Discover Top Posts Tagged with #hetty douglas

Sure, these guys embrace working class culture when it's en vogue, but while retaining their contempt for working class people, explains Dawn Foster.

Orwell’s approach, adopting the dress and lifestyle of the working classes to report on them is still endemic today. The poverty safari approach – where a middle class person goes “undercover” as a member of the underclass to expose the realities of low paid life – is still regarded as the height of investigative work on social issues. Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickeled and Dimedhas spawned dozens of copycat books, each less valuable than the original. The idea that you could simply ask, or commission, people in these jobs what their life is like and listen to them seems ludicrous to many journalists, failing as it does to provide them with any kudos for fleetingly enduring hardship and sacrifice themselves.

There are thousands of Hetty Douglas’s in modern Britain though: people who went to boarding school but never mention it, and spend their days eulogising about going to Greggs and Wetherspoons as if it shows how grounded and open-minded they are. No working class person I know does the same, because for most people going to McDonalds isn’t a notable event in which they’re deviating in what is acceptable for their class. They’re buying food or ordering a pint, not going on a class-crossing field trip to an alien territory in which they feel comfortable because being middle class affords you the confidence to feel entitled to enter any space you wish.

Instagramming photos from your Wetherspoons crawl seems exciting and exotic when you have the privilege to adopt any class signifier you like. But being working class hasn’t ever meant people treat me or friends with any wide-eyed respect. Instead I’m spoken to as if I’m stupid, have scorn poured on the fact I decided against going to Oxford, have people make openly scornful jokes about the areas we come from especially post-Brexit, or slag off “benefit scroungers” even after pointing out you grew up on benefits.

Playing class dress up is so irritating because it doesn’t erode discrimination and snobbery based on class. Common People by Pulp was a criticism not an instruction manual. Tweeting and effusing about working class signifiers grates because middle class people have the cultural privilege to do so without reprisals, while working class people are still discriminated against openly day in and day out.

If you went to boarding school and are bankrolled by your parents, own it, and be honest about your privilege: don’t think donning an Adidas tracksuit and tweeting about going to Greggs for lunch is anything other than offensive and embarrassing.

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#hetty douglas #poverty tourism

#hetty douglas #class war

ahahaha Hetty Douglas is finally being called out on fetishising, whilst also demonising, the working class with her terrible art and honestly i am HERE FOR THIS

#rip bitch #hetty douglas

POSING WITH A JOB SEARCH BOOKLET HAHA

Assuming this photo isn’t her posing for some “working class aesthetic” - she’s working aka selling expensive paintings AND signing on. I demand sanctions

#hetty douglas

‘I’m just earning a living for me and my son’

Warren told the Sun Online, ‘I would like an apology. I do not think it’s right she can take a picture of us without us knowing and say that. I’m just working – just earning a living for me and my son.

‘It’s not very nice. It’s made us look like a load of idiots when we are just trying to crack on and do some work.

Campaign for Hetty to give them an apology and buy them a Mcdonalds - she can afford it

#hetty douglas #class war #shite pale weirdo middle class people that want to be working class

The fellas Hetty Douglas insulted enjoying her art lol

#hetty douglas

Shows you how horrendously irrelevant nasty and posh the british art world is when actual artists are slagging off the proles rather than dazzling them, enchanting them, representing them, telling their stories etc. We need more prole artists to wipe this lot off the map.

#hetty douglas