I slept with a classist and here's what I learned about British society
First of all I want to set the scene. I had just entered Oxford University to read for a degree in German and Arabic. This was a weird experience for me, coming from a very working class background, my family were mostly ex-miners, ex-military, or had professions in tiling, joining or plumbing trades. Suddenly the question: "What do your parents do?" was answered with things like "CEO", "City Lawyer" or "MP". But this didn't matter, people liked to push the idea that Oxford was a meritocracy and so background didn't matter. And sure enough I didn't feel like it did.
That was until one night when I was talking on Grindr to this one guy doing a Phd in Musicology. He was good looking and we hit it off. We went for a drink a few nights later and had mostly good conversation. He would occasionally make jokes about me being Northern, which is just a part of the fabric of British society. North/South banter and rivalry is all in good taste after all. Anyway as the night progressed the conversation started to circle around my accent and the mocking of how I pronounced certain words. I'm from Stoke-On-Trent, and locally we pronounce the "oo" sound in words like "Book" and "Hook" as a long "ooo" rather than an "u". This was apparently highly amusing.
Eventually, we left the pub and went back to his. What happened next was pretty standard. I'll leave you to fill in the gaps.
I left in the morning and went on with my life, only slightly more conscience about the way I spoke, slowly realising that nobody I knew here spoke with the same accent.
A few weeks later the guy messaged me again (we had progressed to Facebook at this point), and asked if we could grab another drink. I was avoiding writing a couple of essays at the time and so I agreed. We met for a pint in the pub just across from my accommodation block, and again conversation started well but soon descended into a mocking of my background. This time however my accent wasn't the main focus of discussion. Somehow we got on to talking about food, and he had taken to making a joke of the fact that I hadn't ever eaten guinea fowl or actually knew what it was, (it's sort of like a small chicken according to my subsequent google searches). I explained that nobody I knew back home would be able to identify a guinea fowl in a line-up of various poultry. And then we got back to the ritual jokes about the North. Because the ability to identify guinea fowl is the difference between civilised and non-civilised peoples, apparently.
Anyways after a couple of drinks we decided to head back to mine. I wasn't thrilled by the conversation but the sex was good last time and I really didn't want to write an essay that night, so he was a convenient excuse for me to avoid doing any actual work. When we got to my room, he immediately noticed the cans of baked beans and a bag of pasta that I had on one of my shelves, and sure enough the jokes about my working class diet recommenced. Eventually he shut up long enough to have sex, and then he left. Thank god.
Once more a few weeks later this whole routine happened again. Drinks, chat, jokes, sex. Only this time he didn't leave until the morning and we had perhaps the most awkward pillow talk ever. He asked about my work back home, and I said I worked as a bartender before coming to uni. He then went on to make the jokes which have now become so predictably routine I could probably recite them from memory. All of them this time centred on the assumption that I had no sexual restraint because I was in a low paid job. He didn't put it so bluntly, but anyone with an ounce of intelligence could work out that's what he meant.
All of this contributed to a very uncanny sense of self-consciousness which I had never before felt in my life. What I learned from my encounters with this upper-middle class Musicologist from London, was that the issue of Class is far from dead in British society. The way we speak, what we eat, our culture, our professions, and our relationships are all relentlessly mocked by the middle classes. At Oxford, a university that can probably be described as a playground for the middle class elite, true working-class students stick out like a sore thumb, and we are put down for this daily. The idea of there being a pure 'meritocracy' is merely a façade used by members of the middle classes to justify their attacks on working-class people as just friendly banter. It's not banter. It's all part of a systemic structure of discrimination designed to keep people in their places and protect middle class institutions for middle class people.
We need to start a dialogue about Class in the same way as such dialogues exist to tackle issues around Race, Sexuality and Gender.
Share This Article
