If I Speak - 11: Help! My partner’s too posh

Episode Date: April 30, 2024

Ash and Moya answer a Mystery Question about what they’ll do on the left-wing commune of their dreams, before helping a listener deal with class envy in their dating life. Plus: The Tortured Poets Department. Got a problem? Tell us: [e-mail] *Gossip, elevated.* Music by Matt Huxley.

Hello and welcome to a brand new episode of If I Speak, the show which aims for insight but lands somewhere around volubility. With me as always is my co-conspirator, Moya Lothian, John McLean. Moya, how the hell are you? I'm fine. If you were in Die Hard, would you be Hans Gruber or John McLean? I've got a confession. I've never seen Die Hard. Then why why make the reference why wear the band t-shirt because die hard is like one of those films which has been so absorbed into the collective unconscious of pop culture that i feel like i've seen it like i had that with jurassic park for years i didn't see it until like two years ago for the first time in my life because i felt like i'd already seen it and no nothing could have prepared me for just how inappropriately sexy jeff goldblum was as the statistician he had no right to be that oh he is sweating up a storm

in jurassic park oh that's definitely a sexual awakening experience for a lot of people not me i had because i was slightly too young i think but when it came out for it to be my awakening but later it was definitely something i enjoyed i'll say i'll say that i came back to it later like you know how he like read that script he was like okay statistician i'm gonna play him mega erotic just absolutely oozing sex i think jeff goldblum comes from the school of actors like bill murray where off screen they're very difficult and there's you know some uh what's the word negative feedback about their behaviors ranging from the minor to the serious but that means on screen they will deliver a performance of real eccentricity and sometimes eccentricity eccentric yes eccentricity is a word real eccentricity and but sometimes on screen that means that you will just get the most interesting

eccentric left field performance which will sometimes be completely goofy and sometimes just be okay I'm going to play this really erotic in a children's movie about dinosaurs and you know what we love risk takers in the arts and humanity speaking of which before we get cracking with the icebreaker do you have any tortured poets department opinions for us this is the sound of me cracking my knuckles

and locking in some listeners I have a confession to make and I hope you won't judge me for this i've hidden my truth for too long i am a closet swifty but i belong to a special subcategory of closet swifties which is known as the hater swifty who unfortunately uh love some of the music think some of it's absolutely terrible and are just completely fascinated by taylor swift as a cultural figure because she marries

you know this avatar of like pure late stage capitalism um gossip uh what's the word when you attract things lightning rod gossip lightning rod um and is bundled up a lot of questions about like liberal feminism so i think for me she's almost one of the most interesting figures to unpick uh but i also am a swifty and have listened to all her music quite a lot i have good taste as well you know like i listen to Harry Nilsson. I'm cool. But I do have a lot of opinions. I listen to Shostakovich, actually. Yeah, I... It's not all just fucking Taylor Swift.

I have playlists that will appeal to people who pride themselves on their alternativeness, okay? But I have lots of opinions on Taylor Swift. But for the sake of the podcast, I will keep it brief when it comes to the Tortured Poets department. I think, like many people people it really needed an editor it's very bloated she needs to stop working with jack antonoff for a bit because the songs all sound the fucking same even the um aaron destner songs who's the guy from the national who you worked with on uh folklore and evermore um and a bit on midnights as well they you know you can't just lean into one or two contributors when it's producing the same sound but I think Jack Antonoff and her have such similar instincts they're just like going for

synth and going for the big same chorus every single time I also think that she's suffering from a problem that other people have identified which is the music is collapsing under the weight of the law so there's so many easter eggs like Taylor Swift numerology is really a thing I don't really try and get into all that because it's not of interest to me like I don't care about that but that the like to listen to the tortured poets department it's all about law and there's so many little like nuggets that she drops in that you'd have to be acquainted with her previous work to understand but someone I read a really good review I think it was in it wasn't Pace magazine it was another one similar um which basically said that she kind of forgot about the music she's all there's all

this law but it's like when a film is so in like the MCU is so focused on the law and feeding the fans you know these easter eggs that they forget to actually put a plot in it's just law and nothing else however I have created my own tortured poets department cut which is a playlist it's called not shit ttpd which me and my friends are listening to and there's actually like a 3.5 album within the 12 tracks that i've selected from that that i really am enjoying but by no means is this her best album i don't think she's released a really good album i would say since evermore some people would say folklore but she's being bogged down by the re-recording she's doing she's being bogged down by her churn like she churns out an album this it's been less than a year i think since midnights was released and that was bad

