Posted by trouble on March 1, 2002, at 12:13:18
In reply to Principles - trouble, posted by Dinah on March 1, 2002, at 6:04:23
>Yo Dinah!!!
This is so amazing. Every day this week I've been thinking about you and this one issue, ever since you described yourself as "upper class" in a play post to the ladies.
All week I've been trying to get my mind around your social status, but haven't brought it up b/c I'm ignorant and haven't formed any intelligent thoughts really.
Let me ask you:
Are you rebelling from the cultural imperatives of your social and economic class? Or is that another silly stereotype?B/c culturally, especially in my sub-culture (aesthetics, downward mobility, "alternative" diets, sexuality, music, lifestyles and medicine),
the idea is that suburbanintes are not thinkers, they are achieving conformists. Affluent women are particularly conformist, they hold one another to very high standards, and one pays a price for the slightest deviance, especially regarding personal appearance, weight gain being the most severe infraction. They are also expected to be militant gatekeepers of the household budget, their husbands hold them accountable for any irresponsible or frivolous expenditures.Bourgeois values are all about success, and the appearance of success. Decorum, carriage, propriety, measured speech, euphimisms, non-extemporaneous (is that a word? sorry!)social intercourse, hierarchy, obedience, promotion of the status quo, skeletons in the closet, you don't call attention to yourself, talking about your marriage is vulgar and embarrassing, calling attention to yourself in speech or appearance is vulgar, spontanaity is frowned upon, neediness is unheard of, no questing, no inner journeys, there is no such thing as mental illness in the suburbs, if a friend or neighbor is hospitalized, we'll find a way to avoid the subject.
Obviously there are a lot of stereotypes there, but over the years I've done my own kooky social experiments involving squares and have found that there is a definate structure to the bourgeois social system and violators will be penalized. There are so many words you cannot say! You can't
say the word "grassroots", or "existential", or "rubric", or "capitalist", "sexual orientation", "hate", "dismissive," "grandstanding", anything that suggests thinking on a less than superficial level. It's unseemly. I can say them, but you can't.Oh Lord Dinah. It's too much, and I'm all over the map here. Do let's get together on this, it's not just an intellectual exercise for either one of us, right? But I am so happy that it's out in the open now, as our differences will become more apparent the more we talk, and many differences will have to do w/ our class status.
Anyway, I don't hold your love of Principles against you, as I hope you don't hold my love of values against me. I believe there's a huge difference btwn values and principles, and like you I take them seriously.
One's got my head and the other's got my heart, and when the two start wrestling I usually side w/ the latter.
I'm off to work!
troublep.s. I miss Phil Donahue so much sometimes I could just cry.
poster:trouble
thread:19047
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/social/20020223/msgs/19067.html