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Via Flowing Data, I see that Zappos.com will now show you who is buying what from where in real time. Thus I can sit in front of my laptop, stare at pictures of shoes superimposed on a map of the United States, and make wild generalizations about regional fashion preferences based on isolated financial transactions. Rigorous preliminary research reveals that people in the Los Angeles area like cute strappy sandals.
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Dana, perhaps I should not have compared Elizabeth Cousins to Bristol Palin; Cousins never offered herself as a spokesperson for anything, except herself and her own experience. While I agree with you all about preventing teen pregnancy, Cousins' baby is already here. She should be commended for rising to the occasion, rather than roundly chastised. In addition, I don't think Bristol Palin's example paints a realistic picture of teen motherhood, and in fact could be accused of glamorizing it: She remains living in her mother's mansion with ample help from her wealthy family and a nationally televised platform. Sure, Levi embarrassed her, but I'd bet when at least some teens saw him on Tyra, they were swooningly jealous of Bristol having such a dreamy boyfriend.
Emily, at the end of the day, I think we're all products of our own environments. Elizabeth Cousins and Bristol Palin both come from peer groups where teen pregnancy is rampant and opportunities for the future are limited. I sincerely doubt the kind of teen who is watching multimedia presentations on the New York Times website would hear Cousins' story and say to herself, "Having a baby now sounds like a great idea!" She'd be the kind of teen who would be well aware at how much she had to lose.
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A guest post from Slate staffer Nathan Heller:
Sam, the blurred boundary you describe between boyhood and adulthood rang true for me, as I expect it will for any member of the "educated, twentysomething, urban set" you mention. It certainly doesn't help that that the 20s are—perhaps now more than ever—an age of wildly divergent professional and lifestyle identities. Some of my old friends now wear suits daily and live in luxury buildings; those of us in the fuzzier professions wear jeans to work and spend the summer hauling secondhand air conditioners home on the subway. Others, still, have already scrimped and saved to buy property and start families.
As much as I agree with your description of the quandary, though, I wonder whether it's as unique to "our generation" as you suggest. This discussion made me think of an interview with Jonathan Franzen I heard years ago and just tracked down. Franzen teases out the cultural rift between his parents' postwar generation and his own post-'60s generation to describe exactly this kind of confusion:
I seem to have grown into a time and a place where adults didn't really want to be adults in the same way I understood them to be, which was well-mannered people who dressed differently than children and ... put their children's interests before their own, and all around, just were of a different class. They liked being adults. They got a satisfaction from that.
Ever since the boomer generation faced the problem of adulthood, with kind of dubious results, and since so much of commercial culture has come to focus on the 18 to 34 demographic, its seems as if adulthood itself is to some a threatened commodity.
I'm not sure I endorse Franzen's definition of adults as "well-mannered people" fixed in domestic life, but his observation does seem to suggest that this question has been floating for a while.
And, Dayo, on the swaggering, creepy tone of the Esquire piece: I found myself wondering whether this wasn't an effort to invoke, imitate, and channel the pithy declaratives of David Newman and Robert Benton's famous "New Sentimentality" Esquire cover story of 1964. If so, it's a bizarre allusion, since the New Sentimentality, as described, was pretty much a reaction against the ball-busting, domestic-providing sensibility of "What Is a Man?"
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Back at Jessica and Bonnie: To me the saddest part of that NYT slideshow interview with Elizabeth Cousins, the 16-year-old mother in Brooklyn, was the moment when she explained that she'd thought about abortion, but reconsidered because "people" told her that this might be her only chance to be a mother. It's one thing to decide against abortion because you have a deep moral repugnance for the practice. But how awful to bear a child at 15 (her daughter is 19 months old now) because your ignorant teenage friends tell you something that patently wrong. Assuming she has regular cycles and normal fertility, Elizabeth will have at least 300 more chances to get pregnant in her lifetime. There are plenty of things she will need to worry about in life, but having a baby as infertility insurance at age 15 creates a hell of a lot more problems than it solves.
