Feeling Younger

It happened. I turned 30. Woe is me. Just kidding--but this milestone has been accompanied by certain clichés: hangovers are more severe, working out is becoming necessary, and I've somehow started to feel like it's really go time. No more dilly-dallying.

Which is why I've really been enjoying TV Land's Younger. The protagonist, Liza, is a 40-year-old mom and divorcée who, after 15 years out of the workforce, pretends she's 26 to get a job in publishing. In getting a second chance at her twenties, Liza reawakens the youthful spirit that laid dormant throughout her marriage. Produced by the guy who brought us Sex and the City, Younger plays out in the typical New York sitcom manner, with plots introduced and satisfyingly resolved in 20 minutes. But there's a narrative through-line that keeps me coming back, besides the will-she-get-discovered anticipation. It's the idea that self-exploration shouldn't have to end when your twenties do.

In other words: "nevertheless, she persisted." 

The show is lighthearted and goofy, but it gets certain things right about millennials and this zeitgeist. For one, it affirms that the ubiquity of social media is both exhilarating and daunting, and that what goes on behind the 'gram isn't always so picturesque. What I love about the show is how effortlessly it empathizes in two generations (X and Y) the struggles that we as women face in excelling in our careers and love lives. The challenges differ according to age but are universal: how do I get taken seriously? How do I figure out what I want?

At 30, I'm smack-dab in the middle of these two generations. For example, the geographic and emotional shifts I made in my twenties are now mostly quelled, but my career is just taking off, not yet fully embedded. Like Liza, I find myself wondering whether everything will work out (though my fears have less to do with fraud than climate change). More personally, though, I find myself still comparing my choices to my peers' and the lives they've constructed for themselves. Whether it's the patriarchy, the millennial highlight reel on social media, or my ever-questioning brain, I don't know, but sometimes the self-imposed pressure of go time mixes with self-doubt and I wonder if I'm just following a formula for success instead of designing one for myself.

Thanks to this character on Younger, though, and her 26-year-old coworker (played fabulously by a millennial whose pop culture appearances I grew up with, Hillary Duff), I'm feeling like time is elastic. Funnily enough, in season two there's an episode featuring a character who is a thinly-veiled Meg Jay of The Defining Decade. When I was in Copenhagen at age 25, trying to figure my life out, I devoured her book, which reminded me to live a life of intention and to eschew the notion that your twenties are a throwaway decade. To see this theme pop up on the show felt circular, like I'm doubling down on that intentionality while also asking some new (but similar) questions. It's funny to remember the same concerns I had then take a new form now, like: what does a (queer) partnership mean for me? How do I make a stable life while holding onto adventure? Younger and The Defining Decade may not be able to answer these for me, but they're providing a helpful lens nevertheless.

Girls, Revisited

It seemed weirdly epic, Sunday night, to be sitting in the dark in K's apartment, binge-watching Season 5 of Girls in preparation for that night's premiere of the final season.  Back in 2013 I wrote about feeling like an 'emerging adult' as I handed in my master's thesis on the show, and now, in 2017, more endings and more beginnings are emerging for me. It's been 3.5 years since leaving Denmark, a year with K, 3 years at Twitter, 3 months since leaving, 3 weeks since the Trump era has begun. So much has changed since that blog post, and yet I still find myself wanting to find some full-circle niceties on which to judge the interim.

still self-satisfied, always wanting more 

Like Hannah, Marnie, Jessa, and Shoshanna's world, my circumstances have changed and I'm older, but the patterns of progress and closure still feel messy. Unlike them, though, I hope (to god) I've evolved more than they have. Marred by immaturity, obliviousness, and lack of self-awareness, the girls of Girls are just barely adults after 6 years, yet I keep watching the train wreck for the few, sublime moments of heart that Lena Dunham pulls off. What continues to fascinate me about the storytelling of the show is that the characters, while perhaps caricatures of people, are inexorably who they are. This is different from saying they know who they are, but they chase after some vision of what they want, at all costs. This kind of storytelling is bold; it may diverge from realism into satire, but there's a certain steadfast adherence to depicting the messiness of emerging adulthood in the show's style, stories, protagonists, and comedy that I admire.

It would do me well, in this time in my life, to appreciate that I may not ever be done, baked, out of the oven. I want to remember my former appreciation of the process, not outcome, of adulthood, as I described in the blog post. It's hard to remember, much less accept, that change can feel like crisis, loss, or adventure, and that curiosity eschews closure. These notions are hard for us as we settle into our adult lives, where bank account zeros and career achievements and personal milestones start to feel more like must-haves than guidelines. But believing in the process (especially creatively) means taking risks, and this gets harder as we start to decide, 'well, this is it, this is my life.'

Today, though, on a walk in the sun with icicles dripping off roofs and a podcast in my ear, I vowed to remember my potential to change for the better. Instead of nostalgia for the grad school days of being broke and wistful, I'm choosing to see the past three years as a continuation of emergence into that flow of adulthood. My Danish may be rusty but I'm fluent in queer. I may not long to see all the movies all the time, but maybe I've consumed enough stories to know how to tell a good one someday. We'll just have to see how it plays out.

