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On Beauty, Pageantry, and Performance

Friday, March 1, 2013

I was never going to be a beauty queen.  Not from the day my mother first fed me solid food.  I liked it, you see.  I liked it, and I never had one of those “eat whatever you like and never gain a pound” metabolisms.  By the time the exercise-induced migraines hit hard when I was 8 years old, it was pretty much written in stone: I was going to be the fat kid.

What’s more, I was a couple years younger than my grade level peers, and was taller than they were.  A tall, fat girl–developing into adolescence 2 years behind everyone in her peer group.

And I knew, with all my painfully awkward fat adolescent kid ways, that I’d never be a beauty queen.  So why bother learning how to use makeup?  Why wear dresses?  Not being pretty meant I had the freedom to make my time my own.  It meant that I could roll out of bed in the morning fifteen minutes before the school bus arrived and be ready to go with two minutes to spare.  It meant I had more time for all the things I liked better than torturing myself to be pretty.

Because it’s always some form of torture, isn’t it?  The beauty enforcers can wrap it up in any amount of ritual, but it’s torture.  They put a curling iron right up close to your face, this chunk of scorching metal inches from your eyes, and they call you names when you shy away.  They clog up your pores with chemicals and then they sell you new chemicals to unclog your pores and new chemicals when you’ve stripped away all the oil in your face with chemicals so your skin looks like it’s been to hell and back.  They give you skin cancer in tanning beds.  They deform your feet with high heels.  They put you in dresses that make you conscious, constantly, of where your hemline is and whether you’re being appropriate and who’s looking at you and where they’re looking.  They rip your hair out and burn your hair off and leave you with little ingrown hairs scarring your skin.  Look at your average day spa: how many “indulgences” are they selling which involve physical suffering to some degree or another?

When you participate, you’re tortured.  When you don’t participate, you’re tortured in other ways.  Bullying starts early if you’re not a girl who gender conforms.  In the 1980s and 1990s, being a girl who liked playing with boy toys and liking science could mean your ass was about to get kicked on the playground.  A little later on, the bullying got more subtle and more cruel.

Even so–for all the bullying, all the scorn I received from my female classmates and elders for not doing enough to gender perform–I often believe very truly that I got the better end of the deal.

My mother was in pageants when she was younger, and was a figure skater, which for women (especially at that time, before many of the harder technical elements of today’s figure skating were added) was in many ways another form of pageantry.  She developed an eating disorder that I believe has had consequences on her health for the rest of her adult life.

My sister and my cousin who is my sister’s age both participated in several pageants.  Both developed issues around food, around men.

I’ve known a lot more “pageant girls” than most people.  Some big pageants, but mostly small towns, county fairs–the kinds of pageants where, minutes after the glittery podium gets taken down, a demolition derby might start up in the same arena.

People mock pageant girls.  They say that they’re shallow, that they’re unintelligent, that they lack senses of humor or an ability to think analytically.  They’re thought to be overly earnest, chatty, extroverted, constantly smiling, and possibly dangerously oversexed.  For every one of those descriptors, I’ve met a beauty pageant contestant who fit it.  I never met even one beauty pageant contestant who fit all of them, or even close.

If you have an idea in your head of who pageant girls are, what they look like when they’re not in pageants, what goes on in their brains, get it out of your head because it’s all bullshit and you learned it from shitty movies that existed in part to make cheap fun of women.

The women in beauty pageants are working really hard.  THAT is what makes beauty pageants tragic, dear reader.  It’s not that it’s easy to be a beauty queen, it’s that it’s actually quite difficult to even make it into the named runners-up.  It takes practice and dedication and money.  You may think that every girl in these pageants has rich parents footing the bill, and that’s not true, either.  I’ve seen girls in pageants who paid their way there by doing wage labor, and those who were already developing a knack for sales and marketing getting sponsorships from local businesses by just dropping in and making cold calls.

And it’s not just the hours of practice at the actual pageant.  Do you know how many hours you have to train yourself on femininity practices before you come close to walking like a beauty queen in towering heels?  Just to move and be comfortable in the face paint and garb of a pageant girl requires an incredible investment of time and energy.

For nothing.

For less than nothing, in some ways, because even if you’re the winner, so what?  Are you going to put that on your resume?  Unless you’re Miss America or at least a state-level Miss America pageant winner, and maybe even then, most employers will just look at you with an eyeroll.  Being the county fair beauty queen took work and effort, but it’s the kind of work (read: women’s work!) our society belittles and devalues, making the people who perform it seem shallow and stupid.

That’s why at the end of the day, I feel like my sister and my cousin got a more raw deal than I did–because beauty performance is addictive, and it’s something that’s very hard to scale down once you’ve started performing at a particular level.   If my sister or cousin suddenly chose to take as little time with beauty rituals on a daily basis as I take, they would be perceived as “letting themselves go.”  Because people are used to seeing me without makeup, I don’t get told that I look “tired” when I’m not wearing it.

They also got told, much more than I did, that they had some sort of shiny, glamorous “perfect” self that was set above their normal, humdrum, everyday self.  Without a perfect self to compare myself against and to fail against every single time, it wasn’t difficult to face the me who woke up bleary-eyed and tangle-haired.  Without face paints, I never had to consider myself undressed without makeup, never had to wake up before my boyfriend so I could make sure he only saw me after I “put my face on” (a telling euphemism, as if the bones and skin and flesh beneath the makeup were mere scaffolding for the real face of paint).

When I see people who are otherwise relatively decent human beings make negative comments about beauty queens, it makes me angry.  The part of beauty pageants that should frustrate us is how much of the effort, how much of the brilliance and time and energy of many of our young women, goes into a type of production rooted in pitting women against each other and ranking women according to their looks.  The part that should frustrate us is how many of those young women come out of pageants with fresh new eating disorders and ulcers and anxiety problems and depression.  The part that should frustrate us is that over and over again, women can’t win for losing–performing gender will get you trashed as surely as failing to perform it, and often by the very same people.

Many women worry about their place in women’s social hierarchy, whether they seem feminine enough, attractive enough, whether their performance of patriarchal gender norm compliance is enough.  In case you’re wondering exactly what you’re doing wrong, take heart.  It doesn’t matter if you’re a butch or a beauty queen–the beauty enforcers don’t hate your performance.  They just hate you–for being female.

