heterosexual culture: innumerable romance novels about the polished High Society Girl falling for the rugged Blue Collar Worker who Rides Motorcycles and Cusses A Lot and Drinks Beer (tattoos optional)
like, as someone who comes from an actual family of blue collar workers:
- why are 90% of these rugged blue collar dudes mechanics? where are the novels about the rugged dudes out there doing custodial work or HVAC or working for the power company or whatever
- why are these guys presented as never having had a single Emotion™ before having met the heroine? my cousin kyle literally built a tiny graveyard for all of his dogs that have passed and he takes them flowers on their birthdays like jesus
- he also totally got swasted on cranberry spritzers at family thanksgiving one year lmao
- okay but have you heard 25 year old rich dudes when they’re drunk they cuss AT LEAST as much stop acting like Bethany from the country club has never heard the word fuck before ok
high society girls often swear more than blue collar workers in my experience anyway
The reason why they are all mechanics is probably because cars are viewed as sexier than custodial work?
yes. that was a rhetorical question, a device i chose to utilize with the hopes of illustrating the incredibly elitist & classist themes throughout this type of novel, which romanticizes the blue collar worker while simultaneously eschewing most types of blue collar work–as well ignoring many of the problems faced by blue collar workers, including the rapid decline of real wages, lack of social mobility, the very real health risks of many blue collar jobs accompanied by subpar health care access, and the lack of a meaningful social safety net and opportunities for job training when workers are laid off due to the decrease in so-called “unskilled” jobs (which, as we all know, are not really unskilled–just undervalued)
Tag: classism
I too hate rich liberal pricks who scapegoat impoverished bigots because they don’t want to confront bigots from the same social class as them, but also as one of the poor benighted hinterlanders, I’m really, really fucking sick of his sob story about how rural white racism/homophobia/anti-semitism/etc is totally ok cuz bubba’s hooked on heroin and the factory closed 15 years ago and also one time some of them mean city gays once said something about not liking homophobia, which is totally mean and elitist and oppressive, so bubba can’t help but be a nazi, and his pride in being pigshit ignorant is striking back at them city elitists. I’ve grown up around people like this, and yes, they are genuinely awful fuckers who don’t need to be cried over.
this bullshit enables bigots, and tbh is also pretty massive insult to people who struggle with this like poverty or addiction without turning into bullying bigots
What cracks me up about this narrative is that POC are much more likely to live in the exact same conditions as poor whites yet, somehow, magically, we manage not to believe in ideology that calls for the genocide of millions, and often are the ones actively fighting against this shite with what little resources we have. Really makes me think.
My stepdad is a white guy with an engineering degree who grew up firmly middle-class in NOVA. He was one of the people who ended up moving back near Virginia Tech later on, when he needed a change. And a number of people in similar positions were really surprised to find out he’d married one of the local hicks (not to mention one who was obviously not white), as an indication of some ongoing politics there.
(He’s also an autistic misfit who didn’t do nearly as well for himself in general as basically anyone expected, and wound up under heavy medical debt. Still, I got to watch some interesting dynamics in action there.)
His sister and her husband are still in the DC suburban sprawl, on the Maryland side. And they’ve been doing more what expected of them. Visiting them up there was always an experience. They’re at least not in a gated community, but it was one of the developments with a pretty intrusive neighborhood association, etc.–which I had never encountered before. I’m surprised some of the neighbors never called the cops over our car parked there, at least that we ever knew of.
One visit when I was maybe 12 was also where I got my only exposure to the suburban Evangelical megachurch phenomenon, because of course we had to join them since we were there on a Sunday. (And my parents made sure not to be, after that.) At least half the neighbors were there too, not to mention people they worked with.
(It was also absolutely devastating when their older kid turned out to be bipolar, to the point that Sis kept calling my mother for emotional support. We were 95% sure the younger kid was not straight, and he was obviously having about the level of conflict you might expect. I really hope both of them are doing OK, because they really couldn’t help their family situation and I always kinda liked them both.)
I haven’t talked to them at all since like 2008, when the hubby felt a need to complain about Obama before the election. But yeah, I really doubt those political leanings have changed much in the meantime.
But sure, let’s focus on some lower hanging fruit.
Seriously, if you think poor, white, rural folk had the money to fly and drive to Charlottesville, pay for lodging and food and all other expenses to attend a Nazi rally, i don’t know what to tell you
These folk are probably professionals in cushy positions, business owners or public employees.
shit working class leftists and ppl in general don’t need to hear:
– you making fun of our schooling
– you belittling us for working actual jobs instead of going into higher education
– you complaining that we don’t “do enough about our situation”
– you looking down on us because we might not have the time or the patience to read heaps of irrelevant political theory
– again, these fucking jokes about us having no idea about politics when we’re the ones living them
– you patronizing us about health, parenting, and literally anything else
– you asking why our families didn’t just buy a house (that happened more often than you’d think)
– you making fun of our dialects and mannerisms
– you using a lack of education as an argument against your political opponents
– you pitying us like we can’t be proud of our roots
– you ignoring our self-organization and community work because it doesn’t live up to your ideological standards
– the fucking LEFT in general being classist as fuck which should be a paradox but isn’t
for real I’m just really fed up with the academic left sometimes and y’all should really look at yourselves first when you ask why the new left is so out of touch with working people.
We don’t have to read Marx to know that capitalism sucks. Believe us, we know.This has been a PSA.
A snippet from an article on Huffington Post about what it means to be working poor.
