MAN-CHILDREN, YR DRUGS AREN'T WEIRD & WHAT'S PUSSY DOING FOR YOU?
"WE DON'T GO TO THEIR PARTIES, WE DON'T TALK LIKE THEY TALK. WE DON'T GO TO THEIR PARTIES, YEAH, BECAUSE WE HATE THEM."
- Ian Svenonius, Nation of Ulysses "Maniac Dragstrip"
When I was a kid I didn't go to parties. I hated parties. I still kind of hate parties. I can't be around drunk people unless I'm drunk, because... well, drunk people are annoying. I'm annoying when I'm drunk. I'm crazy when I'm drunk. However, it just happens to be the landscape of the scene I live in, esp. prominent for those involved in music. The shadowy nights of shows leaves us fucked up (and trying to fuck something) by the end of the night ... super easy to do w/o adult day jobs. This behavior doesn't mean we're all base-level fuckheads just because we go out and stay out late tapping into our carnal lust and our need to get fucked up. Some of us harbor weird hopes that some magical connection will be made thru casual sex. And if that doesn't pan out, perhaps cocaine can fake out our loneliness (the worst popular casual hard drug - WAY TO STOMP ON A SOUTH AMERICAN PERSON'S FACE & BECOME A PARANOID ASSHOLE W/ FUCKED SEROTONIN LEVELS). Usually though, it just makes us feel worse.
Youth counterculture rejects the American authoritarian "proper" lifestyle, you know, the one based in Christian values. To creative types, when you put on a suit and tie, you die. So do the opposite instead, never mind that A. drinking is a major part of the working class lifestyle as well and B. those "normal" fuckers go to strip clubs and do similar parallels of shit because they're too stressed out from their jobs. Sometimes these macho assholes get drunk and beat their wives and we think it's way different than a poly-amorous "feminist" boy who physically intimidates, threatens and lies. We excuse fucked up behavior if someone's tragedy is entertainment in a hipster outfit. This is the post-emo "ME ME ME" existential infiltration all around us. "Hipster irony" is another excuse for dude bro-isms under a pseudo intellectual fashionable facade. And the drugs just add to buffer out responsibility for humanity's ingrained shitty behavior.
As a teenager, I already didn't buy into the idea that "getting wasted" wasn't just another normal all American thing. Sure, in middle school I thought I was like so weird for smoking weed (with the hundreds of other kids who also smoked weed in the suburbs), then it occurred to me that my father was smoking weed too (and doing shrooms and acid and coke) with hundreds of other suburban kids in the '70s and beyond. Drug use is no rarity and it has made no person any more original or interesting than the next. It is rather a somewhat "coming of age" rite of passage for 1st World youth.
Even with all my free time as a teenager, I didn't wanna make small talk with a bunch of emo boys cracking sexist jokes or have darts be thrown at me by the eyes of some anorexic baby bangs mall goth in black framed glasses who felt entitlement to hold the loyalty and attention of a rather non-impressive bipolar bass player. Fuck going to shows to hang out with those base level humans. I hated alcohol, too, and the idea that people couldn't have a good time without it. The crutch of recreational drugs seemed against the idea of "kid power", though in so many ways we get fucked up as adults to hold on to being a kid. The first nine years I attended punk shows, I didn't touch booze. I popped pills at home, sure, listening to Tubeway Army and making zines about robots (my AOL chat name was "missanniethropic"). I hated the counterculture cool kids just as much as I hated misogynistic jocks and Christians, even though I was supposed to relate to the hardcore boys and raver girls in my high school hallways. Then... eventually I fell into the relief of bar culture, drugs and casual sex - disheartening because I have forgotten what it was to be the solid bad ass girl that I used to be (or really I have forgotten what it's like to stay home alone a lot more).
I can not blame heterosexual gender politics for upholding sex/drugs in society solely when both have been humanity's vice since the beginning. Cavemen took drugs. Cavemen raped cavewomen, too. I do know that hetero hipster boys have taken the cake in reigning my disdain for this kind of lifestyle. I'm grown now, having given in to (not exactly what most Christians would look at as "sin" but) what I look at as numbing dishonest bullshit... self awareness has escaped the hipster male who lives off pizza dreaming of some Vice magazine fantasy life, a Sasha Grey prize girlfriend except who would only fuck them and keep quiet about anything real unless it was interesting enough to impress their dude friends. It's not to say hetero women don't enjoy porn or weed or beer and don't want to fuck a la carte themselves, but still we live in a world where a lot of this lifestyle works in favor of males. The idea of "free love" was upheld by Emma Goldman and the anarchist movement of way back when, but '60s counterculture made it easier for men to more openly fuck women over.
