have you ever/do you try to pretend youre of a different class?

I know people who are privileged and try to "slum it" in an effort to be more "real" because they're useless, uncreative, spoiled pieces of shit who think living among the "lower class" will make them more relevant, even though they always have two independantly millionaire parent escape lines. Okay I am talking about one person, but boy is he dud. However, playing to a particular class for a real reason, like doing well at work, is less dud.

Yeah, what's it with trash talking rich rich kids?

I blame Mick Jagger

Well, I don't see anyone else smiling in here...

I know people who are privileged and try to "slum it" in an effort to be more "real" because they're useless, uncreative, spoiled pieces of shit

Haha you have just perfectly defined a moment at my (priviliged British private) school, around 15/16, when a good two dozen of my yearmates suddenly started sounding like extras from Oliver Twist. Twats.

In retrospect, that post fully did not need the level of vitriol it had.

I know people who are privileged and try to "slum it" in an effort to be more "real" because they're useless, uncreative, spoiled pieces of shit who think living among the "lower class" will make them more relevant, even though they always have two independantly millionaire parent escape lines.

maybe they think that because lower class people keep calling them useless, uncreative, spoiled pieces of shit

Err. Poor little rich kids? I'm not sure where you were going with that, sunny.

well if you write off every rich as "spoiled" and "useless" how can they correct that but to pretend they arent rich?

if i were rich id be SO spoiled and useless. i mean, thats the appealing part, right??

If your overall life satisfaction and self-definition doesn't involve anything resembling your productivity or creativity or contribution to, like, the world, omg, then I guess so.

who thought this thread was a good idea or interesting??

some middle class tosser no doubt. ;-)

British people

ah ok so british

LOL XP

if i were rich id be SO spoiled and useless. i mean, thats the appealing part, right??

-- sunny successor, Friday, 12 October 2007 18:07 (6 minutes ago) Link

I live for the day when I can be spoiled and useless*. I've worked/ done enough good in my life. I'm ready to live in a Corona commercial. with better beer, obv.

(*I am 98% kidding)

I don't know if this thread translates well to the US, where "class" as a set of mannerisms is far more fluid. There are lots of rich people with lowbrow tastes, and lots of poor people who appreciate culture and the arts.

ilx thinks it's so clever and classless and free

Isn't that the case in the UK too? I thought class wasn't totally connected to money there, whereas in the US you're kind of automatically upper class if you're rich and can be middle or lower class but very cultured.

Classless? FREE? U mad.

I think ILX is just freakin tired of talking it to death, esp cos everyone is just going to be defending his or her own background/actions from start to finish, and we've seen that movie already.

true

I want to sleep with common people.

The class system in Britain suffers from waaaayy too much reverb. In the USA there are far fewer reliable class signifiers. Speech patterns are frequently useless as a way to sort class in the US. Clothes often are, too. Supermodels on their days off wear t-shirts and jeans. Billionaires wear the same polo shirts as golfers on public links. Even that Rolex could be a knock-off, while genuine designer clothes could just mean a whopping huge credit card debt.

It would be fair enough to say that in the USA vast numbers of people are constantly pretending they are in a different class, so much so that the whole thing has become a shell game that no one presumes to understand any more.

Aimless, OTM, especially on the credit card thing.

Whoo. I know some Gucci credit having, Target paycheck getting motherfuckers.

All that "spending" gonna catch up.

The only time I still really think about this sort of thing is when I am (rarely) in an expensive restaurant. The most important factor in pretending to belong somewhere expensive is not one's manners or habits, but the casualness that comes from feeling you belong there. It's much more of a *giveaway* to fret over whether you're using the right fork than to use the wrong fork.

Sorry, even I find that post kind of annoying.

go head big baller

wait ,this thread isn't about D&D?

http://www.collider.com/uploads/imageGallery/Into_the_Wild/into_the_wild_movie_poster.jpg

I think I imagine myself to come off much more free-floating, class-wise, than I actually do.

i pretended once i was a bassit hound and i wnet HOWL HOWL

herro puppy

"Screenplay and directed by Sean Penn"

I remember when I first got to ILX (early 2003, I think?) , I assumed most people here were british, because class kept being brought up. Worst topic ever.

well if you write off every rich as "spoiled" and "useless" how can they correct that but to pretend they arent rich?

-- sunny successor, Friday, October 12, 2007 2:05 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Link

Note that I wasn't overgeneralizing, and know many interesting, creative jetsetters, and was going off on one particular person from my past who I'd rather not remember exists

I suspect Sunny will not be joining my Eat The Rich campaign.

