Dependent but paraben-free

Like Miss Self-Important, I was baffled by Eric Posner's call for for declaring college students children. The biggest issue with it for me, though, was something much more basic, namely the vagueness surrounding whether the idea would be to treat college students or all individuals of traditional-college-student age as minors:

Society seems to be moving the age of majority from 18 to 21 or 22. We are increasingly treating college-age students as quasi-children who need protection from some of life’s harsh realities while they complete the larval stage of their lives.

It would be one thing if we as a society acknowledged the difficulties of becoming a self-supporting adult by 18, and the existing effective-majority of 21 (adult socializing is legally out of bounds for 18-20-year-olds), and decided to move The Age up by a few years. It might not be the best idea - if we let the 'the brain only fully develops at...' crowd pick an age, they'll go with 50 - but it would be, as I say, one thing. It would be another entirely to declare 18-22-year-old college students children, while maintaining 18 as the age of majority for the non-student population. It would be writing into law an existing norm, though, of a class-based age of majority.

This is, as others (Elizabeth Nolan Brown? a NYT op-ed? both?) have brought up, already an issue when it comes to campus rape. College-age women are evidently less likely to be victims of rape if they're college students, but the cultural conversation is about college sexual assault - especially cases at elite schools. One might also point to the issue of juvenile offenders (generally not from the most advantaged backgrounds) tried as adults - there's no upper-middle-class equivalent. Privilege - that amorphous buzzword - can be summed up as, at what age will society consider you an adult? If the answer's over 40, you're positively drenched with the stuff.

Except... is it actually advantageous to be a dependent at the age when your first gray hairs appear? It's advantageous to have the option - that is, to have a safety net if things have gone wrong. But are endless years of dependency desirable?

In a very interesting article of hers that Miss Self-Important links to, she points to "descriptions of emerging adulthood as something that one is 'supposed to have' [and that] soon enough slip into talk of emerging adulthood as a right, and one that government programs are obliged to provide for everyone." She's skeptical: "And what more important use of tax revenues is there than to level the emerging-adulthood playing field so that the less fortunate can have equal access to a year or two of aimless hipsterdom after college?"

This is already the case when it comes to the cultural conversation about unpaid (or negatively-paid) internships. These internships tend not to be necessary for entering well-paid fields, nor (last I checked stats on this) do they up the chances of getting paid employment. But rather than discussing them as yet another foolish undertaking of the pampered classes, another way well-off parents hurt their kids while trying to help them - as we very well might have done - we refer to them as the epitome of privilege. We ask how we can extend the ability to work for free for an indefinite period of time to all.

The obvious counterargument would be, well, college. It's now quite generally accepted... not necessarily that every individual should go to college (although that's a popular view with political support), but that no one should be prevented from doing so for socioeconomic reasons.

But the thing is, not everything common among elites is better. For that matter, not everything common among elites is conducive to perpetuating elite-ness! Some highbrow habits are conducive to regression to the mean. Going to college, getting and staying married, these have advantages. But the elite thing of researching the ingredients of all food and cosmetics products, this seems mainly to encourage women to stay out of the workforce, with dubious benefits to their paraben-spared offspring. Related: the elite thing of not vaccinating one's children. I'd lump unpaid internships and ever-emerging adulthood into that same category.

Trollerie

Via Antonia Noori Farzan, yes, "trolling" is the best way to describe this Observer story about the trouble it is for "'kids [...] somewhere between their mid 20s and their 40s, in some cases even older" who want their parents to buy them luxury apartments in Brooklyn. Their problem isn't that their parents are refusing to buy them apartments. It's that Brooklyn's too scruffy, as far as the parents are concerned. Not only is this the firstest worldest of non-problems, but it's framed as service journalism for the not-so-young adults in question:

And for those trying to convince their families to lend a hand, letting them see you take some knocks in the marketplace can be helpful. “Even when children are well established professionals with high income of their own, I see parents buying for them,” Ms. Sewtz, the Douglas Elliman broker, told the Observer. “Often, the child will be competing against cash buyers. And the parents see: Oh, again you lost out on a bidding war. Again you lost out. Hardly any parent sets out from the beginning and says, ‘Let me just buy you a mansion for three million dollars.’”

Well done, then,  Chris Pomorski! You've managed to far outshine Gwyneth-and-crew, whose "Gift Guide" includes a $4,739 gold... juicer, of course. Or does it? Which is the better trollerie - being knowingly out-of-touch (even turning one's out-of-touch-ness into a brand), or engaging in Styles-style rhetoric?

"Squirmy"

When does adulthood begin? There are the articles regularly placing it older and older, according to the latest neuroscience. The 'the human brain only stops developing at' articles, according to which I, at the tail end of 30, am probably too young to be making any major life decisions.