Filed in Feminism, Society | | Comments (0)

Tagg Romney, Jerry Sandusky, and America’s White Male Entitlement Culture

Friday, October 19, 2012

It’s no secret that Republicans in today’s America are masters of projection.  One of their favorite tactics seems to be accusing their opponents of whatever they’re actually doing–generally in the hopes that once accused of the same thing, they can simply say “well, both sides are guilty.”

Take voter fraud, for example.  For all the noise made over ACORN, it’s become quite clear in this election, as it was clear in the last two, that Republicans are responsible for much more voter disenfranchisement than the Democrats have been at any point in their contemporary history.  They accuse Obama of being an angry black male–and then Tagg Romney wants to respond to Obama’s words in a debate with his fists.

They accuse Obama of cutting Medicare, when of course, that’s very much what they’d like to do.  And of course, they complain about “entitlement culture” when they talk about things like Social Security and Medicare.

Poor people, they suggest, are becoming increasingly entitled.  They will not work if they are given money, as they clearly have no desire to make more than what they are given.  Rich people, on the other hand, must be given money–in fact, if you don’t make sure they get their entitlements, they might go on strike Atlas Shrugged style and stop working!

The phrase “entitlement culture” appears primarily in reference to poor people in America.  In fact, just now when I searched on Google, “white male entitlement culture” had exactly one hit.

Entitlement culture isn’t a term you hear feminists use very often, and when they do, it’s almost always referring specifically to the way that men feel entitled to use women’s bodies sexually–i.e. as a facet of discussion on rape culture and the reasons that rape culture exists.

I would like to posit something different.  Entitlement culture isn’t one of the reasons rape culture exists.  It’s the reason, and rape is just one symptom of this entitlement sickness.

The reason men feel entitled to take your body or the body of a young boy or the body of an incarcerated black man or the body of their Latina housekeeper is that they have been told the entire world exists for their consumption.

Your vagina, a little boy’s mouth, a sheep’s anus, an island with indigenous people already inhabiting it, a diamond mine underneath a peaceful village, the very air we breathe and water we drink–the men at the top of the system are taught that these things are theirs for the taking, by “natural right” and right of conquest.

Raping a boy in a shower stall and planting your flag on inhabited land are two expressions of the same sentiment.  In the colonialist milieu of the entitled white male, conquest and rape are mixed together not simply because it is convenient or because of some half-baked hypothesis about evolutionary biology, but because they are identical assertions of dominance.

It’s not just your body.  It’s not just the bodies of women.  The people at the very, very top of the colonialist hierarchy believe that they are entitled to consume whatever they wish, regardless of consequence to others or, indeed, even to themselves in the long term.  In fact, they believe they are also entitled to be shielded from the very consequences of their actions.

Their egos, they believe, entitle them not only to the world, but to the world’s approval and its gratitude.  It’s the same now as it has been for a long time.  The king tosses back a few crumbs to the bakers and brewers who make his feasts possible, and if they dare to ask for enough to make their bellies full, why, they are the ones acting entitled, and he may very well just feed the crumbs to his hounds instead.

No woman or man on this planet is naturally entitled to a greater or lesser share of its bounty than any other when they are newborns.  But by the time they have reached the age of five, the world will have already begun telling them exactly what they are and are not entitled to.  By the age of ten, they’ll have clearly formed ideas of what those entitlements are.  By age fifteen, some of them will be rapists and murderers.

Of course, it gets confusing.  There are so few people at the very top, so few people who are in the Mitt Romney and Koch Brothers stratospheric level of entitlement, that it is absolutely necessary for their continued survival that they make sure other people believe they are reaping some of the same benefits.

This is, as bell hooks suggests in “Outlaw Culture,” much of the reason that black men have gravitated in American culture toward a violent machismo:

the assertion of sexist domination is their only expressive access to the patriarchal power they are told all men should possess as their gendered birthright.

White men in the lower classes stand in solidarity with people like Mitt Romney, believing that this culture of entitlement is fully their birthright.  Of course, they have no idea that to people like Mitt, they’re still less than nothing–that he and the Koch Bros. would happily sell them and their families down the river if they felt it could put a dent in their capital gains tax rates.

For men who are in the middle or upper middle classes, but not in the very top echelons of white male entitlement culture, many of the most common expressions of American white male entitlement have begun to slip away.  Being sole breadwinner in the household meant that you were entitled to dictate your wife’s allowance, what food went on the table every night, and what chores were done at what time.  Home ownership meant being entitled to do what you pleased in your own home–in many cases, this including killing people who crossed over the threshold of your house without your permission.

These expressions of entitlement used to be part of nearly every middle class American household.  Today, though, home ownership is slipping out of reach for many people who considered themselves middle class.  Many men are being outearned by their female partners.

All across the spectrum of incomes, though, men can still assert that entitlement with rape.  Those toward the bottom of the social pecking order tend to do so in particularly violent and quick ways, taking action to assert their dominance and then vanishing as quickly as they appeared.

The men at the top of the heap take their time, because they don’t just think they’re entitled to their victims’ bodies.  This is why powerful men like Jerry Sandusky don’t simply rape children and then leave them alone.  They have a powerful need to have their sense of entitlement validated by the world and human beings they feel entitled to.  Any thug can demand your obedience for half an hour; it takes a king to demand an oath of fealty, because the thug doesn’t believe he has a claim to it.

Remember that no matter what they steal, no matter what they tell you is their right by man’s law or by God’s law or by simple muscular strength, they are entitled to no more than you are.  You are no more bound to your oaths of fealty to your colonialist nation or your workplace or your priest or your abusive spouse than you are bound by a promise to a thug with a gun to your head.  It’s never too late to take back what is yours–to take back what is all of ours.

If they call you “entitled,” or worse, hear their words for what they are: desperate projections by people who know their power comes only from the myths White Male Entitlement Culture tells about itself.  You’ll know it’s working when the temper tantrum gets louder.

Filed in Feminism, Intersectionality, Poverty and Labor, Society, The Economy | | Comments (4)

The Failure of Occupy: Organization and Why It Matters

Friday, October 12, 2012

I.

I never intended to get involved with Occupy Oakland.  I had friends in the movement, but I planned to spend my first semester trying to focus on classes and a new relationship.

That’s why it surprised my boyfriend (now husband) Brian and I when we found ourselves in an alley with just us and hundreds of riot cops–and no other witnesses.