I realized my self-image of class had shifted once I noticed that my idea of a resonably-priced restaurant shifted from $15 entrees to $30 entrees.

Perhaps your self-image just caught up with inflation?

I still think McDonalds needs to slash its value menu.

More like my self-image caught up with my promotions!

http://conservativlib.files.wordpress.com/2007/04/churchillcry3.jpg

I need to sell out.

I pretended I was getting into Criminal Justice once at a dinner party.

ilx: pure class!

once I faked a North London accent at a party. (I, like everyone there, am Canadian.) It went off without a hitch. Now, was I playing up my class (anyone who lives in London has to be able to afford to live in London, surely!), or down (I talked about how my "mate" got "merked" after a few drinks, and then told people that meant "laid")

I still don't think of $30 entrees as reasonable, unless it's a special occasion. I should probably worry less about that and more about what I spend on food on a daily basis tho.

http://mywebpage.netscape.com/Cartimandua4/bryanferry1.jpg

Ian OTM (about that time I pretended to be a rogue cleric)

i've told this story on ILX a zillion times and has fuck-all to do with class...

the first time i went to London, I was accused of faking my American accent as an exotic way to pull birds. it worked, but only after i showed my american drivers license and various paperwork.

I think most people in America don't know anyone with "old money", esp if you're not from either coast (East more than West, I guess?). So that sort of oil baron lifestyle hold-over is more like a fairy tale to most people, something for the history books.

-- Laurel, Friday, 12 October 2007 20:51 (Yesterday) Link

i didn't know any "old money" until i went to fancy ivy league school. there, my friend J__ said, completely seriously, that she respected teachers, but could never be one because "that would be beneath us." (us = her family). swear to god she's an alright gal, though, just totally and utterly clueless and prone to kicking her foot into her mouth like a lot.

but yeah, to echo what burt said upthread: the only thing that matters to 99.9% of america is the color of your money. that being said, the "old boy" network is alive and well.

also, w/r/t old money: i have an old schoolmate that opted to go to my "less prestigious" ivy and not harvard, where his family's got names on buildings apparently. his pops and granddad were NOT pleased, nor have they been happy with his subsequent bumming around the west. he's lived out of the back of his truck for weeks at a time, lived very close to the margins, etc., but he still sounds patrician and will dress like he owns a volvo for the rest of his life.

i don't think most americans have any idea what class they are: the signifiers that work well in the UK to indicate one's economic strata are so muddied and complicated by racial, professional, geographic and educational concerns that any US conception of'class' doesn't exist in much of a meaningful way except for - say - the top/bottom 5% of the earning range.

eg. if you get a scholarship to a small new englandy liberal arts non-ivy school, take out cripplingly high loans to attend an ostensibly prestigious grad program, and work in a variety of careers (both 'high' and 'low'), perhaps drift cashless for a little but ... it's quite possible to feel entirely alien and phony in both rich and poor circumstances, in spite of the fact that you exist in them both in some kind of weird simultanaeity.

^^^^^ OTM

what class is overeducated/underemployed

I think most people in America don't know anyone with "old money"

I think most people in Britain don't know anyone who would be described as 'upper class'. They probably make up about 0.1% of the population.

If you make upper class money, you're upper class.

See, there's another difference, because I would say in Britain you only really become upper class by marrying into an upper class family. Also, I don't think upper class people 'make' money as such, they just live off their vast wealth.

the comment about $15 and $30 entrees just re-shifted my sense of class, haha - i started to feel very spoiled and entitled when i stopped freaking out about dinners over $10.

the only place i've even heard about "old money" in the us is from novels (specifically, jane haddam murder mysteries, in which half the characters are crazy rich main line people and the other half are armenian immigrants). even the people i'd been to college with who went to prep schools had parents who were lawyers or teachers at said prep schools, not "old money."

you shd visit providence

One of my best buddies in college was a 7th-generation legacy (along with his sister). He is currently a private-school teacher.

undereducated, underemployed represent

One of my favorite anecdotes about class:

Girl meets boy, through mutual acquaintances, at a bar in Portland.

She hails from a blue-collar, beer cans in the broke-down pick-up truck, rural Minnesotan family. He is East Coast old-money. She is a talented artist with a dynamic intellect, and swears and drinks like a sailor. He is a fifth-generation ivy-leaguer who sails.

They bond over erudite conversations about literature and music, but on the cab ride to his apartment he confesses that he initially had reservations about her. She inquires and he replies that, "The way you spoke, 'fuck this' and 'fuck that', I thought you were working class."

She loses her shit and is laughing so hard she can't talk through the tears. Upon regaining some composure, she says, "As opposed to what, leisure class?"

