Noah Millman mentions the show “Girls” and touches on the infantilization of males and females:
We started with the title of the show: when did it become okay again, the oldest among us wondered (his mind ranging back to the 1970s when it became not-okay) to call women girls? To which the universal response was: it’s okay again not because suddenly it’s okay to infantilize women relative to men, but because it’s not okay to call anybody a grownup. We’re all “guys” and “girls” now – there are no “men” and “women” except when the relationship has an exclusively formal dimension (“there’s this woman I work with” is correct, but “there’s this woman I’m seeing” feels somewhat less likely) or when you intend a particular commendation, often, but not exclusively, of a sexual nature (“now that is a woman“).
Lacking a clear way to separate the boys from the men (perhaps military service previously served that function), we call people guys-boys/men and girls/women based upon an intuition. We just go with what feels right, and the age at which people generally break over into the men/women camp is creeping northward.
Responsibility turns guys and girls into men and women, but as a society we’ve successfully staved off responsibility. College helps kick the can. The show “Girls” is about a 24 year-old whose parents are pulling her financial safety net out from under her. Allowing children to remain on health insurance roles until the age of 26 helps put an age to this dependency as well.
Perhaps Louis C.K. said it best when he discussed the differences between girls and women.
“To me you’re not a woman until you’ve had a couple of kids and your life is in the toilet…When you become a woman is when people come out of your vagina and step on your dreams.”
Go to a bar on a Friday afternoon and people-watch. You’ll see guys in their late twenties with shit-eating grins on their face, soft, pampered faces, round-shouldered and pathetic. They’ve never encountered true hardship in their lives and it shows.
The girls, meanwhile, have eyes that are sultry but tempermental. There’s nothing solid within them, no core of adulthood. Entitled little princesses.
Neither are interested in being anything more than a happy little consumer.
Feminism was very militant in the early 90s. “Girl” was very bad form in any kind of respectable context. There was even one college comic strip that lampooned PC by referring to female children as “pre-women.”
The Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, and Paula Jones melodrama went a long way toward weakening feminism. You can’t have a culture that so completely reverse-objectifies women as asexual beings while your man in the Oval Office is whipping out his johnson at Women.
There was generally a big backlash against feminist speech codes at the end of that decade, and beginning of the 2000s. Eighties-style bawdy sex comedies like American Pie were huge. I think people also got tired of certain aspects of feminist PC even more that they did on race et al. Girls/women (LOL) probably didn’t care too much for it either.
I recall reading somewhere that in Russia, women aren’t generally referred to as such until they’re 30: before that, they’re all “girls.” The reasoning is that Russian girls prefer to be called “girls” because it implies youth and beauty, while being a “woman” is associated with being a boring old hag.
Again, I can’t confirm the truth of this because I haven’t witnessed it in real life, but there’s another possible motivation for the proliferation of “girls”; womens’ desire to be seen as young and hip.
Responsibility comes in different forms. Perhaps having a fake, bubble economy combined with lots of government regulation of “real” industry (e.g. manufacturing) has made it more difficult for young people to find real work that involves responsibility. I have never been in the military, nor do I have kids. But I have done engineering work where I have been responsible for the start-up of multimillion dollar installations. I have also done multimillion dollar sales deals in international environments. If that is not responsibility, I don’t know what is. Another example would be any kind of business start-up, particularly one involving manufacturing. A real economy with lots of real business and career opportunity will necessarily lead to more jobs that involve substantial responsibility.
Another word for responsibility is opportunity. I think American young people welcome opportunity when it is presented to them. Remember all of the whining about those lazy Gen-X slackers in the early 90′s? When the economy turned around in the mid 90′s, many of them became the dot-com entrepreneurs as well as career people of the late 90′s. I think we are simply seeing a replay of the early 90′s. The economy certainly looks like a replay of the early 90′s. When the economy picks up later this decade, I expect lots of young people to become motivated and hard-working again.
BTW, Assumption of responsibility does not necessarily co-relate with the destruction of one’s life dreams. Indeed, I think this is a very stupid comment and that the precise opposite is most certainly true. The bigger your dream is (especially those that are technological or financial in nature) the bigger the responsibility involved in making it a reality.
I have never been in the military, nor do I have kids. But I have [...] also done multimillion dollar sales deals in international environments. If that is not responsibility, I don’t know what is.
Lollzzz, I’ve done all three. I guess I’m one freakishly responsible fucker, heh.
Does anyone here think Bill Gates or Steve Jobs should have gone into the military? Or Bill Gates having kids BEFORE starting Microsoft? I think Bill did it the right way. Make the money first, then get married and have the kids, if that’s where you want to go.
Matt: “I recall reading somewhere that in Russia, women aren’t generally referred to as such until they’re 30: before that, they’re all “girls.” The reasoning is that Russian girls prefer to be called “girls” because it implies youth and beauty, while being a “woman” is associated with being a boring old hag.”
Not exactly. In Russian there are three possible words one can use when referencing a female: devochka, devushka and zhenshina. Roughly translated they would be “girl”, “youn woman” and “woman”. Quite often you can see “devushka” being translated as “girl” probably because English doesn’t seem to have a one word that would mean a young woman aged 13-30 (or does it?). In Russia young women are ALWAYS called devushkas and when a woman is over 30, she will take “devushka” as a great compliment to her youtful appearance. However, being called “devochka” after 20 is most often an insult (depending on situation, of course).
