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A post from DoubleX writer Meredith Simons:
I’m all confused about which age group is supposed to be the
Entitlement Generation. I thought it was mine; after all, I’m always
hearing my elders snark about how today’s twentysomethings never
graduate in four years, won’t submit to cubicle culture, and can’t get out of our parents’ basements. But it looks more and more like seniors are trying to strip us of our title ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A simple but telling little study
from the University of Brussels challenges the idea that college kids
are gobs of clay passively waiting to be molded by their professors. In
general, students of social science are more likely to graduate college
as self-defined leftists, while law and economics graduates tilt the
other way. To find out why, sociologists gave various cohorts of
university students surveys when they entered their schools and when
they graduated. They found that while ... (Read more in DoubleX.)
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A guest post from Double X intern Margaret Johnson:
Sam, your post on Gen Y's educational entitlement
sounded eerily like a schpeel that plays through my mind every morning.
As you know, I am a grad student getting a master's degree in your
field. Government and private loans, check; no more earning potential
with my degree than without it, check; denial—not really. I went back
to school last fall for a specific purpose: to make up for what I, one
of those Gen Y strivers, didn't get out of my supposedly idyllic
undergraduate education ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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I agree with you, Jess, that the poor job and internship prospects for today’s college students are more about the underperforming economy than an over-supply of participation trophies,
or any other Gen-Y generalizations on which people like to pin such
trends. But I disagree that Gen-Yers’ (that is to say, “our”)
entitlement is purely economy-driven. Following your theory, that sense
of privilege should diminish with the foundering economy. That would
mean that our peers, many of whom are getting laid off or fear they
soon will be, should right about now be tossing aside dreams of jobs
that let us save the world and stay intellectually stimulated all day
every day—all while wearing jeans and working from home when we feel
like it!—and settling for whatever jobs we can get. Instead, we’re
going to grad school.
The idea that young people choose to weather tough economic times in
the safety of university libraries is nothing new. What’s different
this time around is the opportunity costs that we Gen-Yers are all but
ignoring when we choose the post-bac path. Education is expensive—much
more so that it was for our parents, having gone up at more than twice the rate of inflation over the past two decades. The federal income-based repayment plan that kicked in this month underscores how bad the student loan trap has gotten. People are rejoicing over ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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The New York Times had an article in its style section yesterday about college students' bleak prospects for employment this summer.
The content is entirely unsurprising: We're in a recession where jobs
are drying up for everyone. What interested me in this article was the
180 that experts are making on their previous assumptions about
Generation Y: ... (Read more at DoubleX.com.)
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Dayo, you say the article in the Washington Post “conflates enthusiasm for child-rearing with enthusiasm for marriage—a mythology one would think modern reality continually explodes.” Modern reality is exploding the connection between these two events, much to the disservice of the now 40 percent of children born to unwed mothers in this country. And there is no getting around the fact that women putting off marriage and childbearing until well into their thirties raises the risks of compromised fertility. I am the result of an early marriage—my mother was 19 and father 20 when they got married, and I was born a year later. Theirs was a thoroughly disastrous union and both my parents urged me not to get married, or if I had to, not to do it young. I grew up thinking that a major part of what made their marriage so bitter was they both felt it had robbed them of their youth. In an overreaction, I didn't marry until I was 38. Because of my own experience, I used to think it was crazy to get married early. Now I'm not so sure (although I'm not talking about teen marriage). I used to think marrying your high school or college sweetheart led inevitably to feeling a desperate desire for a fresh partner when you're 40. But maybe finding early love and making it permanent might be a beneficial thing for many people. It certainly saves on the years of heartache, dead ends, and wondering if you'll find someone while you can still have children.
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Mark Regnerus has a piece in the weekend Washington Post that is crying out for young people to get married. That’s a fine argument to make, and he does it no extreme disservice—emphasizing, however, that early marriage has suddenly become stigmatized among young women:
[M]any women report feeling peer pressure to avoid giving serious thought to marriage until they're at least in their late 20s. If you're seeking a mate in college, you're considered a pariah, someone after her "MRS degree." Actively considering marriage when you're 20 or 21 seems so sappy, so unsexy, so anachronistic. Those who do fear to admit it—it's that scandalous.
