#Social Class

[a-elliott]

Class In Dead Poets Society

This has been sitting in a doc for a while now, so I thought I'd throw it out into the void.

I’ve seen this movie once (and am sure to watch it many times again), and found the portrayal of class differences to be very interesting. The writers made it very clear to us that Neil’s family wasn’t as wealthy as some of the others at Wellton. When he’s talking to Mr.Keating about his struggles with his father and the play, he says, “We’re not a rich family like Charlie’s, and we- but he’s planning my whole life out for me.” Later on in the movie, the comparison between Charlie and Neil in particular becomes even more apparent. 

Charlie is daring and frivolous. He doesn’t worry himself over rules, and he experiences the consequences of that, so it’s interesting then to look at how Neil, a similarly excitement-seeking and passionate character, simply doesn’t have the option to take risks like Charlie. Sure, he’ll sneak out of the dorms at night, audition for a play, fake a letter of approval from Nolan, but there are lines he can’t cross, lines that Charlie dances on constantly and eventually crosses entirely. 

Cameron's response after he got decked by Charlie (best part of the movie tbh) brought me a lot of clarity, “You just signed your expulsion papers, Nuwanda”. Charlie may not be coming home to a warm hug and a cup of tea, but where he would lose some privileges, Neil, who’s been deprived of even small and well-deserved joys, has no privileges to lose. So they sent him to military school. 

Anyway... look how cute he is 💕💐☺️

My angel 😔

[without-ado]

(x)

[bethanydelleman]

You might have seen this dumb article already:

The age-old trope about the gold-digging woman marrying for wealth, then, is a myth. Instead, marriage as an institution is keeping the British class structure intact.

Guess what person who clearly didn't read Jane Austen: HER MARRIAGES ARE ALL WITHIN SOCIAL CLASS!!!

(While many Austen characters are considered to be marrying up or down, they are all in the broad category of gentry or wealthy merchant class crossing into gentry. Even Jane Fairfax and Fanny Price, who are on the very fringes, have connections which allow them to move in the gentry class. The only woman who marries out of class is probably Lady Susan who marries down)

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

By: Tom Slater

Published: Mar 27, 2025

Male privilege. Toxic masculinity. Smash the patriarchy. A thousand dumb slogans have shaped our debate about the respective lot of men and women for the past decade or more. But this past week, the agreed-upon narrative – that essentially nothing has changed since Victoria was on the throne; that women remain as stifled and disenfranchised as ever, while men continue to lord it over them – has begun to collide with reality.

While we were all arguing over Adolescence and Andrew Tate, a report compiled by the Centre for Social Justice (CSJ) has quietly laid waste to the prevailing orthodoxy. Lost Boys: State of the Nation makes brutally clear that a lot of young British men have very little privilege to check. Males lag behind females at every stage of education, from nursery to university – in higher education, women now outnumber men by three to two. That gender pay gap you’ve heard so much about? It’s now been reversed among the young, with women out-earning men. Young men are much more likely to be unemployed, too. To those who have been paying attention, none of this will come as a surprise. But rarely has it been spelled out in such compendious, stark and irrefutable detail.

Of course, a big part of the picture here is the history-making strides made by women in education and the workforce. If, as victim-feminists have so often told us, young women still have the deck stacked so mercilessly against them, young women certainly haven’t got the memo. But these emerging gaps aren’t just about historical wrongs being righted – a new equilibrium being reached. Going by the report, this shift has at least as much to do with men falling backwards as it does women pushing ahead. Since the pandemic, for one thing, the number of men aged 16 to 24 not in education, employment or training has increased by 40 per cent, compared with seven per cent for women.

The chattering classes have long struggled to compute such facts. It upsets the hierarchy of victimhood. It grates against the notion that men are only ever the oppressors, the beneficiaries of ‘structural sexism’. To talk about the challenges faced by young men and boys will often see you smeared as anti-women, or some crybaby men’s rights activist – desperate to insist that men are the real victims, thwarted by the girls. Wokeness, it seems, is a zero-sum game. You couldn’t possibly care about, say, the barriers to re-entering the workforce women experience after having children and the barriers many young men face to finding gainful employment at all.

This has always struck me as bizarre. Not least because many of the struggles many young men face today have little to do with their sex and everything to do with their social class. Indeed, when we talk about the issues confronting men and boys, we’re usually talking about working-class men and boys. Just as it is ridiculous to pretend that women in boardrooms and women in call centres share identical challenges and interests, so it is also ridiculous to suggest that the prospects of an unemployed 21-year-old lad, yet to break out from his council-estate boxroom, is intimately connected with those of a Russell Group Hooray Henry, slogging away at grad-scheme applications.

