Danah Boyd on lowering the drinking age

I think she's got something interesting to say about the whole debate:

Anyone who tries to tell you that something magical happens for everyone at the age of 21 that makes youth brains capable of moderate consumption at that age is full of shit. The drinking age is not about psychology, no matter how many reports appear to "prove" otherwise. The drinking age is first and foremost about social control. We tried to prohibit everyone from drinking and when that failed, we went about trying to oppress the population that could be controlled. Like all other acts of Prohibition in this country, the minimum drinking age stems from a set of moral values projected onto a population as a means of control.

Read on.

Teenage Wasteland: Suburbia's Dead End Kids

I'm not going to review the book, but rather just plant a few quotes I liked:


P. 183: To embrace Led Zeppelin with all the trimmings was a declaration that you would have no part of it. Your place in your town was set in stone. You flirted with evil, you were dangerous. So the cult of Led Zeppelin helped kids carve some space, communion. Zep was liberation theology in vinyl.


P. 192: Adults worried about protecting kids' "morals" but were completely unconcerned that the minimum wage hadn't gone up once during the whole decade. Since the 1960s kids have lost power in leaps and bounds; but when they turned to 'Satan' or to other youth culture traditions for help, for comfort, for support, adults complained that kids were being seduced by evil.

Everything that kids did to empower or protect themselves in recent years, any refuge they created from adult indifference and brutality, was turned around and used against them. We should have been proud of them. Proud that the kids' religion gave them so much courage to fight back.


P. 254: Because of transformations in the nature of the family and in the global economy, the concept of adolescence as a preparatory stage for adulthood is essentially obsolete.


P. 255: Young people move within social enclaves, just like everybody else. The autonomous history of each new generation operates a lot like an ethnicity. Kids are a priori marginal. They live in a historically specific moment of their own, making sense of the world in new ways, different from the parental generation.

TwistyFaster

This is as good as an excuse as any to get y'all to read I Blame The Patriarchy:

For my part, I have stated on numerous occasions (following the materialization in my personal sphere of a pair of nieces), children are an oppressed class. Their universal and legitimately reviled unruliness is not natural. It is a product of neurosis generated by patriarchy’s two main replicatory units: the nuclear family, which directly supports male dominance, and the single mother household, which indirectly supports male dominance a) by acting as an underclass dependent for its survival on paternalism and b) by incubating a ready supply of disadvantaged candidates for membership in the all-important working and military classes.

Of course kids are obstreperous hellions. They dislike oppression as much as the next guy.

I'll drink to that.