Firstly, the article’s catalogue of the dynamics between women in my peer group seems oversold (one female college student likens talk of marriage to “staging a rebellion.” What happened to lower back tattoos?). No one is forcing anyone to stay unhitched; this analysis seems a back door into yet another tale of women judging one another in some sort of endless, catty bride war, searching for “scandalous” behavior—whereas for the 19, 20, and 21-year-old men asking for these maiden hands in marriage, there is no such rush to judgment.
Regnerus then flagellates the parents of the young holdouts, and by consequence himself, for obscuring the many cultural virtues of early marriage:
How did we get here? The fault lies less with indecisive young people than it does with us, their parents. Our own ideas about marriage changed as we climbed toward career success. Many of us got our MBAs, JDs, MDs and PhDs. Now we advise our children to complete their education before even contemplating marriage, to launch their careers and become financially independent. We caution that depending on another person is weak and fragile. We don't want them to rush into a relationship. We won't help you with college tuition anymore, we threaten. Don't repeat our mistakes, we warn.
Yes, there are advantages—obvious ones—to getting married. I don’t think kids today are unaware that it’s a financially preferable arrangement. But this “our children” angle seems disingenuous. In fact, the whole piece seems targeted not at “indecisive young people” and their enablers, but at young women in particular. Maybe I’m as out of touch with shifting social conventions as the author, but I don’t sense coequal lecturing of men about the ills of dependence. (In my head, men receive more of a "wild oats" conversation.) Not to speak of withholding tuition!
I suppose Regnerus’ argument troubles me most where it suggests—with little proof—that a conservative, gendered norm is returning to what had been his generation’s wayward adventure into higher education and marriages “with math on their side.” Further, it’s hard to tell of what he complains: Does Regnerus want more marriages, younger marriages or more stable marriages?
If he had made the point that marrying early and then continuing the 20s and 30s trajectory of college, bars, apartments, mistakes, MBAs, JDs, MDs, and PhDs, that would suggest his flacking for marriage were based on some theory of economics and companionship. But his nagging is targeted at the women who have collectively embraced third wave feminist cake-eating because then they won’t procreate. Men who wait and wait for the ring “get there,” he says—whereas women must “beg, pray, borrow and pay” to reclaim fertility later in life. In other words, Regnerus conflates enthusiasm for child-rearing with enthusiasm for marriage—a mythology one would think modern reality continually explodes.
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In Sunday's New York Times Magazine, Peggy Orenstein has an essay about Facebook's impact on today's youth. Orenstein worries about two different, separate things: first, that college-age kids will find it difficult to forge new identities because of their social networking pasts, and second, that Facebook provides such a comforting connection that these members of Gen Y will lose out on "an opportunity for insight, for growth through loneliness."
As an older member of Generation Y, I think Peggy misses the mark a bit. While I'm certain college kids do spend a lot of their time networking socially, there's not a one-to-one correlation between their Facebook selves and their personas in real life (or IRL, as the kids say). Part of the reason Facebook is so popular is that it allows the user to control his or her experience. It truly is possible for an 18-year-old to delete their profiles or to have the wherewithal to defriend the people who made them miserable in high school. Even though they spend a lot of time on their MacBooks, I find it difficult to believe that they're not also disengaging from the computer, having late-night real-person chats with their floor mates, and experimenting with Sartre and sex, just like many college kids before them.
Which brings me to Orenstein's other point: that Facebook somehow alleviates or prevents the loneliness that many young people feel when first leaving the nest. Nothing sounds more alienating than being miserable at college and seeing Sarah's status message pop up about how she's "On her way to the Bon Iver concert with Dave." Being constantly confronted with your friends' social triumphs when you're flailing seems like it would be incredibly lonely-making. Even if your buddies are all similarly depressed or floundering in college, there's still something sterile about the clean lines and ice blue color scheme of Facebook. I find it hard to believe that it's a satisfying replacement for actual human contact, even for those born after 1990.
