Gail Collins has a great article in the New York Times, today, as usual, which takes off on her discovery of a pop-culture phenomenon: a series of books with a teenaged girl as the heroine and a vampire as the hero. The vampire is devotedly in love with the girl, but won’t have sex with her because it wouldn’t be good for her.
Collins juxtaposes this phenomenon with a concern credited to Jessica Valenti, that “young men are spending so much time watching pornography on the Internet that they will never be satisfied with normal women and normal relationships,” and Collins continues:
“This sure sounds like trouble to me: A generation of guys who will settle for nothing less than a porn star meets a generation of women who expect their boyfriend to crawl through their bedroom window at night and just nuzzle gently until they fall asleep.”
No statistics are given as to what percentage of young men and women might be harboring such points of view, and no doubt there are many who do not. I did hear some statistics on a perhaps related phenomenon recently, courtesy of Chris Jordan’s TED talk, who said that 384,000 women last year had elective breast augmentation surgery—a rate of 32,000 a month.
Perhaps we could conclude that young women either want to become porn stars, want to be attractive to young men who are attracted to porn stars, or want to attract a nicer class of vampire.
One thing we can be sure of is that culture defines who’s attractive and who isn’t, and what sort of augmentation is required to be attractive, and it runs the gamut: men with elaborate body-painting, tattoos, costumes, scarification, etc.; women with all those plus stretched necks, bound feet, etc. So currently it’s skinny women with big breasts, men wearing their pants around their knees and watching porno, more tattoos, body piercings, etc. What will those kids think of next? Where will it all end?
I have a vision of the future—how far in the future I don’t have a clue—but in this vision, human beings will be taught about the peculiarities of their species from an early age. Philip Wylie, who I talked about extensively in Bare Brains Episode Twelve, had a plan for such a future. In his book, “An Essay on Morals,” he wrote, “Man studies the world. He teaches what the world is.
“Let him study man, teaching who man is.”(p. 184)
He proposed teaching evolution and anthropology at an early age as the basis of who we are—a wonderful place to start.
We have come a long way in the decades since his death, and hardly a week goes by without some new revelation on the brain chemistry of our mental abilities and disquietudes. Sooner or later kids will learn the basics of neurophysiology in elementary school along with the history of human conceits: primarily our illusions of conscious control of our thoughts and behavior. Once it is understood that we don’t make ourselves, part of our education will include the role of the cultural environment in imbuing us with values, preferences, and our strange ideas about beauty, courtship, relationships, propagation, etc.
I had a recent example of the kind of attitude toward oneself that such an education might produce, although I don’t know the details of how it came about in this particular person. Marvin Minsky, in a comment on the previous post, reported a conversation with his daughter in which she said, ““It must be because I’m an adolescent. You see, we adolescents are bothered by all sorts of irrational phobias and sexual thoughts and social concerns…”
I was dumbstruck that a teenager could have such an objective perspective on herself, perhaps because of the contrast with my own at her age, when I was drowning in a sea of confusion about what was going on with me. I think that such a perspective is extremely rare even now, but then my exposure to teenagers is limited to what I see on the streets. No matter, I think all of us would be tremendously better off if such a perspective were universal; if we all knew that who we are is a product of our age, our history, our current circumstances, etc.
There is a tendency to think that our problems, opinions, etc. are uniquely ours, but we are all just human beings, acting as any human being would, given the same life. In that sense, none of us are anything special.
Find the Special One