um she needs to do a beyonce and go away and come back like actually cut the creatively refreshed because she's she's like there's one line she sings on this album where she's like I cry a lot but I'm so productive where she's talking about you know the weight of her breakups about how she has to go and smile and put on a face and as someone who is a workaholic and prize myself on like churning out work constantly that's actually not good for the quality of your work um you just end up doing it for the sake of doing it instead of really thinking about why am i doing this what am i trying to produce and the songs where she sounds the freshest are the songs either where she's like imitating other people's styles or it is like a break from the jack antonoff um synth and big bleachers chorus

uh whisper whisper versus bleachers chorus um so yeah i have a lot of opinions the tortured pirates department and my main one is she needs to stop surrounding herself with yes men get some no men take a break but i do want to also just make one last point which is at i think the same age or around the same age beyonce was releasing self-titled and people question beyonce's creative ability like yeah obviously she works with lots of songwriters and lots of producers but that woman has a musical ear and has consistently I would say since uh probably since self-titled like four was a transitional album but since self-titled has pushed herself and what her music sounds like forward and tries new things again and again and again and now we're getting some of like the best work Beyonce has ever put out.

But at the same point in her career, she was doing something that was really groundbreaking. And Taylor Swift is a dominant force in the same way that Beyonce is. But I don't think she's actually producing the same sort of creative, she's not meeting the same creative standard Beyonce was at her age.

And if she wants to be a legend like Beyonce is, rather than just like an icon of the moment, I think she needs to like go away and think about what she's doing so I completely agree with you for me it's always been Beyonce at the top of my divas tree and I think that's just also because she's the one that I connected with the most I find her vocally really really interesting the way in which her vocal performances have consistently evolved and I think you're right to compare you know the impact of self-titled to the impact of tortured poets department self-titled changed the way artists drop music forever it completely changed what people think of as the lead up to an album release and i think that

an interesting thing to do is to compare lemonade to tortured poets department because lemonade was obviously intensely autobiographical and was you know very specific and true to beyonce's experience in many ways but also didn't forget that poetry isn't just a series of name drops and that actually every image should be bright and luminous and reaching outwards from itself to resonate with other people's experiences and that's exactly what tortured poets department didn't do for me and to be honest i don't get me wrong i love a big pop cultural moment where everyone's talking about the same thing love that shit but i just don't rate taylor swift and i never have and i think that if you compare her not to beyonce because they're incomparable right just in terms of what they're doing and for me the amount of

craft in it is just different levels but if you say compare taylor swift to lana del rey lana del rey is interesting to me because what she's saying in so much of her work is i will debase myself for you do you want to see how degraded someone can become when they throw themselves into lust and love and desire and attraction it's not pretty you do not end up with a pretty image whereas taylor swift is like look at me crying i'm crying in this way which is very neat and i don't think troubles the prettiness of the femininity within it it's just you know her lines are quite neat they're a bit zingy and i think it lacks the messiness that would make an autobiographical work more interesting to me but i think we may have to move on moya i know no let me say one last thing which is i don't

i don't think beyonce and taylor's incomparable because i think they're both they they are both the titans of sort of the pop industry they are like i think i think they're incomparable in terms of like the creativity and that beyonce is like an amazing performer around whereas taylor can't really sing um but in terms of their dominance of the pop industry i would definitely compare them but i would say as well i would agree with your lana assessment in a bit i think that lana's you know she does create pretty imagery around a very messy thing what i would also say the final thing i would say is it's funny to me that taylor swift has always held up as the american lyricist of her generation because that title actually does belong to lana del rey and a lot of taylor's lyrics are just dud like they used to when she was younger she was like this prodigy they were amazing but I think she's lost a spark

but I also think she'll never come up with something like hello it's the most famous woman you know on the iPad or you took my sadness out of context at the Mariners apartment complex like she's never gonna get that she's never gonna get it she's never gonna get the delivery and it's it's just interesting to me that she's held up as this amazing lyricist where you know Lana Dora is singing like happiness is a butterfly try and catch it every night like um you know hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have but I have it Norman fucking Rockwell one of the greatest albums of this century and I'm not even aana stan like that but that album if you want good if you want to see what taylor's trying to do go to that album god i could talk about taylor for so long and i really shouldn't on that bombshell it's time for our traditional

icebreaker vogue 73 questions minus 70 because we don't have the time or the intellectual property rights moya what do you got for me this week um i've got a hangover question from when i thought i was giving you questions uh based on your birthday week but it's fine uh so first question what advice would you give to your 21 year old self um listen to your gut more and don't be afraid of your own thoughts is there something specific that you think that came to mind when i said that yes because when i was 21 i was in a relationship with someone who was really really wonderful and we were together for a couple of years and he was just like such a morally good guy. But then when I wasn't happy in the relationship anymore,

