by Dr. M, aka Marvin X
The Xmas holidays to Superbowl Sunday is the most violent time in America for partner abuse. Men get distraught when they can't pay their pussy bill, and wives and girlfriends lose tempers over the lack of attention and material goods, thus men commit economic crimes to satisfy their partners, but often end up in prison and/or jail. When does it end, this vicious cycle of psychosexual pathology? It shall not end until we get a healing, a consciousness of the spiritually of life rather than the insatiable striving for conspicuous consumption or pursuing the world of make believe; no, this scourge of violence, emotional and verbal abuse shall not end until we recover from the patriarchal notion that we own each other as chattel property, personal property, a mythology based on the ideology of white supremacy domination in personal and political/economic life.
Pussy is a many splendid thing.
Pussy power has been known to help construct civilizations and destroy them.
Wars have been fought over pussy. And the most powerful men in the world have
been brought low behind pussy. What a powerful thing it is, totally confounding
men time after time, season after season, century after century. The more men
learn about pussy, the more they forget—or shall we say, they got it (theory)
but didn’t get it (the practice). It would probably be proper to first discuss
the mythology of dick before discussing the mythology of pussy, but for
dramatic effect we will continue our discussion of pussy, for it is common sense
that what is good for the goose is good for the gander.
And furthermore, there is more oppression in the world caused by men’s
attitude toward pussy than toward their dick, although the patriarchal society
gives dominance to the dick, but in the male’s headlong rush to enter the
pussy, he becomes blind to his own sexuality and consumed by the need to plunge
his organ inside the vagina. In his blindness and his resulting sexual
pathology, he becomes numb to the reality that the female is more than pussy,
that pussy has a mind, a brain, a cornucopia of emotions based on phases of the
moon. “If you think I am just a physical thing, wait til you see the spiritual
power I bring”, says a poem by Phavia Kujichagulia.
For
But rather than consider the totality of pussy, let’s limit our discussion
to the physicality of pussy, although we may, by the end of this essay, arrive
at a more holistic attitude toward pussy. In our initial discussion here, let
us then deal with pussy as a physical thing, somehow unconnected to the
phenomenon known as “woman.”
Let us begin by saying pussy is transient, elusive and ephemeral. “See,” a
woman demonstrated to me as she jumped, “When I jumped my pussy
jumped—therefore my pussy belongs to me.” Thus the locus of control of pussy is
with the pussy, not any external source such as a man, based on marriage rites
and patriarchal social definitions of authority, or de facto slavery when the
female is viewed as chattel (personal) property. “I pay the cost to be the
boss.”
The time is way past for men to get a grip on themselves regarding the
matter of pussy and their warped attitude toward it that is primitive,
reactionary and in the modern world forces men into court mandated anger
management classes, and often jail and prison as a result of domestic violence.
The purpose of this discussion is to bring about progressive consciousness on
this matter so that men finally “get it,” and in the process free the woman of
oppression and free themselves as well, so both man and woman can pursue their
divinity by transcending the focus on sexuality to the higher level of
spirituality. Of course the roots of this sexual dysfunction are religious
based—and nearly all the religions are guilty, certainly the patriarchal
religions, Judaism, Christianity, Islam. The educational system enforces the
religious order by the sin of omission or saying nothing.
After all, a person can attend the highest universities in the land,
Harvard, Yale, Stanford, without ever having a class on human sexuality or
male/female psychology and socialization. And so the male, in the absence of
manhood training, is left to his own ignorant notions of the nature and value
of pussy. His main concern is that the pussy is his and nobody else’s. That he
can come and go into the pussy at will, at his beck and call.
A
Of course this is a mental blindness he must overcome immediately he can
enter the road to spiritual maturation. He cannot continue throughout his life
in these enlightened times with such backward notions of pussy. Pussy is never
static but ever moving, dynamic and fluid. Pussy told me, “I can come with
anyone.” But in the cave man’s mind, pussy is static, thus the man is shocked
when pussy shows its fluid and dynamic nature jumping in tune with another dick
or pussy for that matter.
These days, pussies are jumping in tune with each other, partly due to male
ignorance of feminine psychosexuality, but more importantly due to the
feminization of black males by societal forces or institutional racism. The
social construct has always been to keep the black male from the reins of
power.