It started when he checked his Twitter feed, earlier in the evening.  Rumors had started flying that police were swarming onto Treasure Island, between the East Bay and San Francisco.  Buses full of riot cops, people tweeted, had been spotted–they were probably going to try to dismantle the Occupy San Francisco encampment.

“That’s got to be bullshit,” I said to Brian.  “There’s no way that’s actually happening.  Still…wanna find out?  We can debunk it and be Twitter famous.”

“You serious?”

“Sure.  I’ve never been to Treasure Island.  Wanted to see it anyway.”  10 minutes later, we were out the door.

Within half an hour, we found out that we wouldn’t be debunking anything.   Sure enough, public buses stuffed with standing-room only riot cops, SWAT vans, motorcycle cops.

When they took off, we–and the other citizen-journalists gathered there–followed.  After several miles of driving through San Francisco, they managed to lose most of the convoy of followers.

But they couldn’t lose us.

We stopped when they did, in a dark alley, thinking that we still had one other citizen convoy member with us.  Then we saw the license plate on the “citizen” — a police plate.  Brian and I looked at each other nervously.  The nervousness turned into a near anxiety-attack when one of the officers approached the car.

“What are you doing here?”

“We’re just parked here.”

“Yeah, but why here?”

“It’s a legal space and we wanted to park here.”

“License and registration, please.”

Brian’s car was registered and he is a licensed driver with no accidents on his record.  And the cop threatened to impound the car anyhow, until he saw we were going to stay calm and Brian swiftly grabbed his own driver’s license back from the cop’s hands.  The cop practically spat out his words as he walked away: “Why don’t you just go find somewhere else to park.”

“I thought we were going to jail tonight,” I told Brian.

“Yeah, me too. ”

He thought for a minute.  “That cop is pissed.  Should we leave right away?”

“No.  Let’s stay here.  We’re not doing anything wrong.  I don’t want them to think we’re intimidated.”

We stayed for ten minutes, then left to circle a path around a few blocks, hoping to keep monitoring the police convoy.  When we finished the circling, the convoy had moved.

“It’s gone!”

“Where the fuck did they go?”

The game of cat and mouse began.  We found them, they moved and lost us, we found them again.  It was now the wee hours of the night.  As word of the raid spread, city council members started showing up at the Occupy encampment.  The police called off the raid.

 

II.

We kept it up every time someone told us a raid was imminent.  We tracked pods of police and followed them.  We were a thorn in their side and proud of it.

We moved into a tent in downtown Oakland, in front of City Hall, at the encampment.  Because we were late to the party, so to speak, our tent was next to benches full of homeless drug addicts.  Some of them were obviously mentally ill.

We left our possessions in our tent frequently.  No one stole from it.  It collapsed while we were gone one rainy, windy day–and it was put back up, with my wallet and cash untouched inside.  The only other time someone ever opened our tent without getting permission first was when someone unzipped it to shout that there were now barbecue ribs in the free food line, while they lasted.

I had been hearing negative things about Oakland for a long time.  But the environment at the Occupy camp was anything but lawless.  The same went for Brian’s neighborhood in West Oakland (supposedly the “worst” part, by which people mean “blackest”).  I had seen extreme poverty in Oakland, but no one poor ever did anything to me like what I saw the police do indiscriminately to anyone unfortunate enough to be in their path.

III.

The worst part about keeping track of the cops was that while it was fully possible for us to warn people about raids, once the convoys were on their way the raids were basically inevitable.  We couldn’t figure out a way to stop them.

That was, until the last day that I associated myself with the Occupy movement.

We had been getting frustrated at the lack of leadership at Occupy.  Without one person to just say “this person’s okay, and we should listen to them, because they’ve helped us,” you had to rely on your existing connections and we didn’t have enough.  We’d try to gather people to help us chase cops, so that there would be more safety in numbers and better coverage of more neighborhoods, but couldn’t find a way to actually get to speak and be heard.  The supposedly open meetings seemed dominated by a particular breed of anti-hierarchy anarchists.

The day that I knew Occupy would die, we found the convoy of cops gathering just 10 blocks or so from Frank Ogawa Plaza.  They had gathered in an incredibly stupid way: crowding all of a one-way street with no real way to go but forward.  Brian and I realized the implication in an instant.

“We need to be laying down in front of those cars.”

But we knew two people wouldn’t be enough.  Two people would be carted off in a moment’s time, and that would be the end of that.  We needed dozens of people to lay in front of the police cars–the kind of nonviolent civil disobedience that gets attention paid to your cause AND stops a raid.

So we went back to the encampment and tried to tell everyone.  We told Twitter.  And you know what happened?

Nothing happened.  With no top-down organization whatsoever, everyone just said “meh” when given an opportunity to actually halt a raid and take non-violent action against police.  We had the chance, and we couldn’t do it, because there was no one to organize and no one to lead.

We left Oakland soon after, disillusioned, knowing full well that the end was coming for the movement.  If you can’t lay in front of the goons coming to attack you with chemical weapons, you don’t have a non-violent resistance movement.  You just have a tent city.

IV.

The end of Occupy happened because of its associations with anarchism.  The goals of Occupy were not, at their core, compatible in any way with anarchy.  You want regulation of banks?  You want student loan relief ?  You want housing as a right?  Libraries?

Regulatory and organizational functions require a government for efficient functioning.  This idea that government is the enemy is an idea that comes from the capitalists, and anarchosocialists have been proudly trumpeting it ever since as if it was really theirs all along.

Government isn’t the enemy, bad governance is.  By deciding that all leadership, organization, and hierarchy was antithetical to the movement, Occupy was tacitly ceding ground to the libertarians who say that the only good government is none at all.

Occupy’s motivations were confused, with the anti-hierarchy people “leading” by bullying anyone who voiced the need for demands, for organization, for leadership.  Overall, I’d say more people at Occupy wanted some sort of leadership than not, but to say so was regarded as something akin to heresy.

If there is ever to be a movement, a real working class movement, it can’t be Occupy, with its emphasis on anarchism.  Anarchy, historically, has not benefited the poor–social democracies with strong welfare states have.  Anarchy won’t regulate a bank in a way that leaves it stable for the future.  Anarchy won’t make highways to transport the goods we need for continued survival.  Anarchy won’t even get itself together enough to lay in front of the police cars that are about to tear down their homes and their community.

People who say “but it COULD do all those things!  Anarchists will just all do everything better and more effectively and with more freedom!” are making the same mistake as people who say that the church would step up and prevent hunger if we stopped providing government benefits.

