sorry I just eta - I meant during lockdown specifically
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Respect Pandora for being upfront about having a nanny - a lot of privileged women should follow her example, instead of hiding their hired help and making everyone else feel tit via social media.
However, I think this illustrates how she is not best placed to write the book. She only has experience of a certain kind of lifestyle. Her trying to sympathise and pretend we’re all in the same boat is, at times, a bit disingenuous.
I don’t want to go into too many details about myself, but I will say I grew up in a working class family with financial difficulties and through immense luck and good choices, my life is very different now. I am not quite Pandora levels of rich but I’m probably not far off either. I have friends now who come from similar backgrounds to D&P, and although I love them, sometimes I inwardly cringe at their inability to realise their privilege, and that their experiences just aren’t universal. They are very much in a bubble. To be fair, I’m in a bubble too now, but I will never forget what it was like to grow up in a freezing cold house because we couldn’t afford to put the heating on, and this often shows up in my attitude to life vs my privately educated friends.
I don’t mean to say that nobody can write about something they haven’t experienced, or that only people who’ve lived through hardship are worth listening to. It’s more that I notice this implicit idea that their lifestyles are the norm and therefore they are just the authority on every aspect of the female experience. It’s only true if you’re a middle class, white, straight woman though, and even then, both D & P have a very limited approach to the topics they talk about. It’s all very myopic.
However, I think this illustrates how she is not best placed to write the book. She only has experience of a certain kind of lifestyle. Her trying to sympathise and pretend we’re all in the same boat is, at times, a bit disingenuous.
I don’t want to go into too many details about myself, but I will say I grew up in a working class family with financial difficulties and through immense luck and good choices, my life is very different now. I am not quite Pandora levels of rich but I’m probably not far off either. I have friends now who come from similar backgrounds to D&P, and although I love them, sometimes I inwardly cringe at their inability to realise their privilege, and that their experiences just aren’t universal. They are very much in a bubble. To be fair, I’m in a bubble too now, but I will never forget what it was like to grow up in a freezing cold house because we couldn’t afford to put the heating on, and this often shows up in my attitude to life vs my privately educated friends.
I don’t mean to say that nobody can write about something they haven’t experienced, or that only people who’ve lived through hardship are worth listening to. It’s more that I notice this implicit idea that their lifestyles are the norm and therefore they are just the authority on every aspect of the female experience. It’s only true if you’re a middle class, white, straight woman though, and even then, both D & P have a very limited approach to the topics they talk about. It’s all very myopic.
I find the lack of other voices in general v irritating in the media. It’s so white and upper middle class. There is such a lack of other voices. Even supposed ‘working class’ comedians and broadcasters are one generation removed working class. Maybe one parent was working class but it’s so rare that the media person didn’t then get a place in a fancy school and usually frame it as their parent worked every job under the sun, they had it tough etc but it doesn’t ring true.
The only exception I find at the moment is Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper and it is SO interesting to hear mainstream interviews with them, esp Daisy as so many interviewers massively tsk down to her.
Getting back to Pandora and Dolly, another bugbear (not sure why I’m being so negative, there is a lot I like about them) is when they talk about how hard they work, how they work their asses off, how they grafted and put themselves out there at the start of their careers which is something I hear all the time from people who feel the need to deny that their privilege got them to where they are. I’m sure they have put the hours in but pretty much EVERYBODY puts the hours in, most people work their butts off but not everyone gets to do so in their dream career/ a highly desirable industry. It’s not just Pandora and Dolly but it’s annoying.
The only exception I find at the moment is Daisy May Cooper and Charlie Cooper and it is SO interesting to hear mainstream interviews with them, esp Daisy as so many interviewers massively tsk down to her.
Getting back to Pandora and Dolly, another bugbear (not sure why I’m being so negative, there is a lot I like about them) is when they talk about how hard they work, how they work their asses off, how they grafted and put themselves out there at the start of their careers which is something I hear all the time from people who feel the need to deny that their privilege got them to where they are. I’m sure they have put the hours in but pretty much EVERYBODY puts the hours in, most people work their butts off but not everyone gets to do so in their dream career/ a highly desirable industry. It’s not just Pandora and Dolly but it’s annoying.
I downloaded a free sample on to my Kindle, so I saw the first few pages, and it was a bit of a word salad. There were a couple of dense paragraphs that were basically just lists of products (used, I think, to illustrate a point she was making). Don't think I'll be buying it.
Yes, and in the book sample she talks about how she wanted a holiday after having a baby so they jetted off to Mexico (with the baby). I don't begrudge anyone for having a nice holiday, and it's not her fault that Covid happened since she wrote the book. My problem is how she presents this as a normal, middle-class life and that she is speaking for everyone in that bracket. She's also writing about an elite but also seems to be trying to make out that she's not part of that elite.
This is exactly it! The assumption that people who work in average jobs don’t work as hard. I hear it a lot and it really winds me up.
Honestly, sorry to go on about my own experiences but my mum worked nights in a care home, then came home, got us to school, slept for two hours or so and went to work at lunchtime as a playground supervisor. Went home and cleaned as quick as she could, got us from school, fed us dinner, dad home from work around 8pm and then she went to work all night.
