Potemkin
01-03-2005, 08:29 PM
Middle Ground: Why teenage girls and middle-aged men belong together
by Ada Calhoun
http://www.nerve.com/personalessays/calhoun/middleground/
When I was a teenager, Frank Bascombe, the forty-year-old man at the center of Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, was my kind of guy. He's "in the deepest depths of my worst dreaminess." So was I! He feels "a swirling dreaminess." Hey, me too! The symptoms of dreaminess "can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling," he says. And that's what I felt: a disoriented, is that all there is torpor. At fifteen, I was having a midlife crisis.
Young women and the Richard Ford brand of middle-aged men have an awful lot in common. Both are alone in a crowd, too smart for the room. Both feel trapped — by school on one hand, suburban obligation on the other. Both are uneasy with responsibility, newly unsure about what they want to do with their lives. And both confuse sex with love. In short, both are fantastically lonely. So is it any surprise that, in spite of progressive society's disapproval, they so often fantasize about — and even occasionally wind up — together?
These days, older men are not supposed to want to date young women. As we know from Demi-Ashton and Something's Gotta Give, when older women score young studs, a collective societal wink of approval is in order, while for men, the convertible and half-his-age girlfriend are signs of moral bankruptcy. Men dating women young enough to be their daughters is frowned upon. While it's hard to condone older men dating women who in fact are their daughters (Woody Allen), I absolutely defend Jack Nicholson's right to arm candy, not for his sake, but for the candy's.
Being the younger girlfriend isn't exactly a prison sentence. It typically involves travel and being fussed over. And, as a rule, that pretty, smooth-skinned young thing in the passenger seat isn't in it for cynical reasons. Sure, maybe sometimes it's about what people always say; he wants to stave off mortality with a wrinkle-free trophy, she wants money and power. But I think a lot of times their neuroses just happen to be in sync; sometimes they just get each other.
Throughout my life, I have known plenty of girls who wound up in various relationships across the intimacy spectrum with men twenty years older. Maybe it was socially awkward at times, but they didn't die and few of them felt then or feel now that they were being exploited.
Maybe if one of my thirty-year-old male friends started fraternizing with an eighteen-year-old girl, I would be scandalized, but I don't think so. In any case, I certainly wouldn't question the young lady's motives. I have smart, nice friends who would have a lot of neat stuff to teach any girl who's like I was ten years ago.
Besides, even though my friends and I fraternized with older men out of a sense of adventure or friendship rather than what people always say younger women are after — money and power — I refuse to believe that money and power are such terrible things to want. Both are in short supply when you're a teenage girl with ambition beyond the limited life to which you've been sentenced by your age. Mutual, life-improving arrangements that happen to involve one person being rich and the other being pretty certainly aren't any worse than those unglamorous couplings of similarly endowed and aged people who combine to synergistically create a perfectly healthy, fantastically boring dyad.
And healthy, boring dyads seem to be what sanctioned teen entertainment is all about. In the eighties, you had Judy Blume's training-bra classics and softcore porn like Do You Love Me, Harvey Burns? In the nineties, you had Francesca Lia Block's L.A. fairytales. Now, teen girls have Louise Rennison's books about the engagingly pouty heroine Georgia Nicolson (Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging, etc.), which, while charming, are about pretty standard stuff: fights with mom, kissing boys, feeling ugly. Then you have Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic series, pure proto-socialite drivel about a ditz who just can't stop buying accessories on credit. From the Amazon summary: "Becky's ten-month globe-trot with hubby Luke was a shopping spree disguised as a honeymoon — heck, Becky will walk across hot coals for an aquamarine necklace…"
Girls: reading these books is a BIG MISTAKE. Not only is this soulless genre, with its "look how unsexy sex can be" posturing, way too shallow for a growing mind, it only expands the chasm between you and men. What one needs from a boyfriend or husband, at any age, is empathy and companionship, and the more Women are from Venus bullshit one indulges in, the more difficult it is to bridge the gender gap. Whenever you're setting up human relationships as a game (The Rules, He's Just Not That Into You) or a glamorous lifestyle choice wherein you dress up and spend most of your time talking with your girlfriends or your journal about how exasperated men make you (Sex and the City, Bridget Jones' Diary), you're never going to see men as fallible, mortal beings looking for understanding just like you are.
