Girls (and Boys) Gone Wild... again

I'm sad I missed this great piece by David Brooks just less than a month ago, but thanks to best friend Susan (pictured here with much beloved hubby Nate) I have the opportunity to post it now. It's about time for her debut!

David Brooks is an interesting guy who I like mostly because he chooses to err toward optimism rather than the stereotypical pessimism most bright people who get paid to write about all that's wrong in the world do.

The piece is titled "Bondage and Bonding Online: Online social contact leaves much to be desired" and it offers shrewd insight into the impact of personal blogs (watch out!) and other online information-sharing resources like Facebook.

Brooks argues, "The idea on these sites is to show you’re a purebred party animal, which leaves us fogies with two ways to see MySpace. The happy view is that this is a generation of wholesome young people building nurturing communities, and the smutty talk is just a harmless way of demarcating an adult-free social space.

The dark view is that these prolonged adolescents are filled with earnest desires for meaningful human contact, but they live in a culture that has provided them with no vocabulary to create these sorts of bonds except through cleavage and vodka."

I agree with Susan that that last line is so true it makes me want to throw up. The increased sexualization and objectification of women at younger and younger ages is startling in-and-of itself but it becomes downright scary when you consider the reality Brooks spells out here:

"To get the attention of fast-clicking Web surfers, many women have posed for their photos in bikinis or their underwear or in Penthouse-parody, “I clutch my breasts for you” positions. Here’s a woman in a jokey sadomasochistic pose. There’s a woman with a caption: “Yes, I make out with girls. Get over it” — complete with a photo of herself liplocked with a buddy.

The girls are the peacocks in this social universe. Their pages are racy, filled with dirty jokes and macha declarations: “I’m hot and like to party. Why have one boy when there are plenty to go around?!” The boys’ pages tend to be passive and unimaginative: a guy posing with a beer or next to a Corvette. In a world in which the girls have been schooled in sexual aggressiveness, the boys sit back and let the action come to them."

More on this sad phenomenon later, but for now... YIKES.