The Rawness

…given that I identify with a few too many of these behaviors.

(Yes, I know I am the millionth person to link to this site in the past few weeks. Bite me.)

A lot of the behaviors described on this site can also be found discussed in more depth in the book Bobos In Paradise: The New Upper Class and How They Got There by David Brooks.

If you want to know more about the book Bobos In Paradise, this review by Robert Locke covers it pretty well. The opening paragraphs from the review:

Bobos, or bourgeois bohemians, are, to put it bluntly, the new establishment. Bill Clinton is a bobo. So is anyone else who has the income and power that only fat old men in oil paintings used to have, but who also has the mores, personal tastes, and culture of a 60’s radical college student. This is easy to laugh at, but it is not a superficial phenomenon. Brooks has put his finger on the central weirdness of our current ruling class: they have blithely combined the power and wealth of the old establishment with the cultural and intellectual trappings of its supposed mortal enemy, the counterculture. The two camps that have seemed to be warring for America’s soul since the 60’s have not just reached a detente, they have merged. This is, of course, exactly what you get when you send your best and brightest to universities where bohemian ideals are taught and then release them into a world where the realities of material life inexorably impel them into moneyed positions. As the author puts it,

“This is an elite that has been raised to oppose elites. They are affluent yet opposed to materialism. They may spend their lives selling yet worry about selling out. They are by instinct anti-establishmentarian yet somehow sense they have become a new establishment.”

Brooks describes in great detail the bobo lifestyle, which one can visualize most easily by thinking of its characteristic locales: Greenwich Village, NY; Berkeley, CA; Boulder, CO; Cambridge, MA; Georgetown, DC; Austin, TX; Portland, OR; Seattle, WA; Santa Fe, NM; Ann Arbor, MI; Madison, WI; Athens, GA; Wilmington, NC; Missoula, MT; Burlington, VT; Princeton, NJ, South Beach, FL. This is the world of cappuccino and Volvos, Sierra Club memberships and private schools. Bobos love to live in places that have artiness as their mythical identity but seven-figure real estate prices as their reality. Brooks calls these latte towns or neighborhoods.

The essence of the bobo lifestyle is being rich while pretending you’re not. Bobos love luxury as much as anyone else with five senses, but because they have been educated in a leftist critique of it, they would suffer damage to their self-image if they openly and honestly imbibed it. Therefore their lives are a peculiar dance, whose subtle application of abstract rules to everyday life would boggle the mind of an ultra-Orthodox Jew, in which they seek to indulge luxury in ways that somehow, according to the bobo code, don’t count.

They employ a number of strategies to this end. For example, the cult of the Absurdly Expensive Ordinary Object, in which the bobo pays $75 for a gardening trowel or $3.50 for a cup of coffee. The first item escapes the stigma of yuppie materialism, which bobos despise, because gardening is a) environmentalist and b) manual labor, and the second because it is only a cup of coffee, after all, and therefore cannot possibly constitute a luxury. Another strategy can be called the Magical Power of Progressive Association: anything, however luxurious, that is somehow associated with progressive politics is thereby purified of the despised taint of consumerism. Thus the fattiest ice-cream on the market, Ben & Jerry’s, survives this usual bobo no-no (they are usually health nuts who eat whole-grain bread) by donating a portion of its profits to approved leftist causes. There is also the Magical Power of Primitive Cultures and other magical powers associated with sports, art, wilderness, tools, and other things. Tools are especially valuable because they enable bobos to play at manual labor and thereby deny their class status. None of this comes cheap. As the author says, “A person who follows these precepts can dispose of up to $4-$5 million annually in a manner that demonstrates how little he or she cares about material things.”

Bobos extend this pseudo-modesty to their social relationships. They talk about the nannies and servants they frequently have as if they are close personal friends and it is merely an odd quirk that these servants have to commute two hours each way from the slums of L.A. to the bobo’s house near the beach. Because they love to appropriate peasant clothing like clogs and the Latin American poncho, they are the first ruling class in history to aspire to dress like its servants. But of course bobos would never dream of dressing like the real American working class, in polyester pantsuits, designer jeans, and big hair, because then they would run the risk of resembling a lower social class that they could actually be mistaken for. They only posture at belonging to proletariats that are sufficiently foreign or archaic that no one could make this error. Similarly, they love to decorate with old farm implements and industrial artifacts, but would never dream of doing their office to look like a real contemporary working-class environment like the inside of a McDonalds.