That, in my mind, was a total grind and very difficult on her. Not the same as unpaid internships. The stakes aren’t as high - it is a luxury to do the kind of hard work D&P are talking about, when it’s not about keeping a roof over your head or your bills paid but advancing your competitive career.
Honestly, sorry to go on about my own experiences but my mum worked nights in a care home, then came home, got us to school, slept for two hours or so and went to work at lunchtime as a playground supervisor. Went home and cleaned as quick as she could, got us from school, fed us dinner, dad home from work around 8pm and then she went to work all night.
That, in my mind, was a total grind and very difficult on her. Not the same as unpaid internships. The stakes aren’t as high - it is a luxury to do the kind of hard work D&P are talking about, when it’s not about keeping a roof over your head or your bills paid but advancing your competitive career.
She brought up in an interview that she had her nanny continue during lockdown, which is just horrible. For someone who considers herself such a feminist, to not put one’s childcare on furlough during this time feels insincere and thoughtless. If you want to support other women and be an intersectional feminist, you need to start in your own home. Especially when her and her husband were working from home, it feels so awful and selfish to put your childcare at risk.
Isn't it fair to say though, regarding privilege, that not everything has to be for everyone? I.e I won't relate exactly to every experience Pandora has had, but I can still enjoy reading about it? Or, I can seek out other authors who have have the same experiences as me, and I'll get a different experience from it? I haven't read her book but she did say they aren't personal essays... would someone like Alain de Boton, who clearly has a privileged educational background, get slated for not being 'relatable'?
This is generally how I react to her writing and I perhaps find it particularly grating because I came across a good few people at uni who had been privately educated. It seemed to me many (not all!) got through and succeeded because they knew how to convincingly reframe other people’s arguments and ideas and portray them as their own. Either they’d been taught that that was the way to get through, or they just felt so divinely entitled to success that they didn’t care if they got there by thinking for themselves. Pandora’s writing often reminds me of this. It is like reading the work of a privately educated undergrad who has crammed in a tit-ton of reading and then just regurgitated it, confidently and with lots of flourishes, for the essay.
Absolutely.
It is their representation of their lives being the standard/norm and accessible to anyone that works hard enough that is the problem here, though.
I am sure Dolly describes her upbringing as something like totally average in her book (can’t remember the exact wording). That is ridiculous. It’s so far from average, the same as Pandora describing an elite and implying she’s not a part of it in her book (as mentioned in a comment above).
Privilege is a natural part of our society and it’s largely down to luck. It’s not something people should feel guilty for. However, misrepresenting and downplaying your privilege, or blindly assuming your privileged upbringing and lifestyle is utterly normal and you’re just a harder worker than those less successful than you, is problematic. There are clear undertones of this in a lot of D&P’s work and discussions, and that is ultimately the problem for me.
I’d rather see more from them admitting their privilege - like I said above, I respect Pandora for being so open about hiring a nanny. They do seem to be quite irritated by people pointing it out to them though - they hated the “posh podcasters” label and I think the more they try and be for everyone, the worse their output is.
I appreciate that Dolly & Pandora recognise their privilege at times - certainly, I think they’ve been smart enough to recognise the privilege of their skin colour and have had Black authors on The High Low, rather than offering their own opinions on race.
Their blind spot, however, is within their grouping of millennial white women. To them, the millennial white woman experience is THEIR experience and their experience only, and I think they’re hideously incorrect in that respect.
Edited to add: there’s also the fact that privilege got Dolly & Pandora into their positions in the first place, and there is a distinct lack of non white, non middle class voices in the media because it’s just not possible to rise that high without the financial means and connections (and confidence) to do so. They’d do well to acknowledge that but from what I’ve seen, they believe their positions are down to hard work only, which is incredibly insulting.
My issue with Pandora’s book is that it seems likely to me she’s been published solely on the strength of having an established audience, rather than having something worth saying or being a particularly skilled writer. It’s about making money. Like a million YouTubers did about five years ago. I know it happens all the time but I get the sense she thinks she better than an influencer cash in and I don’t know she is. I’m not saying it’s the pointless book, but I’m not saying it’s not...
Disclaimer - I’m being very judgemental myself and am working on assumptions, what I make of her character , intelligence , taste etc, haven’t read a word. Am going to see if I can check out that free kindle sample someone mentioned. Will try and be as fair as possible in my response.
Disclaimer - I’m being very judgemental myself and am working on assumptions, what I make of her character , intelligence , taste etc, haven’t read a word. Am going to see if I can check out that free kindle sample someone mentioned. Will try and be as fair as possible in my response.
Just saw the below on Pandora's website: https://pandorasykes.com/advice/ where she at the very least implies she never did any unpaid internships. This didn't ring true to me so I listened back to the bit of the 9 March 2017 podcast where she talks about her three internships (I found this quickly because unpaid internships is a particular bugbear of mine, so I remembered the episode!). Maybe they were paid internships, but surely she would have mentioned that (she says she saved up £10k so she could intern over 2 years), and so it feels a bit like rewriting history...
