wordcrush

...all men are slimy fuckheads that deserve to die in a fire and I'm quitting my life to join a lesbian colony. In the past couple of days I've encountered a whole whack of articles discussing the shifting sexual realities of teenage girls "these days." Though the pieces are actually quite divergent in approach, they all ulitmately seek to blame something or somebody (advertising, peer pressure, low self-esteem, class background, intelligence levels, acceptance from boys, free money). I'd like to shift the grounds for debate -- a la Foucault -- and blame the articles themselves because they are providing a legitimizing forum for the development of discursive strategies which can then be put into legal, medical and cultural practices. The articles' open questions are all formulated as "why is this happening?" and never seem to ask "why are we asking these questions instead of other more challenging ones, such as 'how these various places of blame become the ones where we agree to put stock in the answers?'?"

Asking that question may actually give some insight into why the articles, while taking different stances, always lead to the same tired places. They essentially reveal themselves to be tautological, because they begin by assuming that "the problem of teenage girls" is a coherent, approachable problem. You can see where it goes from there. You can't go wrong when you're proving the existence of what you already think to be true. On the other hand, have you ever noticed just how little blaming things like "the media" actually accomplishes? That is, unless your goal is to lament the degradation of society, or sit back with a self-satisfied smirk and ponder the world's idiocy. Idiots...

Listen to the way that psychological and academic discourses slip into the journalist's observations and the article simultaneously offers new directions for these discourses to expand:

"These teenagers don’t feel as though their sexuality has to define them, or that they have to define it, which has led some psychologists and child-development specialists to label them the 'post-gay' generation. But kids like Alair and her friends are in the process of working up their own language to describe their behavior. Along with gay, straight, and bisexual, they’ll drop in new words, some of which they’ve coined themselves: polysexual, ambisexual, pansexual, pansensual, polyfide, bi-curious, bi-queer, fluid, metroflexible, heteroflexible, heterosexual with lesbian tendencies—or, as Alair puts it, 'just sexual.'" (Cuddle Puddle)

GAH! It's like, "the shrinks have it wrong, so here is the way for them to get it right." "These teenagers" may not have to define their sexuality, but we sure do, because it's a problem... Who knows? We might even be able to invent some new prescription medication to solve this problem. Maybe we coult start a "sexual identity therapy" field, or alrternately a "de-identification" field. Perhaps we could drum up a few new laws proscribing what the media can and cannot do. Yeah, that'd be sweet. The more I hear media stories focus on such things, the more suspicious I become of the efficacy and goals of the discussions. There is only one clear solution: blame the man. GOD DAMN THE GOD DAMN FUCKING MAN!!!!