But the real ambiguity is the one surrounding college students. We've decided that they're too old to live at home but too young to pay their own way. If 60% of 20-somethings and early-30-somethings are getting financial help from their parents (how I read the relevant, startling paragraph), that's not a phenomenon that can be dismissed as impacting only the rich. Certainly if you consider that those not receiving help are probably clustered mostly on the older end of that range. The way the economy is now structured, it's unlikely that a 20-year-old, especially one in school, is entirely financially independent. That exceptions exist, or that many managed this in a different economy, is a distraction.

But we still have this notion of 18 as adult. And it's this tension that leads to messes like the one described in this week's Social Qs:

I am the mother of a 20-year-old college student who is still on our family health insurance plan. I was confused about a benefit statement we received regarding her visit to the gynecologist. The insurance company told me the charge was for fitting her with a diaphragm. I am not sure if this is correct, but my husband and I disagree whether it’s appropriate to discuss it with her. Thoughts?

Philip Galanes answers the question in a way that almost makes sense, until you remember that the child in question is 20:

Of course you should talk to her! What are you waiting for — your daughter to hit menopause? If you suspect the bill is incorrect because your 20-year-old is not having sex, let me assure you that you are probably wrong (statistically speaking). And whether your daughter likes it or not, it is your job as a parent, along with her father, to insist on a running dialogue about her emotional and psychological readiness for all kinds of adult activities she is on the verge of undertaking — including sex. 

As with many important talks, this one may be squirmy to start. So, whichever of you is better at intimate chatting should sidle into her bedroom one night, and ask her sweetly about her love life: “Anyone special?” And no matter what your personal views of premarital sex, let her know that you just want to help her make the right decision — for her. Feel free to wax poetic about waiting for true love, but for God’s sake, make sure she knows that a diaphragm will not protect her from sexually-transmitted diseases. Now, get to work, Mom!

A 20-year-old looking for contraception is, one would hope, informed enough to know which forms do and don't prevent STDs. If she's gone to a doctor for said contraception, seemingly the doctor would also discuss this with her. 20 seems sort of ancient to be learning the facts of life. A conversation about this with one's 10-year-old might be "squirmy," but with one's 20-year-old, it's squirmy in the same way as it would be squirmy for any adult to discuss any other adult relative's sex life. A 20-year-old should feel comfortable going to her parents in a time of crisis, but what, in this case, is the crisis? This seems like a case of an adult behaving sensibly.

More to the point: isn't doctor-patient confidentiality supposed to be a thing? Again, maybe there would be some emergency situation where that would have to be breached, but does a 20-year-old getting contraception count as such?

But it's the parents' insurance! They are paying for the diaphragm, so they have the right to... what, exactly? It *is* an awkward situation. It's now appropriate (says the government!) to stay on one's parents health insurance until 26, as well as quite possible to be employed without benefits. So the health information of generally functional 25-year-olds is open information for their parents. Should the parents happen to be writers of overshare (and who isn't these days), they're thus free to spill not only anonymously, to advice columnists, but in any public forum they desire. 'My Millenial Child Has Herpes,' coming soon to a magazine cover near you. But back to the matter at hand: 20 is at one and the same time too old to ask for a parent's permission (or owe an explanation!) for something so private as contraception, and too young to deal with this truly independently.

The answer I always lean to, for this sort of thing, is the one that will rile my libertarian readers: get the state involved. For people of limbo age, in higher education or the lowest, most precarious rungs of employment, basic living expenses and health insurance should come from the government. The parents (and non-parent adults) are still paying, yes, but in tax dollars. This would apply not to children, but to those in whichever age range we determine is both definitively adult and realistically tough to be 100% self-supporting at in our economy. Maybe 18-22, maybe 18-25. This would accomplish two things. First, it would level the playing field at a time in people's lives where this is especially key, but also especially possible to address. (An equal playing field within the childhood home is, for obvious reasons, more complicated.) Second, it would take away the awkwardness around children owing not just society but their parents specific behaviors as adults. Because it's not exactly that the 20-year-old's mother is wrong to want to pry, but that society should be structured in such a way that this would be considered outrageous.

Midriff age

A NYT Styles piece recently informed us that crop-tops are back, and that women are doing special workouts and even undergoing cosmetic procedures in order to look good in the latest Fashion. As per usual, Styles-wise, you might say - there are always a handful of people (ideally rich women in NY) doing something ridiculous, who can be cast as representing a trend - but what jumped out at me was that some of these women are kind of... old. One's 33, another 37. Two are 29. I'm 30, so I get to say this: these women are well into ma'am country. (Yes, I read about the troubled 30-something who just successfully convinced a school she was a high school sophomore. Exceptions that prove rules and all that.) Is 29-37 too old to wear midriff-baring shirts? No, although in my subjective opinion, this isn't the best look on anyone, no matter the age or abs. But, I tend to think, it's too old to be changing diet or exercise routines in order to look good in whatever happens to be in the window at H&M.

