I Question Your Taste Level, Essays (university) of Technical Writing

Download I Question Your Taste Level and more Essays (university) Technical Writing in PDF only on Docsity!

“I Question Your Taste Level” (Class)

The first time we meet Alana’s family, they’re throwing paper towel rolls at one another. Six-year-old Alana is a competitor in the Precious Moments Pageant and a featured child on Toddlers & Tiaras.^1 Her family has amassed a large quantity of paper towels because her mother buys things in bulk. Introducing herself as “the coupon queen,” Mama June explains that, all told, pageants have cost them about $8,000 to $9,000. “But that’s okay, because I’ve saved it all with my coupons!” On the inaugural episode of their spin-off show, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo —which focuses on Alana, Mama June, and the rest of their nuclear family—they attend an event called the Redneck Games. Mama June describes the games as “similar to the Olympics, but with a lot of missing teeth and a lot of butt cracks showing.” There, they bob for pig feet and compete in the “mud pit belly flop.” (“I like to get in the mud because I like to get dirty like a pig,” Alana tells us.) Elsewhere in the episode, they’re farting audibly, washing their hair in the kitchen sink, and eating cheese balls for breakfast out of a communal jar. Alana lifts up her shirt and shows us her stomach chub, folding it into a mouth and making it “talk” to the camera. On the one hand, reality TV may not seem like great fodder for a rumination on class inequality in America. The tone of these shows is often light, and they tend to focus on individual behavior without overtly contextualizing it within broader structural processes. Generally, as the media scholar June Deery has observed, if reality programs touch on issues

class divide nearly as soon as it begins. Scenes of a suit-clad Rick, sitting at a desk and shuffling papers, are interspersed with shots of his employers frying up burgers and passing them through the drive-up window into outstretched hands. While both Rick and his employees work, it’s clear that they perform the manual labor and that his share of the profits is much larger. The show crystallizes this distinction, on this and many episodes, by revealing the boss’s ineptitude at the physical tasks required by the low- level jobs in his operation. Here, Rick nearly burns some burgers and struggles to work a cash register and an intercom. The fundamental distinction, both within Marx’s theory and on Undercover Boss , is monetary. The main chasm here is between the CEO and his workers on the line, who are of varied genders and races but who are all subordinate to him within the class hierarchy. In having the boss pose as a worker bee, the show reveals forms of labor that are often obscured. It’s this obfuscation, Marx argues, that allows for the oppression of workers to go unchecked. He discusses “commodity fetishism,” which doesn’t mean just that we love to buy stuff (although we do: see below) but is the idea that we don’t tend to think about the things we buy in terms of the social relationships that have created them.^7 Since we as consumers are separated from the labor process, the relationship that is central to our minds is between each item and our money. And then we take for granted that apples just are , inherently, $1.32 apiece, without thinking about the human dynamics that make that so. Yet Undercover Boss exposes these dynamics. While the show doesn’t reveal exploitation per se—which would be terrible PR for these companies—it does show us hierarchies of labor and the power relations enmeshed within them. At one point, for instance, a manager at one of the restaurants speaks harshly to his workers. Rick takes aside one of the employees, Todd, and asks him why he puts up with this treatment. “I couldn’t work there for ten minutes,” Rick says. “I would never let someone talk to me like that.” “It’s my job,” Todd replies. “I do it because I need to help my mom.” Rick suggests that they talk to the manager. “I don’t think so,” Todd repeats several times, shaking his head. “I need my job, by any means necessary.” Ultimately, Rick does speak to the manager, because he is really the boss and he is empowered to do so. This scene highlights the different

experiences Rick and Todd have of the world, not just because Rick makes more money but because of the privileges that accompany that money— including social respect and the ability to make choices. Notably, when Rick discloses that he’s the CEO, the manager immediately begins speaking to him more respectfully.