"I had a traditional, but non-linear route. By traditional, I mean that I started via a series of paid assistant role. (Nearly a decade ago, many year-long placements were unpaid, so I was extremely lucky). By non-linear, I mean that I didn’t do the standard intern-assistant-junior writer-editor route – my first job was actually as a PA to a screenwriter, and once I got my first paid job at a now defunct fashion-sharing website for The Daily Mail, I jumped around a bit, mixing my mediums."
"I had a traditional, but non-linear route. By traditional, I mean that I started via a series of paid assistant role. (Nearly a decade ago, many year-long placements were unpaid, so I was extremely lucky). By non-linear, I mean that I didn’t do the standard intern-assistant-junior writer-editor route – my first job was actually as a PA to a screenwriter, and once I got my first paid job at a now defunct fashion-sharing website for The Daily Mail, I jumped around a bit, mixing my mediums."
Doesn’t Dolly pride herself on being part Italian? Interesting way to characterize them...
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I can TOTALLY relate to this! EVERYTHING is down to me
even when my husband offers to do bath/bedtime, I’m on call to show him where stuff is! We would literally have no social calendar unless it was for me getting in touch with other women and arranging things...Unless my hubbs is just a useless lump
I do wish she would explain how she does it though. Otherwise I feel like complete tit that I haven’t had a chance to grow my business as fast as I like because of my very energetic night owl toddler!
EDIT: oh just saw your post @Libertine - that has given me a sigh of relief!
For sure and I don’t think that I necessarily want to read an author who comes from the same background as me but I think that there is an awful lot written and produced by people from a very similar background and I wish there was room for more voices. I really like a lot of P & D’s content but I’m not sure how much content is needed from the same perspective - podcasts, articles, newsletters, fiction, non fiction, tv shows, films from hundreds of Pandoras and Dollys. I’m so glad that there is so much female driven content at the moment, I just wish it was more diverse but maybe this is a stage that needs to happen.
We cannot ignore the fact that they really go out of their way to bring in different voices and different perspectives though, come on. That's a huge part of their podcast!
I honestly think I'm the only one who is sick of them apologising for/admitting their privilege. I feel like they do it every 5 minutes to the point I want a disclaimer on at the start of their podcast that you can skip. Who cares? Is there any point? I think at this point the responsibility is on the reader or listener to manage their own feelings around that, like be a big girl and realise everyone has a different path in life, some luckier than others, just get on with it
You're not the only one, @ceebs233! I also find it incredibly tiresome. I find the whole privilege conversation in general extremely tiresome. Mainly because people seem to focus all their attention on privilege being to do with career and opportunities, when there are so many other important things. Do we have to 'check our privilege' if we grew up in a loving and happy household with two parents? What if we're rich but have a narcissistic, alcoholic mother? What about if you're extremely good-looking? 'Privilege' isn't just about wealth. (And therefore, it's a pointless exercise to box everyone into these ever-increasing categories).
Also, side note, literally anyone can start a podcast.
Also, side note, literally anyone can start a podcast.
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I get what you’re saying but the actual theory of social privilege is based on things like class, wealth, race, sexual orientation, disability, and how those often affect the opportunities you are given in life. Stuff like being brought up in an abusive family generally doesn’t have an affect on the same societal level (not to diminish that, of course).
Also, yes, anyone can start a podcast, but they won’t necessarily have the contacts to gain sponsorship or notable guests, or well-connected mates to post about it on social media etc, like D&P did from the start. That’s kind of the point of privilege!
Will stop banging on about it now as appreciate it’s tiresome for some
With all respect because I am finding your points really interesting, so what about them having the certain contacts? My understanding is that they were fairly renowned journos (I really liked reading D's ST column) so they possibly would have had backing and finance from the ST in addition to certain contacts. But so what? Are they supposed to just quit their position because the world isn't fair? In my perspective it's admirable that they use their platform for good, donate the proceeds etc - that's way more than most do.I get what you’re saying but the actual theory of social privilege is based on things like class, wealth, race, sexual orientation, disability, and how those often affect the opportunities you are given in life. Stuff like being brought up in an abusive family generally doesn’t have an affect on the same societal level (not to diminish that, of course).
Also, yes, anyone can start a podcast, but they won’t necessarily have the contacts to gain sponsorship or notable guests, or well-connected mates to post about it on social media etc, like D&P did from the start. That’s kind of the point of privilege!
Will stop banging on about it now as appreciate it’s tiresome for some
I'm not well off or anything but because of the area I grew up in, I used to constantly be called posh at school, in a really derogatory way. So that 'posh' gate strikes a chord with me because it is f*king annoying when all you are doing is being the only person you know how to be.
Fearne Cotton (god she annoys me), Joe Wicks, Chris Ramsey, All Killa No Filla etc somehow managed to create successful careers (I'm taking them from the top podcast list) without being posh and privileged. I do get that connections help, but also... it's possible to just be really good at what you do and make cool tit and people will enjoy it. Not that I think Fearne's crappy podcast is cool 
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