Chick-lit heroines are like the pettiest and most practical characters in a Jane Austen novel come to life, minus charm or patience. It's all frantic screwing-cute with no time for anything to steep, whereas Ford and company — they know from steeping. Everything is mystifying for these confused, angst-ridden heroes — even getting up in the morning, which is why these books stop being good reading once you hit your twenties and need to stop stewing and get on with things.
As a ten-year-old girl, my first cassette tapes were (and how this happened I'll never know): Huey Lewis, Phil Collins and Weird Al. Hipper friends quickly swooped in with Hey, I could think, at least I'm not an alcoholic with a dead bird in my closet.
Depeche Mode and the Violent Femmes, but the damage was done: from an early age, I deeply identified with the cultural output of that demographic. And after the obligatory Jane Austen and Brönte sisters phase, I got obsessed with random older male authors I found purely by chance at used bookstores (if the back cover referred to its aging hero as "tortured" my babysitting money was as good as spent):
Richard Ford, Tom Spanbauer, Joe Coomer, J. D. Salinger, Lewis Shiner, Philp K. Dick, Denis Johnson... I was smitten. I even liked Harry Crews, whose genuinely terrifying Southern Gothic books — getting tattooed when you're blackout-drunk in Alaska, accidentally killing a hawk you're trying to train, watching a cockfight — taught me everything I needed to know about the darkness of the soul. And it sure put not being invited to some cool-kids party in perspective. Hey, I may be sitting at home alone, I could think, but at least I'm not an alcoholic living in a shack in the woods with a dead bird in my closet. I just sort of wanted to date one.
As refuge from perpetually disappointing teenage boyfriends, I pined in a romantic fashion for dozens of older male authors, alive (Sam Shepard) and dead (Tolstoy). Falling for a narrator is weird It entails a curiously absorbing sensation ofwanting to simultaneously be and sleep with the person who owns the voice that's entered your head. When you already share so much intellectual bandwidth with someone, you lose yourself a little. But when your life consists of baffling social scenarios, pop quizzes, and drug experimentation, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
Think Lost in Translation Bill Murray, in narrator form, whispering his frustrations into your ear while you stay up all night, thoroughly at sea in a twin bed in your parents' house. Is it any wonder I wanted nothing to do with the young-adult novels and feminist literature calculated to make me a well-adjusted young woman? Sure, I skimmed Possessing the Secret of Joy, but joy gets old; I was interested in other secrets — secrets like what it feels like to walk up to the door of the home where you live with your wife and children and not want to go inside.
Ultimately, I have a healthier idea of the difference between men and their books. When I interviewed Sam Shepard for New York Magazine, he did not insist we go on a road trip immediately, but instead hung up on me after a few perfectly normal questions. At nearly thirty, I'm too old for all my older men anyway. But my emotional affair with that demographic has left me less judgmental. Whenever I read a middle-aged author's overwrought piece of self-indulgent fiction, even if I don't enjoy it, I can picture my younger self reading the same story and understanding it exactly. If my husband goes through a mid-life crisis twenty years from now, I hope I'd be able to channel my teenage self and remember how to be the refuge-girlfriend rather than the wearying spouse.
