The Upper East Side women in Odd Mom Out.

The other day New York Times columnist David Brooks wrote a well-meaning column bewailing segregation of the social classes in America. But right in the middle of it he popped out this whopper—which struck so many people as condescending that, in certain Facebook circles, it nearly went viral: “Recently I took a friend with only a high school degree to lunch. Insensitively, I led her into a gourmet sandwich shop. Suddenly I saw her face freeze up as she was confronted with sandwiches named “Padrino” and “Pomodoro” and ingredients like soppressata, capicollo and a striata baguette. I quickly asked her if she wanted to go somewhere else and she anxiously nodded yes and we ate Mexican.”

What’s particularly rankling about the tin-eared-ness of Brooks’s remark is that, while he is a man, the label “elitist” often sticks more forcefully to the opposite sex.

What’s particularly rankling about the tin-eared-ness of Brooks’s remark is that, while he is a man, the label “elitist” often sticks more forcefully to the opposite sex. From the hit TV show Odd Mom Out, which lambastes over-the-top status competition of Upper East Side Wives to the similarly themed bestseller of two years ago, Primates of Park Avenue, it’s usually females who get tagged as label-conscious snobs.  And, of course, the long-running hit franchise, The Real Housewives of…  has made female superficiality and tacky snobbery a depressing meme.  

The Affair Compared to Billions

Kathleen Chalfant and Maura Tierney play overly entitled mother and daughter in The Affair.

On a higher level of TV artistry, consider a couple of can’t-wait-for-the-next-season cable series. On The Affair, two of the main women—the snooty doyenne played by the fabulous Kathleen Chalfant and her spoiled daughter, played by the equally fabulous Maura Tierney (whose poor-background husband is devoted enough to her to go to prison for an accidental vehicular homicide she committed)—are over-entitled enough to make you want to punch them.

By contrast, over on Billions, the hedge-fund good guy/bad guy, Bobby Axelrod, played deliciously by Damian Lewis, is an outer-borough working class boy who used to caddy at an elite golf club. He wears tee shirts, drinks beer out of the bottle, and listens to heavy metal music. And when we think of real-life Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, it’s Zuckerberg in his sweatshirt—and Marissa Mayer of Yahoo in her haute couture.

The reflexive urge to paint super accomplished or wealthy women as snobby may not be so much mean-spirited as lazy.

The reflexive urge to paint super accomplished or wealthy women as snobby may not be so much mean-spirited as lazy, but the truth is: It should stop. Women are plenty democratic. Had many female movers-shakers been in David Brooks’ spot, they would likely have never even thought of the super-chic sandwich shop and gone to the Mexican restaurant first. The late Hollywood legend Debbie Reynolds would definitely have high-tailed it there. Her childhood in deep poverty in El Paso made basic bean stew her go-to comfort food for all the 85 years of her life.

Fans of Fast Food and Elvis 

Then there was the Duchess of Devonshire, the former Deborah Mitford Cavendish (one of the six aristocratic Mitford Sisters), who was an Elvis fanatic, pilgrimage to Graceland and all. Closer to home in time and place, our current Ambassador to the U.N. and former Governor of South Carolina Nikki Haley is such a Joan Jett fan, she positively hyperventilated about her adoration of the Blackhearts’ lead singer when I interviewed her five years ago inside the stuffy antebellum Governor’s Mansion in Columbia.

Julia Child (the grandmother of haute cooking in this country) loved McDonald’s for the (of course) French fries.

Hillary Clinton has made it known that she occasionally relaxes by tuning in to Love It Or List It, HGTV’s show about regular people struggling with real estate decisions. Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor shops at Costco like so many of us—which makes sense given her background—and Julia Child (the grandmother of haute cooking in this country) loved McDonald’s for the (of course) French fries.  Another surprising fast-food fan is Diane Sawyer, often considered the most elegant of the recent primetime newswomen. She went out of her way to stop off at a Taco Bell right after the O.J. verdict was announced.

Couric On Her “Cougar” Label

Katie Couric’s self-deprecating humor showed her lack of “airs.”

But her then-network rival Katie Couric would do her one better in the intentional anti-snobbism department: When Katie was invited to be the first female honorary PhD, at Princeton, soon after she took over as the first female marquee news anchor (replacing Dan Rather and inheriting Walter Cronkite’s vaunted chair), she stood up in her cap and gown, looked out at the sea of distinguished scholars and said, “It’s so nice being a tiger [Princeton’s athletic mascot] for a day, because” – artful pause – “I’ve been so used to being called a cougar.” That was a reference to the fact that the Enquirer had blared on their cover the news that she had been dating a younger man. To volunteer to the most elite audience the tackiest insult made about you in the lowliest newspaper takes humor and humility in spades.

You don’t have to be famous to be a woman who is an anti-snob.

You don’t have to be famous to be a woman who is an anti-snob. One Jennifer LaPorte wrote this to me on Facebook: “I am working on my second post-graduate degree but I will eat Velveeta and Wonder bread sandwiches till the day I die.” Fittingly, LaPorte—a hospice chaplain in Wisconsin—divides her counseling time between an Oxford-educated former owner of a big-game safari park and a woman who lives in a mobile home: to her, they are equal.

Lone Vegetarians Among the Chic

In this red state/blue state, media elite/ordinary folks world we talk about so incessantly now, it is so easy to go with cliché instead of reality. Ten years ago, I was doing a magazine story in Mississippi about the friendship of two women—one white, one black—both of whom grew up poor during the years of ugly segregation in that state. A hair, makeup, and photography team was flown in from New York and L.A. Parading around the Super 8 Motel, they all looked so chic.  But the two women who were the subjects of the article got a kick out of the fact that, amid the presumably enlightened cosmopolitan outsiders, “we were the only two vegetarians there,” one of them said to me later.

With probably far more gratitude than if a wealthy hostess had offered her a guest suite, Gloria Steinem took the cleaning woman up on that offer.

My favorite story about a famous woman embracing real-life egalitarianism comes, not surprisingly, from Gloria Steinem. While she is traveling, she is forever slumping in uncomfortable airport waiting room chairs. One day she was excitedly recognized by an airport cleaning woman. “She told me that she didn’t finish high school,” Steinem reported to me, “but that her daughter is going to college and that the women’s movement made all the difference. ‘Then’ she said, pointing, `when I need a nap, I sleep in this broom closet.’” Steinem paused to make clear how much the woman’s next words meant to her: “Honey, do you want to sleep in this broom closet?”

With probably far more gratitude than if a wealthy hostess had offered her a guest suite, Gloria Steinem took the cleaning woman up on that offer.

So when someone like David Brooks makes a snobbish remark—even unconsciously—or the media delightedly paints accomplished or wealthy women as avid status grabbers, let’s draw a line and say: Dudes—this is not us.