I was thinking about Reclusive Leftist’s post on feminists’ hatred of Sarah Palin and told her that my reason was simple, and equally applies to anyone who deserves it: Palin is an anti-choice Republican. I have a serious problem with anti-choicers, and with Republicans, and those who are both. They enrage me.
But the more I think about it, the more I realize there is a tinge of classism in my dislike of Palin.
Which is not to say that I wouldn’t feel very differently about her if she was a pro-choice Democrat, or even a pro-choice Republican. I would. I quite like and admire Sandra Day O’Connor, for instance. The classism alone isn’t that big of a deal, but it’s there. I am very class-conscious; yes, this is ironic, given my pretensions to communism. It’s one of the things I find un-progressive about me, but which I haven’t made much of an effort to change.
What makes my class-consciousness resilient is that it has nothing to do with money. That gives it that sheen of respectability, as if what is being measured is some more objective characteristic of a person than how much money their parents had, but it’s really just as arbitrary, since class for me is a matter of taste.
I was raised poor, but that was an accident of my parents’ circumstances when I was a child. My parents, despite periods of poverty, are indubitably middle class. Solidly so. Yes, my dad only has the American equivalent of an Associates degree and my mother never went past high school. But where I have one aunt who literally had to subsist on charity, I have another aunt who was a Rhodes Scholar. Where some of my relatives have lived out lives of poverty in rural Pakistan, others have immigrated and done well in a western country. The lives of my mother’s five sisters couldn’t have been more materially different from each other and for them, what determined their destinies more than any other single factor was the families they married into. Therefore, when two of my aunts married into the Pakistani equivalent of “white trash,” they lost class prestige accordingly, even though one of them had a graduate degree and was a high school teacher. I grew up watching my mother be classist toward her own sisters.
One of the bigger class-markers for me are seemingly trivial things like taste and style. The way I approach home decor, for instance. Or the fact that I wouldn’t be caught dead in certain styles of clothes, hair, shoes, handbags, sunglasses and make-up, for instance. And when I mentally size up other people, their class as exhibited in their manner of dress or something equally superficial, gets automatically catalogued in my head. This goes for men too, but since women have a lot more accessories with which to advertise their taste (and therefore their class), they are often more easily sized up.
It’s horrible and anti-feminist in a certain mild sense, but there it is. I would find it morally reprehensible to think and feel this way, to judge people like this, if it was money I was looking at. But since it’s something more subjective and less dependent on naked privilege for its acquisition, I bury any guilt I feel. It’s as if judging people for lack of money is the equivalent of judging them for lack of good looks, but judging them for lack of good taste (as defined by me, natch) is the equivalent of judging them for lack of intelligence. [money:intelligence::good looks:good taste.] The end result is, I avoid making friends with people as much for reasons of their class as their intelligence, quite frankly. This sort of class is way more insidious than a mere money-marker would be.
Sarah Palin screams white trash, without getting any pity-points for being as disadvantaged as most white trash folk are. I hate that term. It’s a terrible term. But I can’t get away from it in my head. Her hairstyle! Even her glasses. That lipstick. The too much makeup, especially on the eyes and cheeks. She never looks wholesome, natural, dignified. The way anything she wore would immediately look tramp-ish, even if it was a business suit. OMG, did I just say that out loud? But forget the personal style. She has five children. Count ‘em. FIVE. In my extended family which belongs to a third world country, a country in which women don’t traditionally work (and most of my female relatives certainly don’t), where birth control isn’t openly discussed and in previous generations, wasn’t used much, hardly anyone has more than 3 or at most 4 children, my mother’s generation onward. In fact, my two “white trash” aunts are the only ones with 4 children each. It’s a very classist thing to look askance at big families (and to have babies at a young age), and I plead guilty. My own simple mother felt her family’s class-status was lowered because her parents kept having daughter after daughter in the hopes of a boy (they got my crook of an uncle on the 7th try, and much good it did them). My mother had her first child in her 28th year and she stopped at three. Remember, neither money nor education nor career had she, so strong are the dictates of class.
There’s also religion. Palin’s type of religiosity is just not done in the upper classes. That is also why Bush, who is an east coast elite if there ever was one – an old-fashioned rich Republican – lost class points through his evangelicism. There are two styles of Republicanisms, and one is dying out (the old-fashioned socially-neutral, secular, moneyed Republicanism) and the one that is growing is a lower class Republicanism that doesn’t keep fundamentalist religion where it belongs – in your heart.
Sarah Palin lacks class. In the most literal and the most figurative sense. And I have contempt for her for that.
Terrible, but true. She just ain’t my kind of woman.
ETA: This is partly why it strikes me as so ridiculously funny when a certain type of woman accuses us Palin-haters of disliking Palin because she’s too good looking or because she has kids. As if.
Second edit: Just to clarify, I don’t dislike Palin because she’s “white trash.” I dislike her for her politics, but her class makes her easier to other. Thinking about disliking Palin inspired a meditation on my classism; this isn’t a post *about* Palin, per se.
I have no doubt I would feel very differently about Palin – whatever her perceived class – if she were a liberal politician. I would then probably find her “white trash” quirks adorable, so ridiculously grateful am I for liberal politicos.
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