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From last week's New York Times Magazine, an article on the dating habits of contemporary teens, or rather non-dating habits.
It's not that teenagers have given up on love altogether. Most of the high-school students I spent time with said they expected to meet the right person, fall in love and marry -- eventually. It's just that high school, many insist, isn't the place to worry about that. High school is about keeping your options open. Relationships are about closing them. As these teenagers see it, marriage and monogamy will seamlessly replace their youthful hookup careers sometime in their mid- to late 20's -- or, as one high-school boy from Rhode Island told me online, when ''we turn 30 and no one hot wants us anymore.''Be prepared to go "Ew" a lot.
Ew
One of the most interesting things in there was the brief mention that straight kids today act the way people tend to assume the gay population does, and pretty much vice versa.
Doesn't really do a lot to raise my estimation of teens.
Re: Ew
Strangely, it hadn't occurred to me to have a low opinion of teenagers because some of them indulge in meaningless (or meant-to-be-meaningless) sexual flings. My take on the whole thing was that we as a society have let them down, by providing the wrong role models, lack of guidance, etc. Typical bleeding-heart liberal stuff.
I feel so old.
I enjoyed the gay/straight thing too, although I thought the best part of all was the historical review--how "normal" behavior for young men and women has shifted back and forth between monogamy and, uh... lepidopterousness... all through the century.
Re: Ew
I liked the history lesson myself, although I note that most of the sources seem to be people writing in to a particular magazine, which didn't seem like an entirely characteristic sample. And I admit this article's source's may be suspect, but he did at least talk to teens in multiple parts of the country and seemed to be talking to an awful lot of sources. Certainly not a local hoax. I question whether they're right too, but that's always a question in stories like this -- in fact, shedding light on the inconsistencies in what the sources are saying is even part of the reportage.
Particular quote that stuck out was the guy who couldn't get hookups with girls his age, talking about being able to get underclasswomen "because they look at us like gods, and of course we are". That was pretty sad. It speaks a lot to how this all plays into a complicated game of self-esteem (and in some cases self-delusion).
Re: Ew
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Ah...
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--sean
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I'm sure there's meaningless sex going on in our offices, too. Somewhere. I've already started to try and sort out who's having affairs with which coworker.
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http://washingtoniennearchive.blogspot.com
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maybe the indie community is a little more prudish that the abercrombie crowd, but my friends and i really don't discuss sex all that much. sure there's the inevitable inter-group crushes and all that, but it never leads anywhere because our cliques are so small.
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*cries*