Missing Voice of a Generation

Richard beat me to blogging the Salon interview with author Marty Beckerman, whose new book Generation S.L.U.T aims to explore teenage sex and the problems there-associated.

I was not, in my teenage years, part of the kind of social circle Beckerman half-recounts and half-fictionalizes. I had a lot of sex in high school, but with one monogamous partner in a committed relationship. I saw the sexual culture Beckerman describes on the periphery of my tiny teenage life, however, and I see its continuation into the college years on a daily basis. It bothered me then when I didn’t have to deal with it, disgusts me now that I’m looking for a relationship, and yet I felt and do feel very much in the minority, that perhaps my perception of my peers’ activities and attitudes was skewed.

Beckerman makes the assertions I’ve longed wished some young writer would make. A poignant example: “Generation Y is one of depressingly few emotional attachments, and this is leading to a total lack of cultural identity—primarily manifesting itself in a vapid, psychologically hollow sex scene, but also apparent in increased rates of self-mutilation and sexual violence.” He attributes this lack of cultural identity in no small part to the shoddy relativism, warped feminism, and other failed intellectual initiatives of the Boomer generation – our parents’ generation (my inference, not his).

Beckerman’s is a view I’ve long held, even bounced off some Boomers to murmurs of potential guilt, and it’s nice to hear it echoed by someone (nearly) my age. It’s nice as well that Beckerman’s no puritan, no racist, no sexist, no anything categorizable. He’s not advocating a platform, just recognizing a problem in his generation, a generation he genuinely seems to want to like, a generation he wants to do the right thing. I’m reading my personal views into his words, perhaps, but there seems present in him a kind of pragmatism coupled with classically Liberal values that is all too rare in thinkers of any generation.

I’ll write more when I’ve read the book, which I’d like to find time to do sometime in the next twenty to thirty years (read: I’m busy). But meantime the interview is worth a read, chased with a response by Beckerman that offers his perspective on the interviewer’s fairly apparent bias in the piece.