A while ago some reply asked me to finish my thoughts on the complicated relationship between gender and class in America, since while the Sexism and Objectification essay argues that both men and woman face serious problems with how much agency they are considered to have, it should not be read that those are the only problems people face related to gender, especially under the class structure.
So before this, you might want to read
Here, by class, I do not just mean “how much money you make” or even “your socioeconomic group” but the entire ladder by which some people at the top have a scarce resource, and people lower down are consumed with trying to appear like people higher up, in order to get more of that scarce resource (and also just by psychological self-perpetuation at a certain point.) Anyone who’s seen a highly prestigious field (theater, academia, the Inner Ring) knows the ordering I am talking about - and it sometimes has nothing to do with money.
(However money is so incredibly important, that class usually comes to include money as one of its rewards and signifiers eventually. Which is why class and economic status are such conflated subjects.)
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The simplest model would be to identify women as in a lower class than men when all else is equal, due to their general lack of power and money. While this might capture the unfairness of the situation, it doesn’t seem to work like a class dynamic.
In particular, you don’t have the fashion phenomenon where women try to imitate men so that they might get the same treatment.
(You do, however, get the reverse of this, where men obsess over how to make themselves distinct from women.)
So let’s put that model to the side for a moment.
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It is a truism of life that Men Want Sex. Those men, they just have one track minds, and all they care about is sex. Not self-respect, not money, not caring about the other person, not being pro-social, they just want that sex.
Okay, among us enlightened liberals we know this is not true for all men. But there’s awareness of a cliche, a model of the default, negative-affect man who “just wants that poontang.” Not you readers men, but those men, who give the gender a bad name. The cliche is that he is so driven by this need that they ignore everything else in their life for it.
Except this makes no sense and doesn’t fit the available data of even these neanderthals.
Conventional Wisdom: Men want sex.
Naive Alien: If they just want to orgasm, they can go masturbate. Or watch a porno.
CW: No, it has to be with a person.
NA: Well they’re set with other men-
CW: A woman person.
NA: Seems like it’s easy enough to get a prostitute on your world.
CW: No they have to want to give it to you. Paying for it doesn’t count.
NA: What do you mean doesn’t count? It’s a primal need. Why does it matter where it comes from. Do humans enjoy food only if the animal wanted you to enjoy it?
CW: Having to pay for sex is only for losers.
NA: Okay, well it might take a while to find a partner, but once you do, you can go at it like rabbits, problem solved.
CW: Monogamy is fine, but it’s not what men “really deep down want.” Not the greedy men. They need lots of different women, even if only briefly.
NA: Fine. Well, there seem to be a lot of very lonely women out there, who don’t seem shy about asking men for sex.
CW: Nah, they’re unattractive. Doesn’t count again. I mean you might sleep with them when bored, but they aren’t really the all-consuming lust men think about.
NA. Sigh. Well what are these particular features a woman needs to be attractive? Big breasts, long hair, what?
CW: You’d think that, but actually it’s a more minimalist thing, looking kind of innocent and hard to get. Kate Upton as the central example. And mostly looking like someone from the same sub-culture as that man. For that sort of woman, a classic bro will do anything to get in her pants.
NA: Yeah this doesn’t sound like a “physical need” this sounds like “a desire to acquire high-status items in a particular way that attests to your value.”
I saw a wonderful example of this in SomethingAwful’s classic “Fashion SWAT,” which like a lot of powerful humor, captures the beliefs of the ideology perfectly.
Dr. Thorpe:He's having sex with all the other goofy assholes in the International Male catalog. They're like the drama kids in high school, they all get laid all the time, but only with their own horrible, horrible kind.
Which is to say “Teens are primally crazy for sex -- but it only counts if it’s with the right group of people. And this is such an intuitive thing we can use it as a simile for other situations.” Talk about submerged class tensions!
Once you see that every time our culture talks about “wanting sex” it’s really talking about “class envy”, you’ll see Marxist sociology all around you.
(To be clear, there seem to be two different desires in regard to sex. Sometimes people do seem happy to take sex in whatever form it comes in: like at a kink party where every body is valued for how they can contribute to a scene. It’s sex as a hobby like anything else.
...And there’s the other kind, where the dude or couple comes in who are only interested in partners who are petite women under thirty. It wants to possess high-value objects. Both drives exist, but it is this second one that is considered the “fundamental desire of thoughtless men.”)
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When we think of the above-referenced stereotypically feminine traits, the ideals women are encouraged to display, what do they boil down to?
This sounds like an upscale pied-a-terre.
And the ideal “rough, rugged, macho” man is the opposite of all of these. It’s a cute binary.
But it’s also an astoundingly class-based binary. Those features women are pushed to attain are basically “look like the local upper class.” This romantic image of the couple is “lower class figure doing the work to care for, protect, and acquire the upper class object.”
