Yes, We Suck: The Return of the "Generation X" Think Piece

It's such a simple word, "we." It echoes around the world - nous, nosotros, wir, wij, all basic and universal evocations of a common purpose and identity. And all, when deployed in the correct context, signify a writer's departure from the realm of the personal or critical essay, and the beginning of Generation-Defining Time.

This installment of Generation-Defining Time comes to you courtesy of talented Salon writer Heather Havrilesky! I believe it is her first entry in the genre. It is entitled "An open apology to boomers everywhere," and it comes straight from Generation X.

Now, I missed Generation X by a few years (I think I am technically a "Millenial," what with my Facebooking and my text messaging and my baggy pants) but I have been familiar with the X Generation since the early '90s, having known them primarily as the generation of people that would not stop fucking defining themselves, ever. Throughout my tender adolescence there came to prominence a barrage of Generation X spokespeople with Generation X thoughts who wanted us to know about how Generation X was perceiving the world in this totally new Generation X way, and it maybe involved having a crappy service job and being mad at your parents. I thought we were done! I thought the answer was "irony." Apparently, not, however, for the Generation X define-a-thon continues.

So, on the "being mad at your parents" tip, here is Heather Havrilesky, apologizing to them for the entirety of her Generation:

Dear boomers: We're sorry for rolling our eyes at you all these years. We apologize for scoffing at your earnestness, your lack of self-deprecation, your tendency to take yourselves a little too seriously... Chanting "What do we want? Peace! When do we want it? Now!" at that rally against the Iraq war made us feel self-conscious in spite of ourselves. We felt like clichés. We wondered why someone couldn't come up with a newer, catchier, pro-peace slogan over the course of 40 years of protests.

Ah, the true failure of the anti-war movement - insufficiently catchy slogans. Here, Havrilesky explains political involvement, X-style:

We really did stand for something, underneath all the eye-rolling. We're feminists, we care about the environment, we want to improve race relations, we volunteer. We're just low-key about it. We never wanted to do it the way you did it: So unselfconscious, so optimistic, guilelessly throwing yourself behind Team Liberal. We didn't get that. We aren't joiners. We don't like carrying signs. We tend to disagree, if only on principle.

So, completely ineffectual, then? I'm not sure I get it; I've only read 900,000 pieces on Generation X in my lifetime. Can you explain this in a way that involves the words "cynical," "ironic," or "slacker?"

We grew cynical. We doubted even the most heartfelt, genuine statements. We didn't want to be blind to our own faults, like you were, so we paraded our faults around, exalted in our shortcomings. The worst thing, to us, was to not see ourselves clearly. The worst thing was to not be in on the joke... everyone is a fake and the high capitalist world is bought and sold and even the purest form of art is a commodity, not to be taken seriously. No one can be trusted, nothing is pure -- these are the truths we held to be self-evident.

My goodness! Imagine the "capitalist world" being "bought and sold!" Clearly, this means that you can never believe in anything ever and that people are terrible. Remember, people: sad thoughts are always more valid and insightful than happy ones. This is the principle of all psychological health.

Anyway, Havrilesky explains, the real fault lies not with Generation X, but with the Baby Boomers, who were horrible, horrible parents:

You told us to tell you anything, to be honest, to come to you with our problems, but when we did, you were uncomfortable and dismissive. You didn't really want to know how we felt. When we were emotional, you flashed back to that time your drunk mother threw the jack-o'-lantern into the street. You loved us, but you were passive-aggressive and avoidant in spite of your best intentions.

Wow. An entire generation raised by my ex-boyfriends? That must have blown. From now on, I won't carry any bitterness about my past relationships. (Which all ended, by the way, exactly like Terminator 2: "I know now vhy you cry, but it is sommesing I can nevah dooo.") I'll simply understand that they were Baby Boomers. Gentlemen - congratulations. You all look very young for your age.

But wait: crappy parents? Cynicism regarding the political views held by the preceding generation? Disengagement, disillusion, dysphoria? Why this sounds precisely like the Generation X anthem from Generation X-defining Generation Xtacular Reality Bites, written and performed by Ethan "X-treme X-ing" Hawke!



Okay, to be fair, I only put that video in this post because it is the most horrible thing that has ever happened. Just like Generation X!