In the Sisyphusian mythology, we advance to retreat, for with each advance
the rules change so we must renew the march up the hill, for the closer we get,
the more the mountain top retreats to higher ground. The 60s was the great leap
forward in black manhood, but it was crushed of necessity by the US government—black
men were determined to take power by force of arms—which could only mean civil
war, so they had to be stopped—no society can risk civil unrest by its slaves
or former slaves and/or their descendants.
This rush to manhood had to be stopped by any means necessary, infiltration,
agent provocateurs, disinformation, sabotage, conspiracy, murder, false charges
leading to imprisonment or exile, drugs, sex and rock and roll. Perhaps a well
disciplined army could have withstood the barrage from the oppressor America,
but brothers went mad with power, misusing pussy while the government used
pussy to destroy the movement by using pussy power to cause chaos in the
movement. Sonia wrote, “What a white woman got cept her white pussy?” She also
told us about brothers taking pussy in the name of Fanon, Fanon, Fanon—the
“revolutionary screw!”
As activist parents were terrorized by the oppressor, the men in turn
terrorized the women, often beating them in the name of black power. The
children took note of this parental behavior and some of the males emulated
their fathers. And daughters emulated their mothers by remaining passive and
submitting to male oppression.
The religions enforced this notion of male domination or “leadership.” But
when the blind lead the blind, they both fall into the ditch together. How can
the male lead when he is ignorant to knowledge of self? Has no knowledge of
Supreme Wisdom, or if he does, he doesn't know how to apply it! So he is blind,
yet he is supposed to be in authority over his woman—his pussy, rather. This
doesn’t make sense!
The women fled from this ignorance to embrace each other, finally free from
male terrorism, the man who only saw her pussy as pussy, never having a name, a
personality and spirituality. The gay/lesbian revolution caught the fallout
from the failure of the pussy culture, the deconstruction of the patriarchy
that could not remain in the process of the modern technological revolution
that forced the woman out of the house as chattel slave--and once she saw the city,
she would never return to the country. World War II brought her the beginning
of economic independence with the desecration of the male population from the
war. It instituted the matrifocal household or female dominated culture that
would become pervasive as we entered the new millennium.
The 60s revolution was the last outbreak of black manhood, after which came the
crushing power of the state to crush his nuts back into the sands of time,
drugging him out, imprisonment, lack of economic opportunity and homosexuality
took its toll. After losing control of the pussy forever, some men turned into
pussy, became weak and passive, a disgusting representation of the macho man so
familiar to the female who concluded if she was going to have a woman she might
as well have a real woman. Terrified of the new woman, the pussy man turned to
his own kind for support, adding to the devastation of his gender.
Do not think societal forces had no play in his deconstruction, for the 60s
terrorized him as much as he had terrified the state--and of course the state
won with its awesome police and military power. The state went a step further:
it turned the male against himself, his brotherhood, by supplying the drugs and
guns that would further deplete the male population by creating internal fear
as well as external.
As his woman seized power allowed her by the state and given her by the
powerlessness of her man who suffered a military and political defeat after the
60s rebellion, the next generation of males tried to continue the sexual
domination with the rise of hip hop culture, the culture that is the direct
descendant of 60s black power culture. The young males saw their fathers abuse
their mothers and continued the tradition, even trying to extend the pimp/ho
culture. So the black woman had a moment of glory when she became a
"queen" in the sixties, but by the 80s she was depicted as ho, dog,
bitch, even with her advance education and attempt at economic parity, thus
equality. In short, his woman was completely and forevermore out of control
unless he accepted reciprocity which was anathema to the patriarchal ideal of
dominating the pussy.
But with female economic security, the woman would not tolerate his
reactionary view of her as pussy. Or maybe she would flip the script and make
him her boy toy, to be kicked out at her whim, depending on her emotional
disposition or phases of the moon. Alona Clifton, a political woman in the Bay
Area, asked what happened to the love revealed in the song, I Love You Porgy?
Indeed, the passion is gone, the chase, the capture, the triumph of domination.
It is all fake these days. No one is true, but lies prevail and pervade the
love ritual. What has love got to do with it, Tina asked? And Janet said,
"What have you done for me lately?" And so we have arrived at a
moment in the sun wherein the Creator has things fixed, as Sun Ra taught me,
either do the right thing, or we can't go forward or backward in our
relationships. Relationships are fragile at best, with men and women filled with
insecurity.