They get to his massive loft and he explains that he took a job at Microsoft because he wants to earn his living by, "working a real job."

He further explains that while he is finding his own way, in rebellion against his family, he has shed himself of most of his possessions in order to live a more austere, normal life. In his loft, there is only a desk, a mattress on the floor, and a grand piano.

Made uncomfortable once again by her hysterical laughter, he explains that there is nothing so simple and universal as music.

They became great friends, but, according to my friend, he never quite understood why she found him so amusing.

The comments above about class in the US remind me of a NYTimes article a while back on already super-exclusive resort hotels offering even more super-exclusive perks for the super-super-rich. An agent at one of the hotels was quoted saying something like, "I'll usually offer the perks to our more refined guests, for example if they have a platinum Master Card."

New money is the new old money.

I think in the US, the East Coast is much more fixated on wealth as signifier. On the West Coast, it's more individual and gluttonous and personal.

Oops. I didn't read Hurting's post. Maybe this is all the NYT.

where can i find seriously rich girl who aims marriage?

"I'll usually offer the perks to our more refined guests, for example if they have a platinum Master Card."

pish. you get stores closed down for your personal shopping when you have a black amex.

i dont get fluffy bears story.

FB's story is basically "lol stupid richie rich" which, in honesty, is never not funny.

my (mom's, and to a lesser extent my dad's) family is east coast "old money," but we have about as much money as every other upper-middle class suburban family out there, which is to say less than most "nouveau-riche" families

but which is also NOT to say that we're poor

just that being from a "name" family isnt a guarantor of wealth or anything; that being said, my grandparents have sort of attempted to willfully pass down all sorts of prep-school-WASP cultural behaviors

the ones that stuck mostly involve drinking heavily in the mid afternoon

dud: "but we have about as much money as every other upper-middle class suburban family out there"

as a canadian i think i am just allowed to remain confused about class

as a Canadian you're too polite to ever refer to class

I think most people in Britain don't know anyone who would be described as 'upper class'. They probably make up about 0.1% of the population.

It seems like British people LOVE talking about them though.

lol polite stereotype

kinda true tho

i am mostly amazed at people who own cars that are less than five years old and actually drive them all the time

and amazed that actors can become so rich and influential when, generalizing here, actors are srsly some of the most messed up narcissistic people out there

but i'm gonna go all anthony freakin robbins on this shit and say you are what you believe man and that's how you 'transcend' 'your class'
but at the same time then we're talking more about material wealth there and 'things' representing class, vs the 'aura' of class e.g. how someone with seemingly no possessions (lol grand piano in empty loft story) still remains upper class.

i mean what is class built on anyway? probably your ancestors dicking over people

Also, I don't think upper class people 'make' money as such, they just live off their vast wealth.

-- Nasty, Brutish & Short, Saturday, 13 October 2007 18:34 (Yesterday) Link

er, no.

there's a lot of mobility between the upper-middle class (would be called bourgeoisie in european countries) and 'aristocracy', it's how the latter (which is tiny) keeps going. idea of families going back to the norman conquest is total fallacy. it is always after new blood. the point (i'm paraphrasing) is the british 'bourgeoisie' as a result never had a distinct 'bourgeois' identity formed in distinction and against the aristos. (and arguably, up to a point, vice versa.) in france and germany this wasn't so much the case.

It seems like British people LOVE talking about them though.

nowhere near as much as working and middle

Is there a single genuine Brit aristo on ILE? I can't think of anyone who comes close.

Sunny, I made the story too long.

"I thought you were working class."

"As opposed to what, leisure class?"

Followed up by, "I want to live like normal people do with my grand piano and my fantastic loft, and my crappy mattress and no furniture."*

*not actually a quote

But, yeah, basically lol @ richie rich and his naivety.

My college kept a copy of the Social Register in the library and it was interesting to see that three out of 10 of the girls who lived on my hallway were in it. Not me, although my paternal grandfather's clan are namechecked as party guests in The Great Gatsby; one of our party at Frieze this week asked me if I was related to a woman sharing my surname who'd been photographed by Cecil Beaton - he claimed was the spit of me. Possibly, I'll have to check. I will say that the one branch of my family not to arrive on the turn of 19th and 20th centuries to the US arrived to colonies in 1620. Beat that, pilgrim!

Mark, I know one with the correct ancestors but who is not even a little bit Honourable (clue: it isn't me). I also grew up with a neighbour (English) who was at pains to explain what it meant to be UPPER CLASS, to wit - Americans don't understand the whole concept of 'posh' which is more about connections and education and manners than actual money.

