Class and Oppression Olympics
Sometimes I wonder if there’s a kind of Oppression Olympics with class-related stuff. For one thing, when you start talking about class, this is what most people associate with the word “privilege.” And I feel like discussions involving class sometimes descend into a kind of oneupsmanship.”Our lights were always getting turned off because we could only afford rent or bills, not both!” “Oh yeah? We lived off of food stamps when I was growing up!” And so on and so forth.
I get annoyed by class discussions for reasons at both ends of the spectrum. This bit from a recent comment at Anji’s blog really rubbed me the wrong way:
However, your own photo you posted to this entry (and the other flickr photos) shows the pro-sex work protesters to be white, and visually middle class.
“Visually middle class?” What the hell does that mean? That’s just supporting the idea that you can tell what a person’s current financial/economic situation is, as well as their background and personal history, just by looking at them. And frankly I find that extremely condescending. There isn’t one way to be middle class, working class, poor, whatever. Thinking you can clock someone based on a set of external markers is reductive at best and downright offensive at worst.
I’ve mentioned before that for all the talk of the definition of privilege as not referring simply to economic advantage and/or being a personal fault, it seems like an awful lot of bloggers who should know better fall into this trap. This was particularly evident to me with that “class privilege” meme that was going around a while ago. Talk about annoying. No, class is not something you can determine by ticking a few boxes on a form. An empirical fact such as “when you were growing up you had a lot of books in the house” carries, by itself, not much information. It’s all the backstory, the complex stuff that can’t be represented by a tick-mark, that contains the real information.
I also keep coming back to what Queer Dewd said: “Class is not a sweater that you take on and off.” I hate the way some bloggers have been guilty of pointing to a person’s current perceived (because let’s be honest, for the most part they don’t know much about anyone else’s personal situation) economic status as if it exists in a vacuum. There is also a conflation of income and wealth which I find very frustrating and, again, reductive. (We’ve discussed this at some length at Octogalore’s blog, but I can’t find the thread now.)
On the other hand I’m also annoyed from the other side, when people try to act like economic privilege doesn’t exist, or minimize its importance. Sometimes I wonder if I’m slipping into the Oppression Olympics game, but I really do feel it’s worthwhile to talk about the differences in perspective from people who have never really known what it felt like to not “have enough” as opposed to people who have felt the very real effects of the lack of a safety net. To pretend these differences don’t matter, or to minimize their effect, is foolish.
Hugo wrote a post yesterday about college graduates who end up having an existential crisis after graduation and I just can’t get too worked up about feeling sorry for them. Yes, I know I went to college; but these are the kinds of people who annoyed me in college. They didn’t seem to have any sense of perspective. They never had to worry about paying the rent or paying their tuition or anything like that, because mom and dad were taking care of it. Or like on the Suze Orman show the other night, this couple was asking whether they should focus on saving for retirement or saving for their child’s college education. To me the idea of saving for a kid’s education is so foreign. I wonder what it would feel like to be someone who had a college fund or whose parents paid their tuition. Personally I think college students should pay for their own education, take out loans, get jobs, figure out how to make ends meet, because otherwise you get this protracted adolescence and a lack of understanding of the real world. Or maybe I just think that because I’ve always been so independent, by nature. I wouldn’t have wanted to be supported by my parents even if it had been financially possible. I was an adult and I wanted to live accordingly – which is why I used to get so annoyed by people talking about college students as if they weren’t adults. I probably even wrote about it on this blog back in 2002.
The above, about paying for college, might sound draconian. You might ask, why shouldn’t someone’s parents pay for their college, if they can afford it? And, yeah, I get that. It’s not like I’m advocating making a law or something. :P I’m just saying I think being able to fend for yourself is an important skill that should come sooner rather than later. And it’s a skill many people don’t have the luxury of foregoing.
So is it Oppression Olympics, to say that? Or just fact?
Spigot of whatever
The title of this post is an obscure reference to a friend’s long-defunct blog. Anyone who knows me well knows that I can be cryptically self-referential – I guess what you could call very “inside baseball,” but I hate that term. Almost as much as I hate “it is what it is.” That is one of my all-time most-loathed phrases. It’s meaningless!!
A conversation among (not “between!” between is for two people only! pet peeve!) Jenny, Niki, and I might as well be in a foreign language as far as third-party listeners are concerned, once we get going on inside jokes and shared history and such.
Anyway. Once again, I’m thinking that I really need to blog the way I used to, the way this blog started out. A post didn’t have to have a central theme. I didn’t delicately pick and choose my every word so as not to offend some theoretical reader showing up out of the blue. I didn’t feel so inhibited.
