Self-image, Sex, and Beauty
Maybe there’s a portrait in the attic somewhere, but there’s no doubt that Youth culture seems to be getting younger. It’s a mindset perpetuated mostly through the Internet, detached from real life with off-line identities in which people don’t actually age. It’s a lovers’ lane; an unpatrolled space that allows, forms and strengthens fake, virtual, or unreal expectations and affiliations. Whatever your other negative perceptions are of Millennial’s — entitled, self-centered, and overprotected — they are actually more civic-minded, open-minded, curious, and tolerant than previous generations. The dark side of is how it perceives age and sexuality in a very skewed way. Beauty takes on weirdly odd proportions with invasive, procedures that were only exceptional or corrective, but are now the standard. Photo shopped images are the norm. Consequently, more than half the population of women and about a third of American men worry about the physical effects of aging, a lot. The majority of in media have “had work” or plastic surgery or anti-aging injections to prevent them from looking their age. This is a country that doesn’t look back and conversations about history, aging, death and ultimately mortality or anything old are conspicuously absent. Sexuality has also become darkened by the freely accessible YouTube-able pornographization of intimacy and relationships. This may seem confusing to you if you are from a culture that doesn’t embrace these notions of modern love, but it’s their reality.
America’s Youth Culture
From the 60’s Beat Generation to the Millennial’s, there’s no doubt America is the mecca of a Youth oriented culture that has adopted a younger is better mindset, which probably goes against your cultural expectations. Kids are in control and some say it’s become a youth obsessed culture. With roughly 80 million U.S. Millennials influencing American life, this is a generational aspect of American culture we think is worth knowing. We don’t know who put the kids in charge: the kids themselves, their parents, or advertisers, but they overshadow the national culture in many more ways than previous generations. The irony is while they lack economic buying power – which was a requisite for demographic influence – they are the driving force behind how we live, think and process information; how we communicate, work, shop and consume; even how we view time, and even our perceptions of beauty.
Notes
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/visualnewscom/americas-perspective-on-a_b_3361939.html
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Youth_culture
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennials
Amit-Talai, Vered, and Helena Wulff, eds. 1995. Youth Cultures: A Cross-Cultural Perspective. London: Routledge.
Austin, Joe, and Michael Willard, eds. 1998. Generations of Youth: Youth Cultures and History in Twentieth-Century America. New York: New York University Press.
Brake, Michael. 1985. Comparative Youth Culture. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Fass, Paula S. 1977. The Damned and the Beautiful: American Youth in the 1920s. New York: Oxford University Press.
Gelder, Ken, and Sarah Thornton, eds. 1997. The Subcultures Reader. London: Routledge.
Inness, Sherrie, ed. 1998. Delinquents and Debutantes: Twentieth Century American Girls’ Culture. New York: New York University Press.
Kett, Joseph. 1977. Rites of Passage: Adolescence in America 1790 to the Present. New York: Basic Books.
Levi, Giovanni, and Jean-Claude Schmitt, eds. 1997. A History of Young People in the West, Vol. 1.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