While young women are pulling ahead of young men even among university graduates, the so-called lost boys are really to be found among the poor and working class. Over recent decades, radical shifts in society and the economy have corroded many of the old certainties working-class men once relied upon. Manufacturing, agriculture and construction – industries that used to provide secure, decently paid jobs to young men who weren’t destined for, or couldn’t afford to go to, university – have withered on the vine. In 1970, the CSJ notes, these sectors collectively made up more than 40 per cent of UK GDP. By 2023, this stood at just 16 per cent. Fatherlessness has also exploded among lower-income groups. ‘One of the most stark inequalities in Britain’, Fraser Nelson notes, ‘is the unequal distribution of fathers: 95 per cent there for those at the top, 60 per cent absent for those at the bottom.’ And while this can be tragic for boys and girls alike, it is particularly perilous for boys growing up in neighbourhoods where trouble isn’t hard to come by. Indeed, a full three-quarters of children in custody report having an absent father.

Just as class explains many of these problems, it also explains the blindness to them. While the media and politics have become more superficially ‘diverse’ in recent years, working-class ‘representation’ – if we must use the r-word – has actually gone in the other direction. And so, those charged with discussing and addressing the issues confronting working-class people are more detached from them than in decades past, when a less thoroughly bourgeois Labour Party brought manual workers into parliament and local newspapers, long since disappeared, offered a trade to bright kids who lacked the connections and expensive educations that have now become all but obligatory in mediaworld.

This ‘crisis’ among men and boys, then, is another symptom of the neglect of the working classes. Of the indifference to the decay of blue-collar communities, and the industries that once sustained them. Of the total capture of almost every institution, even those explicitly founded to represent workers’ interests (I’m looking at you, Labour), by the metropolitan middle classes. As class politics has given way to identity politics, the lives of ordinary men – and women – have become ever more inscrutable to those in positions of power and influence. There’s a lesson in this, perhaps, for the few who might be lured by the mirror-image victimhood of the ‘manosphere’. Identitarianism – whether of the left-wing or right-wing variety – is forever a deadend.

--

At the Centre for Social Justice, we have always asked: what is really going on in our homes and communities, and where can we make a difference? We listen to those working on the frontline - the teachers, youth workers, charities, and parents who see, day in and day out, the struggles playing out in the lives of young people. And in recent years, they’ve been telling us the same thing: something is going on with our boys.

Lost Boys is our attempt to find out what that is.

What we have uncovered is stark. Boys are struggling in education, more likely to take their own lives, less likely to get into stable work, and far more likely to be caught up in crime. The numbers don’t lie - something has shifted, and we cannot ignore it any longer. It’s not just about Andrew Tate or online influencers; they are the symptoms, not the cause. The deeper truth is that too many boys are growing up without the guidance, discipline, and purpose they need to thrive.

But let me be clear - this is not a message of despair. Boys and young men have enormous potential. They always have, and they always will. We must stop seeing masculinity as a problem to be solved and start seeing it as a strength to be nurtured. Strength, resilience, responsibility - these are not traits to be suppressed but harnessed for good.

This report, Lost Boys, is not just an exploration of the challenges young men face but the beginning of a journey to offer a hopeful, positive vision for masculinity in Britain. We need strong fathers, mentors, and role models. We need a culture that values the unique contributions of men and supports boys to grow into good, responsible adults.

This is just the first step, but it’s an important one. It sets the scene for the next stage of our work where we will begin to offer solutions to the challenges outlined below.

We must be willing to listen, to act, and to restore hope for the next generation. Because when boys thrive, our whole society benefits.

==

The left - my left - used to be about workers and the lower class. Now they're about elites with the right identity markers, and large tech and media corporations which endorse the same view.

[mediamatinees]

Another Eat-the-Rich Film, "Parasite" is an Exploration of Class at Its Deadliest

The wait is (finally) over! My review of Bong Joon-Ho's materpiece, "Parasite" is now live!

Content Warning: Parasite contains depictions of severe class disparity, violence, grooming, and extreme manipulation. Viewer discretion is advised. Spoilers for Parasite ahead! In January of 2020, the English-centered film industry was put on blast for not giving foreign language films their proper flowers. Director Bong Joon-Ho, already celebrated by Hollywood and audiences alike for previous…

[jayjuno]

Open Letter to Democrat Party of USA

Hello,

Democrats, no one gives a damn about the "middle class". Stop talking about the middle class, because working-class Americans don't give a damn about them, and we never will. Screw the middle class! They're a bunch of spoiled lazy brats who wouldn't last two weeks without the slave power they depend on from working-class Americans like myself. I have not served coffee to any middle-classer in years, and I never will again. I would rather be free than just another indentured wageslave peasant whose sole purpose in life is serving middle-classers who're too lazy to do any real work themselves. 

Classist bigots, all of you! And you wonder why working-class Americans were so disgusted with you that they just chose not to vote at all in 2024? Look in the damn mirror, you educated idiots... you're the problem! Trump is just a symptom of centuries of classist bigotry boiling over.