It's not a phase, it's a process.

This morning, as I clicked "save as PDF" on my masters thesis, I brought an end to my formal education. The funny thing is, I don't feel like anything is ending. I wrote my thesis on emerging adulthood in HBO's Girls, and now, thesis done, at twenty-six and officially beyond the official age restriction by which developmental psychologists categorize emerging adults (18-25), I no longer feel allowed to use that label for myself. But I'm still emerging.

Emerging adults live their twenties in a state of exploration-of careers, relationships, friendships, worldviews, travels-without settling on one life pattern. It's a documented period of upheaval, intense setbacks and overhauling questions of identity, but it also is a time of great freedom and ambition. Emerging adults constantly ask, who am I and what will I become? None of this is comforting, nor should it be. The only saving grace is that we hope, one day, it will all resolve itself.

But my thesis has perhaps showed me otherwise. The crux of my argument revolves around the fact that Girls may be proof that emerging adulthood is not a phase of life to get through, but rather a process. As Hannah, Marnie, Jessa and Shoshanna try on different identities for size, their narratives of self-exploration lead not necessarily to a clear and confident sense of self, but rather to a transformation of that self and, paradoxically, a lack of closure. The way the narrative works doubles this impulse, by accumulating moments based on emotions rather than plot. Things that come seemingly out of nowhere shift the story in directions no one saw coming, but these moments make everything feel more human--and messy. It is as if the entire series, in character and story pattern, is working away from enlightenment and towards confusion. Or at least change. Instead of funneling constantly towards conclusion, Girls investigates the middle of a cycle without hinting at the end of it. The narrative of emerging adulthood, in Girls and my own life, is ultimately not a phase but a process.

So, using my age and finished education to mark an abrupt end to my emerging adulthood is silly, because I can't declare myself "done" and "adult" when the phase itself is actually just a process that potentially never ends. Maybe the real rite of passage out of emerging adulthood and into full adulthood is not the formative threshold one crosses--a degree, owning a home, a marriage, kids--but the moment when you realize that you, as a person, are constantly in production.

Perhaps recognizing that this is a process is actually the first real step in leaning towards, or actually acknowledging, my adulthood. I actually really enjoyed the process of writing the thesis, whatever the outcome. So I'm trying to listen to that feeling of staying in the present in my writing, to dive into the uncertainty with a disregard for any concluding significance the process might generate. As I emerge as an adult and a writer, maybe this uncertainty of process is actually the key to everything.

I'm almost getting it kind of together.

Girls Against Boys?

Uh oh.

So I've been reading a lot lately about how millenials are in a "post-dating" world. There's Hanna Rosin's polemic book The End of Men. There are the women at The Gaggle who encourage opening up your eyes to the men you never considered. There are the depressingly spot-on Atlantic and New York Times articles condemning hookup culture, texting, and online dating. There are the Acculturated symposium articles that ask "Can Men Be Men Again?" The (horrible horror) film above, Girls Against Boys, seems to be an extreme prediction of a result of this current battle of the sexes. So, in a departure from my usual film-focused posts (which nevertheless owes a lot to Girls) I'd like to weigh in with my take on "post dating."

Of particular importance here is the fact that I don't date a lot. This is both a conscious and subconscious decision. The simplest explanation is that living in Denmark as a non-Dane, I may be scaring off potential interests because they worry that I'll leave the country (which I did, once, after a French boyfriend broke it off for precisely this reason), so neither of us tries from the start.  But the second-simplest explanation is that it's too hard.

Sometimes I'm full of rage, like these murderous women, that post-feminism has rendered men lazy, unambitious and averse to commitment. Unfulfilling past experiences with "the casual thing" tell me I don't want that anymore, but how do we get out of the cycle when casual sex is everywhere and endorsed? So my anger brews until I (wrongly) peg all men in sight as commitment-phobes without getting to know them.

Sometimes I think it's us girls' fault for putting up with casual sex. Some argue that casual sex empowers women; I think that in a society with more highly educated women than men, we're really just scared that if we stick up for our right to monogamy, we'll scare the boys away because they can chase easier tail. Plus, casual sex is awful and awkward. The insidiousness of hookup options leaves the mature women partnerless.

Sometimes I'm complacent, more interested in my comfy bed with its comforter that hugs me just right, and that doesn't snore. Reading a book on a Saturday night often feels much more fulfilling than braving the sticky floors of bars, only to have unwelcome men barge their way into my (great) conversations with my friends.

Sometimes I simply have no idea where to meet men. In my daily life I'm surrounded by students (I can feel my mom repeating, "they're too young, Kate!") and, worse, startup entrepreneurs. And with a job, a master's program, intensive Danish courses, and an active social life, all my time for new activities is taken up.

Sometimes I pity the men who've missed out on the encouragement and support that my fellow female generation has reaped. Masculinity is confusing these days; how are boys supposed to learn how to be men if Bruce Willis's guns and hipster jeans are the only guiding symbols?

