oh hey, didn’t know you had a substack! giving it a follow :)
i think the analysis here is a reasonable assessment of one part of the elephant. here are some thoughts on another part, as an asian woman whos dated pretty broadly—my longest relationship was with a west indian, but ive also dated white and asian people.
the white person i dated was from a fairly well to do white family. the asian person was, too; they were adopted as an infant by white parents. the west indian had parents who worked prestigious jobs, grew up in one of the wealthiest and whitest toronto exurbs, and went to lego camp every summer.
all of them had a way of interfacing with the world that i’d describe as something like—without baggage? without bitterness or grievance at the world. a thing some might call “white privilege”, but actually if you look under the hood you might not be surprised to find that it is actually class privilege.
when i was in high school in toronto, there was this dynamic where all the most popular kids were white. you can become pretty popular no matter what your ethnicity is, but it was more like second tier popularity, and there was always something defensive in the posture of these popular minorities. they thought of themselves as second class citizens that by some luck and hard work made it to the top, but they had to hustle for it, and it did not come naturally to them; it was not their birthright.
this was the thing that was unattractive to me, this defensive posture. but when you grow up in a poor immigrant household as a minority, and you knew what it was like to go without, it’s hard not to acquire it.
the interesting thing is that this is changing. asia is becoming wealthier, and when new immigrants come, they no longer start from the very bottom. there are also more 2.5gen and 3rd gen asian kids now; asian immigration into north america didn’t really exist before the 70s-80s, yeah? now there’s more asian kids who come from nice middle class asian american households where they went to summer camp every summer and had like, dogs and backyards and stuff. their parents likely had that defensive posture; but they themselves will not.
i find myself in a few zoomer circles these days. the most jarring thing to me at first was that the popular non-white kids do not have that defensive posture to them at all. confidence looks great on them, every bit as great as it looks on white people. (nb: i live in a college town for a fairly prestigious university, so, selection effects there.)
in a room of ones own, virginia woolf writes about what changed after her aunt died suddenly and left her “five hundred pounds per year for ever”:
No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house, and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease, but also hatred and bitterness. I need not hate any man; he cannot hurt me. I need not flatter any man; he has nothing to give me. So imperceptibly I found myself adopting a new attitude towards the other half of the human race. ... By degrees fear and bitterness modified themselves into pity and toleration; and then in a year or two, pity and toleration went, and the greatest release of all came, which is freedom to think of things in themselves. That building, for example, do I like it or not? Is that picture beautiful or not? Is that in my opinion a good book or a bad? Indeed my aunt’s legacy unveiled the sky to me.
and on reading another woman novelist, at the dawn of that being a thing that was a viable career for woman:
Considering that Mary Carmichael was no genius, but an unknown girl writing her first novel in a bed-sitting-room, without enough of those desirable things, time, money, and idleness, she did not do so badly, I thought.
Give her a room of her own and five hundred a year, let her speak her mind and leave out half that she now puts in, and she will write a better book one of these days. She will be a poet, I said, putting Life’s Adventure, by Mary Carmichael, at the end of the shelf, in another hundred years’ time.
she had this whole thing, about how women wrote too defensively, and that this came from their diminished social circumstances. and that as society became more egalitarian, as more women had a room with a door that locked and five hundred a year, she expects to see more and more interesting works by women.
non-white people of dating age historically did not come from backgrounds where they had a room of their own, and the modern equivalent of five hundred a year. this will change. and i think dating preferences will soon change along with it.
Right yes thanks for this insightful comment Jenn. This rings very true when I reflect on my own experiences as well. I think part of my middle-school and high-school attraction to middle-class white women involved factors very similar to the ones you’ve mentioned: a lightness of mannerism, more social confidence and situatedness, their family dinner tables were lively and fun, more likely to read books for fun, their parents actually had friends, etc...
It makes sense that these deep middle class manners take a generation or more to settle in. Similar to this “Room of One’s Own” analysis you’re giving on women writers, I think about Proust’s analysis of Jews in France. Swann, the Verdurins, the narrator himself, they are all the grandchildren of Jewish stockbrokers or traders, and it takes them more than a lifetime to bury this fact and successfully join the social circles of, absorb the mores of, and ultimately supplant the older aristocratic French families like the Guermantes. Cultivating the appropriate lack of baggage and grievance takes generational time.
I generally like and appreciate your comment, but I have one complaint that relates not just to your comment but basically every comment I have ever seen mentioning Virginia Woolf ’s book:
The five hundred pounds per year of passive income are not an equivalent of getting the same amount of money as a salary. They are not an example of equality; most people do not have a passive income. How is it even possible to look at “a woman suddenly started to live like an aristocrat” and conclude “this is what gender equality looks like”? Like, maybe within the subset of aristocrats… but then I think the true lesson is “it is great to be an aristocrat” and “with gender equality, it is also great to be a female aristocrat”.
