Teenage Head

In a discussion of Eric Alterman's new book What Liberal Media? in the October 2003 Harper's, reviewer Gene Lyons relays some disturbing and unfortunately unsurprising anecdotes about the media's tendency to behave like a gang of wedgie-inflicting high-schoolers. Journalist Margaret Carlson confesses, in her book Anyone Can Grow Up, that "[Al] Gore elicited in [the press] the childish urge to poke a stick in the eye of the smarty-pants." And while New York Times reporter Frank Bruni confesses in his campaign memoir Ambling into History that Bush displayed an "eerie blankness" and was in the habit of making "ridiculous statements," during the actual campaign Bruni decided it was more important to make fun of the fact that Gore actually knew how to pronounce Slobodan Milosevic's name and was capable of finding the Balkans on a map. Then there's a lovely report from Time describing a group of journalists booing and hissing Gore during a debate with Bill Bradley "like a gang of fifteen-year-old Heathers cutting down some hapless nerd."

Why isn't this surprising? Among other reasons, there's the fact that most reporters, particularly political reporters assigned to high-level action like a presidential election, are male (in fact, elsewhere Katha Pollitt points out that there are fewer female editors or executives in the media compared with five years ago)...and the most common masculine ideal evoked in the media today is essentially adolescent. How are men most commonly depicted in mainstream movies, television, and commercials? Jockish hordes of "boys" bonding over beer, sports, and talk of girls, drooling over fast cars, motorcycles (but only the cool brands), and high-tech gear, scornful if not ignorant of the finer points of running a household, incorrigibly slovenly and proud of it, prone to favor foods like burgers, hot dogs, fries, and hot wings: sounds like a model lifestyle dreamed up by a high-school sophomore. Okay, I'm aware that Queer Eye for the Straight Guy is a big hit...but, uh, you'll notice that it's the straight guys who are in need of being saved from their adolescent lifestyles - and it's not other straight guys who are presented as capable of doing it.

My own city (Milwaukee) recently was besieged by hordes of bikers celebrating Harley-Davidson's 100th anniversary (the company's based here) - and while a few people noted how incredibly white and male this demographic was, the only writer I'm aware of who called the bikers on what they are - nerds - was columnist Matt Cook in local paper The Press. Let's see...an overweening desire to babble about "freedom"...obsession with cool mechanical toys...lots of talk about doing their own thing, being non-conformist, yet a rather noticeably stereotypical appearance? (I'll bet when you read "biker," you thought of a fat, fortyish guy, with long gray hair and a beard, dressed primarily in black: you just visualized a good third of those folks) Oh, and let's not forget "show us your tits!" What high school boy can't jealously relate to all of that?

The Harley phenomenon zeroes in on the key reason for the media's ongoing efforts to maintain its male audience in arrested adolescence: since adolescents are unsure of who they are (understandable for actual adolescents), they tend to be insecure about themselves...and often shore up those iffy senses of self with readily identifiable lifestyle signifiers - often branded ones. It's no accident that, despite having less spending power than older men (or women), the teen and young-adult male demographic is so desirable: convince this crowd that your product is cool, and they'll buy it whether they want/need/like it or not, just to signal to others that they know it's supposed to be cool. (Of course, the marketing of cool has been endlessly written about, most notably by Tom Frank in The Baffler and elsewhere.) But wait a minute (some genius advertiser once upon a time must have been thunderstruck), what if we can make not just real teenagers, but guys in their twenties, thirties, forties...hell, all the way up to retirement age!...worry about their self-image and self-esteem, and keep them always warily policing their image for the slightest taint of uncoolness? And why stop there - why not competing brands of coffins vying to outdo one another in how "extreme" they are?

And there's the fact that for the adolescent male, the uncool is a scary hair's breadth away from being - in the words of noted philosopher Lars Ulrich - unheterosexual. Wanna make a product cool in the eyes of these guys? Find an alternative to it...and make it ridiculous, even emasculating. Consider the whole ridiculous "quiche" thing in the eighties (it's the Frenchness, the sound, and the "q": call it "egg meat and cheese pie" and it sounds positively macho), or the way minivans are presented as the ultimate in vehicular ballslessness in ads for sports cars and SUVs. (Not that minivans aren't ridiculous, mind you...)

The problem is that, Kalle Lasn notwithstanding, "uncooling" something is harder than it seems. (Although taking up one of Lasn's pet peeves, cigarettes, I've always thought a fine teen anti-smoking campaign would be based around the simple line "Smoking: It's What Your Parents Do.") Choose the wrong group of people to make something uncool, and they're just...uncool. Choose the right group, and...their coolness transfers to the product or image (witness bad seventies fashions, bedhead, etc.). So as tempting as it might be to raise a flag against "cool" (I'm on a campaign against "excitement"...or maybe you've noticed?), it'd work only if you used cool against cool - and guess who wins?

And besides, such an idea misses the point: because the whole economy is based on luxury items (think about it...), advertisers have, since the 1930s, fought an ongoing battle against notions of responsibility, sobriety, thriftiness, and so forth: just hearing those words probably evokes a sort of revulsion for many, repugnance kicking in nearly as a reflex at the staid, dull, gray world those terms suggest. (And yeah, a little of those qualities goes a long, long way.)

So of course the media ridiculed Al Gore (for all the wrong reasons: there were plenty of good ones): he was Fifties Dad brought back to life, lecturing about responsibility, reeling out wonkish reams of knowledge, generally evoking the epitome of wooden white malehood without a shred of the XtReEm, cool, "whatever" that even guys in their forties are supposedly to strive for. Whereas Bush - well, he was cool: he used to drink and do coke; he gave out nicknames; he had a flexible relationship with the truth and didn't seem to care about that; and most importantly never ever made journalists feel as if he knew more than they did. Who do the cheerleaders go for? The clueless but charming guy who tosses the football, or the guy with the calculator talking about its windspeed velocity and rotational vectors? And the mainstream press today is nothing but a bunch of cheerleaders, more eager than anything else to be well-liked, and have "access." Instead of the old-fashioned press card in the fedora, perhaps we should issue them kneepads.