Follow-up on Imus from 1994

Earlier today I posted about Don Imus, the Duke Lacrosse team rape scandal, and the general problem of a culture that idolizes pre-adult snarkish rage, powerlessness, and inability to cope with real adult women. In that post I mentioned an article in The Atlantic Monthly that heavily influenced my thinking back in 1994. I was unable to find a link to the article, even behind AtlanticMonthly.com's subscriber firewall, even once I had the author's name (Steven Stark), the article's title (Where the Boys Are), and the issue of the magazine (Sept. 1994, Vol. 274 Issue 3, p18) or ISSN number (1072-7825.)

Fortunately several readers, including "MR" and "Ann," with library database access have come through. I'm eternally grateful.

Since the article's no longer available, and since I'd really, really like to encourage Atlantic Monthly to consider reposting it, I'm going to post some extended excerpts from the piece in order to a) give you the gist of the essay, b) whet your appetite to seek the rest of it, and c) give you a strong sense of where I'm often coming from when I talk about real adulthood and real adult sex.

Over the past several years American pop culture has spawned a wide range of wildly popular offerings that appear remarkably similar in sensibility. Although at first glance little appears to link the infamous syndicated-radio talk-meisters Howard Stearn and Don Imus with the movies Jurassic Park and Field of Dreams, the comedy of David Letterman and Jerry Seinfeld, the cartoon series Beavis and Butt-head and The Simpsons, and journalism's The McLaughlin Group, they in fact share a motif: though for the most part aimed at adults, these are all offerings that strongly echo the world of boys in early adolescence, ages eleven to fifteen. The unspoken premise of much of American pop culture today is that a large group of men would like nothing better than to go back to their junior high school locker rooms and stay there.

There is nothing new, of course, about men acting like boys, as anyone who has read the Odyssey or Don Quixote knows. But something different is going on today: never before have so many seemed to produce so much that is so popular to evoke what is, after all, a brief and awkward stage of life.

Take talk radio: One of it's most popular approaches today is to offer the listener a world of close-knit boyish pals. The style of Stern and Imus is that of the narcissistic class cutup in seventh grade: both sit in a playhouse-like radio studio with a bunch of guys and horse around for hours talking about sex or sports, along with political and show-biz gossip, all the while laughing at the gang's consciously loutish, subversive jokes. To the extent that women participate, they are often treated to a barrage of sexual and scatological humor. It's no wonder the audience for both shows is predominantly male.

...

One of Letterman's contributions to late-night entertainment has been to take its humor out of the nightclub-act tradition -- replete with all of Johnny Carson's jokes about drinking or adult sex -- and place it firmly in that prankish, subversive, back-of-the-classroom seventh-grade realm that has become so culturally prominent. Although Letterman rarely greets women guests with filthy jokes (you can't do that on network television), he often treats them with the exaggerated deference and shyness typical of fourteen-year-old boys.

...

Even popular "adult" [here meaning only "for grown ups" --fl] movies, such as City Slickers and Big, often revolve around the premise that once a man has passed through puberty it's pretty much all downhill.

...

Also in journalism as currently practiced, reporters often set themselves up as passive observers of events and then spend much of their time identifying with those who exercise real power -- a point of view reminiscent of the way a young teenager views his parents.

...

Still, if early-adolescent boys are notable for their inclinations to look at dirty pictures and talk about sex, they aren't quite ready to do something about it responsibly with a woman. That propensity to be in the world of sex but not really of it is certainly a sign of the times.

...

That idea [that adolescence is the stage in life where one is acutely aware of being powerless and thus most subversive of society at large] also fits a wider cultural mood, always somewhat prevalent in America, that exalts the outsider. Such an anti-establishment mood, rooted in powerlessness, is particularly strong today... Whether the subject is how the tabloid press now eagerly tears down public figures... or the rise of anti-establishment [at the time meaning right-wing extremist] talk radio... America is full of the defiant, oppositional anger that often characterizes the early adolescent.

...

That anger is also an asset for TV programmers in the cable era. Television, of course, tends to encourage a kind of passivity that isn't ultimately much different from the angry powerlessness early teens tend to feel. Beavis and Butt-head have become cultural symbols precisely because a nation of couch potatoes feels like a nation of fifteen-year-olds.

...

It also doesn't hurt that adolescents tend to be what advertisers call "good consumers" -- narcissistic, with a fair amount of disposable income, and with no one but themselves to spend it on. A culture that is obsessed with this stage of life is arguably in a better frame of mind to buy -- to run up the limit on Dad's (or Uncle Sam's) credit card -- than one that worships, say, thrifty middle age.

...

In a country whose citizens have always had tendencies that remind observers of those of a fourteen-year-old boy, it would be wrong to lay all the blame for society's vulgarity and violence, its exhibitionist inclinations, it's fear of powerful women, its failure to grow up and take care of its real children, and its ambivalence about paternal authority at the feet of Howard Stern, John McLaughlin, and Jerry Seinfeld. But they have helped, and many of us have willingly obliged.

People with access to library databases may be able to find photreproductions of the essay here. Otherwise it looks like a signup,and possibly a subscription is required.

All pretty cool stuff.

I'd just like to add two semi-related points:

1) It may sometimes be disgraceful but it's in no way dishonorable to behave like a 14-year-old boy *when you're actually 14-years old!* It's a generally hellish age. No more than it's dishonorable for a two-year-old to poop his or her diaper. It's no less unseemly, no more edgy, and no more subversive, however, for a 24-year-old man (let alone a 70-year-old like Don Imus) to behave like a 14-year-old than to behave like a 2-year-old. (Though I'm confident some shock-jock somewhere has pooped a diaper on live radio.)

2) Not to let women off the hook either. The middle-aged Ann Coulter's adolescent-styled tantrums, preenings, and cliquéish side-taking are no less dignified.

Update: Via Kevin Drum of The Washington Monthly see a comparable discussion of the commercial Imus/immaturity approach from Phil Nugent

The talk radio world, one that Imus worked hard to shape, is one where overpaid white guys who did well in the voting for the title of "Class Clown" at their respective high schools sneer at blacks, women, gays, what have you, in a dismayingly self-congratulatory tone.

....I remember that when Howard Stern began a short-lived tenure of having his show broadcast in New Orleans, he held a press conference, and one of the local reporters asked him how he would compete with the hilarious, daring wild man talk guy who was already doing a New Orleans morning show, and whose name escapes me. Stern, who'd clearly never heard the local guy's name, said something like, what's he do, like a Southern guy and a black guy and a gay guy, all the while doing high-school level impersonations of a drawling hick, a Stepin Fetchit type, and a nelly dude, which did indeed sound exactly like the local guy's repertoire of funny voices. I remember that the New Orleans reporter was stunned by this, and seemed genuinely unaware that there was some yokel doing the same basic act at some radio station in every city in America.

Update: Cool. The adolescence-by-proxy narrative on Imus is really starting to seep through the Band-Aids now. Via Adele M. Stan of TAPPED here's an excerpt of an NPR interview with 'winger columnist David Brooks

"You know, most of us who are pundits are dweebs at some level. And [Imus] was the cool bad boy in the back of room," Brooks said. "And so, if you're mostly doing serious punditry, you'd like to think you can horse around with a guy like Imus."

(In her post Stan highlights the impact of pre-adult ideology by quoting a male colleage, ""This whole town runs on people trying to work out the issues they've been harboring since high school," and adding "Say, did I ever tell you about the time the boys wouldn't let me on the debating team?")

Again, I'm just sayin'