Lifestyle Gurus. Chris Rojek

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СКАЧАТЬ Already, the bourgeois philosophy of getting the most out of yourself in order to get the most out of the world is present, albeit in embryonic form. Beecher and Beeton follow on the heels of Utilitarianism in proposing that the aristocracy and the lower ranks have much to learn from them, and little to teach.

      At this time it is easy to see how, and why, these interventions were so readily analysed in a framework of class struggle. The ideas of Marx and Engels emerged and developed as a sort of counter life to the monological side of bourgeois progress. For them, class struggle was the determinant of human history. They proposed that the struggle between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat should end in the transcendence of class by virtue of the attainment of communism. In contrast to common perceptions today, they understood the communist society to be one that guarantees and nurtures the full and free development of the individual. However, as it turned out, the class model proved to be of limited value. It was persuasive when applied to the rising power of the bourgeoisie in the nineteenth century. Thus, Smiles, Beecher and Beeton all fit snugly into a framework that explains the methods of self-help as tools in the mission of social mobility and class domination. The model is less helpful, however, when applied to the means of persuasion and ends of lifestyle gurus today. The goals of acceptance, approval, social impact and self-validation are not strictly speaking means of controlling people. Today’s lifestyle gurus do not peddle the line that lifestyle makeovers will result in a fully and finally realised individual or, still less, that they will produce a superior society (McGee 2005; Raisborough 2011). Instead, they typically operate upon a just-in-time principle that techniques of marshalling acceptance, approval, social impact and self-validation are only as good as the challenges presented by the present moment. Hence, the resort to ‘update packages’ and subscriptions as part of their lifestyle programme. Integral to today’s form of lifestyle management is the idea that the ‘journey’ of self-discovery is continuous and without end. The pace of social change makes life a permanent race with no final finishing line. Lifestyle management and improvement is in perpetual motion. One is only as good as one’s last makeover.

The Globalisation of Self-help

The writings of Smiles, Beecher and Beeton were immensely influential. Still, in terms of what was to come, they were more in the nature of being first runs in the territory of lifestyle architecture and engineering positive intimacy. The period from 1875 to 1914 was the epoch in which the household management and cookery book came into its own as a genuinely global phenomenon (Driver 1989: 13–14). It was also the period when women’s magazines and problem pages, in which journalists acted as counsellors for anguished individuals seeking advice, began to cater for a mass, global consumer market concerned with intimate life (Bingham 2012: 51). The first ‘Agony Aunt’ is thought to have been Annie Swan, in Women At Home (1892–1920). At the outset, these pages were coy about intimate questions. They drew upon reserves of folk ‘common sense’ to address the marital difficulties, child-rearing challenges and the veiled desires of their readers. Sexual matters were seldom referred to directly. This changed after the 1920s. Partly under the influence of the emergence of the mass sex survey and psychology, the Victorian moralism and strictures against what could be imparted in ‘problem pages’ was relaxed. In the UK during the 1930s, journalists, such as the American agony aunt ‘Dorothy Dix’ (the working name of Elizabeth Meriweather Gilmer) in The Daily Mirror, and Anne Temple, in her ‘Human Case-Book’ column in The Daily Mail, began to adopt a more open attitude to issues of carnal desire, sexual problems and related topics of an intimate nature, sent in by readers (Bingham 2012; Bingham and Conboy 2015: 139–40). It was not that morals were abandoned and an ‘anything goes’ climate on sexual, emotional and other intimate matters was initiated. On the contrary, the advice given by journalists tended to reinforce moral rectitude based on the class based stereotype of behaviour appropriate to women, drawing upon inviolable Christian precepts and parable. All the same, the new media frankness about intimate and lifestyle matters signalled the growing power of women in the public sphere. This carried over into book-length works dealing with intimacy and lifestyle. For example, The Marriage Book (Various 1930), a 766-page manual published in 1930 by the Amalgamated Press included chapters on ‘Happiness in Marriage’, ‘The Love Art of the Husband’, ‘The Love Art of the Wife’, ‘Choosing a Career’, alongside more traditional chapters on ‘The Healthy Family’, ‘Cookery’ and ‘Home Dressmaking’. Interestingly, The Marriage Book was published without an identified author, as if it were a folk oracle of common sense and wisdom, liberated from the shackles of Victorian prudery.

The agony aunt, recipe aunt or marriage advice aunt, perpetuated in magazines of the interwar period established a culture of presumed intimacy and informality (Rojek 2016). It saw itself as part of what we now call, the informalisation process, loosening the reserve and hierarchy while, of course, at the same time holding true to the template of respectable society (Wouters 2007). The rise of lifestyle journalism emerged in the 1950s and 1960s when the emergence of consumer culture, coupled with increased periods of leisure time, led to a demand for information about optimal time use, not only in the area of household management, but also in respect to the general presentation of the self. During this period newspapers and magazines introduced sections dedicated to health, food and travel. This new journalistic field addressed its audiences as consumers, providing them with information and advice about goods and services that they could use in their daily lives (Hanusch 2013: 4). As a precursor to the self-improvement movement, lifestyle media provided practical advice that people could apply to improve their lives from recommendations about what to eat and where to travel, to tips about how to live a healthier, more fulfilling life. As print media and television developed so too did lifestyle journalism, providing content to fill the growing number of pages in newspapers and channels on satellite and cable television (Cole 2005: 33). Though criticised by some for being frivolous in comparison to ‘hard’ political reporting, lifestyle journalism is now mainstream. Prestigious journalistic institutions, such as the BBC and the Guardian, regularly feature lifestyle media and advice columns where anonymous readers seek advice from an experienced individual, who emulates the agony aunt method of counselling, about how to navigate personal problems. A case in point is the British newspaper, the Guardian, which features a weekly column entitled, ‘Dear Mariella’ in which Mariella Frostrup, a self-described agony aunt, ‘offers words of wisdom’ to readers (Guardian 2018). Departing from the more generic concerns of lifestyle media, much of this content focuses on intimacy, including sex and relationship troubles of various kinds (e.g. familial, marriage, lovers and friends). There has also been a rise in ‘how to’ articles dispensing practical lifestyle advice on a range of editorial concerns from health to beauty, fitness, fashion, food and travel. Lifestyle gurus tell us what to eat, what to wear, who to love and where to travel. Though generally lacking certified credentials, these popular experts present themselves as user-friendly ‘information providers’, providing information and advice about the management of the self and everyday life (Hanusch 2013).

Lifestyle media is instructive, but it is also marked by commercialisation, having a strong market-orientation and connection to advertising (Fürsich 2012). This raises ethical issues about the impartiality and objectivity of lifestyle advice and ‘expert’ reviews; it also reflects a time when the boundary between commercial and private spheres have become more intertwined. Market values, such as rationality and cost-benefit analysis, are increasingly applied to the management of intimate relations. Eva Illouz (2007) terms this process ‘emotional capitalism’. Here, the intimate sphere is subject to commercial principles as a site of ongoing production, a place for reinventing a ‘marketable self’ (McGee 2005: 22). The emphasis on reinvention has been theorised as a new form of ‘immaterial labour’ (mental, social, emotional) required for participation in an insecure world and labour market (McGee 2005: 24). In twentieth-century America, for example, the market for self-improvement products (e.g. books, videos, seminars and the like) rose following women’s mass entry into the paid workforce, which generated competition and challenged traditional gender roles and cultural expectations of men and women. This period was coupled with economic uncertainty as a result of reduced wages, outsourcing and downsizing. Scholars have shown how following the breakdown of tradition, intimate relations are characterised СКАЧАТЬ