But most of all, I don't date because I am an emerging adult. I have a lot of things to work on, for myself. I genuinely feel as though I do not really know who I am yet. I would argue that most of my peers agree. We're in the midst of deciding careers, lifestyles, worldviews, and finances for ourselves, and this is more than a full-time job. Therefore, none of us can possibly know what we want in a relationship, and what we have to offer the other person.

So I guess I wish that the media would quit ringing the alarm bells about millenial dating, because it's making a pressure-filled situation even more stressful. Could we instead focus on the fact that emerging adults need help and guidance too, much like teenagers and new parents? At this age, I'd much rather be asked the question "how would you describe yourself" than, for example, "what do you do for a living?" The latter implies a fixed identity, while the former hints at the truth - that we have the capacity to decide who we are and who we become. And that we are ever-changing.

This is why I love Girls.

Note: I am currently writing my masters thesis at the University of Copenhagen on the realism in HBO's Girls. What follows is the first of probably many musings on the series as I attempt to work my way around its complexity. Bear with me. 

This is why I love Girls. 

Hannah tells Adam: "I don't even want a boyfriend. I just want someone who wants to hang out all the time, and thinks I'm the best person in the world, and wants to have sex with only me." 

The fluidity, weirdness, and unsteadiness of the romantic relationships in the series epitomize the confusion we girls/women have in our mid-twenties. No one wants to commit but they want intimacy anyways, the sex is disappointing, and self-doubt and insecurity may prevent us from realizing who is truly good for us at this age. 

Gone are the late teen years, when everything felt like an angst-y yet somehow carefree, monumental game. Now, pressure to "figure out who you are" comes internally, as if we're bursting from the seams, because we're sick of being unsure. So we try on personalities to see if they stick. Hannah, an aspiring writer who talks about writing much more than she writes, does everything for The Story, accumulating experiences and tough skin. Jessa is "unsmoteable" when it comes to sex but can't get the rest of her life in order, and Marnie thinks she knows who she is until she dumps Charlie and loses her job, at which point she's not so sure. 

I don't just love Girls because of self-identification; it's not just because I see parts of myself in the female characters. Because doesn't every narrative strive for some type of sympathy or empathy? What I love about Girls is its ability to show the commonplace, un-showable awkwardness of life for people in their twenties. 

Especially the awkwardness of sex. No one seems to know how to have great sex at this age - and Girls shows just how true this is. From the first episode, awkward sexuality rears its head: Adam, Hannah's casual fling, commands her to lie on her stomach, hold her legs up behind her, and stay there while he grabs lube - and he'll "consider" getting a condom. Then he proceeds to have sex with her in that clearly uncomfortable position on the couch, while she talks her way through her discomfort, and Adam tells her to play the quiet game. Clearly, sex and communication are both murky waters here. 

Then there's Charlie's coddling love for Marnie, who finds it suffocating. She wants a real man instead, maybe like Booth Jonathan, who gets her so hot that she goes and masturbates in the office of the art gallery where she works. This, by itself, has made a lot of people uncomfortable, because we're apparently not supposed to see female sexuality displayed in this manner on tv. But in Season 2, episode 3, it gets more uncomfortable in a different way: Booth's dominating masculinity is laughable as he straddles her on his hipster bed. She can't help but burst out laughing when it's over - all that bravado came to this terrible sex?  For Shoshanna, it's her virginity that takes center stage, and stamps her like a pariah (she wants to be so much more than her inexperience, but she exudes it). For Jessa, sex with multiple partners is linked to her wandering - she's good at superficial encounters, but she needs guidance in the rest of her life. 

This terrible sex (which also features Lena Dunham's bravery of showing her very normal, not supermodel naked body), has so much honesty that it feels true and also absurd. And that's why it's funny. It's not quite the Cringe Comedy epitomized by Ricky Gervais and The Office, because we're not laughing at the characters' own social ineptitude, flaws, or lack of self-awareness. The girls of Girls have all of those things, but the comedy doesn't target them. It's an "I've been there" comedy that is deeply sympathetic and honest about how hard it is to make sense of it all, inside and outside the bedroom.

This awkwardness of sexual encounters is the most acute example of what makes this series progressive. In the evolution of sex on screen, we've moved from censorship and ellipses to gratuitous sexuality and the fantasy of the sex symbol. But even in the quality drama currently on cable, sex is rarely honest. Too often it's a plot device or a time for gazing. Rarely does it show a less-than-perfect body. But in Girls it fills the characters with honesty, because it capitalizes on insecurities, miscommunications, and messy expectations--therefore showing just how human they are. 

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, sex presents these women as an extension of their personalities, desires, and big questions. This works quite well for the show's realism, because what other place is more honest than the bedroom? Yet in a setting that film and television usually marks as matters of "private life," in Girls the striving for intimacy (and often not achieving it) is an exposure technique that takes young women's private lives into the public sphere. This is because sex is sex, but it also becomes a metaphor for the uncertainty of the young female mind, with all the pressures, hangups, misgivings, signals, and overwhelming everythingness of being a 24-year-old woman. So thanks, Lena Dunham, for showing the world what it's like to be us, inside-out.