Fishermen have fish porn. Snowmobilers can’t get enough of sled porn. There’s food porn, ski porn, and plain old porn porn (no link provided—get your own, perv). And now that the newspaper of record has used the phrase, we officially have recession porn. So what’s the fascination with how the recession is impacting rich, poor, and everyone in between?
For months, we’ve seen the stories about how the economic downturn is hitting home in all sorts of homes. The truly poor, of course, are suffering the worst, as Barbara Ehrenreich pointed out yesterday in the first part of her series in the Times. Most media coverage of the recession’s impact seems to focus instead on more privileged people, particularly white-collar workers and well-educated strivers, as Gawker, the Huffington Post, and others have noted. You read about landlords having a harder time renting their beach houses in the Hamptons or the Outer Banks. Or how state and community college applications have skyrocketed. Or how former hedge funders are learning to cook dinners for themselves—because the company credit card is a goner.
Seeing as this blog was born of the recession, and it dwells on topics such as who is screwed the worst in our troubling times, I have some theories why people get off on reading about other folks’ woes. Part of me thinks we love seeing the rich brought down to their knees, French Revolution style. No one is above the “great leveler,” as the recession has been called. Those folks who got ripped off by Bernie Madoff? They got what was coming to them, I’ve heard people say. Yankee Stadium is having trouble selling $3,000 tickets. Boo-hoo-hoo. Poor Steinbrenner.
In a much more positive spin on human nature, the recession fascination is something of one big group hug. We’re all in this together. It feels good to know you’re not the only one struggling. And it feels good to bear witness to other people’s struggles.
There’s a practical part of reading everything you can about the recession. Perhaps, you’ll get a tip on refinancing your mortgage, or save some money on your car insurance, or avoid a mistake that’s caused havoc in other people’s lives, or learn something that’ll point you in a new career direction.
Finally, what else are people going to do? There’s only so much spinning of your wheels you can do to network yourself into a company that has a hiring freeze, or to try and kick start the real estate world into gear. With all that free time, why not read more about what the economy is doing to people around the country, and the world?
With that in mind, I’ll continue peddling some recession smut from the Sunday papers. A LA Times columnist goes slumming on a quest to find a cheap-but-nice suit, cheap food chains are expanding all over New Jersey, a NY Times magazine piece about chicken meatballs that qualifies as both recession and food porn, and, most interesting of all, the hard times economic climate seems to be changing people’s values, at least according to papers in Boston and Chicago.