Distortion and Disgust

I want to talk about two terms that are very weighty in a *moral* sense, but I believe should be looked at as neutral in *ethical* senses. So we’re going to take a more detached, clinical view in this discussion, and trying to remember that each are tools that could be used in either good or evil ways, from an ethical perspective.

The first let’s call *distortion*, although disharmony would work too. This is the warp in the normal state of affairs, or just the sense of heavy weight, when something is going dramatically wrong. If someone has a family life where they are constantly being yelled at and shamed, they may find their work starts suffering as well. That result, where one disruptive thing bleeds into all the things around it and causes difficulty, is distortion.

Distortion occurs when the harmonious state of affairs (a stable, happy community or universal agreement on norms) is interrupted by some disagreeable agent. That agent could be a stranger coming to town, or a member of the group behind closed doors acting terribly to others, or one personally privately coming to realizations that the group and its rules don’t make sense. Notably it can’t be a “typical” problem that the society is set up to deal with, but rather one that is unexpected by the normal social working order. Simplistically, a mugger beating someone up is not distortion, but a police officer doing so is.

Harmony is a watchword in Marxist and Zizekian language, since both schools are so quick to point out how often harmony is a lie that seeks to pave over any contradictions within itself, or the experiences of members that do not match the beliefs of the community. However from a practical and common sense perspective, we know that some level of harmony is just a basic necessity for life, and someone who does nothing but kick over the blocks of other people’s harmony is violent and unpleasant. Some harmonies in the short term are beneficial, and some harmonies are repressive and unacceptable. (In the long term, all harmonies collapse, but so does life.) What matters is not putting “harmony” entirely in one ethical box, but taking the non-normative stance that “if harmony exists, and matters, then distortion exists, and matters.”

One positive example of distortion is the stranger who comes to town and tells the underclass and slaves to no longer accept their position, but to strive for equal treatment. One negative example of distortion is the spouse who is having an affair so they lie about where they were last night so they have to ask their friends to cover an alibi for them so their friends have to lie to their spouses about what they were doing and so on and so on.

While very different ethically, in both cases we see a dynamic of something that cuts across typical categorizations and separations (where a problem is contained to one box), and creates a weight that affects everything around it, if only a little. It’s like Einstein’s ball on a bedsheet, bending spacetime around it.

Identified this way, we can see there are many sources of distortion in our lives. A deeply held disagreement that two friends can not talk about. Someone who often shows extreme and volatile emotions. A superior constantly asking too much of their subordinate. A dramatic mismatch between what we want and what we feel allowed to express. (For this reason, distortion is very much tied up with “legibility”, the domain of what society understands and finds legitimate reason for grievance.) Gay people in the closet experienced distortion this way. If someone clearly has a strong crush on you but never acts on it, your nervousness around them and how to deal with it could be distortion.

Almost always, distortion blurs lines of liberal ontology. If civil society is built on “these matters are the domain of the job, and these of the family” or “this is the way you voice complaint about approved matters” and above all the restraint to not let your personal feelings interfere with your institutional duties, then distortion mocks all of the above. It is the repressed howl, and is powerful exactly to the degree that the superego doesn’t accept it. (If the rules of society gave your complaint voice, then it would no longer be distortion.)

It is useful to have an ethically neutral term here because then you can point at something and say “that’s distortion.” A community may be changing due to an influx of new members with different beliefs, or a friend may be burdened under too many emotional demands that they have committed to all of them freely, and normal moral language only allows us to say whether these things are good or bad. We can take note “these scenarios have weight and will create many smaller changes around them.” We can avoid the denial that “nothing unpleasant will happen” while still admitting in some cases this distortion is good (maybe the community needed change) or in some cases the distortion is bad (maybe the friend’s friends need to adjust their expectations even if the person is not asking for it.)

(Distortion and unexplainable crying jags basically go hand in hand.)

Obviously, there’s no easy guide for how to deal with distortion. Sometimes you *should* use it as a signal to address important and neglected matters. Sometimes you *should* push it down because it’s not worth destroying a harmony you depend on, and it’s not that hard to deal with. It has a lot to do with the context, the nature of the distortion, and the value of the harmony. Anyone trying to sell you a one-size fits all approach is… well selling their own simplistic harmony that our unique and varied experiences will inevitably distort. (It is tragically true that even if someone might believe that the costs of distortion are worth it for the harmony they want to preserve, as a practical matter the distortion *just might not let them do that*. That’s how it works after all, even if we don’t want it to.)

