I am a Grenade

Maybe I was just really tired when I read this and the copy was wicked bad, but I did not like parts of this article.

Generally, I just felt like there was a severe lack of intersectionality in this discussion.

But I'll back up...


There were some things that I agreed with that I thought were really interesting points.

"The absence of a significant economic role for young people has made them dependent on their families for longer periods than their ancestors often were" (7).

I enjoyed reading about this discussion of the "youths" from the past and their role in society versus the role of the "teenager" in this society.  I look back at my own "teenage" years and can totally relate to this economic dependency.  I did not have a job--though my mother pressured me to find one.  I didn't have a car and my mother worked full time so getting a job was near impossible.  And nearly all jobs need previous experience, so it has been an endless cycle of being economically dependent on my parents.  I was given no allowance so I was totally dependent on my parents for money.  Which, as a working class family, was hard to come by.  I couldn't do anything because everything required money, and my father made me feel extremely guilty for asking for anything.  So I became accustomed to going without.

Me as a teen, hanging out in the mall and not buying anything. Look at that punk necklace! Hahaha!

Now, I agree with the first part of this text, and what Hine does in pointing out these ideas that we have about youth (similar to Raby's article).  But towards the end of the article it almost sounded as though Hine were agreeing with certain stereotypes.  Maybe I just don't understand what Hine was trying to say, specifically when he brought up the whole situation with the girl who gave birth at prom and discarded her baby.  He seemed to allow these teenage stereotypes stand without personally critiquing them, and when he offered a personal critique it was to condemn these actions as evil.

Not to mention the fact that he failed to look at this issue intersectionally at all.  Especially when he continued to say "young people crave contact with their families.  One of the most important incentives to teenage pregnancy [...] is that it is a way for the young woman to win individual attention she wouldn't ordinarily receive from family members" (25). And not really say anything to the contrary.  I have a huge problem with this. Mainly that I would challenge this point and ask about the specifics of this study that determined this "important incentive" such as did these "young women" want to get pregnant, or did they become pregnant due to lack of sex education--which is an extremely important thing to say.

Also, I found this article very "white, middle class, heteronormative" oriented.  And it seemed as though the focus was mainly on the "young women" population (specifically with the Teenage Mystique section).  So I was a bit put-off by how "hey, by the way, I put my white-middle-class-heteronormative penis in this piece."

Did anyone else feel like this?  Or is it because I could barely read this copy of the text?