One of the Last Real Men

"Mr. Rogers, have you given anyone a detention today?"

"...Day ain't over yet."

Let's Help Them Marry Young

I’d hate to be 22, and in love, these days. How could I support a bride? How could I find a place to live? How could I train for a profession—in a day where more and more training is essential?

Without financial help I couldn’t.

[...]

The case for making marriage available to hundreds of thousands of the blocked generation is not built on sentiment: it is a serious business of saving young people from frustration, of preserving the American home, of stemming the tidal waves of promiscuity, delinquency and divorce.

We surround boys and girls in their late teens and early twenties with ideals of marriage and home building. We admit that our Hal Smiths and Jean Fosters are biologically mature, that they possess growing and compelling urges toward mating and parenthood. We lure them toward marriage in our movies, our fiction, in the whole romantic gloss with which we daub youthful life. Then we snatch away this illusion with: “Don’t be a fool, Alice. It’s ridiculous to marry a boy who’s making only $30 a week!” Or, “Out of the question, Ned. You can’t marry until you’ve finished your internship!”

The result is a sexual dilemma. Psychiatrists’ offices teem with men and women suffering from guilt complexes because they indulged in premarital sex relations, and with equal numbers who are frigid or impotent because they were too long repressed.

From the files of Dr. Janet Fowler Nelson come these case histories:

Tom and Lillian were in love and wanted to marry, but couldn’t because Tom, an architect, was working out his apprenticeship at $28 a week. Faced with a wait of five years or more, Tom and Lillian realized that they had to make a decision. Either they would (1) have extra-marital relations, thus breaking the rules of society, or (2) stifle their emotional and physical drives, with the resultant frustration. They chose the first alternative.

When they finally married, Lillian was oppressed with the fear that “Tom only married me because he thought he ought to,” and Tom unhappily remarked, “If she was that way with me, maybe she’d be the same with any man.”

Equally bitter is the case of conscientious Arthur and Margaret, who chose the second alternative. Margaret’s parents refused to allow her to marry until she had a college diploma and had taught school for at least a year. She and Arthur “went steady” from the time she was 19 until she was 23. Then they were married. A few years later Margaret was in Dr. Nelson’s office relating a sorrowful story of their failure to reach mature sexual adjustment. “You see,” Margaret said, “we ruled out all petting before we were married. We knew that was the only way to keep out of difficulty. I suppose it was puritanical, but anyway we prided ourselves on never showing any sign of physical affection.”

Arthur and Margaret had fallen into a familiar trap. They had reined in their impulses by labeling them evil and tawdry. “This carried over into their married life and completely blocked a happy adjustment,” Dr. Nelson explains.

[…]

Promiscuity, sociologists agree, is the greatest foe of successful marriage. But a YMCA poll among men in their early 20’s indicated not only that extramarital relations were “greatly increasing” but that 80 percent of the young men blamed financial bars against early marriage for the upward trend.

Our communities, up to their necks in delinquency, scream alarm at the number of wayward girls, young sex offenders, unmarried mothers. “Yet what is this,” asks Will C. Turnbladh, of the National Probation Association, “but an indication of the stone wall many young people are up against.”

- From “Let’s Help Them Marry Young” by Howard Whitman. Taken from The Reader’s Digest condensed version, October 1947.

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Discussion Questions:

1. Whitman cites an increasing trend towards later marriage and independence among Americans in 1947, stating financial barriers to be the cause. Discuss ways this observation has changed and remained the same in the last sixty years.

2. How have society’s opinions about premarital sex and promiscuity changed since 1947? How does this change affect the author’s argument? Do Tom and Lillian’s fears still sound realistic today?

3. Have the parental arguments in Paragraph 4 become ingrained in our concept of marriage, or are they remnants of the 1940’s? Include specific examples in your response.

4. Why did Ian include such an obviously outdated article in his blog?

Laura's House

Laura’s husband had bought countless DVD boxed sets to watch while he was in Iraq; which Laura was happy to sell to me for my own entrepreneurial purposes. She lived in a brand-new three-story house in a Londonderry subdivision within easy commuting distance of Manchester, Nashua, and all of northeastern Massachusetts; with an attached two-car garage, a shiny black lamppost, a newly paved driveway, and pale-green bushes set firmly on a bed of dry mulch.

Laura herself was engrossed in a large television when I arrived promptly at nine-thirty, and answered my knock wearing a t-shirt and baggy sweatpants with “U-Mass” written down one leg. She couldn’t have been over thirty. I introduced myself and she invited me in to show me the merchandise. The inside of the house reflected the careful yet banal neatness of the outside; and aside from a few tacky travel prints, the walls were covered with framed family photographs centering around a blonde three year-old boy. A nearby study doubled as a playroom filled with large multicolored plastic toys. All the furniture looked and smelled brand new.

