"Intimacy and Belonging" by David Brooks

I hardly ever read magazines. The two I do read aren't typical magazines: Lucky (a glorified catalogue), and the New Yorker (more short stories than anything). But I had to buy two at the bookstore for a Postmodernism class collage project. It's fascinating. I bought Adbusters and Flaunt.

In Adbusters they had a reprint of a David Brooks article. I love him. I liked Bobos in Paradise a lot and love his other articles. It talks about three songs that were on the radio this summer: "Before He Cheats" by Carrie Underwood, "U + Ur Hand" by Pink, and "Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne.

..."If you put the songs together, you see they're about the same sort of character: a character who would have been socially unacceptable in a megahit pop song ten, let alone 30 years ago. This character is hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fed up, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving. She's like one of those battle-hardened combat vets, who's had the sentimentality beaten out of her and who no longer has time for romance or etiquette. She's disgusted by male idiots and contemptuous of the feminine flirts who cater to them. She's also, at least in some of the songs, about 16. This character is obviously a product of the cold-eyed age of divorce and hookups...When Americans face something that's psychologically traumatic, they invent an autonomous Lone Ranger fantasy hero who can deal with it. The closing of the frontier brought us the hard-drinking cowboy loner (I'm learning about this in my Victorian class too - the close of the Frontier made everyone freak out like there was no danger or real life left, just tamed cities). Urbanization brought us the hard-drinking detective loner.
Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don't' get married until they're past 30. That's two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn't a transition anymore. It's a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules.
Once, young people came a-calling as part of courtship. Then they had dating and going steady. But the rules of courtship have dissolved. They've been replaced by ambiguity and uncertainty. Cellphones, Facebook and text messages give people access to hundreds of 'friends.' that only increases the fluidity, drama and anxiety.
Young people still need intimacy and belonging more than anything else. But the pose is the product of something real - a response to this new stage of formless premarital life, and the anxieties it produces...We imagine we can overcome the anxieties of society by posing as romantic lone wolves. The angry young women on the radio these days are not the first pop stars to romanticize independence for audiences desperate for companionship."
(See the full article)