Anyone who has noticed the way American leftism runs on sentimental fantasies about the poor will find this pattern familiar. The bobo style can be described as the concepts of liberalism, aestheticized into pretty visual images.

When bobos run corporations, as they increasingly do, they do so in an “anti-hierarchical” manner with respect to everything but the actual salaries. Salaries are not supposed to be the point of work anyway, since we are all creative visionaries now, not wage slaves. This is of course the perfect way to stop employees from asking difficult questions about whether all this anti-hierarchy translates into their paychecks. Bobo corporate boardrooms look like garages and nobody wears a tie or has a fixed desk. Commercials for the company’s products have alternative-rock soundtracks. Prosaic items like shampoo are sold as tools for achieving new-age spirituality. And, as Brooks notes of that quintessential bobo company Ben & Jerry’s, “Ice cream companies now possess their own foreign-policy doctrines.”

Note that what bobos really despise is not consumerism as an actual way of life, the way people who genuinely renounce it like nuns, the Amish or the U.S. Marines do, but consumerism in the abstract, which offends their exquisitely refined ideological sensibilities. Bobos have ideological sensibilities as subtle as wine-tasters. They have been educated in an elaborate leftist critique of how money makes you its possession, not the other way round, and commodifies you, et cetera et cetera, and have responded by mastering the art of faking one way culturally to feel good about themselves while living the other way in the real world. If a $500 sweater is made in Tibet, a place that represents purity and anti-consumerism, then this anti-consumerism in the ideological significance of the thing neatly cancels out the materialism of buying it, and the bobo is home free. One almost imagines an enterprising shaman could make a living running around in a 4-wheel drive vehicle (the bobo standard in flat suburban areas) blessing their household establishments like a Shinto priest in Japan blessing a new automobile assembly line. The problem, of course, is that this would make the whole thing explicit, and this rank cultural con game could never survive the light of day…

Basically, if you enjoy the website Stuff White People Like, I recommend reading the rest of Locke’s review of Bobos In Paradise, and of course the actual book Bobos in Paradise.

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Every now and then I come across something that I wish I wrote. This piece from Craiglist’s “Best Of” section is a perfect example. It’s called “Myths and Truths,” and I’ve reproduced it in full below. I’m sure a few people will call it jaded and cynical, and it probably is, but that in no way negates how astute and accurate it is:

Myths and Truths

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Date: 2006-04-18, 11:09PM PDT

Some rants and accumulated experience about women. Men in happy marriages or stable relationships don’t need to read this; neither do men who get laid every week (or even every month). The “truth” I’m putting out here is for all of those men who, like me, worship women and can’t figure out why they keep getting screwed over and dumped. The myths are things that I used to believe before I wised up.

MYTH: Women want love and affection. Women want to be treated well. If you treat a woman well, she’ll treat you well.

New York women are among the most fashionable women on the face of the earth. They are also among the least stylish. Confused? If so, you aren’t alone. You’re just among the many people who confuse stylish with fashionable.

To have a personal style is to have a statement you want to make with your clothing. You use your body as a palette and try to make your outfit into a work of art. Thought goes into a personal style. There are three “yous,” you as you see yourself, you as others see you, and you as you want others to see you. The aim of an impeccable personal style should be to bring these three yous as close together as possible. Questions to ask include: does this outfit match the personality I’m trying to convey? Do I have the attitude and mindset to pull it off? Is it showing the right amount of originality, yet is it not so out there as to become a freakshow? A good personal style takes into account the right amount of risk vs. safety for any occasion. A good personal style also takes into account what works for your body, especially your weight, skin tone, height and muscle tone.

Which brings us to fashion. There is a reason why the term “dedicated follower of fashion” exists. Because being fashionable is strictly about following. It doesn’t matter if the trend is ugly, if it doesn’t go with your personality, if it’s not flattering to your body shape, if the color that is in season does not go with you at all….all that’s irrelevant when you’re trying to be fashionable. Fashion is about checking your mind in at the door and slavishly keeping up with what other people are wearing. You’ll rock the ugliest, hard to match handbag if it has the right name splashed on it. You will rock Audrey Hepburn skinny jeans despite having a pear shape. You will put on the latest revealing low cut jeans despite having huge muffin tops. You will wear ballet slippers to work even though as an adult working in an office it makes you look like a child no one should take seriously (then you cry sexism).

