Beltane Waxing Planting Moon
In this month’s Atlantic an article investigates teen-age girls and the hook-up culture they now must navigate. Written by the daughter of an early feminist the article identifies the reason girls swim in this often self-destructive ocean is the Boyfriend Story. Teen girls today, as teen girls yesterday and of years ago, want to find a real, true, pure love–the Boyfriend Story. Never having been a teen-age girl and not having raised a daughter, I don’t feel qualified to assess the accuracy of the author’s premise.
It did get me to wondering though. What’s the story that propels teen-age boys? It’s not the Girlfriend Story, I know that much for sure. It might be the I Get Big and Strong Story. In this story the hero does not seek real, true, pure love, but the vehicle for becoming a man, usually a career focused drive, different in substance and in direction than the Boyfriend Story, but a story that puts teen-age boys on life’s highway like deer in front of an oncoming 18-wheeler just as surely as the Boyfriend Story puts girls on the same highway, facing down the same oncoming truck, just one carrying a different load.
I remember high school, hoping good grades would make the I Get Big and Strong story happen for me. If that wasn’t it, maybe it would be acting. I did Our Town and had to learn to walk like an adult. If neither of those worked out, it could be leadership. The class president had to amount to something, didn’t he?
The I Get Big and Strong story is a not we story, it is an I story. As the teen-age girl runs up on the shoals in search of a partner, the teen-age boy hits the rocks alone while fending off the competition, making himself bigger, faster, stronger, smarter, cleverer.
What do you think? What is the boy’s equivalent of the Boyfriend Story?
