Years ago, I got an email from a long time reader. She was looking for a particular article on APW, so she searched “growing up.” While she did not find the article she was looking for, she did find hundreds of articles including that phrase. She wrote to tell me that—while she was sure I had realized it all along—she had just realized that APW was really about the process of growing up.
She was, of course, right. All writers circle obsessively around themes, and the object of my obsession has long been balancing the structures and limits of adulthood with the authenticity of self. The wedding stuff is, more or less, a cover for me to write about that, endlessly (and, obviously, pretty dresses).
Every fall, we sit down behind the scenes and discuss which elements of growing up we want visit and revisit before the onslaught of new engagements in January. For a few short months, after the rush of summer weddings are over and before the crop of new engagements begin, we all settle down to talk about the basics: how we’re dividing up chores, how we manage to fight with our partners without killing them in their sleep, how we’re learning to tell our parents no sometimes, and how we’re planning our own holiday traditions. And then we also talk about the more ephemeral stuff: what does being an adult even mean, and how do you know when you’ve arrived there?
So it was a thrill when the New York Times Magazine rolled out their Culture Issue this weekend (solid gold from cover to cover, btw), with a huge article on “The Death Of Adulthood in American Culture,” by film critic A.O. Scott. It’s far too sweeping a thought piece to begin to sum up here, but I wanted to throw out a few favorite quotes for discussion.
The Death of Adulthood
Summing up why I think weddings force us face to face with adulthood (like it or not):
[Leslie A. Fiedler] broadened this observation into a sweeping (and still very much relevant) diagnosis of the national personality: “The typical male protagonist of our fiction has been a man on the run, harried into the forest and out to sea, down the river or into combat—anywhere to avoid ‘civilization,’ which is to say the confrontation of a man and woman which leads to the fall to sex, marriage, and responsibility.
Touching on why my dad has never understood why his children always viewed adulthood with dread, while he viewed it with anticipation (of future cocktails, perhaps):
In the old, classic comedies of the studio era—the screwbally roller coasters of marriage and remarriage, with their dizzying verbiage and sly innuendo—adulthood was a fact. It was inconvertible and burdensome but also full of opportunity. You could drink, smoke, flirt, and spend money. The trick was to balance the fulfillment of your wants with the carrying out of your duties. The desire of the modern comic protagonist, meanwhile, is to wallow in his own immaturity, plumbing its depths, and reveling in its pleasures.
And, for better or worse, why I’ve firmly considered myself an adult since I had a child. Not particularly because my life changed, or I had additional responsibility (though the latter is undoubtedly true), but because now I glimpse myself through his eyes.
We can see that to be an American adult has always been to be a symbolic figure in someone else’s coming-of-age story. And that’s no way to live.
Just Capitalism At Work
In an embarrassment of riches, Andrew O’Hehir of Salon wrote an excellent response, “The ‘Death of Adulthood’ Is Really Just Capitalism at Work.” Here are a few salient quotes from that, as well.
I keep grappling, both here and in my personal life, with the fact that my current adulthood does not reflect the idea of adulthood I was presented with as a child. No pensions, no serious prospect of social security, no protecting employer. And, somehow most symbolically for me, no easy access to home ownership. (We regularly peruse the listings of houses it seems like we should be able to buy, with their half a million to a million dollar price tags.)
We now live in a culture (using the word in its anthropological sense) of diminished expectations and permanent underemployment, where many or most young people will never be as affluent as their parents. Lifetime job security is an antediluvian delusion, and in many metropolitan areas home ownership is out of reach for all but the rich. It’s just as useless to object to those changes as it is to complain about grown-ups reading Harry Potter books, but certainly those things were the essential underpinnings of classic adulthood, and without them it’s no surprise to see the old order fading away.
And finally, many complex thoughts in one. How women who have children can’t escape adulthood in the same way men can. And how job prospects for lower income men have decimated long-standing structures of masculinity.
This is too complicated an argument to develop here, but I suspect that the “death of adulthood” is so much more evident among men than women because women are still called upon to perform productive labor—the bearing and nurturing of children—that cannot be or generally is not performed by men. In that sense the death of adulthood is just another name for the fabled “crisis of masculinity” we’ve been hearing about for thirty years or longer, in which men often feel that their power has been undermined by ball-busting feminists when what’s really happening is that their economic role has changed and they don’t know what the hell to do about it.
And with that, Discuss. Where is your thinking on the issue of American adulthood?
