Jinn

HOW DARE YOU!

Young girls NEVER say anything that is offensive to men, minorities, or homosexuals. Young girls could NEVER be described this way:

Or this..

HOW DARE YOU MAKE SUCH CLAIMS. ONLY YOUNG BOYS ARE CAPABLE OF SUCH THINGS.

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analog

Great article, thanks for the link.

In fact, this is a comment someone left on that site, regarding the article, and I think it makes a series of great points. Bolding is mine.

mixedmedia

For my part, I haven't excluded women from my assessments.

What I did say was that women are, in general, less extroverted than men when it comes to this kind of frivolity. IN GENERAL...and when they are sober, lol.

It does make some relevant points. Very relevant points. But I think over-indulgence still plays into the phenomena.

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Most people go through life dreading they'll have a traumatic experience. Freaks were born with their trauma. They've already passed their test in life. They're aristocrats. - Diane Arbus
PESSIMISM, n. A philosophy forced upon the convictions of the observer by the disheartening prevalence of the optimist with his scarecrow hope and his unsightly smile. - Ambrose Bierce

analog

Oh, definitely. It's definitely still a generation rife with "gimme" attitudes and "all about me" selfishness. It's dead-on-accurate that these kids have been coddled their whole lives and are now facing the existing establishment, which does not favor or even want to allow any sort of employee reward system. They want their work-hard-until-I-give-you-permission-to-die boomers, the people who will take a heaping helping of bullshit from bosses and others, and smile.

Separate thought, for all:

Does the fact that this new generation won't take that sort of treatment, and markets themselves as valuable employees to be appreciated, not taken for granted, make them worse? Certainly there are many bad portions of their behavior/attitude, but I don't think the overall "work is not my entire life, and you WILL appreciate my loyalty and hard work" business model is a change for the worse. See Google, among many others, for examples of such.

jewels

How can you say you're reading the OP if you think this is "normal" teen rebellion?

I totally agree with her post. I was a rebellious teen and that kind of hatred didn't exist in my world.

Why? IMO: poor parenting, technology, and the general pace of everything today.

inBOIL

I think many of them take this to the extreme. They're less likely to take crap from their employers, but they're also less likely to pay their dues; many of them think that it's beneath them to do the shit work that everyone has to do.

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And you believe Bush and the liberals and divorced parents and gays and blacks and the Christian right and fossil fuels and Xbox are all to blame, meanwhile you yourselves create an ad where your kid hits you in the head with a baseball and you don't understand the message that the problem is you.

Plan9

Our crotch-mounted toolbox isn't as big as deciding factor on the Assholeness Meter as we'd all like to believe.

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Whatever you can carry.

"You should not drink... and bake."

Sion

I read the first dozen or so posts in this thread. What I can't get past is the level of generalization expressed by the OP and some of the responders.

simple fact: not all young men/boys are like this. I'd venture to suggest that not even a simple majority (51%) are.

and I'd also suggest that most of it is normal adolescent behavior, which will be grown out of in due time. as well, it seems a reaction to the insanity of political correctness here in America.

as the saying goes: this too shall pass.

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Some wrong been done, he done it first. -fz

I jus' want ta thank you...falettinme...be mice elf...agin...

host

I detest this guy but i force myself to listen to his radio show during my commute from work. This is a recurrent theme of his. It will come off as partisan, it's unavoidable....but much of halx's description of deficient attitude and behavior seems to be about intolerance and lack of empathy.

Could conservatism, circa 2007, a "movement" grown astoundingly out of proportion to what I, as a high school student observing the "Woodstock weekend" that took place in August, 1969, could ever have imagined emerging, and growing, just ten years later, be a culprit?

It is acceptable to be openly negative towards gays and just about anything else that is not affluent white protestant in America. Forgive me, but the Ron Paul "movement" seems to be the rallying point for the more political of the older range of the young men and boys you've described, halx.

