Outraged moms, trashy daughters
By Anne Kingston - Tuesday, August 10, 2010 - 0 Comments
How did those steeped in the women’s lib movement produce girls who think being a sex object is powerful?
Bennett Raglin/ Getty Images/ Cole Garside
A few weeks ago, when she was chatting with her teenage daughter, Olivia, Leanne Foster mentioned the word “feminist.” “She just wrinkled her nose,” Foster recalls. “It was ‘Eww, yuck.’ ” Olivia, an articulate 15-year-old who’s about to enter Grade 10 at a Toronto private girls’ school, thinks feminists are about as relevant to her life as a rotary-dial phone. “When I hear the word I think of the hippie-ish generation where they’re all ‘girl-power,’ ” she says. And not in a sexy Spice Girls “girl power” way, more in a humourless, style-less way: “They refuse to wear perfume because they don’t want to be seen as sex objects,” she says dismissively.
Like many other teenage girls, Olivia regards the fight for female equality as over. “In the Western world, we’re pretty equal,” she says.
-
Sir Mix-A-Lot
By Kate Lunau - Thursday, November 19, 2009 at 12:00 PM - 6 Comments
A growing number of young people suffer from musical ADD
When Toronto DJ Yale Fox performs for a young crowd, he’ll generally only play a song for a minute or so before mixing out to the next one. “I rarely play past the first chorus,” says Fox, 24. “It sounds weird, but it’s nightclub standard nowadays.” When he played his first corporate gig (where the audience was 30-plus), Fox was surprised. “Everyone kept saying, ‘You’re mixing the songs too fast,’ ” he says. “I had to slow myself down and play the whole song.”That night, Fox became aware of what he calls a “generation gap” in how younger people (say, those aged 25 and below) listen to music, compared to older crowds. He sees it when he’s driving with his parents, too: Fox will skim through tracks on his iPod, while his parents “scream, ‘Just let the song play!’ ” Working with University of Toronto sociologist Robert J. Brym, Fox has written a paper that coined a term for his generation’s inability to listen to a piece of music that lasts more than 90 seconds: musical attention deficit disorder, or MADD. It’s a condition he’s been studying—as a DJ, first-hand—and one he believes is on the rise. Continue…
-
Generation gap? There really is no such thing.
By Andrew Potter - Wednesday, September 2, 2009 at 2:41 PM - 7 Comments
Yes, kids like ‘sexting’ and are bored by how the nation runs. That isn’t complacency or a decline in values, it’s being young.
A while ago I participated in a seminar on what the private and public sector could do to keep young talent interested and engaged. My job was to listen to the discussion and offer at the end some critical reflections on what I had heard. But after a day spent listening to almost a hundred well-paid and over-indulged twentysomethings complain about how their jobs didn’t allow them to self-actualize in the manner to which they felt entitled, I was ready to strangle the lot of them.It’s with similar wariness about the youth of today that people like me greet the Beloit College “Mindset List,” an annual summary of the cultural touchstones that shape the world view of each incoming class of undergraduates. And so for the class of 2013 (born in 1991), Freddy Mercury has always been dead, text has always been hyper, and Magic Johnson has always been HIV-positive. Add to all of this “sexting” and cyberbullying and a general lack of concern for privacy, and it is hard not to conclude that kids these days espouse a seriously alien set of values. Continue…