If I had a passive income of (a modern equivalent of) five hundred pounds per year for ever, I would probably also get better at writing or whatever else I would choose to spend my extra 8+ hours a day on.
LOL, did I just expose myself as an unattractively bitter non-aristocrat by writing this?
But also, how much does this change your argument into “now that more minority boys are among the aristocracy, they are suddenly more attractive”?
I find it fascinating that you have basically succeeded to make a pseudo-PUA advice “don’t be born poor, guys; that will make you bitter and unattractive” sound feminist. :D :D :D
(No offense meant, I still appreciate your insight about the generational changes.)
I would also point out that, despite whatever she said in 1928 about her 1909 inheritance, Woolf committed suicide in 1941 after extensive mental health challenges which included “short periods in 1910, 1912, and 1913” in a kind of insane asylum, and then afterwards beginning her serious writing career (which WP describes as heavily motivated by her psychiatric problems as a refuge/self-therapy), so one can certainly question her own narrative of the benefits of her UBI or the reasons she began writing. (I will further note that the psychological & psychiatric benefits of UBI RCTs have not been impressive to date.)
The point of the OP is that having financial security has significant psychological benefits, and for that it’s not particularly relevant whether the income is active or passive, deserved or undeserved. Though in the historical context, it was comparatively challenging for women to have any income independent from their husband, who was the breadwinner of the household.
I read it differently. That comment was talking about a level of financial security as high as “I will always have food and a house without any work or bosses”, and a level of confidence as high as “being at the top is my birthright”. Let’s be real, these things are the privilege of the top 1%, both now and historically. I’m all for giving more people these things, but that’s different from being only attracted to the top 1% - that’s just assholish, no matter the gender. People should give the 99% a goddamn chance.
That’s not at all what the OP (jenn) is saying. She’s claiming that immigrants from poor households used to display a certain insecurity that came from them being literally economically insecure, that this made them unattractive to her, and that this has been changing for the better as the living standards of new immigrants and second-gen immigrants rose.
None of the things you saw as being in that comment (“I will always have food and a house without any work or bosses” or “privilege of the top 1%”) are actually in the comment.
And separately, even if that were all in the comment, don’t prescribe dating preferences to other people. People are allowed to be (not) attracted to anyone they damn well please.
None of the things you saw as being in that comment (“I will always have food and a house without any work or bosses” or “privilege of the top 1%”) are actually in the comment.
They are, though.
“No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house, and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease...”
“by some luck and hard work made it to the top, but they had to hustle for it, and it did not come naturally to them; it was not their birthright”—which I described as “being at the top is my birthright”.
And separately, even if that were all in the comment, don’t prescribe dating preferences to other people. People are allowed to be (not) attracted to anyone they damn well please.
This is confusing. Prescription != proscription. I prescribe that people not be fat and sedentary. I don’t thereby think that people are “not allowed” to be fat and sedentary.
oh hey, didn’t know you had a substack! giving it a follow :)
i think the analysis here is a reasonable assessment of one part of the elephant. here are some thoughts on another part, as an asian woman whos dated pretty broadly—my longest relationship was with a west indian, but ive also dated white and asian people.
the white person i dated was from a fairly well to do white family. the asian person was, too; they were adopted as an infant by white parents. the west indian had parents who worked prestigious jobs, grew up in one of the wealthiest and whitest toronto exurbs, and went to lego camp every summer.
all of them had a way of interfacing with the world that i’d describe as something like—without baggage? without bitterness or grievance at the world. a thing some might call “white privilege”, but actually if you look under the hood you might not be surprised to find that it is actually class privilege.
when i was in high school in toronto, there was this dynamic where all the most popular kids were white. you can become pretty popular no matter what your ethnicity is, but it was more like second tier popularity, and there was always something defensive in the posture of these popular minorities. they thought of themselves as second class citizens that by some luck and hard work made it to the top, but they had to hustle for it, and it did not come naturally to them; it was not their birthright.
this was the thing that was unattractive to me, this defensive posture. but when you grow up in a poor immigrant household as a minority, and you knew what it was like to go without, it’s hard not to acquire it.
the interesting thing is that this is changing. asia is becoming wealthier, and when new immigrants come, they no longer start from the very bottom. there are also more 2.5gen and 3rd gen asian kids now; asian immigration into north america didn’t really exist before the 70s-80s, yeah? now there’s more asian kids who come from nice middle class asian american households where they went to summer camp every summer and had like, dogs and backyards and stuff. their parents likely had that defensive posture; but they themselves will not.
i find myself in a few zoomer circles these days. the most jarring thing to me at first was that the popular non-white kids do not have that defensive posture to them at all. confidence looks great on them, every bit as great as it looks on white people. (nb: i live in a college town for a fairly prestigious university, so, selection effects there.)
in a room of ones own, virginia woolf writes about what changed after her aunt died suddenly and left her “five hundred pounds per year for ever”:
and on reading another woman novelist, at the dawn of that being a thing that was a viable career for woman:
she had this whole thing, about how women wrote too defensively, and that this came from their diminished social circumstances. and that as society became more egalitarian, as more women had a room with a door that locked and five hundred a year, she expects to see more and more interesting works by women.
non-white people of dating age historically did not come from backgrounds where they had a room of their own, and the modern equivalent of five hundred a year. this will change. and i think dating preferences will soon change along with it.