I do conceed, though, that boys have become more feminized, less able to enjoy a "Tom Sawyer" boyhood. A sign was when their toy guns were mandated to have orange highlights. Suburban development cleared and built on the woods boys used to role play in. They went inside, permanently, and played video games, instead. I see lifeless suburban cul de sacs in my environment, no kids out riding their bikes, playing basketball, or drawing hopskotch squares in the driveway with chalk.

roachboy

i watched "we jam econo" last night---a documentary about the minutemen (you know, d. boon, mike watt, george hurley).
it was made in 2005.
d. boon was killed in 1985. december 22, actually.
i came late to the minutemen, but double nickels on the dime is still an amazing record.
anyway, i mention this for a couple reasons, which i am making up as i go.

turns out that these gentlemen are the same age as i am so watching the film was also kinda like watching a generational piece.

mike watt said something on the order of having been listening to captain beefheart and the stooges in high school, so in 1976--when uk punk broke--he wondered about the punk "rebellion"---"what's the big deal?--these others guys did it already..."

later, watt went on at some length about the effect that d. boone's mom had on the band in her insistence that they invent their own activites, make their own music, not copy, learn for themselves.

you provide too much structure, he said, you create a generation of robots.

and he talked about just going your own way, doing it, and continuing to do it, fuck what other people think---which made sense in a new way (to me at least) of the minutemen's politics. and the difficulties of going your own way--little symbolic moments like opening for black flag and getting spit on by the audience of punk "rebels" because they weren't "punk enough" or "punk" in the right way...

so argument number one: we operate in a smothering culture of copies.
if there's a problem with "the kids" it's servility, the willingness to subordinate themselves to models, to conflate copying and thinking.
trick is that there's nothing in itself problematic about copying---keeping with "we jam econo"--the minutemen covered blue oyster cult and creedence tunes for example---its the relation that you imagine obtains between what you are doing and what is. if you do more inventive stuff and then cover something, it's not the same as making yourself into a copy of what already is.

thing is---linking this to the op--that the culture of consumer servility isn't new--it's what in the main americans confuse with freedom.

and there's an interesting segment in "we jam econo" during which watt and d. boone talk briefly about an imaginary alternate future in which minutemen music was mainstream and so was the ur-copy of a host of sub-minutemen.

kids are not encouraged to take chances. they aren't given the tools to think independently. creative work has to be safe. it has to be "normal"--it has to fit somewhere. but this fitting somewhere enables folk to slot what they are doing straight into something that already is, and to use that framework to simplify the process of considering what you do, why you do it. it truncates process. to my mind, the major result is a strange inflexibility in thinking. it gets paradoxical when groups of the inflexible band around a style and understand themselves as being "in revolt"...


in an interview, d. boone said that he felt that there should be bands in every apartment block, clubs on every corner where musicians could play, record labels in every neighborhood--cultural production should be radically decentralized, kids (and everyone else) encouraged to go their own way, get the chance to play, acquire discipline on their own terms---and not to think in terms of being "stars"-----but do what you love in your way. do something that seems new to you. fuck what other people think. if they like it, cool. it they dont, it doesnt matter. ultimately, it's not for them.

i graduated high school in 1976.
it was already like this.
i teach in universities and see lots of good kids. good smart kids, kids who contradict every last generalization that has run through this thread about "the youth of today"....but i also see that their modes of expression--and worse of thinking--are off the rack, chosen like jackets from a range of pre-fabricated alternatives, and that they have trouble getting their heads around the fact of this and imagining how they--or anyone--could be otherwise.

i think that it is wrong to imagine that revolt happens amongst 18 year-olds.
my experience teaching...and being in the world myself--showed me that working your way out from under the smothering effects of a culture of copying takes time, and that more radical stuff happens as folk figure their way out. i also think that there is no particular time-line nor is there a particular way to move through to get to a different relation to process.

hell, the minutemen were collectively there when i was still foundering about in new hampshire. they were there in their early 20s and i think in many ways i'm only just figuring out what they already knew and i'm--well--older. and i think that's the case because the way out is in the doing--you can't sit around watching fucking television or consuming shit and wait for someone to hand you a template.

the most efficient form of domination is convincing people--particularly without ever having to say as much--that they should dominate themselves.

folk dont take themselves seriously, they dont take their process seriously, they dont see thinking as a basic activity that opens up options for how you are in the world--they think it's work, something imposed on them from outside--and when they figure out that this is auto-lobotomy time, often they dont have the tools to do much about it. this simply because they dont understand how much is in the doing, how much is in projects---they miss the simple fact that thinking is a form of creative work (it must not be confined, as it is in academicworld, to generating commentary on texts by legitimate Authorities)--they---no we----undervalue creative work and overvalue it at the same time--they think the idea of doing such work is to be a star and quit your day gig----when its an end in itself. it's the process that matters. it's the doing that is important.

if there's a single cause, i think it's in the simple fact that education is social reproduction.
we have an educational system that at every point de facto imposes an image of a dysfunctional social order--in the widest sense---as an image of a natural order.
we allow a system that is geared around fear of change to stamp us.
we look to that system to legitimate us.

and we collectively reap what we sow.

i dont think there is particular drift amongst "the youth of today" into any heightened state of mediocrity--we're already there and if we stumble across a path that seems to lead us out from under it, we are working our way along that path. same as it ever was. but to the extent that the servility of auto-emulation runs deeper, glen brown has it right:

you better watch out
you better watch out
the youth of today
will be the youth of tomorrow

except it applies to ourselves as much as to "kids these days."

it's easy peasy to pass general judgments on others.
there's some line that jesus said about the mote in your eye.
it's a good line.

