Previously in this series.
You love Don Draper, but at the same time you’re glad patriarchy is dead. It was a tough fight, and when you watch Don Draper you can see that he understands this too— both the love, and the complicated gladness.
At patriarchy’s funeral you were the one who laid a wreath on the coffin, and it was you who brought coffee to the grieving widows. You offered your shoulder and tried to be strong. You worry now that they may not have noticed.
You realize that how you view adulthood must have been shaped by something. Maybe that something includes race, sexuality, religion, ability, class, gender identity… maybe more. This is why you invite others to share the ways they deviate from you.
Other people are ALWAYS welcome to add their thoughts. You are only starting the conversation.
You read Henry James.
You realize that it’s too soon after patriarchy’s death to speak about progress.
You dream that the founding fathers are boys like you. Exactly like you. You find them playing in a tree house, and they yell: “Come! We’ve built a whole country in your image!” When you look, their country is a fort, or a raft, or an abandoned mine…or a railroad track and a sandwich.
In another dream you’re shaving. You ask your reflection: “Who’s the most important of them all?” and your reflection answers. It tells you about being in charge—about blood, and ruins, and forcing. It says you were never in charge to begin with. But when you wake up, you remember only Huck and Jim, on a river.
The night after your dreams, you watch an episode of Breaking Bad. Someone in the world understands.
On television, you see a boy’s dead body left in the sun. You see a black man, facing long lines of white police officers. Weeks later, you are anxious but you’re not sure why. It could have been the burrito you ate last night. More likely it was the white dude you just saw on his scooter, wearing sandals and a Pac Man t-shirt. You know he was pushing too hard. Somehow, though, it feels like things are slipping away.
You write essays about the cultural impact of feminism, and do not quote feminists.
You write essays about the cultural impact of children’s books, and do not quote critics of children’s literature.
You think feminism, patriarchy, and childhood are each one thing. Except for patriarchy. You were there at the funeral.
You feel as though you’ve lost something, but you’re not sure what. It’s possible the thing once belonged to you. If so, it was like keeping a secret world in your closet. You worry, though, that it was something promised and then never delivered. Thinking about it now, you’re fairly certain what you miss is like a scraped knee. Or like a knee that’s never been scraped. Or maybe, it is like Humphrey Bogart’s jaw.
You would never conflate adulthood and dominant ideas about masculinity, but other people conflate adulthood and dominant ideas about masculinity, so in your critique, you compare children’s books to the hem of your mother’s dress.
Things made by people who aren’t like you make you nervous.
You spend 12 years watching a movie about a boy like you. You imagine that, like him, you only dated models in high school. In fact, you can still remember them—how they used to murmur as you explained that CDs aren’t REAL, not like records and tapes are real, and if that’s true maybe nothing is real, you know? They smiled, and whispered: “go on.” This was before they took up with football players— before you realized they’d been wrong the whole time, despite the modeling. Was that what you lost, then? The innocence?
You sort of hope there will be a Mad Men reunion show. It could be set now, in 2014, because even though reunion shows never capture the magic of the original, you do wonder how Draper would judge President Obama’s second term.
You do not understand Beyonce, but you’re glad other people have someone they think is important.
You remember a time before women wore hair clips. It was a gilded age, but even you admit the gilt sometimes flaked. Really, who can blame women for discovering the fort, or for wanting in once they saw it. You just wish they’d thought it through a little better. If everyone’s here, who’s left to call you for dinner?
You’ve heard that some men who enjoy making video games aren’t happy when some women enjoy making video games. You’re not criticizing, but it sounds as though they’re all behaving like children.
When you can’t sleep, you remember the ways you were never in charge.
You like children, but sometimes it feels as though they’re playing monkey in the middle. They keep tossing a ball over your head, and a man who looks like Cary Grant throws it back. You only catch glimpses, but you’re pretty sure the ball is the thing that you lost.
If they would only hold still, you could get it back.
You wonder if Louis CK will be the next Don Draper. Louis is even more like you, because he is like you watching Don Draper, if Don Draper knew you were watching. Louis is the madness and the sadness and the badness all mixed together, and he is also a feminist. So maybe there is still hope.
Tags: adulthood, childhood, how to tell what novel you’re in, sarah hamburg, writing
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“You like children, but sometimes it feels as though they’re playing monkey in the middle. They keep tossing a ball over your head, and a man who looks like Cary Grant throws it back. You only catch glimpses, but you’re pretty sure the ball is the thing that you lost.”
This is perfect. I am just going to post this everytime these conversations happen (God, why do they keep happening?!)
