There is an extraordinary and very thought-provoking piece in1 the Atlantic magazine this month about the sexual habits of American teenage girls. It seems to be widely reported, and may even be true, that they offer blowjobs as we used to offer cigarettes — a non-commital gesture of recognition within the peer group. What makes the piece worthwhile, though, is the way that Caitlin Flanagan sees this as evidence of a wider depersonalisation of society.
… kids who seem adrift in the increasingly isolating family culture that was being born in the nineties. They speak of family members who have televisions in their own rooms, who never eat dinner together, who live with one another in the sepulchral McMansions of Conyers the way people live together in hotels: nodding politely as they pass on the stairs, aware of one another’s schedules and routines but only in a vague, indifferent manner. These are kids—girls especially—who have developed a dull, curiously passionless relationship to their own sexuality, which they give of freely.
… The question is this: How, exactly, in the course of thirty years, did we get from Katherine to Gin? How did we go from a middle-class teenage girl (fictional but broadly accurate) who will have sex only if it’s with her boyfriend, and only if her pleasure is equal to his, to a middle-class teenage girl (a gross media caricature reflective of an admittedly disturbing trend) who wants to kneel down and service a series of boys? Katherine and her mother (who still enjoys a pleasurable sex life with her husband) represent two points on a continuum. In the mother’s generation sex was contained by marriage; in the daughter’s it was contained by love and relationships. The next point on this progression ought to be a girl who feels that nothing save her own desire should control her choice of sexual partners. Instead we see a group of young girls who have in effect turned away from their own desire altogether and have made of their sexuality something that fulfills all sorts of goals, but not the one paramount to Katherine and her mother: that it be sexually gratifying to themselves.
No wonder thoughtful parents want to home school. I don’t think that we can understand creationism unless we see that worrying about “Darwinism” is a proxy for worrying about these sorts of changes in society — and that they are worth worrying about.
1 It may be paywalled. I can’t tell from here, as I am a subscriber.
It is indeed paywalled, sadly.
If we’re moving from Pan Troglodytes to Pan Paniscus in our primate behaviour, I for one welcome our new evolutionary behavioural programming.
I don’t suppose one would get anywhere by saying “No, it’s not Darwinism, any more than it was the communists or the Jews or [insert placeholder du jour here]. If you want to promote a social structure to maintain your favoured morals, you’ll have to include the last four hundred years in more than one dimension”? It must be hellish to grow up in a place where there are quite so many mutually exclusive imperatives.
R
This article looks really good and now I’m dying to read it, so much so that if I cannot access it through the university library, I may just subscribe to The Atlantic!
I have actually been looking for new reading material and wanted to ask (if I may) for opinions/tips on magazines which carry good think pieces…
The Atlantic is superb. OK, the present one has a piece on
Cardinal RatzingerPope Benedict which could do with being cut to about 6,000 words from what feels like 20,000. But there is never an isssue without something to disagree with, and it’s not desperately expensive. The New Yorker, even if sdome weeks I only look at the pictures. The LRB.I’m realy sad tht piece is paywaled, If I were Brad del Long I’d post broad acres of it.
Rupert: I’m glad you read the Sapolsky piece in Foreign Affairs, too. I must try and interview him.
Of course it’s not Darwinism; but it is what the fear of Darwinism is about, I think.
Well, I haven’t read it, but it gives the impression of being deeply silly. Matt Yglesias, who has read it, says it is.
He doesn’t. He “says”:http://yglesias.typepad.com/matthew/2006/01/why_cant_i_get_.html the article is “long and mostly hilarious”, though the conclusion is “both wrong and also almost silly”
Fair enough.
Thanks for the tips Andrew. I already get LRB and NS. 🙂 LRB was a gift, I rarely read more than two articles unfortunately. They’re too long for my bus ride, and I always get cut off mid-article. New Yorker has never appealed. I always pick it off the shelf and put it back. Can’t explain it. I was thinking about getting Prospect but I’ve been wanting to get The Atlantic Monthly for ever so this is the perfect excuse 🙂 Fingers crossed they do student subs.