Tag Archives: protest

November 30, 2011 · 3:02 pm

Guest Post: OWS, A Conversation Worth Having

Welcome back, Sara! You may remember her from a guest post a few months ago about Jezebel’s iffy science coverage. We were discussing my Occupy Wall Street post earlier this week, and she raised some very interesting counterpoints to my frustrations with the OWS movement. I asked her to write them down (in non-gchat form) and she did, just for you!

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Much like Emily, as I’ve watched the OWS protests, I’ve alternated between feelings of solidarity — my salary, while keeping me in yoga, isn’t exactly paying for a private jet — and feelings of disconnection – I too am the child of educated parents who grew up in a house full of books and opportunities. But I support those protesters and I identify with their frustration, even if I’m unlikely to brave the cold to join them. And it’s because I really do think they’ve started a national conversation about income inequality in this country.

Because of OWS, I can make intelligent arguments about how there should be higher capital gains taxes – a term I couldn’t even have defined 6 months ago. Now I know that hedge fund billionaires pay a lower marginal tax rate than I do, and that there are no insider trading laws preventing congressmen from using privileged information they might gain from, say, sitting on the committee on financial services, to increase their personal income. All of this knowledge about the way the tax code works is stuff my accountant parents have talked about for years, but it took OWS to make it national news.

I credit the protests with forcing the American media, and therefore Americans, to have an actual philosophical (if also hyperbolic, melodramatic and sometimes alarmist) conversation about the way wealth is distributed in this country, and whether we think a government has a responsibility to diminish inequality. Whether you think the free market should reign unchecked, or that we should all live on a commune and share everything evenly, that’s a pretty powerful conversation, and exactly the one we should be having.

Related Post: A different kind of protest, with less clothing.

Related Post: Harnessing Poehler power for the purposes of Planned Parenthood.

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November 28, 2011 · 9:02 pm

99% or What?

I know I’m not the 1%. That’s a fact that my bank statements readily confirm. Based on the current lore, that makes me a 99 percenter, right? I don’t claim to be down with the movement, but to my best understanding, those are my choices. Since I’m certainly not at the top, by default I am of the crowds.

The problem is, I don’t feel like a 99-percenter. At least, I don’t feel like a 99-percenter is supposed to feel, if you believe the protest signs in Zucotti Park. I sympathize, but I don’t empathize. I see the truth and frustration in the faces of the Occupiers, but I don’t relate to it.

Let me clarify: I don’t make a ton of money, but I make enough. I don’t get everything I want, but I get enough. I have student loans that are challenging, but not overwhelming. I struggle with the temptations of my credit card, but its seductive power is not more than I can handle. I firmly believe that the things I want in my life are things I will eventually attain. I think things will get easier, not harder. This does not seem to be the dominating mindset when I read the blogs, comments, quotes and billboards of the OWS protesters.

I am well aware that most, if not all, of the comfort I have found is the result of the very lucky hand I was dealt. Educated parents who could afford a preposterously high caliber public school district led to a top-notch college education that fostered the skills that led to the first job and the connections that led to the second. Not everyone starts out this way. Most people don’t start out this way, that much I recognize.

But when I look at the pictures from OWS, I see a lot of faces that do look like mine, and a lot of dealt hands that were equally lucky. Of those people, I am skeptical. I don’t know what you expected your life after to college to look like, but mine is pretty much as I anticipated. Start at the bottom, work hard, pinch pennies, climb out of the mouth of the loan-monster. Live simply until you can afford to do otherwise. I don’t feel misled, and I don’t feel manipulated.

I am concerned about people who don’t have enough (money, food, opportunity, etc), but not particularly concerned with people who have too much. The 1% doesn’t get under my skin, and I don’t identify with the vitriol toward the wealthy that is tossed around by the OWSers. I get that the anger is real, and justifed, but the methodology doesn’t mean anything to me.

Related Post: Hot Girls of Occupy Wall Street. Sigh.

Related Post: The politics of having your picture taken… at the beach.

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November 27, 2011 · 3:58 pm

Sunday Scraps 38

1. OCCUPY: The internet works its collective magic once again with the pepper spray meme. Watch the California cop nonchalantly spray his way through famous works of art in this Wired gallery.

2. SIGH: One of these things is not  like the other. Time Magazine has different covers by region. Apparently Americans are VERY concerned with anxiety.

3. TELEVISION: Emily Nussbaum is now writing for The New Yorker, and this essay on 2 Broke Girls and Whitney is evidence that they chose well.

4. AWWW: Australian ad for marriage equality featuring hunky Australian men. You will tear up, and that’s a promise.

5. RACE: Jay Smooth from Ill Doctrine conducts a Ted Talk about conversations about race. Maybe we’ve all been approaching it a little bit wrong.

6. CONNECT: Forget 6 degrees of separation, science now suggests we average only 4.74 degrees from any Facebook using stranger. Yes, that qualifier is a little irritating, but the NYT piece is still worth a read.

Related Post: Sunday 37 = Questlove, Beyonce lyrics, and Alan Cumming has a new cologne.

Related Post: Sunday 36 = science tattoos, pixie cuts, attempt to do nothing!

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October 18, 2011 · 12:59 pm

Protesting Chicks are HAWT

Earlier this week, I wrote about the sexualization of Halloween (and not just the costumes), and now we’ve got the sexification of something devoid even of costume and camp: Sexy Occupy Wall Street. You read that right. A guy named Steven Greenstreet has made a blog called Hot Chicks of Occupy Wall Street. There’s a video, too.

These women are beautiful, and as Steven says in his “About” letter, “the video, and the voices within, are honorable and inspiring.” Their voices and stories would be just as honorable and inspiring if the faces behind them weren’t so attractive, right?

There’s something about it that gives me icky feelings and I’m having a hard time identifying exactly what. I think it’s a combination of a) the voyeuristic style, and b) the historical tradition of mitigating the impact of women in progressive movements by emphasizing their beauty.

a) The video and the photos both have this peeping tom quality; it’s quite clear that many of the women didn’t know their photos were being taken. Do they know they’re in a gallery of hot protesting girls? Are they cool with that? Also, it’s invasive, stylistically speaking. The cameras are so close to the subjects that makes me feel claustrophobic just to look at.

b) In college, a speaker came to a class I took and told us about her experience at the UChicago sit-in of 1969. She talked about how the female students were encouraged by their male peers to “get with the movement.” So they did, and it turned out that what the guys meant by “get with the movement,” was “get with the dudes in the movement,” and also, “get some coffee.”

Greenstreet’s little site is not so egregious as that, after all, he does calls them “super smart hot chicks being all protesty.” I just want to make sure he knows that all these hot protesting girls didn’t leave their homes this morning with the intention of being the subject of some progressive voyeur’s jerk-off reel. Their purpose in this movement is not to provide eye candy for the male participants, and I sincerely doubt it was to be gawked at by a dude with a camera.

Or, maybe I’m wrong. Perhaps Greenstreet has a stack of signed release forms.

Related Post: Words between friends: my teenage cousins pull out the big guns on Facebook.

Related Post: Disney princess and the word “impregnate.”

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