Juvenile delinquency: Imus and Duke

Can I just say that I believe Don Imus shouldn't have been fired for his egregious remarks about a victorious college basketball team.

Instead I think he should have been fired, oh, maybe 30 years ago. I'll explain why in a minute but I need to say something else first:

Can I just say that I don't think the Duke Lacrosse team members should have been dragged into what now appears to be collapsed sets of charges and counter-charges? (I feel the same way about their accuser, and I'll get to *that* in a minute too.)

This blog is called "Real Adult Sex" for reasons having a lot to do with the phenomena of Don Imus and unsupervised athletes hiring strippers for frat parties. Ten, maybe fifteen years ago I was profoundly influenced by an article in The Atlantic Monthly magazine about the culture of the adolescent boy. The article (now either lost in the ether and/or banished forever behind their subscription-only firewall) pointed out that because early adolescent boys have tremendous spending power compared to other demographics there's natural market pressure to a) cater to them and b) encourage extension of that pre-adult period as long as possible.

[Note! Thanks to both readers MR and Ann for sending me a PDF and inter-library links to the article, Where the Boys Are by Steven Stark from the September 1994 Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 274 Issue 3, p18. It's relevant enough that I'm going to do a second post with relevant excerpts and a summary, but I'm guessing that if you have either a university or public libary access account you might be able to view the original article here. --fl]

[Second note: I've posted excerpts from the Stark's essay, plus a little more background info here. --fl]

In strictly economic terms it's a tough argument to refute. Very young men tend to live at home where their obligatory expenses are negligible, have quite a lot of free time, have surprisingly few responsibilities, and therefore while not exactly high-income never the less tend to spend whatever they do have on discretionary items. If I were in business I suppose I'd covet, and coddle, that demographic as well.

In nearly any other terms, The Atlantic article pointed out, it's a bit of a catastrophe both for the young men themselves and for society as a whole. The issue being that young men of that age are maximally alienated. Physically and, for the most part, mentally they approach adult capability but, largely because they're still emotionally, hormonally, and experientially immature, they tend to be tightly controlled by their elders and nearly powerless. The perfectly understandable result is a lot of anxiety, insecurity, and frustration that, when left unchanneled, is expressed with sarcasm, passive-aggression, extremely rich fantasies, physical distractions (including drugs, alcohol, sex, music), status-seeking posturing, and aggressive game playing. They tend to have enormous, though largely untested, self-confidence that manifests in often-aggravated mixtures of "nobody listens to me" and "if everyone would just listen to me." They tend to have contempt or wariness for those they don't perceive as being in the same boat they are. And intense affinity for, and loyalty towards, they believe are. Oh yeah, and they revel in opportunities to shock, surprise, or one-up adults and other authority figures.

I'm not recounting The Atlantic's article terribly well, for which I apologize. (And if I can find a link I'll post it.) But that was the gist.

The article pointed out adult men who manifested the indicted adolescent behavior, focusing on radio host Rush Limbaugh's smug calculated-bad-boy know-it-all attitude and television host David Letterman's affected detachment, sarcasm, along with school-boy-style grimaces and squeeze-legging when encountering with sexually desirable women. (I'd like to mark, by the way, the passing of actor Calvert DeForest who played "Larry 'Bud' Melman," the token representative of male adulthood as hallucinated by Letterman and his audience.)

Enter Don Imus, the 70-year-old man who based his career, and his popularity, on pretensions of arrested development. The man who's remark about the women of Rutgers was offensive not only for its unforgivable racism, its gratuitous sexism, and it's uncivil diminishment of athletic accomplishment but also its sheer, pointless abdication of masculine maturity.

The problem with Imus's remark, like way too many similar remarks over the years, was not its utterance but its origin in pre-adult male jealousy in the face of that which he believes he himself could not accomplish. The Rutgers athletes had advanced to the NCAA national championship, something Imus, not an athlete himself, did not and could not. Reaching into the standard toolbag of the alienated and resentful he sought for an insult that would, in his eyes, most diminish his guest in his eyes and those of his "market demographic." And found what turned out to be a perfect one in the sense that it deeply cut those at whom he threw it, shocked and outraged responsible people, got him "sent to the principle's office," and earned him sorrowfully approving murmurs from his admiring ostensible peers about "going a little to far this time."

His supporters needn't feel sorry for him. Given that it's certain the man will return to the airwaves after being grounded for, like, dude, woah, a whole year or something, I'm pretty confident that it's a win/win/win/win situation for him. If he does return, though, *I'll* feel sorry for him. Imagine spending not only your working career but even your twilight years rehearsing the tropes of the most hellish and powerless years of the average person's life.

And meanwhile look at the world he and his maturity-challenged cohorts have wrought through the lens of the Duke lacrosse team. The unsupervised boys Imus strives to both recruit and emulate semi-surreptitiously rounded up a couple of kegs and a couple of strippers and behaved like little boys getting away with something -- not least because in a world populated by Imus's, Sterns, Letterman's, George Walker Bush's, and sundry athletes and entertainers you can count the number of responsible public adult-male role models on the fingers of one mitten.

Real adults can accept when someone declines their overture in the presence of their peers without losing face or otherwise feeling diminished. Real adults can distinguish the difference between a stripper and a prostitute, not least by asking clearly and by insuring the clarity of the reply. Real sexual adults don't think they have to sneak around or cut corners on their prospective partners to have sex. Even if Don Imus reinforces the impression that men can't "get any" unless they do.

For that matter, real men don't "get any," they don't "hit that," they don't "score," and they don't "get lucky." Real men don't "get a piece" of a chick, a MILF, a babe, a coed, a "nappy headed 'ho." Real adult men, "even" unmarried men, fuck other adults eye to eye, belly to belly or belly to back with nothing else on their mind at the moment but the enjoyment that can be shared, not taken or given, between equals.

The status quo for masculinity does no service to the genuine boys of Duke, the geriatric "boy" that is Don Imus, or the staggering number of men who imagine adulthood in the form of "Larry 'Bud Melman" is the only alternative to the shameful destructiveness of extended juvenility.

I'm just sayin'