I robbed him of the right to know that. And so I emotionally checked out, but I didn't want to break up with him because he was such a good guy. And it made me so anxious to the point where I just didn't want to be alone, even like on the tube or the bus, because I was afraid of being alone with my own thoughts. And I think that 21 year old me needed to know that it's not a moral breach to break up with someone just because you're not happy. And that's not a rejection of who they are as a person. It's just saying we're not right for each other at this point in time but i

think it's also just generally good advice don't be afraid of your own thoughts because every stupid thing i've done has been when i've ignored my own thoughts i know lots of 30 year olds that should take that advice i'm 31 years so that's evergreen okay question two what is the one beauty slash skincare product you would want on a desert island it's got to be a simple one cocoa butter is this your moisturizer is that your go-to it is it is my moisturizer because i actually had really really bad eczema when i was a kid and the only thing which works to like calm my skin and the only thing that my skin likes to deal with that is also fragranced in some way is

cocoa butter so if you're on a desert island that's very drying that's very chapping i would say so 100 100 raw cocoa butter eczema hive pause up uh number three what is a place in england that you visited that has surprised you um surprise me in a good way or a bad way either way take it how you want baby cornwall was so racist it was crazy like honestly it's fuck cornwall all day for me one i don't even like pasties they're unseasoned empanadas and the world needs to know and two it was literally like we got to the place where we were staying and like we'll you know dumped our stuff and we're walking down to the beach we've been there 10 minutes literally and someone yelled out the car packy go home and i was like you know what that's the only q i need like hello helicopter get me out

of here but i stuck around for a week i was meant get me out of here. But I stuck around for a week. I was meant to be there for two weeks, but I stuck around for a week and then was like, fuck this, we're going home. Because it was just so bad and so constant. And I did not expect that from Cornwall. Do not rate it. That's really demoralizing.

That's, yeah, that's really sad. I'm's this oh that's yeah that's really sad i'm so sorry that happens because cornwall cornwall is very kind of like a lot of people that you know they have a very strong sense of cornish identity as opposed to english identity and there's all these movements you know independent cornwall etc etc they call it um kernel which i'm not pronouncing correctly i'm really sorry i'm pronouncing that phonetically uh but that is sad that there also seems to be a strong virulent current of white nationalism within you know what you know it's so racist it's so racist they could have their independence movement i'm like be your own country erect a hard border build that wall i'm fine with that i will never trouble you again as a region god okay well pleasantly

surprised by yorkshire though i love yorkshire that's where your husband is from is it not it is and also um my stepdad's family are all from bradford and every time I've been to any part of Yorkshire I've been surprised by something beautiful in nature something beautiful to eat or just a social experience which was unexpected um for all the um stereotypes of like people from Yorkshire being like very gruff and self-contained there's actually a level of friendliness which is just always there it's not loud and it's not you know always like it's not like that but there is just like a general base level friendliness and lack of chilliness which I really really rate about yorkshire so i'm making up for my cornwall hatred by saying how much i love yorkshire because it's not just that i love london and everywhere else can go fuck itself it's cornwall specifically

we have a segment to do ash this segment is as well we're bringing back the mystery question because it was so much fun last time so we're going to juice our producer chal a little bit more get her to ask us a mystery question which should be dinging up my phone at any moment now my phone hasn't made a noise in about eight years oh that this is a first we've got a mystery question are you ready oh i'm not politically equipped to answer this but we can have a go oh my god what will your job be on the commune i've actually given this a lot of thought i've given of course you have you're a communist yeah and i think about what it's going to be like when we've got the belay not the line start that again i've thought about it a lot about what it's going to be like when we've got the

benign totalitarianism of the politburo reigning above our heads i would completely opt out of of politics in the commune and I would not take on any role of analysis or speaking or leadership or nothing what I would do is I would set up a pie shack where every day I would make a savory and a sweet pie option and then everyone could come for their lunch and they would get their savory pie and then they would get their sweet pie for pudding and that's what I would do do you think we should briefly explain what the commune is to people yeah I guess so what does the commune mean to you what does the commune mean to you well the commune obviously we're using as an avatar for sort of a utopian society where there's some this is all I mean the sort of like model that we seem to be using is like the communist non-hierarchical everyone's assigned a role society uh there's equality across the board

this idea of utopia but that like that seems to what the commune kind of takes on in cultural parlance when people like loosely reference oh on the commune i'm going to do this there's no restaurants on the commune um that kind of vibe but maybe you should just outline what the commune technically means okay so obviously a commune can mean life under communism where perhaps the state has withered away um basically your working life isn't defined by the wage relation anymore. And I think that the idea that Marx very vaguely sketches out is that there'll be a lot more self-directed work. So he describes it as being a fisherman in the morning, a carpenter in the afternoon and a philosopher in the evening, and that everyone would be able to do that. So you wouldn't just