The amount that government does is huge.  Every single church in America would have to donate $50,000 per year just to make up for Paul Ryan’s proposed cuts to the food stamp program.  These small, ad hoc allegiances of people aren’t sufficient to provide for the needs of all.  Government is sufficient, and has been proven to be, in the nations with strong welfare states.

We need a new movement with goals that are based in making government better and more responsive.  Until we have that, the left in the United States will not attain power.  Until the left stops accepting the idea that government is inherently evil, it cannot begin to actually help the working poor get the benefits and status and dignity they deserve.

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I Hate The Things You Love, Part I: Pornography

Friday, October 12, 2012

Marilyn Monroe’s original Playboy centerfold hung in my parents’ bedroom from the time I was very small–possibly since the time I was born.  It didn’t seem particularly remarkable to me: my parents took pains to make sure I had gone to museums, and I’d seen nude art.  The Playboy magazine context was something I didn’t learn about until much later.

When I found a Penthouse magazine of my father’s in his dresser drawer at the age of 8, I was fascinated.  I probably snuck peeks at it four or five times.

As I grew older, I–like just about everyone on the internet–viewed my first hardcore pornography, both voluntarily and due to unwanted pop-ups.  I saw enough to get jaded, because I had friends who engaged in the practice of sending each other shock sites in the late 1990s.  Later, at times, I viewed pornography with boyfriends, including a fair number of hardcore pornographic movies.

Today, I’m very much against a great deal of pornography and quasi-pornographic photography.  How did I go from porn-watcher to porn-hater?

It had to do with how much men defended it.

I already knew, when my then-boyfriend told me that he was in a book about men’s reactions to porn, that he viewed it.  You’d be a fool to think your boyfriend never looked at porn, in a high-speed internet-connected United States.  But he tried in the book to note that he watched porn with a wide variety of women–an equal-opportunity user, if you will.

I was very quiet after I read it.  Eventually he asked what was wrong.  I told him that I felt like he was acting like women were items on a buffet line, to pick and choose from.  I didn’t know it, but that moment was actually the push that would, in the months after, lead me to becoming a vocal proponent of feminism.

As I became a feminist, I also joined a website that was, at that time, just getting started.  It was called Reddit.  On that website, people could talk about anything.  People asked advice, gave interviews, talked about their relationships, and posted many, many links.

And I couldn’t help but notice a trend in something that women in particular kept talking about.  They’d ask questions that sounded about like this:

My boyfriend looks at pornography all the time, and it’s not because I’m not pretty or don’t want to have sex.  He just seems more interested in porn than me, and then he doesn’t have the energy to actually have sex with me.  What am I doing wrong?  Help!

There were hundreds of these questions over the years.  I also couldn’t help but notice that the responses from Redditors was almost always the same: “are you letting yourself go?  You should be more entertaining in bed.  Sometimes guys just like to have something easy instead of getting a woman off.  This is normal.  You just need to deal.”

It was amazing the lengths people would go to, just to say that men jerking it to porn was more important than anything else in their lives.  If couples set a “no porn” boundary, it was ridiculed as impossible and controlling.  If someone said, hey, porn isn’t always very nice and sometimes it’s of pretty gross stuff, you’d get a “but this keeps me from doing it in the real world.”

It’s not just porn addicts who are the problem.  It’s every man who gets his ideas about sex from porn.

“Oh, but those guys are stupid.  I’m not like that.”

Bullshit.  Bullshit, bullshit, bullshit.  I’ve had sex with a large number of men, and not one of them–not one–didn’t at some point try to do something that they had learned about in pornography.  Sometimes, those things were things I could get into.  Other times, they made me feel degraded and bad.  And yet, more than once, I went along with it.  Why?

Because if you’re against porn, you’re THAT kind of feminist.  You’re the shrill harpy who just wants to stop everyone from having fun.  Your concern for the people in porn is dismissed, because after all, porn actors and actresses aren’t people, and your concern for the viewers and their partners is dismissed because clearly you’re imagining this epidemic of porn problems in American relationships.

Every girl I know who has sex with men has stories about being basically forced into sex acts that were enshrined in the pornographic canon of Things You Are Totally Allowed To Do To Bitches Because They All Secretly Want It.  Every one.

And yet even though every hetero woman has had this happen, and every hetero woman knows about this phenomenon, we have to act around men like it’s not true.  I’ve seen women who talked with me privately about their anguish in relation to porn–feeling they couldn’t measure up, their insecurities and the ways that watching porn seemed to change the sexual habits of their boyfriends–who then would watch porn with their boyfriends and tell them how sexy it was.

It’s because if you don’t do that, maybe he won’t want you at all.  You have to pretend to want, if not the actual sex acts in the pornography, at least the ideas behind it.  You have to accept, especially in the case of amateur porn, that it’s okay to watch footage of what may or may not be a rape.  You have to accept that women are there to do things for men’s pleasure.

People think they can watch pornography and even make it central to their sex lives without being affected by it mentally.  They think that they’re superhuman, that they can have some sort of block.  Those people are wrong, and they’re trying very desperately to cling to their ability to watch porn.

Here’s the next place your objections go (and if you’re a very sharp and clever feminist, maybe the first place!): “But what about all the GOOD porn directors and websites”?  What about the Abby Winters, the Candida Royalles?

I hate to be the one to tell you this, but just because the women are smiling in your porn doesn’t mean it’s not presenting a shitty view of sexuality.  The theme of the Candida Royalle movies I watched was that women sure do need to get fucked, frequently.  That they’re starved for orgasms.

It was more focused on woman’s pleasure, certainly–and the same goes for websites like Abby Winters–but these women are actresses.  If you tell them to look like they’re having fun, they look like they’re having fun.  If you tell them (those very same actresses!) to look like they’re being cruelly abused and raped, they’ll look like they’re being cruelly abused and raped.

This emphasis on “happy porn” has had the effect of making it so that women feel they not only need to do porn-style sex, they need to do it with a big grin on their face while stroking the ego of the guy constantly about how much they love it.

And every single one of those women, just by being there in your readily available wank material, is potentially giving up career opportunities in our society.  Not only that…if you’re a porn star, and you get raped on or off set, you can basically forget about reporting it.  At best, you’ll be a laughingstock.  The person who raped you will never go to jail, not ever.  Once you’re in porn, whether it’s happy smiley porn or shocking rape porn, your rape may as well be legal.