“You’ve heard that some men who enjoy making video games aren’t happy when some women enjoy making video games. You’re not criticizing, but it sounds as though they’re all behaving like children.”
UGH I KNOW THIS GUY and he is also the one who told me racism is over because obama
You know that boys have a connection – a love – that can’t pass into adulthood, and can’t be felt by women. Youa re a feminist, so you know that this isn’t a flaw in women, but were women ever children? Do they know the difference between childhood and adulthood? You feel a kind of sick, distant nostalgia for a time when it was only boys, and your mother, and golden summer days. Sometimes your sister cried. You don’t know why, but it was probably something to do with a boy.
Perfect perfect perfect. Thank you.
Well this just makes me glad that I spend my time reading recaps of The Vampire Diaries instead of essays about adulthood.
You equate adulthood and maturity purely with cultural consumption, with sharp suits and cigarette smoke and scotch, and never once, in many thousands of words about adulthood, deploy the words “responsibility” or “kindness.”
You dream of a time when all adults in America gathered together in tuxedos to discuss Tolstoy in French. You have heard that maybe all adults didn’t read Tolstoy, and that many perhaps watched professional sports or read airport thrillers instead, but perhaps that was the dream.
You conveniently forget that The Flintstones aired in evening primetime in the 60s and was a hit.
Oh my god, I want to quote all of the best lines here but then I would just be copy/pasting the whole piece. This is perfect.
“You would never conflate adulthood and dominant ideas about masculinity, but other people conflate adulthood and dominant ideas about masculinity”
…I have been ranting about the dominant ideas about childhood vs. adulthood since I was an actual child and somehow never realized this. How?!
This whole piece was amazing but I especially know lots of guys who feel this:
“You wonder if Louis CK will be the next Don Draper. Louis is even more like you, because he is like you watching Don Draper, if Don Draper knew you were watching. “
You spend 12 years watching a movie about a boy like you.
Thank you so much for this indirect Boyhood diss that crystallizes my feelings on why I didn’t want to watch Boyhood.
Nothing on earth could induce me to watch that film! It’s just like when The Catcher in the Rye was supposed to have summed up the truly universal experience of coming of age or something – ugh!
“Universal experience of coming of age” = coming of age as a white middle class hetereo man
Boom. There it is.
I really, really, really always thought Holden Caulfield was just an asshole made up by proto-Vice. ANYWAY.
The most emotionally affecting thing in Boyhood is Patricia Arquette and she is going to win shit-tons of awards. The way the movie gets raved about you think it’s all about the kid, but it’s also about the parents, especially his single mom (since Ethan Hawke’s character is sort a lovable douche bag). God, she’s amazing.
yes! I mean, I loved the movie – but it was as much about Patricia Arquette’s character as it was about the boy (at least the way I watched it). she was phenomenal.
I loved it too! I really wish it had played for longer or I probably would have seen it again in theater. I saw it with a very happy audience and I missed a few lines because of laughter, which surprised me, because I hadn’t expected it to be funny.
I have been promised — PROMISED! — that it is not like that, really, and the women are just as important, and that I will like it — and yet every time I think of the title and that bloody poster, with the boy gazing moodily into the sky, I feel like a cat who needs to cough up a hairball.
Well – I think the question you then have to ask yourself is “Promised by whom? And how apologist are they?”
Somebody needs to send this absolutely correct piece to A.O. Scott.
A.O. Scott! A.O. Scott! Paging your office, A.O. Scott!
As soon as I got to “hair clips,” I knew exactly what piece Sarah was spoofing.
What is it? I gotta see this.
It’s A. O. Scott’s The Death of Adulthood in American Culture: “Charting the final, exhausted gasp of the adult white male.”
Google the title, you’ll get the free NYT link.
Yesss, thank you.
It’s that Death of Adulthood piece he wrote a couple weeks ago now. I avoided it at the time and just went to try and read it now, and omg I can’t. I mean I actually can’t, t’s just bloat and maleness and my eyes literally refuse to take the words in.
I just got to the part about hair clips and violently twitched. Ohhhh Scottie boy…
I got to “God, listen to me! Or don’t,” and thought, good advice.
The fact that they dek’d it with “Charting the final, exhausted gasp of the adult white male” appalls me. Who approved that? Who thought that was a good idea? Who thinks that the adult white male is anywhere close to being “final?” Why are we glorifying the adult white male anyway?
Yeah, I missed that moment where everybody got together and agreed being an adult white male would not only be the primary cultural signifier of adulthood but also the measure against which all future signifiers would be judged. Too busy buying hair clips, lol.
