Poor Man About Town

I had to attend an out-patient appointment today. There were quite a few magazines lying around. The choice was varied - Sunday supplements, lifestyle mags, true stories and celebrity mags. What struck me was the class divide between the mags. The lifestyle and supplement mags were clearly geared towards the middle-class nest builders - all of which insisted on force feeding crap and more crap to the already bloated middle stratum of society. The photos looked very cosy, nice clean photographs of nice clean and healthy people (the ethnicity of which is invariably white) - the couples look happy and look as if they are about to go on holiday to Barbados. Then you have the products, face creams made from the mud of the Borneo jungle, the bollocks of rare goats steeped in olive oil and balsamic vinegar, furniture made from one of the last surviving rain forests in South America...

Then we come to the magazines aimed at the working class - the true stories - grainy and out of focus home produced photos - the highly graphic stories were invariably tragic - wife beaters nearly beating women to death with pokers and pick axe handles; wives poisoning their husband; children being physically and sexually abused - these mags were selling stories of the front line of working class tragedy. None of the middle class angst that one finds in middle-class childless couples. These true-life stories made rather painful reading. Has the working class really become this pit of depravity!

Then we have the Celebrity Mags, obviously directed towards the working class - celebs in expensive homes - it is as if they are not making any suggestion of aspiration, more like to say "look at what we have got, you pathetic plebs"

Whoever says that we live in a classless society needs to have his / her head testing.

Labels: Class, Lifestyle, media