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Now that my wildly ambivalent review of the disturbing new comedy Observe and Report is up, I can address that little matter of date rape in greater detail here. Is it true that Seth Rogen’s character Ronnie, a bipolar mall security guard, forces himself on drunk and drugged cosmetics clerk Brandi (Anna Faris) against her will? On New York magazine’s Vulture blog yesterday, Dan Kois makes a case for the prosecution. In a New York Times profile of the director Jody Hill, Dave Itzkoff disagrees, noting that before the scene is over Faris’ character “indicates that she had given her consent” (I love the Times-ian delicacy of that paraphrase. What she actually says is “Why are you stopping, motherfucker?” And she says it from the perch of a pillow stained with her own vomit.)
There are a lot of things in Observe and Report to feel morally icky about, but for me, this scene didn’t number among them. In fact, it probably made for the biggest laugh in a movie that often had me staring at the screen in slack-jawed dismay. By the rules of this movie’s crude, vapid and ultraviolent world—a world that the movie is (I think) a not-entirely-successful attempt to satirize—Ronnie’s hesitation when he notices his partner is passed out, and her slurred command for him to keep going, constitute a moment of tenderness between the two of them. And when what looks like a creepy sexual assault suddenly becomes a declaration of female agency (when she tells him to keep going, Ronnie apologizes and deferentially complies), it’s the reversal that makes it funny.
Remember the controversy over the use of the term “retard” in last summer’s far funnier comedy Tropic Thunder? My stance on both gags is the same: When a character in a satire engages in bad behavior, it’s not fair to disregard the satire and condemn the simple fact that said behavior is being represented. I’m hoping a few of you will see the movie this weekend and tell me what you think.
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There was a time when teenage mothers typically dropped out of school, moved out from their mothers and needed public assistance. Baby daddies would come and go (as has always been the case). Today, prospects are slightly better for mother and child. Nowadays children having babies often live with their parents and finish high school while the family weal provides for the child. Jessica quite rightly respects the Flatbush teen in the New York Times audio slideshow for having "a real head on her shoulders" because, after her daughter Mahniya, she does not want to have more children for a while, despite that she is still with the baby's father who participates in Mahniya's care. But, as Emily points out, the story of Elizabeth Cousins sends the wrong message. Her 19-month-old toddler is adorable and no doubt far more emotionally rewarding than the partying her young mother has had to give up, but, while thoroughly engaging, toddlers are the most exhausting creatures on earth. Moreover, as her young parents have most likely figured out by now, their tireless little girl is just going to keep on growing. Although Elizabeth may not look like it, or feel like it, that 16-year-old is the grown-up in her new family. For the rest of her life her daughter will need her to act like one.
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I posted earlier this week on a bogus trend piece in the New York Times linking buoyant romance-novel sales to the recession. The piece offered no evidence beyond bland generalities, like "In a recession, what people want is a happy ending." But that was nothing in comparison to the whopper in today's Times: "Uptick in Vasectomies Seen as Sign of Recession."
I could list all the reasons the article doesn't hold up under scrutiny, but why bother? Just get a load of this hedge, placed conveniently right after the lede, so you know you can stop reading: "It is too early to proclaim a bona fide trend in elective sterilization, because no organization regularly tracks the number of vasectomies performed on an annual or even a monthly basis."
It's true the birth rate fell sharply during the Great Depression, but at least as of yet, there's no proof we're heading towards a vasectomy-induced population decline.
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Jess, I actually prefer Bristol Palin as a poster girl for teen motherhood to the young woman in the New York Times you link to. If you're a teenage girl and you'd followed Bristol's saga, it might actually make you realize that getting pregnant in high school would pretty much ruin your life: the embarrassing attempt to tell your parents; the pressure to marry your boyfriend; the breakup with your boyfriend because he's an immature jerk; your boyfriend telling everyone about you; you having to spend all your time babysitting for your brother and your own kid—only it's not babysitting if it's your own kid. This New York Times piece, with its mostly happy narration and beatific photographs of mother and child sends the message that while teenage motherhood is hard, it's also doable and fulfilling, and the reward of an adorable child who loves you is enormous.
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Jess, I liked Parks and Recreation as well, and I think it can only get better. It's a great time to be making a show about governance and government. The fact that Parks is about small, silly government, far from D.C., should serve it well, allowing it to be current (Are they going to have budget cuts or get some infrastructure dollars over in Pawnee?) without being too inside baseball or Obama-philic.
