Cuddle (shudder) puddle

If there was ever a headline I didn't expect, it was "The Cuddle Puddle of Stuyvesant High School." The very thought, the very image, Stuyvesant kids in a web of sexual adventure... "nausea" doesn't quite cover it.

I was always under the impression that New York Magazine didn't give a crap about the plebian schools, of which Stuyvesant, by virtue of being technically public, is one. Coke at Collegiate? Braless at Brearley? Spanking at Spence? Sure. But the sex lives of nerdy teens whose parents aren't paying private-school tuition? What gives?

The set described, of course, is the group of might-as-well-be-private-school kids, white kids who hang out on the Upper West Side and have professional, open-minded,
mostly-non-immigrant parents. Kids who are in public school because their parents are too liberal and bohemian to believe in private school, not because they couldn't afford it. But as the author, Alex Morris, admits, the sexually-adventurous clique profiled in the article is just one crowd, and is not necessarily representative of anything larger. Morris writes that "Alair and her friends... are known as the 'bi clique.'" One "bi clique" doesn't a trend of bisexuality make. The author does not, however, mention the demographic difference between these kids and the rest of Stuyvesant. And yet, finally, a piece about teens that's not a scare story, kids who don't fit into any particular category of cool or dorky, rebellious or innocent, but simply go about their lives and try to figure out ways to improve upon their parents' world. Refreshing, if biased and unscientific.

The obvious question--why is this the article to launch the newly-redesigned NY Mag website, the cover of paper copies city and nationwide? Sure, bisexual teen girls sell magazines, and the fact that most of these particular girl-girl kissers will soon be at elite colleges adds a little prestige to the story. But there's no story. Nothing happened, nothing significant has changed, or, if it has, the article doesn't make that clear. Here's one possibility. It seems as though Morris might, just might, be a former Stuy kid:

Ten years ago in the halls of Stuyvesant you might have found a few goth girls kissing goth girls, kids on the fringes defiantly bucking the system. Now you find a group of vaguely progressive but generally mainstream kids for whom same-sex intimacy is standard operating procedure.

This sounds about right. When I was at the school (late 90's-early 00's) there was a mix, the really greasy-looking, super-alternative try-everything types and the vintage-loving, relatively conventional-looking pseudo-hippies for whom bisexuality was sort of assumed, and who blended in fine with more mainstream popular types. But, correct interpretation or not, how else would someone happen to know who was kissing whom in the halls of Stuyvesant at any given time?

Or perhaps the author is not, in fact, a Stuyvesantian:

"They had to be pretty serious students to even get into Stuyvesant, which accepts only about 3 percent of its applicants."

Serious students? It's a test, middle-school grades, what your teachers thought of you in junior high, all this is irrelevant. Thank god. And really, who cares about Stuy kids' (shudder) sexuality? Gotta get the facts right where it matters.