be tied to one job, one form of labor. Marx quite famously says I don't write recipes for the cook shops of the future so he's quite vague and undefined about like how everyone doing what they want would add up to productive labor being done across society for the benefit of society's needs um but i think if we if we take that very furry vision of like what would you do if all your work was self-directed and you didn't have capitalism to fight anymore that for me is the meaning of the question and that's why i'd want to open up a pie shack. As someone with ADHD, it sounds like a fucking nightmare. What will I do if my work is self-directed? Well, I'll watch TikTok all day.

I'll do everything except what I should be doing. Like, what do you want to vow? And if there's nothing, if there's no deadlines. Maybe we should make you like a ward of the Politburo. You'd be the one person subject to intensely hierarchical control. If there's no deadlines,

I'm not going to do jack shit are you crazy like there won't be anything done i need just like i need regular structured deadlines i should be awarded the politburo um what would i do i'd need something with i think i would even i mean who knows what i'd be like if we didn't live under capitalism i'd probably be faster better smarter stronger or however the song is um but I think I would probably want to do something in organization I've always felt like I'm a better executor than a leader I don't think I'm very good at leading but I think I'm great if someone gives me a loose instruction at taking it running with it and making it something great um so I quite like to run I don't know if we have venues even under in the commune but I'd like to run some sort of community space with you know arts programming and regular like food it wouldn't be a food bank because you

didn't have that there but like regular communal meals situations um just yeah I'd like to I'd love to run an arts venue I think that would be really ideal for me when I've been out about um working on sort of the documentary projects I'm doing at the moment or interviewing people for pieces the thing I love most is talking to people who run those kind of venues um and meeting people who work in arts I don't think I myself would be someone who like would want to just DJ all the time but I would love to curate and program something like that so I think that would be and I also love administration so I think I could do all the you know the bookings the production stuff like that that that to me sounds the ideal thing I would love going around with your little clipboard just like oh ash talk more about my little

clipboard oh my god wow you'd have a little clipboard and I think you'd have a pen which was on a chain around your neck constantly and so you go it wouldn't be around my neck because I would definitely pull it off and strangle myself but it would be I'd have like three pens because I lose them all the time one tucked into the clipboard one behind my ear one in my pocket and I always carry three pens because at least one gets lost oh that would be great yeah I run the arts venue and you could do a pie pop-up at the arts venue I would love to do a pie pop-up I mean I've got I've got a question for you which is have you ever been a part of a space like an occupation or a squat where you and a group of people have had to come up with the division of labor all yourselves no I've never been part of an occupation

or anything I've had to organize in that sense and I think it's a real missed aspect of my political education um and speaks also to the generation that i was the micro generation i was born in because it was too young to get involved with the student protests when there was occupations at university i was actually quite skeptical of them even though i was and i didn't get involved with the nus side of student politics because i'm not a loser uh sorry i had a life found crying shaking throwing up i had a job and a life i and yeah um so the only sort of like organization when it comes to politics i'd got involved with was really ad hoc stuff for example around uh like the 2019 election when i was kind of like okay i feel

like i want to go canvas and get involved with this stuff but I feel too nervous to actually do it via the you know the official routes the momentum routes or whatever so I just said who else wants to canvas but doesn't really know how to start and then started a group and then because now I had a group that I could just like give directions to it became that became a way of like fortifying my own learning as well so we just kind of we managed to like get you know a couple hundred people out we grouped together and go out canvassing according to the places people were gathering which was really great but I'm not really uh I've never done like real political organizing in that sense I'm I very much came out of university went to journalism like I'm a I'm a journalist with left-wing politics first and foremost rather than an activist or an

organizer I just happen to be very good at doing the grunt work of organization when it happens which is why i also run events on the side this is not bragging by the way like i just i'm very bad at loads of other stuff but i recognize that in another life i'd have been a fucking fantastic pa so i may as well just admit that i mean so that thing about being in a space where you're trying to come up with what your social structure is and how you divide the labor that was something which I did a lot of from my late teens into my early 20s and now you look back on it with a degree of I would say like fond derision because you feel affectionate towards that you know 18 19 year old who you know thought that they were deciding the most important things about how you structure society by being like whose job is it to make you know taboola for 150 people camped out in

the main hall of UCL but yeah I look back with a kind of like fond derision at that 18 year old who was like the most important thing is how we divide the labor of who's going to make the taboo there for like the 150 to 250 people who are here in the Jeremy Bentham room at UCL and the roles that I took on at that first UCL occupation which was in protest of tuition fees being trebled to nine grand this was back in autumn of 2010 the two jobs that I took on were making the dinner which had to be like vegetarian vegan easy and you had to be able to make it without access to like any real like cooking materials so a lot of it was like cold salads and couscous that you could make en masse with like a kettle and looking after the cash donations which is actually how me and Aaron Bastani of Navarra