And while I don’t want to just keep putting up an endless stream of “why can’t I blog like I used to?” meta-posts, I also want to make it clear that I really do feel a sense of inhibition with my blog unlike anything I felt ~5 years ago.
When I first started my blog you could say I was too far in the opposite direction, honestly. Bless my heart. But then, nobody really knew about blogs in 2002 so it didn’t matter anyway.
In a few ways I feel less inhibited now, but I don’t want to get off on that tangent right now.
Speaking of titles. (Well, I was in the first paragraph.) Penelope Trunk says it’s important to write good titles for your posts. Obviously I agree, for SEO purposes and such. But one thing I love about Penelope Trunk is that she acknowledges the rather simple, common-sense (or should be common sense) fact that everyone’s blog has different goals. Not everyone blogs with the same kind of purpose in mind. If you’re blogging to draw attention to a cause or a business or an issue, or to spur conversation about a topic you’re interested in, or whatever, then yes, SEO is important and therefore you have to write good titles. Me, I’ve never been very good at writing titles. They’re usually an afterthought. I didn’t have titles on my blog in its first incarnation, and even once it was on the second database I didn’t always include them. I understand about SEO and all that, but for me and my blog, I just don’t care. I write my blog for me and if other people show up, fine, but that’s not the main point. As with everything else with blogging, social media, etc., I’ll just keep doing my thing like I always have, and not get caught up with all the earnest “trends” and whatnot. I went through a phase where I thought I should try to be what you would now see called a “thought leader” (I hate that term!) but it stressed me out too much and it wasn’t what I really wanted anyway – it was just BS. I know for people who are trying to use their blog for their business or whatever it’s different, but fortunately for me that’s not what it’s about.
So all this is to say I really need to take my own damn advice already and get this blog back to its roots, for realz! I can always ban asshole commenters, after all. There’s one guy I’ve been on the verge of banning for a long time because his comments don’t make any sense and they make me feel like I’m taking crazy pills.
This is one unfortunate fact about the internet… people feel entitled to make all kinds of proclamations and declarations about your life. I really don’t get it. I mean think about it, how freaking presumptuous can you be, waltzing onto somebody’s personal blog and telling them what they should and shouldn’t do? Several years ago I had a guy who used to come around and berate me for what he called “poor financial decisions.” As if he knew shit about dick! The latest exhibit is the guy who is obsessed with me and says I hate freedom – seriously, he said that. Sometimes you just have to strap on your lollerskates and roll along.
Today I was talking with my sis, Crystal, and we started hatching a plan to take a trip to Australia. Unfortunately I doubt we’ll ever do it. I don’t like to hatch plans like that if I don’t think there’s a chance of it actually happening, but somehow we got going. I would like to go to Australia, but that is such a long flight, and I don’t know if I really want to leave the country right now anyway. Maybe I’m becoming an old lady. I would like to see zebra finches in the wild, though. And it would be interesting to see if what they say is true, about the toilets flushing in the opposite direction. I would also be tempted to do a stint at a legal brothel like Kimberlee is now, but in reality I know that wouldn’t happen.
I’ve had a post in draft mode for a few weeks now titled “Pole dancing and Teh Menz.” I feel very strongly about the subject but it’s one of those ones I haven’t felt motivated to actually write, because of inhibitions. I’m afraid people will come around and tell me how I’m being so judgmental, and misinterpret my words, which to be fair probably won’t be all that well-chosen – hence the inhibitions, and round and round we go. But I’ll just throw it out here, and decide later whether to write more. A lot of people who don’t know what they’re talking about always frame pole dancing as being “for the men” or “a performance for men” or “catering to men’s desires” and all kinds of related nonsense. Let’s get it out of the way right now that most people have no fucking clue what they’re talking about when it comes to pole dancing, and I wish they’d shut their stupid faces because they always end up saying something idiotic and/or trying to make a dumb joke out of it, hardy har har. I don’t know how many times or ways I can explain that I pole dance for me, that it’s fucking HARD, and that there are no men present and only a small number of men have ever seen me pole dance – not because I feel like that would make me a dirty stripper and we can’t have that or because I’m afraid of what they’ll think or something, but because they’re ANNOYING. Yes, most men in my experience who watch while we’re pole dancing are just as annoying as all the people who talk out their asses about pole dancing! None of them have a clue, that’s what they have in common. At Lisa’s Halloween party, one guy said something like, “Now you don’t have to work out!” and I said, “This is how I work out.” Another guy said, “The pole is your lover” and I wondered if he knew what a moron he sounded like. Most of them have no appreciation for the difficulty of the various tricks and moves, the form, the strength needed, the practical and logistical concerns… and I just don’t have time for it. Just like people in general, as another symptom of our adolescent-mentality society when it comes to anything vaguely sex-related, have to always crack a joke about pole dancing… like “what are you wearing” or something… or joking about are there regulation dimensions and whatever… and then I explain, yes, in fact, a standard dance pole has a two-inch width. Brass is the best material because of its tackiness, hence your skin sticks to it better. This is also why being “scantily clad” is a necessity in pole dancing, especially for the more advanced moves: your skin is what makes you stick to the pole and be able to hold some of those positions. Stainless steel is the most difficult dance pole material, but if you can dance on that you can dance on anything.
