You can respond in any number of ways. You can address the articles directly, or you can address the issue in general. Are guys and girls being stereotyped in movies and pop culture or is there truth to what you just read?
They grow up much too fast -- Is 10 the new 18 for girls: Phillip Morris
By Phillip Morris, The Plain Dealer
October 30, 2009, 5:01AM
A few weekends ago, I gave my daughter $20 and sent her across the street to buy us a large pizza for lunch.Twenty minutes later, she came back with a small pizza and a new pair of shoes.
That’s when I knew we had reached a critical point in our relationship. I knew my gig as Daddy, ruler of her universe, was just about up. Any day, I suddenly knew, I would become little more than a means to an end, a figure to be tolerated in small doses and mostly on her terms. I had heard that this day of parent and child reckoning would come. But I had hoped that it would hold off until she was well into the insanity of her middle teenage passage.
It wasn’t that long ago that the little girl, who is suddenly taller, enjoyed sitting next to me and watching SpongeBob SquarePants. If I added a bowl of cheddar popcorn and lemonade to the entertainment, I was the coolest dad ever.
Now this little girl was disappearing with lunch money and making spontaneous shoe purchases. What bomb went off inside her head? How did I lose her so quickly? I am not yet emotionally prepared to be reduced to her personal ATM/chauffeur/general attendant. I still feel the need to push her in swings and give her piggyback rides. The girl is still in elementary school, for crying out-loud.
Earlier this year, a very intuitive friend gave me a book written by journalist Beth Harpaz with this arresting title: "13 is the New 18, and Other Things My Children Taught Me While I Was Having a Nervous Breakdown Being Their Mother". I’ve only managed to read the prologue, and already, I’m very afraid. It reads like something from the Book of Revelation. It probably should be required reading for today's parents, whose children will eventually use the tools of social media to perform stunning end-runs around house rules, children who will go to Google before ever thinking to consult the people who gave birth to them.
"Childhood doesn’t fade away with the onset of puberty; now it disappears all at once," writes Harpaz. "Thirteen is the new eighteen, and nothing in your own adolescence can prepare you for this moment. Soon you will be the shortest person in your house and your taste in music will be despised. The kid who just a few years ago wouldn’t leave you alone long enough to drink a cup of coffee before it got cold now can’t bear to spend five minutes in your presence."
Harpaz is raising boys. That’s why I’m especially alarmed by her work. Everyone knows that girls mature much more quickly than boys. So if 13 is the new 18 for boys, what is the new 18 for girls?
The thought makes me shudder.
Halloween is tomorrow. This year the child says she going as an "80’s throwback." She fancies herself Cyndi Lauper. With the help of her mother, she shopped at thrift stores to cobble together an outfit of an old, formal looking black dress and accessories like cheap jewelry, gloves and granny boots.
But why did mother and daughter both feel that fishnet stockings were an appropriate finishing touch to this get up? It’s not enough that she’s buying shoes with pizza money. Now she’s rocking fishnets on Halloween.
Don't get me wrong. She's a great daughter. But I tell myself that I've got to really enjoy these next few precious months, before my academically and artistically talented young girl officially declares me her Swiss banker and sashays off to the jungle of middle school.
Is it me, or is 10 the new 18 for girls?
Why are there so many movies about guys who won't grow up?
The plight of modern-day masculinity is easily solved, according to pretty much every recent Hollywood comedy: don't grow up. Who – or what – is to blame?
Steve Rose, The Guardian, Thursday 10 May 2012 15.00 EDT
Growing up sucks. Being young sucks too. Especially if you're a white American male. You need only look at the four heroes of American Pie: Reunion. Back in 1999, they were teenagers burdened by hormonal urges, peer-group humiliation and a lack of girls to date. Fast forward 13 years, and they've merely inherited a new set of burdens: careers, babies, young rivals and a lack of girls to date. These dudes got it so wrong.
To get it right, they should have watched just about every other Hollywood comedy of the past decade. There they'd have found the solution to the plight of American masculinity: don't grow up. Just stretch out that period between adolescence and parenthood to the extent it becomes a prolonged state of infantile bliss. Teenage bad behavior on a grown-up salary; being old enough to drink but still having your mum do your laundry; not having to share your Star Wars figures with anyone. This is the new American dream.
This perpetual state of immaturity has spread like a fungus across the movie landscape, the freshest example being the Duplass brothers' Jeff Who Lives At Home. As the title suggests, Jeff, played by Jason Segel, is the latest in a long line of movie men-children with no great urge to fly the nest, and why should he, when his mum feeds him, puts him up, lets him smoke weed in her basement and no doubt does his laundry? This backwards evolution in movie masculinity might well have started with Tom Hanks in Big, which somehow made the idea of a 12-year-old boy in a 30-year-old body look like the cutest thing. Get rid of Big's mystical body-swap premise and what do you get? Adam Sandler. He was encouraging schoolkids to pee their pants in 1995's Billy Madison, and 15 years later there he still is, peeing in the pool with his buddies in Grown Ups. In the interim period, many more have limbo-ed under the maturity bar. The Frat Pack stable, for example (John C Reilly and Will Ferrell in Step Brothers must represent some kind of landmark). Then the vaguely more reflective Judd Apatow crew (at least Seth Rogen actually realises he needs to grow up in Knocked Up). Not to mention Kevin Smith, Jack Black, Danny McBride, Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott. Without arrested masculine development, where would American comedy be?
The movies can't be held entirely responsible, but they're hardly the solution either. Hollywood's manchild heroes usually exist in an artificial reality sustained by other movie constructs. Chief among these is a mature female love interest with a blind spot about men. These heroines invariably manage to hold down a serious job, manage a family, and generally cope with the adult world while still being gorgeous, and yet they find an ungroomed layabout half their mental age irresistibly attractive. If you were Katherine Heigl in Knocked Up, would you seriously settle for Seth Rogen?
Could the triumph of the manchild be any reflection on the people making movies? The ones who are paid a fortune to stay in touch with their inner children and keep us in touch with ours, by spoon-feeding us infantile comedies and superhero movies? Go down that road and you start to sound like a bitter parent bent on spoiling the frat party. Invoke manly actors of yesteryear and you sound like a cranky reactionary yearning for some spurious golden age of masculinity (I'll get my hat and walking stick in a minute, don't worry). But where previous generations rebelled even when they had nothing to rebel against, to paraphrase Marlon Brando in The Wild One, this one seems content to play in some sort of giant pop-culture creche. It might be fun, but it's not clever and it's not Big.