"I don’t wanna grow up, I’m a Toys R Us kid…"
When I was a kid one of the best movies my friends and I watched was a movie with Tom Hanks entitled, Big. This movie was about a boy who made a wish and the next day he woke up looking like an adult. He was “Big”. Reflecting on the movie as this point in my life, “Big” is a story about adolescents desire to be adults.
This narrative seems to have been a common theme throughout time – kids desiring to be adults.
That is until now.
My wife and I rented “17 Again”. This is a movie about an adult who desires to be, well, 17 again.
This really got me thinking about the current cultural trend to extend adolescence. Graduates go to college with their high school clicks. Botox is still uber popular. Everyone desires to be younger than they are. Many movies, especially comedies, are sophomoric and geared for the teenage male.
Could this be the first time in history that we adults would rather be kids than adults?
If our culture idolizes our adolescent who are the adults going to be?
Research on the sexualization of girls
From the September/October 2008 Youth Worker Journal
“See Jane Deal with Her Body. How You Can Address the Sexualization of Today’s Girls”
• Mothers are competing with their daughters to look good or sexy.
• The efforts to help girls “stay pure” might be too focused on avoiding specific behaviors and not focused enough on a deeper transformation of hearts and attitudes toward sexuality.
• Sports are a double edge sword: they boost self esteem, but there is a lot of popular media overwhelming sexualizing women’s sports.
• Self esteem is directly linked to materialism: as self esteem falls, materialism sky rockets; and vise versa.
The Merchants of Cool
A Frontline documentary (60 minutes long) discussing how marketers court the teenage consumer.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/video/flv/generic.html?s=frol02p70&continuous=1 (I think this will take you straight to the video)
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/cool/ (This is the homepage)
In it the documenter says there are 5 major corporations which determine what is “cool”:
New Corp
Viacom
Disney
Universal ViVendi
AOL/Time Warrner
These conglomartes are who owns the vast majority of music, movies, video games, television.
