Who Will Defend the Children of Priviledge?

LNS claims to have something like 14,000 members.

That’s an awful lot of rich right-wing preppies in one place even for Washington, DC.

Except the hipster t-shirt demonstrates a greater degree of self-consciousness. Obviously, that’s the old trope about hipsters, that they’re ironic and self-conscious. But it’s self consciousness, I think, that opens the door to curbing whatever trait it is in human beings that makes them find various forms of exclusivity attractive.

Therefor, obviously, anyone can see it, hipsters are better than young conservatives.

Hmm, my favorite t-shirt of that variety is an Onion T-Shirt that simply states: “Your favorite band sucks”

I wonder if they have an option for same sex liaisons on the site like many other similar networking sites do, it could be indicative of whether the next generation of conservatives will be funding efforts to keep same sex marriage and other anti-gay agendas running for the next couple of decades or not.

If McLemee thinks LNS is really all a bunch of right-wingers, then he’s completely out of it. There are, I’m sure, your fair share of non-profiteering Ivy trust-funders with crushes on Obama who equally elitist and disgusting.

What I fail to understand is this obsession with LNS. People on LNS are not spending months writing articles about how hipsters interact, what ironic t-shirts they’re wearing, or what branch of queer literary theory they’re expounding on this week.

LNS is hilarious, but I understand why some people wouldn’t like it. The hit pieces I’ve seen on it are generally pretty funny, if bitter. The only problem I have with this one is the fact that by most accounts, the author made up quotes, and in one case called up the mother of one of the subjects of the article to read her a salacious quote by her son. I mean, come on.

Well, Pimp C (if that is your real name) I can testify that, far from being “obsessed” with LNS, I for one never heard of it until reading the article, and expect never to think of it — short of that happy day when humanity becomes free by hanging the last capitalist with the guts of the last Stalinist.

God, how I love that slogan. It never gets old.

Hmm…I seem to recall reading this story somewhere before…

Well Scott, you just wrote a 700 word blog post on the subject.

Even 10 or 20 years ago you would never have seen something like this. People were still embarassed to be seen as elitists.

I think this is pretty clearly nonsense. The technology of such sites has made this sort of noxious, banal elitism more obvious to the rest of us, but it always existed. To find evidence, one need only look at examples of the elite talking among themselves but being overheard. (This is, of course, what LNS is–they don’t invite the riff-raff in to watch, the riff-raff in the form of journalists or bloggers infiltrate.

An example from 10 years ago can be seen in Lawrence Otis Graham’s book about infiltrating a country club, published in 1996, A Member of the Club, or listen to him on a (recently rebroadcast) episode of This American Life. The point of what Graham says is that it’s not just the casual racism of everyone at the club (although it’s that, too); it’s a larger elitism that is not meant to be heard outside of the club.

For an example of 20 years ago, you can read the coverage of the strike of clerical and technical workers at Yale in 1984 in the Yale Daily News. The blithe elitism of many of the Yale students is mind-boggling. Their problem was not they disagreed with the union, but that these people who were not in the club (not of the school, although of course they actually were) had the audacity to disrupt their lives, wake them up with chanting, inconvenience them with picket-lines, and demand recognition of their importance to the university. If that isn’t LNS-style elitism, I don’t know what is.

This is a typical confrontation between two stereotypical extremes. On one hand, you have the self-righteous, altruistic, liberals and in the other you have the rich, conceited conservatives. You have the liberals taking the first shot and conservatives fighting back. To me, i think it was a low blow, irresponsible and pathetic for a newspaper to publish such an article in the first place. That kinda writing belongs in a blog not a ‘newspaper’.

Full disclosure – I am a member of LNS, I am neither white, nor rich, not conservative, and definitely not privileged. Also, I know some of the people who got ‘outed’ and even though i despise most of them, they did not deserve to be tricked and made poster boys/girls for one person’s ( or a newspapers) agenda.

“is not the sort of behavior that a ruling class that is really sure of itself needs to indulge”

I think they’re just kids. Also, not actually the elite, as text said.

