The "pinky up" trend on TikTok is a whole thing right now. People performing exaggerated poshness, lifting pinkies over everything, narrating their mundane activities in a fake-British accent, generally having fun with the theater of upper-class affect. I love it. It's funny. It's also hitting something real for me that I want to talk about.
Because the joke works, and it IS a joke, a good one, because everybody understands on some level that the pinky-up, the elaborate table settings, the knowing which fork to use for what course, the whole vocabulary of "correct" social behavior: it's a performance. A code. A costume. And the people inside that world have always known that the costume keeps certain people out. That's the point. It's not about tea drinking. It's never been about tea drinking.
I grew up working class in a small Southern town, and I grew up in a church that was a masterclass in class performance. Let me explain that, because the juxtaposition might seem weird, but I promise it makes sense.
The Church as Class Theater
The church I grew up in was technically a place where "all were welcome." That was the explicit theology, said out loud every Sunday. And in a lot of genuine ways, it was. But there was also an invisible hierarchy that had everything to do with appearance, manners, money, and the very specific way you performed belonging.
The families who were "pillars" of the church, the ones whose names went on the donation plaques, whose kids led youth group, whose opinions shaped the committee decisions, they had something. I couldn't name it exactly as a kid but I could feel it. It was in how they spoke. How they dressed on Sunday, not just nice, a certain kind of nice, a polished-to-a-specific-standard kind of nice that required money and taste and the knowledge of what the code was. How they held themselves. How they greeted people. My family was part of the congregation but not part of that inner circle, and the distance between the two was not about theology. It was about class.
Nobody said this explicitly. That's how class works. The most powerful social hierarchies are the unspoken ones, the ones where the rules are never written down, so you can't argue with them, and if you violate them by accident, the violator bears the embarrassment rather than the system bearing the scrutiny.
The dress code wasn't written. But I showed up in the wrong kind of dress once, not immodest, just department store instead of the boutique kind, with shoes that were visibly worn, and I felt the micro-adjustments in the room. The slight shift. The smile that was correct but not warm. I was eight years old. I have never forgotten that feeling.
Etiquette as Gatekeeping
Here's the thing about etiquette: some of it is actually useful. Yes, don't talk with your mouth full. Don't take a phone call in the middle of a conversation. Hold the door. Return what you borrow. These are reasonable social lubricants that have to do with basic respect for the people around you. I'm not anti-manner.
But a significant chunk of formal etiquette, the which-fork-goes-where, the never-wear-white-after-Labor-Day, the specific vocabulary of "cultivated" behavior, is not about functional social cooperation. It's about exclusion. It exists to be a barrier, specifically because it requires resources (money, education, exposure) that not everyone has equal access to. You can't know which fork to use if nobody ever took you to the kind of dinner where that matters. You can't know the dress code for a certain event if you weren't raised in circles where that event was attended. And when you get it wrong, visibly, publicly, you don't just get a correction. You get a verdict. You're marked. You're outside.
The pinky-up joke works because it's taking that whole system and making it absurd on purpose. Lifting the curtain on the performance. When everyone does the posh accent over their microwaved soup, the costume gets exposed as a costume. That's genuinely subversive, even in meme form.
Growing Up "Low Class" in an Appearances Church
I want to tell you about a specific memory. When I was maybe twelve, there was a church potluck. That very democratic Southern food tradition where everyone brings something and you share. My mom made a casserole she'd been making my whole life, a proper, good, filling casserole, exactly the kind of thing that belongs at a potluck. Other families brought the same. But there was a tier of families who brought things that were different. The presentation was different. The serving dish was different. The way the food was arranged was different. And somehow the conversation after the potluck was about those dishes. Who brought what. Which families brought "nice" things.
Class signaling in casserole form. In a church. About a potluck. At an event whose entire premise is the equal sharing of abundance. The performance never stops.
What that taught me as a kid, what it took me a long time to unlearn, was the belief that my family's versions of things were lesser. That the working-class way of doing things was the wrong way. Not just different. Wrong. I absorbed that without anyone saying it directly. The architecture of the social space taught it to me through what got praised, what got the warm smile, whose contributions counted.
I am genuinely angry about that, in a quiet background way that informs a lot of how I make art. Not at the individuals in the pews, they were mostly just doing what their class position had taught them. At the system that made a child feel like her mother's casserole wasn't good enough.
The City and the Costume
When I moved to the city in my early twenties, broke, tattooed, absolutely nobody's idea of polished, I encountered a different version of the same game. New costumes, new codes. The indie music world has its own hierarchy. The alternative crowd that thinks it's outside mainstream status games is playing a very elaborate status game. The codes are just different. Knowing the right obscure bands. The right attitude about success. The correct relationship to selling out versus staying underground. I learned the new costume relatively quickly because I'm good at reading rooms, but I never forgot that I was wearing a costume. I've always known.
Here's what I actually believe, stripped of costume: people with good manners who are genuinely kind are a joy to be around. Warm, attentive, considerate, that's real and it's valuable. But the performance of class, the knowing-which-fork, the quiet marking of outsiders, that's theater. It's always been theater. The pinky-up trend is funny because it knows it's theater. The problem is when people forget they're performing and start believing the costume is the person.
I'm a woman with red hair, tattoos, a foul mouth, a secondhand chair, and a guitar that buzzes on the low E. I have never once lifted my pinky over a teacup in genuine sincerity. I make music about grief and faith and rage and identity, in a closet, at 2am, because it's the only way I know how to be honest. That's not working class or refined or any category. That's just mine.
Class is a costume. Underneath it is a person. I'm more interested in the person.
Pinky up if you want. I'm going to drink my cold coffee with both hands wrapped around the mug like a gremlin and feel absolutely zero shame about it.
That's the whole lesson. You're welcome.
What Actually Matters Under the Costume
Let me tell you what I think is actually underneath the class performance. What people are trying to signal when they lift the pinky, when they deploy the boutique dress on Sunday, when they know which fork to use. They're trying to communicate: I am safe. I am legible. I belong here. And that desire, to belong, to be seen as belonging, is human and real and not something to be mocked.
The problem isn't wanting to belong. The problem is when belonging gets defined as a performance of class instead of a genuine recognition of shared humanity. When the checklist of correct behaviors becomes the barrier between the person inside and the community outside. When you can only enter if you know the code, and the code is expensive to learn.
I think about this in the context of HEATHEN HYMNS, the songs I've been releasing and the people finding themselves in them. The listeners who've connected most deeply with the record are not all from the same background. They come from different places, different class contexts, different relationships to the church and to faith. But they share something that no checklist can measure: the experience of being on the outside of a system that told them they were wrong for what they were. That experience doesn't belong to any income bracket. It crosses all of them.
What I hope for, in music, in community, in any shared space, is the thing underneath the costume. The person who is frightened or funny or grieving or wildly happy. The person who needs something. The person who has something to offer that no etiquette test was ever designed to measure. That's who I want in the room. That's who I'm writing for.
Pinky up if you want. I'm going to drink my cold coffee with both hands wrapped around the mug like a gremlin. The costume is optional. The person underneath it is the point.