All that being said, if I were a stripper I certainly would just pop my booty in their faces, because it’s not nearly as exhausting and I’ll make the same amount of money (or more) because they don’t care about the effort that goes into pole work, they just want to see T&A. Just like how that “Strippers Ball” at Trapeze wasn’t about talent at all, it was about spring break.
This is the part where I get nervous about what people will say because I’m afraid it will come off like I’m saying there’s something wrong with wanting to see T&A. Well, if you’ve known me or read this blog for any length of time, you know how I feel about that – I hate when the sexual is relegated as “less than” or not good enough. So you should know that’s not the point here. There! Now I’ve got that out of the way.
Last thing, I guess, in this back-to-basics experimental post… tonight I was watching Suze Orman with my mom, and I already said this on Twitter but I just want to reiterate, I do not understand some of the crap people spend their money on. And the elaborate justifications they must make in their heads! Why are you going to spend $2000 on a Chanel handbag – especially when you don’t even make that much money per month?! Not that I would understand spending $2000 on a handbag otherwise – that’s the kind of thing I will just never get. Now, you know I’m NOT the kind of person to hate on someone just for having money – if you know me, you know I really hate that, and I think it’s yet again filled with presumptions, and I’ll probably write about it at another time – but I do NOT understand the materialistic drive that so many Americans apparently possess. I never have. I just don’t get it. I cannot wrap my head around thinking you need a $2000 handbag or that that’s a good idea in any universe. Or wanting to spend $30k+ to install a swimming pool when that’s just slightly less than your annual income, and then you have to pay for maintenance, water bills, etc. – oh AND you’ve already got two mortgages on your house, in this market! I do not get it. Do. Not. Get. It. And don’t even get me started on the guy who was trampled to death in Wal-Mart on Black Friday. It’s beyond disgusting. No one needs a DVD player or a new duvet that bad. I can’t even begin to comprehend it.
Well, I guess I’ll turn off the spigot for now. I need to get some sleep – I’m going home tomorrow, yay!! I’ve been in Augusta since Wednesday and while I know it’s been good for my mom, and I’ve enjoyed being here in many ways, I’ll be happy to get home and see Rusty. Have I mentioned how THANKFUL I am that he’s in my life?? Well, I am!
“Income” != “wealth”
Income does not necessarily equal wealth. Is it fair for Warren Buffett’s secretary to pay the same or a higher tax percentage than he does? “Warren Buffet takes a salary (taxable @ 35%) of $150K but has net wealth of $50+ billion. Under BO’s tax plan, he gets a tax cut.” Getting rid of loopholes that allow this makes perfect sense. Punishing small businesspeople without his kind of money in the bank, without the ability to use tax lawyers to evade taxes – doesn’t.
I love that Octogalore discusses these issues which are so often overlooked in the feminist blogosphere. They are occasionally touched upon by the mainstream media but in an overly simplistic, reductive way, devoid of any analysis. And the reason I think they’re absent from the feminist blogosphere is too many people are afraid of looking like “capitalists” or whatever, and there’s a whole lot of hairshirt-wearing and self-flagellating and I’m just fed up with it.
I said something similar at Ren’s recently:
It just IRRITATES me. Someone’s gross income doesn’t tell the whole story, by a longshot. What if they have a ton of debt from putting themselves through school? What if most of their income goes toward taking care of a sick parent or child who needs medication, medical devices, nursing care, etc.? At the same time, the “artist” who makes (based on their W2, anyway) $20k a year might be living off inheritance or a trust fund, or mom and dad’s money in some other way. My point is, you just never know, and it’s not okay to assume.