You know what working-class Americans like me want to hear from Democrats like Senator Slotkin? I want to hear something like "Working-class people need this and Democrats are going to do this..." or "We're going to do this and this for the working class, because the working class is VERY important to Democrat success blah blah blah...." or just mention the working-class sometimes, because you liberals never do mention us in your big fancy speeches that you expect us to sit through (even when they're more boring and patronizing than a bag of rocks).

Spoiler alert- I'm not voting for a Democrat EVER AGAIN. Not until you rich liberals stop being a bunch of stupid classist bigots with sticks up your bums who snub your noses at anyone who's never been within a 50-mile radius of an Ivy League school, DC, San Francisco, New York, or Seattle. Get your privileged heads out of ivy league and private clubhouses (where most Americans aren't welcome because they're too poor), and instead go talk to regular Americans who've never gone to college. You Democrats need to talk to regular Americans over cheap drip coffee in local coffee shops, because most Americans drink drip coffee (not expensive lattes from Starbucks). You want our votes, don't you? 

What's the matter? You're too much of a classist bigot to spend 15 minutes talking to one of the peasants you're wanting votes from? Hmmm... it's gonna be a real challenge for Democrats to regain power in congress if they keep disrespecting and infantilizing poor Americans like myself through classist rhetoric like what Senator Slotkin keeps displaying. I guess you guys really do want Trump to just stay in power, huh? 

Oh well, bring on the concentration camps then because the Democrats are too classist to develop the class they need to defeat the classist prejudice inherent in American society that prompted a Trump victory in the first place. *sigh* 

Will you dumbasses PLEASE consult with more educated members of the working-class so we can avoid a nouveau holocaust from Adolf Hitler 2.0? Thank you kindly! 

Sincerely,

-Jay Juno

(an Independent voter who voted for Biden, Clinton, Obama, Harris... but I ain't giving you Democrats another vote, not until you stop showing preference for middle-class Americans over working-class Americans like me. You want my vote that badly? Then stop kissing up to middle-class douchebags, and start sucking up to peasants like moi... you IDIOTS! Have a lovely day, you banal bourgeoisie brats...)

[sigridstumb]

Americans carry our social class in our teeth.

[doremipoetry]

[melovibes57]

[artemlegere]

Pamela and Lady Davers

Artist: Joseph Highmore (English, 1692-1780)

Date: 1743-1744

Medium: Oil on canvas

Collection: National Gallery of Victoria, Melbourne, Australia

Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded

Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded is an epistolary novel first published in 1740 by the English writer Samuel Richardson. Considered one of the first true English novels, it serves as Richardson's version of conduct literature about marriage.

Pamela tells the story of a fifteen-year-old maidservant named Pamela Andrews, whose employer, Mr. B, a wealthy landowner, makes unwanted and inappropriate advances towards her after the death of his mother. Pamela strives to reconcile her strong religious training with her desire for the approval of her employer in a series of letters and, later in the novel, journal entries all addressed to her impoverished parents. After various unsuccessful attempts at seduction, a series of sexual assaults and an extended period of kidnapping, the rakish Mr. B eventually reforms and makes Pamela a sincere proposal of marriage. In the novel's second part, Pamela marries Mr. B and tries to acclimatise to her new position in upper-class society.

The full title, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded, makes plain Richardson's moral purpose. A best-seller of its time, Pamela was widely read but was also criticised for its perceived licentiousness and disregard for class barriers. Furthermore, Pamela was an early commentary on domestic violence and brought into question the dynamic line between male aggression and a contemporary view of love. Moreover, Pamela, despite the controversies, shed light on social issues that transcended the novel for the time such as gender roles, early false-imprisonment, and class barriers present in the eighteenth century. The action of the novel is told through letters and journal entries from Pamela to her parents.

Richardson highlights a theme of naivety, illustrated through the eyes of Pamela. Richardson paints Pamela herself as innocent and meek and further contributes to the theme of her being short-sighted to emphasize the ideas of childhood innocence and naivety.

[whatithinkaboutdarkshadows]

Episode 706: What it was to be a Collins

Yesterday, we were in the great house on the estate of Collinwood when dying nonagenarian Edith Collins met mysterious newcomer Barnabas Collins. She told Barnabas that she recognized him. Edith had been entrusted with the Collins family’s darkest secret, which was about Barnabas. He is a vampire, entombed in the 1790s to be kept forever away from the living. Now it is 1897, and Edith sees that…

[spaceintruderdetector]

[jademickian]

Sometimes i just be watching shameless then get hit with lines like “Role models and morals are for the comfortable middle-class. Rich people don’t have ‘em, and working guys like us can’t afford ‘em” so i pause and just sit there letting it soak because yeah. it’s a reminder that a lot of the plot points in shameless are a class thing. even the relationships involved elements of class disparities.

[paulapuddephatt]

(via Writing Diversity: Creating Working Class and Underclass Characters)

[theauthorpaula]

CLASS IN FICTION