All Americans in salaried employment and with a mortgage can and do claim 'middle class' status.

I have a friend who is somewhat of a hobo/gutterpunk type (to get back from the east coast to the midwest he hopped trains the whole way) despite his parents living in an upper-middle class suburb. But, that's nothing compared to some of the friends he's made while hanging around a lot of east coast ivy league towns.

I remember him dropping by with his friend who, apparently, was trying not to be too obvious because the last time he'd been in town he'd been busted stealing boots from Wal-Mart. Apparently this same friend also interned for McSw33ney's and had parents with a big old house in San Francisco.

http://uk.gizmodo.com/ricky%20gervais.jpg

^The upper class of Reading.

All Americans in salaried employment and with a mortgage can and do claim 'middle class' status.

-- suzy, Sunday, 14 October 2007 15:42 (35 minutes ago) Link

This is damned ignorant, and flat out wrong. As the current US housing credit crisis might suggest, the application/receipt of a mortgage line is/was basically available to anybody at all, including those that had no hope (/intention/chance oin hell) of repaying their commitment. While there's this historically-based aperception of 'home-owners' as somehow affluent, somehow more financially abled than their renting, temporary-housing counterparts -- it's a totally wrong idea. Adjustable rate mortgages, especially, are set to soar really soon and there are a lot of very valid non-alarmist predictions for a tsunami of foreclosures and looming evictions that'll result from the unscrupulous & poorly-considered mortgage programs that've been peddled for the past decade.

remy, that's not the point. Owning your own home, whether you can actually afford it or not, is a middle-class signifier. That's all I read into Suzy's statement.

if you've got a mortgage you can't pay, you don't own it.

and determining class by property 'signifiers' or whatever we'll call them in microecon 101, is a really clunky, imprecise, and antique way of deciding status.

well duh!

the cleaning lady at my old school, making +/- $27,000 annually and a buy-in health benefits program she couldn't afford to take advantage of, who supported 4 kids, held a mortgage on a 3-room broken-down condo in an otherwise empty building 20+ miles from work, lived off food-stamps and occasional alimony payments from her deadbeat ex-husband = suzy's description of middle class.

upper working class

bomb-shelter aristocracy

Basically, in America, 90% of the population thinks of themselves as middle class. When we try to define it, we define it by economic indexes. There are cultural signifiers of class in America, but they're very mixed up and muddled.

"I'll usually offer the perks to our more refined guests, for example if they have a platinum Master Card."

pish. you get stores closed down for your personal shopping when you have a black amex.

i dont get fluffy bears story.

-- sunny successor, Sunday, 14 October 2007 02:36 (15 hours ago) Link

Wait, I think "black amex" was the actual detail from the article - I was paraphrasing from memory.

http://www.gomog.com/images/Kingralph.jpg

'lineage' is bullshit, cf

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/George_I_of_Great_Britain#Accession_in_Great_Britain

I know people who are privileged and try to "slum it" in an effort to be more "real" because they're useless, uncreative, spoiled pieces of shit who think living among the "lower class" will make them more relevant, even though they always have two independantly millionaire parent escape lines.

Oh come on, no one who lives around the Bedford stop is even fooling himself anymore.

Remy, the ad-hominem above was not only completely unneccessary, it was the kind of emotional response which kind of precludes any logic in your argument. But that's okay, I don't expect you to know everything or remember that I'm not a Britishes.

FB 'got' what I meant - home ownership, which normally you need salaried employment or a small business to qualify for, whether the result of a sub-prime mortgage or not, gives most Americans a kind of middle class signifier to point to and damn straight most of us are happy to do so. And DUH of course the bank owns the house until the mortgage is paid off.

I've always thought of it like this:

You have a mortgage - welcome to at lower middle class status, where if you are most Americans you are allergic to the term 'working class' and don't use it to describe self. You will probably never inherit anything from anyone. To be accurate you don't really like the 'lower' part either because you are aspirational.

You have a mortgage and a down-payment gift from parents (or inherited from a grandparent) because you are marrying and starting a family of your own - solid, middle-middle class, especially between the coasts where this is still more achievable.

You have a mortgage with a massive parental downpayment or your home is bought outright for you by a parent in the 'professions' as a shrewd investment regardless of whether or not you are fixing to breed - upper middle class.

This is really not difficult or controversial.

Yeah, everyone knows the Bedford stop is -the- new SoHo. I think you meant to say: Bushwick. Word from some private sources is that white kids are flooding the area like never before, and rents are skyrocketing as far out as the Jefferson and Dekalb stops.