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a gramophone its corrugated trumpet silver handle
spinning dog. such faithfulness it hear

it make you sick.

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Ustwo

We would assume your account was hacked if you weren't.

Seriously...

Anyways, thats nice and all, but no, welcome to humanity. Just because a portion of the 60's generation decided to do a lot of recreational drugs and sex before becoming normal middle class citizens didn't change anything, nor did having Bush president suddenly turn people into mean homophobes.

You might be closer on your second point, but again, the pussification of America hasn't changed basic human natures.

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Issmmm

OK I've read most of the post here, so if I plagiarize someone, well...oops

Our youth have become jaded
they are exposed to more than we were. They have to deal with stuff we didn't and they are doing it under circumstances that are more difficult than our's were.

We grew up in communities, neighborhoods and towns. Everybody knew everybody. Families were accountable to those communities, children included. If you f-ed up, someone told you parents. And your parents were expected to address the issue.
Also parents stayed together, marriage wasn't as disposable as it is today.
Family is way important.
It's Feminism. I support women doing whatever they want or can, as good or better than a guy. But the other side of that is the sacrifice she makes in her family
It's the modern man. We have become soft. Fathers are afraid to take their position in their families for fear of being labeled domineering or abusive.
It's work being more important than home.

It's so much more but apparently I'm rambling too, so I'll stop it there

Ustwo

http://www.penny-arcade.com/comic/2004/03/19



This sums up about 3/4ths of it right here

__________________
Agents of the enemies who hold office in our own government, who attempt to eliminate our "freedoms" and our "right to know" are posting among us, I fear.....on this very forum. - host

Obama - Know a Man by the friends he keeps.

genuinegirly

This community aspect is something that I had not considered. Yes, this is an aspect that is lacking in urban/suburban America. In French polynesia there's still this community discipline. I imagine every region has varying levels of degregation in this regard. It'd be interesting to conduct a study on this.

Family is still important. Marriage does appear disposable in some sense - but is it not possible that broken marriages are less of an issue than simply not putting family first? I do not like the idea of making divorce difficult. There are far too many women in abusive situations. Divorce must remian simple for this reason alone. Poorly-educated women with domineering husbands, women that do not have any concept of their rights - if divorce were not easy, these women would never gain the courage to work their way out.

I agree that femminism on the whole is moving in a direction that could be negative. But a woman who has rights, knows her rights, votes, speaks out in the community, and still looks out for her famly is not a bad thing.

Without at least a portion of the femminist movement, I do not know that a woman's place in society could have progressed to a healthy level.

Er... well, there are still domineering and abusive men in the world.

There are soft men. There are also not-soft men.

What position in the family do you mean? My father always worked, provided, disciplined when necessary, taught me to ride a bicycle and went riding with me often, taught my sister to rebuild an engine and other classic car tinkerings.

My mother balanced the books, kept track of the kids' schedules, did the bulk of day-to-day enforcing of rules and only called in father when she needed the big guns. She did the shopping, the raising, the everything consequential. Not to say that my father wasn't important to me - he was - but Mother really wore the pants. Father's income just made it possible for her to take such an active role.

I see no reason why this could not have worked just as well with reversed roles.

This I'll agree to. Definitely a contributing factor. Again, when children are involved, the home should be the top priority.

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"Sometimes I have to remember that things are brought to me for a reason, either for my own lessons or for the benefit of others." Cynthetiq

"violence is no more or less real than non-violence." roachboy

Issmmm

I wasn't swinging at the femminist movement. What I meant that in a very practical way, if Mom is working the same hours as Dad, that is how many hours the kids are alone.



What position in the family do you mean?



the big guns
father always worked, provided, disciplined when necessary, taught me to ride a bicycle and went riding with me often, taught my sister to rebuild an engine and other classic car tinkerings.
Father's income just made it possible for her to take such an active role.

genuinegirly

Yes, that makes much more sense. Thanks for the clarification!

__________________
"Sometimes I have to remember that things are brought to me for a reason, either for my own lessons or for the benefit of others." Cynthetiq

"violence is no more or less real than non-violence." roachboy