If you think about the sexual revolution of the last century, you soon realize that almost all you know is about the educated class.
I was reminded of this as I read Stefan Zweig's excellent memorial, The World of Yesterday, of his adult life from about 1900 to 1940.
Zweig tells us all about the horror of girls in high bourgeois cities like Vienna being trussed up in girdles and corsets that completely disguised their real bodies, and mourns their utter ignorance about sex. That was upper-class bourgeoise girls. Whatabout the tidal wave of prostitutes that the young men of the era patronized, given that they couldn't sample the wares of the well-born girls that were being chaperoned out of all recognition.
How much better it was, he writes, after World War I when young people could freely mix and match, and actually be friends with the opposite sex.
Well, Zweig died in 1942 so he couldn't have known about the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s arising out of the pill and abortion on demand. And he couldn't have known about today's confused backlash against the sexual revolution in the #MeToo campaign and the demand for safe spaces and the Age of the Cat Lady.
But one thing that struck me was that apart from prostitution, we folks in the Olympian world of the educated class really have no idea how sex goes down in the lower classes.
The only thing I know is the progress of the Irish Americans from "shanty Irish" and 50,000 "nymphs of the pave" in the New York City of the mid 19th century to "lace curtain Irish" by the turn of the 20th century. I translate this to mean that in 1850 the potato-famine Irish were dumped on the streets of New York and Boston and had to make their way as best they could. But by the turn of the century, with the help of Archbishop "Dagger" John Hughes and the slogan "first build the school, then the church" the Catholic Irish had achieved an astonishing and remarkable ascent to middle-class respectability.
So, what was going on with the family and sex in the world "below" the middle class all this time? What was the effect of the cultural transformation between the Edwardian era and the inter-war period on the European and North American working classes? We know all about hippies and feminists in the Sixties, but what was going down in the households of factory workers and policemen and firemen? I doubt if All in the Family exhausts the possibilities.
And what did the welfare revolution of the Sixties do to the lower classes? We know that premarital childbearing went up and marriage went down. And thanks to Charles Murray and Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 we know that, in upper-class households, career and merger marriages reign, while career and marriage aren't that firm in the middle. And that the bottom 30 percent don't work much and don't marry much.
And that is just for white people!
See, my feeling is that back in the day liberals were drenching us with narratives about working-class life and then African American life, in service to their lefty politics, but what did we really learn?
And in the aftermath of the civil rights era, I'd say that things aren't going so great that liberals want to talk about them.
All I know about lower-class life is from visits to Rudy's Barbershop where I encounter the tattooed and the pierced at first hand. Or I interact with the aides that attended upon Lady Marjorie's mother at her end of life. Just between you and me, I feel that life ain't so great if you live outside the charmed circle of the educated class.
That's because the educated class is great at making a society fit for the educated to live in, but really doesn't have a clue about anyone else, except as a vehicle for activism.
Of course, you know me. I blame liberals for everything. For demolishing the unions and fraternal organizations and mutual aid societies of the 19th century. For demolishing the Catholic Church with Vatican II in the Sixties. For demolishing the lower-class family with welfare on demand. For sending women on a wild goose chase of "career" which was society's amazing solution to the problem of how to socialize aggressive men. For devaluing sex with abortion-on-demand and divorce-on-demand and the attack on bourgeois respectability.
See, I wonder how kids are socialized about sex and marriage in the lower classes today. I wonder how all the ruling-class obsessions about non-binary genders and the rape crisis and #MeToo and safe spaces plays by the time it has filtered out of the educated class out onto the street.
It may be just me, but I don't believe that the obsessions of well-born women and carefully-taught activists has any relevance to the lives of ordinary people that work at "jobs."
I guess that I should keep a weather eye out for writing that would give me a clue about life outside the charmed circle of ruling class privilege and ruling-class obsession. I'll bet it's out there, for anyone willing to pay attention.
And Stefan Zweig has reminded me that to learn anything useful you have to pay attention and look away from the endless rubbish of ruling-class propaganda.
I better get to work.