Still, Havrilesky notes, Obama's nomination can change all that. Now that we've elected a President we can believe in, we can drop all of the cynicism and disengagement and reach out to the world, with eyes and hearts wide open. We can be vulnerable, trusting, maybe even a little bit naive. We can be, in other words, this woman:



Oh, Generation X. You say we only hear what we want to. We don't listen hard; we don't pay attention to the distance that you're running to anyone, anywhere. We don't understand if you really care. We're only hearing negative - no, no, no, baaaaaaaad!

And we say: stay.

Douche (Noun): Something a Reasonable Woman Wouldn't Put in Her Vagina

Some men aspire to be famous douches; others are happy to toil in douche obscurity until the light of internet fame shines upon them. Then, there are men who arise, in the space of a moment, to the heights of douchery - men like young Ian Sloane, of Wheaton College, who inquires: 

I have a question, addressed to any academic (or social) studiers of women at Wheaton; When will the woman stop playing into the traditional gender role, submitting to a hot and steamy smooch on the lips while griping about male dominance in relationships out of the corner of her mouth?

Ha ha, yeah, when will we? (Also: the traditional gender role... OF KISSING? Since when does a woman "submit" to kissing? I thought we liked to smooch!) In answer to your question, Ian, we will probably stop griping around the time dudes stop saying things like this: 

In a surprisingly musical moment of clarity, I realized all women are prostitutes.

Now, keep in mind that Ian Sloane does not mean "prostitute" in the sense of "a person who is paid a pre-negotiated fee in exchange for facilitating the orgasms of his or her client." He means it in the sense that dudes who say things like this tend to mean it - to denote any woman who has expectations of the dude she is dating, no matter how small those expectations are, and no matter what she gives him. Women: they want things! Things like "anniversary gifts!" And "free car rides!" And "ridiculous time commitments!" Relationships today, they are crazy, Ian Sloane says - mostly because they involve women: 

In spite of all the hooplah about the modern independent woman, ladies these days are trying to have the best of both worlds by assuming dominant roles but still requiring regular affirmations of love and commitment.

Women are asking for affirmations of love and commitment? THOSE DIRTY WHORES. When will they realize that the best way to date Ian Sloane is to not want to go out on dates with him? 

But wait: I don't want to go out on a date with Ian Sloane. In fact, I've been not going out on dates with Ian Sloane for years. Ever since I've been old enough to date, I've not been having dates with Ian Sloane. Does this mean we've been together all along? 

I mean, it's the perfect relationship! He's never bought me a gift, I've never been in his car, I've never asked him to spend any time with me, and I can safely say that I will never want him to demonstrate any love or commitment to me! I've never even met him. This raises so many questions: have I been cheating on Ian? What does this mean for my prior commitments? It's clear now that this is my major relationship. Perhaps I should become a nun, or an anchorite, retreating into lifelong isolation so that I can enjoy the absence that is perfect intimacy.  

As for all the other women who are not dating Ian: don't worry ladies, I'm not jealous. There's more than enough of his lovelessness to go around. 

Eh, It's Been Done.

I know that last post was pretentious as all fuck, and a bit heavy on the hipster-hate, and I know that hipster-hating is played out and pointless, but seriously: 

If the truth must be told, he was a little bit frightened of middle and lower class humanity, and of foreigners not of his own class. He was, in some paralyzing way, conscious of his own defenselessness, though he had all the defense of privilege... Nevertheless he too was a rebel: rebelling against even his own class. Or perhaps rebel is too strong a word; far too strong. He was only caught in the general, popular recoil of the young against convention and against any sort of real authority. Fathers were ridiculous; his own obstinate one supremely so. And governments were ridiculous: our own wait-and-see sort especially so. And armies were ridiculous, and old buffers of generals, altogether, the red-faced Kitchener supremely. Even the war was ridiculous, though it did kill rather a lot of people... Everything was ridiculous, quite true. But when it came too close, and oneself became ridiculous too...? 

- D.H. Lawrence, from Lady Chatterley's Lover, 1928

Drunk Transcription Services Presents: Virgins, Whores, and Retail

I gave a reading at the Knitting Factory last night. This is the first piece I read: written on the day of the reading, no doubt too rough to work outside of the reading, yet transcribed (post-several-drinks) so that you can feel you were there. To those of you who did not attend, or were asked not to: don't worry. You were there in spirit, and in the piece itself.

---

Ladies and gentlemen of the crowd: I am writing to you from the second floor of the Union Square Barnes & Noble, whence I have retreated to enjoy a series of panic attacks concerning a reading I am to give later on in the day. It is the reading at which I am to deliver this piece, in fact, and by the time I tell you this, it will already have begun. I have considered inviting several people to this reading, and have decided against it, reasoning that my spectacular failure is nothing that they need to be involved with; the end result is that I have extended a round of frantic dis-invitations, pleas not to watch me choke, and I know none of you. This is great, because now we can talk.

