BARBELITH underground
 

Subcultural engagement for the 21st Century...
Barbelith is a new kind of community (find out more)...
You can login or register.


Underground > Head Shop >

Definition of a chav

  
  

Page: 12(3)456

 
 
Evil Scientist
14:15 / 16.11.06
I can't describe the eyes, you just have to know, something dead and black.

Are you sure they weren't sharks?
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
14:16 / 16.11.06
No Im saying that the media or whoever has identified an entire class as chav when really theres simply a hardcore of element of violent classless pricks who are where the term really lies
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
14:17 / 16.11.06
Steven Spielbergs : Chavs
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
14:21 / 16.11.06
I can't lay out my answers like a textbook for you. All you can possibly achieve by breaking down in such a way is to make it look as if the thing we're talking about doesn't actually exist at all when we all know it does and everyone, everyone has identified it at some point.

I don't know it does. Just for reference. I mean, what you might be describing is Pinky from Brighton Rock, but thanks to Graham Greene we know that, for all his affectless appearance, Pinky had a complex inner life. So, problems.

"Classless" is an interesting term, though. Surely class is what being identified as a chav is all about?
 
 
Ganesh
14:22 / 16.11.06
I can't lay out my answers like a textbook for you. All you can possibly achieve by breaking down in such a way is to make it look as if the thing we're talking about doesn't actually exist at all when we all know it does and everyone, everyone has identified it at some point.

I'm not asking you to lay things out like a textbook; I'm asking you to try to examine your assumptions. It's not easy. For a start, you're assuming that "everyone" has identified something that you've identified. I don't think they have: people use the term "chav", sure, but I think they vary in terms of what they use it to mean. With you, the term seems to be attached to a whole mix of fairly emotional/persecutory thoughts about class and clothing and what you perceive other people to be thinking.

I'll repeat my questions, and add another:

What are your feelings about the people you identify in this way?

Do you think it's reasonable for you to have these feelings about the people you identify in this way?

What do you think your use of the concept "chav" says about you, if anything?

Does it reflect any underlying assumptions or even prejudices?
 
 
All Acting Regiment
14:23 / 16.11.06
Re: those dead, black eyes. Yes, I've seen them- they were in a pair of sockets regularly bruised by the owner's father. Similar stories no doubt abide for most if not all violent people, and while it's no excuse, I think it's something we should all take into consideration. I don't like people going around being violent, much as I don't like people going around saying that everyone who doesn't pray every day is going to burn in hell, but a) there are probably a whole bunch of reasons why these people are doing these things, which reasons deserve consideration, and b) if we simply hate the people who do these sorts of things, well, there'll be an awful lot of hate and not much progress. This may, in fact, be the ethic of the story.
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
14:28 / 16.11.06
What are your feelings about the people you identify in this way?

Do you think it's reasonable for you to have these feelings about the people you identify in this way?

What do you think your use of the concept "chav" says about you, if anything?

Does it reflect any underlying assumptions or even prejudices?


My feelings about people I identify in this way (and remember this is exluding the vast majority of people) is that they are people with severe emotional difficulties and intense feelings of self loathing.They are extremely complex to the point they cant articulate their feelings and this manifests in the simplest terms, ie, violence. I do not hate them but I do fear their action towrds me, that is true.


Based on my experiences I do feel it is a reasonable and fairly well judged look at a small element of society


Im not entirely sure what my use of the word chav says about me, that im elitist and snobbish and unwilling to interect except in the most abstract ways and base reactions based on fear.
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
14:29 / 16.11.06
Most likely
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
14:58 / 16.11.06
So eh..........what do you think of "The Streets"? (only messin)
 
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
17:07 / 16.11.06
interesting, cos i'm in two minds about this term/issue...

my usage of the word "chav" generally means "misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic, generally anyone-who-looks/acts/dresses-different-from-them-phobic, conformistly-dressed, (usually but not always) young, (usually but not always) male, people who seem to make it a primary point of their identity to pick on and abuse anyone who doesn't share the exact same, incredibly rigidly conformist, patterns of consumption as them". It also has nothing to do with economic class at all (i'd hazard a guess that over 95% of the people who would fit my definition of the word "chav" are richer than me).

