[Paleopsych] WSJ: It's, Like, So Totally Cool

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It's, Like, So Totally Cool
http://www.opinionjournal.com/taste/?id=110007132

    Or Whatever
    Girls' magazines are filled with bad grammar, but their content is
    even worse.
    BY MEGHAN COX GURDON
    Friday, August 19, 2005 12:01 a.m. EDT

    Last summer a polite, articulate 11-year-old friend of my daughter's
    went off eagerly to a week of summer nature camp--and found herself
    ridiculed and ostracized for what the other children considered her
    peculiar manner of speech. "She was mocked," the girl's parents
    recounted, "for speaking in complete sentences."

    I had largely forgotten this sad little anecdote until I happened on
    an online edition of Girls Life Magazine. "Girls Life?" thought I, all
    innocence. "Why, that must have something to do with the Girl Scouts."
    An image of wholesome do-goodery, of scrubbed cheeks and Norman
    Rockwell freshness, rose obediently in my mind--only to sink instantly
    under a deluge of inane headlines: "Too cute suits!" "Guys, Life,
    Friends, Body: Real Advice Just for You." "Wanna sound off about GL
    mag?" "Win FREE stuff! Feelin' lucky? Enter now!"

    Guys? Wanna? Feelin'? Ugh! Yet it turns out that Girls Life is indeed
    the magazine of the Girl Scouts of America (GSA), that high-minded
    organization originally modeled on Britain's Girl Guides, which itself
    sprang from the rib of Lord Robert Baden-Powell's turn-of-the-century
    Boy Scout movement.

    Girls Life is a successful stand-alone magazine ("From liking boys to
    'like-liking' boys, Girls Life has it all!") and a five-time recipient
    of the Parents' Choice Award; the copies that Girl Scout subscribers
    receive contain a special four-page GSA insert. Yet isn't it piquant,
    even painful, to consider that an organization created to promote
    children's spine-straightening moral and physical development has
    devolved into one that through its magazine asks: "Poll Party:
    Favorite nail polish color?"

    "If an article comes in and it's a snore, and just needs to be funned
    up a little, I fun it up," the executive editor of Girls Life, Kelly
    White, told the online writers' magazine, The Purple Crayon. "I inject
    it with words like 'swank' and 'stoked.'" Girls Life, Ms. Kelly
    emphasized, is "not condescending. Still, we try to speak our readers'
    language."

    No wonder my daughter's friend had such trouble at summer camp. When
    adult editors talk of "funning up" the English language, when the vast
    panoply of info-tainment aimed at children parrots and reinforces the
    cheesiest pubescent vocabulary and preoccupations, what chance does a
    well-read, well-spoken child stand? In the terrible, gleaming world of
    adult-facilitated teen culture, talking calmly in complete sentences
    marks you as a freak.

    Teen People asks, "How Sexy Are You?" and "Gotta Hottie Next Door?"
    Cosmo Girl hosts a "Battle of the Boys: Who's the Hottest?" and Bop
    magazine online offers a male-as-sex-object game called Frankenboy:
    "Build your dream boy and e-mail him to a friend!"

    But magazines are only a part of it. Watch television aimed at the
    young and it is difficult to escape the disquieting sense that too
    much children's programming exists to--well, program children.
    Nickelodeon and the Disney Channel teach children through precept and
    relentless example how to preen, how to diss and how, if
    d''ark-skinned, to talk Ebonics. Virtually every girl sashays in
    heels, miniskirts and lipgloss; virtually every adult is an easily
    outsmarted villain or an eyeroll-worthy chump.

    And always, coiled beneath the amped-up happy talk of cool stuff, mean
    girls and cute guys, is sex. Children groomed within an inch of
    supermodeldom, with flashing teeth, gleaming hair and sexy clothes,
    are shown having crushes, yearning for dates and trying to act cool so
    as to get dates. Though for the misery that often results from
    too-early dating and consequent backseat fumbling, you presumably have
    to switch to Lifetime . . .

    [081905scouts.jpg] It used to be that adults talked about bringing
    children up, of raising them. Today the mass media, with the tacit
    support of parents, has largely abandoned any effort to lift children
    up and instead crouches ever lower to what it thinks is their
    aesthetic and linguistic level. Slam poet Taylor Mali's witty cri de
    coeur "Totally like whatever, you know?" aptly laments the pandemic
    brainlessness this fosters:

    Has society become so, like, totally . . .
    I mean absolutely . . .You know?
    That we've just gotten to the point
    where it's just, like . . .
    whatever!
    So actually our disarticulation . . .ness
    is just a clever sort of . . .thing
    to disguise the fact that we've become
    the most aggressively inarticulate
    generation
    to come along since . . .
    you know, a long, long time ago!

    Clunky bottom-feeding language is, of course, an expression of clunky
    bottom-feeding thinking. And when you "fun up" language, you
    trivialize thinking, fueling the already unhelpful suspicion among
    young teens that someone who talks seriously is ipso facto boring. So
    what we have is this extraordinary wave of empty, glittering,
    funned-up teen culture that rushes children into an ersatz
    maturity--chiefly sexual--and where the only reward is a jaded heart
    and an empty head.

    The natural defense, of course, is that the purveyors of mass culture
    are only giving young consumers what they want. Yet it is also true
    that magazines, Web sites and TV shows do not just minister to taste;
    they create taste. And here is where adults are grievously culpable,
    for it is not children who pitch ditzy show ideas, write facile
    scripts, edit funned-up, dumbed-down copy or crop photos to make
    Lindsay Lohan's breasts look melon-esque.

    It is worth mentioning that this awfulness applies chiefly to
    girl-consumers. Boy's Life, the magazine for Cub and Boy Scouts (and
    published by the Boy Scouts of America), is fully of goofy jokes,
    puzzles, jazzy photos of boys swooshing on surfboards or white-water
    rafting--even a Bible Heroes comic strip--but there is not a girl to
    be seen, or alluded to, except a few little-sister-types in the ads.
    But then, lip gloss, hip inarticulateness and sashaying in heels don't
    really have male counterparts. So perhaps there is no consumer demand.

    When a girl recites the Girl Scout Law, she promises to respect
    herself and others. Somehow I don't think the founder of the American
    Scouts, Juliette Gordon Low, would have dreamt this to include having
    "beach-perfect hair" or "crushing on a Momma's boy." And when there is
    scarcely a stiletto-height's difference between the magazine vehicle
    of the Girl Scouts of America and, say, Cosmo Girl, something is
    rotten in the culture--not teen culture (that goes without saying) but
    adult culture.

    Mrs. Gurdon is a columnist for National Review Online.