The only thing The Sportswriter's Frank Bascombe said that I disagreed with was this: dreaminess when you're young is pleasurable and when you're old is not. In fact, it can be torturous for the young and pleasurable for the old; it's just a question of finding someone just as dreamy as you are to see you through. But I have no doubt that — driving around in his shiny new car, all intense longing and existential angst — Frank and I would have worked it out. n°
by Ada Calhoun
http://www.nerve.com/personalessays/calhoun/middleground/
When I was a teenager, Frank Bascombe, the forty-year-old man at the center of Richard Ford's The Sportswriter, was my kind of guy. He's "in the deepest depths of my worst dreaminess." So was I! He feels "a swirling dreaminess." Hey, me too! The symptoms of dreaminess "can be a long-term interest in the weather, or a sustained soaring feeling," he says. And that's what I felt: a disoriented, is that all there is torpor. At fifteen, I was having a midlife crisis.
Young women and the Richard Ford brand of middle-aged men have an awful lot in common. Both are alone in a crowd, too smart for the room. Both feel trapped — by school on one hand, suburban obligation on the other. Both are uneasy with responsibility, newly unsure about what they want to do with their lives. And both confuse sex with love. In short, both are fantastically lonely. So is it any surprise that, in spite of progressive society's disapproval, they so often fantasize about — and even occasionally wind up — together?
These days, older men are not supposed to want to date young women. As we know from Demi-Ashton and Something's Gotta Give, when older women score young studs, a collective societal wink of approval is in order, while for men, the convertible and half-his-age girlfriend are signs of moral bankruptcy. Men dating women young enough to be their daughters is frowned upon. While it's hard to condone older men dating women who in fact are their daughters (Woody Allen), I absolutely defend Jack Nicholson's right to arm candy, not for his sake, but for the candy's.
Being the younger girlfriend isn't exactly a prison sentence. It typically involves travel and being fussed over. And, as a rule, that pretty, smooth-skinned young thing in the passenger seat isn't in it for cynical reasons. Sure, maybe sometimes it's about what people always say; he wants to stave off mortality with a wrinkle-free trophy, she wants money and power. But I think a lot of times their neuroses just happen to be in sync; sometimes they just get each other.
Throughout my life, I have known plenty of girls who wound up in various relationships across the intimacy spectrum with men twenty years older. Maybe it was socially awkward at times, but they didn't die and few of them felt then or feel now that they were being exploited.
Maybe if one of my thirty-year-old male friends started fraternizing with an eighteen-year-old girl, I would be scandalized, but I don't think so. In any case, I certainly wouldn't question the young lady's motives. I have smart, nice friends who would have a lot of neat stuff to teach any girl who's like I was ten years ago.
Besides, even though my friends and I fraternized with older men out of a sense of adventure or friendship rather than what people always say younger women are after — money and power — I refuse to believe that money and power are such terrible things to want. Both are in short supply when you're a teenage girl with ambition beyond the limited life to which you've been sentenced by your age. Mutual, life-improving arrangements that happen to involve one person being rich and the other being pretty certainly aren't any worse than those unglamorous couplings of similarly endowed and aged people who combine to synergistically create a perfectly healthy, fantastically boring dyad.
And healthy, boring dyads seem to be what sanctioned teen entertainment is all about. In the eighties, you had Judy Blume's training-bra classics and softcore porn like Do You Love Me, Harvey Burns? In the nineties, you had Francesca Lia Block's L.A. fairytales. Now, teen girls have Louise Rennison's books about the engagingly pouty heroine Georgia Nicolson (Angus, Thongs and Full Frontal Snogging, etc.), which, while charming, are about pretty standard stuff: fights with mom, kissing boys, feeling ugly. Then you have Sophie Kinsella's Shopaholic series, pure proto-socialite drivel about a ditz who just can't stop buying accessories on credit. From the Amazon summary: "Becky's ten-month globe-trot with hubby Luke was a shopping spree disguised as a honeymoon — heck, Becky will walk across hot coals for an aquamarine necklace…"
Girls: reading these books is a BIG MISTAKE. Not only is this soulless genre, with its "look how unsexy sex can be" posturing, way too shallow for a growing mind, it only expands the chasm between you and men. What one needs from a boyfriend or husband, at any age, is empathy and companionship, and the more Women are from Venus bullshit one indulges in, the more difficult it is to bridge the gender gap. Whenever you're setting up human relationships as a game (The Rules, He's Just Not That Into You) or a glamorous lifestyle choice wherein you dress up and spend most of your time talking with your girlfriends or your journal about how exasperated men make you (Sex and the City, Bridget Jones' Diary), you're never going to see men as fallible, mortal beings looking for understanding just like you are.