I'm also intrigued by the ways it's not like The Office, which, granted, are very few. The Office, set in a dying paper business in a dying town (Scranton), has always been about how regular people cope with this—being a part of a dying business in a dying town—while simultaneously contending with all the other jokers wasting away their lives in the cubicle next door. The American version of The Office has done much to mute the essential soul-crushing, dreariness of this premise, fully explored in the wondrously brutal British series. (Liesl Schillinger wrote a great piece a few years ago comparing different nations' versions of The Office that speaks to the why of this watering down).
Given the relative positivity of the American Office, it's no surprise that when the guys who softened it up were tasked with making a whole new show, they came up with something a lot less inherently depressing. Despite all the ways that Parks is like The Office, it's not about dead end jobs in a dead end place—it's about everyday jobs in an everyday place (where people even have their own offices, like, with doors and stuff). In other words, compared to The Office's Michael Scott, Poehler's Knopes doesn't even rate on the loser scale. She may share Michael's linguistic ticks and social awkwardness, but, in just one episode, by dedicating herself to building a park, she's already done something 100 times more worthwhile than Michael ever has. The fact that Parks is about relatively dedicated, successful people may make it far less indelible, and a lot more standard sitcom, than The Office—or it might just make it that much more insightful in the long term.
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We've spilled a lot of digital ink talking about teen motherhood, though most of us have not been adolescent moms ourselves, so I thought I would post this New York Times package, which includes the narration of Elizabeth Cousins, a 16-year-old from East Flatbush, N.Y., and the mother of 19-month-old Mahniya. Bristol Palin could take some lessons on clarity and maturity from Elizabeth, who seems to have a real head on her shoulders. Elizabeth says she considered abortion, but ultimately decided against it because a friend pointed out that this could be her only shot at motherhood.
Elizabeth used to stay out all night partying, but having Mahniya has given her new focus on her studies, and the Times notes that Mahniya's father takes care of the baby several days a week while Elizabeth commutes to an alternative public school on the Upper East Side. For now, Elizabeth says she has "retired" from the motherhood business—she doesn't want to have any more kids until she has her future more settled.
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Dayo, I totally agree with your assessment of Esquire's "How
To Be A Man" cover story:
This reads like some kind of
grunting parody of male speech and thought patterns-jerky, reductive, and
obsessed with stereotypical tropes of manhood (boobs, booze, breadwinning). Who
talks like that?
Who talks like that? Mad
Men's Don Draper and his compatriots, that's who, but definitely none of the guys I
know. In the office, Jessica and I have been discussing whether
males of our generation lack a sense of how to become men. The ones we know
among the educated, 20-something, urban set (not broadly representative, we
realize) aren't for the most part off at war or fathering babies or even
bringing in the big bucks. Without those traditional cues, how are they to know
when they've crossed over from boyhood to manhood?
Thanks to the feminists who came before us (and in many cases, birthed us), females
my age have been raised with the constant reassurance that there are many
acceptable ways to be a woman. "You can wear pants and still be a woman!" we've
been told. "You can play sports and still be feminine! You can choose to be a housewife
or choose not to have kids—both are fine paths for a modern woman!" But are
guys getting similar encouragement? I'm not saying that the Esquire cover package
is the perfect guide to manhood in the 21st century—it's more a
send-up to the male ideal of the Don Draper era. Still, do you think its
existence highlights the need among the XYs of this generation for some such
guidance? If so, what's the right way to answer that need?
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I did not have high hopes for the Amy Poehler mockumentary sitcom Parks and Recreation, which premiered last night, largely due to tepid previews from Nikki Finke and Slate's Troy Patterson among others. In part because my expectations were so low, I was pleasantly surprised by how much I enjoyed the show. In the style of the Office, the show follows a semi-inept manager of an Indiana town's parks department, this one played by the always-adorable Amy Poehler, whose considerable charm could carry even a (more) mediocre show. But Parks and Recreation is even better than mediocre, thanks to its supporting cast of Rashida Jones and Paul Schneider. I have been a fan of the low-key Schneider's since he starred in the sleepy Southern indie All the Real Girls. He is crushworthy as the object of Poehler's affection—he makes you believe that he has a soft spot in his heart for Poehler's yipping "labradoodle" of a bureaucrat (as Troy calls her). But, the show certainly has a lot of room to improve. The pacing was jerky and a few of the jokes went over like a lead balloon. I think the Rashida Jones character described Poehler and the show best when she said, "she's really nice…but doofy." Did anyone else catch the premiere? What did you think?