'd hate to be one of those smug idiots'. I can guffaw about Jeremy and Jemima and their lifestyle.

But to lots of people, I'm the smug idiot. I have the odd Boden bit, I buy olive oil etc. To somebody somewhere, I'm a c*nt.

Indeed. But just How Far Can You Go to demonstrate one is Middle Class?

I love David Lodge but am poor and don't have a car, let alone a 4x4- can I be a working-class intellectual please?

Not seen TerryWogansCock for some time and it my all time favourite MN name.

I am probably awfully underclass

Eeek, MZ my last reply was to your Jedi post.
Not a comment on the Boden one. Just to clarify

I don't have a car either, and all my beloved and very well thumbed Lodge books came from charity or second hand shops.

To me MC is about values etc not income. My parents haven't a pot to piss in, never have had. I got a full grant to go to uni (showing age). But they're unquestionably MC.

Think of students - skint but mostly MC.

Hmmm. Thinks...

BitofFun, of course you can. David Lodge fan club is a broad church and even those of us with little in the way of Middle Class credentials are welcome. I myself transcend the class structure and am, simply, classy

Well, it's nice work if you can get it, MZ

Actually, scrub the working-class intellectual- can I be an artistic bohemian-type instead? It is a tad more glamorous.

My favourite ever bit from David Lodge is the Text As Striptease Lecture

The bit where he says 'and then the climax, where we see directly between the open legs to the vulva itself' and the two lady lecturers leave the hall noisily

Oh he is awful.

YANBU - and I think morriszapp hits the nail on the head with her "values not income" comment.

This drives me mad! Class is just a useful way for those interested in dividing and categorising to manipulate us and put us all into neat little boxes for their own ends (I am thinking politicians/statisticians/ trade unionists and elitists for example)

If you mean what is wrong with wearing Boden and having a decent income or eating bloody olives or whatever then absolutely nothing if that's what floats your boat! What bothers me more than class is rude, selfish, lazy people - and you get those in whatever class box or stereotype you want to come up with (unfortunately).

There is always confusion when talking about class though, because there are social definitions (the type generally discussed on here),which can be endlessly debated, and there is the economic definition, which is far more clear-cut.

In terms of our relationship to the means of production, most of us are working-class. Much as the Boden-wearing olive-munchers dislike the fact.

Tell us more about the economic working class BOF.

Values not income indeed.
MZ and BoF, sadly, my David Lodge books are not to hand (damn my lack of a proper bespoke library crafted from ancient oak) so I cannot find your reference.
Reading Author, Author at the moment btw - love it

BoF, there are socio-economic categories aren't there? ABC1s Ds and Es - think they are based on level of education achieved, occupation, income, home ownership etc. Much beloved of pollsters and market researchers.

I guess we are all working class if we have to work to live. Who coined the phrase I wonder?

ok just found out. Working class, first ref, 1789, so pre Marx et al.

Take my second hand books and clothing.

I was brought up on jumble sales, charity shops etc and I think it's a great way to shop.

But my gran has taken much longer to embrace the joy of second hand. She's traditional working class, and was brought up to see pride in having everything 'bought new'. Using other people's cast offs was to her, associated with charity, poverty and even possibly disease.

She's totally into charity shops now but it took her a long time. I remember the shiny white sock girls from my primary school mocking my second hand stuff - they were from the council estate.

So to me, second hand is actually a MC marker, not WC. Though of course ebay etc is changing all this very rapidly.

Er....

It's to do with having nothing to sell but your labour power, not owning or having a share in the business but working for a boss, and having to clock-in, clock-out and exercising little autonomy in your work. And not being the manager of anyone else.

So there is an argument that teachers, for example, who used to be seen as middle-class in that they were fairly autonomous, held a position of high regard and responsibility analoguous to a manager, have actually become more working-class. Ever heavier mountains of mundane paperwork, performance targets and ticking prescriptive boxes with standards handed down from on high rather than exercising their own professionalism, have all contributed to to a situation in which they have little power except for collectively through their unions.

That sort of thing.

Ooh, olderandwider (very clever name, by the way ) you will like this then, even though it's not the full Lodgeian genius:

" The classical tradition of striptease (?) offers a valid metaphor for the activity of reading. The dancer teases the audience, as the text teases its readers, with the promise of an ultimate revelation that is infinitely postponed. Veil after veil, garment after garment, is removed, but it is the delay in the stripping that makes it exciting, not the stripping itself; because no sooner has one secret been revealed than we lose interest in it and crave another. When we have seen the girl?s underwear we want to see her body, when we have seen her breasts we want to see her buttocks, and when we have seen her buttocks we want to see her pubis, and when we see her pubis, the dance ends?but is our curiosity and desire satisfied? Of course not? Striptease (?) is the terpsichorean equivalent of the hermeneutic fallacy of a recuperable meaning, which claims that if we remove the clothing of its rhetoric from a literary text we discover the bare facts it is trying to communicate? The attempt to peer into the very core of a text, to posses once and for all its meaning, is vain?it is only ourselves that we find there, not the work itself. Freud said that obsessive reading (and I suppose that most of us in this room must be regarded as compulsive readers) is the displaced expression of a desire to see the mother?s genitals but the point of the remark, which may not have been entirely appreciated by Freud himself, lies precisely in the concept of displacement. To read is to surrender oneself to an endless displacement of curiosity and desire form one sentence to another, from one action to another, form one level of the text to another. The text unveils itself before us, but never allows itself to be possessed; and instead of striving to posses it we should take pleasure in its teasing."

you cant win here (MN) , its so so British

Middle Class get sneered at (boden yada yada)

but then again so do chavs (just see the reaction when people post with text speak, or about their family "ishoos" and get called Jeremy Kyle), and a vile thread recentkly sneerint at chavs in a park

noone is safe

god sometimes I think the americans have got it right..............