Flipper wrote:What's wrong with having parents who work in a steel mill and drink Iron City beer?
Are you one of those pseudo-french cultural elitists I've heard about?
The cultural elite is liberal on values. The more intellectual the job the more points you score with these people. One a scale of 1 to 10, I would put working in a steel mill about 1. A teacher or a doctor about a 5 because they actually help people. An activist or liberal arts professor an 8. Only way you get a 10 is if you're a renowned intellectual leader for a liberal cause.
Unless you're a professor of economics, any conservative tendencies are frowned upon. Sales is viewed as the latter day blue collar profession. A corporate business job is okay because it requires a higher level of education and professional track record to get in. Being a quality business professional in a fortune 500 company is just average joe. An education from an Ivy league level institution is considered standard.
The very worst you could do is have a father who was an ex-Marine, taxidermist, who when you bring your date over for dinner talks about killing deer, backwoods opinions, ect. When you're sibling makes a remark, the Dad telling you to kick their asse. Who wants to deal with this kind of crap?
Everyone from the cultural elite expects to date someone from a modern liberal educated family. You say the words "Ohio" or "Pittsburgh" and you may as well say "backward" or "unsophisticated", and conveys images of gun racks, obese people, crappy old towns. What they want to hear is Paris, or London.If you say Athens, they assume you just returned from Greece.
And if you tell someone you're a janitor, or work at a fast food place, they'll just be like "No. Really, what do you do?" like the notion of a native born American doing something like that is incredulous. And it pretty much is in the world of the cultural elite.
Growing up in Athens and playing for the high school, the only thing anyone dreamed of was to play for Don Peden.", 1950 OU graduate. "He was the most respected man in town."