So then we have the people who think that it’s ok for THEM to watch porn, because they know it’s all fake and besides they WANT the conditions to be better.  They WANT equality.  Yeah, well, guess what, we don’t live in an equal world.  We live in a world where porn acting consigns women to the bottom of society in the vast, vast majority of cases (with a few well-paid stars to stand out and tell us it’s all okay and that exploitation is the exception and not the rule).  Until the world is what you want it to be, using pornography is feeding into the regressive forces keeping women oppressed.

I don’t expect this post to change anyone’s mind.  I have a feeling that most people who are reading this and view porn regularly are already thinking up excuse after excuse, with the basic summation: my ability to masturbate to new images is more important than the mental health and physical safety of other human beings.

It’s amazing how many people, deep down, really do believe exactly that.  Are you one of them?  How defensive does this post make you feel?  Does it make you angry?  If it does, maybe you should give some real thought as to why you think it’s so, so, so critical to have access to images of sexualized and objectified people that you don’t even know.

 

Filed in Feminism, I Hate The Things You Love, Pornography, Poverty and Labor, Society | | Comments (0)

Slavery, the Lottery, and Honey Boo Boo: What Would You Do For Freedom?

Thursday, October 4, 2012

Every time a lottery jackpot gets big, you hear this old chestnut trotted out:

“The lottery is just a tax for people who are bad at math.”

It’s said derisively, often by otherwise kind and decent liberal human beings.  Sure, maybe they understand that gambling can be an addiction, and they may pity the poor people who are spending their money on tickets, but they have no empathy.

What if buying lottery tickets was the rational thing to do?

What if it wasn’t just rational?  What if it was in some ways a brave and courageous thing to do?

***

The first time I ever used a coin to scratch off the silver waxy coating of a scratch-off ticket, I was eight years old.  My paternal grandmother gave one to each grandchild on Christmas Eve.

My ticket was a winner.  But not by a lot.  Five bucks, which wasn’t bad to a 1992 lower middle class 8 year old, but it wasn’t the $10,000 jackpot, either.  I studied the back of the ticket.  I looked at the odds.  And when my mom took me to cash the ticket in, I told her I wanted five scratch-offs.

She gave me the tickets.  I knew I was lucky.  I could feel it in my bones.  What would I do with all that money?  A bicycle–a brand new ten-speed that was big enough for my too-rapidly-growing frame?  A vacation.  Disney World!  The world would be my oyster.

The tickets, of course, all lost.  My five dollars was gone, exchanged for a few minutes of believing that I could be the coolest, richest girl in school and no one would ever tease me again.

***

A few months back, the Powerball jackpot got so huge–over half a billion dollars–that I decided once again to play the lottery.

I wasn’t lucky, of course.  If I had been, I’d be writing these entries and having them drawn up as full page ads in The New York Times, because that’s the kind of crazy shit I’d do with half a billion dollars.  Maybe.  Maybe I’d buy a cruise ship for me and my hundred best friends and we’d have an intentional community on the ocean where we’d raise children who were citizens of the world.

See?  That kind of money, it doesn’t just make people think about the actual money itself.  With that much money, you can do whatever you want.  Any crazy dream you’ve ever had.  You would never have to worry again about money, you think.  No one you love would ever have to be unhappy because they wanted for necessities, not ever again.

***

When you have an overdue electric bill and are worried about making rent, people will call you crazy if you spend money on lottery tickets.  But let’s look at it from another perspective.

The term “slavery” didn’t used to just mean the system of chattel slavery imposed on Africans who were kidnapped and forced to work in the Americas and Western Europe.  Slavery, from antiquity through The Enlightenment, had a substantially broader definition that included everything from indentured servitude of limited duration to–well, to wage earning.

Wage earning?

In Ancient Rome, if you were a wage earner, they considered you a slave.  Many slaves in the Roman Empire were “voluntary” slaves, which is to say, they sold themselves into slavery in order to pay a debt they or their family owed.  If a slave in these societies had children, the children were full citizens who could rise high in bureaucratic or military occupations.

If you earn money today–whether you’re a doctor or an assembler or a writer–and you went back in time to ancient Greece or Rome and explained how you spend your days, they would assume you were a slave, not a citizen.

The only people who really are not enslaved in the contemporary capitalistic economy–who do not have encumbrances requiring them to sell their labor or face penury and privation–are the people whose land or existing wealth is making them money.  These people are free in ways that those who must work simply cannot be.

[I always find it a bit curious that many conservatives and libertarians emphasize freedom from taxation as the Ultimate Freedom, to the point of making snide remarks to the effect that poor people have it pretty great with all their low taxes.  If a lack of taxation was equivalent to freedom, the freest people in our society would be the homeless, the imprisoned, and children.  Black men, who are facing incredible unemployment numbers in this recession even before you take into account gross search, arrest and sentencing disparities leading to high prison numbers, must sure love all that freedom that they get because of racial discrimination--not having to pay taxes sure is great, right?]

Rich people’s freedom in America is largely heritable.  By keeping inheritance tax rates low, we have ensured that the United States lags behind the rest of the developed world in social mobility.  All rags to riches stories that are touted as “only in America” are wrong.  You’re more likely to claw your way out of poverty in most of the EU than you are in the United States, and more likely to become rich from middle class beginnings.

Similarly, wage earning is heritable, and your chances of ever being able to buy your way out of slavery are becoming slimmer every year.  Crushing student loan debt means that children of the middle class and working class have a mortgage worth of loans just to get job training that employers now refuse to provide.


The rich have cut off nearly every way for a poor person to buy their way out of a system that requires them to sell their labor by the hour, with contracts that can be terminated on a whim at a moment’s notice.

And into this world, they deliver lottery tickets.

***

The scratch-off tickets of my childhood cost only a dollar.  I have probably spent only twenty dollars, in total, on lottery tickets in my life.  There are scratch-off tickets here in Tennessee that cost $20.  In Texas, a single scratch-off with a big jackpot can cost $50.

The odds may be long, but the question is: does it matter when what you’re really buying is a chance at freedom?

Historically, people have taken all kinds of risks that would have been foolish, except that they were striving for liberty, for the ability to be the masters of their own fate rather than subservient to cruel or capricious whims.