“enabling rich young white people from good prep schools to get drunk and have casual sex with others”

Except for the prep school part, it sounds like the fraternities and sororities at schools like the University of Texas in Austin.

munchkin is right; I teach at a prep school and, while right-wingers are certainly more common than in the local population (…no great challenge here in Massachusetts), there are plenty of left-wingers as well (some of them even rich and white — of course there are non-rich, non-white people who attend prep school as well, though rather fewer).

The sense of entitlement, though, I can’t help you with. Or, alas, them.

For a set that claims to despise hipsters, these LNSers sound like they could use a bit more irony in their dialectical diets—at least enough to realize that going off on indignant diatribes is a poor way to express how little you care about something.

Lemuel, if this stuff is new, how come Bret Easton Ellis wrote about it 20 years ago?

And F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about it 80 years ago. Tom and Daisy anyone?

Another example of this variety is the law school message board on http://www.autoadmit.com, with which Leiter infamously tangled. There’s nothing to stoke the Marxisant in you like seeing anonymous HLS students denigrate blacks and the “poors,” discuss spending hundreds on call girls, etc. (Though much of it is trolling, to be sure.)

OMG…are these people for real? Is this serious?

I’ll take my indie music thank you, over self-imposed superiority.

That was hi-freakin-larious. The comments section is a goldmine.

Point: “We are better athletes, smarter in business, more attractive, tougher, and, in general, winners of the genetic lottery.”
Counterpoint:”I know it gets said all the time, but shouldn’t these fellows be out losing a war, just like their slaveowning ancestors?”
HAW!

Gosh, I did? Seven hundred words?

I must say Scott, the LYM on Wednesday, these Beltway Camarillitos on Thursday. For Friday the 13th, let me guess … on to Gatlin, Nebraska?

The establishment screws each other, as well as the rest of us.

“Both of which you did a terrible job of doing.”

It gets funnier every time I read it.

Well I guess he was writing in a hurry, seeing as how his time is already divided between making money and RUNNING THE WORLD.

And F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote about it 80 years ago.

Though not American, see also Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh. Very funny. I think it is funny; the elites are always like that, by definition.

what ever happened to the nice people in the wonderful Whit Stillman film “Metropolitan”?

on the other hand, there’s a particular form of social ressentiment that can be incredibly annoying and as andromeda points out regularly misses the target due to overgeneralization

I don’t know what’s behind JR’s insinuations about Angela Valdez in #5. I was in Portland when Angela wrote for WW (and have met her), and I can’t remember anything justifying his dark aspersion.

Googling finds two possibilities:

1.) the source for one story claimed that he had been offered co-authorship. WW’s response — basically that they thought the guy was too much part of the story to be an author — looks pretty reasonable to me.

2.) Valdez wrote a piece accusing the Oregonian of overhyping the “amphetamine epidemic”. Jack Schafer at Slate praised her story and linked to it, while the Oregonian on Poynter Online claimed that she was all wrong. I can’t judge who is right and wrong for sure, but the controversy was raised by Valdez herself about the Oregonian, which responded — it’s not that she wrote a story which became controversial because of some flaw. If her story was even partly valid, it was a real coup.

14000, we write about you guys for the same reason that you do the dumbfuck things you do. We’re killing time and being nasty.

I’d imagine that LNS has a definite internal structure, with a certain number of true elite, a certain number of conmen climbers, and a lot of deluded wannabes.

“Even 10 or 20 years ago you would never have seen something like this.”

I’d second that this is pretty much nonsense.

Huh. Do people really not think that the glorification of wealth and privilege isn’t a much bigger part of American society than between, say, 1940 and 1980?

I grew up in affluent Montgomery County, Maryland not so very long ago in the 1970s. At that time nobody had a nanny or cleaning person or any kind of domestic servant. It’s not just that they couldn’t afford them — altho it was a lot less practical then — but it simply wasn’t part of the culture. Hiring someone to clean your house or watch your kids wasn’t something that would have crossed anyone’s mind. You either did it yourself or paid a kid from a family just like your own to do it.