He can hang out with the guy at the Guardian, who when writing about a woman winning the Fields medal for the first time ever referred to it as “the moment one of the last bastions of male dominance fell.” Sure, dude. I mean, all men have is nearly complete control over the world’s wealth and political power- bastions are definitely falling. Yeah.
What a bunch of curmudgeonly, reactionary garbage.
“Wehhhh there are no adults anymore” what do you even mean “anymore” have you considered the possibility that there never was such a thing as an adult? Because, secret for you here, buddy, it’s that thing.
I stopped reading after he said that bro comedies at their worst rely on racial stereotypes and nervous homophobia because that is OBVIOUSLY not the worst that bro comedies are guilty of doing, and he spent all of those sentences that preceded demonstrating that he apparently very much enjoys being completely wrong in the way that men do so well, so there was really no hope for that changing, why bother, I’m pretty sure that man owes me money for all the explaining me a thing that I DID read.
will someone explain the hair clip thing i am curious but don’t want to provide clicks / don’t feel like being enraged by a man right now
A. O. Scott develops a “sneer he can’t suppress” when he sees adult women with butterfly barrettes in their hair. (For the sake of gender parity, he also sneers at adult men who wear shorts and flip-flops.)
The best part is that in his obsession with Mad Men he missed all the infantilizing, bow-bedecked dresses many women wore on the show. I’m sure there were secretaries at SDCP who had bows and ribbons in their hair.
Just dropping in to say: sweet Boyhood burn
You can’t help but admire your mother’s sense of duty and the quiet pride she took in her work. She never once raised her voice, not once, and there was a strength in that too, damn it.
You remember when the models you dated all turned to the football players. And how there were no other girls to date. The only girls were the pretty girls dating the football players. There were no even slightly flawed girls who would’ve made out with you (or listened intently as you played an incredibly meaningful on your acoustic guitar) in a second were you to smile in their general direction.
” (or listened intently as you played an incredibly meaningful on your acoustic guitar)”
As a girl musician (amongst other things), if you will, the absence of a modified noun after “meaningful” delights me a little too much.
Especially since I think we probably all know it is usually only the boys who get to play “incredibly meaningful”s on their instruments.
“You think Nathaniel P is unique, a fresh statement of manhood for these modern days, but this man has been around forever. He’s Bobby in Company. He’s Vronsky in Anna Karenina. He’s Willoughby in Sense and Sensibility. You only know these stories by their titles.”
while reading this i rage blacked out like eight times
Me too.
If everyone’s here, who’s left to call you for dinner?
RAGE CONCUSSION
Ugh. Wow. Unf. Yeah.
Sorry, all my feelings have been converted into intense reaction noises.
Love this, especially the beautifully poetic style that only enhances the critical bite! Amazing.
Toast, you are KILLING IT today (I mean, every day, but especially today)
You have no idea of American (or, indeed, any) culture beyond cable television and books you had to read for high school.
I will be right back- I am giving the link to this piece to all the people I care about.
Do you ever feel nostalgia for a time that hasn’t happened yet?
*Applause*
I’ll give it a try:
You heard that some Native people object to things you hold dear, like that Washington DC football team name and the costume your mom made for you so you could be Dances With Wolves whenever you wanted to, but dismiss their objections because they are just a bunch of crybabies who don’t understand you honor and love them. And besides that, there are more important things that they should be doing with their lives.
A. O. Scott develops a "sneer he can't suppress" when he sees adult women with butterfly barrettes in their hair. (For the sake of gender parity, he also sneers at adult men who wear shorts and flip-flops.)
I read the toast fanatically, am proud of being a feminist and normally find myself nodding emphatically or snorting 'oh man that's so true' to myself under the bedcovers when I read the comments. However, after reading this article and comments, curious, I searched for and read Scott's article. It seems to me that no one here actually read his article. He does lament loss of adulthood but then explores the notion that adulthood, perhaps, never existed. He qualifies contemporary adulthood as being able to be childlike and free but still remembering our responsibilities. He queries if patriarchy is on the demise and is excited by such a notion for the very unprecedented future this will bring. (I am not naive, I know patriarchy is far from dead, but I have to believe in the swing of the pendulum otherwise what is the point.) As for the 'sneer' expressed towards women wearing plastic hair clips and men in sandals..who here hasn't made a judgement call about something and thought 'oh grow up!'? Scott is just being honest about himself without actually deriding the practise of wearing clips or sandals – he qualifies that he is "not necessarily proud of this reaction". I could go on but probably have annoyed you all sufficiently for now. (And in case this is at all relevant, I am a 30 something woman with post grad in gender studies)