Children of Child-Men

[fengi]

I’m annoyed by the essay “Everyone Needs to Grow Up” by James Greig, though it's clearly written in haste for content mill wages and low expectations. But it reflects a certain half assed analysis that gets under my skin.

“Everyone” opens with “We are a generation of adult babies.” A quip a world weary college freshman might find wise. It’s been a hit of generational self loathing since at least Noah Baumbach’s first movie. From there offer series of complaints that reads like Andy Rooney doing a cover of Flagpole Sitta - two references that pre-date the author’s birth.

It’s part of youth to feel certain trends are unique to one’s peer group. To Greig’s credit, he eventually references distinct pressures that set his group apart: worse than ever economic and ecological conditions.

Yet these are also part of a longer trend - to the 80s when Reagan and Thatcher gave class inequality a turbo boost. And since then a favored bullshit tactic has been to pretend systemic issues that impact younger adults are just a generation's inherent weakness. By 1990, young people living at home after 18 were deemed immature rather than coping wiht the impact of the S&L collapse. A 1990 article offers a definitive yet absurdly broad description of Gen-X immaturity: “They have trouble making decisions. They would rather hike in the Himalayas than climb a corporate ladder...They crave entertainment, but their attention span is as short as one zap of a TV dial." A handy rationalization for treating adults like children in terms of pay, status and job security.

Though Gen X recognized this as bullshit, it was pervasive enough to inform their culture. Thus pop songs about failure, movies about being adult but not grown up and stuff like the savagely self mocking comics of Peter Bagge and Evan Dorkin, etc.

There was some truth in the self-deprecation as there did seem to be a certain lack of class consciousness and solidarity. But part of it was just how those on the bad end of things can be hardest on themselves and the bosses are more than willing to cultivate that.

The problem is Greig's thesis treats the BS narrative as substantial, despite being old enough to notice the Peter Pan bs that has dogged millennials into their 40s. Overall the essay is light on context. The opening includes links that are ostensibly citations but not really: a glib article from the same platform, a single tweet and a single Instagram post. To me an insipid tweet about ADHD isn't quite a qualified source for a broad generalization about peers being babies.

Greig also doesn't note how the 20th century was defined by increasingly creepy fetishization of youth as commodity by an upper class obsessed with exploiting it while resenting its loss.

I'd argue the alleged infantilization Greig laments arises not from the young, but their struggle to navigate over half a century of accrued immaturity by capitalists. It's not 20 somethings who had the power to trap large parts of culture into IP franchises that began 30 to 80 years ago. The original man hating reactionary comic book guys and video gamers are now grandfathers. Harry Potter became a kids book read by adults a quarter of a century ago. And the internet was founded by guys who needed to read another book besides Tolkien or Heinlein and so on.

Then there's how public performances of certain immature qualities can be a career. The parasocial industrial complex (not just the sex work bits) rewards certain kiddish qualities and occasionally punishes adult language or behavior. This is related to how the rich and powerful will chase youth in various ways for as long as they can get away with it.

Which connects to part of the essay that really bugged me. In the middle Greig his editor embeds a tiktok clip of a woman miming to a little girl talking about putting on lipstick. It's a creepy but popular meme. There's no caption nor reference to it in the text, but it's placed after this quote: "I think self-infantilisation is a belated version of this. If as an adult I play at innocence, cuteness and delicacy, then I choose and assume some command over my feeling of helplessness." It's implied the woman is an illustration of this.

If one clicks, through, however, one sees that Hybr!d is an aspiring model/musician from Sweden who presents as her age in most videos. The one vid was part of the self-marketing grind maybe seeking a lipstick sponsorship. Creepy, but a different context than the essay's self-infantilisation. But it's used as a sensational sample of the adult baby generation for the reader to disdain, all the better for being an attractive woman.

To me, a good example of self-infantilization would be Justin Roiland, whose career imploded at age 43 when it came out how success allowed him to regress to a tween's idea of power, boundaries and work ethic. It wasn't just that he creeped on and bullied women younger than him, it's his childish response to his workers unionizing and apparently defined success as doing as little work as possible. It was Dan Harmon and a everyone else on staff acting like fucking adults that allowed him to be a baby, actively enabled by other members of the managerial class, who only stopped when it all came out.

To be fair, I do wish many of my fellow adults would grow the fuck up and read another book, watch another movie and just think or do something else. I think much (not all) of fandom is consumer dysfunction. But it doesn't seem confined to a single generation.

So while I appreciate "grow up" in this context, I also think of how the ruling classes equate commoners with children to elevate themselves. I think of their mixture of resentment and desire as wealth may allow them to fuck and fuck with youth but not stay young (not yet). And rage over getting older without having fucked as many young as they felt entitled to consume seems to be a key driver in their fascism.

In this way the lower classes need not so much to grow up as grow in solidarity so we can rid ourselves of these man babies and enjoy our adult lives regardless of what cutesy or grumpy persona we prefer.