It's not that most women in their 30s don't want to look nice, or thin, or "toned." Nor that serious concerns like eating disorders or body dysmorphia cease to exist in women past some particular age - unfortunately, these medical issues pop up at any time. But something like crop-top-specific vanity seems very teenage, maybe even tweenage. I can't decide if that makes me think this trend is extra-manufactured, even by Styles standards, or if this is a hint at something really depressing about Not-So-Young People Today.

Savage vs. Brooks

Dan Savage introduced his latest podcast with what was, I think, his most spot-on rant yet. But it wasn't so much a rant, nor was it all that much about sexuality. He began by recalling a particularly debauched New Years of his younger adulthood. It wasn't clear where he was going with this, but longtime listeners may have guessed, from the bar-scene he was describing, that he was retelling the story of how he met his husband. Then it becomes clear that was a different debauched night. Where's the story going then? Nowhere in particular, it seems, this far in.

Then he explains that New Years this year would involve staying in with his husband and kid, trying to stay awake till midnight. His point? Both are fun. Both are valid. But those who've reached the staying-in-with-family life stage have, he notes, a tendency to treat that as true adulthood, as the correct way to be. As versus the truth, which is that different things work for different people, at different times.

While it might be tempting to brush this aside as a middle-aged guru-to-youth attempting to stay relevant, it's actually a really important point, one I don't think I'd ever seen, other than at WWPD, where I've made versions of it on occasion. Although I may take this further than Savage - my point is that the younger you isn't acting entirely in the service of the older-you. You don't want to close off options, to do things while young that will really sabotage your life later on. But you also need to act in the best interests of the self that currently exists, and to trust that that younger self wasn't a complete fool. As in, say a woman who's 45 and single kicks herself for not marrying a doofus who asked (or might have, had she not broken things off) when they were 25. At 45, one just knows so much more about life, yet tragically can't go back and fix the mistakes of youth. Or: The 45-year-old self doesn't accurately recall what the dude from 20 years ago was like. She make long for the idea of having met a good-enough guy and settled down younger, but the specific problems with this guy, well, that's knowledge only available to the 25-year-old self actually living that relationship.

I thought of this in terms of David Brooks's column on pot. He and his friends went through a pot stage as adolescents. They enjoyed it for a time, then grew out of it because they realized it's kind of dumb. Because pot isn't the best thing ever, the government should discourage it. That means it needs to remain illegal.

Now, my first thought - and I'm shocked to see in the comments that it wasn't everybody's - was that the problem with pot being illegal is that the kids who get caught end up with this on their record. And this sort of mark on a record is going to have a bigger impact the less power someone otherwise has in society.

But then there's a separate question: Was young David Brooks wrong to enjoy pot? I ask not out of any particular interest in pot - that, specifically, was never my thing - but because it seems like he got something out of it for a time (had fun, bonded with a seemingly nice group of friends), and, like so many before and after him, emerged with his brain intact. (I've also known people who end up far too reliant on the stuff, but whether that's worse than equivalent alcohol dependence is its own question.) "[B]eing stoned is not a particularly uplifting form of pleasure," he writes, but the same could be said of "Designing Women," which was my great vice at the age when the boys I went to school with were most enthusiastic about pot. "Smoking was fun, for a bit, but it was kind of repetitive." Should we make "Designing Women" illegal, then?

Different things appeal at different life stages. The idea that once you get a bit older, you're in a position to declare the relatively innocuous choices of your youth immoral doesn't make sense to me. But then again, I'm not, I suppose, a conservative.

"They're men with jobs, Jerry" - George Costanza

Finally saw "Frances Ha." Greta Gerwig - allow me to spoil the movie - plays an aspiring dancer who's reached the age (27) at which it's either going to happen or it's not. And it's not. In a city where (as is remarked upon in the movie) an artist is generally someone with an outside source of income, Gerwig's income really is what she can earn from her art. At the very beginning of the movie, she's offered an easy way out - moving in with a wealthier, maybe older boyfriend whom she's not all that in love with - but turns it down. She does the same (at first) when offered an office job. She's deeply committed, but to what? To art, to her best friend, or to the idea of staying a college student forever?

-I'm not sure I need to see another on-screen rendition of my recent-college-grad years living with roommates in Prospect Heights. It was on the cusp of, did they actually film that in my old apartment?