But understanding, as a first step, is a maneuver of strength, and it can be easier to do without ethically loading the answer from the outset.

Distortion comes up a lot for me when I am thinking about societies with high inequality or winner-take-all lottery professions (movie stars, academia, etc). By and large the participants of those economies follow the liberal, systemized rules for behavior (or when they don’t, their failures are clearly prosecutable.) But the huge power differential between two different participants of a system creates incentives and desires that distorts normal action. It’s hard to be a genuine friend, or express honest critique, or legibly give consent in these structures. If you desperately need someone to recommend or vouch for you or just give you charity and mentorship, then saying no to or disappointing them becomes very difficult, and that problem then spreads into other problems involving bad communication or repressed feelings. However, it’s not as easy to say “because you had power over this person, it’s your fault they weren’t honest with you” (well some people do say it but it always makes me flinch for how simplistic and callow it is.)

***

*Disgust* is always used in a morally-loaded sense. Either we are talking about something that disgusts us - rotten food, cruel behavior, a violation of our boundaries - and our loathing is so strong that it needs to claim a moral dimension. OR we’re talking about someone’s objection we disapprove of, such as a Trumpian hatred of immigrants, and we say they have disgust, and it is phrased as if their disgust is immoral and something they need to purge themselves of. I agree with both these takes, I’m just noting that disgust is usually moral or immoral but not amoral.

And yet, knowing this word disgust can encompass both good and bad disgust, we can talk about it in an ethnically neutral way, and open its usage for some important middle ground. Disgust after all is an instinctive, emotional reaction. We can then build rational structures over it to justify it, but the reaction comes before those structures. What can we say of the purely emotional reaction then?

Well it’s unlikely to be always correct. Things we feel at least sometimes we want to reconsider in the light of reflection and more evidence. But it’s also a powerful preference, and we shouldn’t always dismiss it based on “this does not accord with my principles and rational thought” anymore than whether we like pizza and pineapple needs a reasoned justification to be respected.

For example, I play a lot of Hearthstone and watch a lot of Hearthstone tournaments. After one tournament, a winning player in his interview endorsed revolution in Hong Kong. Afraid of Chinese reaction to that, the company that ran the show, Blizzard: deleted the interview, banned the player for a year, revoked his prize money, and banned the broadcasters that interviewed him. It was roundly derided as political cowardice by the company.

I felt disgust at Blizzard’s actions. I felt myself unable to watch their tournaments in the following days. Now I had two options. One, I could build on that disgust to boycott Blizzard, and find reasons they were worse than other profit-oriented videogame companies (or quit videogames altogether), and always find justifications to link anything this company does in the future to that one bad decision. Or two, I could decide that in the grand scheme the decisions of this PR department were not outside the norm for other profit-oriented videogames, that the amusement of animations or the quality of card balance had nothing to do with this decision, and I could just suck it up and force myself to watch Hearthstone even as my stomach felt uncomfortable at it.

Neither of these were really satisfactory to me. I just didn’t watch Hearthstone for a week, and I got over it. This is not at all ethically consistent. (You could make some pragmatic argument that *this week* was the way to show Blizzard my disappointment, but I can’t claim that was my clever aim.) I allowed the moral feeling to guide me at one time period, but I didn’t try to adhere to it in the long term. In some ways this is unfortunate, as I’d rather be ethically consistent. But the two options were worse, and in the long run, lead to you molding your own beliefs in bad ways just to satisfy a temporary gut feeling.

***

With both distortion and disgust it’s very useful to have a term that encompasses clear empirical phenomenon without necessarily having to come to an ethical judgment right away. In response to one of the unending accusations of immoral behavior among videogame developers, you can categorize your disgust as making you not want to engage with their game currently and talk about it, before making long term pronouncements about whether they are deserving a boycott. You can say that something bad happened in that distortionary environment, and acknowledge the serious pain of that, before you figure out if a crime that broke established norms happened.

