![]() Occasionally, one will swoop down from their lofty ivory tower and make conversation with a lowbrow. Lowbrows can’t engage with highbrows, or so the black polo neck wearing brigade will have you believe. Highbrow people only like other highbrow people. Sure, they’ve lost their punch a bit over the years but there’s nothing more fascinating than how people interact with each other – all of life is in those programmes highs and lows. But don’t kid yourself, The Only Way Is Essex when it first launched was nothing short of revolutionary. We rarefy high culture and dismiss low culture as banal or obvious. Well, it’s time to call bullshit on this social acceptable bigotry. Read any Jane Austen novel (particularly Emma) or watch films like Clueless and Legally Blonde and you’ll see a recurring theme: women are expected to better themselves or they’re ridiculed and dismissed as bimbos. It’s OK to take selfies, but only if you know the story of Narcissus off by heart. There’s an implicit sexism in the dismissal of women who like clothes, celebs and pop music as though that somehow precludes us from being interested in anything else. Woolf was right about one thing in her attack on the reviewer who dared to dismiss her as being middlebrow: highbrow was then, and is often now, a term reserved for and cherished by men. To be fair, Woolf was a big old snob (but nobody’s perfect are they). She thought middlebrows were bit old cultural sluts, flitting between high and lowbrow culture – the sort of people who would buy fake old furniture as opposed to antiques. There was, she said, a ‘battle of the brows’ taking place in popular culture and she was totally mortified to be categorised as middlebrow as opposed to highbrow along with the likes of Shakespeare. It is a term, so insulting, that Virginia Woolf fully lost her shit in 1932 because a reviewer at the New Statesman suggested that her work was not highbrow, but middlebrow. not difficult enough to prevent riff raff like me understanding it. It is a highbrow way of dismissing art and literature which is ‘accessible’ i.e. When I got home, alone because I think we both knew there was no point trying to flog a stone cold dead horse, I googled ‘middlebrow’. We’d known each other for a while, and we were around an hour into this particular date – one of many failed attempts to make a match that looked so great on paper but totally failed in all other departments work. I was once on a date when the person sat opposite me (a very smug intellectual PHD type) looked at me straight in the eyes and said: ‘you’re actually pretty middlebrow, aren’t you’? I wasn’t sure if it was a compliment or not, the way his lips curled upwards in a half smile as he said it suggested not. This phenomenon has, perhaps, been exacerbated by the likes of Tinder and Facebook which group our interests as tiny thumbnail ‘likes’ – indicators to potential friends and bedfellows as to how compatible we may or may not be based on our TV viewing tastes. We do it with women in particular, as though our every one of us is defined by her interests: she’s an idiot, she’s a bimbo, she’s an intellectual, she’s boring, she’s cool, she’s plastic, she’s nerdy, and so on and so on ad nauseam. We like to put one another into nice, neat categories. I’m not supposed to admit to all of that at once. I also like, in no particular order: Virginia Woolf (essays especially), Talking Heads (This Must Be The Place), German techno (the really dark industrial kind), philosophy (Ancient Greek and C20th), Britney Spears (especially circa Toxic and double denim), celebrity gossip (lists from A-Z), Phil Collins (every single rubbish song), feminist theory (all sorts), politics (I actually read Hansard) and fashion (not shopping, fashion bbz). I get excited when they announce a spin off: Kourtney and Khloe Take The Hamptons Was My Favourite. It’s not a ‘guilty pleasure’ nor is it something I watch ‘ironically’, I genuinely enjoy watching it. I’m not going to attempt to ascribe a philosophical framework to the show in order to legitimise my love of it or attempt to sound cool, I’m just going to leave it there. I really like Keeping Up With The Kardashians. Hi my name is Vicky Spratt and I’ve got something I need to confess.
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