Pretty spot on…
I got into an argument today with someone who is a landlord, and they were outraged, outraged, to find that their evicted tenants owned an Xbox 360. Never mind that the console was ten years old and worth perhaps $50 on Craigslist, they were outraged that their evicted tenants did not sell it, along with the very clothes on their back, to pay their back rent. I tried to explain to him that when you are $1800 in back rent, $50 isn’t even a dent in that debt. Why bother? Why bother selling that $50 item if it isn’t going to get you any less evicted? If it’s not going to save you, you’ll hold on to it. Money becomes meaningless when you’ll never have enough to hold onto. You just let it flow like water through your hands. It’s all gone anyways, no matter what you do. It was gone before it ever touched you.
The other day I got very mad at someone because their justification of why a family didn’t deserve their council house was because they had decorated the front of their house with xmas lights. DO YOU REALLY KNOW WHAT ITS LIKE TO LIVE WITH NO SMALL PLEASURES AT ALL?!?!? DO YOU REALLY?!?!
This is one of the great end results of capitalism: we treat people as if the only thing they should care about are their mechanical needs but without things to nourish the soul or the capacity to talk about same, we fall apart.
We aren’t meant to be things which sit in blank boxes waiting to be used by our employers. Nothing in nature acts that way. Nothing’s meant to.
The source article: ”This Is Why Poor People’s Bad Decisions Make Perfect Sense”
#um this topic makes me fucking furious#i will do a murder immediately#don’t#not only are small pleasures necessary to keep from SPIRALING INTO DEPRESSION WHEN YOU ARE POOR but they are STATUS MARKERS#you NEED a fucking phone to get a job#you need a fucking SMARTPHONE to be accepted as a normal person#you need nice clothes to be treated like you’re worth something#especially if you’re a poor poc#everyone sit down#think about this if you haven’t before#smashes a vase#fuck capitalism
The need rich people have for poor people to constantly perform some sort of Dickensian display of abject poverty is so goddamn disgusting and proves that, yes, it is all about status markers. Rich people want visible proof that others are beneath them. It’s malicious and nauseating. And the kicker is that they’re usually too busy being impressed with their own wealth and sense of superiority to use their brains, because as already stated in the other comments, having technology or a couple of small pleasures is *not* a reliable indicator of income. This anti-poor people shit is revolting.
And it turns poor and working-class people against each other. Like I knew a guy who installed cable TV for a living and barely could make a living, and resented that some people who got cable TV were on welfare. I tried to explain that you actually have to spend a certain amount of money in order to qualify for such basic thing as Medicaid – if you save money you’ll get thrown off the system, even though you won’t magically be able to survive outside the system with the amount of money you have to save in order to be thrown off it. He didn’t care. He told me poor people should be given nothing more than food, clothing, and shelter. He grew up poorer than most poor people have ever been. All this combination of shit made me furious and still does. Not to mention the cultural ideals of being too proud to accept help of any kind and how people think this is a good thing even when it kills people.
The poorest people in the world forgo some amount of necessities for staying alive in order to have some money for recreation or things that connect them to the world. During the Depression, many people surveyed said they would rather give up their beds than their radios – radio being how people stayed connected to the outside world in the same way Internet does today. And does anyone need to bring up Rat Park again? Holy crap this stuff pisses me off.
(– Poor person who has Internet & Netflix & smartphone & other so-called luxuries. And does anyone really think the extra $100ish a month I’d get giving all that up would catapult me out of poverty and solve all my problems? Not to mention the Internet has literally saved my life before. As in, I was in the hospital being mistreated in a way that was life-threatening, and blogging allowed me and another poor person who was making decisions for me, to get other people to call the hospital and say “We’re watching you.” Other poor people get food and rent and etc. money by asking on the Internet and receiving food money through the Internet. Many people on disability supplement their income by selling art or small crafts online – how much you’re allowed to sell before they start cutting benefits depends on what part of the system you’re in, but it’s a common thing.)
People who perform manual labor should be not only given high and liveable wages, but unlimited access to healthcare and physical therapy to help manage the myriad conditions that come from doing back-breaking work.
Like this is not an absurd concept. It bothers me that people think that it is.
I have literally been yelling about this all day. The Washington Post published a misleading and Ill informed article called Disabled or Just Desperate. The author followed a man living in poverty, reluctant to file for disability after watching his family barely survive on it for various aquaired disabilities. The article implies 1/3 of working age Americans live off of disability checks, and explicitly says signing up to receive disability checks pretty much garuntees you will never work again.
What if fails to point out is if this man had access to healthcare or the money to afford health Care in his line of manual labor, he would likely never had needed disability checks to survive.
The reason so many working age adults receive these checks are because when they are hurt, they work through the injury instead of getting the help they need because they can’t afford the medical bills, or afford to take time off of work to heal.
This is a cycle, and passing the AHCA will only increase these expenses. People who work manual labor need access to health Care and they money to get the extra care they need so they aren’t forced to retire at 40 and collect checks from the government simply to survive.
- the people in grenfell died because they were poor.
- the people in grenfell died because their landlord chose to spend money on flammable cladding because rich tenants in nearby penthouses didn’t like the ugly council building ruining their view.
- the people in grenfell died because their landlord chose not to spend money on a centralised fire system or sprinklers or an additional fire escape.
- the people in grenfell died because the tories voted against a law that would force landlords to make their buildings inhabitable and safe for their tenants.
- the people in grenfell died because of the privatisation of social housing.
- the people in grenfell burnt to death with their children in their arms because they were poor.
We never hold the same contempt for the struggling coal miners and manufacturing workers who are already losing their jobs to automation? These, too, are jobs worked by people without higher education, yet never scoffed at like the retail worker or the fry cook.
Hahahahaha 😩
Says someone who sounds very comfortable using that rhetorical “we” throughout the piece.
Not to invalidate some of the main points about the open classism there. But, way to distract from them yourself, buddy. Especially when that style of condescension is the best you can even manage.
Urocyon's Jaunts 2.0 