Young people are exposed to relentless pressure to see themselves as discerning consumers from an early age, writes BREDA O'BRIEN.
THE WRITING was just a bit small for these middle-aged eyes, but it was worth the squint. The button on the teenage girl’s T-shirt read, “Well, what did you expect of a generation raised on Disney movies and internet porn?” Maybe I have been hanging around young people too much (strictly as a teacher and mother, you understand), but it summed up for me a kind of ironic, wry awareness that characterises teens of this century.
It would be hard to imagine any of us who were teenagers when poor old Michael Jackson was still black wearing such a badge, even if the internet, much less internet porn, had been invented then.
At the risk of reading waaay too much (as one of my students might say) into a pin-on badge, it expresses perfectly a kind of jaded awareness of the way in which their own generation is viewed, but also of the cultural influences that have shaped them. I spotted the badge not long after reading Ann Marie Hourihane’s piece in this newspaper two weeks ago about the “sexed up beauty” of teenage girls stumbling in high heels to a disco, and Anna Carey’s piece on stereotyping of young people. If it is the function of good writing to make you think, I have been thinking a lot about those two articles.
I won’t even attempt to do justice to Hourihane’s piece. Go back and read it in the archives. (“Parents don’t understand that sexual display is rehearsal”, Opinion and Analysis, June 22nd.) Among other things, it contains one of the funniest lines I have read in years. “To this day, we have no idea how the boys get into the disco: they must have a tunnel.”
Hourihane muses both about the effort these young women put into their appearance, and the effect they have on adult blood pressure, even for normally sane adults. She concludes by saying that parents should not worry too much. Instead, they should realise that this look is all about rehearsal, that “these teenage girls have constructed a shop window, a sort of playground where they can look seductive for their female friends, and then refuse to really seduce”. After all, she says, there was no fake tan around when “priests were beating snogging couples out of ditches, but the story was the same”.
Carey (“The real life of teens”, Features, June 24th) looks at negative stereotyping of young people, and believes it is nothing new. “But in recent years, moral panics are becoming even more hysterical. If you believe certain media sources, everyone born after 1990 spends their days happy-slapping, ‘sexting’, having sex parties and drinking their own weight in alcopops. A few isolated incidents are repeatedly portrayed as typical of an entire generation.”
As someone who teaches young people, I know that many of them are frustrated by the way in which they are portrayed in the media. In this column, I have said again and again that rather than always concentrating somewhat salaciously on the evils of young people, we should be supporting instead the many young people who don’t binge-drink, or who aren’t promiscuous, or who have balanced and healthy attitudes to their bodies – and seeing what we can learn from them.
In Carey’s piece, 17-year-old Rosie O’Dowd from Tralee says: “We’re not really different from teens 20 years ago. We’re just growing up in a different world.” Certainly fundamental human nature does not change, but that “different world” should not be underestimated. It makes me respect young people even more that so many of them manage to remain level-headed, despite the pressures they are under.
Disney movies and internet porn represent two ideals presented to young girls – to be either cute little pink-clad princesses or wannabe porn stars. Or preferably both in rapid succession. What the two have in common is relentless marketing. Of course, Disney movies are about more than princesses. But even the most apparently wholesome family-values movies come with a whole raft of products that kids are supposed to buy, buy, buy.
Kids are exposed to relentless, insidious pressure to see themselves not as children, but as discerning consumers from an early age. Children are seen as vital keys to how a large portion of every family budget is spent, from computers to cars to cereal. At younger and younger ages, children are encouraged not only to become “brand loyal”, but to regard their parents as unreliable navigators of the new world. Just count the number of advertisements featuring incompetent adults. Of course, if Mum and Dad allegedly haven’t a clue, children are ever more exposed to grooming from other sources.
Australian columnist Phillip Adams uses the term “corporate paedophilia” to describe this phenomenon. However, the premature sexualisation of children is only part of what he describes as “a war on childhood waged by local and global corporations employing designers, researchers, child psychologists, TV producers, and billion-dollar budgets”.
An extreme view? Sadly, I don’t think so. If I had to pinpoint one trend that has changed everything, it is the commercialisation of childhood. It is no coincidence that the teenage-slut look is so expensive to maintain. And while many kids, particularly in strong families, resist pressures heroically, I am not so sure that all that sexual display is just rehearsal. And if it is just rehearsal, what will the eventual performance consist of?
When I said to my 15-year-old son that I thought it was one of the most difficult eras ever to be a teenager, he told me to steady on, that in previous times teenagers had to go out to work to bring in much-needed supplements to family income, or at other times were even canon fodder.
Of course he is right. It is not the most difficult time in history to be young, but it is certainly the most difficult since the word teenager was invented, partly as a marketing ploy, in the 1950s. This generation has to cope with being overprotected and overexposed, with being both privileged and extremely vulnerable. The only consolation is that so many of them navigate this tacky world we created for them with such wry aplomb.