Posted by
Andrews on Tuesday, March 18, 2008 1:54:31 PM
Before I start, let me say I am no prude, in fact by any standards I have had a rather colorful life. I was a punk in the 1980's, I did my share of illegal and degenerate deeds. I have hardly led a sheltered life.
Still, I am troubled when I visit the
Urban Dictionary* site. It isn't the obsession with foul scatological sex acts, though that is part of it. When you cut loose teenage boys and give them computers they will surely find a way to indulge in their penchants for trying to top one another with disgusting terms.
What disturbs me much more is the nasty misogynistic, and often simply misanthropic, streak I see in the site. And not just in the site, but in teen society at large. Everywhere I look, it appears that we are steadily coarsening our teens to the point where they are verging on sociopathic behavior.
In part, it comes from our increasingly casual attitudes towards sex. When we teach young boys to view girls as nothing but a source of oral sex, and teach young girls that servicing boys is a meaningless act, you tend to create youth who have an instrumental view of one another.
Of course, it isn't just sex, we have also made a shambles of traditional notions of success. When you create idols of pimps, pushers and bimbos, holding up the truly worthless idle rich as role models, you create children who think being noticed is the highest aspiration and that doing anything it takes to fulfill your whims is the normal state of affairs. Careers have been replaced with slinging dope and shooting, happiness has been replaced with fame, marriage has been replaced with multiple hook-ups. In other words, we have taken the teen behaviors we used to discourage and turned them into the goals towards which teens and adults aspire.
And when adults are behaving like teens themselves, the teens will emulate them. Our own irresponsibility is mirrored in the behavior of teens, and amplified, as they take its logic to heart and run with it to its logical conclusion.
Teens are, by nature, a bit self-centered. That is why traditionally we have struggled to force them to view one another as actual beings, forced them to recognize that other teens and adults share a common humanity with them. But now our culture has given up on that effort. As we have created adults who are obsessed with nothing but themselves, we have now turned to creating children cut from the same cloth.
There is only one problem. When an adult turns into a monster of ego, he does so having been previously taught to recognize others' humanity. He may choose to ignore it, but in some way he is still aware of it. In most cases it keeps him from committing truly horrible acts.
Our teens have no such background. Young children are self-centered and teens even more so, as they have not yet truly evolved the empathy we need to live in society. So when you allow teenagers to turn into brutal, selfish, self-obsessed creatures you end up with sociopaths in the making, creatures who have no understanding of what it means to have empathy, without an ability to understand the feelings of others. When you view others solely as objects either to gratify your whims or to be moved out of your way, you end up with your textbook sociopath, one who feels nothing while committing the most monstrous deeds.
And that is what I see in the Urban Dictionary. The scribblings of a generation of future sociopaths.
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* Be warned, this site contains some pretty foul language as well as non-obscene descriptions of some pretty offensive acts, both sexual and otherwise. I know I sound like a boring old man when I say this, but trust me, I am not. I own the complete Grove Press library of De Sade's writings and have read them, yet the Urban Dictionary disturbs me. So you have been warned.