Because, as previously indicated, I am writing this on the second floor of the Union Square Barnes & Noble. And it has porn.

Three feet to my right, several teenagers are poring over a photo book, the principal subject of which is naked ladies. It's the Suicide Girls book, actually; you can find it in the Women's Studies section. These teenagers are mostly boys, clad in aspiring-teen-rocker gear, which I am comforted to note has not changed much since the late '90s: longish hair, wallet chains, baggy pants and band tees over bodies they haven't learned to deal with yet. They're not cool yet, these boys, but you get the sense that in a few years they might be. Their pictures from this time will be hidden, or burned.

(Is that a Puddle of Mudd t-shirt? Do they still make Puddle of Mudd t-shirts? Am I looking at evidence of time travel?)

There are girls as well, two of them. Their clothes are tighter, and more stylish. Girls learn how to present before boys, always; the concept of the body as spectacle comes to us earlier in the game. Still, they look awkward and half-formed. When they go to college, they'll discover American Apparel and try to forget that their eyeliner ever looked this way.

The boys are staring at the book with raw fascination, offering little critiques and murmurs of approval as they flip the pages. The girls are looking alternately at the book and at the boys. The boys are having the time of their lives, it's clear; the girls might be too, though it's hard to tell, because they rarely speak.

"That one's beautiful," says the blondest and heaviest of the boys, pointing at a photo. "I don't even want to see the titties or nothing."

So sensitive, this boy! One of the girls - a slight pixie girl, dark hair drawn back in a bun and four studs glinting in her ear - lifts her eyes to his face and nods, making a small wordless sound of agreement that echoes in her throat. Mmmmhm.

I wonder how much she's heard. I wonder if she hears him saying that there is a difference between thinking a girl is beautiful and wanting to see her titties, between pretty and sexy, between the girl you admire and the girl you fuck. I think about this, and I wonder about the rest of her life.

My friends and I wrestle with these concepts constantly. We talk about them, write about them, negotiate our positions on the spectrum with every man we meet. I know girls who won't sleep with their boyfriends because they don't trust those men not to disappear, and girls whose boyfriends lost their sex drives once the word "love" was exchanged. I know girls who accompany their dates to strip clubs and feel guilty or crazy when jealousy enters the picture, and I know girls who strip, saying that they've never felt more desired in their lives, but that their clients swear at them, call them names, put their hands where their hands aren't supposed to be, and that they wake up on some mornings feeling angry at the entire world without quite knowing why. All of us want to be liked and respected and cared for, and all of us want to be well and frequently fucked, and all of us, for some reason, take it as a foregone conclusion that we can't have both. Our conversations - those marathon IM therapy sessions or late-night rants in bars - all end in the same way. What do you expect? This is the way things are.

I used to think that all of this had changed, or was changing. I took it for granted that I would have more choices than my mother, and that my daughters would have more choices than me. Hooking up was supposed to change everything, right? People just sleep with each other, sometimes for months at a time, with no commitment, because sex is no big deal. Yet, when I look at these teens, and the world they live in, that seems wrong: virgin and whore are spinning farther and farther away from each other, in a decaying orbit. We synthesize stars so cartoonishly virginal that the sight of one draped in sheets, with an inch or so of back exposed, can incite mass panic; Jordin Sparks can take the stage at the VMAs, her voice gripped with hysteria, and announce that she has to wear a purity ring because she doesn't want to be a slut, as if she - and we - had only two options. Other girls talk about reclaiming their sexuality by appearing in Girls Gone Wild videos, and for every Miley Cyrus, there is a pop star sanding her personality down until she presents nothing but sex, and only the kind of sex that her marketing team thinks most men will find appealing. I kissed a girl, and I liked it; I hope my boyfriend don't mind it. There's always a boy watching; his reaction, his respect or pleasure, is always what matters most.

So I wonder where this pixie girl will end up, in the bedroom or in the kitchen or somewhere in between, what compromises she'll make to get what she wants. I wonder which parts of herself she'll give up, and when, and why.

----

Here, for those keeping track, are the reactions that I received:

• Dude #1: "I was one of those boys."
  