“BUT WE’RE STILL ENTERTAINING PEOPLE”

People in the higher classes, like Rick, have more money. But, as both Marx and Undercover Boss demonstrate, this is not necessarily because the work that these people do has inherently higher value. Yes, Rick and Todd are in very different types of jobs that necessitate different levels of education and skill. Still, that doesn’t mean that labor requiring a college degree is more important to the actual functioning of society—though we may try to tell ourselves that. For Marx and Engels, ideology is not something that stems organically from each of our individual brains; rather, it’s born from our social relationships and functions as an instrument of power.^8 We sustain the current arrangement of power when we interpret work that involves manual labor as less important. The classical sociologist Max Weber makes the related point that engagement in physical labor tends to disqualify one from status. He gives the example of artistic work that’s more labor-like (such as masonry) being lower-status work than artistic practice that’s less labor-like (such as oil painting).^9 While we can likely all think of exceptions to this rule—for example, professional athletes—it’s still generally true that our most esteemed work is more intellectual than physical, and vice versa. Indeed, some of our most highly compensated work is not the work that’s crucial to the functioning of society. For instance, if we look at the list of professions that people view as the most prestigious, food preparer doesn’t make the cut.^10 Yet food preparers literally hold our lives in their hands daily, as we discover anew each time there’s an E. coli scare. During the height of COVID-19, the people deemed “essential” to our infrastructure included relatively low-paid grocery store stockers, delivery people, and sanitation workers— not those in jobs like Rick’s. Within our capitalist system, the objective importance of one’s work is not necessarily aligned with compensation, as Rick and Todd show us.

I can wiggle each ear independently, which I think is pretty special, but I’ve never earned a cent for it.) Of course, this all presumes that the Kardashian/Jenners don’t have any type of marketable skill or talent—which, to be clear, is not a foregone conclusion. These women (and maybe Rob) have managed to parlay a sex tape into international stardom. At some point, in some form—perhaps in Kris’s expert momaging or Kylie’s keen sense of consumer trends—it is reasonable to believe they did something to hasten their ascent. But whether these particular reality stars just fell upward or made shrewd decisions or some combination of the two, it’s not unique or contemporary that they get paid handsomely for something that many people think is worthless. They simply reveal how our conceptions of talent, money, and social worth were never connected to one another in straightforward ways.

FROM RAT PITS TO “RATCHET”?

In part because objective value, status, and compensation are misaligned, we have to tell ourselves stories justifying our class system. Job hierarchies become prestige hierarchies as we interpret certain types of work—and, consequently, certain types of people —as legitimate, valuable, and morally correct. Reality TV, with its emphasis on archetypes and difference, amplifies these typologies. The sociologist Patricia Hill Collins uses the term “controlling images” to refer to media’s stereotypical portrayals of marginalized groups—which, she argues, serve to normalize the power structure and allow us to view facets of culture such as racism and sexism as natural and inevitable.^15 This brings us back to Honey Boo Boo. In Alana’s family, we see controlling images that legitimate the class system. Though there is some debate within the family about whether they actually qualify as “rednecks” (“We all have our own teeth, don’t we?” the dad says),^16 the show repeatedly emphasizes their stereotypical southern- hick qualities. Their grammar is creative, they intersperse their sentences with words not found in Merriam-Webster , and they offer medical advice like “If you fart twelve to fifteen times a day, you could lose a lotta weight.”

Notably, the show also includes their bodily emanations, rather than editing them out. But, again, this isn’t anything new. We’ve been wringing enjoyment from lower-class stereotypes for hundreds of years. In the next chapter, we’ll see how minstrel shows historically caricatured Black people, but here it’s important to note that they satirized poor white “rubes” as well.^17 As the sociologist Jennifer Lena has explained, “The idea of respectable people being entertained by demonstrations of working-class or poor lifestyles is as old as the bourgeoisie is as a class.”^18 For instance, she describes how, beginning in the 1800s, “slumming parties” in London and New York brought upper-class white people into poor and immigrant urban areas. These trips allowed elites to participate in activities such as “rat pit” gambling—that is, betting on how long it would take a terrier to kill a rat in a hole in the ground. “When elites slum,” Lena argues, both then and today, “lower-class culture is enjoyed as a commodity, and the experience of consumption is designed to satisfy and thrill without too much discomfort.”^19 It’s hardly a stretch to draw a line from the rat pits of yore to the weave- pulling and mud-pit-belly-flopping “ratchet” fare of today. While critics panned Here Comes Honey Boo Boo , it was one of the most popular programs on TLC during the time it aired.^20 In 2013, Deadline reported that the show had ended its season in the number one spot for its time slot “among ad supported cable networks in virtually all key demos.”^21 Were all of those viewers “slumming” when they watched Honey Boo Boo? Maybe not. It’s plausible that some people watched because they personally identified with the characters and/or because they found them likable or even aspirational as everyday, working-class people turned TV stars. Still, these types of programs arguably also attract viewers because they enable us to slum. For instance, perhaps there was a reason that the reality-adjacent Tiger King (Netflix, 2020) became so popular during the early days of the coronavirus pandemic. Part of that reason, likely, had to do with the show’s many riveting plot twists. (Did Carole Baskin really feed her husband’s corpse to her tigers? I still don’t know what to believe!) But perhaps seeing the working-class criminality and buffoonery on the show also allowed us to think less about, or explain away, the fact that many low- wage “essential” workers were being placed at daily risk for COVID-19.