Right yes thanks for this insightful comment Jenn. This rings very true when I reflect on my own experiences as well. I think part of my middle-school and high-school attraction to middle-class white women involved factors very similar to the ones you’ve mentioned: a lightness of mannerism, more social confidence and situatedness, their family dinner tables were lively and fun, more likely to read books for fun, their parents actually had friends, etc...
It makes sense that these deep middle class manners take a generation or more to settle in. Similar to this “Room of One’s Own” analysis you’re giving on women writers, I think about Proust’s analysis of Jews in France. Swann, the Verdurins, the narrator himself, they are all the grandchildren of Jewish stockbrokers or traders, and it takes them more than a lifetime to bury this fact and successfully join the social circles of, absorb the mores of, and ultimately supplant the older aristocratic French families like the Guermantes. Cultivating the appropriate lack of baggage and grievance takes generational time.
I generally like and appreciate your comment, but I have one complaint that relates not just to your comment but basically every comment I have ever seen mentioning Virginia Woolf ’s book:
The five hundred pounds per year of passive income are not an equivalent of getting the same amount of money as a salary. They are not an example of equality; most people do not have a passive income. How is it even possible to look at “a woman suddenly started to live like an aristocrat” and conclude “this is what gender equality looks like”? Like, maybe within the subset of aristocrats… but then I think the true lesson is “it is great to be an aristocrat” and “with gender equality, it is also great to be a female aristocrat”.
If I had a passive income of (a modern equivalent of) five hundred pounds per year for ever, I would probably also get better at writing or whatever else I would choose to spend my extra 8+ hours a day on.
LOL, did I just expose myself as an unattractively bitter non-aristocrat by writing this?
But also, how much does this change your argument into “now that more minority boys are among the aristocracy, they are suddenly more attractive”?
I find it fascinating that you have basically succeeded to make a pseudo-PUA advice “don’t be born poor, guys; that will make you bitter and unattractive” sound feminist. :D :D :D
(No offense meant, I still appreciate your insight about the generational changes.)
I would also point out that, despite whatever she said in 1928 about her 1909 inheritance, Woolf committed suicide in 1941 after extensive mental health challenges which included “short periods in 1910, 1912, and 1913” in a kind of insane asylum, and then afterwards beginning her serious writing career (which WP describes as heavily motivated by her psychiatric problems as a refuge/self-therapy), so one can certainly question her own narrative of the benefits of her UBI or the reasons she began writing. (I will further note that the psychological & psychiatric benefits of UBI RCTs have not been impressive to date.)
The point of the OP is that having financial security has significant psychological benefits, and for that it’s not particularly relevant whether the income is active or passive, deserved or undeserved. Though in the historical context, it was comparatively challenging for women to have any income independent from their husband, who was the breadwinner of the household.
I read it differently. That comment was talking about a level of financial security as high as “I will always have food and a house without any work or bosses”, and a level of confidence as high as “being at the top is my birthright”. Let’s be real, these things are the privilege of the top 1%, both now and historically. I’m all for giving more people these things, but that’s different from being only attracted to the top 1% - that’s just assholish, no matter the gender. People should give the 99% a goddamn chance.
That’s not at all what the OP (jenn) is saying. She’s claiming that immigrants from poor households used to display a certain insecurity that came from them being literally economically insecure, that this made them unattractive to her, and that this has been changing for the better as the living standards of new immigrants and second-gen immigrants rose.
None of the things you saw as being in that comment (“I will always have food and a house without any work or bosses” or “privilege of the top 1%”) are actually in the comment.
And separately, even if that were all in the comment, don’t prescribe dating preferences to other people. People are allowed to be (not) attracted to anyone they damn well please.
They are, though.
“No force in the world can take from me my five hundred pounds. Food, house, and clothing are mine for ever. Therefore not merely do effort and labour cease...”
“by some luck and hard work made it to the top, but they had to hustle for it, and it did not come naturally to them; it was not their birthright”—which I described as “being at the top is my birthright”.
This is confusing. Prescription != proscription. I prescribe that people not be fat and sedentary. I don’t thereby think that people are “not allowed” to be fat and sedentary.