None of this is exactly shocking, but it’s important to keep in mind when asking “how do different gender role make us feel about our class position?”
Women trying to fit their gender role, will find it doubles up with class-climbing.
Pro: That’s one coherent image to try to focus on, that gets a lot of social rewards if you succeed. (This is partly why “upper class women” are a bedrock of conservatism in many societies. Things are working for them.)
Con: If you can’t present a face of smooth sleekness and classy elegance, you are doubly damned as both unfeminine and lower class. And things that make it harder to look upper class (such as racial stereotypes, aging, lack of aesthetic skills) can produce severe anxiety.
Men trying to fit their gender role, will find it conflicts with normal class signaling.
Pro: Whether you look dirty and rough, or smooth and refined, there is at least some narrative to see yourself in.
Con: The desire to look upper-class to society can often conflict with the need to appear as “a real man.” Ie, underclass-associated behavior (violence, aggression, earthyness) may be counterproductive in professional circles, but also be an inextricable part of your male identity (see Dave Chappelle’s “When Keeping It Real Goes Wrong.”) Or success at upper class performance can simultaneously make you insecure about your “manhood.”
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Again, all of the above is just discussion of stereotypes and social constructs. As even the gender binary crumbles, certainly the cliches about it are even more unreliable. But these stereotypes do exist, they are widespread, and they have incredible performative efficacy over us. Much like love exists only because we believe in it but it still is very real, so do these fantasies of all our gender and class obligations.
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The first is an injunction not to be loud or needy, since after all those show desperation and that what you offer is abundant (and therefore low value.)
The second guideline explains a lot of rules that appear to have independent justification.
- Don’t burp, yawn, cough, or make other bodily sounds.
- Don’t smell. (Social rules about bad hygiene are usually more about “reminding people your body exists” than actual ill-health.)
- Don’t eat in public.
- Cover yourself up and some skin unintentionally showing is embarrassing.
- Slut-shaming focuses on the display of breasts and legs.
- Don’t talk about illnesses or bodily functions.
- Don’t scratch an itch.
- Have less body (be thin) rather than more (fat.)
- Although hair is complicated and highly subject to fashionable changes, on average: more hair -> lower class.
Each of them independently usually get some sort of Miss Manners explanation for why that is considered rude or low-status, but altogether they speak of a deeper fear of the human body. Its very presence is obscene and uncomfortable. The strongest, visceral drives behind both class and ideology are this underlying fear of disease, filth, and corruption. Anything bad is somehow dirty, and anything dirty is somehow bad.
The positive direction is luminous. The negative direction is crude matter.
Patriarchical ideology sure used this body-based class-shaming as part of its enforcement against women. Promiscuous women are not just denigrated as immoral, but specifically as low-class. They are sluts and whores. Description of them feature lasciviously displayed breasts. They use garish amounts of makeup. And the threat they bring is of icky diseases around your genitals. It’s all designed to trigger our disgust reactions.
When we can identify this vector, we can oppose it. We should be less credible towards body-based-shaming, and understand it as part of defining the class ladder, with people described in bodily terms as “obviously lower down.” It is a fantasy, and even as we understand it better we can also dismiss it.
(As mentioned in “Class is Normative Power”, this sort of fantasy is enormously complicated because by performance it becomes partially true. People with wealth who are concerned about status will then pay a lot of their greater resources to conform with the desired appearance, and they will select other people who also conform to this, so that now upper-class people really do smell different. Though importantly, this is just a trend, and there are always individual exceptions.)
People who denigrate women for how much skin they have showing, or how much hair and where they have it, or whether they follow manners like how to eat and how to dress, we understand are both performing sexism and classism. They are intertwined, and you can’t really take down one boss without the other.
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This is what’s behind the complaint that so much of current social justice ideology is classist. It’s not just about using a few wrong words about people with less money or education, or even the privilege that most social justice activists seem to not know what life is like for people who didn’t go to four-year selective colleges.
The complaint of classism is about the logic of their ideological judgment. Instead of saying “we will no longer use class and body-shaming to humiliate our out-group” it’s “class is an excellent tool, so long as used against the right groups.”
So we see the same emphasis on the body-presence when describing men. Mockery focuses on their beards, and their odors, and their whole physical existence.
@prudencepaccard described the campaign against “man-spreading” as Kafkaesque. The criticism is that men “take up too much space.” And you can easily imagine that accusation some Russian existential novel “Your crime is taking up space.” Which is not to say it’s meaningless, it’s actually something that once you are aware of, you feel incredibly guilty about. Is your volume or your smell or your skin an affront to someone, has it made you an exile from society?
There is of course polite behavior, regarding making room for other people on your seat or most of the above-class criticisms, but intense focus on your body will lead to paranoia well beyond the polite requirements of society. Drilling into them is a rich vein of power, but it’s exactly the power we must forswear.
