Stop Youngsplaining to Me!
check your privilege
The youngs, they are treating me like an old. And it’s really getting to me.
The first time I noticed it was at SXSW in 2011. In line at a drugstore, young guy with a new phone, really big, was it the new Galaxy? the Droid? I was not sure if I was going iPhone or Android, so I asked the guy how he liked the phone. There was this tiny moment, after he turned around, like a microexpression, after which he adopted a sort of slow, patient, helpful posture and tone.
Christ, why is he being weird, I thought. And then I realized, he was not talking to me like a tech peer; he was talking to me like I was an irrelevant technologically challenged old.
I was in a takeout place, waiting for fish and chips. Huge flatscreen is playing a music video of a woman writhing around in waves and on sand. “Holy crap,” I thought, “When did Beyonce decide she wanted to be Shakira?” What I said, aloud, was “Now, that’s just straight-up pornographic.”
A guy also waiting turned to me and said, with the kindliness of a nursing-home attendant, “That’s Beyonce. She’s a really big star. It may seem shocking, but that’s the way the girls dance these days.”
It’s hard to explain how upsetting this is to me. After each one of these small moments, I feel a terrible despair. I’m on the edge of tears for hours, and can’t wait to get home, out of public, which has turned into a dystopian place where the people around me reflect a cardboard caricature of myself back to me. It’s like I woke up one day and was no longer funny, everyone thought I was saying or asking something different than what I meant, I was disinvited from the collaboration of culturally constructed meaning. It hurts bad. And it’s terrible to realize it’s only ever going to get worse, worse and worse until my death.
It’s made walking around Williamsburg and Bushwick for me like running a gauntlet. Had brunch at an outside patio on Sunday, communal table style, with two friends. Manager comes by with menus and three girls in their 20s. As I scootch to make room, one of the girls says, “We’re sitting here,” to me, in a way that conveyed “so fucking move.” I switched sides, facing my friends and her on a diagonal, and looked at her for any sense of discomfort or awareness that she’d been rude. None at all; she’d simply asserted her natural primacy and was enjoying the sun.
Sometimes I wonder, is this real? Do I just have some kind of chip on my shoulder? Is this really happening?
How I know it’s real is that it’s new, for me. People used to treat me differently.
I’m having the sort of experience that newsmagazine-TV and Mashable-propagated videos enact for clicks: watch this hottie put on a fat suit and see how people treat her; see this guy in a suit and the same guy in raggedy clothes and how people do or don’t stop to help when he falls down. Like that book from the college professor who worked as a dishwasher for a year and wrote about the assumptions of intelligence and status he experienced. But he knew he was “really” a college professor, so he was, anthropologically speaking, slumming it.
I can’t take off the old suit. I can’t dress the way I’d love to without appearing absurd. I’ve crossed over some divide and it’s soundproof and distorting and nobody acknowledges it’s even there.
Age may be the last socially acceptable frontier of isms. It’s blatant, it’s celebrated, it’s the punchline.
I was watching a video of the cold open from last week’s Saturday Night Live, the one about Solange and Jay-Z in the elevator after the Met Costume Gala. Jay-Z joked about why Beyonce wasn’t there: “She’s off making another sexually suggestive music video about a monogamous relationship.”
See? I thought, See? It’s a joke, a perfectly fine joke, good enough for SNL, to comment on the borderline porn of Beyonce’s videos.
Googling to bolster my point —keywords Beyonce, Video, Review — instead, one of the top few results, from vibe.com, is “Old Ladies Review Beyonce’s ‘Drunk In Love’ Lyrics.”
This is one of those videos where the actual content is not funny, or even, I think, authentic (these sorts of videos tend to be set-ups, or, in this case, possibly actors). The joke is “old ladies.” That’s the joke. They’re old. They’re shocked because they’re old. And we have a video of them being old, which is inherently hysterical.
This sort of content — video juxtapositions of age and technology, bafflement ensues, to the hilarity of all, is all over YouTube.
On Reddit, if developers or designers are debating whether something is good or bad, they’ll trot out a “my mom” story, and everyone will get sidetracked topping each others’ “my mom can’t figure out this obvious thing” anecdotes.
This is not only acceptable, in a way that a “watch this non-white person try to figure something out” video would never be (old-school racists excepted), it’s celebrated.
The New Yorker just published a “humor” piece called “Turning Your Cell Phone Off for Folks Born Before 1950.” The quality of the joke is no more sophisticated, and every bit as grotesque, as the old-ladies-explain-Beyonce-lyrics dreck.