Look at the tragic love affair of the young quarterback. It represents the
woman asserting her rights to the dick, and so the script has flipped. She owns
the penis now, are we not to assume, to the extent that she would blast him
four times while he slept. Young men beware, things ain't like they used to be
and never will be again. "If you think I'm just a physical thing, wait til
you see the spiritual power I bring," says Phavia.
Part Two
Brother McNair, may he rest in peace, was an NFL quarterback who made it to
the Superbowl, but in the Superbowl of Pussy he was an abject failure: he could
not quarterback his team of pussies. In the end, pussy triumphed a thousand to
one, meeting him on the one yard line and knocking him into eternity. Poor
soul, his patriarchal mentality of "I pay the cost to be the boss"
didn't mean anything when pussy stood up to confront his proposition of male
domination. Clearly, he thought, like men of patriarchal socialization think,
that he could have all the pussy he wanted, without a consensus from the
pussies. At least the Muslims get a consensus in their polygamous fantasies.
I was lucky to escape with my head. One of my pussies said she thought about
killing me in my sleep for abusing her. And my father-in-law said he would have
killed me a long time ago if his granddaughters didn't love me so much. Pussy
is a life and death matter, as we see with McNair and millions of other men who
are meeting their fate these days in the pussy rebellion sweeping the planet.
Some time ago I went to speak at a court-mandated domestic violence session. I
had come early to the men's session, so when I arrived a women's group was in
session, so I sat in. I was amazed to hear the women speak of what they were
doing to men these days: from violence to threats of violence over the phone.
They were charged with making terrorist threats. Men and women, know that you
cannot make "terrorist threats" over the phone or in person. Verbal
violence is the same as physical violence. Take a walk, smoke a blunt, chill
out.
Whether in anger management or not, Brothers need to study the psychology of
pussy. As the great mythologist Joseph Campbell noted, women know they are
women after the first cycle. When do men know? All primitive societies had manhood
rites that taught about womanhood and manhood, but in modern society this
training is absent, so men rely on the ignorance of their friends or some
reactionary pimp psychology. So when do men get the lesson they are dealing
with a spiritual being, a being who can actually take more pain than they--who
can bleed for five days without dying while a man cannot bleed for five
minutes! Brothers need to get a healing real quick, quicker than you can say
Jackie Robinson!
Brothers, don’t ask for the pussy. Wait until she offers it to you, after
all it is her pussy. Please, brothers, get an immediate understanding on this,
no matter how much you pay on your pussy bill, it’s still her pussy. Your
ignorance on this point has caused many of you to be locked down in prisons and
jails, some for the rest of your lives, simply because you thought, in your
deranged patriarchal mentality, that you owned your woman, that she was your
chattel or personal property, causing you to kill your brother or friend. I
have friends no longer on this earth because they got caught up in the pussy
game. I sincerely miss my friends and wish they were here to enjoy the fall of
Western civilization with me—and the fall of Eastern civilization, for that
matter—all the reactionary myths and rituals of the East must fall into the
dustbin of history as well, the domestic violence, female genital circumcision,
child marriage, honor killings, the whole range of reactionary, archaic,
ignorant male mythology pervading the religions and culture of Africa and Asia.
And obviously, women need a healing as well. The woman who killed the
quarterback thought she owned her man’s penis. Just as your pussy is not his,
his dick is not yours, he can and will give it to whomever he likes. Get a
healing on this point and you will advance in your spiritual maturation. These
days, you can’t get on your cell phone and call baby boy to tell him you’re
gonna “key” his car because your girlfriend saw him riding down the street with
baby mama. Nobody owns nobody, no matter what the marriage papers say, no
matter what shacking laws say.
We are free spirits and only when we recognize this will some relationships
become lasting, after all, what does flesh have to do with it? Flesh has
nothing to do with love and I can use myself as an example—read my essay The
Maid, the Ho, the Cook, in my book In the Crazy House Called America. I
describe my love for a prostitute who sold her love up and down San Pablo
Avenue, one of the longest streets in the Bay Area. But when she showed up at
my door I was happy as a puppy dog, so don’t tell me about flesh. It wasn’t a
physical matter, but a matter of the heart. I didn’t give a damn how many men
she had slept with since the last time we were together, just come on in the
house and give me my moment in the sun.
