"Adulthood" and Financial Independence

Jessica at ...and another thing points out this essay from Newsweek bemoaning the tendency for young adults to continue to live off of their parents' generosity post-college. The whole thing's pretty much statistic-free (although the author does cite a "majority" of her NYC-dwelling peers at one point), but for a sense of its objections an excerpt will suffice:

Higher rents and the need for deeper pockets are part of the charm associated with city living, but urban pricing aside, it is possible to live in any city regardless of your age or income; it just takes a little budgeting and prioritizing. Surrendering to lifestyle flexibility may be unattractive, but sometimes it's necessary. It's easy to "keep up with the Joneses" when financial responsibility is someone else's problem. The fact is, my peers who flood out of designer stores, arms adorned with shopping bags, wouldn't be able to afford their purchases without ringing up a massive credit-card debt. By continuing to provide for their twentysomething kids, parents hinder their children's ability to be financially responsible. If you don't learn to budget early on, what will inspire you to do so when your finances become your own prerogative?

...

There is something to be said for writing that rent check each month and knowing you've managed to live comfortably on your own terms. Racking up $500 shopping sprees on Mommy and Daddy's credit card may have its momentary allure, but the adult part of me believes that working for what you have is much more rewarding than being handed it on a silver platter. And I have my own mom and dad to thank for that.

I get the impression Jessica's somewhat more hard-nosed about this phenomenon than I am. It's already considered socially acceptable to have people spend some 25% of their lives with the intense support of their parents; a few more years hardly seems like a big deal to me. There's something abstractly romantic about financial independence, but I don't know that I'd wish it on anybody.

What I will say, though, is that this sort of thing highlights the absurdity of worshipping "success" the way people sometimes do in this country. As often as not, people who seem successful have, in fact, succeeded at very little beyond sustaining the momentum that they were born into. And by the same token, people who seem like "failures" tend not to have failed at anything in particular, but often have managed not to slip further down the economic ladder despite various inherited disadvantages.

To also get in a swipe at the media, here, one really gets a sense for what segments of American society the mainstream media represents when it seems to them worthwhile to run an essay complaining that parents are giving their big-city-dwelling kids too much money. While I'm sure that credit card debt is a problem for a lot of households, it's not like the problem for most people is that their credit card debt is underwritten by their parents.

Update: Because this made me laugh, I'm going to say it's related.

Really? Both of you?

It's common among many socially progressive couples--different sex and same sex alike--to exclaim, when one member of the partnership is pregnant, that "we're" pregnant. "When we were pregnant, Ellen got horrible morning sickness." "We're pregnant right now, so Jen's feet are swollen."

I appreciate the sentiment behind this choice of words, especially in heterosexual couples where, for logistical reasons, any attempt to equally divide the duty of pregnancy would be impossible. Namely, the couple is trying to verbally indicate that both members are invested in the creation, outcome, and, most saliently, backbreaking work associated with a pregnancy. It's nice when the man in the partnership steps out of the customary male role and contributes to the pregnancy, too, which usually means taking care of all the other miserable work (driving the future mom to doctor visits, shopping for tiny footsie pajamas, sending baby shower invites, all the usual housework) that pregnant women usually are expected to perform in addition to carrying around a 30-pound parasite with foreign genetic material for nine months. Usually the "we" designation indicates that, contrary to tradition, both mom and dad will play active roles in rearing the child-to-be. Further, exclusively referring to the pregnancy as "hers" comes off as dismissive, disinterested, or unwilling to absorb the duties that you formerly divided equally. "Oh, that's her shoe rack; I have nothing to do with that. Oh, that's her pregnancy; I'm sure glad I don't have to help out with that mess!"

On the other hand, any semantical attempt at equality aside, men simply can't get pregnant (yet!), and it's absurd and insulting to imply that the burden of pregnancy can shared equally between both partners. Sorry, bub, but you're not the one peeing on a stick, putting on weight, getting stretch marks, enduring strange hormonal shifts, passing a basketball through your vagina, getting stitched up, breast feeding, and potentially suffering severe depression as a result of this pregnancy.

This isn't to say that good future fathers don't have to do extra work when their partners are pregnant. Even soon-to-be older siblings have to pick up the slack when Mom isn't able to do all the work she normally does. But the concept of mutual pregnancy justifies related phenomena such as "sympathy weight," or the idea that PMS hurts men as much as it huts women ("She gets so irritable when she's about to start her period; it affects me, too!"). Yes, women's issues are everyone's issues, but there's no comparing being a male in solidarity to actually being a woman. (I might also accuse men who "suffer" from PMS of just being wimpy. Brother, if you had any idea how bad it actually is...)