At TechCrunch Disrupt two weeks ago, the CEO of Vice media, about my age himself, emphasized over and over how “young” the Vice perspective is. Young reporters, young format, young viewpoint, fresh and now. And although age discrimination is illegal in hiring, I didn’t think it very likely I’d be getting an interview for that job I’d just applied for at Vice. (Especially since the Internet knows my age, even though I never told it, and will give it to you on the first page if you Google me.)
On stage at the Startup Battlefield, one young founder presented a use case for her app by introducing a slide of a fictitious user. “This is so-and-so,” she said, “She’s 43 and needs a lot of assistance with…” The slide was of a much older woman, and the gist of the use case hinged on this woman’s utter helplessness in the face of this newfangled stuff (I think there was a health angle, as well, so decrepitude was implied). I knew that no one over 36, at the very edge, worked at this startup, and that they had created a user persona from stereotypes and from that safe space (and I used to live there, too) where 40 is impossibly ancient, all but dead.
In the startup world, in the comedy world, in the TV show world, diversity is shown through race and costume and style and “types,” but it seems entirely acceptable, invisible, that this range of diversity is all within a slim age spectrum, except for bit-part foils.
I’m finally understanding racism better.
There’s been a lot of talk about micro-aggressions lately, those tiny moments of power hierarchy reinforcement in the workplace or in an online discussion, hard to pinpoint but jarring and disturbing to the recipient, and seldom perceived by the perpetrator.
This is even deeper than micro-aggression, because it’s not a discrete moment in an interaction, it’s a subtle and pervasive tone of voice and body language that come from a host of unconscious assumptions.
And thus it’s only through getting old that I understand just how much white privilege I was walking around with, how it seemed objectively normal to me, the way the fish doesn’t know what water is.
I was never a hottie, but now I see that rules were bent for me, indulgences were made, as a young white woman. I remember how, in the East Village Key Food, passionate about not using plastic bags, I would simply throw a few items in my handbag while I shopped and then pull them out to pay at the register. Did I think everyone could get away with this? I was dressed vintage-grunge and genuinely poor, but I reeked of a certain class. I didn’t even see it as privileged; I was just shopping as efficiently as I could.
New to Bed-Stuy, I stopped into a neighborhood liquor store, because, support local, and walked through an ajar interior glass door to look at the wine selection up close. A black woman customer made a sucking sound through her teeth, and only then did I realize I had just waltzed past the bulletproof vestibule, wearing my whiteness like a VIP pass.
Orientation week at college, we had to attend a SCORA session (student committee on racial awareness). These were notoriously and predictably traumatic. Inevitably, some sweet 18-year-old white student would say, “One of my best friends is black,” and self-select as the lightning rod for a brutal teachable moment. Everyone would pile on until the kid was in tears. “But I don’t understand,” they would cry, “Why is everyone so angry with me?”
We all knew the right answer: we are all racists; it’s systemic, institutionalized, we benefit from it every day, we participate in it no matter how much we try to be colorblind; the concept of color-blindness itself is rife with racism.
I believed this, on an intellectual level; I could talk the talk.
But it is only through getting old that I understand, however partially, the soul-sucking, draining, real, and unspeakable (in the literal sense) experience of being other-ed, in every interaction, in every context. How white liberals, like myself, and like some youngs when they speak to me, overcompensate and over-nice. I mean, I do think it’s changing, in the sense that Millenials have been exposed to, culturally and personally, many more permutations of role model and friendship and family, including race and sexual orientation; I do have hope in that sense, that the scolding of SCORA will seem blunt and old-school as the population becomes less white and also less defined along racial lines.
But now, right now, I feel, in a way that previously I only intellectually understood, how frustrating and exhausting it is to be on the other side of an ism, an ism that people insist they do not participate in, does not even exist.
I remember when I came home for some holiday and was playing the Smashing Pumpkins on the home stereo, and my mom was like, that’s really great. I ended up leaving the CD in her collection because it had somehow been devalued by her approval. But that’s my mom; she owned OK Computer before I’d even heard it. I yearned for a generation gap. When was something I liked going to be baffling to her, the way it was for parents on TV commercials?
So I understand that the young need the old to be old, to act old. It’s too confusing otherwise; it undercuts the natural order of things and threatens a sense of infinite potential and immortality. It’s also the case that, for the young, older adults have always served in the role of either cheerleader or repressor: parents, teachers, coaches, counselors. The focus was always on them, the adults in a supporting (or squelching) role. I have to remind myself how close to college-age these people are, how recently every older adult around them was a facilitator of their shining future.
I have to think that allowing them the unconscious narcissism of youth is an act of generosity, because all too quickly people will be treating them how they’re treating me; the inevitable rise of the yet-unborn, the inevitable humiliating marginalization of the old.