And what is life except a moment in time? That’s all we have with each
other, a moment or two, so enjoy the one you’re with for the moment it is and
have no regrets. Get rid of all that sexual greed and guilt from religious socialization
that have you inside the box of sexual madness and depravity. Ask any
prostitute or sex worker, her pussy will be just as good tomorrow as it was
yesterday. Come out of all that holy Joe bullshit that he violated my trust or
she violated our vows. Grow up, what do vows have to do with the reality of
life? Human beings are subject to do anything in the course of a day. A large
percentage of black women admitted to having sex on the job with the boss in
Jet Magazine some years ago. Now you know Jet is the Negro Bible, if it’s in
Jet, it’s got to be true!
So love the one ya wit, give them all you can for the moment you are with them
and have no regrets, since nothing lasts forever, know this and grow in your
spiritual maturation. Let our boys become men with this knowledge and our girls
become women. Don’t be a fifty or sixty year old man or woman still tripping
about pussy and dick! Oh, he/she was unfaithful! He/she lied to me. He promised
to be true. How can you worry about her pussy when you can’t safeguard your
dick? You want to stick your dick in every hole yet worry about what dick is
going in her pussy. Get a life! What does it matter what dick is going in her
pussy when you don’t even know who she is as a spiritual being and she doesn’t
know you accept as a hard dick? Again Phavia, “If you think I’m just a physical
thing, wait til you see the spiritual power I bring!”
Part
Three
Brothers, clean your hands before entering the pussy, cut your fingernails,
remove the dirt. Otherwise, you will wonder why your pussy is not feeling good,
but it will be because of your filthy hands causing infection, to say nothing
of your filty dick that might have been in any hole it could find, even a hole
in the ground. Pussy is delicate, treat it gently, not like you are entering a
machine, even though some pussies like it rough and hard, so accommodate those
pussies, even though bad results will appear sooner or later.
A friend tells me her doctor friend told her we can't imagine some of the
problems pussies come to her with as a result of how the men treat pussy, the
objects they put in it, beyond dildos--sometimes fists and arms up to the
elbow. But pussy is to be treated gently for it is a vital, the most vital
organ of the female, well, maybe not equal to the heart, but life comes through
pussy, so threat it right. Let it rest from time to time, something I had to
learn in my cave man days. In general, the woman's body is precious and
complicated. You cannot beat it down and think it is going to serve you forever
because it is going to break down. If you beat on your car with a sledgehammer
how would it look.
We do the same with our woman in general, beat her down then expect her to
function at her best. Sometimes we beat her while pregnant with our child. What
can come of a savage who does this--nothing of good, no good luck, as my mother
told me time after time when she learned I was abusing my women (as if I owned
them).
Brothers in prison and jail behind women, either directly or indirectly
(those who committed crimes to satisfy your pussy, i.e.,pay your pussy bill)
need to think hard, now that you have a moment to think. There's a right way
and wrong way to pay your pussy bill. Don't kill half the community to pay your
bill. Figure out a way to hustle without killing people because that shit comes
back on you. All money ain't good money. Money with blood ain't no good--it
will never bring peace and happiness. Have you seen any movie where the
gangsters and murderers went on to live a happy life?
And when you go to jail, you want to put your pussy in jail on the outside.
You didn't treat your pussy right when you were free, so now that you're locked
down your pussy wants revenge, and yes, your friend is the best way to get
revenge--pussy knows how to hurt you real bad by giving some to your friend,
best friend. Now you want to kill him and her over her pussy that you abused,
disrespected time after time. You locked down with twenty-five to life, so let
the pussy walk. Let it have a life. You can't stop it anyway. Go ahead and get
with cellie Joe because your days with pussy are over--you blew it, buddy!
Don't stalk your pussy from the prison house. Got your boys following your
pussy around town to make sure it doesn't find a dick. It's gonna find
something, if only another pussy since you played yourself out of pocket,
thinking out of your dick head. Now your girl's girl got your pussy. How you
like that Mister Big Time? Life is a thinking man's game, so think before you
act. There are very few things in life really important and pussy ain't one of
them.