For example, look at the dress at the top of the post.

I had a post recently called The Power of Vagueness, which you can find here. In the first post, I focused mostly on vagueness when it came to the political arena and only touched on it slightly in the dating arena. This time around I’m going to go more into the topic of vagueness in dating.

In the mail, I got my issue of the Sports Illustrated Swimsuit Special. (I have an SI subscription.) Most of the girls in it bore me because they seem interchangeable, but this one exotic-looking black girl in it named Quiana Grant caught my eye, and I actually read her interview. One part of it really jumped out at me:

I feel a secret connection with …

Chris Webber because he is mysterious to me. I love the fact that you never hear anything about him anywhere. Even when he was dating Tyra Banks, you didn’t hear anything about him. It’s the unknown. I remember living in D.C., and the Kings came to play the Wizards, and all the ladies were in the hairdresser getting their hair done and I’m like, “What’s going on?” and they told me, “Chris Webber’s coming to town, girl!” That was kind of funny, but he’s actually, um, yeah, he’s pretty great. I was supposed to go to a game when he was playing for Philly, but then he got traded and I thought, nevermind I just wanted to see him.

I love that quote, because it perfectly illustrates what I described in the last vagueness quote. Chris Webber is a good-looking, charismatic, athletic and talented athlete, but he’s intensely private. When he does make a major statement to the public, it carries that much more weight and becomes an event because he so rarely does it. In fact, for a while it even intensified scrutiny of him because the scarcity of information about him make information about him become even more valuable.

But what I really love is how you can tell Quiana Grant has used the half-blank canvas Webber has created and filled in all the blanks herself. She’s taken every dream guy trait she has and has probably assigned them to Webber.

Of course the blank canvas alone isn’t enough. You have to have something on the canvas to attract attention in the first place. If you’re too vague or nondescript you’ll just be ignored. But Webber has the fame, athleticism and good looks that get him in the door. After that, he just has to keep his mouth shut and not fuck it up.

It amazes me how often guys don’t get this. They just talk and talk and campaign with women until they just tell too much about themselves and talk themselves right into the doghouse. Several reasons why this is bad:

1. Unless you are particularly gifted in smooth conversation, you are just increasing the chances you are going to fuck up a good first impression with each sentence you say.
2. It puts the girl on a pedestal if you are trying too hard to impress her, thereby lowering your own value in comparison. When you are talking about how smart you are, how much money you make, how cool you are, all the things that make you great, all you are doing is subconsciously convincing the girl of how great she is because you just met her and are trying to hard to gain her approval. Think about it, you don’t try to convince an ugly person of how good you look, you don’t try to convince a dumb person of how smart you are, and you don’t try to convince an uncool person of how cool you are. You expect them to get it automatically. So if you are trying too hard to convince someone you are cool, the implication is that you consider them to be even cooler. If you are trying too hard to convince someone you are good-looking, you are implying that you already consider them better-looking than you. If you are trying too hard to impress someone with how smart you are, you are implying that you consider them smart enough to judge your intelligence. Good masters don’t openly try to impress students, students openly try to impress masters. When you are too blatant in seeking approval, you broadcast to the people you’re seeking approval from that you consider them your masters. You are now in a “one-down” position from them. They may like you, but they won’t respect you as much as you want.
3. You deprive the woman of her fantasy. If for some reason you conveyed a positive first impression and got her intrigued, it’s because something about you reminded her of one of her fantasies. And each time you open your mouth to talk yourself up or impress her, you just kept painting a picture different from the one she wanted to paint. You promised her the fulfillment of a fantasy with your first impression and now you’re taking it away from her. And of course she’ll resent that, even if it’s on a subconscious level.

See, most guys have women they have no interest in that are incredibly fixated on them. They consider them pests. They make no effort to impress them, yet they stick around. Then they meet women that impress them terribly and they start campaigning hard. They call and text them too much. They watch their phones in hopes they’ll ring. They meet the girl and find her to be interested at first and get confused at why they seem to lose interest with each following interaction. What guys don’t realize is that the aloof, slightly disinterested attitude they affected with the former type of woman is the one they need to affect with the women they really like. If more men could treat the women they really like the same as they treat the ones they want to get rid of, they’d have a much better dating life. (And probably, if they pestered and tried to impress the ones they wanted to get rid of the way they do the ones they obsess over, they’d do a better job of getting rid of them.)