-So is it just Variations on "Girls," with Gerwig the Dunham character, and the friend who works in publishing the slimmer, more uptight Marnie? Google reveals a similarly nepotism-charge-inspiring cast (Sting's kid and Meryl Streep's!); this, too, is a New York without racial diversity. ("Ha" isn't an Asian last name, but what happens at the end of the movie, when Frances can't fit her full last name, Halliday, into her mailbox label. And the Chinatown she briefly lives in gives no hint of having non-white residents.) The big, whopping difference from "Girls" is that here, the protagonist is 27 and - as is remarked upon throughout - not such a recent grad after all. They're both, though about an adult who identifies - against all odds, and all sense of reality - as a child. Which is apparently very millennial, or something.

-Age. I'd mentioned before (before seeing the movie, that is, in reference to an interview with Gerwig) that "Frances Ha" apparently deals with the not-so-recent college grad, and indeed, it does. At one point fairly early on in the movie, a woman Frances meets announces that Frances looks much older than she is, but acts much younger. And it's clear that this insult has stung. There's a life stage where everyone kind of pretends to be bohemian, but what they really are is young. Money's stupid! Marriage and kids are for squares! And then a lingering, earnest few in each friend group will be taken off-guard and will feel betrayed when it turns out these were not everyone's hard-and-fast values, but just young people being young. But the older you get, the more awkward it is for you to cry 'sellout!' every time a friend gets engaged. Frances has a bit of the Holden Caulfield about her, sniffing out phonies, but then her refreshingly non-Botoxed face reminds us that this is a grown woman in her late 20s. When she finally takes the desk-job she's been offered, you're at once relieved and stunned that she hadn't done so immediately.

-Money. The movie's been praised (where? I forget) for being really honest about money in a way that feels fresh. The $3 ATM fee scene is apparently a thing. (I was so expert at avoiding those!) It's a great big exploration of the line between broke and poor. At one point, a friend tells Frances that in calling herself poor, she's being unfair to actual poor people. You sort of agree with him (ahem), but then you remember that he himself can always turn to his family, while she's on the cusp of something that goes beyond broke. It's not entirely clear - she has a family that can't support her life in New York (as vs. Ms. Horvath's family, which won't), but they seem to have a home she could move back to. Because of whichever forms of non-economic capital - connections she's made in the arts world, being white and pretty, whatever - she's never entirely out of work, or at least not for more than five minutes.

-Age, class, and money: What was most interesting was how the movie gets at that time in life when trajectories diverge. Because Frances is still hanging around with college friends, there's this sense of camaraderie mixed with the underlying fact that some people have family money or finance jobs (or both), while others, not so much. So it's not just that people with different situations are hanging out. It's that they're half under the illusion that they're all in the same boat.

-Online neurosis: The thing where the best friend moves to Tokyo with her banker-bro fiancé and starts a cringe-inducing couple-blog about it is just spot-on. And of course it turns out the friend was miserable at the time.

-I liked "Frances Ha." But I kept thinking of advice I got in grad school, that whenever you're writing something, you have to ask yourself, what are the stakes? Here, it seemed like if you look at the protagonist's trajectory, she goes from one artistic pursuit that isn't quite right for her (dancing) to another that is, and that has a longer shelf life (choreography). A great life-and-career crisis that lasts for all of five minutes, and that occurs at 27 rather than 22, but still within the decade when such things are socially acceptable. It's not that the problems depicted are too "first-world," exactly. More that it's never entirely clear what's stopping Frances from getting her act together, making it that much less surprising when, by the end of the movie, she has.

Your don't-go of the evening

Because what's a day without at least three bleak articles about academia, grad-student-Facebook-land has now brought me to this piece about the difficulties of getting a PhD and job in the humanities without outside support. UChicago doctoral candidate David Mihalyfy writes:

Spousal income, a parent-owned condo, a trust fund – no matter which, these necessities increasingly make a humanities Ph.D. less of a career path and more of a leisure pursuit for those with financial stability from elsewhere, even for students at top institutions.

It's one of the rare trustafarian exposés that remembers that sometimes - strange as it may seem - 30-year-olds (40-year-olds) are married. That the invisible extra source of income of someone ancient might be a spouse, and not mom and dad. Far too often, articles about the broke and humanitiesish suggest that it's this upper-middle-class thing to support one's kids financially until said kids themselves reach retirement age. And, eh, I don't think it's quite gotten to that point.

Further, similarly scattered thoughts below:

-Is marriage to someone who earns more than a grad student does privilege in the same way as having rich parents? I mean, it's pretty equally unearned advantage, or at least irrelevant advantage, but it doesn't necessarily indicate that "Despite rare exceptions, our humanities professors will come from wealthier backgrounds." I mean, a grad student whose spouse is a plumber or schoolteacher is at an advantage. It hardly needs to be Wall Street.