When I went to high school, you couldn’t tell the kids who were going to Harvard after graduating from the kids who were going into the army. Not true today. The huge increase in income inequality is reflected in segregation along every dimension of society. (And really, wouldn’t it be more surprising if this weren’t the case?)

Sure, sure, both-ways-uphill-in-the-snow, but you can’t tell me that changes I’ve observed in my own lifetime aren’t real.

Re: “You’re going to work for us someday” being chanted by Harvard students…yes, it’s heavily ironic. Other Ivies are generally the target for this. I can’t imagine under what circumstances Harvard would play UMass in football–they’re not in the same league (Harvard football, fyi, sucks). However, I would be shocked if the vast majority of these social climbing creeps had the test scores to be admitted to any Ivy, despite Daddy paying good money for the best prep schools and test prep tutors.

The article is disturbing, but the comments are hilarious. I love all the folks who claim that they are misrepresented and personally libeled and that the reporter is bad because she is a poor, ugly, slut (not that LNSers dislike the poor, the ugly, or the sluttish, you know). Now *there’s* irony for you.

It’s also quite hilarious that “Pimp C” thinks that 700 words is a lengthy oeuvre. Perhaps it is difficult for him to string more than two or three sentences together without paying someone else (one of those nasty plebs) to do it for him?

#20 is hilarious.

The site was made “exclusive” because Reed is a savvy businessperson – rule #1 of gaining attention is to make something unattainable – it’s human nature. However, in practice there is very little exclusivity.

The characterization of LNS as some sort of “club,” using the term “LNSers,” and generalizing the whole group as some sort of cultural phenomenon works great for the story, but isn’t reality. I am on the site, all my friends are on the site, and it is little more than a great way to kill time. Reed has come up with several social networking innovations which make people more likely to log back in. Examples of these are the “hunting range,” putting anonymous captions on photos, the forum, the party invite function, sending messages with a “brush-up”, and a host of others.

The author of the City Paper article does her best Tom Wolfe impression, and it’s been humorous watching people on both sides of this “divide” get all bent out of shape about this “culture war.” It really has exposed the hypocrisy and defensiveness on both sides. I am a Democrat, and the most appalling hypocrisy that liberals or progressives have in this country is that they are so judgmental. It is easy to put the “LNS crowd” in a box and call them rich, conservative, spoiled, or whatever else, but a true liberal might try to look behind these stereotypes and might realize that Republicans can be great individuals. You might not agree with their political beliefs, and you might dress differently, but guess what – you can have fun if you just opened your mind.

“While you are busy writing about us, we are busy running the world and making money so you have something to write.”

Where have I heard that before? Oh yeah…

“The aide said that guys like me were “in what we call the reality-based community,” which he defined as people who “believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.” … “That’s not the way the world really works anymore,” he continued. “We’re an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you’re studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we’ll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that’s how things will sort out. We’re history’s actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.”

The most insular vanguard of modern American “conservatism” is apparently held together by string and an overwhelming sense of one’s own superiority.

Also, what Mrs. Coulter said in 61: these excesses are especially typical for the nouveau riche, so naturally it had to start happening in the 80s when the top tax bracket went from 80% down to 30.

The Upper West Side looks over at the Upper East Side and finds…

Dagny Taggart = Jane Galt’s sock puppet?

Yes, who will defend the children of privilege?

Status, power, identity, community are such emotional topics.

The shameless despise the guiltmongers, the guiltmongers hate the shameless.

There seem to be only so many ways to react to the ill-deserved status problem.

1. Disdain- Oh the wickedness of the powerful!
2. Distress – How/when/why has the world become so corrupt?
3. Dominance – They aren’t really as smart/powerful/sexy/funny/lovable/connected/old-money as we are.
4. Deflation – Who cares what “they” do anyway?

I can relate to all of these strategies. A case study are the grammar/spelling/rhetoric/literary knowledge snobs.

I find the whole “oops I misspelled a word” and “gotcha, fool” posts distressing. I mean spelling is clearly conventional so where do these people get off perpetuating it as a status fetish. Sure, I’m like everyone else and watch the spelling bee on ESPN in awe, but to criticize the less linguistically facile, it just seems so harsh, so needlessly cruel, so judgmental (not judgemental, right?)

