Hey y’all (I’ve now lived in Texas for just over a year, so I’ve been granted my license to say "y’all"). I have a post over at one of our Valley Advocate sister blogs, The Public Humanist. It’s titled "When a bedskirt is more than just a bedskirt: Thoughts on class, marital discord, and the fear of falling," and it’s pretty interesting, if I do say so myself. I write:
Arguing over a bedskirt might seem trivial, but it’s part of a larger conflict that’s one of the substantial conflicts of my marriage, and, I would argue, of most marriages – how are we going to present ourselves, as a family, to the world? What cars will we buy? What prints will we frame and put on the walls of our home? What linens will we choose? How will we dress our daughter (exclusively in Baby Gap, natch). What wine should we bring to a dinner party? What records will we play for our kids. What bumper stickers will we put on our car.
My wife and I—who first met at prep school—are in fact much closer to each other on a lot of these issues than it often seems to us from inside the marriage. We’d never put our daughter in a shirt that says “Mommy’s Little Princess.” Our next car will be a Honda, or a Subaru, or a Volkswagen. We buy lots of organic produce at Whole Foods. We live in Austin, Texas, which has one of the highest hipster quotients in the continental US. We’re Bobos— bourgeois bohemians—as David Brooks called us in his book Bobos in Paradise.
And all these choices of taste, all of these primarily consumer decisions, are ways that we signal to the world that we want to be recognized, and treated, in a certain way, and that we absolutely don’t want to be treated in certain other ways (like the middle-middle class, like white trash, like the working class). They’re ways of contending with our insecurity, our “fear of falling,” as Barbara Ehrenreich puts it in her book Fear of Falling: The Inner Life of the Middle Class.
We’re also having a discussion in the comments that you might want to join, if you’re so inclined.
