Low-Middle-Highbrow

The Taste That Dare Not Speak Its Name

Devin Friedman

HERE’S SOMETHING I’M AFRAID to say out loud. I like Feist. I know I’m not supposed to like Feist. I’m not even sure how I know that, but I do. Her voice is too pretty, edgeless, located only in the most harmonically pleasing register. Saying you like Feist is like not having an opinion, the greatest offense in certain Internetty precincts of our contemporary culture. You might as well say you like chocolate or potato chips. It says nothing about you. It’s not curated. It doesn’t say what we most want our music to say about us: I used to read Pitchfork.com until it got lame. You can’t like Feist, in other words, because it’s middlebrow. And loving the middlebrow is an unforgivable crime against taste. Loving something makes you interesting –in some ways the lowbrow is actually higher-brow than highbrow. Watching The Real Housewives of Atlanta or being into shitty peasant sandals from Vietnam or low-res porn– that you can sing from the rooftops. But if you like Feist, it’s like you might as well tell people you’re having a wonderful sexual affair with your mother. Because you know who likes the middlebrow? The unacceptable. Boring people. The easily manipulated. But fuck it. I was in Le Pain Quotidien the other day (middlebrowest chain of them all), and some Feist came on, and my mood brightened a little bit. Because you know what? I like potato chips. I like chocolate. And if Feist isn’t middlebrow enough for you, I will offend your fashionable sensibilities by saying that I, from time to time, enjoy hearing songs by Sting. I’ve never admitted that, even to myself. But (as long as it’s not from Ten Summoner’s Tales) I would gladly listen to Sting while I consume a three-pound fajita burrito at Chipotle wearing a J.Crew suit and reading Jonathan Franzen with Friday Night Lights on in the background. These are all things that make me happy to consume. And they are all middlebrow.

It’s not totally fair, of course, to classify Sting with J.Crew. They really belong to two different species of middlebrow. Because the middlebrow –having been subjected to the marketing genius of a generation that’s obsessed with the niche and constitutionally opposed to the middlebrow– now knows how to disguise itself as something else. Anyone can admit to liking J.Crew and Franzen (Chipotle is more polarizing, I don’t know why), because J.Crew and Franzen are really a new kind of middlebrow. The high middlebrow. Again the point here isn’t to put down anything listed above, except Sting, whom I hate even when I like him, like an unpopular girl you’re attracted to in junior high school. Pulling off the high middle, that takes enormous skill. The high middlebrow is middlebrow product for folks who say they hate the middlebrow. Which they probably don’t.

People tend to hate the middlebrow because of its embarrassingly earnest desire to be liked, its scientific and successful approach to hitting people’s pleasure buttons. It points out the obvious fact that you’re not as much an individual as you’d like to think, that human beings are designed to like chocolate and potato chips and Jack Purcells. That’s where the high middle differs… If you’re still having trouble classifying all this stuff, it may only be because you possess a durable sense of logic. What the high middle does is further mess with and already totally whacked-out logic of what’s high –and lowbrow now. I mean, is a T-shirt highbrow just because it costs $345 and says Maison Martin Margiela on it? Part of the anxiety here is being able to figure out at any moment what brow anything is.

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Think Again: Prostitution

“We Should Rescue Prostitutes From Brothels.”

NOT NECESSARILY.

by Aziza Ahmed

[Fragment]
On top of arguing for criminalization, some abolitionists agitate for actively removing people from the sex industry –that is, entering brothels in “raids”, pulling sex workers out, and placing them in rehabilitation programs. Proponents of rescues, whose views dominate many anti-trafficking organizations, have secured substantial international funding. The U.S. government, for example, has given grants to organizations like the International Justice Mission (IJM), a faith-based group headquartered in Washington, D.C., and the Anti-Trafficking Coordination Unit of Northern Thailand, both of which actively promote rescues.

                But rescues are often far from heroic. IJM has been criticized for failing to distinguish between sex workers and trafficking victims. Describing the response among people pulled from a Thai brothel in a 2003 IJM raid, a sex worker advocate told the Nation, “They were so startled, and said, ‘We don’t need rescue. How can this be a rescue when we feel like we’ve been arrested?’” More recently in Thailand, law enforcement has scrambled to respond to U.S. criticisms of the country’s anti-trafficking record by stepping up raids. “[In 2012], the Royal Thai Police ordered all police units to spend at least 10 days each month doing anti-trafficking work.” Gen. Chavalit Sawaengpuech told Public Radio International (PRI) this past October. In effect, PRI noted, the police are “trying to meet a quota… even when there isn’t data or evidence indicating the sex workers they are rescuing are victims after all.”

                Violence perpetrated by local authorities during raids has also been documented from South Asia to Africa to Eastern Europe. In 2005, the World Health Organization (WHO) wrote in a bulletin that “research from Indonesia and India has indicated that sex workers who are rounded up during police raids are beaten” and “coerced into having sex by corrupt police officials in exchange for their release.” The bulletin added, “The raids also drive sex workers onto the streets, where they are more vulnerable to violence.” So rampant have these problems with police become in Cambodia that, last June, more than 500 sex workers rallied in Phnom Penh, chanting, “Save us from saviors.”

                Also troubling are some of the rehabilitation centers –run by NGOs, churches, or governments– where “rescued” sex workers are placed. These centers profess to offer medical care, counseling, and vocational training. Yet many are known for perpetrating violence, detaining individuals, and separating them from their families. The WHO bulletin stated that some Indian and Indonesian sex workers are “placed in institutions where they are sexually exploited or physically abused.” In Cambodia, Human Rights Watch (HRW) has documented beatings, extortions, and rape at government rehabilitation sites. And in the state of Maharashtra, India, in addition to holding women for long periods of time, a rehabilitation home has suggested that marrying them off is a mode of rehabilitation.

               The rescue approach certainly makes for good optics. It has been covered, notably, by Nicholas Kristof of the New York Times, who live-tweeted a brothel raid in 2011. And the impulse to protect is surely a noble one. But in addition to ignoring that some people choose to sell sex, rescues have subjected sex workers to a whole host of abuses –a fact certainly problematic for the abolitionists who champion such interventions in the name of human rights. 

-Foreign Policy 

(Jan/Feb 2014)

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