So, I run through the D’s. Disdain – Those bastard spelling nazi’s are at it again! Distress – when did they start breeding like flies- Ezra where are you now that we need you? Dominance – I’ll bet that guy doesn’t know Anglo-Saxon from Middle English anyway! and finally the peaceful plane of deflation – cuz it just don’t mean nuthing NE-WAY!

Dagny Taggart = Jane Galt’s sock puppet?

Nah, if it were from La Galt it would surely have (a) an anecdote about the author’s totally working class friend who was in LNS and says it wasn’t like that at all and (b) some counterfactual speculation about how exclusive communities like LNS are actually good for poor people and democracy, plus optionally (c) a threat to bean anyone who doesn’t agree with a 2×4.

These crypto-fascist idiots have been in D.C. forever. The only difference is now, with gentrification, a massive population of upper-middle class “hipsters” have taken over the middle parts of the city. Whereas in the early 80’s, preppies used to patrol the streets of Georgetown looking for fights with young punkers like Ian Mackaye, now a new “critical mass” of hipsters has chaged the tide, and the date-raping preppies are up against the ropes.

But before we set up a good/evil binary here, make sure to look at the big hipster websites like “brightest young things,” where a different brand of knee-jerk elitism prevails under the banner of a not very reflective MTV2 “cool” that is really only another kind of conspicuous consumption and another kind of violence.

Why is it a surprise that these LNS kids feel rightious; the date rapists have their bands and clothes, and the hipsters have theirs.

We are in UR litterbox, burying your reputation.

Lemuel,

You sound like my wife. She see’s doing yardwork as a man’s highest moral duty no matter how economically ridiculous it is not to have it hired out.

I see your point about the cleaning lady, but God’s own gift to virtue, George Bailey, had a domestic servant so it can’t be that bad.

if you can’t imagine a world without servants, that’s a failure of imagination on your part

a servant? bloody hell, have you ever spoken to a cleaning lady? should you ever do so, I suggest you don’t call her a servant, it’s just a job like working the checkout at Tesco’s or something

Of course, the low-class LNSers get jobs like managing hurricane relief In New Orleans, reconstructing Iraq, censoring the CDC’s AIDS and contraception publications, etc., while the posh Yglesias types work for low-paying, low-circulation magazines.

I have to agree with tyro. Living in Silicon Valley, I see the people who are actually changing the world, and they are overwhelmingly hippies and hipsters.

“We’re seeing a similar cultural evolution to what we saw in the 1920s. I think that supports my point.”

Don’t worry, soon enough a major economic/military crisis will come along, and then you/we pointy-head types will get to take their money away and spread it around.

Any minute now.

“They’re not worried that someone might mistake them for one of the hoi polloi.”

And you’re apparently not worried that “the hoi polloi” is the semantic equivalent of “the les miserables.”

*

The version of the chant *I* heard was “That’s all right, that’s okay, you’re gonna *pump our gas* someday.”

Cheney is a not too bright cynic

You think? I had the pretty clear impression he was very, very bright … and pure evil. (Which is a kind of idealism, the dead opposite of cynicism, no?)

Knemon, fuck off back to Late Night Shots…that’s a good boy.

knemon, you think it’s a coincidence that of the 5 reactionary justices that now form a majority, every last one is a Roman Catholic? And that of the 4-member moderate minority, two are Jews and two are Protestants? Are we not allowed to note the strong totalitarian tendency among some Catholic intellectuals?

These rich brats never made an honest dollar in their lives. They don’t deserve the money and privilege earned by their fathers’ exploitation. What they deserve is to be stripped of their ill-gotten inherited wealth and made to work for the benefit of society.

We have a concierge, Monsieur Sánchez. He vacuums the carpeted staircase in our apartment building. He lives in our building too.

Incidentally, I remember hearing a colleague saying the other day that he pays his cleaning lady 30chf/hr. That’s about $25/hr or so.

just like the housemaids who cleaned the homes of the rich before WWII

And if you’re hiring servants, you’ve joined the ruling class, whether you want to admit it or not.