She had stacked the DVDs on the kitchen table next to a pile of interior design and celebrity gossip magazines. Had I been a fan of Buffy long? Just getting into the series—my friend and I are going to watch them together. And Deadwood too, a great show; it’ll be good to start with season one instead of trolling through random reruns. How about The Shield? Oh, that one’s not for me—showed the ad to a friend from school who loves it. I always get stuck running the errands. Oh, and where did I go to school? Bennington—it’s in Vermont. Not surprised you haven’t heard of it, it’s a very small place. No cable on campus, so we get together to watch TV boxed sets all the time. Weird schedule, so I won’t go back until the beginning of March. Have a senior thesis to work on in the meantime. Back to business. Curb Your Enthusiasm; that show the Seinfeld guy did, right? My friend loves it, I’ll check with him. It has been hard missing TV during the writer’s strike, but I’m sure it’ll be over soon. Oh, and would you take twenty for the Police Academy set?

Laura kept me in that house for half an hour while she searched for that damn Police Academy boxed set (Amazon resale value $43.00). In the meantime, she showed me her hot-tub, her robotic Roomba vacuum cleaner, her compact DVD storage unit; and explained to me in excruciating detail how difficult it was to recolor the grout on her bathroom floor from brown to off-white. I wondered if she had a job of her own while her husband worked at the base, or if she ever read books. When I had seen enough, I paid her and waved goodbye, still trying to process that house and everything in it. So, I thought, this is what happens when all the popular girls grow up and settle down. I had a sudden urge to run to my car and drive off in whichever direction would get me away from there the fastest.

Upcoming Movie Sequels

Blade Runner II: Rise of the Replicants
Deckard (Jim Belushi) and Rachel (Lucy Liu) outlive their four-year lifespans in the sequel to this beloved sci-fi classic directed by Jonathon Mostow (Terminator 3, Beverly Hills Bodysnatchers). Twenty-five years after their first meeting, can the pair save the Off-World colonies from a renegade army of replicant unicorn warriors? Find out in this summer’s most automated sequel!

Indiana Jones V (working title)
Scheduled for 2012, an aging Indy must outrace an army of Cuban revolutionaries on the trail of Noah’s Ark while attempting to save his failing real estate business.

Rocky Zero
Sylvester Stallone reprises his role of Rocky Balboa as viewers remember him best: before he had his shot at the heavyweight title! Watch as Rocky bounces his rubber ball along the streets of Philadelphia, threatens deadbeat gamblers for debt money, delivers advice to neighborhood kids, and feeds his pet turtle. Will Rocky win enough to pay his rent at this Saturday’s small-time fight? Find out this summer!

Star Wars: Episodes VII, VIII & IX
Starting production in 2017 (by which time a generation of moviegoers too young to recall a time before Attack of the Clones will have reached ticket-buying age), George Lucas returns to a galaxy far, far away with these long awaited sequels. This groundbreaking trilogy is slated to be the first created with 140% CGI technology, so even the actor’s voices will be computer generated! Featuring the talents of Dana Carvey as Luke Skywalker and Paris Hilton as Princess Leia.

The Shawshank Redemption II
Tommy Lee Jones returns as a U.S. Marshall out to capture the most infamous fugitive of all time: Andy Dufresne! Set on the beaches of sunny Mexico, this heart-warming Action/Drama features both the narration talents of Morgan Freeman and a high-speed powerboat chase down the coast of Zihuatanejo.

Terminator 4: Back to the Past
After the humans finally win the war against the machines, Skynet has one last trick up its sleeve: send multiple copies of the evil T-853780580 back to kill John and Sarah Connor during the events of the first three movies! Nick Stahl and Arnold Schwarzenegger are together again for some reason with a new version of Cyberdyne’s Time Displacement machine mounted on a rocket-powered hoverbike, and must travel back in time to save humanity not once, but thrice. (By the way, this time the future can be changed—but we can’t make any promises for Terminator 5.)

The Mask II
Oh wait, this piece of shit’s already been made.

Money

There’s plenty of money out there for _____________.

a) Someone who’s willing to work for it
b) Clever individuals who keep their eyes open for profitable opportunities and aren’t afraid to snatch them up when the time comes
c) People with rich families
d) People with stable salaried positions who attended college in their particular field
e) People willing to take advantage of others
f) All of the above
g) C, D, and E only

Elizabeth Bishop, On Blogs

One of the questions I’ve been trying to answer with this blog is why so many people (myself included) feel compelled to keep blogs at all—especially ones that delve deeply into people's personal lives (see 12/2/07). It occurred to me that the answer may lie in an Elizabeth Bishop essay entitled “The U.S.A. School of Writing” that came out long before the advent of online eavesdropping. Though Bishop was better known for her poetry, her prose—especially this essay—is well worth the read.