Chick-lit heroines are like the pettiest and most practical characters in a Jane Austen novel come to life, minus charm or patience. It's all frantic screwing-cute with no time for anything to steep, whereas Ford and company — they know from steeping. Everything is mystifying for these confused, angst-ridden heroes — even getting up in the morning, which is why these books stop being good reading once you hit your twenties and need to stop stewing and get on with things.
As a ten-year-old girl, my first cassette tapes were (and how this happened I'll never know): Huey Lewis, Phil Collins and Weird Al. Hipper friends quickly swooped in with Hey, I could think, at least I'm not an alcoholic with a dead bird in my closet.
Depeche Mode and the Violent Femmes, but the damage was done: from an early age, I deeply identified with the cultural output of that demographic. And after the obligatory Jane Austen and Brönte sisters phase, I got obsessed with random older male authors I found purely by chance at used bookstores (if the back cover referred to its aging hero as "tortured" my babysitting money was as good as spent):
Richard Ford, Tom Spanbauer, Joe Coomer, J. D. Salinger, Lewis Shiner, Philp K. Dick, Denis Johnson... I was smitten. I even liked Harry Crews, whose genuinely terrifying Southern Gothic books — getting tattooed when you're blackout-drunk in Alaska, accidentally killing a hawk you're trying to train, watching a cockfight — taught me everything I needed to know about the darkness of the soul. And it sure put not being invited to some cool-kids party in perspective. Hey, I may be sitting at home alone, I could think, but at least I'm not an alcoholic living in a shack in the woods with a dead bird in my closet. I just sort of wanted to date one.
As refuge from perpetually disappointing teenage boyfriends, I pined in a romantic fashion for dozens of older male authors, alive (Sam Shepard) and dead (Tolstoy). Falling for a narrator is weird It entails a curiously absorbing sensation ofwanting to simultaneously be and sleep with the person who owns the voice that's entered your head. When you already share so much intellectual bandwidth with someone, you lose yourself a little. But when your life consists of baffling social scenarios, pop quizzes, and drug experimentation, I'm not sure that's a bad thing.
Think Lost in Translation Bill Murray, in narrator form, whispering his frustrations into your ear while you stay up all night, thoroughly at sea in a twin bed in your parents' house. Is it any wonder I wanted nothing to do with the young-adult novels and feminist literature calculated to make me a well-adjusted young woman? Sure, I skimmed Possessing the Secret of Joy, but joy gets old; I was interested in other secrets — secrets like what it feels like to walk up to the door of the home where you live with your wife and children and not want to go inside.
Ultimately, I have a healthier idea of the difference between men and their books. When I interviewed Sam Shepard for New York Magazine, he did not insist we go on a road trip immediately, but instead hung up on me after a few perfectly normal questions. At nearly thirty, I'm too old for all my older men anyway. But my emotional affair with that demographic has left me less judgmental. Whenever I read a middle-aged author's overwrought piece of self-indulgent fiction, even if I don't enjoy it, I can picture my younger self reading the same story and understanding it exactly. If my husband goes through a mid-life crisis twenty years from now, I hope I'd be able to channel my teenage self and remember how to be the refuge-girlfriend rather than the wearying spouse.
The only thing The Sportswriter's Frank Bascombe said that I disagreed with was this: dreaminess when you're young is pleasurable and when you're old is not. In fact, it can be torturous for the young and pleasurable for the old; it's just a question of finding someone just as dreamy as you are to see you through. But I have no doubt that — driving around in his shiny new car, all intense longing and existential angst — Frank and I would have worked it out. n°