 

Now, hold up a minute, you say.  Buying a lottery ticket isn’t like running away from the plantation and finding the nearest stop on the Underground Railroad.  It’s true–there are significant cultural and historical differences in many ways.  But the kind of freedom people are seeking when they dream big lottery dreams isn’t just a word or a feeling.  It’s being able to have your dignity, to be able to say no, to be able to refuse consent for people to walk all over you and pay you a pittance.

More than that, it’s buying not only your freedom from indignity and pain and want–it’s buying the same freedom for your children.

The odds are low.  But what are the odds that someone in poverty, with few skills and little education, will be able to start a successful business without safety net policies and additional training?

We are too used to thinking of poor people as stupid, as simply not knowing what is best for them.  That’s comforting to a lot of people; in their minds, it means the poor deserve their fate because of their insufficient neural power.  That’s a lot easier than stomaching the truth: that when poor people do things like gamble compulsively, they’re actually sacrificing the small pleasures and properties of their lives for the one real chance, however small, that they have to get out of a life they were born into and have no hope of escaping otherwise.

***

When Here Comes Honey Boo Boo began to air, it was hailed nearly universally by anyone and everyone on the internet as the ultimate horror of our age.  Strangely, it seemed to be the people who had never tried watching the show who were most loudly opposed.

Some people called it exploitation.  Some called it disgusting.  Some called it child abuse.

I watched the show, just for a few episodes.  Reality television isn’t my cup of tea generally, so I doubt I will watch Honey Boo Boo again unless I hear about something relevant to my interests.  However, I will say that in the episodes I watched, I saw a family that was positive about body image, working hard to maintain their working class standard of living, and enjoying themselves in ways that are time tested–like farting contests.

The Honey Boo Boo family members aren’t classy.  But they’re very, very human, very accepting and tolerant.  They love each other more than any other family on a reality program I’ve seen.  I would much rather my hypothetical daughter act like Honey Boo Boo than a Kardashian or a Real Housewife.

And they’re hated.  The people who watch the show aren’t predicting the apocalypse because of it.  Often, they’re oddly charmed by a crude, loud, but somehow quite functional family.  The question these people ask is:

How could they let themselves be filmed like that?

In some ways, Honey Boo Boo is showing an American family that is more psychologically “free” than most.  They seem largely happy with their lives, family, friends, hobbies, and home.  How many of us can say the same?  But undoubtedly, they also live with the same crippling anxiety that haunts all working class families.  Any day, the gravy train could exit the station.

Economic freedom is the one freedom they don’t have.  Do you think Honey Boo Boo, or her mom or dad or siblings or cousins, is going to be the next Bill Gates?  Do you think she’ll get a Harvard MBA so she can become one of the many rent-seekers preying on laborers like the ones she grew up among?

Honey Boo Boo’s family had one chance for freedom.  A big payout from a television network is as long a shot as winning the lottery, especially since reality shows get produced because they’re cheap.  But they took the risk of humiliation and ridicule, and they did it for a first season payoff that wasn’t enough to buy anyone total freedom–$50,000.

Now, though, sources report the second season will bring in much more money for the family.  They’re looking at bringing in hundreds of thousands of dollars this year, and could easily bring in over a million in 2013.  That’s real money.  That’s freedom-buying money–enough so that you can live on your interest without touching the principal ever again.  They’re not seeking out other kinds of fame, and have turned down book deals and appearances because they want to spend more time together.

All the Honey Boo Boo cast wants is what every American family wants: to be together, to be themselves, to be able to make their decisions without coercion.  Instead of plunking down cash for a lottery ticket, they’re risking everything: their reputation in their community, their privacy for a lifetime.   And it’s the best opportunity that America gives them, the only route offered out of where they are.

What does it say about us that we find this worthy of ridicule and hyperbolic statements about the end of television?  What does it say about the family’s status, how desperate and hard life can be on the bottom, that they’re willing to make that trade, to show their most ridiculous and personal moments to strangers?

Over and over, America tells you that wanting economic freedom is only right if you “earn” it–for instance, by being born with rich parents.  If you try to buy your freedom in a way that isn’t sanctioned by the ruling classes, if you try to convince yourself that maybe somewhere, somehow there’s a life better than the one you’re living, you can expect to be singled out for mockery, too.

It’s a sick society that sees slaves struggling toward freedom and takes delight in seeing who can insult them in the most creative and hurtful terms.  Americans talk a big game about freedom, but when it comes down to it, freedom isn’t just another word for nothing left to lose–sorry, Janis.  It’s a word for having so much to lose that losses become an inconvenience rather than a catastrophe.

Filed in Feminism, Intersectionality, Poverty and Labor, Society, The Economy, The Prison School Pipeline | | Comments (2)

Our Own Rope: “Job Creators” and the Race to Erase Society

Thursday, October 4, 2012

There’s a joke I once heard from a Russian of my acquaintance.

A team of researchers interested in the differences between labor policies in various countries decides to see what workers will be willing to put up with.  They first go to France, where the workers are all happily working 32 hour weeks and taking six fantastic weeks of vacation.  Their parental leave is plentiful, and their healthcare is provided for by the state.  They say to some French factory workers, in the guise of being from the main corporate office, “There has been a change of policy, we will be requiring mandatory overtime, but you will be paid additional wages.”  The workers immediately strike, unwilling to work the mandatory overtime requirements.

The team moves on to the United States, to a factory where the workers work forty hours a week and get union benefits.  “From now on you’re working overtime but you get paid extra.”  The workers cheer.  The researchers jot down notes.  “Actually, no, we lied, you’re getting paid nothing extra, your wages will be the same as if you had only worked forty hours, but you need to be here until sundown.”

The workers nearly riot; there’s a struggle to contain them well enough for the researchers to get away.

They continue on to Russia.  For these workers, mandatory overtime and even working overtime for nothing extra has no effect.  They just keep their heads down, nodding.  The researchers try again.  “No, we’ve changed our minds again, actually, we’re cutting all your wages in half so we can pay larger executive bonuses.”

No one says a word.

“We’re hiring overseers to whip you whenever you stop working for a moment.”

Silence.

The researchers, exasperated, try again.  “In fact, we’ve changed our minds completely.  You’re all terrible workers, and we want you to go out back and each man should dig a hole large enough to be his own grave.  Then you’re going to come in here and we’re going to hang each one of you.”

Suddenly, the researchers notice movement and murmuring in the crowd.  A man slowly, tentatively raises his hand.

“Do we have to bring our own rope?” he asks.

