(Note: this piece was originally written for Clarissa Explains Fuck All, but it turned out to be a bit heavier and less pop culture-focused than the stuff we usually cover there. As such, after checking with the Clarissa editorial team, I've opted to put it up here instead - AJ)
Good
news everybody: I’m not a
‘millennial’! I know I’m not because Chris Erskine, a man who has opinions
about young people for money in the LA
Times, tells me so. As a
38-year-old woman I fall comfortably outside the 18-34 age range Erskine uses
to bracket the media’s most reviled generation, but reading his article, I find
myself wishing that I was one. Partly
because I’d rather be a ‘millennial’ than the kind of bitter old douchebag who
pens passive-aggressive nonsense like Erskine’s ‘Millennial Pledge’ (sample
entry: ‘I will not consider the cilantro (coriander,
UK readers) on my taco to be a vegetable’ – these kids with their whacky
ethnic food!), but also because, apparently, one of the key freedoms available
to millennials is the freedom to be
smut. I’m not kidding: ‘I will not be smut’ is one of the commandments
Erskine wants the young folks to sign up to. Interestingly, the consumption of a little smut is
apparently acceptable – the preceding commandment is ‘I will (mostly) swear off
smut’. Which would suggest that somebody, somewhere, is going to have to ‘be smut’ in order to provide the modicum of
smut which Erskine considers acceptable – but I guess we can forget about those people. Those people don’t read
the LA Times.
I
probably used the word ‘smut’ a little too often in that paragraph, but y’know
what? I like smut. I like the word, I
like the concept, I like the thing itself. Longtime fans will recall I opened
my review of Magic Mike XXL for Clarissa Explains Fuck
All by talking about how one of my exes got off on watching me wank,
I’ve stripped on stage in spoken word shows, and I have a poem in my repertoire
in which I talk openly about sucking a trans
dude’s strap-on
while he simultaneously blew his husband. I am all about the freedom to be smut, and I don’t give a damn if some
old dude wants to take time out from his cloud-shouting schedule to whine about
how young people today are too smutty damn
it, not like the respectable people who rolled naked in the Woodstock mud back
when he was a nipper. And if Erskine doesn’t like that, I can only refer him to
an earlier entry in his overlong, unfunny pledge: ‘I will not shun comedians or
college commencement speakers just because I don’t agree with them.’ I’m
interested to know at what point the unrighteous shunning of comedians and
their priceless freeze peach becomes the decidedly righteous act of (mostly)
swearing off smut, but I’d be willing to guess a lot depends on whether the
comedian is white, old, straight and was born with a penis they’re happy with.
In which case, count my fat trans ass proudly among the smut-peddlers.
It
isn’t just Erskine, of course. Governor of Ohio and Republican Presidential
hopeful John Kasich decided to jump on the millennial-bashing bandwagon for
cheap pops this week, dismissing audience member Kayla Solsbak by saying he
didn’t ‘have any Taylor
Swift concert tickets’. Solsbak did well to get herself into a
position where she could speak at all – Kasich seems to have wanted all the
students to sit behind him for a photo op while he fielded softball questions
of the Matlock
Expressway
variety from older members of the audience.
See,
Governor? Generational disrespect can go both ways.
The
thing about comments like those of both Erskine and Kasich is that they form
part of a larger trend in which older, usually white, usually male, pretty much
always cisgender people rubbish the concerns of the young, especially those
young people who happen to be concerned with building a fairer society. We see
it in articles which criticise trigger warnings as a threat to
the literary canon, which confuse
no-platforming with censorship, or pleas for safe space with ‘banning white men’,
as in the shameful distortions and official harassment which have plagued
former Goldsmiths Diversity Officer Bahar Mustafa. In this
culture war, the phrase ‘millennial’ has become lazy shorthand for the older
misogynist set in the same way that ‘SJW’ is a shibboleth for their younger
counterparts. To be a ‘millennial’, in the eyes of old white dudes like Erskine
and Kasich is to be ‘entitled’. To what? Massive student debt? Precarious
employment? To be a millennial, in Erskine’s words, is to regard entirely too
much as ‘beneath me’. What is it that millennials consider beneath them,
exactly? Working more than one job? Getting paid minimum wage? Unpaid
internships? Social exclusion? Being constantly patronised by elected
officials? Barely concealed misogyny?
The
most disturbing aspect of millennial-bashing is how many of the behaviours it
singles out are coded as feminine or queer. It’s tickets for popsters like
Taylor Swift, rather than a serious rock act like, say, Ryan Adams, which
Governor Kasich reckons Those Damn Young People covet. And in Erskine’s
listicle, particular behaviours millennials are criticised for include hugging friends as well as the
aforementioned injunction not to ‘be smut’. Let’s take a moment to think about
which groups in society have usually been the focus of that kind of policing.
It’s a pretty sure bet Erskine doesn’t have college fraternities in his sights
when he cautions against smuttiness. And let’s also take a moment to think
about how ironic it is for a man who considers millennials lazy to churn out a
list-piece like this – and to not even proof-read his work sufficiently to
realise that there is a difference between ‘the bereaved’ and ‘the deceased’ at
a funeral:
 |
| In my experience, the bereaved tend to sit or stand at funerals... |
And
ultimately that’s the biggest criticism of millennial-bashing: it’s lazy. Journalists whine about the snarky
entitlement of the younger generation, but themselves feel entitled to write
reams of ill-thought-out, badly edited snark themselves. Politicians consider
engaging with younger audiences ‘beneath them’, opting instead to pander to
older voters with put-downs about liking female-fronted pop music. And this
isn’t just an American thing – faced with the astonishing groundswell of
support, especially among young people, for new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, how
did the Prime Minister, David Cameron, decide to respond? With an easily
fact-checked smear
and the smug assertion that ‘Britain isn’t Twitter’ (these young kids, with
their social networking!). Well, you’re sort of right there, Dave: everybody on
Twitter knows about you and that pig by now, whereas it’s theoretically
possible that there might be one person in Britain – possibly sat on a unicycle
balanced on a ladder on top of the Old Man of Hoy – who hasn’t heard that news yet
(in which case I hope someone waits ‘til they’ve got down to tell them).
 |
| The last place in Britain where no-one's heard of #BaeOfPigs |
The thing about being lazy is that it works out great in the short term – pieces like Erskine’s bring in the views, being a douche to young women plays well with Kasich’s base – but in the long term it’s not such a smart strategy, because the danger of playing to an aging demographic is that, to be brutally honest, that demographic dies out. Grandpa Simpson only lives forever because he’s a cartoon. And even before mortality comes into it, there are risks involved in cynically pandering to pensioners because of the received wisdom that old folks vote and young folks don’t. It remains to be seen what effect Corbynmania is going to have on British politics, but the energising of thousands of previously disenfranchised young voters could well be a game-changer. It’s something the British political establishment simply hasn’t been geared up to deal with for three decades now.
To
adopt this kind of reasoning, though, is
to buy into the same cynicism that fuels millennial-bashing in the first place.
Ultimately, this is about a failure on Erskine, Kasich and Cameron’s part to
live up to what’s expected of them: to engage with their readers and constituents,
rather than throwing out douchey remarks about cilantro or Taylor Swift
tickets. To treat millennials as people with hopes, dreams and ambitions, whose
concerns are every bit as legitimate as those who don’t fit the 18-34 age
bracket, and who deserve to be treated with the same respect their elders
demand they display.
But
then, why would they do that? It’s clearly beneath them.