• Extremely Admirable & Accomplished Feminist Writer: "That was great. No, I mean, I'm not just being supportive: I really liked it."
• Dude #2, With Whom I Have A Past: HIGHLY UNCOMFORTABLE FACE, accompanied by "congratulations, good job."
• Dude #2's Girlfriend: "You just took everything in my head and said it."
• Dude #3: "The thing is, the thing is, when a man loves you, you will know it. You can't change a man, girls try to, you can't change a man. When a man loves you, you will know it."
  
• Dude #4: "I liked your reading. It taught me how to pick up chicks."

Favorite part of the reading:

• The fact that everyone in the audience put down their drinks and stopped chatting when I said the word "porn."

Dudes I Might Possibly Have Dated Once: The Groundbreaking Social Study

So: while I am writing a long and terminally unwieldy piece which aims to set forth a postmodern theory of pornography (yes, I am doing this, may God have mercy on us all), it seems like a reasonable time to be catching up on books in the ever-growing and slightly bullshitty field of Masculinity Studies.

Specifically, I really wanted to read Guyland. The basic premise of the book seems sound: young middle-class white men are raised with a tremendous sense of entitlement, which is threatened by the successes of women and people of color in formerly all-white, all-male environments, and they are therefore retreating into all-white-boy societies where they can act out a particularly virulent and ugly strain of masculinity without actually taking on any responsibilities or having their perceived superiority challenged in any meaningful way? Yes! Okay! Tell me more!

Fifty pages into the book, however, I regret to say that it is not very rewarding. The reasons for this are twofold: first, Michael Kimmel is a horrible writer, and second, he does not get the young people, which would be fine - does anyone ever get the young people, really? - except that it renders his thoughts about youth culture quite suspect. See this:

You can find them in New York’s Murray Hill, or Silver Lake and Echo Park in Los Angeles, Houston’s Midtown, or Atlanta’s Buckhead district, sipping their mocha lattes in the local Starbucks… They are the “friendsters” with their wi-fi computers looking for love, friendship, or hookups, or on monster.com looking for next month’s job.

The kids today, with their fancy coffees and their Internet and their baggy pants! It is crazy, I am telling you. And their music?

… is some of the angriest music ever made. Nearly four out of every five gangsta rap CDs are bought by suburban white guys. It is not just the “boys in the hood” who are a “menace to society.” It’s the boys in the “burbs.”

OH GOD MAKE IT STOP MAKE IT STOPPPPPPPPP.

Yet it does not stop. As far as I can see, the writing remains precisely this terrible throughout the entire book.

There's also the fact that Kimmel views terminal boyhood (which is, I can confirm, a very real thing with the dudes today) as an escape from the "responsibilities" of manhood, by which he chiefly seems to mean that these men are not angling for high-powered corporate jobs and getting married at twenty-one. I find that this is actually the least annoying thing about contemporary dudes - the conflation of manhood with social power and the possession of a wife was one of the chief targets of second-wave feminism - and Kimmel's constant insistence that all of these men need to "grow up and settle down" (and stop "hooking up," a phrase which he uses constantly and with the prim, scandalized air of an old schoolmarm) is fairly grating. Yes, there are men who can only ever hook up, men who shy away from the word "girlfriend" as from a branding iron, men for whom an equitable and serious relationship with a woman seems akin to hacking one's balls off with a dull knife and putting them up for sale on eBay, and these men, my friends, these men are assholes - yet, when Kimmel's exploring how male sexual entitlement can lead to rape, it would perhaps benefit his study if he did not speak about consensual, casual sex in the same breath as if it were the same thing.

This is not to say that the book is entirely worthless. If you're looking for an Anatomy of the American Douchebag, this might be not be the worst place to start. It just has the same problem as a lot of social research: the person making the study aims to explain the culture at hand without absorbing it, and therefore ends by concluding that these people are freaks, so that while the actual behavioral patterns and insider perspectives can be enlightening, the framing narrative carries a strong whiff of normative crap. That problem is compounded, in this case, by hugely, spectacularly, breathtakingly bad prose.

Anyway, it's all worth it for this:

Guyland now even has its own literature… in such recent novels as Booty Nomad by Scott Mebus, Love Monkey by Kyle Smith, and the widely praised Indecision by Ben Kunkel.

This is transcendence. There can be no greater joy in this world. My entire life up to this point has been justified, and I know now why I was born - for I have seen Indecision referenced in the same sentence as Booty Nomad.

Actually, wasn't Booty Nomad the original title of Indecision? Either way, it would work.