Image: Old Boy Network, by Martin Kingsley.

So, Sandra Tsing Loh’s recent essay in the Atlantic Monthly convinced me to run down to the university library yesterday and borrow myself a copy of Paul Fussell’s Class: Style and Status in the USA.

The (rather simple, unassuming) sentence that follows resonated to such an extent that I felt compelled to text message it to some of my nearest and dearest:

If you feel no need to explicate your allusions or in any way explain what you mean, you are probably talking with someone in your class.

But it wouldn’t have made sense without my explicitly connecting it to other things I’d thought and written about in the past (not on this blog, or else I’d, uh, link it here), so I didn’t.

In thesis terms, I’m interested in “class” not in the rich = good and poor = bad way most of us are used to thinking about it, but as a highly complex form of classification, by which certain behaviours and attributes - in this case, sexual ones - are associated with different degrees of social status, depending on who you talk to. Money comes into this, but it’s far from the whole story.