Also, I do not agree that zhenshina would be associated with being an old hag but it does definitely refer to a woman older than 30. It’s not an insult to be called a zhenshina (unless you’re very young, obviously) and unknown older women are always called like that. In this it’s same as English miss/mrs. There is a word for “mrs” also, but it’s very formal and would ALWAYS used for a married woman only. So zhenshina is quite handy in this way as you don’t have to know whether the woman in question is married or not.
Go to a bar on a Friday afternoon and people-watch. You’ll see guys in their late twenties with shit-eating grins on their face, soft, pampered faces, round-shouldered and pathetic. They’ve never encountered true hardship in their lives and it shows.
The girls, meanwhile, have eyes that are sultry but tempermental. There’s nothing solid within them, no core of adulthood. Entitled little princesses.
Neither are interested in being anything more than a happy little consumer.
Next to Mad Men, Girls might be the most over-analyzed program in the history of television.
Feminism was very militant in the early 90s. “Girl” was very bad form in any kind of respectable context. There was even one college comic strip that lampooned PC by referring to female children as “pre-women.”
The Bill Clinton, Monica Lewinsky, and Paula Jones melodrama went a long way toward weakening feminism. You can’t have a culture that so completely reverse-objectifies women as asexual beings while your man in the Oval Office is whipping out his johnson at Women.
There was generally a big backlash against feminist speech codes at the end of that decade, and beginning of the 2000s. Eighties-style bawdy sex comedies like American Pie were huge. I think people also got tired of certain aspects of feminist PC even more that they did on race et al. Girls/women (LOL) probably didn’t care too much for it either.
I recall reading somewhere that in Russia, women aren’t generally referred to as such until they’re 30: before that, they’re all “girls.” The reasoning is that Russian girls prefer to be called “girls” because it implies youth and beauty, while being a “woman” is associated with being a boring old hag.
Again, I can’t confirm the truth of this because I haven’t witnessed it in real life, but there’s another possible motivation for the proliferation of “girls”; womens’ desire to be seen as young and hip.
Responsibility comes in different forms. Perhaps having a fake, bubble economy combined with lots of government regulation of “real” industry (e.g. manufacturing) has made it more difficult for young people to find real work that involves responsibility. I have never been in the military, nor do I have kids. But I have done engineering work where I have been responsible for the start-up of multimillion dollar installations. I have also done multimillion dollar sales deals in international environments. If that is not responsibility, I don’t know what is. Another example would be any kind of business start-up, particularly one involving manufacturing. A real economy with lots of real business and career opportunity will necessarily lead to more jobs that involve substantial responsibility.
Another word for responsibility is opportunity. I think American young people welcome opportunity when it is presented to them. Remember all of the whining about those lazy Gen-X slackers in the early 90′s? When the economy turned around in the mid 90′s, many of them became the dot-com entrepreneurs as well as career people of the late 90′s. I think we are simply seeing a replay of the early 90′s. The economy certainly looks like a replay of the early 90′s. When the economy picks up later this decade, I expect lots of young people to become motivated and hard-working again.
BTW, Assumption of responsibility does not necessarily co-relate with the destruction of one’s life dreams. Indeed, I think this is a very stupid comment and that the precise opposite is most certainly true. The bigger your dream is (especially those that are technological or financial in nature) the bigger the responsibility involved in making it a reality.
I have never been in the military, nor do I have kids. But I have [...] also done multimillion dollar sales deals in international environments. If that is not responsibility, I don’t know what is.
Lollzzz, I’ve done all three. I guess I’m one freakishly responsible fucker, heh.
Does anyone here think Bill Gates or Steve Jobs should have gone into the military? Or Bill Gates having kids BEFORE starting Microsoft? I think Bill did it the right way. Make the money first, then get married and have the kids, if that’s where you want to go.
Matt: “I recall reading somewhere that in Russia, women aren’t generally referred to as such until they’re 30: before that, they’re all “girls.” The reasoning is that Russian girls prefer to be called “girls” because it implies youth and beauty, while being a “woman” is associated with being a boring old hag.”
Not exactly. In Russian there are three possible words one can use when referencing a female: devochka, devushka and zhenshina. Roughly translated they would be “girl”, “youn woman” and “woman”. Quite often you can see “devushka” being translated as “girl” probably because English doesn’t seem to have a one word that would mean a young woman aged 13-30 (or does it?). In Russia young women are ALWAYS called devushkas and when a woman is over 30, she will take “devushka” as a great compliment to her youtful appearance. However, being called “devochka” after 20 is most often an insult (depending on situation, of course).
Also, I do not agree that zhenshina would be associated with being an old hag but it does definitely refer to a woman older than 30. It’s not an insult to be called a zhenshina (unless you’re very young, obviously) and unknown older women are always called like that. In this it’s same as English miss/mrs. There is a word for “mrs” also, but it’s very formal and would ALWAYS used for a married woman only. So zhenshina is quite handy in this way as you don’t have to know whether the woman in question is married or not.