Media met because there was hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of pounds in cash and it was all like really heavy coins and stuff and I kept on top of it by like counting it and recording how much we had day to day but then had to find a place to hide it so for the first couple of nights I was sleeping around it to try and like guard the money and then I was like that's not actually that secure so I found like a loose ceiling tile where if you went into the kitchenette and then you climbed on top of the sink and then you could push the tile and then you could hide all the money and I did that a couple of times but then it got too heavy for me to like lift right above my head so Aaron I asked to do it a couple of times and he was like underslept and quite

cranky and we became sort of fractious frenemies at that point through like trying to hide this money and then another time when we had squatted a different university building and I think we called it like I can't remember if this was what we called the really free school which was a reference to like coalition era education policy making or if this was the one which was like the bloomsbury social center but i do remember there being this argument about whether or not we should put on workers breakfasts and this is now a time where i look back on it and i realize i was on the wrong side of the argument because there was this discussion about whether or not to put on workers breakfasts as a way of like deepening connections between students and workers in a way which wasn't just going through like

the local unions which were of course all the like lecturers and academics unions um and there was like an objection from some of the women which i joined in with which was like no we're not going to do workers breakfast because it's just going to be women doing all the work and it's just it's radical social work it's not real organizing and now with the benefit of hindsight or as my ex-boyfriend used to put it with the benefit of hind legs i now look back on that and go we were being way too precious about the wrong thing and actually you can deal with the problem of the gender division of labor if and when it comes up but just do the fucking breakfast and maybe it isn't such a bad thing of

like middle class graduate women and educated women and like you know undergraduates are like performing acts of like labor for working class people in the area here's a question do you think that because i think my sort of micro generation, even though we, you know, universities are kind of like, they say a hotbed of radicalism. It goes in both directions, I would say. But I think my micro generation was kind of a more fallow one, even though there was definitely stuff going on. youngins today are having more direct experience of that organization with all this you know the strikes and the new occupations are going on particularly the rent strikes around covid will they be getting that direct experience of trying to reimagine social structures within their environment that maybe mine didn't get as much as yours did well i think that where you are seeing that is in the us right now with the occupation at the columbia

campus in new york at yale texas as well it's all over uh usc um all campuses which are being occupied in solidarity with the palestinian people and are trying to force their universities to divest from israeli corporate connections and i actually think that these students have learned from many of our mistakes looking at what columbia has been doing they've appointed a single spokesperson and that's the one person who can speak to the press and so there's a level of discipline and organization which actually we were very skeptical of because you know we'd all read these very like anarchist horizontalist texts and we sort of saw hierarchy specialization all of these things as like creeping stalin, whereas actually you need like a tiny, like a little soupçon of Stalinism to make your movement actually effective, because organized beats

disorganized every time. So I think that there are places where there is not just like radicalism, which like springs up and, you know, that's it and it's chaotic I actually think that there's a way in which it's building on some of our generations or my generation's failures in a way that makes me feel really happy but yeah I always feel like when someone's like you know when you look at the kids today when you talk to the kids today I'm torn between going what do you mean kids today I am a kid today I'm still young I'm not Methuselah and then the other part of me wants to be like I don't talk to the kids today I'm not a nonce but I don't know I'm quite interested I do think that my there's obviously a lot of people

my particular age and that's why I say micro generation because we are the same generation um and I think people who say things like Gen Z don't really understand how big a generation is or how it works and it doesn't just like cut off there but there's these micro generations where things move so fast that you will have different experiences and the people who were at university say 2011 have a totally different experience than those of us who went after tuition fees were whacked up and the the um conservative government was in full swing or we came at like after 2015 when the majority conservatives got majority that's a totally different experience you will have on expectations you will have of what higher education can give you and the options you have afterwards and also

the environments around it and you know there's loads of stuff now around free speech on campus has always been a an issue that has been you know fought over uh wrangled over since the 70s but the nature of what that is has tied in so much more as well with you know wider culture wars etc so there is there is a different experience that micro generations will have and universities are a really key part of that because so many young people are kind of just made to go to university is because the other options are being shut off and they're like well just become a graduate you'll become a graduate whether that's actually the right path or not so I just am interested and I wonder what it's done to I do think my micro generation is was particularly isolated in some ways um that might

