Selfish wankery and other age-defying feats

Today smacking: The assumption of adulthood

For the last six years or so, every single time I have told someone my age, the response has invariably been something along the lines of: “No way! I thought you were a lot older than that!” Since I was young when this started, I thought it was cool to be older. But now? Not so much. Now it’s verging on insulting. So recently I have begun to ask people if what makes them think I am older has anything to do with the fine wrinkles around my eyes brought on by a long youth under a southern sun without sunglasses or semblance of an effective ozone layer. “No,” is always the response I get, and while I know that this is obligatory politeness, I cannot ignore the many responses which go on to say, “It’s nothing to do with your face and how you look; it’s the way you present yourself and the way you speak.”

These days it’s generally agreed – certain religious customs notwithstanding – that there is no set age at which one can decide, “Yes, now I am an adult.” To earn the title you have to act like one, and to keep the title you must continue to act like one, all your life. But far too many adults think that by virtue of being older than 21, 31, 41 – whatever age determines it for them – they are certifiably responsible, card-carrying ‘adults’ whose word is now wiser and more informed than that of people who are younger. This seems to give people license to be the biggest fuck-knuckles on earth; they feel they’ve earned that right by reaching an arbitrary age. Yeah, congratulations; you didn’t die yet. Just like it is cakewalk to conceive a child (for Pete’s sake, you can even do it by accident) but a mammoth undertaking to be a parent, it similarly takes no intelligence at all to grow older, but an enormous amount of self-checking and introspection to be an ‘adult’.

I have a friend, let’s call her Vivica because, well, Vivica is a pretty cool and unusual name – and why do I have to justify my friends’ aliases anyway? – who right now is suffering the kind of mistreatment that makes me righteously indignant. Her suffering is all in the name of, “I’m an adult so I can say and do what I want.” I’ve talked before about good parenting, most notably that a good parent should not be afraid to stand up to their offspring. I guess what I forgot is that a good parent should also act like they were born well before MC Hammer was crab-shuffling across the stage in ballooning pants and Baby had not yet stammered to Johnny Castle that she carried a watermelon.

My friend Vivica is under a lot of stress right now because her mother is, in one particular respect, acting more like an adolescent than her twenty-something daughter. You see, Vivica’s parents divorced about a year ago now. The reasons for the divorce were pretty horrible: apart from her parents not having gotten along for many years, Vivica’s father is an alcoholic, and the emotional and financial strain this was having on the family and the parental relationship finally caused it to break. When the divorce was finalised, Vivica’s parents sold the family home, her mother bought a house not far away, and her father moved back to his home country on the other side of the world.

Understandably Vivica’s mother harbours a lot of anger towards the man who, in her view, broke the family apart and gave her some twenty years of frustration and pain. But equally as understandably, Vivica’s father is still Vivica’s father, and she still wants and needs to be in contact with him. Every woman is, after all, still just a little girl who needs her daddy. But Vivica’s mother’s bitterness towards him and emotional fragility over the whole issue makes it impossible for Vivica to have any semblance of a relationship with her father, even from 17000 kilometres away. Vivica cannot talk about her father, and is forced to call him in secret. This is because at the mere mention of him, Vivica’s mother either spews unresolved rage about him or regresses into emotional infancy, unable to accept the things that have happened.

I realise that divorce is a horrible, horrible thing to happen to anyone and that it takes great emotional toll on all involved. And I also have great, heaping piles of respect for anyone who does make the decision to divorce, knowing that to stay in an unhealthy relationship does nothing but harm to parents and children alike. But when the dust settles, there is still a parent-child relationship here, and despite the fact that both Vivica and her mother are adults, it is still Vivica’s mother’s responsibility – nay, obligation – to show her children that their father is still a man to be respected and remembered. He was, after all, always a loving father to them, and he should not have stripped from him the right to continue to be that loving father.

Vivica’s mother has every right to still be bitter, angry and not-even-close-to-over-it. But to inflict this upon her children is immature, impulsive and a touch selfish. She has not considered that it’s not her daughter’s role to listen while she reflects on how much she both loves and hates her ex-husband. That’s what her fifty-something, married, divorced and everything-in-between friends are for.

Even the impassioned, wilful, watermelon-carrying Baby in that greatest of eighties movies, Dirty Dancing, learns that adulthood has nothing to do with age. It has everything to do with how you act and how you deal. There are many subtle tells which indicate to the world that you are an adult, the least of which are those forehead furrows and the grey shadows in the lines beside your mouth which L’Oreal wants you to banish to the seventh circle of hell. Adulthood comes on with subtlety, but you know when it’s there. And you definitely know when it isn’t, or when it has temporarily lapsed like in Vivica’s mother’s case.

It’s a never-ending struggle, to continue to be an adult, and at times we all want to regress back to the halcyon days of childhood, if halcyon they were. But with age comes obligation, and when our immaturity and selfishness is hurting others, it’s time for most of us to take a long, hard look at ourselves. And a few turns with a good therapist wouldn’t go astray, either.