The Man-Child has two moods: indecision, and entitlement to this indecisiveness.
The Man-Child tells a racist joke. It is not funny. It is the fact that the Man-Child said something racist that is.
The Man-Child wants you to know that you should not take him too seriously, except when you should. At any given moment, he wants to you to take him only as seriously as he wants to be taken. When he offends you, he was kidding. When he means it, he means it. What he says goes.
The Man-Child thinks the meaning of his statement inheres in his intentions, not in the effects of his language. He knows that speech-act theory is passé.
The Man-Child’s irony may be a part of a generational aversion to political risk: he would not call out a sexist or racist joke, for fear of sounding too earnest. Ironically, the Man-Child lives up to a stereotype about the men from the rom-coms he holds in contempt: he has a fear of commitment.
The Man-Child won’t break up with you, but will simply stop calling. He doesn’t want to seem like an asshole.
He tells you he would break up with his girlfriend, but they share a lease.
The Man-Child breaks up with you even though the two of you are not in a relationship. He cites his fear of settling down. You don’t want marriage, at least not with him, but he never thought to ask you.
The Man-Child can’t even commit to saying no.
Why are you crying? The Man-Child is just trying to be reasonable. This is his calm voice.
The Man-Child isn’t a player. Many a Man-Child lacks throw-down. He puts on a movie and never makes a move.
Is Hamlet the original Man-Child? No: the Romantics made him one.
Just as not all men are Man-Children, neither are all Man-Children men.
Lena Dunham may be living proof that the Man-Child is now equal opportunity. That is, the character she plays on Girls is. A real man-child would never get it together to get an HBO show. As we watch Hannah Horvath pull a splinter out of her ass, we wonder: Is this second-wave feminism? Or fourth? It is no accident that Judd Apatow wrote the scene. The mesh tank Dunham wears over bare tits is isomorphic with the dick joke.
The hipster and the douchebag may be subspecies of the genus Man-Child.
If the Man-Child could use his ironic sexism to build a new world, would you want to live in it? Would anyone?
In need of attention, the hetero man-child is a bottomless pit he has to keep filling up with booze and boobs. Pretending to be casual (and yet the most jealous individual when it came to open relationships, a hypocrite), the community at large excuses his behavior and the young girls around him blindly follow his lead between bars and house shows, her insecurities being the largest motivation in her consumption of alcohol, making her less uptight and more appealing to his bad boy cool. When he's around his male friends he talks a lot about porn, uses slang that makes him sound like a bro. Because inside he is a bro. And guess what? Your bro bullshit is THE ENEMY.
We defy convention to create an anti-convention convention which only works to keep us free from commitment to introspection, that which we are too afraid to commit to anything. To respect oneself and be respected specifically by those one is intimate with is incredibly important on either side of the coin. But isn't that what our culture is souped up with? Vice magazine is really popular. Man children everywhere with egos being pumped up with connections, he's gotta stick his dick in things just to feel loved because there is nothing in him that loves himself. Sadness can be fixed by cocaine, at least for a little while. Real change never happens through ignoring oneself, using pussy or pills for band-aids. Real change happens through real change.
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"High school is the worst thing ever for pretty much everyone and I don't think 18 is a good age for most kids for college. From what I've seen, most people handle it better later on. Seems like there's been a shift though, like kids are maybe more sheltered now. There's just a completely different sort of socialization going on. People communicate via MySpace, or texting on cell phones more than anything. I don't think they can communicate as well in person. There's a lot more anonymous support out there for things that aren't necessarily good, like 5,000 anorexia LiveJournal communities which support and encourage anorexia and every teenage girl knows how to use the internet. And that's just something common! God, the connection it's given ICP fans! All those "Mad Rad Hair" communities... way to make every kid look the same. So there's just a whole new layer of peer pressure thanks to the internet, peer pressure and general influence, isolation. I would say that dealing with people in person is much more visceral in that it's likely to deeply affect someone, or cause them to consider things in a more dynamic way, whereas internet peer pressure is more like subtle brainwashing, like advertising."