just be a perception but I do get a lot of people like my age wondering how generations before and after organized how they did it like we that's not to say there aren't like you know major activists that were at university with me or like major movements that started being born uh institutions when I was at university but I'm just I don't think there was like the mass movements in the same way I might be forgetting something that we saw with student protests or rent strikes after in 2020 to about 2023 and I'm just I'm quite interested in what that does to a sense of collectivity and your politics because even though I'm left wing I do find myself like constantly fighting against this feeling of being

like the individualism the on my own like I'm you know how do I marry that and I have I have politics that are not as grounded in the theory or even in practice that maybe you do because you have this different background and this you had you came from a different petri dish and one of the things I'm interested in is like what your experience of politics at uni was like did you feel that politics was a matter of things that you say and almost like an exercise of branding yourself so that people know to interact with you in a certain way of certain expectations or with politics something that you thought about enacting or living or embodying in some regard luckily i have a lot of my old blog posts to point to so i think i i thought i had a like more negative view of my past self and

how I would think about politics than was actually present and when I go back and look at some of the posts I wrote my politics was a lot more I think material like the identity politics was massive at the time um when I was at university and there's also lots of stuff around lad culture there was a real pushback about lad culture it was really good um and one of my friends at university was instrumental I won't mention her name because she's very private but she was instrumental in doing that and she's gone on to run some of like the organizations that are just filling gaps that are so important um probably one of the most inspirational people that I know um and she she was very instrumental in like the pushback against

lad culture the particular new university I was at um but yeah identity politics is really big I remember that we talked a lot about representation we had this thing called the wall of bame um which I got included in uh and apparently is still up which is crazy because my fit in the photo that was on that is so bad and I don't want anyone saying that ever but it was because we had in the university there was a whole display of professors and academics in the main hall where you went into and they were all white and so it was very like where are the faces where the face is that but when I look back at the things I was talking about I was talking about stuff like um hostile environment immigration uh there was a camp my university tried to change its name at one point

and I wrote a blog this was my first experiences of having blogs that could actually influence things so I wrote a blog post about how ridiculous it was that they weren't consulted they hadn't consulted students they just announced this like multi hundred thousand pound name change when students were really complaining about the level of investment that was going to their work and they were all these staff redundancies which I think does speak to like a grasp of um actually looking at like the problems that people were facing which was you know the teaching quality isn't very good the working conditions aren't good but yet they're pouring loads of this money into this branding um so I was quite I was quite like nicely surprised when I look back at the way I was writing about politics and thinking about

politics in relation to the lives of people around me there was quite like a worker-based um understanding of it but I also felt disconnected from the movements because I I had I don't know I was like I have left from politics I had, I don't know, I was like, I have left wing politics, I think. And I didn't brand myself as anything. I wasn't like I'm a socialist and this and that. I'm just I just thought of myself as someone who was interested in history, interested in stories and interested in fairness. And that's that's the main kind of thing, like fairness and compassion have always been the things that I talk about when I discuss my political views. have always been the things that I talk about when I discuss my political views whereas I'm very insecure when it comes to being like oh yeah I'm a Marxist or I'm like a Leninist I'm Leninist Marxist Leninist um I don't have these schools of thought I don't and those were not the books that

I was reading I was reading books that were about I don't know transatlantic slavery and the first world war which obviously really political but they're not political theory and I did political theory courses but it wasn't where my passion lay my passion lay in like understanding gender which is again it's all political but it's a different it's different framings and at uni I think there are sets of people that you get who are so into the nuts and bolts um and are like you know I'm a Trotskyist or whatever and they just were fucking annoying so I wanted to work at Urban Outfitters and do my job you know looking back at what I was like at uni there are some things where I feel intensely proud

of things that I did movements I was a part of and there are so many things I'm like oh my god I was just the world's biggest jar like what the fuck um and I think that what was great about that time is that there was an opportunity to learn from so many people so many people who are older than me so many people whose experience of work in the labor market was different, and people who took the time to explain ideas to me. And I think that the occupation that happened at UCL, that was really, really soon after my freshers week. So I was still 18 at that time. And suddenly it's like, here's David Graeber explaining his political theory to you here's someone else you know saying what Leninism is oh look here are two you know

unknown backbenchers called Jeremy Corbyn and John McDonnell coming in like to show their support and so that was a really accelerated experience of politicization which I think may be happening now for the students at Columbia, USC, Texas and Yale and I really hope that it is because it was so important and I think like completely formative to who I am as a person and I actually remember this wasn't that year this would have been a few years later so maybe like 2014 2015 something like that I remember spotting my then husband across a room after a protest where all the people had been part of black block so like wearing the hoodies and masking up had like sort of reconvened. And I remember spotting him and going, oh, who's that guy? We never met or spoke for, you know, a few more years. But I remember distinctly spotting him across the room.

