Fascinating article in today's NYT about the stresses faced by today's young men. Here are a few of the more interesting snippets:
Ed and Colby are two of the amazing boys at Newton North High School here in this affluent suburb just outside Boston. “Amazing boys” translation: Boys by the dozen who are high achieving, ambitious and confident (if not immune to the usual adolescent insecurities and meltdowns). Boys who do everything: Varsity sports. Student government. Theater. Community service. Boys who have grown up learning they can do . . . anything they want to do.
But being an amazing boy often doesn’t feel like enough these days when you’re competing with all the other amazing boys around the country who are applying to the same elite colleges that you have been encouraged to aspire to practically all your life.
* * *
To spend several months in a pressure cooker like Newton North [High School] is to see what a boy can be — what any young person can be — when encouraged by committed teachers and by engaged parents who can give them wide-ranging opportunities.
It is also to see these boys struggle to navigate the conflicting messages they have been absorbing, if not from their parents then from the culture, since elementary school. The first message: Bring home A’s. Do everything. Get into a top college . . . . The second message: Be yourself. Have fun. Don’t work too hard.
And, for all their accomplishments and ambitions, the amazing boys, as their teachers and classmates call them, are not immune to the third message: While it is now cool to be smart, it is not enough to be smart.
* * *
You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Ed’s classmates, K. Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on his SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”
“Effortlessly hot,” K. added.
If you are free to be everything, you are also expected to be everything.
* * *
Another of Ed’s friends, from student theater, Lee Gerstenhaber, 17, was juggling four Advanced Placement classes with intense late-night rehearsals for his starring role as Brick, . . . in “Cat on a Hot Tin Roof.” It was too much. About 4 a.m one day last fall, he was still fighting his way through Advanced Placement physics homework. He dissolved in tears.
“I had always been able to do it before,” Lee recalled later. “But I finally said to myself, ‘O.K., I’m not Superman.’ ”
He dropped physics — and was incandescent as Brick.
* * *
This year Ed has been trying life without a girlfriend. It was his mother’s idea. “She’d say, ‘I think it’s time for you to take a break and discover who you are,’ ” Ed said over lunch with Colby. “She was right. I feel better.”
“I never felt like having a girlfriend was a burden,” Colby said. “I enjoy just being comfortable with someone, being able to spend time together. I don’t think that means I wouldn’t feel comfortable or confident without one.”
Ed said: “I’m not trying to say that’s a bad thing. I’m like you. I never thought, ‘If I don’t have a girlfriend I’ll feel totally forlorn and lost.’ ”
But who needs a girlfriend? “My guy friends have consistently been more important than my girlfriends,” Ed wrote in an e-mail message. “I mean, guy friends last longer.”
Girlriends or not, a deeper question for Ed and Colby is how they negotiate their identities as young men. They have grown up watching their fathers, and their friends’ fathers, juggle family and career. They take it for granted that they will be able to carve out similar paths, even if it doesn’t look easy from their vantage point.
They say they want to be both masculine and assertive, like their fathers. But Colby made the point at lunch that he would rather be considered too assertive and less conventionally masculne than “be totally passive and a bystander in my life.”
Ed agreed. He said she admired Cris, the spunky resident on “. . . one of his favorite TV shows.
“He really stands up for himself and knows who he is, which I aspire to,” Ed said.
Cris is also “really handsome,” Ed laughed. “And when he’s taking off his scrubs, he’s always wearing cute boxers.”
Speaking of boxers, part of being masculine is feeling good about how you look. Ed is not trying to be one of Newton North’s trendsetters, the boys who show up every day in Ugg boots, designer jeans — or equally cool jeans from the vintage store — and tight-fitting tank tops under the latest North Face jacket.
* * *
The amazing girls say they admire guys like Ed and Colby.
“I hate it when boys dumb themselves down,” Gabe Gladstone, the co-captain of mock trial, was saying one morning to the other captain, Cameron Ferrey.
Cameron said she felt the same way.
One of Ed’s close friends is Danielle Catomeris, a school theater star. “One of the most attractive things about Ed is how smart he is,” said Danielle, whose mother is a professor at Harvard Business School. . . .
Sometimes, though, everybody wants some of these hard-charging boys to chill out. Tom DePeter, an Advanced Placement English teacher, wants his students to loosen up so they can write original sentences. The theater director, Adam Brown, wants the boys to “let go” in auditions.
Oh, did I say this was an article about young men? My bad. It's really an article about young women. And, did I say "Ed"? Sorry; I mean Ester. "Masculine"? Silly me; I meant "feminine". Did I say "Daielle"? Whoops, I meant Dan.
I can almost hear your sigh of relief, feel the tension drain out of your shoulders. Because what you've been reading didn't make any goddamn sense, did it?
And if it doesn't make any goddamn sense to write this kind of idiotic pablum about young men, could someone please tell me why the NYT is publishing this kind of idiotic pablum about young women?
8 comments:
heh, nice April one presentation.
Frankly, I read it through and it made perfect sense with the gender's reversed...
mebbe it is just me.
*headdesk*
I started to guess the answer before the end, but still....
You know the saddest thing about all of this? Approximately five minutes after high school ends, no one is going to give a spit who was "smokin' hot." The universities to which these kids are applying, I'm sure, will do what they all do: stack in the applications in order of GPA and SAT scores, and disregard who played in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof or wore trendy footwear. I wish someone had told me all this when I was in high school, so many years ago. The New York Slimes is certainly not going to share the info with this generation.
You still have to be pretty, thin and, as one of Ed’s classmates, K. Jiang, a go-to stage manager for student theater who has a perfect 2400 score on his SATs, wrote in an e-mail message, “It’s out of style to admit it, but it is more important to be hot than smart.”
Sickening.
While I agree that it would be unusual to see young men written about in this way don't be mistaken into thinking that young men aren't still under this pressure to be superman! The pressure is there, it is simply placed upon them in a different manner.
Nothing being written about the boys was at all jarring, except for the assertive/masculine dichotomy. Even that made me think that I was out of touch with the pressures boys face, rather than thinking that something odd was going on. The focus on clothing was slightly odd, but there is definitely some pressure there (much less for boys than girls). If these are the concerns facing girls (or boys), then I don't see the problem with the NYT writing about them.
I thought it made perfect sense as presented. It seems to me that young men and women face many of the same kinds of choices in their own personal development.
I agree that the development of the article seems a little vacuous. I would love to hear more about your own opinions about why this is drivel and to what extent it is so because it is actually about young women.
You fooled me completely because my daughter goes to a school where everyone, both male and female, behaves this way. Except my daughter. She just told her guidance counselor that she's not going to take AP English because the summer assigned reading for that class is "Don Quixote" and she'd rather read Kafka and Gunter Grass. On her own.
My daughter has friends of both genders who are frying their brains with multiple AP courses and homework until 4:00 a.m. As for the part about hotties, well, the "amazing boy" at my daughter's school is a hottie of the first stripe, and he knows it too.
Dumb NYT reporter who couldn't figure out that it's not just girls who suffer in these circumstances.
Until I saw the part about the UGG boots, I didn't notice anything strange...
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