Now, it certainly doesn't say anything good about a career path if you need a decade of outside support to get started. It doesn't seem like the way to get the best candidates for anything. It's still wildly unfair. But if the concern is social mobility into academia, and the socioeconomic class of resulting humanities profs, spousal support would be less of an issue.

-In order to succeed on the academic job market, what you need on your CV are fellowships. Grants. Scholarships. Awards. These things tend to come with money. Needing money - being someone for whom $500, say, isn't just a night on the town - is an awfully big motivator to shoot for these, or at least I found it to be. If something is your job, you may well be more likely to treat it as one. Those who approach grad school as dabblers (no matter the source of outside income) and don't apply for extra (or any) funding may well have more time to publish, but they may have gaps in other key areas.

-Being married/partnered as a grad student isn't necessarily a career advantage. It does seem to up the odds that one will have kids. And as great a thing as marriage to a high-powered hot-shot (or anyone with a job, really) can be in terms of allowing some - like a woman mentioned in the piece - to avoid grueling perma-adjuncting, often enough, a spouse with a decent salary isn't going to want to move to Outer Mongolia (selected due to its current non-existence; no offense intended to Mongolians generally, nor to the Mongolian family who used to be my neighbors in particular) with you when that's the place that has the only tenure-track job in Medieval Tapestry Studies.

Nor will the grad-student spouse necessarily think Outer Mongolia and a far lower family income (and what about when Outer Mongolia deems you unworthy of tenure?) beats not-Outer-Mongolia and high school teaching/non-profit work/library work/from-scratch housespousery/retraining-in-air-conditioner-repair/there's-always-law-school. Don't let anyone stand between you and your dreams! But god forbid you should have found a partner before age 35, and that that person should also have dreams, and that that person's dreams pay more and in a better location. The best you - a purely theoretical you - can hope for is that in the course of grad school, you realize your dream may not have been Professor of Medieval Tapestry Studies after all.

(There isn't a two-body problem, generally, when parents or a trust fund are the source of whichever cushion. Although I don't think the first of the helicoptered generation is old enough yet for grad school.)

-Did you think I was going to let this go without a gender angle? No such luck. It seems possible that being partnered helps men but not women. While - given, if nothing else, the fact that men tend to earn more than women - women with husbands (because most couples are opposite-sex) may have a better shot at avoiding garret starvation, women may also have more trouble than men when it comes to getting a spouse to move wherever a job happens to be. A single man, meanwhile, will lack whichever Stable Adult With Family aura that apparently benefits married men - and not married women - on the job market, academic or otherwise.

The plight of the not-so-recent college grad

On a recent "Fresh Air," Greta Gerwig told Terry Gross that after college,

There's a grace period where being a mess is charming and interesting, and then I think when you hit around 27 it stops being charming and interesting, and it starts being kind of pathological, and you have to find a new way of life. Otherwise, you're going to be in a place where the rest of your peers have been moving on, and you're stuck.

I was listening to this on a run earlier, and it was like, whoa, I'd better write this down. But then NPR's website saved me the trouble.

Anyway, this strikes me as not only spot-on, but also relevant to two topics familiar to WWPD's three readers. The first is the case against graduate school (defined, for our purposes, as PhD programs in non-STEM fields). When you start, assuming you go soon after college, you will feel more together than many of your peers, or certainly not less. Sure, there will be the ones who went straight into finance or consulting, but then there will be many others who are more or less floundering. And you'll be thinking, huh, I'm 24, I have health insurance and not via my parents, I'm paid to read books, dammit!

And then a year will pass. And another one. And then at a certain point you're the friend lagging behind. All of a sudden, Facebook (where, needless to say, no one is announcing unemployment or underemployment), which has become your principal source for what your cohort is up to, now that you're not actively in touch with most of your non-grad-school friends (although you will rekindle friendships with those who've also gone your route)... all of a sudden, Facebook is telling you that everyone you knew growing up now has a real job, maybe a house, and you? When exactly are you getting that degree we've been hearing about for the past 500 years?

The other reason the quote stuck with me was nothing to do with grad school in particular. Rather, it was that the moment Gerwig describes is, for women, the window of opportunity. The point at which your friends and family switch from telling you not to get distracted by boys, to asking you when you'll find yourself a man. Gerwig doesn't describe it as such - she describes it as the moment when many of your friends start settling down. But it amounts to the same.

While the Recent College Grad is very much a thing (and thanks to "Girls," all the more so), the not-so-recent college grad is also a type in its own right, and a more poignant/pathetic one. When one is still young, but only relative to those who are older. Which, sure, could also be said of 10-year-olds. But what I'm describing - what Gerwig and her colleague/director/boyfriend Noah Baumbach seem to have made a movie about - is the first point at which one has fully exited youth.