That's Taylor Swift would call that invisible string, just saying. You would call that invisible string. Shall we move on? We should move on, but i just want to give a quick shout out because you mentioned like usc and columbia and i do want to say that uk universities are also involved in these campaigns directly the university of nottingham's had like a long ongoing demilitarization campaign particularly around like stopping killer robots uh newcastle university has a targeted one about the university's contributions to israeli weapons industry obviously goldsmith has an occupation in support of palestine like the students today really are also there is a

radicalization there that i think has happened especially from covid and has been passed on and i think those organizing lessons that you had are you know as you say being picked up being learned and there's there's more discipline how they're done I just think that my micro generation might have missed out so that's why often I say conflicting and confusing things if people wondered where that comes from I'm ignorant I'm ignorant I say conflicted and confusing things all the time. And I was in the particle accelerator that was the UCL occupation of 2010. And that's because humans are conflicted and incoherent. And that's fine. I'm in big trouble, Moya.

Or at least some of our listeners are. Let me help. So this is the section where we discuss audience submitted dilemmas and if you are in a pickle please email if i speak at navarra media.com that's if i speak at navarra media.com and we will hopefully not make your problems worse by discussing them on the air so i'm going to read out number one. My question is about dating across social class. I'm an early thirties gay man living in a big city with two generally bad relationships in the past with partners who were of a significantly higher social class than I. And with the color,

I cannot say this word. And with the corollary financial clout that comes with such, I'm generally pretty aware that my bad behaviours in a relationship are rooted in envy and frustration at my partner's privilege that I perceived they took for granted. One partner never picked up the coffee tab in the three years we were together, the other couldn't fathom a lunch date south of an £80 check, especially when the most recent was a committed leftist, albeit one who downplays class struggle as such in recent years i've generally just focused on hooking up and attending sex parties for the casual no-strings sex positive fun of both but as i maybe consider dating again what

would you recommend as strategies to keep my class envy in check thanks in advance promiscuous marxist that could have been karl marx he was also very promiscuous moya what do you reckon i don't i think why don't you go first i just think stop dating posh shows it's harder than you think ash it's harder than you think no just just just honestly and like the reason why i say this is because i too know the siren call of dating somebody who was incredibly, incredibly posh. And that is the relationship where even though I've had ones which were much bigger car crashes and sort of like spectacularly terrible, this is the one where my self-esteem was the most mangled. And I think it's because there's the superficial charm and way of like drawing you in and then

suddenly it's just like total lack of like reciprocity mutual obligation or warmth and it really fucked my head up until I realized this is just what privately educated men are like and I never dated a privately educated man again and I'm so much happier because of it so just get rid of the poshos there's so many median income men out there there's so many statistically there's so many of them all my boyfriends have been from wealthy backgrounds um there are a range of ethnicities as well this isn't these are not like white people there's only one white one um i've all been from wealthy backgrounds one international school one private school no two private schools one very prestigious private school as well uh so i think i feel like i can speak to this dilemma quite well. How do you kick your public school addiction?

How do you kick? Well, I'm not dating right now. I'm basically celibate. So I'm not sure we have kicked it yet. I'm not in sobriety. I'm in cold turkey. I think my main question is you need to examine why you were attracted to this particular type of posh person

because you're not just attracted to people who are of a higher economic class than you you're attracted to people of a higher economic class who don't have any class empathy because when I've been in relationships with these you know these people who were of who had better financial family backgrounds than me or and had usually because of that got better jobs at the time i was dating them um they would still split stuff like they would one of my partners actually did a thing where he 60 40 weighted it so until i started making more money then he would weight the bills 60 40 which is totally reasonable and fair so but you're dating people who won't pick up coffee tabs and can't

do a lunch for less than 80 pounds that is interesting to me what is it what is it about those particular intersections of lack of class empathy and really posh that attracts you do you want to resent people in your relationship are you attached to having the chip on your shoulder see the thing that i would maybe suggest because this actually happened with a very good friend of mine not that long ago which is they were very very attracted to somebody who not only came from private school background but like all his friends did as well and i think that there can be this phenomenon where we become fascinated by the social class which is directly above us so you know for this person they were from like a middle class

