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Recently in Salon Mothers Who Think

Different hero, different war
John McCain's first wife won't say a harsh word about the man who dumped her. Is she a spineless wimp or a quiet hero?
By Jennifer Foote Sweeney
[03/06/00]

Lessons in consumption
Only by immersing our children in marketing can we teach them to choose.
By Nick Gillespie
[03/06/00]

Watching TV on the bus
Teen TV novelizations invade bookstores and void the teenage mind.
By Carina Chocano
[03/03/00]

The tyranny of "Abercrappie"
My brother is under the spell of a company that promotes the frat-boy free-for-all.
By Damien Cave
[03/03/00]

When the revolution comes
We invite readers to respond to the Family for Sale series with grand plans, brainstorms and blueprints for a better tomorrow.
By Jennifer Foote Sweeney and Amy Benfer
[03/03/00]

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By Amy Benfer

March 6, 2000 | Once, in the ninth grade, I was told by my English teacher that the majority of kids in my school district came from the poorest households in the city. I was shocked. Who around me was poor? I had been taught that poverty was something immediately recognizable and visceral, that poverty was as visible as a tattoo. I had imagined that poverty existed somewhere far from the world that I lived in. Poverty was the kid in torn clothing, the kid who inhabited some permanent Dickensian nightmare.

My teacher's response was cryptic, but I instantly recognized its meaning, even if I had not yet articulated it: "The first thing that a poor person buys is clothes."

Also Today Lessons in consumption Only by immersing our children in marketing can we teach them to choose. By Nick Gillespie

She said this smugly with clear disapproval, the kind that I agreed with at the time: These people would do better to wear their poverty with pride, buy healthy food, rent a decent place to live. If they wore cheap, secondhand clothing, who cared? We would recognize them for what they were: the deserving poor. Lesser than us, to be sure, but the kind of people who demonstrated the values -- proper nutrition, decent education, a puritanical disdain for material culture -- that made them worthy of our sympathy.

I should have known better. Many of my friends were poor or at least working class, though, because they were also prettier than me and resourceful, I hadn't noticed. When I was 13, my best friend taught me how to shoplift. We shoplifted things that my parents would have bought me anyway (we were middle class) -- $25 T-shirts emblazoned with surf and skateboard company logos, polo shirts, miniskirts. But our first theft was the most symbolic: We stole the Guess? jeans triangle.

At this time, Guess? jeans, the skintight ones with zippers on the ankles, were $50 a pair. The knockoffs were also skintight with zippers. They sold for $19.95. The knockoffs had plain back pockets, the originals had the Guess? triangle.

Melissa couldn't afford the brand-name versions, but she had a solution: Steal the triangle. We would go into the dressing room with a pair of Guess? jeans and a razor blade. We would slice the label from the jeans and, later that night, sew the label onto a pair of generic jeans.

How we got caught is another story, involving a diary (not mine); but the lesson I learned was not along the lines of "Thou shalt not steal." Instead, I realized that having (or appearing to have) the right stuff is essential to being seen as an ordinary (read: middle-class) person. Melissa already had long legs, she was the best student in accelerated math and she was popular. Having Guess? jeans didn't make her visible; we all had them. Having Guess? jeans made Melissa -- the daughter of a single mother who worked as a grocery store clerk -- invisible.

Of course, poverty was never invisible to her. Owning Guess? jeans didn't make her house bigger or remove the 20-year-old beige carpeting or make her father, a kind, brilliant alcoholic who lived in a trailer, any less likely to pass out in front of the television. Her Guess? jeans insulated her; they gave her privacy, a privacy that actual middle-class students took for granted.

The story of Melissa and her Guess? jeans can be read as a moral fable about the evils of material culture. We have all read the essay about teens and their stuff. It changes only as the status of brand-name labels waxes and wanes. One year it's inner-city kids and their Tommy Hilfiger, the next year it's suburban kids and Abercrombie and Fitch. There is usually a subplot involved, about the shameless way that advertisers use sex to market to teens.

It's true that marketers are probably shameless, and that most people want their stuff to make them sexier, but the ideology behind the perennial screed about materialistic teenagers is that it implies that there is some ideal world that we all live in, a world in which the content of our characters does not have to be communicated by a corporate logo emblazoned on our ass.

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