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Are You There God? It's Me, Monica (theatlantic.com)

3 points by Ennis ↗ HN
This article was linked to on Penelope Trunk's blog. For those that are familiar with her then this shouldn't be much of a surprise.

I'm posting this because it's an extremely well written article with intelligent social commentary.

If you are going to comment please do so on the social nature and implications - ignore silly comments.

4 comments

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Ennis
This article was linked to recently on Penelope Trunk's blog. For those that are familiar with her then this kind of article shouldn't be much of a surprise.

I'm posting this because it's an extremely well written article with intelligent social commentary. Very thorough and articulate reasoning.

If you are going to comment please do so on the social nature and implications - ignore silly comments.

frossie
I am sorry to say Caitlin Flanagan is one of the the reasons I dropped my subscription to the Atlantic. I find her views are so coloured through her own experiences and opinions (with which I invariably disagree) that they completely distort any chance of objectivity in her writings. So I guess we differ about the intelligent social commentary part - it's opinionated, but I never get the feeling it moves the debate forward.

As to the subject matter: personally, I think stuff like this is just a symptom (not a cause) of the fact that in large sections of society we are no closer to gender equality than we were half a century ago. The damage has been done long before girls become old enough to engage in sexual behaviour, and focussing on sexual behaviour is a red herring, though it can make for dramatic reading and heated conversations.

Ennis
I also disagree with most of her arguments. That's not to say she's wrong though. I wouldn't have expected the Atlantic to be objective in any case. It's a bunch of editorials and letters wrapped up in glossy paper.

I disagree with you about the gender gap. I guess she also made that point among others. I don't think there is a gender gap, at least not significant.

The most important point that she makes is about society turning individualistic and away from communal activity - which is true. She is just exploring another effect of this happening.

Putting in tech terms, I find it hard to see every member of a family in the 1950's to carry cell phones - if cellphones existed back then. There would likely be one cellphone that the family shares - kids take it when they go out... Technology is definitely accelerating the move to more individualism. Not sure how far it will go though. Will each member of a family have a separate mailing address and mailbox even though they live in the same house? There used to be 1 television in the house and now that the cost is much lower there is one in every room..

ZeroGravitas
Interesting stuff, though I'm surprised that the writer concludes that this "craze" is a reality and not just parents getting worked up over nothing as people have in the past about "reefer madness" and various other faddy notions.

She does something she calls the PBS documentary on and moves very swiftly from lurid tales of "train parties" to cold stats on teenage experimentation which struck me as a strange leap to make if you weren't trying to imply something the numbers didn't actually show.

It did occur to me (as someone old enough to be married with a kid) that since this was published nearly 4 years ago, and given the demographics of hacker news, which seem to skew quite low, that some people here would be able to call this as BS from their own personal experiences.