College teenyboppers, act your age

Thoughts From Here
    By Sonia Lin

Six months ago, I felt sad and neglected. The loneli ness of being a college student drove me to a near-despair that was mixed with a measure of righteous indignation. I had a complaint to make, a call to trumpet vigorously to my petite-generation. I had a message—so, naturally, I wrote a column.

This past May, I lamented in these pages the full-blown revival of the teenybopper in pop culture. It was so unfair, I whined. Our slim college-age group had been too young for the Brat Pack/John Hughes heyday of the '80s. We had survived early and middle adolescence with a relative scarcity of overt pandering to our consumer needs. Then, as soon we left high school and settled into college life, the teenybopper rose into pop prominence once more. The injustice of being born too early! I lamented frivolously.

I pouted, flipping through television shows featuring young teenagers more beautiful and angst-y than any other TV characters. But little did I understand the shamefully seductive powers of Dawson and his creek, for while I was whining about our missed opportunities, everyone else my age was rushing to make up for them by catching the next screening of Cruel Intentions.

College students, and seemingly everyone else, are now crazy for middle-school cool. What has happened? The public hubbub for teen (and pre-teen) idols is no longer merely limited to teenyboppers. Twenty-something women swoon for the Backstreet Boys on MTV and chant the mantra "I don't want no scrub" with the little girls in the mall. Teen queens Jennifer Love Hewitt and Britney Spears are celebrated in the pages of fashion magazines as great beauties—or at least as celebrities worthy of post-teen adulation. Where once childlike models were all the rage, now the style is defined by whom and what the children like.

In fashion, the female body has been rejected in favor of the child's body. Trendy women's clothing designers all but deny the existence of hips and breasts, and certain recent styles further the insult. Low-slung, fitted, and flared boot-cut jeans and pants look best on the hips of a gawky 14-year-old boy, not on a woman who is old enough to vote.

Is the central idea in all of this that we desire a rewind button on our lives? The ubiquitous makeup company Clinique is currently pitching its fragrance Happy with an ad featuring three strangely and deliriously happy adults dressed as a football player, a birthday girl, and a pigtailed cheerleader depicted in mid-cheer. These symbols of romping suburban youth have bounced right into the pages of glossies everywhere—and it's very strange.

Our brazen collegiate fascination with pre-pubescent pop culture is absurd and ought to stop. I say this even though we may wish we had had something similar in the eighth grade, even though it's deliciously fun and funnily ridiculous—how could we not delight in the new WB teen drama called Popular? On Popular, everyone wants to be pretty and to be a cheerleader, but even the prettiest cheerleaders can be sad too. Despite these sugary lures, we must remember our years and uphold our intellectual standards.

College students find themselves in a quandary, however, because the teenyboppers are everywhere. We have precious few alternatives to this when we seek an entertainment fix. Turn on the television and you find either the ringing emotional climaxes of Dawson's Creek or the pathetic, flat 20-something drama of Beverly Hills 90210. Given this choice, of course we'd want to watch the Creek. Still, difficult as it may be, we college students must pull ourselves out of the pom-pom realm of locker flirtation and find our own generational culture.

Sure, the teen revival taps into the last pleasurable remains of the melodrama that once filtered our every youthful experience. We can all remember those high school classifications: the nerds, the jocks, the newspaper and yearbook-types, the bitches, and the hippies. We may be tempted to give in to the pretty, packaged, white-bread pop that stirs up our old school resentments. But there are plenty of new school resentments to be had—or made. A little Total Request Live is fine every once in a while. But never to excess; we're not supposed to want it "that" way.

Recent Herald Columns by this Columnist:
NOTE: SITE WILL APPEAR IN A NEW BROWSER WINDOW

• Combatting American cynicism, 9/24/99
• Yale's annual honeymoon bittersweet, 9/10/99

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