on the central clan but on their reaction to the other participants. We see shots of various attendees, their flesh drooping over their minimal clothing, and Mama June and her daughters are critical of the physiques on display. “Her body is eatin’ the bikini,” Mama June says of one large woman. In a testimonial, she advises “women that are of voluptuous size” to cover themselves up. “All that vajiggle-jaggle is not beautimous,” she opines. Later in the episode, the focus shifts to the family members themselves. They discuss the prospect of losing weight as they sit on couches munching on cheese balls from the ubiquitous shared jar. Mama June agrees to participate in a “family weight-loss challenge,” though she is ambivalent about the goal. At one point in the episode, she says she’s happy with her body—at another, that she’d ideally lose one hundred pounds. By presenting fat bodies initially at the Redneck Games, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo almost immediately contextualizes fatness within a particular class category. Indeed, female thinness has become something of a privilege marker. Small and taut bodies translate into “embodied capital”—Bourdieu’s term for “external wealth converted into an integral part of the person.”^28 This becomes evident in fashion markets; high-end boutiques, for instance, seldom carry plus sizes, while cheaper mass retailers such as Walmart do. It’s also quite telling that as the income from Here Comes Honey Boo Boo began rolling in, Mama June underwent weight-loss surgery and sloughed off those one hundred pounds—emerging from her chrysalis on her spin-off show, Mama June: From Not to Hot (WE tv, 2017–2020). (In 2020, as the main characters went through a variety of personal and legal struggles, the show was rebooted as Mama June: Family Crisis .) As the title Not to Hot bluntly states, in the contemporary United States fatness is socially undesirable. No, it’s not always undesirable. We might point to putative counterexamples, such as Kim Kardashian’s round derriere, or racial/ethnic differences in the acceptability of thick bodies,^29 or the existence of arguably fat-positive media, including TLC’s own reality show My Big Fat Fabulous Life (2015–present). Which bodies we consider to be “fat,” and how we interpret that fatness, has also changed over time.^30 But in general today, within dominant American culture, fat bodies are generally presented as socially problematic.

They’re also often presented as signs of individual failings. The sociologist Amanda Czerniawski has observed that we stereotype fatness “as a defect, a symbol of gluttonous obsessions, unmanaged desires, and moral and physical decay; the fat body is one that is out of control and takes up too much space, a failed body project. These controlling images of fat are rife with moralistic innuendos that place blame on the individual and ignore culture’s impact.”^31 Indeed, the controlling images on Here Comes Honey Boo Boo suggest that this family’s bodies, like its behavior, cannot be contained. Guts tumbling over pants, belches escaping from mouths, bodies exploding with impulses—this family is just spilling out, in every sense. Mama June and her offspring show us how lower-class status and fatness are culturally aligned, how we convert both into moral categories, and how we lay them at the feet of individuals. Of course, the individual members of the Boo Boo clan (the adults, at least) do have some ability to control what they put into their mouths. Mama June feeds her daughter sugary foods, including “go-go juice” (a mixture of Red Bull and Mountain Dew), to keep her alert for pageants. And there’s the cheese ball jar. But by presenting these individual decisions as just individual decisions made by out-of-control people, without interrogating the broader mechanics of food production, marketing, and distribution, or underlying inequalities in the educational system, Here Comes Honey Boo Boo obscures the large-scale social dynamics that have helped move the go-go juice to Alana’s lips. When we look at Here Comes Honey Boo Boo as a slumming adventure, we can see the types of cultural mechanisms that we use to normalize class hierarchies. Portraying this clan as lazy, impulsive, and not that bright, the show contributes to a narrative that naturalizes the class structure as correct and appropriate. And it’s far from the only reality show to do this. The entire subgenre of makeover TV reminds us which bodies we perceive as acceptable and good. On these shows, as in our lives, our bodies are understood not simply as collections of cells that exist neutrally in the world; they can be evaluated and altered accordingly.^32 On Dr. Pimple Popper (TLC, 2018–present), for instance, the dermatologist and YouTube sensation Dr. Sandra Lee remedies extreme skin conditions, while over on Botched (E!, 2014–present), Drs.