background didn't go to a fee-paying school but I think there were elements within their family where the character traits and qualities and habits of the class directly above were seen as aspirational so along comes this guy and his social group and they were just like drawn like a moth to the flame for the whole thing and actually now with a bit of distance they're looking back on that and they're like actually these weren't nice people and they weren't nice to each other and they weren't nice to me and the entire model of interaction that they had as a social milieu was horrible but I felt so much like I wanted to be a part of it because that's what I was taught to think of as aspirational and I think for me my ex posho was not just like one level of class above me but like many many levels

of class above me and i think that there was an element of fascination for me i was thinking wow how do you people live what were your experiences like my nose was pressed up against the window and i think that may have also been incredibly unattractive to him this feeling of here's this woman here's this girl who just wants more and more access to me and wants more and more of who I am and I think what he had learned from being at boarding school is that you have to keep people as far away from the core of the self as possible so it was a dynamic which made me feel really really rejected and really really sad and you know post breakup I felt very resentful about that and I felt resentful about my lack of dignity it felt like I was in a very undignified position and so yeah I wonder if for our listener the reason why

he's attracted to these posh guys who are in some way showing a complete lack of interest for your experience who you are and what your needs are is there some element of class fascination because that's not your background and your nose is up against the window yeah do you like do you also get satisfaction from thinking that these people are not treating you well in some ways is there a level of like confirmation bias when you date these these bad poshos and you're like ah look how rotten they are inside like look how they fail to value me like they're exactly what I thought they were these people of that class so it's not just the aspiration there's also like you get to fulfill out your resentment fantasies at these people being both privileged and soul rotten is how I

describe it I think there's elements of that as well. I mean, I think the last thing that I want to say is that that doesn't mean that you have to be the same in every way as someone that you're dating in order to have a really strong connection. It's just that in my experience, social class is the difference which can be most toxic in some ways if there's a big difference

between the two of you but differences is the origin of curiosity and fascination um me and my partner have very very different backgrounds it's just there isn't such a huge difference in class background there's of course a difference in in like relative privilege because I grew up in London and he didn't and so that means that there's London property wealth in my family which is a very very different thing even if you're you know family own homes elsewhere in the country but it's not like I went to like Rodin or B deals or something and I'd been It's not like I went to like Rodin or BDLs or something and I'd been socialized into a completely different way of viewing other people. Because I do think there's something so fucked and antisocial and dehumanizing about the way private schools socialize their pupils to look at other people i think that they are child abuse factories and they should be closed down every single one

i do think that private schools teach their pupils to look at everyone else as sort of like these weird aliens that they and what this produces is either a massive disdain in some of them but other people who don't come the same background or it produces a real sense of guilt and fetishization that's something i've also found with private school paramours who um just endlessly trying on like marginalized identities uh or attaching themselves to like marginalized identities to try and offset the guilt they feel and the shame they feel at being in such an environment at a young age and all the neuroses it comes with but also not having not equipped to actually deal with their own insecurities

because private school teaches you just to sort of barrel on um the e in bame stands for eaten yes actually okay so do you have any final thoughts on how to keep class envy in check ash just don't date posh shows don't do it i don't think that's helpful because this person i think will need to wean themselves off the posh shows and you need to start no cold turkey no because i'm doing that and I still don't know if when I go back in will I end up with a pocho um maybe you need like the equivalent of like I don't know what like methadone would be in this case maybe it's someone who went to a grammar school I think it also probably is the circles you're running in there's probably something about that where are you meeting these

people where have you been is it is it apps or is it somewhere else like if it's an app then it's a specific vibe you're going for um if it's somewhere else then you need to examine the circles you're running in and where you're pulling your pool of sexual partners from but i think with class envy you need to first of all look at why you would stay with people who are treating you with such little empathy because that isn't standard that is that is the sign of like that is the it's egregious resentment you will build up in that relationship um and but you're obviously there's something you're clinging on to there otherwise you wouldn't have done it twice i think that's smart but also go cold turkey just do it just wean yourself off the postures ask what

school they went to first and foremost and then if they say one that i mean actually if the only people who ask what school you went to went to private schools themselves yeah because how are you gonna know they ask you that question sorry if you ask what school did you go to it implies a knowledge of the system of schools if i say what's like if i said what school you go to i would not recognize the school like if you say i don't know you say queen mary county or whatever i don't know what that is i've got no idea like the only ones i'd recognize is eton the first time that i went uh i ever did news night i remember a very posh person in the green room went so what school did you go to and i thought they were just interested in me so i was like oh enfield county

and they were like glazed over immediately i'd failed the the test. Anyway, this has been If I Speak. I've been Ash Sarkar. Who have you been? I've been Moira. This has been a very education heavy If I Speak. I know. What's that about? Turns out you never ever leave school

and that's why Taylor Swift exists for people whose identity was fixed in year nine and has never changed. Anyway, see you next week bye goodbye