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• Friday, November 21, 2008 11:32 AM

  Today's teens, another take

  I'm also the mother of a teen, a boy. He's homeschooled. It's a completely different world. The girls he knows are neat, clean, unfashionable, un-dieted and un-painted. The boys all look like Skid Row rejects, including him. He's growing his hair out, can't get braces yet to deal with a non-cosmetic problem, and he has a baby mustache that he doesn't want to start shaving.

  He's also very popular with girls, the kind of popular where they hand him their number unasked. If you ask him, his secret is treating them "like human beings". He's also really interesting, the kind of interesting that makes even adults sit up and take notice. He's working toward lifeguarding. He's studying a second language. He's not only a gamer, but a designer of games or parts of games. If there's a free building or modeling tool out there, he's used it. What he's never used is Axe or hair gel, never mind tanning cream or guyliner.

  Now, these are not hotties he's attracting. He doesn't know any hotties, which isn't deliberate on my part, just an artifact of his education, but when I showed him Hot Chicks with Douchebags, he busted out laughing, not only at the douchebags, but at the hot chicks. He thought they were just as gross as the douchebags. He doesn't like orange tans, flat stomachs, make-up and ironed hair, not to mention the stupid facial expressions and exaggerated modeling poses. Compared to the girls he knows, they looked like aliens.

  Middle school and high school are ruthless hierarchies, and for girls, the only things that counts are looks and manipulation skills. Score high on a test or even be genuinely kind, and you drop to the bottom. For boys, it's athletic prowess and douchbaggery. I personally think that 99% of our problem in our twenties is that it takes more than a decade to recover from this crap, and even when we do, our sexual tastes can get stuck.

  I was lucky. I scored too high on tests for my looks to matter one way or another. The men I dated as a young adult were the kind of dweebs who gave up on hotties at about age 12, which was the age at which I gave up on football stars.

  Is that population dwindling? I don't know. What I see from my current, 40-something vantage point is that the ones I knew are still happily married. The homeschoolers, who are pretty much all dweebs, are very slow to date. They seem to be too busy figuring out who they are, and are under no pressure to get laid. Sexual precocity is frowned on in that community, by the kids themselves as well as by the adults.

  A man who wants a Maxim-quality woman is going to have to turn himself into either a Fortune-500-quality man or a douchebag. Sorry, but there's no other way. Wailing about it as unfair or sexist isn't going to change it, because it's really neither. These women are putting in some serious expense and effort to look that way. Why should they do it for a man who wouldn't give them the time of day if they didn't go to the gym, didn't tan, didn't diet and did nothing in the morning but shower and dress?

  My meditation on HCwDB turned out to be really good for me. Sometimes it's important to be clear on what you're expected to bring to the table and who you're expected to sit next to, especially if you don't want to eat at that table.

  I'm also glad for my constant exposure to "free-range teenagers". They're wonderful.

  —Anonymous_Too Read Anonymous_Too's other letters
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