Can you take pussy to the bank? Even so-called pimps know pussy comes and
goes, rarely does pussy stay forever, so why you killing over pussy that was
going to leave anyway--it was just a matter of time, dummy. Ask Fillmore Slim
how many of his ho's stayed forever? Ask him where are all those ho's he had,
where did they go--they went to pussyland where all pussies go. So appreciate
the pussy while you got it, if only for a moment. Like Fillmore says, if you
treat pussy right, it might come back, but if you treat it wrong, it will be
long gone.
Part Four
Lick the pussy lightly, like a feather in the wind. Don't devour it like a
Mike Tyson cannibal, "...so greedy for my lady, I turn her womb into a
tomb.... Be cool, fool, go away and pray and pray and pray." Yes, pray on
the pussy, bless it with kindness until the lips open and spread wide, stroke
it til juices flow like Niagara Falls washing your face with love. Oh, the
juice of love in the night or early morn. When joy comes do not spoil the hour
with negative ideas, but open the heart of love as the bird cage opens for the
bird to take flight only to return when it wills. There is no compulsion in
love, for love is not to be forced but happens when it happens, so let it
happen on its time not yours, for what do you know of love except when it
speaks and you are silent, only then you gain understanding and wisdom. Be
silent is the best mode, not the lips that chatter when silence is glory.
In silence all things come to you for pleasure, because you are deserving
and so the pussy runs over with the juice of love. And you have not touched it
with tongue or finger or penis, but the silence of your mind is read by the
pussy and so it came running as a lover in search of lost love, that eternal
love beyond pussy and dick and silly gender notions of the infantile ones who
dwell on the animal plane. Imagine, the pussy is far away yet so near you smell
it, feel it, stroke it until it comes, yet it is not there, only a thought, a
memory of time past when pussy was young and fresh and wild, and you ran to it
and it embraced you on the beach, in the wind and sun.
There was no shame, no guilt, no greed, just innocence of time and place,
not even knowing you were in paradise, heaven. It was the best of times and
they did not end but reappear even now in the fourth quarter of your life.
There is joy and joy knows you and welcomes you home with open arms and lips.
Be gentle, ask for nothing because all is yours. No one can have what is yours,
for the door only opens for you and you alone. It is no effort on your part, it
is the voice of the wind, the falling leaves say it is yours for your labor
under the sun.
Part
Five
Pussy ruled the world until along came Crack. Crack diminished the respect
and value of pussy forever. It did not destroy the power of pussy but it
wounded it forever. After Crack, pussy will never be the same. Its value became
so low on the stock market, one could hardly find it, for it dropped worse than
in the Great Depression and in this Second Depression pussy is fighting for its
life, especially with young brothers thinking they can pimp pussy because the
dope game has played out. But these days pussy can take your life, with one
drop a man can die from the myriad STDs, not to mention AIDS. Yes, pussy has
gone from the giver of life to the taker of life, from the power of God to the
power of the devil. Oh, will the glory days of pussy ever come again. The young
brothers in the barber shop said to me, "OG, when you were young and
caught something from a girl, you only got a drip--today, when we catch
something we die!" The times, they are a changing and so has pussy.
Brothers coming home from prison are infecting their women from the joy of
prison life. Some women are infertile as a result of their man's homosexual
behavior in prison that he denies until it is too late: his poor, innocent
woman suffers a death dealing blow because of his dishonesty and debauchery.
See Ayodele's great play Death by Twilight. The woman has so much faith in her
man she never admits he is the cause of her dying from AIDS. And then older
women go to bars and nightclubs for that one night stand and never recover from
their evening with undercover brother who looked like a man but was all bitch
inside, even beyond bitch because he was a lier and deceiver, a wicked devil in
the night, who stole the woman's heart, body and soul.
I wrote about the
insanity of sex in my book The Crazy House Called America. As they say in
sociology 1A, sometimes there's a cultural lag because the people are ignorant
of the paradigm shift. They are caught unaware of the new order, so they play
by the old rules and are naturally knocked out of the game. The Bible says the
people were destroyed for lack of knowledge. There is no excuse for ignorance
these days, in this information age with knowledge pervading the Internet, my
space, face book, twitter and elsewhere. Yet the people walk in darkness. Young
girls and old girls fall victim to the pleasures of life, or what used to be a
pleasure, but what pleasure is there in making love to a dummy? Or a
psychopath? I saw a girl with a T shirt that said, "Cute, but
Psycho," at least she warned us, not that the boys will heed her message,
for they are psycho as well. So when the blind lead the blind.... Michael said
Remember the Time!