There’s a saying in the pimp community that touches on this concept: “The player with the right clothes can get chose with his mouth closed.” Basically, if you work on your image, whether it’s your clothing, your muscles, your body language and posture, and/or your grooming, all you have to do is work on not saying anything stupid (harder for some guys than you’d think) and being enticingly vague (but not boring) and the woman’s imagination will do all the impressing for you. As long as you don’t do anything blatantly contrary to this image, you’ll be fine.

Addendum: Something else that Chris Webber understands about vagueness: not just being vague about himself but vague about his conquests also. You never see Chris Webber brag about women he’s banging. Never. Sexual bragging is an amateurish thing the average slob does and betrays not only short term thinking but also very poor social intelligence (poor social intelligence is a huge turn-off to women).

Reputation management since time immemorial has always been of paramount importance to a woman. The sluttier a woman’s reputation is, the more her social stock drops. This is why real players rarely brag about conquests for the sake of bragging. They only bring up conquests to prove a larger point. If you get the rep of being that guy who can’t keep his mouth about conquests, women know their reputations won’t be safe with you, and no matter how much they may want you they’ll feel the risk to their reputation isn’t worth it.

Compare this to Wilmer Valderrama, who pulled a truly unmackish move in bragging on the Howard Stern show about sexual conquests. He claimed to have taken Mandy Moore’s virginity, and also:

The 26-year-old claimed Lindsay Lohan was one of the best girls he’s ever slept with, Ashlee Simpson was loud in bed and he rated Jennifer Love Hewitt an “eight” out of ten when it came to sex.

He probably thought it was cool at the time, but he must have realized his mistake because he quickly backpedaled in the press afterwards. Now what are the chances that future up and coming or established starlets are going to risk their reputations for a chance to sleep with Wilmer Valderrama. He’s proven himself to be lacking discretion and social intelligence. He should have learned the lesson of vagueness from Chris Webber.

Last year, I went to see Rocky Balboa in the theaters. I’ve always loved Rocky movies, especially the first one, and I thought it was a great ending to the franchise. But as I sat there in the theater, it reminded me of how different it is to watch a Rocky movie with a crowd as opposed to watching it at home on TV. The energy from a Rocky crowd is both intense and infectious, almost like watching a real sporting event.

Stallone is very underrated as a writer and an actor. His ability to suck in a crowd emotionally and make them root for his character is incredible. You really get sucked into the movie and forget it’s fiction for a while. You really want all those assholes that put Rocky down and constantly ridicule him or try to crush his dreams to get their well-deserved comeuppance. You see Rocky struggling uphill against impossible odds and being shitted on by arrogant, petty jerks every step of the way and it reminds you of all the dreams you had or currently had that people shitted on. You see those arrogant assholes on the screen and get reminded of all those real-life pricks from your own experiences that just player hated from the sidelines of life and got great enjoyment watching your struggles and failures and twisted the knife and rubbed it in whenever they could.

But I started to wonder: does anyone watch Rocky and sympathize with the pricks? Same with those 80s movies where some obnoxious athlete bully, yuppie or preppy is ridiculing the underdog hero and trying to crush his dreams…does anyone watch those movies and identify with or even root for those guys over the underdog hero? Did anybody in the theater cheer when Johnny swept the leg in Karate Kid?

These types of bullies, peanut gallery picks and dream crushers must exist in some shape or form in the real world, or else these movies wouldn’t be so powerful in evoking emotion and recognition from us. And these movies are so popular and widely seen that it’s highly doubtful that jerks just avoid those movies, they have to be in the theater crowd or among the ones watching at home. Yet no one who watches these movies seems to ever think of themselves as the prick or bully. They all see themselves in the protagonist hero role, and that’s who they end up identifying with.

These movies appeal to our basic narcissism. We get to watch these movies and imagine ourselves as the hard-working dreamer. We get to imagine ourselves as the type of good, positive person who would chase a dream like Rocky against all odds, or at least be supportive of a Rocky and be on his side as he chases his dreams. But we conveniently forget all the times in real life that we were the criticizing, smug assholes, all the times we helped crush dreams. Those moments don’t support our positive fantasy image of ourselves, so we don’t pay much attention to those and play them down. We can go to a Rocky movie and think of Rocky as representing “us” and the sneering, condescending dream-crushing bad guys as representing “them,” but we can go to a restaurant that same night and crack jokes about the waiter and scoff at how stupid he is to actually think he’s going to make it as an actor along with the millions of other dreamers in town and ever be more than just a glorified grunt. The irony of these moments eludes us. A lot of times, the arrogant jerk is you.