When dads became bumbling idiots

Today smacking: the Bumbling Idiot Dad archetype

At risk of turning into the old lady sitting in the rocking chair on the front porch, polishing her shotgun and whistling through the gap where that front tooth should be, muttering, “Back in my day, we used to walk to school uphill both ways, even with a broken leg and tuberculosis, and we were grateful for it!” I must express that I feel there’s a gaping hole where our fathers used to be.

I blame this stupid archetype that came along around fifteen years ago: the Bumbling Idiot Dad. This archetype has single-handedly managed to reduce a generation of fathers to the status of the gum stuck to the bottom of the world’s shoe, and it’s so wrong and destructive that it makes me want to scoop out my eyes with a rusty teaspoon for sheer despair.

It began with Homer Simpson, the lovable but unfathomably stupid foil to the upright responsibility of beleaguered wife Marge. Now, since I grew up on a diet of The Simpsons I can hardly bash it with a clear conscience – and besides, that chip the Fox Network put in my brain will shock my neurones into a catatonic stupor, and I hardly want to be more mind-numbingly boring than I already am. But my horror remains that the character of Homer Simpson inspired a league of Bumbling Idiot Dad characters in our comedy sphere, and it’s ruining our appreciation of the actual father role.

You know the type of character the Bumbling Idiot Dad (BID) is. His head is almost permanently in the clouds, and he often conjures inspired but ultimately stupid schemes in order to achieve his ends, which are always selfish and childish. His wife is tempered and patient and supports him no end, though clearly he doesn’t deserve it since he is partially retarded and frequently on the brink of destroying everything the family holds dear. He gives ill-conceived advice to his 2.3 children, sending them on exploits derived of bad decisions. And all the while we laugh, and we laugh, and we laugh – until we choke on our Doritos and realise our arses are plastered to the couch for the rest of eternity.

The shame is that Homer Simpson was pure comedic perfection, but lesser producers, scriptwriters and networks evidently saw the cash cow that The Simpsons quickly became, and since then we’ve been battered from all sides by an army of poorly-rendered, frustratingly stupid characters all trying to imitate the classic BID. But they completely fail to be even remotely funny or clever. (I’m looking at you, Family Guy: you and your shameless Homer and Marge Simpson rip-off characters. And I’m looking at you, Everybody Loves Raymond: you and your complete mockery of the family unit, and your devaluation of really serious relationship issues, you utter waste of space and air time.)

We are turning fatherhood into a running joke.

I feel sorry for dads in all this, because the BID archetype is just small part of a larger deterioration in our culture of the value of the father role. Fathers these days are too often immediately second-class to mothers just by virtue of their being male. Mothers are given custody of their children often quite unquestioningly in custody disputes. Women are taking the final say in reproduction and how and when the family will expand or not. Don’t misread me: it is essential that women take over the microphone when it comes to what they do with their own bodies. But I cannot see how it is fair that, once there are children in the picture, a supposedly equal parenting relationship will intrinsically give the father’s opinions less voice than the mother’s.
(There’s an expansion of this idea over at Violent Acres, if you’re interested.)

I have raved on about how important I think good parenting is. It’s also important to value what both parents essentially are within the family unit, which is, in a nutshell, really crucial and valuable. It’s destructive and foolish to perpetuate a stereotype that so greatly devalues everything that a father is, can be, and should be. Can you imagine if there was an emerging stereotype in our media of the Bumbling Idiot Mother? Oh, how the feminists would crow!

Speaking of which; there are some who will say it is the rise of feminism which has in large part helped to push this deadbeat dad character in to our entertainment in an effort to Put Down the Man, or whatever it is people seem to think Those Feminists are doing these days. But since true feminism is about equality across genders, and not pushing one gender down for the purpose of advancing the other(s), we can’t say it’s all the feminists’ faults. Sorry, angry mob, you’ll have to douse those torches and put down the pitchforks for now.

I’m blaming, in half part, the laziness of our entertainment vehicles for this. How hard is it to come up with a new and interesting set of characters for a new programme, instead of re-hashing the same old stupid stereotypes time after time? It’s not that hard at all, but the thing is, the TV networks don’t have to. It is we who so gleefully lap up this ridiculous premise that it’s funny to laugh at incompetent parenting. This is where I place the rest of the blame. It’s our stupid faults for tuning in to see how Ray Barone will stick his foot in his mouth this week, thereby turning wife Debra into a screeching harridan, or how Peter Griffin’s latest hair-brained scheme will put his family’s life and income in danger while Lois Griffin sits patiently by.

I really wish we wouldn’t watch this crap when there are so many better-sketched characters out there; characters which are grounded in originality and don’t reek of influences much better than themselves. By supporting and believing this crap, we’re helping to destroy everything that a father should aspire to and be proud to be, and we should be really worried.