See, maybe all of this is fundamentally different in the US, but over here in London the above statements are complete and utter bollix.

A lot of people employ cleaning ladies here, including a lot of young flat-sharers. If all these people belong to the ‘ruling class’, then there’s something seriously wrong with your classification system, some of them are just barely scraping by. The people who do the cleaning are mostly young eastern european girls, who get around £30 for 2.5 hours of work mostly tax free. That enables them to get by in London and leaves them enough time to take english classes, university courses or whatever else they’re up to. It has nothing to do with wealth or servants in an apron.

Hiring a “servant” means you’ve retained the full-time services of someone as part of your “household staff.” Hiring a “cleaning lady” means you pay someone $25-$50/week to vacuum and mop– functionally equivalent to hiring someone to clean our your gutters, getting a full-service car wash, or going to jiffy-lube for an oil change. It’s only because some people have retained a social association of contemporary housecleaners with early-to-mid-20th century servants that anyone even raises the issue… which is to say, way too many of you saw Gosford Park.

“If all these people belong to the ‘ruling class’, then there’s something seriously wrong with your classification system, some of them are just barely scraping by.”
…and they pay someone to clean up after them.

Sometime in the Thatcher era I began hearing London described, by New Yorkers who’d moved there as the one city more cynical than NY.
—

Abb1, union workers get paid very well, cleaning ladies not so much. But it’s not just money, it’s the psychological wear and tear. When class lines are flexible and money is the only measure, People with money often need to distance themselves from people who are except for their lack of wealth, almost identical to them. That can get nasty. There’s also the contradictions of liberalism. Upper West siders can be the best to work for or the worst: needy and guilty; insecure friendliness mixed with unaware condescension. It can be exhausting. I mock the kids at Tapped by asking if any of them or their bosses have ever hired a union crew to paint their apartments.

Remembering the discussion of the book “Doormen” at CT, I looked it up on amazon. In the publishers weekly blurb, I found this:

” He tends to spend too much time examining the obvious questions (e.g., why do doormen find their jobs at once “boring and stressful”?), while barely touching upon others that seem deeper and more fertile, such as the ways in which tenants tend to see their doormen as “socially dead.”

The post didn’t cover that either. If you’re going to have servants its best to keep things simple. Serious professionals (servants) will refuse to call you by your first name, for the same reason my father would not let his students call him “Bob.” You don’t fire your friends, and you don’t give them an “F”
Noblesse oblige may be old fashioned or even anti-democratic but in some circumstances it’s necessary, because it works. It’s coming back, though. you could say that means I approve, or that I don’t. It’s kind of like my response to Mel Gibson.

Scrubbing the shit off your toilet-bowl and your underwear and taking care of your children while her mother babysits for her is not

True. Which is why I did not use that example.

If you’re retaining someone full time, as I said, to work as part of your “household staff” to do toilet-bowl cleaning, laundry, and babysitting, you would likely being paying her a full time salary out of your own full time salary– at which point, yes, you could be said to be “hiring servants” and be a member of the “ruling class.”

And that, I think, is where the distinction is made– when one’s own income is used to pay the entire income of others, not when one is retaining others on a fee-for-service basis.

Other distinction: full-time nanny vs. baby-sitter one hires to watch the kids for the evening while the parents are out. However, the issue of hiring a baby-sitter for these situations never seems to attract the same amount of hand-wringing that paying a cleaning service does.

Constantine, as I made clear before, there’s an important distinction to be made concerning the general social relationship to the person you’re hiring

We just disagree on the issue, and I maintain that it’s because we have a certain social anxiety about cleaning that we don’t have about other home- and car-maintenance issues (my secret shame: it’s been years since I’ve changed the oil in my car myself or personally washed my car in my non-existent driveway).

It has to do with the nearness of the body. Body servants are in an intimate yet distant relation. You can play poker with your mechanic. you’re less likely to do so with your maid. My parents hired a woman to help around the house when she was pregnant with me. My mother wouldn’t let her work alone so they spent all day cleaning. In the end they had to let her go: my mother was exhausted.
You can’t have superiority and equality at the same time. That’s why the army has rules against fraternization of officers and enlisted.

