Hi my name is Vicky Spratt and I’ve got something I need to confess. I really like Keeping Up With The Kardashians. 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. It’s not a ‘guilty pleasure’ nor is it something I watch ‘ironically’, I genuinely enjoy watching it. I get excited when they announce a spin off: Kourtney and Khloe Take The Hamptons Was My Favourite.
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’m not supposed to admit to all of that at once. I know. It confuses people. We like to put one another into nice, neat categories. 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. 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.
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. 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.
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’. It was an insult. It is a highbrow way of dismissing art and literature which is ‘accessible’ i.e. not difficult enough to prevent riff raff like me understanding it.
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. 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. 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. To be fair, Woolf was a big old snob (but nobody’s perfect are they).
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. 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. It’s OK to take selfies, but only if you know the story of Narcissus off by heart.
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.
Well, it’s time to call bullshit on this social acceptable bigotry. We rarefy high culture and dismiss low culture as banal or obvious. But don’t kid yourself, The Only Way Is Essex when it first launched was nothing short of revolutionary. As was Big Brother. 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.
Highbrow people only like other highbrow people. Lowbrows can’t engage with highbrows, or so the black polo neck wearing brigade will have you believe. Occasionally, one will swoop down from their lofty ivory tower and make conversation with a lowbrow. When they return to their four course enlightenment France-style dinner party circle they’ll talk about how ghastly it all was, how mindless, how shallow and take comfort in reciting Proust quotes which are met with approving nods, this makes them feel the warm fuzz of acceptance. Or worse still, they attempt to apply philosophical analysis to Celebrity Love Island and totally ruin its appeal in the process.
Highbrow is basically synonymous with intellectual; it also means elite. Lowbrow is, basically, an insult; it is applied to a person who is felt (by highbrow people) to have little or no taste. Middlebrow, worse still implies that you’re lost in cultural no man’s land somewhere in between (think something along the lines of if Netflix series The Crown was a person).
It’s time to call this false cultural divide out for what it is: self congratulatory snobbery disseminated by highbrows. We need both ‘low’ and ‘high’ culture to coexist in our cultural ecosystem, where they interact with each other whether we realise it or not.
Challenge yourself when you want to, read a bit of James Joyce or pick up a copy of The Delta Of Venus. Then go lowbrow, binge on Kylie Jenner’s Snapchat. As Diana Vreeland once said: ‘we all need a splash of bad taste.’
I’m not highbrow. I’m not lowbrow. I’m not middlebrow. I’m allbrow and proud.
Liked this? You might also be interested in:
Booze All Weekend and Nutribullet All Week: It's Generation Offset
The Peter Pan Generation: Why 20-Something Women Just Can't Grown Up
Follow Vicky on Twitter @Victoria_Spratt
This article originally appeared on The Debrief.