I am, however, aware of the classist use of the word "chav", which does make me feel somewhat uncomfortable using the word (tbh, i actually prefer the word "townie", which was the universal word for the above concept when/where i grew up, but, well, i find myself using "chav" instead because it seems like "chav" has supplanted all the other equivalent words to the extent it now seems to be at least a UK-wide usage). However, to me "chav" doesn't mean anyone who is poor or has a "working-class" accent [whatever the hell that is], but the sort of people who literally drove my best friend out of her council flat within months of her getting it, with daily harassment (including threats of rape) every time she dared to walk out of her front door, just because they found out she was a transsexual...

in practice i suppose that means i use the word in certain contexts (such as with the aforementioned friend) where i'm reasonabnly certain it will be used to mean what i use it to mean, but don't use it in others, where it could be construed to have a classist meaning...

(I've also got to say that i don't dislike the word "chav" anywhere near as much as i dislike the word "hatespeech" - to me that word and concept feels straight out of Nineteen Eighty-Four...)

so i dunno... is it a useful word? maybe not, but i think we need to have some terms in which to describe this (in my experience cross-class) cultural phenomenon of hateful, Other-phobic consumerist conformism, which i really don't think can be excused by any argument about class or deprivation...

is there perhaps some force at work, consciously or unconsciously, to equate "working class" with "mindless conformism" in the eyes of non-working-class-identifying "liberal"/"radical" people, and conversely to equate sexual minorities, clothing/music-based subcultures, intellectualism and general non-conformism with "privileged upper-class wankers" in the eyes of your average person on the street - and thus words used to identify the nastier forms of patriarchal cultural conformism being twisted into terms of classist abuse?
 
 
Hydra vs Leviathan
17:14 / 16.11.06
Hm. Re-reading that post it still (even after multiple preview/edits) looks misinterpretable as expressing views that i don't hold and/or consider dodgy... i'm definitely having difficulty at the moment clearly expressing what i mean... maybe i should have stayed off this topic, cos i can't seem to adequately articulate my position on it...

(there's also a lot of stuff this thread has made me want to discuss about the prevalence of anti-individualism and anti-intellectualism in (particularly, stereotypically, working-class) Anglophone cultures, but i'm not sure if that's within the scope of this thread, so when i'm feeling a bit more coherent than i am right now, i might start another...)
 
 
Quantum
17:22 / 16.11.06
make it look as if the thing we're talking about doesn't actually exist at all when we all know it does

What? I don't even know what the thing-we're-talking-about is never mind whether it exists. We obviously don't all know.
I think I know what you mean when you use the word 'chav' but it seems you have a specific, personal Rural Savage usage I'm not familiar with to do with eyes of blackest night, like the devil. You seem to distinguish between normal people (who wear Ben Sherman shirts and jeans) and evil chavs (who wear Ben Sherman shirts and jeans and have eeeevil eyes). Couldn't you just say there are nice 'chavs' and nasty 'chavs' just as there are nice and nasty people who wear Nirvana T-shirts?
You're digging yourself into a pit here I think, why not take a day or two to think about so it's easier to express without sounding like you hate some people, and define chavs as people you hate in particular clothes.
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
17:51 / 16.11.06
I did repeatedly state that I feel it is a term for a small group of people being assigned to an entire class. At the very start I was simply curious as to how other people would define it in comparison to how I defined it growing up. I have also said that I do not hate any of them but there are people I would fear definetly. However, no matter how heavy handed my writing on the subject may be I wasnt afraid of looking stupid or just bashing it out with everyone to see all the angles and hopefully get smarter. However in some people there is a generally irritated tone that I have somehow offended them with my stupidity when they pretend to look impassionately at other elements in society. To stay stupid is a wonderous thing but to attempt to learn even if it is through fumbling and mistakes is generally looked down upon.
 
 
Quantum
18:12 / 16.11.06
a term for a small group of people

Yes, but you can't tell us who they are. Or define what you mean beyond a certain look in the eye.