Recall that, for Marx, a class is a group of people who share the same material conditions. Building on that theory, Bourdieu argued that a class is actually a collection of things. It includes people who have similar amounts of money but also who share the same habits, practices, and internalized understandings of the world. Bourdieu observed that when it comes to our cultural preferences, we have “the illusion of spontaneous generation.”^35 That is, while we tend to think taste is random and highly individualized, it has a socialized component. Indeed, he found that our preferences in things such as music and cuisine are highly aligned with socioeconomic class; in particular, there is lowbrow culture and there is highbrow culture, and elites are socialized to enjoy the latter. For example, it’s telling, but also probably not surprising to viewers, that the Boo Boo clan attends the Redneck Games and not the opera. These distinctions matter, Bourdieu argues, because taste then becomes a signifier of social status and a form of shared culture that helps to coalesce those within the same class. Elite tastes become a form of capital that facilitates the transmission of social status from one generation to another, thus maintaining the class structure. Consequently, certain tastes are connected with certain class positions, and a hierarchy is created. It’s not just that the opera and the Redneck Games, say, are different pastimes. It’s that one becomes codified as more “high class” and, subsequently, more socially valued than the other. These types of hierarchies, and their social importance, come to life on Project Runway (Bravo, 2004–2008, 2019–present; Lifetime, 2009–2017). On the show, aspiring fashion designers compete in a series of challenges. In each episode, they construct garments that models wear during a runway show and then receive commentary about their work from a panel of judges. Nina Garcia, the fashion journalist and editor who has been one of the judges on the show since its inception, invokes the designers’ “taste level” so often that “I question your taste level” has become her catchphrase and a meme. On one episode, for example, the contestants must create clothing with video game heroines in mind.^36 Judge Brandon Maxwell tells one of the designers, Venny, regarding his female “savior” outfit with feathered cuffs: “It is not that you do not know how to make clothes. What you do not know how to do is to restrain yourself in that process.”

Nina agrees: “One challenge, you can produce something beautiful and tasteful, and the next challenge you present us with this. From head to toe, it’s a disaster.” Later, when the judges examine Venny’s garment up close, Nina reiterates, “He really missed out on the fantasy here. And then, on the reality, there’s a taste level issue that is concerning.” Here, as in the case of Honey Boo Boo , lacking class and taste is associated with lacking control over oneself. This is a common theme on Project Runway , as overuse of feathers and excessive bedazzling are interpreted as an inability to rein in one’s designs. Instead, designers are expected to hit the sweet spot of being restrained without being dull. The very concept of a “taste level,” and indeed the whole premise of the show, also suggests that our fashion preferences aren’t just personal and arbitrary—rather, there is some objective, tiered index by which they can be evaluated. And the judges often confirm that this taste hierarchy is aligned with economics. On a different episode from that same season, for instance, Nina heaps praise on one of the designs.^37 In evaluating Tessa’s garment, she comments, “This look does not look like a $250 look.” There is a pause, dramatic music swells, and she adds, “This looks expensive. This is luxe.” “Good. Good,” the designer says, looking relieved. Later, when Tessa is announced as the winner of the challenge, Nina proclaims, “It felt like any of us [judges] could be wearing that.” “This looks expensive” is a common compliment on the show, across judges and across seasons. Here, Nina specifically links that compliment to people in her own class category, for whom $250 might be seen as relatively cheap. She thus illuminates spectra of taste, economics, and social value and the interrelation among the three. These interconnected hierarchies don’t appear just on reality TV but pervade our lives; for instance, they’re baked into the English language, in evaluative terms such as “cheap” and “classy.” Project Runway teaches us how we all conceptualize certain types of material culture as tasteful or trashy, expensive or cheap, good or bad, worthwhile or not, right or wrong, and in doing so, we implicitly reinforce class boundaries.

