Here's another look at Union Station's Information Booth. I love this thing. Someday I'm going to get some Information from these booth guys.
I've been under the weather all week and sleeping a LOT. Yesterday the only thing I did was take my daughter to In 'N Out Burger and watch her eat. Also, I took a nice long bath while reading A Hundred Years of Solitude and I listened to the new Cat Power CD again. And besides that, I slept a lot. A LOT. And I still slept a full night. Today I have to do laundry. Besides that, I think I'll sleep.
Oh. I also watched Yasujiro Ozu's Good Morning. Great movie from 1959 that's about Japanese kids who want a TV and stop talking when their parents say "No." Very good movie, because you see Japanese life circa 1959, and besides that, just a a great quiet but great story.
Oh. the other thing I did yesterday was read "Are You There God? It's Me, Monica:
How nice girls got so casual about oral sex," by by Caitlin Flanagan in the Jan/Feb Atlantic magazine. Such an interesting and depressing article. I've wondered about our popular culture and exactly how the feminism of the 60s and 70s somehow gave way to the pure adolescent boy's world where boys are now saved the hassle of having to beg for sex by girls who think of blowjobs as "no big deal." Flanagan at one point notes that "A huge report was issued by the National Center for Health Statistics. It covered the topic of teenage oral sex more extensively than any previous study, and the news was devastating: A quarter of girls aged fifteen had engaged in it, and more than half aged seventeen. Obviously, there was no previous data to compare this with, but millions of suburban dads were quite adamant that they had been born too soon." And while reading the article about teenage girls "servicing" guys at parties makes me, as the father of a 12 year old girl, want to puke, as a guy, hey. I was born too soon.
But the article, like a LOT of handwringing about today's kids, involves upper middle class and upper class parents and children. In truth, the behavior has always been there. Maybe the only change is that now, people talk about it more and it's done more, perhaps, by wealthier kids, but so what? I'm tired of stuff that's common in working class and minority neighborhoods suddenly being a crisis when wealthy kids do it.
Well-off parents are constantly moving from crisis to crisis, convinced that their kids are eggshell children so easily breakable. if they don't have the perfect diet, perfect school, perfect summer camp experiences, their lives will be worthless. And this idea generally is directed by mothers at their daughters. Is my daughter bulimic? Is she giving guys blowjobs? Does she think Bush is a good president?! Girls are fetishized in our culture where normal teenage mistakes and experimentation are greeted with parental proclamations of ruin and disaster. Well-off parents are so obsessed with their kids getting into Ivy League schools I'm sure that some are convinced that sexual behavior of the wrong sort will ruin their kid's chances at Princeton. Now, I'm sure we all know a family where a child has real drug, alcohol, or behavior issues. I wonder, however, how the endless obsessing over kids feeds into things. Perhaps parents need to worry about their own sex lives a bit more and stop poking into their childrens'.
When I was a teenager, guys were getting blow jobs. Sure, I wasn't -- but some guys were. And while I wanted to have sexual experiences, I was always in love with some girl from afar. And I never went to parties that weren't my close group of friends. If I were a teenager today, I wouldn't be getting any of these easy blowjobs. I'd be worshipping some goth hottie from afar, writing poems and imagining how amazing it would be to smell her hair and hold her hand. I am not, as much as I sometimes would like to be, the kind of guy who would want a jaded girl to give me some anonymous blowjob.
Anyway, I gotta go.
No comments:
Post a Comment