See, the Rocky fallacy is simply this: it’s easy to root for an underdog when you already know beforehand that he’s going to win. This doesn’t make you a good person. It doesn’t give you moral superiority. It doesn’t mean you have faith in people (faith is belief in something, even when you have no proof or guarantees that your belief is warranted or will be rewarded). It doesn’t make you Rocky. It just makes you like the typical person. Those pompous jerk characters in the Rocky movie? They don’t know they’re in an inspirational feel-good movie called Rocky and that Rocky is the star of the whole thing. If they did they’d support Rocky from the very beginning just like the audience does.

When you watch The Pursuit of Happyness, it’s easy to have that sense of moral superiority by siding with Will Smith’s character…because you already know his risks are going to pay off. You feel good at the end because you feel your faith was rewarded and in some ways you feel your own urges to dream have somehow been validated, but truth be told you knew your belief in the character was going to be rewarded before even watching the movie. But in real life, you and your friends would probably badmouth and look down on someone in that situation at the bottom of his rope hoping against all odds to conquer the world of stocks.

Think about all those people who supported the Rocky character when watching the movies. How many of them scoffed at Stallone the actor when he had a string of flops and it seemed his career was washed up? How many of them laughed at him when he announced he was making a Rocky sequel, just like people laughed at Rocky when he tried to enter the big time after an unremarkable career as a washed up local boxer? That’s because unlike with the Rocky character, we had no guarantee Stallone would succeed in his comeback, and being supportive is always harder without guarantees.

I think this is why so many people hated Rocky V. It’s not the best in the franchise, that’s for sure. But when I saw it, I never thought it was as horrible as everyone claimed it was. It was as well-acted and well-written as any of the other installments. But now I realize why it received such backlash: because Rocky ended as a loser because he had no money or glory, despite winning the street fight. The faith the audience had was conditional: “we believe in you against all odds Rocky, and fuck any haters that say otherwise…unless you actually lose. Then we’ll turn on you too.”

Stallone made a fatal miscalculation with Rocky V: he overestimated the public and thought they “got” what he was trying to say all along. That the winning and the glory isn’t what matters, it’s never giving up the fight in the face of all adversity and being able to hold your head up at the end of the day knowing that you tried your hardest, regardless of the outcome. He had too much faith in his audience, not realizing that they never got that message. So he had to make a slight correction in Rocky Balboa and made Rocky a successful entrepreneur and gave him back some ring glory, and the fans all came back, once again buying into the myth that they were the kind of good guys that would never turn on someone for trying hard and ending up a loser.

Another great example of this is Eli Manning. Tons of people in New York made him a whipping boy for years. They laughed at how inferior he was to his brother Peyton. As he improved and stayed resolute and improved toward the end of the season, people gave a cautious optimism, but still scoffed at him to be safe. Even as the game progressed and he played almost flawlessly and the Giants were within striking distance to win the Superbowl, people I watched with kept saying “Oh man, he’s gonna choke. He’s a loser. Kiss this game goodbye. They’re gonna lose this, I know it was too good to be true.” And after that final play where Eli killed it and won the game, those people were jumping up and cheering the loudest. And I’ll never forget what one of those guys said: “WE WOOONNN!!!!! Whoooo!!!”

Think about that for a second. “They’re gonna lose.” “He’s a loser.” “He’s gonna choke.” But after he wins? “WE won!” Where was the “we” when the outcome was still in doubt? Why is it suddenly first person plural now? You can bet this guy is one of the people who watches Rocky and identifies with the underdog supporter and not the haters and jerks in the movie. And he’s wrong, because back in the real world if Eli starts off bad next season he’ll be the first badmouthing him again and calling his Superbowl win a fluke.

It takes a lot of character to support someone against all odds. It takes even more character to not be outcome-driven and still support them for trying hard even after they lose. Rocky movies provide us the risk-free comfort of fooling ourselves into believing we have that level of character and empathy and courage.

In reality though, that image of ourselves is often the most fictional part of the whole moviegoing experience.