We Need a Good Argument Unrelated to the Election. This Should Do Just Fine.

I confess that when I opened this Jacobin piece on the New Victorians creating top-down moral values through consumption, I thought, “oh great another Jacobin hot take on something that does not need to be said.” But then I actually kind of agreed with a lot of this.

For example, listening to music became an educational — rather than entertaining — experience. The eighteenth century’s classical chamber music functioned as a pleasant soundtrack for aristocratic soirees. At concert halls, the nobility would canoodle in their boxes, only half paying attention to the performers.

But when the rising capitalist class attended concerts, they did not gab away in a convivial fashion: they sat still and demanded silence, in order to concentrate on the music.

German Victorians coined the term Sitzfleisch — sitting flesh — to describe the muscle control required for sitting absolutely still during a concert performance. Even coughs and sneezes had to be stifled, lest they break anyone’s concentration and derail self-improvement.

The quest for Bildung saturated daily life as well. Wealthy young women, who could not hope for any career beyond wife and mother, learned at least one other language and took piano and singing lessons. Men often spent their evenings attending lectures or participating in civic organizations.

For this dedication to pay off, however, these enriched Victorians had to display it, making their difference from both the wealthier and the poorer obvious to all.

So how about today:

Victorians were famously averse to physical activity — which was for the proles — and they saw carrying extra weight as a marker of class and respectability. Fitness and sport began to infiltrate middle-class life in the twentieth century, and today serves the same function as the promenade.

This first struck me nine years ago. I was living in Grand Rapids, Michigan, and enjoyed riding my bike as a way to explore an unfamiliar place. One day, I decided to visit East Grand Rapids, a very wealthy suburb, because it has a bike path around Reeds Lake.

Once I arrived, I immediately realized that I was the only person not wearing exercise clothing. This is not to say everyone was exercising — most were out for a stroll, much like their predecessors — but they were dressed for the gym. The other cyclists all wore tight-fitting spandex outfits, as if they were at the starting line of the Tour de France.

These clothes were sending a message: “Make no mistake, we are not walking or riding bikes for transportation. This is exercise.” The wealthy residents of East Grand Rapids had turned a walk in the park into a fitness routine; their athleisure wear proclaimed that this activity was an act of improvement.

Current exercise trends, like hot yoga, spin, and CrossFit, all demonstrate a commitment to self-denial and self-discipline, values much praised by the Victorians. Marathon running has become the ultimate signifier: competitors can post photos on social media to prove to everyone that they have tortured their bodies in a highly virtuous — and not at all kinky — fashion.

This seeps over into everyday activities as well. Trader Joe’s and Whole Foods are filled with people dressed in workout gear with no sweat in sight. This clothing marks its wearers as the type of people who care for their bodies, even when they aren’t exercising. Yoga pants and running shoes display virtue just as clearly as the nineteenth-century wives’ corseted dresses did.

Being fit now indexes class, saturating both fitness and food culture. As calories have become cheaper, obesity has changed from being a sign of wealth to a sign of moral failure. Today, being unhealthy functions as a hallmark of the poor’s cupidity the same way working-class sexual mores were viewed in the nineteenth century.

Both lines of thinking assert that the lower classes cannot control themselves, so they deserve exactly what they have and nothing more. No need, then, for higher wages or subsidized health care. After all, the poor will just waste it on cigarettes and cheeseburgers.

Both then and now, these purported health differences register disgust with working-class bodies. In The Road To Wigan Pier, George Orwell discussed his late-Victorian upbringing, writing that he was trained to believe “that there was something subtly repulsive about a working-class body.” In Orwell’s time, soap — not fitness — made that distinction; he was taught that, in his words, “the lower classes smell.”

Nowadays, the Internet registers cross-class horror on websites like People of Wal-Mart. Instead of being repulsed by the “great unwashed,” the modern Victorians blanch at the “great overfed.”

While the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie saw full figures not as embarrassments to be eradicated, but as comforting signs of their prosperity, their spiritual descendants are obsessed with eating the right kinds of food. In the last fifteen years, organic food has gone from fringe phenomenon to absolute necessity.

Sure, it’s a broad comparison. But there’s also at least a nugget of goodness there. The wealthy do shame the poor and the middle class does set bodily norms that working people are told to acquiesce to–nowhere more so than breastfeeding.

Child-rearing practices get more onerous with each passing year, demanding that parents exercise extreme discipline and self-denial. A recent book — All Joy And No Fun — sounds like music to a Victorian’s ears. What could be more frivolous and less educational than fun? There’s no time for it amidst the demands of modern parenting.

Mothers must breast-feed for an extended period, provide only organic food to their children, and keep screen time to nil. Slip-ups indicate failure. This represents perhaps the clearest link between Victorian values then and now: both restrict women and reinforce gender hierarchy.

It is hardly coincidental that these new expectations require money and time. A working mother who has to juggle multiple service-sector jobs will find it much harder to pump breast milk at work than a woman in an office job. (Not to mention the disparity in parental leave between white- and blue-collar workers.)

The moralistic imperatives now attached to breast-feeding allow working-class women — who are less likely to breast-feed — to be judged moral failures. Indeed, public battles over breast-feeding restrictions rarely extend to demands for better lactation access for working-class women.

So tell me how terrible this is and how I am terrible for liking it. We all have aggression to get out today.