And I couldn't help but think about how Gerwig, who's evidently less than a week apart from me in age, is in a relationship with Baumbach, who's 43. Not in terms of anything about Gerwig or Baumbach in particular, but in terms of not-so-recent-college-grad-ness among women more generally. In the "Fresh Air" interview, much is made of how young Gerwig is. And, while I acknowledge that 29 is not elderly, I don't feel all that young. 29 is firmly madame territory. 30 is imminent. While 20 is young, '30 is young' is the kind of thing those who are 30 or thereabouts say to reassure themselves/one another, or that the 40-plus say when being jaded. 29 is only young if being constantly juxtaposed to 43.

So I do kind of suspect that the appeal of being the younger woman is greater at 27-plus than when one is a bit younger, but still definitely an adult. So it's not that there aren't available same-age men, or that those men are all chasing after (let alone snagging!) women who've just that evening turned 18. Nor is it that something miraculous happens to men in their 40s, that they become suddenly better-looking than in their mid-late 20s. (And indeed, I'm really not talking about Gerwig and Baumbach in particular, because he's a famous movie director, which, needless to say, most 43-year-old men are not. That, and one can never say what makes any individual couple tick.) Nor is it necessarily about women this age (alas, my age) wanting to settle down, and not finding men their own age interested in doing so. If anything, it seems more likely that a woman wanting to stay in carefree 'girlfriend' mode is going to match up well with a man who's seeking out a younger woman because the 'younger woman' represents not settling down.

Lena-not-Dunham UPDATED

Caity Weaver of Gawker has written a hilarious but essentially mistaken take-down of a NYT real-estate-section profile of some parents buying a one-bedroom apartment "for" (and I'll get to why the quotes are necessary) their 26-year-old daughter who's a college graduate with a job and everything. The young woman's crime - compounded by the fact that she shares a first name with a certain Ms. Dunham - is being a brat. In Weaver's reading, that is.

I didn't see a link to the piece itself in the Gawker post, but highly advanced research skills brought me to it. A key detail jumped out at me: "Her parents take over the bedroom when they visit." This is not this Lena's home, but her parents'. Not just in some abstract sense, in which money is power, and if they've paid for it, it's theirs. In a very literal one, namely that if she wants to have an overnight visitor, heck, if she wants to sleep in her own bed, that may not be an option. This is something above and beyond parents visiting. And as jealous as we all might be of OMG-one-bedroom-apartment-in-the-West-Village (not that one-bedroom barrack-apartments in New Jersey don't have their charms - and anyway, my dream is a townhouse in the West Village, thank you very much), this is a price of sorts. So there's this and whichever anti-motivational impact this sort of thing may - doesn't always, but may - have on a person.

The time may have come to stop looking at the phenomenon of parents "helping" their ever-older offspring as a wonderful thing for them to do if they can afford it. It's like I keep saying re: unpaid internships - rather than looking at it as, how unfortunate that not everyone has the option of working for free, we should see it as unfortunate that even many college-educated adults with previous office experience are now expected to do so. Reactions to tales like these aren't so much "class warfare," as the Gawker commentariat puts it, as a sense of pride on the part of those who made their own way, whose parents maybe couldn't but also maybe could have afforded to do something like this.

My point, then, is not that the rich are paradoxically less advantaged - if anything, the era of eternal parental assistance, in which the alternatives are rare cases of self-made swimming and a whole lot of sinking, makes having rich-and-"helpful" parents more important than ever. It's that we need a new way of thinking about a culture in which dependence (generally discreet, generally not profiled in the Times) goes on for as long as it now does. This culture is bad for the "kids" not getting help and for the ones getting it. And lord knows it hasn't done wonders for NYC real estate.

UPDATE

So, via the Gawker comments, there's yet another angle here, one that's been in the back of my own mind about this topic for ages, but that I was reluctant to bring up, because it seemed maybe gratuitously provincial. But no, so here goes: anti-Semitic misogyny. There's one comment that's just kind of bafflingly anti-Jewish (although I think I can unpack it - Brooklyn is haute-hipster-Americana created by rich white kids not from the NYC area, whereas Manhattan necessitates local connections, local roots, or something?), and another that calls out Chelsea of all neighborhoods as having "sprouted into a Jewish American Princess haven," thereby missing the demographic that the area's boutiques are aiming for. And this with a Lena we have no reason to think is Jewish! A full analysis of the relationship between YPIS and JAP-o-phobia must wait, and may never come, but is stirring in my head, at least.

The 25-year-old teen mom

The topic du jour is that girls on their parents' health insurance often don't have coverage for pregnancy. But as the first episode of "Girls" demonstrated, "girls" remain "girls," and "boys" "boys," throughout the 20s, at least when it comes to financial dependence on parents. Not that everyone 22-30 (or younger, for that matter) is financially dependent on their parents, and let all of us in that age range who are not take this moment to pat ourselves on the back, albeit less so if we graduated pre-recession. But, certainly post-2008, it's no longer considered a sign that you're failing at life if you are.

