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PeonForHer -> RE: The Gen Y submissive male (3/8/2009 1:54:28 PM)
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Every generation thinks that the younger generation is immature, undisciplined, and their music isn't any good. It's just a symptom of getting older.
I agree with you on the music, Kal - the music that those in their twenties generally like is, of course, a pernicious evil and needs ruthlessly to be stamped out. [;)]
However, 'undisciplined' - no. Too disciplined - at least in relation to some generations.
More generally, some generations have been more conservative than those which immediately preceded them. That must go without saying regarding the generation of the late 1960s versus the earlier generations after World War 2. What most springs most readily to my mind, though, is the generation that, here in the UK, followed the end of the punk rock era in the late 1970s and was replaced by the Thatcher generation. Students stopped dressing like nightmares and started wearing suits all over again - just like they had in the 1950s. A small caucus on the left went further left; most of the others became more right wing. Young women were more likely to denounce feminism rather than call themselves feminists (despite having reaped the rewards of their older sisters and being ignorant of that, critics would often say). The neoconservative/neoliberal consensus is (was?) very powerful indeed - not least because one huge 'alternative' had, apparently, died – that which was represented by the ex USSR and its brand of socialism. It wasn't that Soviet-style socialism was ever majorly popular in the West; more like it symbolised - for many people - just the possibility, the hope, that things could, somehow, work in a fundamentally different way.
Things have moved on from the 1990s, of course. The far left has fragmented into a multitude of different radicalisms. Young people are more likely to 'pick and mix' than they did twenty-five years ago and that's not necessarily a bad thing. We need to re-think some basic things. Yet, the lack of a coherence and depth that was (correctly or incorrectly) drawn from the far left, shows. A different kind of coherence and depth is appearing - clustered, for instance, around opposition to the environmental malaise - but, for my money, it's not as radical. There’s still a strong strain of nihilism around. Some of the fight's been knocked out of the younger generation and is yet to return. I mean ‘fight’ in the intellectual sense as well as the physical.
I do think that those in their twenties now are more open about a lot more things than were those of previous generations. Yet, I can't help feeling that this is largely because the hard work was done by the generations before them.
Upcoming are battles will be perhaps harder than any generation has had to face before - on the environment, particularly.
Being open minded is one thing; having the bollocks to oppose and resist is something else again. I do have a feeling that the next few generations are going to need this even more than those which fought against anything else that's happened to date.
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