Remember the time when pussy was golden and pure,
pasteurized and homogenized! Today pussy is filthy as the harlot's, or maybe
hers is cleaner than the square girls because the harlot knows how to clean
hers, the square girl knows nothing because mama taught her nothing because
mama didn't know being the Crack ho she was. But I agree with Tupac, "You
might be a Crack fiend, Mama, but you still a black queen, Mama!"
Part Six
We support a woman's right to control her pussy and the fruit thereof. At
the same time we condemn men who deposit their semen in the pussy of a
murderer, for we agree with Mother Theresa who said, "Abortion is the
first murder, after which all other murder is possible." And prophet
Muhammad said, "Do not kill your children for fear of poverty."
Abortion would not be possible if men did not have sex with women they know
favor abortion, so I put the onus on men, not women. Men should ask the woman
if she gets pregnant will she kill the unborn child? If she says yes, he should
depart from her in haste, unless he favors murder as well. Why are you jumping
in a woman's pussy you know is a killer? Now if you want her to kill your seed,
that is another matter--the matter is why? What if your parents had aborted
you?
What is wrong with putting an unwanted child up for adoption, since there
are many women who cannot have children? There are couples who would love and
cherish that unwanted child, so why is there a need to kill it? And even though
a woman's body is her business, it seems to me the man should be
informed--supposedly, in the woman's mind, it's none of his business. This is
why I say the man was wrong to enter her pussy in adverse circumstances. Even
in the case of rape, why not put the child up for adoption? If the life of the
mother is in danger, this is another matter--abortion must be considered.
We are absolutely opposed to the right wing Christian anti-abortion
hypocrites who favor murder to stop murder, even to the point of assassinating
doctors.
Furthermore, these right wing Christians--where in the Bible does
Jesus advocate murder?--only want to delay the death of the child, allowing it
to grow up so it can fight and die in imperialist wars across the planet. So these
Christians are no different from the pro-abortion women, it is only a
difference of time, the objective is the same. Does it matter if the child is
killed in the womb or 18 years later in wars for the expansion of capitalism
and slavery?
If the woman (and man) is too poor to feed the child, put it up for
adoption. A dear friend of mine adopted a child from Jamaica whose family could
not afford to feed. She brought the child back to America and raised him like a
prince. She paid for him to received manhood training at the African Village in
South Carolina. She adopted and raised four other Crack babies, giving them a
wonderful life, even though they yet appreciate it--like most children (even
the "normal ones")--they are ungrateful. Often times economics is not
the problem but education and psychology or the mental state of the parents,
especially the woman--although the young man or father is in the same
situation, ignorant and often mentally ill. The result is child abuse.
Too many young mothers are ignorant of how to feed a child, even hold a
child. I know young mothers who habitually feed their child and themselves at
McDonalds--breakfast, lunch and dinner. Many young ladies were drug addicted
when they got pregnant, thus unable to breast feed their child. These mothers
need community support. We see these babies with babies on the streets of
Oakland. We see their stress, how they curse the children, calling them
motherfuckers and sons of bitches. They need community support because often
grandmother (thirty, forty or fifty years old) says she's "too old"
to be a grandmother. One grandmother whose son has two children, says she wants
her son to stay home with her rather than live with his baby moma who's
struggling for dear life with two children at 26 years old. This poor mother
grew up in Berkeley but had never been to San Francisco. She is no different
than young people in Newark, New Jersey who've never been to New York. Babies
with babies is not helpful to our community progress. Often the mother, father
and children are doomed to poverty unless they are determined to rise up in
spite of circumstances. And community support is greatly needed.
Teach the young people manhood and womanhood rites or how to restrain
themselves until they mature. At eighteen when I fathered my first child, I was
a baby with a baby, and soon followed another child before I was twenty. I am
happy for the children, but they could have been delayed until I finished my
education. I am happy my children restrained themselves sexually until they
completed their education. Thank God they had more discipline than I. I do know
that one of my sons (now deceased, RIP) impregnated an Asian girl while in
college. He asked me what to do and I told him not to abort, but he did so
anyway because he said the girl could not return to Japan with a black child.
As I've written elsewhere, she could have left the little Tiger Woods here and
took her funky ass back to Japan.
ve 15.