 

***

 

I was told that joke seven years ago, and it shows.  Today’s American workers are browbeaten and used to accepting anything their employer dishes out.  The bosses have been deified, complete with managerial cults of personality and religion-like business philosophies passed down by guru MBAs.

You do not question the bosses.

The bosses, in the Republican way of thinking about things, are like God in a Jonathan Edwards sermon:

 

There is nothing that keeps wicked men, at any one moment, out of hell, but the mere pleasure of God.

By “the mere pleasure of God,” I mean his sovereign pleasure, his arbitrary will, restrained by no obligation, hindered by no manner of difficulty, any more than if nothing else but God’s mere will had in the least degree, or in any respect whatsoever, any hand in the preservation of wicked men one moment…

The God that holds you over the pit of hell, much as one holds a spider, or some loathsome insect, over the fire, abhors you, and is dreadfully provoked; his wrath towards you burns like fire; he looks upon you as worthy of nothing else, but to be cast into the fire; he is of purer eyes than to bear to have you in his sight; you are ten thousand times so abominable in his eyes as the most hateful venomous serpent is in ours. You have offended him infinitely more than ever a stubborn rebel did his prince: and yet ’tis nothing but his hand that holds you from falling into the fire every moment; ’tis to be ascribed to nothing else, that you did not go to hell the last night; that you was suffered to awake again in this world, after you closed your eyes to sleep: and there is no other reason to be given why you have not dropped into hell since you arose in the morning, but that God’s hand has held you up; there is no other reason to be given why you han’t gone to hell since you have sat here in the house of God, provoking his pure eyes by your sinful wicked manner of attending his solemn worship: yea, there is nothing else that is to be given as a reason why you don’t this very moment drop down into hell.

 

You are nothing to the richest people in the United States.  You are less than nothing.  They believe that the world owes workers nothing more than the least they’ll accept.  Mitt Romney made the “47%” comments, and they ignited a firestorm–but why?  Conservatives already thought anyone getting poor-person government benefits (as opposed to rich-person benefits like favorable tax codes) is a moocher.

***

At first glance, Ayn Rand’s thousand-page opus Atlas Shrugged, a perpetual favorite of conservatives, doesn’t seem to have much in common with Edwards’ fire and brimstone sermon.  Rand herself was a staunch atheist.  However, it suggests that rich people should simply let all the poor people die if they try to agitate for themselves, and that rich people would be much better off without all those pesky workers interfering with their grand designs.

The rich people hold the poor over the pit of hell, and their withdrawal on a whim sends the world into a chaotic nightmare.

But Galt’s Gulch, the land of the striking,  doesn’t make sense.

In a society of a few hundred or thousand people, most of whom were some sort of “job creator” (or, more likely, guys who buy swords at the mall), you would have to revert to incredibly basic technology.  Specialization is what makes our world turn, and you can’t run a world with sophisticated equipment unless you have a whole lot of people making food and doing basic services.

Galt’s Gulch could run for a while, of course.  Partly that’s thanks to a magical perpetual motion machine in Atlas Shrugged, created by a lone supergenius (of course), that gives it free energy.  Of course, if you actually could have basically free energy, you’d have a post-scarcity society waiting to happen, but that’s not what Rand wants.  Forget eliminating want and saving humanity from suffering–the inventor of the perpetual motion machine wants to make money, and if he can’t, he’s taking his ball and going to the Gulch.  The other thing you’d need would be to take things in with you.

How are you going to wear clothing?  How many shepherds do you have?  Are you making flax into linen?  Or having someone pick cotton?  Have you opened a farm equipment manufacturing plant, or are you using scythes a blacksmith fashioned?  Who’s producing your natural or artificial dyes?  At best, you’d wear medieval homespun once the clothing the “moochers” wove and dyed and stitched fell apart and couldn’t be patched any more.  And don’t get me started on shoes–or healthcare/medical equipment–or production of apparatus for actual scientific research.

In Rand’s view, rich people could and should take pleasure in being rich and deserved to be openly contemptuous of the poor.  But the idea that you can live apart from society–truly apart–and still live well is, and will always be, a fiction.  Even so, based on this fantasy, she advocated unfettered rich-person worship in her non-fiction–all the while collecting the Social Security and Medicare benefits she claimed to despise.

In order to have Galt’s Gulch, her own rich people would have to use the products made by the world they turned their back on, but it’s the poor who are “parasites” to Rand, like the “loathsome insect” in Edwards’ sermon.

 

***

The reason we can save labor today and still live so well is that people have specialized and used economies of scale.  Those economies of scale could be the most amazing thing in the history of mankind if they were put to use well: an economy in which people are free from want and only have to work for a day or two a week to provide the world with all it needs.
Instead, to prop up the capitalistic system, we have to find ways all the time to keep enough people employed that there isn’t a revolt or mass famines.  But how, when any person today can produce as much as twenty people of yesteryear?  Simple: keep things breaking, and manufacture desire.  Stress independence in residential arrangements so that people will buy more appliances and construction materials.

It’s busy-work.  It’s the kind of thing your crappy second grade teacher gave you to keep you quiet instead of helping you learn.  You aren’t actually profiting from the extra production–only the rent-seekers are, as they skim off the top of every transaction through the supply chain.

Generations upon generations of human beings toiled in unimaginable conditions through Agricultural and Industrial Revolutions to make it possible for people today to have leisure time, specialization, creativity, information access.  They wanted their children to have more time to pursue their dreams.  John Adams put it best:

 

“I must study politics and war, that my sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy, natural history and naval architecture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, tapestry, and porcelain.”

 

The world we have today spits in the face of those desires of our forefathers.  Instead of using our innovation to allow our children to study what they wish and grow as human beings, we mock people studying anything but the hardest of hard sciences as lazy and undeserving of a decent standard of living.  The old saw: What does a liberal arts major say?   “Do you want fries with that?”

Americans, it seems, are no longer interested in making the next generation’s life easier.  Instead, they seem intent upon making it harder, intent on hardening up the supposedly soft youngsters of today–who are, as any Baby Boomer will tell you, lazy and entitled for wanting a job better than burger-flipping when they were told their whole lives that minimum wage labor is demeaning and only for sub-humans.

Slowly but surely, we’re losing the idea that you need a society to function.  We’ve become so detached from the labor that makes our lives possible that many people are simply rejecting the notion that it’s necessary at all.  Unfortunately for the people who believe in that fantasy and those who have to live in a world polluted by it, just because labor is invisible doesn’t mean it isn’t there.