I used the magic word: “P-k-r”!!

“It has to do with the nearness of the body. Body servants are in an intimate yet distant relation. You can play “Canasta” with your mechanic. you’re less likely to do so with your maid. My parents hired a woman to help around the house when she was pregnant with me. My mother wouldn’t let her work alone so they spent all day cleaning. In the end they had to let her go: my mother was exhausted.
You can’t have superiority and equality at the same time. That’s why the army has rules against fraternization of officers and enlisted.”

Wow, my spelling is even worse than Scott’s!

I say:

some of them are just barely scraping by

engels says:

it’s your implication that “young flat sharers” are ipso facto not members of a priveged class

that’s faulty logic on your part

I used to live in a flat-share with 4 others, the cleaner came every other week and each member paid £6. Two of them were ‘just scraping by’, one as a freelance translator, the other doing data input and occasional TV jobs. They frequently had trouble paying their rent. The cleaner was Polish, taking english classes and not living in poverty.

But don’t let reality intrude on your preconceived notions.

That people employing cleaners are members of the ‘ruling class’, ignorant and self-pitying and that cleaners are servants living in inhumane circumstances.

but this is getting increasingly silly

Nova-cant – 40% of UK households with an income of over £70 000 employ domestic workers. 3% of households with an income of less than £25 000 do so. Roughly half of households in the UK have an income of less than £25 000. Hardly any of these people have a cleaner.

If you’re earning over £25 000 then you’re better off than half the people in this country. Seriously describing that as “just scraping by” is inaccurate and self-pitying imo.

As for the for the condition of domestic workers:

Kalayaan, a west London-based campaigning group for migrant domestic workers, has conducted a survey which claims 86% of domestic workers work more than 16 hours a day, 71% have been deprived of food, 32% have had their passports withheld by their employers and 23% have been physically abused. These workers skivvy for upper-middle-class employers whose wealth helps to cover up their appalling treatment of their workers. The Guardian

Also, “the average weekly wage packet [among private household workers] is £30 for 4.5 hours work” – equivalent to £6.70 per hour“. The London Living Wage currently stands at £7.20 per hour.

No elite group has 14,000 members. I don’t care how many cities it’s spread over. The fucking Illuminati runs the world and it’s got, what, 300. Something like that.

Roughly half of households in the UK have an income of less than £25 000. Hardly any of these people have a cleaner.

But maybe (probably) most of these households have one of the spouses doing the housework and nothing else? While in most £70 000+ households probably both spouses are employed.

abb1 – So what?

abb1, this is all fascinating, as usual, but it doesn’t seem to tell against anything I said, so I am uncertain as to why it is addressed to me.

Do think that the fact that someone is hiring a domestic worker means that he or she is almost certainly a member of a privileged class? Yes. Do I think that everybody who hires a domestic worker is in a more privileged position than anybody who doesn’t? No. Do I think that a sharp line can be drawn between domestic workers and people who do similar work outside of the home? No, but domestic workers are much worse off in many important ways, as stated above.

Finally, I just don’t get why you think your friend’s wife (who presumably does domestic work and perhaps brings up your friend’s kids) has it so easy. Would you rather do that than work in an office?

Seth – (i) Have you?
(ii) Do you have any substantive objection to what I said, or just prolier-that-thou posturing?

My last was too simple. The ethics and esthetics of our “service” economy mean that there are a lot of servants. I made that point myself earlier.

Up until it was publicized 20 years ago by an artist, Mierle Laderman Ukeles, the furniture and lockers used by the NY Sanitation department employees were hand-me-downs from the Police and Fire departments. The trashmen got the trash.

It’s usually assumed that the difference between a 3 and 4 star restaurant isn’t the food, it’s the service. I rarely go to four star restaurants.

“Do I think that a sharp line can be drawn between domestic workers and people who do similar work outside of the home?”

There’s less of a line than there use to be. Waiting tables at a diner is not the same as waiting tables for Daniel Boulud, and that’s more the template for our gilded age.