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Emily, I can't reconcile the conflict your freshly minted Generation Y (is it Gen Z now?) has embraced of eschewing privacy, which you all seem happy to do, yet expecting, even demanding as you wrote, "complete control over the private information we make public." The uncomfortable truth is you can never remove all traces of the past. That said, your general forthrightness and candor about your own lives shows a trust and wonder missing during my cohort's coming of age. My pre-alphabet age group of former flower children thought ourselves bold and experimental, but we only flirted with the openness and lovely acceptance members of your on-beyond-zebra generation typically show one another. Each of you inhabits her own skin so comfortably and displays such cheerful self-confidence, it does your elders proud. We third- and fourth-wave Facebook users now crowding your playground are grateful for your gracious reception, but Emily, you are also at the age when you come to realize we can't control what people know about us. We live in a public environment and people like to observe one another. You can't hold a megaphone and then tell people not to listen, nor take pictures of yourselves, post them, and expect the images to remain unseen. Despite the harsh trade-off, I say, go for it. Create as many online personae as you wish to, express yourselves honestly and sincerely, and enjoy the marvelous digital era you were lucky to be born into. Although you do not control who sees what you post nor what they do with it, remember, you will always have absolute power over what you say next.
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A guest post from Slate staffer Nathan Heller:
Nina's excellent post inspired me to volley back from the male side of the Slate court. I'm also twentysomething, also living off an unlavish editorial paycheck, and parts of this discussion leave me quaking in my holey boots. If the brilliant and accomplished women of my peer group secretly hope to snag men who are filthy rich—or who happen to be filthy rich (and the distinction there seems so thin you could make shadow puppets behind it)—then I might as well tonsure my head and hone my bocce skills now. Noreen's brilliantly described vertiginous landscape is eerily close to mine.
Which is why I suspect that Nina, June, and others are right: This is definitely a complexly gendered issue, but it's a vocational issue, too. What sort of writer—or filmmaker or songwriter—wouldn't go weak-kneed at the prospect of a benefactor? I've certainly shared June's Pookie fantasy. (In fact, sugar daddies themselves are hardly relegated to one gender: The dowager-with-stud trope has been immortalized from Laura to Alfie to just about everything in which the phrase pool boy has ever been uttered.) Many of us tell ourselves that a chance to do good, meaningful work is worth some sacrifice. From there, it's easy for both men and women to fall into the trap of thinking that a less-than-scintillating partnership is worth the opportunities it affords. Hence the tendency that alarmed Hanna: the place where self-possessed ambition and domestic prostitution cross.
Of course, the idea that one's work would sparkle under the influence of a clear schedule and a seaside cottage—equally the fantasy of men in the profession, I'd offer—is probably a canard. As Jessica suggests, people with a windfall of time and money tend to end up mushy as an apple in a steam bath, even if they started with sharp minds and orderly ambitions. There is a chance to catch up (at last!) on your reading or home improvement. There is the endless rewriting of sentences. There is the all-devouring black hole of the Brookstone catalog. Meanwhile: Salman Rushdie wrote Midnight's Children while working full-time at an ad agency, Joan Didion did her best work in a partnership of two young freelancers with a small kid, and J.K. Rowling—well, everyone knows about J.K. Rowling. I'm baldly naive, but I'd like to think that learning how to do good creative work among these pressures—the process of making it work—helped those writers hit their strides on more than the electric bill.
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Hanna, I think it's a misnomer that wanting a "sugar daddy" is a generational thing. While I posed the initial question, it was more an observation based on themes in The Secret Currency of Love rather than a personal conviction. Purely anecdotally, I've noticed that my fellow Gen-Y female friends would rather die than "opt out," sugar daddies or no. We've heard horror stories about women leaving their fast-paced jobs for several years to tend to their children, and when they come back they're unemployable; we've seen women of our mothers' generation spend their days with the PTA until a divorce sends them back into a workplace for which they're ill-equipped. Here's a cautionary tale that I often think about: A female rock star from the '90s with a cult following now has an incredibly rich and well-known boyfriend. I heard through the grapevine that all she does these days is sit in his townhouse and smoke cloves and go to yoga. She never writes music. That story makes me want to barf.
As a group, I think we're incredibly ambitious, and I can at least say for myself that I would hate going freelance unless I was so wildly successful that I could guarantee a series of lucrative assignments and continued relevance. It would make me too nervous otherwise. I like having a title and, like Dahlia, a dental plan.
I think what Sam is getting at is not that women in their 20s want a benefactor; it's that they want to work hard and succeed in the field of their choice and not worry about paying for private school for their future children. Perhaps in these economic times it's entitled, E.J., or a pipe dream, June, but I don't think it's an entirely unreasonable hope.
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