In Atlas Shrugged, Atlas (the Greek god who held up the Earth and heavens), the one who’s “shrugging,” is supposed to represent the rich people.  But there are no gods.  No one man is powerful enough, strong enough to hold up the earth.  Rand got it backward–we’re held up by vast interconnected networks of people working and buying and living.  No one can pull themselves up by their bootstraps–but we can all pull each other’s bootstraps up.

The Romney view of “job creators” is that they are merciful tyrants who COULD fire you at any moment, and you should be grateful that they haven’t yet–but don’t feel too safe, work harder for their approval.  They dangle you over the pit of hell and you matter to them not at all, and that’s their story and they’re sticking to it.

I have a new management philosophy to teach to these vulture capitalists, who harvest companies.  I’d like to bring them all to a big open field with a scaffold next to it and teach it to them.

They can bring their own rope.  After all, they can afford it.

Filed in Society, The Economy | | Comments (0)

The Working Poor

Thursday, October 4, 2012

You are a member of the middle class.

In the morning, you wake up to the sound of a buzzing alarm and slam your hand down on the snooze button.  The clock was made in a sweatshop, and you bought it for $50 from a Target.  The cashier who was so bright-eyed and bushy-tailed at the Target is living in transitional housing for homeless men.  He’s got an accounting degree from a good state school, but this is the only job he can find.  He scans Craigslist every day for rooms he can afford, but the only ones he can find in his price range would mean a six mile walk from the nearest public transportation when he has to close up shop.

The alarm goes off again, and you wake up, bleary eyed.  The soap and shampoo you’re using came from shops, too, and it wasn’t just cashiers who were involved in making them come to you.  A multitude of warehouse workers, truck drivers, stockers, and factory laborers made the beauty products in your household possible.  Many of them have no insurance.  Many of them are using food stamps, because by the time their bills are paid, they’re barely above water even if nothing goes wrong.

You put on your clothes, and you get into your car made by workers who have systematically had their pension plans destroyed and their union benefits stripped while their employers got bailouts.  You sing along with the radio, and your radio station doesn’t even have staff any more.

You get to your office, and sit in a chair made by laborers who don’t make in a week what you make in an hour.  You turn on your computer, which moved through warehouses, and was finally delivered to you by a UPS driver who is being abused by her husband, but can’t leave because she doesn’t know how she’d make ends meet without him.

The carpets in your office are immaculate, because they’re vacuumed nightly by cleaning service staff, some of whom are undocumented immigrants.  One of them was in a car accident last week and isn’t fully well, but never went to the emergency room because he was worried he’d be asked about his immigration status.  He still is working 60 hours this week, because he needs the money.

The toilets at your office building flush perfectly, not just because they’re maintained by the janitorial staff but also because your sewage treatment plant is working to clean up your shit in the most literal sense possible.  One of the laborers at the sewer plant is about to lose his modest two bedroom house.  The stress of the looming foreclosure is giving him high blood pressure and constant headaches.

Your water cooler at work is refilled as if by magic, by an unobtrusive water delivery person who hurt his back last year.  His doctor told him he shouldn’t keep working in a position where he has to lift heavy objects, but he can’t even get an interview for a new job.

At the water cooler, you talk about the presidential debate at the University of Denver.  You talk about the hilarious drinking game you and forty thousand other people invented, where you drink every time either candidate says “middle class.”  You didn’t really keep drinking every time, of course, you quip–after all, you’re not dead today.

There was another two word phrase you didn’t hear once.  “Working poor.”   But everything you do in your life–every solitary thing you have done today–was made possible by people in desperate situations, people who are barely clinging on to life at the margins of society.

I haven’t had health insurance in years.  I work full time, and in about a month my husband is expecting to go full time and get insurance.  Over six months ago I developed a persistent cough.  It turned into wheezing.  The wheezing got worse, until about a week ago all I could think of was breathing.  It was asthma.  I couldn’t afford a doctor.  I got a rescue inhaler through someone I knew, and it took care of it–temporarily.  What I needed were corticosteroids.  I could get them for a few dollars from an online pharmacy.  Getting them from the emergency room would bankrupt me.

I know the medicine I need, and it’s not even expensive elsewhere.  But it’s expensive here, because America hates the working poor when it even bothers to acknowledge them.  The United States mocks its poor, considers them objects of derision and disgust.  It’s another disheartening sign that in this debate, the words “working class” or “working poor” weren’t used once.

Mitt Romney has already made his opinion clear: that nearly half of the nation isn’t paying income taxes, and therefore are moochers.  But anyone who’s working is paying into Social Security and Medicare to the tune of almost 10% of their paycheck–and the roughly 5% chunk their employer pays is a chunk that comes out of their employees’ pay.  That’s 15 percent of your income already.

Then, you probably spend all your money, when you’re working poor.  Saving’s unheard of, when even the tiniest emergency drains everything you have and leaves you begging from your friends and relatives.  Sales taxes, both state and local, eat another five to ten percent of your income.  Before paying a single cent of income tax, you’ve been paying twenty percent into the system.  That means you contribute a higher percentage of your income to taxes than Mitt Romney.  Literally everyone who works for Mitt Romney, from his housekeeper to his campaign manager, pays higher taxes than Romney himself.

We care about job creators in our country, but not job havers.  “Get a job!” is screamed at poor people in cities across America, but what about when you have a job?  What about when you’re one of America’s working poor, suffering quiet indignities that you try desperately to keep to yourself?  What about when you’re trying hard to hide the eviction notice and the EBT card from your kids, even though you have one job and have been working on finding a second one?

When that’s you, no nationally relevant politician has cared about you since maybe Howard Dean.  When you’re part of working poor, you vote for Obama not because you are under any delusions that he cares about you, but because you still believe that against all odds you might  be able to claw your way up into the real middle class.  You know better than to believe that some Horatio Alger bootstraps fairy tale is going to give you Mitt Romney dollars.

No politician is coming for the working poor.  The “Green” party’s name will always relegate it to privileged white people who are well intentioned but have failed to examine themselves.  No one is coming for us.  There is no hope.  There’s no light at the end of the tunnel.  There’s only slog after daily slog, until someday we’re too infirm to slog any more.

We’re all alone.  And all we have is each other.  That’s why I’m writing this blog.

Filed in Poverty and Labor | | Comments (0)