No one responded. *shrug*
The school thing has always been a big pet peeve of mine. Someone whose parents paid for their college education and someone who paid for their own education through loans might make the same amount of money on paper, but their situations will be very different.
Oh and that reminds me of when I was in college and took a job at Baxter Street Books, and they paid minimum wage, and I asked the boss if I could have more hours, and she took me aside and said this wasn’t really a job for people who were actually trying to support themselves, it was more a job for kids with money to just have something to do. There was a girl who worked there who was my age (20) who had just had laser eye surgery. I felt like we came from different planets. Which I guess we did.
(Note: I don’t feel like getting into a big economic debate here. So if you want to go off about how horribly wrong I am, you can, but I’m not going to respond.)
Lots of stuff
I have several posts on particular topics saved as drafts, but since I’ll probably never actually write them all, I decided I’ll just do one post addressing all or most of them. Besides, reading my archives (which I’ve been doing periodically over the past week or so, as I slowly go through and tag the old pre-WP entries and update old URLs) made me remember that that’s how I used to write my blog all the time, that’s what comes naturally to me, and that’s why and how I started blogging in the first place. So, back to basics!
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Super-annoyed, part 1
Re: this Feministe post (which a friend emailed me, because as I mentioned, I’ve been taking a break from reading most blogs)…
I must rant as if no one is looking, briefly.
I’m fed up w/ this bullshit. FED UP. I am just sick of all this groupthink/lockstep mentality going on. And I’m sorry but I’ve always thought that the people who think socialism is so awesome are privileged in their OWN way (as much as I’m sick of the word “privilege” being thrown around so much, too…) because it’s like, you know what, I know what it’s like to NOT have money, and I know it’s not romantic or revolutionary or transgressive – it SUCKS. So for me, having money is empowering not to mention “empaychecking.” Not everybody has the luxury to worry about what the best economic system is when they have to put food on the table, ever think of that? Plus the same old thing I keep coming back to… WHY is having money BAD?? It’s what you do with that money that counts, and yeah, feeding your family is pretty damn awesome. If you also have enough money to help others outside your family? GREAT!! But serious change takes economic leverage, and if we constantly vilify anybody who has a certain amount of money, we’re going to shoot ourselves in the foot.
I’m fucking sick of it.
So there yo go. Cast me out, if you will. *shrug*
“Controversial” admissions
Originally posted as a comment on Octogalore’s thread by the same name.
- I am really starting to hate the word “privilege.” Not the concept, not the legitimate analysis; but the way it’s so often tossed around as an insult and a shield. The way even saying this makes me sound like the right-wing assholes I loathe. Big ol’ FAIL stamp to all that.
- Whenever someones says something about a “soul-sucking corporate job” as if this is a generally-understood, universally-loathed thing, I bristle.
- I think people who talk about doing what you love and the money will come, or it’s more important to do something for love, passion, commitment, dreams, ideals, etc. than money, have never really known what’s it’s like not to have a safety net (or never had a circumstance come up where they had to realize they don’t have one).
- When people ask – no, expect – me to do “pro bono” web development work, it REALLY offends me. It makes me feel like they don’t appreciate my work or value my time. It comes off as them saying their time is more valuable than mine.
- I love Starbucks. Same as last year’s confession!
Go on over to Octo’s post and leave your own!
Sometimes I say worthwhile stuff on other people’s blogs
Repost from the comments on this (excellent!) post by Octogalore…
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Anyway. Looking at older, well-off women (“OWW”) as foreign creatures – moms, or well-off friends’ moms… sometimes, I want to say: how do you know that won’t be you? Why are you so sure these people have no relationship to you or your interests? You really never know. And you really don’t know if, in becoming… that… you’d lose your humanity, perspective, values.
THANK YOU!!!
That’s one of the things that bugs me the most about this whole theme. And it’s not just the age thing, but the “age-with-money” thing. Like, if you reach a certain age, and/or have a certain amount of money, suddenly some evil fairy touches you with their wand and you become “out of touch?”
The money thing in particular, I find quite offensive. As if it’s bad to have money. As if it’s bad to achieve monetary success. I’m sorry, but a whole lot of it reeks of jealousy and cluelessness. And I feel like I can’t say any of this very many places, because people will be like, “Oh yeah? Well, PRIVILEGE!!! You just say that because you must be rich, and you don’t know what it’s like to deal with blah blah blah…”
Oh really?
And those kinds of assumptions make me LIVID. How DARE you (general “you”) assume anything about my past, or my present for that matter, based on the fact that I don’t think having money is the worst sin ever? Having money allows one to do things to help others! Not that you can’t help others without a ton of money, but it sure doesn’t hurt! The economic leverage allows you to do some very concrete things to effect change.