The greater implications of a "shared" pregnancy, though no one who uses "we" has this in mind, is that ownership of the pregnancy shifts from the pregnant woman to both members of the partnership. A major tenet of abortion rights is that the pregnancy, fetus, and choice to carry the pregnancy to term belong solely to the pregnant woman, not her husband, boyfriend, father, mother, community, or local legislators. Of course the progressive men who refer to "our" pregnancy probably don't question this philosophical foundation of abortion rights. I fear, though, that many anti-feminists and anti-abortion proponents have a knack for co-opting feminist and socially progressive terminology or ideals and insidiously twisting them beyond recognition. A popular example is, "Feminists say they want to have sex as freely as men do, so it's feminists' faults when college men rape their woman classmates. These poor boys are getting mixed messages from those sex-crazed feminists!" That's not far from, "If the pregnancy is both of yours, then the fetus belongs to both of you, too. If feminists want to share the pregnancy, then men should have to approve it before their wives and girlfriends get abortions!"

Admittedly, I'm being a bit of a worry wart, and will label myself as such. In the meantime, when I get pregnant, I'll let my partner spend all the time he wants decorating for our baby shower.

Forget about Wii. Maybe the problem is Yuu.

Beware, parents: the Nintendo Wii "can be porn gateway," even in the hands of six-year-old girls! Due to the game console's internet access, apparently otherwise innocent children can now browse gigabyte upon gigabyte of dirty, filthy, steamy fetish pornography (we're talking donkeys-in-pantyhose dirty) that would make Larry Flynt blush ... all between frames of video bowling.

Some parents are calling for Nintendo to install a "cyber-nanny" function that would allow guardians to filter the content that reaches the Wii. Maybe after they've achieved that goal these parents can start a letter writing campaign to Sony demanding that PS3s help their teens with their algebra homework and provide Junior an interactive, 3-D graphics version of "the talk."

If you're worried about your elementary-aged kids using their game consoles to access porn, maybe you should examine your parenting skills, not the filtering features on your Wii. Something tells me that your average well-adjusted first grade girl isn't trolling the Internet for clips of hot lunches and light BDSM.

I'm no parenting counselor, but I get the feeling that telling kids that there's a world of super-secret pictures out there that only grown-ups are allowed to look at is just a little too intriguing to pass up. It seems that those most obsessed with sex are those fighting the hardest to suppress it.

Wait, THAT'S the REAL reason he hasn't proposed yet

Ladies, it's not that your marriage-phobic boyfriend is boycotting the institution until same-sex couples can also enjoy the rights of matrimony. Nope, it's that all the tofu he sucks down is making him question opposite-sex couples to begin with. Soy makes you gay, apparently.

Don't believe me? Just ask this guy.

Soy is nutritious and contains lots of good things. Unfortunately, when you eat or drink a lot of soy stuff, you're also getting substantial quantities of estrogens.

Estrogens are female hormones. If you're a woman, you're flooding your system with a substance it can't handle in surplus. If you're a man, you're suppressing your masculinity and stimulating your "female side," physically and mentally.

In fetal development, the default is being female. All humans (even in old age) tend toward femininity. The main thing that keeps men from diverging into the female pattern is testosterone, and testosterone is suppressed by an excess of estrogen.

See, he's using almost real science (soy contains phytoestrogens that mimic estrogen; estrogen is the primary female sex hormone) and applying it to theoretically and empirically unfounded statements (soy makes you feminine). Clever. This is a dismissable (dare I say bat shit crazy) application of the real-science-plus-fake-conclusions tactic that's especially popular among people who foster anti-scientific thinking.

But there are many who employ the methods of scientists and researchers, then twist these methods beyond recognition into a mangled clump of speculation, superstition, and prejudice, but still have their ideas taken seriously! Take the Intelligent Design team or anti-feminists, for example.

All this talk about soy-based estrogens got met thinking, though. Given that about two-thirds of soybeans grown in America are fed to livestock, and given that a cow's diet is as much soybean as anything else, maybe beef is to blame for the gay epidemic. I feel so sorry for those millions of beef steers who have to spend their entire two years on the planet questioning their own bovine sexuality.

By the way, could there be a more hilarious headline than "A devil food is turning our kids into homosexuals"? That wins.