One Comment to 'Oh mercy, it’s still going'
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Oh mercy, it’s still going
Posted By jake
So. Have you seen the dustup over on the Founder’s new digs? (We’ll consider this the official greeting to the Founder’s new gig, too–this webmonkey tends to procrastinate, as you’ve well noticed. Welcome!)
The comments are still going, days later.
Time for a confession. I…was a teenage boy. This decade, even!
It seems Katie’s post about teenage boys not being so bright stirred a hornet’s nest of gents who feel teenage boys are wilting violets whose honor needs defending (by launching into histrionics typical of the negative stereotypes of the opposite gender, no less!)
Here’s my take. If Katie is guilty of anything in the post, it’s hyperbole by means of simplification.
Is it fair to say teenage boys are idiots? Perhaps not in the grand scheme of society. In terms of various forms of raw intelligence, teenage boys can be quite bright.
Do teenage boys have a poorer capacity for decision-making than the men they’ll grow into? Without question. (With the exception of those who fail to grow beyond that box. See above.)
When I think of some of the decisions I made as a teen, I’m lucky to have made it through relatively unscathed. Teenage boys, as I was, aren’t all that great at assessing incentives and risks. It has a negative effect on decision making.
Pretending teens are adults and have adult decision-making capacities does them no favors. We might like cookie dough, but we don’t call it cookies. It’s not done yet. An appropriate approach for teens respects them as people and respects their growing independence without pretending that they have the judgment they’ll have as adults.
–Jake.
Aug 27th, 2008
“An appropriate approach for teens respects them as people…”
I agree completely which is why I think referring to them as stupid, (repeatedly, not just in the title) as idiots, as insanely besotted with sex, is an inappropriate approach. To go further and suggest that those teenage boys who are behaving in a civilized manner are somehow aberrations from the norm, struggling mightily to resist the hormonally driven urge to go out and do something stupid certainly fails to respect their growing independence.
These are the things that Katie said. Either she believes them or she was trolling for comments to generate buzz for her new blog. If the former, she deserves the backlash she’s generated; if the latter, then she got what she wanted.
Incidentally, your link is to Ms. Granju’s explanation of her post, not the actual post in question.