Re: among the innocent
Tim O'Connor (tim@roughdraft.org)
Thu, 26 Aug 1999 09:48:21 -0400
At 5:33 PM +1000 on 8/26/1999, Camille wrote:
> Tim - I'd love to have a read of this - is it anywhere to be found
>in
> Cyberspace?
I managed to latch onto it just now with a search (all one long line):
http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/bin/fastweb?getdoc+site+site+8
2774+0+wAAA+%22troubled%7Elife%7Eof%7Eboys%22
Another of the related articles is at:
http://search.nytimes.com/search/daily/bin/fastweb?getdoc+site+site+8
2773+1+wAAA+%22troubled%7Elife%7Eof%7Eboys%22
You need to be a NYT subscriber to get in, but if you're not already
subscribed, just register on the spot; it's free of charge and WELL
worth it in terms of getting to good news, both breaking news and
archival. (I interviewed for a job there a few weeks ago, and told
the fellow who met me that I relied on the site instead of the
International Herald-Tribune, since I could never find a copy of the
Times wherever I visited, or the prices were prohibitive. The
interviewer laughed and said that he had started doing that, too.)
The entire issue essentially turns upon its head the notion that
women have always been held to impossible notions of "beauty" and
"femininity" via dolls and fashion magazines and peer pressure.
This issue of the magazine examined how boys, too, are now [now? The
suggestion is that it is a recent phenomenon, but it was like that
when I was in high school, only nowhere near as extreme; urban high
schools seems to have little in common with suburban schools in the
US, except for the omnipresence of guns in backpacks; we generally
didn't carry guns in my school, and I attended an all-boys school, so
there was none of the boy-girl tension and rivalry] expected to have
"perfect" bodies and to be popular and in the right crowds, and to be
"masculine" (with the author's acknowledgement that it's an elusive
definition), but also face physical and psychological bullies and
vicious peer pressure and inevitable physical imperfection.
I stayed up until 2am reading the crazy thing. I didn't fall into
any of the categories, but I swear that if I lived among some of
those kids, I would definitely be pigeonholed in an instant. But the
way I was raised, I learned that if you didn't fight back you
signalled immediate victimhood, so I'd have been ground to pulp in
one of those schools!
--tim