-
sponsorship
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?"