The Gatekeeper’s Dilemma

I have a friend who is running a mix swap, where people exchange playlists they created. He wants this to be as open and friendly to newcomers and easily intimidated people as possible. He has two things to monitor in this regard:

One, playlists need to be formatted properly for listeners to be able to run on their device of choice (iTunes, a CD, etc) with a minimum of fuss. This means editing the titles so that player order is kept between conversions to different formats, and a number of other small and important tweaks.

Two, MAKING the playlist needs to not be so intimidating that a newbie doesn’t break down in tears because they got the format wrong.

Failing at either one of these, could result in the mixclub getting a reputation for being exclusive and difficult. And you see the irony, that an enthusiastic manager could lean very much into one solution, solely out of desire to make sure people feel the mixswap is easy and low pressure, and inadvertently make it harder on participants on the other end of the axis, thus creating the atmosphere of high pressure and elitism.

There is of course no easy solution, and this falls under the broad category of “competing access needs.” But it seems a very specific category to me, that a lot of different fields face - most importantly sharing the characteristic moral irony. If you go to the ultimate lengths to make newcomers feel included on one access axis, you might actually be making newcomers feel excluded because they now have all these rules they need to follow.

I think of this when I browse reddit where various subreddits are passionate about free-flowing and uncensored discussion, but in order to keep that have a great deal of intimidating rules about formatting and on-topicness and whatnot. Or when I see old GMs talking about all the demands a LARP should satisfy in order to be welcoming to new players. Or of course, discussion about the right words to use to refer to oppressed groups, that can involve high level knowledge of academia or the latest fashion in slang to even participate.

It’s important to understand that in all of these cases the rules enforcement is done with the best of intentions. It’s just important to see whether it is really working out well or not. Are you adding or reducing stress to your most marginal participants? And this is a hard thing to monitor, since your marginal participants are by definition the ones least tied into your feedback loops. If someone doesn’t bother to listen because songs are hard to load you might not know, but also if someone doesn’t make a playlist because formatting is too hard you also wouldn’t know. These are the areas where we are just most likely to fly by the pre-established rules we believe in, and think anyone who deviates from those rules just doesn’t care as much as us.

There tend to be three solutions to this dilemma:

1. Decide that one type of newbies really is more relevant than another (because of size of population, or their previous experience, or what you are currently lacking, or just your personal bias) and just go full-throttle on protecting their experience while not worrying about the weight incurred on the other type of newbie. This may in some cases be the right call, though it’s easy to do this while being an asshole too and that is to be avoided.
   
2. Put a great deal of thought and effort into striking the exact right balance, considering concerns of all involved groups, figuring out the comparative advantages where one group’s needs can be satisfied with minimal cost to other groups, and intervening directly to solve problems (like edit playlist files) when necessary.
   
3. A return to deontology, and declare “if I don’t want there to be gatekeeping, then I do that best by not gatekeeping.” This is in some sense “privileging inaction” but in the Kantian sense that the best way to achieve pacifism is for everyone to stop fighting, starting with yourself, rather than hoping you can enforce non-violence with violent power over others.

They all have their merits, and different situations will call for each. All we can preach here is awareness: rather than believing “I am trying to be inclusive and if others don’t agree with me they just aren’t as inclusive as I am”, seeing “this is the choice inclusivity requires, and I am resolving it with this particular solution, but I can see how they care about the same principles but think that other solution is better.”

Relatedly: Freedom always requires someone else be limited, and becomes a discussion of who gets the freedom to enforce what.

"Read Another Book"

One of the most common refrains in left-of-center twitter has been people making jokes about the current political situation via Harry Potter or Game of Thrones (often but not always, liberals with a focus on identity politics) and leftists looking for a fight responding with “read another book!” and denunciations of this sort of pop-culture focused political analysis. (Freddie deBoer was an obsessive of this particular contrarianism.)

My blog started as a 30 part series analyzing the political implications of the Star Wars Prequels, so I’m not exactly neutral in this fight.

But it’s also true that these tweets trying to serve as a rallying cry equating voters for Hillary Clinton with Dumbledore’s Army are repetitive and banal. They seem to be failing in a particular way, over and over again, that does invite some generalization.

And the distinction you want to make is between Immersion vs Analysis.

SMG:

The longer answer is that the memes reflect an extremely pervasive nerd ideology.