"Dependence," of course, can mean a wide range of situations. In the case of the new rule allowing those up to age 26 to stay on their parents' coverage, as I understand it, there's no implication that those taking advantage of it are living with or financially dependent on their parents. They may have their own jobs, pay their own rent, even have the option of getting insurance from their own employers.

The discussion thus far seems to go as follows: some point out that if you can't procure your own health insurance, you're in no position to have a kid. Others counter that life happens. It's unfair to the babies born to these young women that they'll have missed out on prenatal care. An entirely legitimate use of 'think of the children.'

But the more striking development is that we're defining adulthood to start later and later. The new rule is a response to the reality of life for those in their early 20s (and I wouldn't have minded it, having been uninsured for a few months at that age), but also might backfire, encouraging even large, corporate employers not to offer insurance with entry-level work, presumably by calling those jobs "internships," and once they're at it, why pay at all?

But the fact that having a kid in your early-mid 20s remains relatively non-controversial - and that by 30 on the dot (I'm 29 these days, so by all means, remind me) women are expected to get to it ASAP - reminds us that 25 is old. OK, not "old," but definitively adult. Not merely fertile in the biological sense, or 'prepared to become a mother' in the horniness sense that can get you there indirectly, but old enough to settle down. It reminds us that 25-year-olds who do depend on their parents - partially or entirely - are in an incredibly awkward spot, far more so than 17 or 19-year-olds who might feel bad about going out on a weeknight, say, when they know their parents, who are supporting them, wouldn't approve.

There comes a time when it feels wrong to be defined as a child. This need not be defined in financial terms - in eras of serfs and aristocracy, or even of a haute bourgeoisie living off investments, the ability to live on your own on your salary, or even that of your spouse, was not the line between childhood and adulthood - but in our times, it kind of is. Parent's don't know if helping a 25-year-old is enabling or morally equivalent to helping a 17-year-old. Nor do 25-year-olds know if working for no pay is a wise investment in their futures or a waste of time. We as a society haven't exactly opted to separate "adulthood" from "financial self-sufficiency," except when we have. As for where to place the dividing line, it would seem that if you're old enough that your parents' weighing in on your sexual and reproductive choices seems utterly bizarre, you are unavoidably an adult.

Excessive humility

Flavia has a great post up about the phenomenon of (academic, in this case) high-achievers, already well-established in their professions, who cling to a self-deprecating grad-student persona. This isn't something I've much experienced, being very much still at the stage at which a self-deprecating grad-student persona is the only appropriate one, but it sure rings true, and has its equivalents at the earlier stages as well.

As for how it comes about, I think it's a few things. One is that the path from 'yay, I got into grad school, they pay me to read books!' to any kind of permanent job is not only long, but also filled with a great deal of internal competition, such that you've never reached the rung where you know that you may not be the Star, but you'll do OK, until you're, at the very earliest, 35. In academia, the competition isn't over whether you'll be a big shot, but over whether you'll ultimately qualify to get any permanent job of the sort that your years of training ostensibly lead to. It's like if anyone who went to law school and got a paid job as a lawyer, anywhere in the country, however prestigious, felt as though they'd won the lottery. If you've spent that many years feeling professionally insecure, giving it up would be difficult.

Another is that there's another way many successful academics approach self-presentation, which is to act, from the first day of grad school on, if not from the first day of high school on, as though it's part of some divine plan for them to one day have HY&P battling it out to see which one gets to appoint him Most Distinguishest Professor Evar. That "him" isn't a gender-neutral "him," as in a grammatical choice intended to indicate "him or her." But if you don't get too many women acting this way, it's not as if most men do, either. But enough do that it might actually pay not to come across as arrogant, entitled, etc., and self-deprecation is shorthand for humility.

One more, though, which might be the big'un, and which someone alludes to in Flavia's comments. In our society, the youthful prodigy is a celebrated figure. Imagine, how did X accomplish so much, and so young? (This made me, a 28-year-old who's never even aspired to be a fashion designer, question my life accomplishments.) So it sounds much more impressive if you aw-shucks got invited somewhere to give a talk, to think, they invited a mere speck like you, new at all this, still fresh from the assembly line, than if they invited you because you're a full-fledged member of the profession in question, and this is what the profession entails. Giving off an aura of youth - which is something different from actually lying about one's age - is a way to make even relatively minor accomplishments seem immense, accomplishments that would indeed be immense if the person accomplishing them was 12, notable at 24, nothing surprising at 46.

If it ain't broke

Just... just... how?