CAVIAR DREAMS

Even a show such as The Girls Next Door was aspirational in its portrayal of money and privilege. Hef’s three central girlfriends during the majority of the series—Holly, Bridget, and Kendra—are all platinum blond, conventionally attractive, and decades younger than the elderly Hef. Their bodies are offered to us not as objects of ridicule, as in Here Comes Honey Boo Boo , but as sites of sensuality. Further, though the show has received critiques related to sexuality, gender roles, and its participants’ values,^40 its tone is not derisive. The women live in a mansion, receive lavish gifts, and go on exciting adventures. They are presented as sexually desirable and happy, ensconced within a thrilling world of celebrity and privilege. Glamorous music plays when Hef enters the room. These types of series reveal our zeal for consumption, our desire to gawk at the slick lives of the rich, and our tendency to conceptualize wealth, material possessions, and contentment all as part of the same package.

MONEY CAN’T BUY YOU CLASS

Yet we don’t simply rebuke the poor and love the rich. We aspire to be the rich, and we interpret their types of bodies and their types of things as morally correct, but we love them in a complicated way. While some reality programs about rich people are aspirational in tone, the genre’s relationship with the elite—and our relationship with the elite—is more complex than just that. Successful people are not exempt from our mockery. In fact, we may particularly enjoy watching them stumble. Reality TV, specifically, reveals how we delight in the shortcomings of well-to-do people, because the genre thrives on these kinds of seemingly incongruous intersections. The Simple Life (Fox, 2003–2005; E!, 2006–2007), for instance, places the socialites Paris Hilton and Nicole Richie in everyday contexts for comedic effect. In season one, for instance, the women live with a family on an Arkansas farm for a month. Like Rick on Undercover Boss , they are often portrayed as inept at manual tasks, both on the farm itself and within their various low- wage jobs. The show suggests that wealth hobbles one’s ability to function in the real world. This is perhaps an attractive prospect for those of us who are not millionaires.

More specifically, the reality genre shows us how, just as we like to cast aspersions on poor people, we also like to cast aspersions on rich people who don’t know how to be rich. The Housewives programs, for example, are not simple paeans to the rich in the manner of Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. There’s champagne and there’s caviar, but there’s also drunken fighting, occasional mug shots, and an endless parade of shiny, unflattering dresses. The mismatch becomes a shared joke between Bravo and the viewer. It is significant that many Housewives were not born into upper-class families, and this information trickles out on the show. In a scene from season twelve, for instance, Countess LuAnn revealed to her autobiography’s ghostwriter that she’d had a hardscrabble childhood. Bourdieu’s concept of habitus suggests that your position in the class hierarchy is key to your general orientation toward the world. But specifically, for Bourdieu, it’s where you were born and raised in the hierarchy that most strongly impacts this “internalized form of class condition.”^41 Yet we live in a society where there is some social mobility: some people move up or down. While Bourdieu acknowledges that an individual’s habitus can change in response to social circumstances, when people jettison out of one class and into another, they can also experience friction. This scenario has played out in various forms of entertainment, from the Frank Capra film Mr. Deeds Goes to Town (1936) to The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air (NBC, 1990–1996), focusing on characters who suddenly become rich and lack the corresponding habitus. Because it focuses on social asymmetry, and because many of its wealthier participants are nouveau riche (perhaps because —Paris Hilton aside—an elite habitus might deter reality-show participation), the reality genre is particularly primed to reveal this potential gap between a privileged economic position and its accompanying habits of mind. The Housewives are an imperfect example of this mismatch between socioeconomic status and upper-class habitus because, frankly, some of them are not all that rich. Some of them do appear to have legitimate wealth and/or fame—for example, Beverly Hills ’ restaurateur Lisa Vanderpump, New York City ’s heiress Tinsley Mortimer, Miami ’s cosmetics queen Lea Black, and Atlanta ’s Grammy winner Kandi Burruss. But Orange County ’s Gina Kirschenheiter’s small, sparsely furnished house littered with