I don’t come from money. AT ALL. I make a decent living in my job now, but I doubt I’ll ever shake the underlying fear/knowledge that the bottom could fall out at any time. That it’s all so tenuous. This is something that I don’t observe in my friends who grew up with a relatively more stable economic situation. They don’t get nervous dropping a few hundred dollars on, say, a new TV, if they have a few thousand in the bank and some savings to boot. Why should they?
Anyway, I’m rambling, and veering all over the place. I hope this makes sense. And aw hell, I might end up reposting it as a post on my own blog.
Conversation about sex work, college, money, and more
Today I had a rather lengthy email exchange with Christopher Penn about sex work, economics, financial aid, and stereotypes. (Yes, all of those things together!) I was frantically typing away in multi-tasking mode while at work, and somehow my replies ended up being longer and smarter-sounding than I’d expected, so I figured I had blog material on my hands. (I did some minor editing to fix typos and such in the parts I wrote.) Hence:
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Ding ding ding!
Octogalore, in a comment on Ren’s site, in response to a commenter called JZ:
You also say: “Having money is also weakly empowering.” There are two serious problems with that.
First, it’s an incredibly privileged statement. Can you imagine how single moms who cannot pay their food/electricity would feel about how weakly they could be empowered by money?
Secondly, it’s an antifeminist statement. Telling women how unpowerful money is, and how much more rewarding other nonmonetary rewards are, is a powertool of the patriarchy.
Know why? Because the political positions that we don’t have the resumes for (because we chose not to pursue wage-earning), the VP jobs at companies who have the power to promote women (or not), the media leaders who have a role in what images of women to put forward? Guess who gets those if the gals back off? Wanna tell them how weakly empowered they are?
I could not agree more.
Today is International Sex Workers’ Rights Day
So far I’ve been too busy to write anything, but Ren has a great post that everyone should read, because it talks about something that I think a lot of people fail to consider in the discussions of decriminalization and destigmatization.
How’s my credit? Well, what credit? I have one, exactly one, credit card that I use for emergencies and travel (air miles). It is paid off on time, because oddly enough, while many credit card companies will bend over backwards to give you a credit card, somehow that changes if your occupation is “stripper”. So I try to keep the thing paid off. I have primarily for years used cash for everything: down payments, daily living, medical expenses- cash in full often- because it is easier often to hand over x amount of dollars for a dental visit or a car or any number of things when on all those little forms they ask name, age, occupation, job title, company…and your answers include stripper, porn performer, or god, goddess and all the little deities…an illegal aspect of the sex industry- a job you cannot write down at all. In the case of the window fellow…I handed him cash for the down payment, did not answer any of those little questions, and Mr. E is the one whose occupation, job title, and credit information went on those little forms…
You see, cash works for us, because you hand cash over and take your purchase. Qualifying for a car loan, a home loan, a home equity loan, a line of credit period, getting approved for an apartment or rental property, even if you do make good money in the sex biz? In many parts of the US, and the world in general, no easy task. Nor is getting insurance of any sort, or any other manner of little things a lot of people take for granted. And not only do you often not get those things, you get to deal with the looks, questions, and speculations of the people who you are filling out those little forms for. It’s lovely, really.
How about when you apply for a second straight job, or leave the sex biz for a straight job? Invariably, potential employers want to know what your other or previous line of work is/was…and my my, can’t that be interesting! Sure, in some fields, no one really cares. It’s easy enough to grab a gig in retail, or as wait staff, or a bartender, even as an office hand in various businesses, but a real office position? In a “straight” industry? Even if it is a job a trained monkey can do? You lie. You don’t tell other people what your other/former job is. You make up previous employment if you have too, and hope they don’t bother to check references. How about school? Well, I can tell you both professors and fellow students look at you oddly if sex work is paying the bills. And sure, sometimes one can hide what job they are in…in fact…most people can for a time, but sooner or later, people find out. And they talk.
And I suppose I don’t need to go over the just generalized opinions people have about sex workers again, do I?
She says “it’s the little things,” but I would argue that this stuff is BIG.
This is the stuff that folks in the middle-class “straight” world take for granted. You buy a new car and write down your occupation on the loan application… no big deal, right? It doesn’t get a second thought. See, the fact that this is almost never discussed – because it’s never thought of to begin with – is the very definition of privilege. And all of us who don’t work in the adult industry have that privilege.