Your description of the 'uberchavs', the hardcore violent element giving white shell suits a bad name, sounds quite like people I see every day. But the idea that it's OK to call *them* chavs because of their evil eyes doesn't sound like something I can agree with.
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
18:25 / 16.11.06
It's not right or wrong, they exist so the name exists.Chav has become generalised, when what I'm talking about could be broken down into say, yobs.
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
18:53 / 16.11.06
Hey thanks to anyone who engaged there without getting pissed off, I really enjoyed it all. Ganesh's stuff was good, very well laid out and comprehensive. It was all very educational.
 
 
Ganesh
19:16 / 16.11.06
Ahh, Rural Savage. I still can't quite work out if you're for real.
 
 
Ganesh
19:28 / 16.11.06
My feelings about people I identify in this way (and remember this is exluding the vast majority of people) is that they are people with severe emotional difficulties and intense feelings of self loathing.They are extremely complex to the point they cant articulate their feelings and this manifests in the simplest terms, ie, violence.

The difficulty here is that you're speculating, essentially, on what's going on in other people's heads based on what their eyes look like. You're making assumptions about what motivates them, based on very very little. You've grouped all these assumptions together and labelled them "chav" but you can't provide any evidence for the validity of this grouping. How do you know a given person has "severe emotional difficulties and intense feelings of self loathing"? How do you deduce this from the appearance of their eyes?
 
 
Sniv
19:36 / 16.11.06
Heh, I'm reading this thread and wondering where all the beating-sticks are. Why, this is downright friendly. Well done, guys.

Ontopic: I think that, as ze just mentioned, Rural Savage is perhaps getting 'chav' confused with 'yob' or perhaps 'thug'. You will find, if you choose to engage with them, that 99% of people you identify as 'chav' are fine people. Not like you and your mates, perhaps, but not all that different either. Different music, different drugs, but it's the same old shit really, isn't it? You'll find, as your experience grows a little further from your small town, that there are just as many people you'd consider as 'alternative' or 'cool' that are complete bastards too.

I don't to be rude when I ask this, and by all means tell me to go fuck myself if you wish, but how old are you RS? I ask, because your views are very familiar to me, they remind me of myself when I was just getting out of secondary school and in college. I'd grown up in a very working-class and often quite hostile area, and I genuinely hated and feared people I'd identify as 'chav' (or townie, when I were a lad). As I got older I met more people from outside of my comfort zone, and came to realise that they were pretty much like me, only with different tastes in pop-culture. Controversially (ha!) most of these people I met as *ahem* a customer for their various import/export businesses and one boon of that industry is that it can be a great leveler and you can really get down and spend some quality time with a bunch of people you'd never otherwise meet in your Nirvana T-shirt wearing cliques (funnily enough, I'm wearing a tatty old smiley-face Tee as I write this. It's skankified, btw).

As I say, I really don't mean to be rude, and you can honestly tell me where to get off, but I think a lot of the problem here is simply perspective. There are 'thugs' or 'yobs' wherever you go and whatever brand of trainers you choose to wear.
 
 
nighthawk
20:14 / 16.11.06
Ontopic: I think that, as ze just mentioned, Rural Savage is perhaps getting 'chav' confused with 'yob' or perhaps 'thug'.

Hmmm. But are words like 'yob' unproblemmatic these days? Its used in connection with (and to justify) the whole New Labour 'Respect' agenda: ASBOs, incarcerating the parents of truants, etc. Basically criminalising certain sections of the population who tend to be from socially deprived backgrounds, in place of more recognisably social democratic programmes. If anything its use is even more class-based than 'chav'. I remember a Switchboard thread that covered some of this stuff - here.

To be honest I think it just depends on when people want to use these words - saying that the person who tried to start a fight with me at the bus-stop last week was a mindless yob is different from using it as a group-noun to refer to particular sections of the population, or as the basis of a spurious analysis of social phenomena.
 
 
Ganesh
20:30 / 16.11.06
Rural Savage is perhaps getting 'chav' confused with 'yob' or perhaps 'thug'.