I was reminded of this as I read Stefan Zweig's excellent memorial, The World of Yesterday, of his adult life from about 1900 to 1940.
Zweig tells us all about the horror of girls in high bourgeois cities like Vienna being trussed up in girdles and corsets that completely disguised their real bodies, and mourns their utter ignorance about sex. That was upper-class bourgeoise girls. Whatabout the tidal wave of prostitutes that the young men of the era patronized, given that they couldn't sample the wares of the well-born girls that were being chaperoned out of all recognition.
How much better it was, he writes, after World War I when young people could freely mix and match, and actually be friends with the opposite sex.
Well, Zweig died in 1942 so he couldn't have known about the "sexual revolution" of the 1960s arising out of the pill and abortion on demand. And he couldn't have known about today's confused backlash against the sexual revolution in the #MeToo campaign and the demand for safe spaces and the Age of the Cat Lady.
But one thing that struck me was that apart from prostitution, we folks in the Olympian world of the educated class really have no idea how sex goes down in the lower classes.
The only thing I know is the progress of the Irish Americans from "shanty Irish" and 50,000 "nymphs of the pave" in the New York City of the mid 19th century to "lace curtain Irish" by the turn of the 20th century. I translate this to mean that in 1850 the potato-famine Irish were dumped on the streets of New York and Boston and had to make their way as best they could. But by the turn of the century, with the help of Archbishop "Dagger" John Hughes and the slogan "first build the school, then the church" the Catholic Irish had achieved an astonishing and remarkable ascent to middle-class respectability.
So, what was going on with the family and sex in the world "below" the middle class all this time? What was the effect of the cultural transformation between the Edwardian era and the inter-war period on the European and North American working classes? We know all about hippies and feminists in the Sixties, but what was going down in the households of factory workers and policemen and firemen? I doubt if All in the Family exhausts the possibilities.
And what did the welfare revolution of the Sixties do to the lower classes? We know that premarital childbearing went up and marriage went down. And thanks to Charles Murray and Coming Apart: The State of White America 1960-2010 we know that, in upper-class households, career and merger marriages reign, while career and marriage aren't that firm in the middle. And that the bottom 30 percent don't work much and don't marry much.
And that is just for white people!
See, my feeling is that back in the day liberals were drenching us with narratives about working-class life and then African American life, in service to their lefty politics, but what did we really learn?
And in the aftermath of the civil rights era, I'd say that things aren't going so great that liberals want to talk about them.
All I know about lower-class life is from visits to Rudy's Barbershop where I encounter the tattooed and the pierced at first hand. Or I interact with the aides that attended upon Lady Marjorie's mother at her end of life. Just between you and me, I feel that life ain't so great if you live outside the charmed circle of the educated class.
That's because the educated class is great at making a society fit for the educated to live in, but really doesn't have a clue about anyone else, except as a vehicle for activism.
Of course, you know me. I blame liberals for everything. For demolishing the unions and fraternal organizations and mutual aid societies of the 19th century. For demolishing the Catholic Church with Vatican II in the Sixties. For demolishing the lower-class family with welfare on demand. For sending women on a wild goose chase of "career" which was society's amazing solution to the problem of how to socialize aggressive men. For devaluing sex with abortion-on-demand and divorce-on-demand and the attack on bourgeois respectability.
See, I wonder how kids are socialized about sex and marriage in the lower classes today. I wonder how all the ruling-class obsessions about non-binary genders and the rape crisis and #MeToo and safe spaces plays by the time it has filtered out of the educated class out onto the street.
It may be just me, but I don't believe that the obsessions of well-born women and carefully-taught activists has any relevance to the lives of ordinary people that work at "jobs."
I guess that I should keep a weather eye out for writing that would give me a clue about life outside the charmed circle of ruling class privilege and ruling-class obsession. I'll bet it's out there, for anyone willing to pay attention.
And Stefan Zweig has reminded me that to learn anything useful you have to pay attention and look away from the endless rubbish of ruling-class propaganda.
I better get to work.
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