hunting supplies. While the family was not always wealthy, its patriarch, Phil, invented a tool for calling ducks that has been quite lucrative. The disconnect between the family’s income and their class conditioning is evident from the beginning of the pilot episode.^44 As the show opens, Phil’s adult son Willie explains, “The backwoods of Louisiana is now home to a new breed of millionaire: my family.” We see boots sloshing through a swamp, followed by a shot of a gated mansion. In the title sequence, the family emerges from an expensive-looking car with a gleaming duck ornament on its hood—the men sporting long beards and scraggly hair, Willie clad in a camouflage blazer. “Money didn’t change some things…,” Willie narrates, and during the episode we see the clan hunting, cutting off the heads of bullfrogs, and frying up squirrel brains. By presenting sweaty millionaires in bandannas capturing frogs from a fishing boat, and demarcating this as atypical, the show reveals how socioeconomic status is normally associated with certain cultural practices. But despite this family’s unusual combination of culture and class, and probably even because of it , the Robertson clan became folk heroes for a certain segment of working-class America. While Duck Dynasty was a mainstream hit (the season four premiere, for instance, was watched by 11. million viewers—a cable record for a nonscripted series),^45 it’s significant that the show was particularly popular in rural markets similar to the Robertsons’ milieu.^46 And within the first year of its airing, it had generated $400 million in product revenue—about half of which was from the low- end retailer Walmart.^47 As we’ve seen, our ability to identify with its broad character types has long drawn us toward reality TV. Part of Duck Dynasty ’s appeal, perhaps, lay in its suggestion that the wealthy aren’t a separate species; they’re everyday Joes like us who happen to have cash. It portrayed a manageable distance between the rich and the poor, fitting neatly into the tantalizing American narrative of ingenuity, meritocracy, and individual achievement. Donald Trump’s reality show, and his subsequent presidency, capitalized on a similar narrative. In the introductory sequence to The Apprentice , set to the song “For the Love of Money” by the O’Jays, the trappings of wealth are front and center: a stock market ticker, hundred- dollar bills, a luxury car, a private jet, and Trump’s silhouette on a golden money clip. Nothing about either Trump’s show or his public persona has

ever “whispered” wealth. The Apprentice was all about the things that money could buy: helicopters, skyscrapers, connections to influential friends. In addition to his overt materialism, Trump long publicly embraced low culture—for example, when he served McDonald’s and Burger King to White House guests. (In one particularly striking photo, he stood behind the fast-food buffet, his arms outspread, as a painting of a pensive-looking Abraham Lincoln loomed in the background.)^48 There’s a reason that Trump was able to package himself as a new kind of candidate to voters, as a renegade who went his own way. His messaging promised, and perhaps his atypical behaviors suggested, that although he was rich he would be different from the queue of other rich white men who had preceded him. He was the billionaire who “kept it real”—the one you could get a beer with. With his braggadocio and his penchant for gold decor, Donald Trump might have made an excellent Real Housewife. Yet these women are still throwing wineglasses at one another on Bravo, and he’s been president. Both Trump and the Robertsons, though arguably “low class” in their actions at times, have been lionized among white, working-class audiences in a way that the Housewives have not. (Tellingly, if anyone is given a hard time on Duck Dynasty , it is Willie for supposedly becoming overly educated and failing at “redneck” tasks like frog hunting.) Why the difference? Gender certainly plays a role in how these reality stars are received. As we’ll see, men—particularly rich, white men—are given more space to play at being crude and offensive. Still, what the Housewives, the Robertsons, and Trump do have in common is that their class/habitus mismatch is notable —whether because it renders them particularly appalling, kitschy, or refreshing. They all confirm that low culture and high income is an unusual pairing. And in doing so, they all solidify our standard ideas about class.

REALITY TV: THE GREAT EQUALIZER?

Although Bourdieu’s initial scholarship on taste is now decades old, more recent research and reality TV shows both continue to suggest that there’s still a relationship between class and cultural preferences.^49 Still, as Donald Trump and other reality stars show us, one can be a socioeconomic elite without exhibiting an upper-class habitus all the time.