This is your weekly installment of WTF is going on because, these days, a lot can happen in a week…
This week we have to talk about Hetty Douglas, the South London-based Nottingham-born artist who went viral after stranger shaming three workmen in a central London McDonald’s on her Instagram story with the caption ‘these guys look like they got one GCSE’. The story initially intended to be seen by her 15k followers, was then screen grabbed and tweeted by one of her followers alongside a picture of her with the retort ‘and you look like a spoiled rich girl gentrifying south London’. The rest is already social media history.
Do I think what Douglas did was abhorrent? Yes. Do I condone it? No. But, do I think some of the abuse she is receiving online is justified? Absolutely not, she is being targeted with death threats, rape threats as well as sexist and homophobic abuse which is never ever warranted.
The interesting question here is not what happened (stranger shaming in what you think are fleeting videos is hardly uncommon and Douglas isn’t the only culprit of this), nor is it why (Douglas, whether or not she is a ‘snob’ as people say, behaved very badly), it’s why this particular instance of stranger shaming, committed by this particular person occurred. So, why has the story of Hetty Douglas started to look an awful lot like the harrowing robotic killer bee episode of Black Mirror?
One the one hand, as DrAaron Balick has explained to The Debriefwhen we engage in stranger shaming via our phones we aren’t thinking about the audience beyond ourselves and when people pile on someone for doing a bad thing, as they have with Douglas, it’s a way of making themselves feel better but pointing out that someone else is a worse person than they are.
Balick neatly explained this in psychological terms:
‘Our psychology hasn’t changed since hunter gathering times, so social media doesn’t cause an Othering but it enables it in a steroidal kind of way.'
'There are two otherings at work here: Hetty Others the builders, then people Other her. People Other to create identity groups and categories where they feel safe on the inside and put the bad stuff outside. But social media enables us to objectify others easily.’
That’s the psychology which, although complex, makes sense. It’s what Jon Ronson dealt with at length in his book. So, what else is it that Douglas has tapped into in our collective psyche that has caused such ire and vitriol? It’s got to be class.
To be clear, it’s worth noting that when her Instagram story went viral there was no definitive confirmation of either Douglas’s class or financial status, people made assumptions based on her Instagram feed (she has since issued an apology in which she says she 'comes from an ordinary family and went to a comprehensive'). As an artist who posts about Job Seeker’s Allowance, works in Supreme and, according to The Sun, has a builder father, her social status, like many of ours, is complex.
We live in one of the wealthiest societies in the world, but that wealth is enjoyed by a tiny proportion of the population. This is also a country where money can transcend class but only in material terms, there are still landed gentry or what you might term aristocracy and, often, we find them at the very highest levels of our political institutions. Take David Cameron, for instance. Or Boris Johnson. It doesn’t matter how much money you make, how many degrees you have or, even, what job you do - you will never be truly accepted by these people. We also live in a time when the gap between the ‘have’ and ‘have nots’ has been severely tested by a serious and long-lasting economic crisis.
There are very few people in this country who don’t have some sort of anxiety about either their own class or that of others. It shouldn’t be this way but it is because, fundamentally, this a country where you are defined by what you do or don’t have. That is always going to cause social anxiety, how can it not?
The National Centre for Social Research conducted a survey last yearwhich discovered that most people in this country think of our society like a pyramid. It has a small elite at the top, more people in the middle and most at the bottom. They found that the class divide is ‘alive and well’, in part because of years of austerity and found that this could explain the widespread ‘disaffection’ behind the decision of so many people to vote Leave in last year’s EU referendum.
The report also found that the majority of people consider themselves to be working class, 60% as opposed to 40% who said they thought they were middle class, despite the fact that many of those people did would you would term managerial or professional jobs.
What this tells us is that class isn’t necessarily about how money you have or what job you do, it’s about your wider attitudes, where you come from and your family’s history. In 1997 Labour’s John Prescott supposedly said ‘we’re all middle class now’ and, maybe, on paper in relative economic terms that’s true but that doesn’t change how people feel about class.
Could the vitriol Douglas received be a symptom of all of this? Her Instagram account seemed almost like a People Just Do Nothing-esque parody the much-maligned character of a liberal elite. An artist, who identifies as working class and ‘snobbily’ sneered at strangers for having less of an education than she has been fortunate enough to receive. She herself may well not feel that she is middle class, but that’s beside the point. At a time when this country is divided along class lines, she represents the very sort of person that so many people feel is responsible for ‘holding Britain back’ and perpetuating liberal orthodoxy. At this point, Douglas is a symbol onto which people can project frustration about a broader social system which, if we’re honest with ourselves, hasn’t been working (see the housing crisis, see more educated graduates than ever and fewer well-paid jobs, see globalisation, see the digitisation of many professions).
We don’t talk about class in my family. I’m middle class, my parents are what I’d call first generation middle class (particularly on my mum’s side) but her parents are decidedly working-class people who made enough money to become middle class. They are the living embodiment of social mobility. To meet them, you wouldn’t know that they once lived in a council house. You wouldn’t know about how little they had. Why? Because they’ve spent their entire lives working hard at appearing middle class because that’s what people do. And yet, I know they do this guiltily.
When I got into Oxford, the first person in my family to go to university, they were proud. I saw tears in both my grandad’s and my dad’s eyes. Before I left I will never forget what my Nan said to me: ‘don’t come back too good for us’. It was the moment that the received pronunciation presentation she puts forward to the world slipped and she revealed the true anxiety that comes attached with social mobility. Like my dad and my grandad, her response was a heady combination of pride and fear. Fear because where I was going was so very alien to them, it is not somewhere they could have gone when they were young. It turned out to be very alien to me when I got there, but that’s another story.
When I became a journalist, their horror was palpable. Why couldn’t I be a lawyer, a teacher or a banker? Those are all professions that ensure financial stability and concrete middle-class status, only posh and wealthy people are supposed to become creatives. I realised that they weren’t disappointed in my career choice as much as worried that it wasn’t a concrete enough marker of financial stability and middle class-ness.
I am a member of the liberal elite which Douglas, whether she knows it or not, also is. Being a middle-class liberal elite is a privilege and not one to be taken lightly, it took the hard work of two generations of my family to make it possible for me to be in this position. Forgetting that, even for a moment as Douglas did, and sneering at others, is to reinforce a perceived social divide which has been growing in recent years.
Perhaps this also explains the pile on that Douglas has experienced and how quickly she became a symbol of so many people’s anger, frustration, and anxiety. The truth is that 'Hetty Douglas' now means whatever people want her to mean, that's why the Daily Mail and The Sun jumped on her quickly. She was the perfect symbol for the invisible war they've been waging on a 'liberal elite' who don't respect 'normal people' for the last 18 months, it's also why publications who'd had a hand in her rise were so quick to turn on her.
To those, like me, who are middle class and feel guilty about it Hetty Douglas provided an easy example of how not to be. To those, like my grandparents, who feared that I would start thinking I was ‘too good’ she is an example of terrible, thoughtless sort of snobbery that makes people feel bad about their social status. And, to those who don’t have the privileges she has, she is yet another just another out of touch member of the liberal elite who helpfully confirmed what they already feared about us.
So, what did we learn this week? It's a lot easier to drag one woman on the Internet than talk about the issues actually causing social divisions in this country. Social media companies are much happier to let the tabloids mediate when people are being abused than do anything about it themselves. The gap for reflection on what we see, think and post online is closing to the point of not existing.
As you were, Twitter.
*This article was updated on September 8th to reflect the fact that Douglas had issued a statement. *
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This article originally appeared on The Debrief.