To be clear, saying that you can’t draw a sharp line between two things doesn’t mean that you can’t distinguish them. As I implied above, I do think that especially live-in domestic workers suffer specific injustices which are worse than those suffered by people who do similar work in a different setting. However, I also think that in terms of class relations there is no important difference in principle between someone who comes into your house for a few hours to iron your shirts and someone who performs the same service for you in a laundry down the road.

“However, I also think that in terms of class relations there is no important difference in principle between someone who comes into your house for a few hours to iron your shirts and someone who performs the same service for you in a laundry down the road.

There is a distinction but I think it’s not as large as you would like. “The body” and relations to it are personal or intimate. That changes things. I wrote about all this above. We’ll just have to agree to disagree on this (and I’ll join you in doing the same with Abb1)

I do my own laundry down the street, and it’s a bit of a principle I think. It could just be embarrassment, my everyday clothes are pretty ragged.

…that’s why families with both parents employed have to hire cleaning ladies and babysitters.

that’s why families with both parents employed have to hire cleaning ladies and babysitters

Not true. As has been pointed out, poorer families don’t and can’t hire cleaners, even if both spouses work. (What you are saying could only be true if all families in the

that’s why families with both parents employed have to hire cleaning ladies and babysitters

Not true. As has been pointed out, poorer families don’t and can’t hire cleaners, even if both spouses work. (What you are saying could only be true if all families in the less than £25 000 bracket had only one partner working. That just isn’t true: a family with two partners working at close to minimum wage, for example, could have an income of less than £20 000.) Also, have you thought about the case of poor families where one partner works and the other is incapacitated in some way? None of these people can afford to employ a cleaner and I think they would look on anyone who can as being very fortunate indeed.

There’s a difference between those workers whom you trust with authority over your body, such as nurses, and those over whom you impose control. Hookers are servants in the most direct way. An enjoyment of service, of serving, is one of the prerequisites of the career. Ask Belle. I find such a desire problematic.

Perhaps you could say I do my own laundry for reasons associated with my lack of interest in paying for sex. Now child care, there’s a complex case. The Unnatural History of the Nanny. I wish I’d kept my parents’ copy. An interesting topic.

I’m not saying domestic service is “worse” I’m saying that the de facto intimiate relations that are required to be defined as impersonal are stress producing and indeed exhausting, To be invisible and in plain sight, to be “socially dead”; to be used by someone directly and merely as a machine or an object is draining. I’l put it this way: delivering my socks and underwear to the woman who cleans and sorts them by had, strikes me personally, as a bit off. I won’t do it. Tossing my uniform in the laundry bin at the shop or taking my tux to the dry cleaners does not.

An another note returning to the discussion of Doormen I mentioned above: I looked through the book today and it was as I suspected. Aside from the mannerisms of social scientist as naif [is this supposed to imply objectivity?] he has no knowledge of the history of th city and history in this case specifically is context. He makes some vague reference to the racial mix among doormen, but that’s it. The upper west side was built, literally to mirror the UES where wealthy Jews were not welcome (and were not even recently judging from my experience) Also my experience is that the racial mix amoing the population of doormen on the UES is majority ethnic white. I’ve asked around and others I’ve worked with are of the same opinion. I’m willing to be the author’s data would show the same thing, if he bothered to run the numbers.

I’l put it this way: delivering my socks and underwear to the woman who cleans and sorts them by had, strikes me personally, as a bit off. I won’t do it. Tossing my uniform in the laundry bin at the shop or taking my tux to the dry cleaners does not.

I think this is a very important point. I agree that most people feel this way. Imo, though, this is a kind of false consciousness. It is a way of hiding from ourselves the extent of our dependence on and exploitation of the labour of others.

However, I do agree with you about the specific, dehumanising aspects of domestic service you cite.

To be invisible and in plain sight, to be “socially dead”; to be used by someone directly and merely as a machine or an object is draining.

It’s just that I think that there is continuum between these roles and roles outside of the home which involve some of the same harms, such as cleaners in an office or maids in a hotel.

And on that high note, comments are now closed.