Or even "person with funny-not-ha-ha eyes".
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
21:00 / 16.11.06
Well, NRJ and Rural Savage are both basically saying the same thing, yes? That when they use the word, they use it only to describe the bad people in the group who are more widely described by the term when other people use it? There's quite a lengthy routine about this by Chris Rock, where he separates out the good, deserving black people from the bad, undeserving black people. Problem being that it really isn't that easy to ascribe moral qualities to fashion choices. Which brings us back to the "wanker" theorem suggested by Quantum, if I recall correctly, right?
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
21:54 / 16.11.06
Am I for real? haha, I admit I can tread a fine line of annoyance to see where it goes. Na it's all there, you all know it, everyone said it. It happened baby. Na I'm not in college but yeah I'm 21 and dole fed, I grew up working class and subsequently about the age of 16 became sort of middle class, it sort of hard to tell round here ha
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
21:55 / 16.11.06
You can identify them by their feet too, massive and hairy and a faint smell of tungsten emenates from their foreheads. Na the Nirvana thing was just a generalisation awell, Im not part of that either.
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
21:57 / 16.11.06
Ah see what I did there?
 
 
Ganesh
22:15 / 16.11.06
Well, you see, it's difficult to tell whether you're doing that "fine line of annoyance" thing or whether you're genuinely having problems separating what's going on in your head from what's going on in other people's heads.

My questions again:

How do you know a given person has "severe emotional difficulties and intense feelings of self loathing"?

How do you deduce this from the appearance of their eyes?
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
22:20 / 16.11.06
I don't know it, from what little I know about psychology and factors of upbringing that influence a persons behaviour this has seemed to manifest in certain people as violence etc. All the people I have met who act in this way all seemed to have these emotional difficulties. As for the eyes ,thats just a gut instinctive mechanism, any human could do the same thing to an animal as it could a human as to identifying the threat posed by another creature within seconds of coming into contact with them.
 
 
Ganesh
22:29 / 16.11.06
I don't know it, from what little I know about psychology and factors of upbringing that influence a persons behaviour this has seemed to manifest in certain people as violence etc.

Are you talking about violent people, then? If so, then that would help narrow things down from funny-looking eyes or ordinary-looking outfits? Are you talking about people who have beaten you up? People who you've feared might beat you up? People who you've observed behaving violently? I'm still trying to get a handle on the core group of people you're talking about. Would "assaultative" be their common defining feature?

All the people I have met who act in this way all seemed to have these emotional difficulties.

a) All the people who act in what way? Be specific.

b) In what way to they seem to have "these emotional difficulties"? Have you found this out by talking to them? What's the basis for this observation?

As for the eyes ,thats just a gut instinctive mechanism, any human could do the same thing to an animal as it could a human as to identifying the threat posed by another creature within seconds of coming into contact with them.

I doubt it, since you've yet to identify exactly what it is about the eyes that tells you someone is "violent", much less having "emotional difficulties", much less "chav". I'm trying to get back to first principles here, and work out which group of people you're trying to describe. People who've attacked you? People who dress a certain way? People who look at you a certain way?
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
22:29 / 16.11.06
From text alone I can tell that you are being vaguely hostile towards me. Eyes etc speak so much more
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
22:30 / 16.11.06
Man if you keep taking the wheels off this bus we're never gonna get anywhere cool
 
 
Ganesh
22:30 / 16.11.06
You can't see my eyes, though, so how about engaging with the text?
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
22:33 / 16.11.06
Well and not to be a prick, what do YOU think I'm talking about, I know you're smart enough to fill in the blanks so correct me and show me the bigger picture. And im not being a cunt saying this, I genuienly want to know, Im tired of answering questions
 
 
Ganesh
22:39 / 16.11.06
As I said earlier, I think you're taking your own fear of (potentially) violent people, loading it with all manner of assumptions as to what motivates those people and, for no particular reason, labelling the result "chav".

It's difficult to tell, because you don't seem very clear in your own mind.
 
 
Joggy Yoghurt
22:42 / 16.11.06
What the hell else am I supposed to do, I see someone being violent or I get beaten up I begin to wonder shortly after what sequence of events in this persons life leads them to be randomly violent and the violent peoples past would immediately jump out at you as not being a happy emotionally constructive place, you know that as much as I do
 
 
Ganesh
22:46 / 16.11.06
You wonder, and leave it at that. You don't draw an authoritative conclusion about what motivated that behaviour, (over)generalise it to other people and call it "chav".
 
  

Page: 12(3)456

 
  
Add Your Reply