Nerdism places incredible emphasis on continuity, so a film that eschews this is incomprehensible. Note how, despite the film being incredibly stylized, the conversation over Fury Road is dominated by plot synopses and descriptions of the worldbuilding. Things like Max’s ability to predict the future are ignored. When the ultimate objective is to catalog plot points on wookiepedia, the fact that Optimus Prime disappears between shots is a threat.

There are also elaborate fantasies of Bay as a despotic sexual harasser, which overwhelm and terrify the Tumbler subset of nerds. In this view, Bay is responsible for the theft of society and we can have a pure liberal multiculture if we simply eliminate people like him through advanced twitter shame-campaigns. Reddit MRAs call meme-repetition ‘signal boosting’. In Fury Road, Immortan Joe is exactly such a Michael Bay figure: he loves big cars, explosions, and literally holds Rosie Huntington-Whiteley captive. So Fury Road provides a variant on 'Joss Whedon’ liberal feminism, where we enjoy Joe’s evil - but only so long as he’s badly beaten up at the end. Have your cake and eat it.

This is part-and-parcel with the above. Nerds demand an immersive franchise universe (e.g. the 'MCU’, the Star Wars EU, the Alien 'Quadrillogy’.) and ideological purity. Oppression cannot be presented as systemic. It must always be a moral threat from 'outside the universe’. Luke Skywalker is 'natural’, and Jar Jar Binks is an artificial imposition by Lucas, the degenerate.

(The same phenomenon occurs when a superhero is recast as black, or female. The normal crass commercialism of comic films is suddenly unacceptable, suddenly perceived as an artificial imposition by 'SJWs’.)

It is immoral for Bay to depict a woman as powerless. Megan Fox’s character 'dresses like a slut’, but not in an 'empowering’ way. Even though, in the films, this character trait stands for her misguided attempt to escape poverty by selling herself, class-ignorant nerds vacillate between slut-shaming Fox and demonizing Bay. The skimpy clothes in Fury Road are acceptable because they are imposed by Joe.

As I noted much earlier in the thread, Fury Road’s narrative structure is identical to the entire 6-film Star Wars series - but condensed into a single film, scrubbed of objectionable/satirical content, and presented in chronological order so that it ends with the triumph of the liberal rebellion. The meme-elevation of George Miller to greatest living filmmaker is likewise a condensed, inverted version of the ridiculous meme-demonization of figures like George Lucas and Shyamalan.

People who literally do not know what cinematography is now write book-length fantasies about how 'lazy’ JJ Abrams is, or devote entire webseries to debating whether Matthew Vaughn is racist. It’s a false progressivism based around punishing celebrities’ perceived sins - lust, greed, sloth, etc. - via endless twitter campaign.

No nerd has ever gotten insanely mad at (say) Wim Wenders or Jane Campion, and nobody gave a thought about Miller when he made Babe and Happy Feet. But once someone makes a film in a science fiction/superhero franchise universe… God help us all.

And most of these “rallying cry” tweets and macros can be read as the same desire for immersion into the franchise universe. What Hogwarts House are you? Or more politically, don’t you want to be there when Harry defeats Voldemort? Because your fight is just like the fight of the good guys vs bad guys in that franchise.

This is usually bad and I agree with the dismissal of it.

But if you’re using the art for actual analysis, that’s great. That’s what art is for. It presents a subjective truth about the world, that we can use to understand our own circumstance.

For instance, in Harry Potter, you could write about how Slytherin represents a fantasy of the reactionary elite who want membership to be determined mostly by birth, whereas Gryffindor represents a meritocratic elite, that definitely posits some people as better, more important, and worthy of special treatment above others, but instead of merely being based around birth, allow in special exceptions for people smart enough, hard working enough, or charismatic enough.

(There’s exceptions to these, like Slugworth or Diggory, but these are broadly the camps the people from those houses stand for – with Ravenclaw being the weirdo-uselessly-smart-people, and Hufflepuff being everyone-else-who-has-nothing-but-eachother.)

This makes Gryffindor of course, analogous to Western capitalism. Most people are oppressed, but there is hope for the Hermione’s of the world, etc.

See, I wrote a bunch about Harry Potter, but none of which is about a desire to be in that world. In fact it’s a resignation that we are already in that world.

Do that, and you can write as much about Harry Potter as you like. Hell write a 10 page tumblr post on the way movie Dumbledore says one line, that’s can still be interesting and insightful.