How is a "broke" recent college grad prepared to go on $50-a-person dinner dates? Doubly bizarre if the Young Person in question intends to pay for self and date alike.

How could the NYT food critic - someone charged with knowing more than the average person about dining out in NYC - say that no "date" restaurant in this price range exists?* I get that not everyone considers Thai food off a tray in Chelsea Market hot-date material (the food is hot...), but the sub-$50-a-person options are endless. (That, or I'm naive about restaurant alcohol consumption of non-grad-students, and this $50 is meant to include pre- and post-dinner drinks, along with at least one bottle of wine with the meal.) A good place to start would be Celeste uptown and Bianca downtown - basically the same Italian restaurant, where unless your date orders three different pasta entrees (not a bad idea if you order the ravioli with sage and butter sauce - delicious but the portion's tiny!), you're in the clear.

*Preempting the obvious: Sifton may have been trying to make a cutesy remark about how sometimes drinks are a better idea than dinner for a date, not to say that literally no such restaurant exists. But the remark - "With the budget you are presenting" - suggests he really does think it's not worth the bother of eating in a restaurant where the total bill for two is under $100. Which is something between aloof and absurd.

Sexy time

Clementine and I just saw "Sex and the City, The Movie." Why not to see it:

1) The most unrealistic thing about the movie is not the $500 shoes or the willingness of young, good-looking men to have sex with older, average-looking women. It is that a woman like Carrie would have any friends at all, let alone friends who dote on her 24/7. Seriously, when she gets ditched by her dull but allegedly jumbo fiancé, her friends wait on her as though she were Mother Teresa on her deathbed. Samantha actually spoon-feeds Carrie yogurt during the latter's recuperation. But why? It is a friend's job to tell a dumped pal to gain some perspective, not to act as though the person has just learned her hut and entire family were wiped out in a storm. So you were stood up by a trazillionaire, big deal! He seemed boring anyway, and was incapable of sending unplagarized email, he's just that good of a writer. Where there's one dim-witted banker, there are others, what was so special about this one?

2) I'm now in favor of arranged marriage. Really. This movie is the best argument ever for women not halfway embracing watered-down feminism, only to discover at 45 that they are not as attractive to men as they were at 15. In all the time these women were overanalyzing their relationships, they could have been long married and busy worrying about something else, say, their work, or even fashion, their alleged interest.

3) Fashion? No, there wasn't much of that, unless the movie was actually filmed in 1992. The movie's constant stream of racism (to be discussed more later) felt not-so-2008, so in a way the clothes helped, in terms of internal consistency.

4) First Charlotte won't eat food in Mexico because eww, Mexico's dirty! This is presented as one of her charming quirks, not as her being kind of racist. Next there's Miranda, whose approach at looking for an apartment is to follow the only white guy she sees walking around. Then Carrie hires a curvy--sassy, even--black assistant who waits on her hand and foot, seemingly unnecessary given that her friends do this as well. This plot line only adds to what had already been the case: everyone in any way marginal dreams of fetching stuff for the not-so-fab four. Gay men just adore straight weddings, and exist pretty much to improve the aesthetic lives of women whose own lovers are bulky straight dudes who communicate in grunts. (I kept waiting for Big to say, "Feels like an Arby's night." To continue on the "Seinfeld" theme, I also wanted someone to tell Carrie, "Maybe the dingo ate your baby," that is, what Elaine says to an irritating woman at a house party who has just announced, "I have lost my fiancé, the poor baby!") And where to begin with Charlotte's Jewish husband, a constant reminder (more so in the show than in the movie) that Jews are quirky, crass, rich, and grotesque, but do they ever make good husbands! And none of this is even post-PC humor, ala Borat. It's just pre-PC ignorance. Why?

5) I might not really be a woman, or at least not an unmarried straight woman living in New York. Because I identified with exactly none of this movie, found none of the men or shoes attractive.

Why to see it:

1) Carrie's spiky belt is pretty cool, if a bit like one I had in high school. Maybe it's time to bring the belt back, that is, to remove it from one of the two microscopic closets it's probably on the floor of right now!

2) It's an excuse to watch over two hours of TV and feel like you're taking part in a cultural phenomenon, or at least watching a film.

3) There could be something empowering about a 50-year-old woman dumping a blond (if bland) model with a perfectly-chiseled torso, simply so she can go around having sex with other, similarly-chiseled contenders. That is, if it were remotely believable that her plan would work out in the end. But it's kind of conceivable that her fantasies will come true, and all told, Samantha comes across as the least objectionable of all the characters by such a long shot.

4) There's something very "Absolutely Fabulous" about the movie, perhaps more than the show.

5) Whoever you are, however superficial and materialistic, you will leave the movie feeling like a self-righteous hippie.