Why Not to Be a Spazz
Teenage girls, middle-aged journalists, peanut butter cookies
Look at that cute kid. There’s no way she’s not innocent, not putty in your hands…
Here’s another tidbit: I’m in first grade and the girl I think is the prettiest girl in class, Kitty Y., accidentally staples her finger. By age nine or ten, I will turn into the kid who takes out all the other kids’ splinters and makes them sandwiches and cleans up the kitchen afterwards. But at five? I staple my finger too. Why? Because I want the attention Kitty gets that day from the teacher, a teacher who gives me a look so queer I not only remember it to this day, but never pulled a stunt like that again. (Well, I did, but the fake appendectomy was the last time!)
I mention this in light of an article that came out over the weekend, the latest, “Oh my god, what are they doing to our girls"?” jeremiad. What is the point to pieces like Teen Girls Are Developing Tics. Doctors Say TikTok Could Be a Factor? Are they a way for psychologists and academics to fleece anxious parents? For political operatives to break up big tech? To fill a news hole? Whatever it is, the season has been lousy with stories like Facebook Knows Instagram Is Toxic for Teen Girls, Company Documents Show, the insinuation being, how dare a social media company offer a completely voluntary app wherein young women can look at other young women and find themselves wanting, a thing that has likely happened every waking minute since the dawn of humankind but never mind, NOW is the time to be super-concerned, to see bogeymen in the algorithm, to shield our tender tender girls from manipulated images, to stop their by god being dazzled by youth and beauty.
Yeah, good luck with that. Girls do what their friends do, do things to be noticed and paid attention to, while also trying not to stand out too much; there’s not a panoply of original thinking that comes with age thirteen, as evidenced by this crew I saw last month getting off the Long Island railroad.
I understand that people fear for their kids, their girls especially. As I wrote in a review of Debra Gwartney’s remarkable, Live Through This: A Mother’s Memoir of Runaway Daughters and Reclaimed Love, “[W]hen confronted with a daughter’s adolescence, we are afraid not (only) of what some man or men might do to her, we are afraid of her, of the awesome unhappiness and unfixable rage that inhabits her body like a toxin.”
I don’t know if adolescent boys experience this particular rage, this sense that you are actually going to explode right out of your skin. Obviously some of it is hormonal, some of it boundary testing: If I do X, mom (and dad and the community and etc) will or will not do Y.
So now it’s up to mom. Does she see the tics the kid never had before she started binging on Tik Tok, the tics that now six of the kid’s friends also display, and freak out? Does she demand technology change course? Does her ratcheting concern demand there be a villain? Does the kid, now that she has mom’s attention, acquiesce to the idea that, yes, she’s being manipulated, and does her being the victim come with privileges, with special status? If so, what happens if she jukes the tics? Does mom calm the situation? Or, with the increased spasticity as proof of villainy, does she go all in, and if so, does she recall the names Betty Parris and Abigail Williams? Do you?
Let me refresh: Betty and Abigail were the 12-year-olds whose body twitches drew the concern of their brethren in Salem, Massachusetts. As I wrote in another book review, of Stacy Schiff’s The Witches: Suspicion, Betrayal, and Hysteria in 1692 Salem:
The girls' afflictions grew in proportion to the limelight; they claimed they'd been bewitched, and they started naming names.
That such behavior might have been rebellion ("Instructed not to fidget, well-mannered, well-behaved Betty and Abigail writhed," Schiff writes) occurred to too few citizens. The girls were not seen as naughty but enchanted -- and thus relieved of their chores. Their celebrity (and leisure) did not go unnoticed…
Noticed and emulated. Others in Salem started to develop tics, to shout, to have visions, to name names, and lo, and no surprise, the whole thing became political, people using the histrionics to further their own ambitions (don’t get me started on Cotton Mather) and it just really did not turn out well. And all might have been averted had the grown-ups given Bets and Abs a cold bath and told them to chill.
Look, I consider it normal for kids to try on skins not their own; to do stupid things that have no sticking power, or would have less sticking power were the grown-ups not to take every Sunday’s whim so seriously.
Or do some grown-ups think doing so bequeaths them some special status? That it makes them look caring, or on the right team? Are we living through a mass Munchausen by Proxy Syndrome moment? When what we might do, what the mature thing to do, is to not feed every faux fire, and especially not light these fires ourselves.
The conviction that we really should not encourage such behavior occurred to me for the gazillionth time over the weekend when reading WaPo columnist Margaret Sullivan, whose incisiveness I do not think can cut its way out of a Wonder Bread bag. This time she was praising new Rolling Stone editor Noah Shachtman, for bringing to the magazine the “more immediate, more visceral” coverage he until recently cultivated at The Daily Beast (and about whose reporters I have on my laptop a string-gathering file entitled, “The Firestarters”).
Shachtman enumerates for Sullivan the kinds of stories he wants the magazine to chase and the speed with which he wants to chase them, damn the torpedos and the fact-checking and if there are unmentioned missions behind them, which the Beast to my mind did in utterly shameful ways when pursuing allegations of racism against former New York Times science writer Donald McNeil Jr.
No matter, it seems, to Shachtman, who expresses that this will be the way forward and pronounces that trusting readers to want the fuller story, out of, I don’t know, curiosity, to be “a relic of print.”
“It’s… the kind of approach that the Internet demands,” writes Sullivan.
Sullivan does mention how this approach really did not work out for Rolling Stone in 2015, when they published and tried to defend a story of a rape at UVA, a story that turned out to be a hoax, a hoax perpetrated by a young woman whose fake story elicited some concern, then a little more, then much more. Cue conflagration.
People think they are doing others a kindness by paying attention to that which they tell us, “This thing that I believe is happening to me, it hurts.” And we should be kind. But by god let us also be the grown-ups in the room.
Hey. here are two now!
If you’re really a glutton for punishment/pretty women/want to see interesting people pop in every 15 minutes or so, you can watch the entire party’s livestream here.
I did one of my favorite podcasts ever last week, appearing on Ethan Strauss’s House of Strauss. Here’s the whole episode, and here, a clip.
The next day, Ethan was a guest on The Fifth Column podcast, an episode that is getting oodles of praise, listen, you will love it, as you may this very cute picture that was on the monitor in the studio the morning after the guys recorded, with the message for me to share, and who am I not to?
Not many recs this week, though will mention “Once Upon a Time at Bennington College,” which is really well done and whose characters, it turns out I know several of them!
Speaking of turning out, I baked like mad this week for premium subscribers, those boxes are on their way, and do they contain what I think are the chewiest saltiest yummiest peanut butter cookies I have ever tasted? I think they do!
Until soon, a PB kiss xx
The picture of the girls reminds me of a news local news story I saw way back in the 1980's. Madonna was touring during her Like A Virgin period and a camera crew and reporter were interviewing a gaggle of teen aged girls all done up in their best, and largely identical, Madonna outfits awaiting the show. When asked why they dressed like that the instant response was "We are expressing our individuality." I was about 15 years old at the time and I think I knew then I had my work cut out for me trying to understand these young women.
Just because the internet “ demands” something doesn’t mean journalists have to respond. Did he not remember the Boston bombing and the erroneous “info” floating around?
https://www.ibtimes.com/reddits-false-boston-bombing-suspect-ids-show-limits-crowdsourcing-1204825