***

(This doesn’t mean immersion is a guilt-inducing sin. Fan fic and RPGs are often about immersion. That’s great as entertainment. Just don’t try to sell it as political activism too, unless you’re critically engaging with the work.)

Axes, Solving Systemic Problems, and Power

@theunitofcaring and @shieldfoss explored one of the contradictions we have about professional environments and how they can support minorities. This is a subject @rasienna discusses a lot. Sometimes people note than an intensely tribal office culture can exclude people who don’t share the interests and backgrounds of the prevailing employees. Sometimes people note that an extremely standardized, corporate environment is based on rules set up by the kyriarchy, and will be most accessible to people used to those rules.

Informal vs formal. Or even more fundamentally, chaos vs order. Which way lies more justice?

And it is tremendously easy to get tricked by this question. You can see some examples where one method led to the exclusion of an otherwise worthy worker or member of the community, and feel “Damned informality, it must be a tool of oppression!”

Someone didn’t get what the office jokes were about and so acted awkwardly. Informal office culture doomed their career.

... or, someone didn’t go to the right college and have the right standardized experience and classes, and no one appreciated the intangible of diversity they brought to the team over the Generic White Guy With A Good Resume, so an overly formal office culture dooms their career.

It’s easy to tell yourself this story, and end up crusading against that type of office culture everywhere. Now you’ve assigned yourself to chaos or order in some never-ending battle, and you think it’s what will always benefit the disadvantaged.

Here’s the thing: Power doesn’t give a fuck about chaos or order. It’s power. It will figure out how to flow either in a very informal environment, or how adapt to an extremely rigid one. If one group systematically has more money and representation and influence, then they will do just fine, whether you’ve got a casual laid back office that feels like a family, or a corporate hierarchy run solely by forms and algorithms.

Our enemy is always Power. Millions of women and black people and people without a college education are held back from anyone seeing their potential, because they don’t look or talk like the people with money and influence. When you see instantiations of this discrimination, you should try to stop it, and give a hand up to those people. You should always sympathize with the excluded.

You don’t need to say “all informal offices are toxic” or “all corporate hierarchies are inherently patriarchal.” Different people flourish in both chaos and order. There should be workplaces for either of them. There should be a workplace for the hispanic coder who gains knowledge of a new part of society because of how many friends she meets at work. There should be a workplace for the single mother who needs to fit a very consistent schedule so her children and babysitters aren’t caught flat-footed. There should be a workplace for nerds who make friends by showing off their code, and there should be a workplace for autistic people who can’t navigate social vague-spaces. And in a country of 330 million people, it’s pretty easy to find one.

This inference can occur on any axis our mind can pattern match to. We can see one example of oppression that occurred in a certain environment, and construct a narrative for why that environment always produces oppression and the opposite end of the spectrum does not. Masculine vs feminine, fast paced offices vs slow, non-profits vs private sector,  tech sector vs brick and mortar , on and on all the binaries we can invent.  And they should be treated as just-so stories until proven statistically significant.

Be compassionate. Be open-minded about candidates from non-traditional backgrounds. Be aware that even candidates who look traditional may be suffering their own lifelong oppressions they don’t wish to talk about. You can fight classism and racism and sexism on an individual basis by treating them like individual people.

Do not be that ideologue who says “because sometimes tribal chaotic office culture can go bad, it’s always a red flag” or “because corporate order is bad, no one would ever want to work in a Faceless Corp.” The world is a lot more complex than that.

Gender and Class

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

• Sexism and Objectification
• Class Has Normative Power
• SSC on Celluar Automata

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.)

***

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.

***

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.”)

***

When we think of the above-referenced stereotypically feminine traits, the ideals women are encouraged to display, what do they boil down to?

• Elegant, sleek, smooth.
• Youthful looking.
• “Classy”
• Lacking toughness and aggression

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.”

***

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.

**********************

Continuing last week’s post, it can seem like the rules of social etiquette for how to appear polite and high class are complicated and ever-changing. In fact, for people trying the low-variance goal of “just get by” most of these rules can be boiled down pretty simply:

• Don’t draw attention to yourself.
• Don’t draw attention to the existence of your body.

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.

Instead, the upper class ideal is to appear as detached from the worldly body as much as possible. Yoda describes this fantasy in Star Wars: “Luminous beings we are, not this crude matter.”

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.

***

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.