There’s a trend of what I’m terming prole porn journalism where young female journalists perform manual labor and report back to the rest of us how crappy their jobs were. We’re probably then supposed to call a Congressman or #occupysomething.
Mac McClelland – the (female) writer who wrote last year about needing violent sex to get over the PTSD she developed in Haiti – appeared at Bloggingheads to discuss her recent Mother Jones piece recounting her 4 day stint as a warehouse “wage slave” – a job at which she was paid $11.50 an hour. This is similar to the recently-released book The American Way of Eating in which author Tracie McMillan (two McC’s) spent a year working bad food industry jobs – a fruit picker, a Wal Mart produce worker, and as an expediter in an Applebee’s kitchen. In a bit of synchronocity with McClelland’s Haiti piece, McMillan tells of her own sexual assault at a going away party after her brief stint at Applebee’s (McClelland reports that her editors wouldn’t allow her to mention the company she worked for).
My brief point is this: yes, there are some arguments to be made for the relatively not-great working conditions and expectations placed on people who work crappy jobs. A certain amount of awareness can place pressure on employers to improve overall working conditions. But I see the play here with McClelland and McMillan. Let’s get two white female journalists to tell the story of the poor proles who are stuck in these heinous jobs. That’ll raise awareness. As a guy who has worked jobs that leave me sore at the end of each shift – as a waiter, as a loader at a giant home improvement retail chain, as a sign painter – I pretty much scoff at McClelland and McMillan because I see them as either being too weak for these jobs (McMillan spends an entire piece recounting her near nausea while picking fruit) and holding everyone to their lower standards of ability or, worse, exploiting the very same people for whom they’re supposedly seeking social justice. At some point these tales of rape and PTSD and horrible working conditions are more about selling magazines and books rather than improving the various conditions of the subjects of these tales.
Briefer point: tell the story from a working class (white?) man’s perspective and see who gives a fuck.
Related material: Journalist Mike Daisey caught fabricating details of sweatshop conditions at a Chinese factory producing Apple components. But of course, his defense is that the ends justify the means. Hmm.
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Hasn’t Nickel and Dimed already been written? Why are they doing that again?
It used to be considered a bad thing to have “never done a hard day’s work in your life.” I worked fast food jobs all throughout my teens and early 20s and put myself through school that way. It’s easy to move up in that kind of workplace if you have a good head on your shoulders. I’ve also worked lousy construction jobs, midnight bakery jobs, swing shift factory work, department store work, you name it.
Not every job is glamorous and wonderful, but every job comes with its own pros and cons. These used to be considered known risks that come with certain territory, sort of like how you know that if you work night shifts at a gas station, you might get held up. (Yep, I’ve done that one, too.)
But nowadays we have millions of people who have literally never done hard, low-skilled labor before. They try these positions out and are shocked – yes, SHOCKED – to discover that, OMG, you have to scrub the flat grill with hot oil while it’s still hot, you have to get your whole body dirty (not just your hands), you wake up the next morning exhausted and with sore muscles.
Yep, hard work is hard. This wasn’t always considered a bad thing. I have a desk job now that pays better and is a lot easier, but I earned it. It wasn’t handed to me. Mommy and Daddy didn’t pay for my college degree, and neither did the government. This is not our Upton Sinclair moment, this is just the way life is. You have to start somewhere, and you have to work upward from there. Simple as that.
Then these women should be happy they are upper middle class and don’t have to do such jobs. I know I am.
A lot of people can’t handle physical jobs. I don’t understand why these women see that as a virtue.
It is a way for these people to appear caring while really being condescending.
There’s a trend of what I’m terming prole porn
Chuck, I think you’re on to something, and is more than journalism.
The Sopranos, for example, was basically prole porn, with Meadow playing the “Lisa Simpson”/”Enlightened SWPL” role. The SWPL viewer is supposed to oogle at the crudity, bigotry, and violence they believe exists in prole,s than therefore feels superior inside. The same thing happens in Mad Men, where the characters, despite their status, become prole-like from their position in time — a woman smokes while pregnant, a man does a blackface act at a private party, etc. etc.
All prole porn is basically an episode of Jerry Springer or Jersey Shore, allowing the viewer to sneer at their dim-witted, superstitious, unruly lessers. Prole porn thus offers a minstrel show for the politically correct; stereotypes of working class individuals — especially working class whites — offer the pleasure of the grotesque, allowing uppity people to enjoy forbidden behaviors by proxy.
