The article starts off the same way the book does, talking about the “Unconditional Surrender” kiss; a photograph of two strangers kissing in Times Square after the announcement of Japan’s surrender to the United States. In a way, that seems like a very romantic gesture that two people could be so happy about the end of a war that the would lock lips even though they had never met before that moment. Based on the tone of the article, this is probably not quite the way that the book depicted the situation.
Instead of the “Unconditional Surrender” kiss being a romantic thing, it seems to have been looked at from a more sinister angle. I wouldn’t go so far as to say rape, but there was still an assumed unsolicited physical interaction between the two, which may have been made possible by the more aggressive way that teenage boys pursued teenage girls at the time. The article hints that the more aggressive mindset was nurtured by a very homophobic and male dominated society.
Moving on only slightly from the “Unconditional Surrender” kiss, the author offers the suggestion that the reason for the more aggressive behavior is that it allowed a very un-accepting society to stamp a label on itself proclaiming a heterosexual predominance. In addition to that, it allowed that society to look to its past and make the claim that everyone starts out straight and if a person is homosexual, it is because they decided to be so later in life.
Then, somewhere between then and present day a more toned down version of male dating practices emerged wherein a male teenager would basically be so infatuated with the opposite sex that he would forego the rest of his social life for her. This seems to be a turning point for male aggressiveness. Instead of being somewhat predatory, boys became a little more like servants who were completely enamored with the object of their desire. This is a gentler view, but it is still showing how much boys tend to get a little girl-crazy.
The author of the article goes on to fill us in about present day teenage boys by using her own son and his friends as examples. While there are still many variations of personalities out there, I feel that her sons are fair representations of present-day boys. They spend most of their time playing video games and playing together, and very little time pursuing the opposite sex. It’s easy to speculate that these boys may just be geeks or social outcasts of some kind, but based on the author’s description it does not seem likely that there are homosexual tendencies among the boys. Rather, they just simply don’t have the kind of interest in girls that society a few decades ago felt that they should.
So now let’s move on to talk about the biases that the article has identified in the book. The most obvious to me is that the author believes that teenage boys have been more or less pushed into what is described as “twitterpation” in the Disney movie “Bambi”. The author also seems to hint that the push is caused by a homophobic society. My personal view is that boy’s intentions lie somewhere between girl-crazy and a lack of interest for the opposite sex.
There are enough boys of both types these days that I believe our society has started to balance out a bit in it’s opinion of how boys act towards girls. I don’t believe that boys who have little to no interest in girls during their teenage years have homosexual tendencies anymore than I believe that boys who are girl-crazy have a tendency towards predatory behavior.
There exists a term today that did not exist when the “Unconditional Surrender” photograph was taken that further describes how much our society has normalized a bit between the homophobic and the homocentric ideologies. That term is “Metrosexual”. This term describes men who are sexually straight, but have interests and tastes that are not the popular consensus of what ‘masculine’ really is. Men who are metrosexual are basically those who live somewhere between homosexuality and heterosexuality. They do not have a strong need to prove themselves to either extreme, and to me, that says something has changed in our society. We live in a society that for the most part, seems to be more accepting of a more toned down definition of masculine.
Of course, I’m drawing my own conclusions here, and one could make the counter argument that there are still plenty of hate crimes, but there always will be. Unless hate crimes become close to being the norm, those won’t define our society. To me, this is a very good thing. Even the more masculine men in our society don’t really compare to the level of masculinity that existed in the days when everyone had rough hands from working on farms. Perhaps this means that our society is becoming more advanced in some ways, maybe it means that we’re becoming weaker, I’m really not sure. But what I feel is that through education we have become a more understanding and accepting society. To me, that sounds like advancement.
No comments:
Post a Comment