“The U.S.A. School of Writing” opens as Bishop, a recent Vassar graduate, has just received a job at the eponymous correspondence school in New York, which is nothing more than a mail-fraud scheme to swindle aspiring authors. Bishop’s task is to respond to students’ assignments, though many of them are barely literate individuals who dream of glorious writing careers after seeing the school’s flashy advertisements in farming magazines. Bishop responds to her students under the name of her predecessor Mr. Margolies; and after reading their humble letters and awkward, confessional stories, she begins to understand what drives them to writing:

Henry James once said that he who would aspire to be a writer must inscribe on his banner the one word “Loneliness.” In the case of my students, their need was not to ward off society, but to get into it. Their problem was that on their banners “Loneliness” had been inscribed despite them, and so they aspired to be writers. Without exception the letters I received were from people suffering from terrible loneliness in all its better-known forms, and some I had never even dreamed of. Writing, especially writing to Mr. Margolies, was a way of being less alone. To be printed, and to be “famous,” would be an instant shortcut to identity, and an escape from solitude, because then other people would know one as admirers, friends, lovers, suitors, etc. (44)

James suggests that writers must separate themselves from the world they wish to portray in their work in order to be successful. Bishop’s students, however—many of whom work as sailors or ranch hands far from any sort of social activity—use writing as a way to gain entrance to a greater community where people will know their names and experiences. They choose writing over more direct ways of alleviating their loneliness because they have no close friends to relate to or confide in. This is not to say that all blog writers are friendless sheepherders, but they too want someone to share in their experiences, their successes, and their failures. It is in our very nature to reach out for human contact in this big world of ours; and now we can do so simply by updating our Facebook statuses.

The Girl from Smith

Anna was a Smith graduate who had double-majored in Psychology and Economics before moving to Boston and deciding to become a nurse instead. She worked part time in the Sleep Research Lab and, on the day of our one conversation, was being paid to sit and talk with me during the second five hours of my Constant Routine. We discussed Northampton and the surrounding area schools; she recounted the time she had seen Kurt Vonnegut sit on a bench marked WET PAINT; and I couldn’t resist making the usual Smith jokes when I found out she was straight. Recalling Cameron’s experience at Mt. Holyoke, I asked Anna if she had liked her school.

“It was refreshing not to be around immature guys all the time,” she said after some thought. “I found the all-female environment to be much more sophisticated.”

Feeling compelled to defend my gender; I replied that not all guys behaved immaturely, and at Bennington there had been little distinction of any kind between the sexes.

“I don’t know about that,” she said. “Men behave ridiculously a good deal of the time—it’s the excess of testosterone. For instance, I used to live below these two frat guys from Bowdoin—total rich kids. Their parents had bought them a TV that took up an entire wall and other things no twenty-three year-old could afford. Every night they would get hammered and make so much noise that we could barely sleep.”

I suddenly felt glad Bowdoin had rejected me. “But that’s not necessarily a guy thing,” I argued, “anyone could be obnoxious and spoiled like that.”

“Consider this then,” Anna said, on the defensive now. “One day we came home to find their brand-new car had been horrendously smashed. I had forgotten about it until a week later, when my roommate overheard one of them at a bar bragging about how they and a bunch of other guys had gotten piss-drunk, stripped naked in the middle of winter, and spun donuts in an icy parking lot. Of course, they crashed into a streetlight and totaled the car.”

“But I’m a guy, and I would never do anything that stupid. I also never get naked around other men. There are any number of guys who would have your same reaction at hearing that. Gender has nothing to do with it; some individuals are just prone to reckless, moronic, childish behavior.”

“But you couldn’t picture a girl doing anything that dangerous or homoerotic, could you? Don’t you think there’s something in the male makeup that enables such stupidity?”

I wasn’t sure.

“Here’s another one,” she continued. “My brother and some friends took a trip to Japan, and one night they all got ridiculously drunk off sake and Asian beer. He said they drank all night and ended up wandering around the city daring each other to do stupid things.” She lowered her voice, as if the Techs outside might be listening. “It reached a peak when one of them dared another to stick a bottle of Tabasco sauce up his ass, and then do a headstand! And the guy did it!”

I was so taken aback by the idea of someone willingly sticking such a thing up their ass and not even getting paid for it that I was speechless. Anna sat back, triumphant; and I finally admitted that yes, maybe there was something that drove certain individual guys—I was very clear on this—to commit moronic acts that girls would never dream of.

But of course—it occurred to me later—girls can be crazy in a very different, non-homoerotic drunken-antics way, as we all know. I could have brought up any number of malicious examples from high school or college to prove that point. But such individual actions should never coerce us into stereotyping people of either gender—it leads to far too many misunderstandings.

Anna and I laid the matter to rest and moved on to relationships instead.