I periodically unfriend people on FB who post annoying leftie comments. But it’s also educational, in a way, to mote two things: one, these are often genuinely nice and very intelligent people who sincerely believe they are the good guys, and who appear to suffer no cognitive dissonance; this is because they think superficially, never examining the premises or implications of liberalism.
Two, they don’t have any idea we exist! By that, I mean they don’t know about traditionalist, anti-war, HBD and sex-realism-informed alt-Right… which essentially is a resurrected Old Right.
Their picture of conservatives is a red-herring caricature, in which Sarah Pain is an “extremist.” They are incapable of imagining righties as as anything but big-business, warmongering, neocon-patriotards, essentially Whorefinder but without Whorefinder’s redeeming frankness on race.
Whorefinder would be loving the title of this post …..
Reminds me of that song “Common People” by Pulp. Everybody hates a tourist…
My entire family has, at one time, done gruelling labor. With the exception of my rather left-wing patrician sister.
Ironically, she’s the one most obsessed with her left-wing social status and her self-identification with the working poor – despite being a white-collar professional who has never done any hard work with her hands.
Man, I hate this shit where over-educated SWPLs shit on manual labor. Me, I have a Master’s degree and work an office job with a coveted title. And I hate it, every moment of it. I feel like a Collie that’s forced to be leashed in a small yard all day long. It’s to the point that I volunteered as a money-saving move for the company to do the custodial and office maintenance work rather than hiring contractors. That way I get at least one day of the week of moving around and doing actual labor. I’m still currently looking at apprenticeships, though. It’s like these people can’t imagine that some people are unable to do the sorts of work that involve sitting on your ass for long periods, and others who are able to do it, might not want to do it and hate all the bullshit that comes with it.
Sometimes I think certain SWPL women think of a rape claim as some kind of merit badge. Or maybe some kind of validation with regards to their attractiveness.
Speaking of prole porn, there was a story behind the story in your last post. Readers with real degrees may have missed it, but if you’ve hung around your campus’s English or Sociology department, the name “Nona Willis Aronowitz” should ring a bell.
Stanley Aronowitz and the late Ellen Willis were an academic-left power couple in the mold of Cloward & Piven. Aronowitz is a chair of sociology at CUNY. Willis was an influential Sixties feminist turned NYU journalism professor who was the New Yorker‘s first pop-music critic.
Their daughter Nona, says Google, is a Wesleyan grad. She recently published a book called Girldrive in which she and her high school BFF take a road trip “to take the temperature of twentysomething women around the country, specifically, to learn about their relationship to feminism and the word ‘feminist.’” (In the promotional interview, she notes “Emma and I decided to do this road trip over brunch.” You can’t make this shit up.) I assume the trip was financed by a solid publisher’s advance.
So what’s going on in her article is that a member of the left-wing media caste is traveling to Minneapolis to investigate signs that the Revolution is actually happening among the proles. But it’s clear to the unbiased observer that the people she meets aren’t working-class sons of toil (except maybe for that one black ex-con), they’re downwardly mobile hipsters with useless degrees. A glance at their photos and the description of their crash pad (“There is an anarchist sticker on the end table. A stuffed unicorn, riding a gigantic, joint-smoking stuffed zebra, sits on the mantel.”) will tell you as much.
So the article ends up being an unintentional illustration of the class divide within SWPLdom. On the one hand, Brahmins from the coasts who’ve spent their entire lives inside the journalism/academia bubble. On the other, middle-class provincials who swallowed left-wing ideology at college but didn’t have the connections to make a career of it.
The elite can rely on the old boys’ network. (Excuse me — old persyns‘ network.) If you’re a Wesleyan grad who’s the daughter of a New Yorker columnist, it’s still possible to make a career in the world of NYC progressive journalism. But for the average Zach or Zoey Hipster whose Gender Studies degrees is from State U. or a second-tier regional libarts college, there are student loan debts to service and only so many feminist nonprofit jobs to go around. Off to Jimmy John’s! That’s why, to those with eyes to see, there’s something repellently disingenuous about this line:
She and Micah, B.K., and Erik may have grown up middle class, but they’ve accepted that they’ll be in the service industry for the foreseeable future, and these downwardly mobile kids aren’t letting their education or their politics go to waste. They’re living every guilty liberal’s dream: no more speaking for the disenfranchised. This cause belongs to them. They’re career activists occupying their service jobs.
Best of luck starting the Revolution, guys! The staff of Good magazine will totally be cheering you on! Just don’t expect us to ever work one of those shitty prole jobs — we can serve the People’s Cause better with our feminist road trips.
And don’t you dare question whether your Marxist professors were stuffing your brain full of bullshit when you could have been studying EE or pre-med.
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