Cool, Calm & Contentious - Merrill Markoe [57]
Looking back, I marvel at the way the teenage me made choices. I wonder, too, which part of our schizophrenic culture might be held responsible for making young female humans require less from their courtship rituals than do sea turtles or millipedes. In all of the animal kingdom, only delusional teenage human girls steeped in their own melancholia seem to require no special acrobatic nest-building competitions or intricate mating dances involving red inflatable bladders to be convinced of the worth of a suitor. Why bother with dangerous hormone-driven treks across the Arctic wasteland, like the ones Mother Nature requires for male penguins and moose, when a scowling, anorexic, paintbrush-holding guy with an outsized sense of his own importance gets the same results simply by being rude?
Which brings me back to Natalie Dylan and her fellow virginity entrepreneurs, with their sleazy online auctions and fat bank accounts. Tawdry though their deeds may have been, at least they could logically explain their own motives. At least they held themselves in such high regard that they looked at the chance for someone else to spend time with them as a high-ticket item. The best I could do was imagine myself as the provider of raw data for a sociology experiment no one was conducting.
The truth is, if a Web auction had been available to me back in my Berkeley years, even the greasiest, most debauched bidder would have been demonstrating more appreciation for me than the rude little art scenester I picked. And even if I’d been hanging out with friends like Natalie Dylan, I’d probably still have thrown my virginity in as a bonus to the highest bidder in a separate auction of my used textbooks. I simply didn’t have the ego to be a self-employed capitalist, let alone an underpaid volunteer escort.
That’s why the modern-day horror stories about teenage girls and their sexting and hooking-up activities don’t surprise me so much as they make me feel sad. The only thing girls are doing now that is demonstrably worse than what I did at their age is starting younger, thereby entitling themselves to even more years of hysterical late-night phone calls to like-minded girlfriends in which they will endlessly rehash and analyze the incomprehensible results of their bad love decisions. Decisions, I must add, that are made without the benefit of a fully wired frontal lobe. Because recent neurological research now explains what I could never have known: that it’s no accident that teenagers are devoted to being boneheads. The frontal lobes of the brain, the area that allows us to comprehend the idea of actions having consequences, aren’t finished being wired for functioning until your late twenties. If ever a religious philosopher or moralist needed a place to anchor cautionary advice about waiting until you’re twenty-eight to pick partners or marry, that frontal lobe data would be a good place to start.
But the worst part is that if I’d known this handy fact back when I was in college, it probably wouldn’t have changed the course of my behavior very much. After all, the teenage version of me would have thought the very idea of worrying about consequences before you act was excessively “middle-class.” I would have argued that no great artist ever worried about consequences. And I would have been processing all of this with only a partially wired frontal lobe.
How to Spot an Asshole
I WAS IN THE SHOWER