Newsflash: Britney Spears found to be human

Today smacking: An insensitive media

So, Britney Spears shaved her own head, which according to psychologists who have never met her, may or may not be symptomatic of a full-scale breakdown.

In light of that, I was going to write this whole diatribe about how ashamed the media should be of itself for turning Britney’s obvious difficulties into such amusement. But then I realised I couldn’t really be angry at a media that is just doing exactly what we expect it to do, as fucked up as that is, and as disgusted and nauseated as it makes me.

I feel nothing but sorry for the poor girl. Never mind that she has the paparazzi on her back all the time, or that the whole world is interested in her private life, or that she just split from her husband, or that her career may never recover: what I feel is the most salient issue here is that she just gave birth to her second child. How could anyone possibly feel normal in her situation? Even in a stable, loving relationship with financial security and family for support, a new mother can find herself beset by feelings of incompetence and depression at the very best of times. With some help this, in some cases, will be diagnosed as postpartum depression, after which a new mother can hopefully get all the support and understanding she needs. Poor Britney has no hope of psychological stability with the hounds of fame nipping at her heels. The world seems to have forgotten that the girl's body is surely still in the grip of the after-effects of pregnancy, and it will be a while yet before even her body – let alone her life – feels normal.

So I am championing Britney Spears, the mother and the human, whom none of us really knows, and whom I suspect doesn’t really know herself. I sincerely hope she gets all the help she needs and finds herself on the sunny side of the street, with the world at her feet, sometime soon.

Mum and dad - now with sticky marshmallow centre

Today smacking: Spineless parents and their rambunctious spawn

This subject is doing the rounds on reality TV with Supernanny and her ilk, and with good reason: quite possibly the single most annoying thing in the world since Nigerian spam e-mail is when you see children, in public, out of control, whilst under the watchful eye of parents whose disciplinary skills, quite frankly, suck donkey balls.

I’ll start by flagrantly NOT providing a caveat for not having kids of my own. For this paragraph would be the part where lesser folk say, “I don’t have children, so I don’t necessarily understand what it’s like to raise them, however… ” but those people evidently have a sludge of melted marshmallow where a spine should be, and are so afraid of their own opinions that I can only conclude they believe that forming a coherent thought might cause gas to burst out of their ears, react with the opinions of others and cause an A-bomb OF THOUGHT. I will make no such apology. I may not have kids, but I have to exist in the same public spaces as them, and they and their parents have no more right to fuck up the surrounding environs than I do.

I referred to Supernanny above. Her disciplinary premise is simple. Is the child acting up? Give them a warning and a clear threat of punishment. The child acts up again? PUNISH. No ifs or buts, and under no circumstances will there be any bargaining with the child.

I have a lot of sympathy for parents, but not enough that I will go easy on them when they make paltry attempt to keep their kids under control. I do not understand this phenomenon I see of parents who have absolutely no idea how to discipline their children. Child-rearing, much to my disappointment, does not come with its own manual, but surely this one is a no-brainer: tell your kids what they have to do, and if they don’t do it, punish the fuckers. How else they gonna learn?

I was in a shop recently which is kind of like a department store except that when you want to buy something, you have to order it, take a number, and then wait among the grimy masses until some pimply kid with dead eyes retrieves it from the warehouse for you. I purchased what I needed, took my number, and proceeded to wait, but this did not turn out to be the kind of calm, glazed-expression waiting one usually accomplishes in this store. Oh, no. For in the queue, ready to raise hell, was a smaller-than-knee-high little spawn of Mussolini and her painfully Incompetent Mother.

Little Mussolini was named Zoe. How do I know that? Oh, only because, every 2.4 seconds, Incompetent Mum would call her sugar-addled, hyperactive child’s name in a futile attempt to grab her attention and stop little Zoe from doing whatever she was doing. ‘Whatever she was doing’ would be any number of the following at once:

• running between the legs of people standing in line, causing them to almost trip over her;
• grabbing fistfuls of brochures from the store’s counters and sticking them in her mouth before returning them to their receptacles;
• climbing on all furniture including the cash desk and, once there, leaning over the desk and pressing buttons on the keyboard while the stunned cashier looked on, speechless; and,
• crawling around on the grubby floor even though she could clearly walk, run, and competently organise a fascist regime in Italy.

This was all to the tune of, “Zoe, come here; Zoe, stop that; Zoe, come to mummy; Zoe, be a good girl,” and on and on. Then when these simple orders, delivered in a weak and un-commanding tone, failed to control little Zoe-lini (and if there’s anything every mother should master, it’s the “COME BACK HERE BEFORE YOU GET YOUR ARSE SMACKED SO HARD CHILDREN WILL FEEL ITS EFFECTS ALL THE WAY BACK TO THE FIFTH CENTURY” tone), Incompetent Mum then began with the threats.

What did I say above? That you have to give a child a warning and a threat of punishment if you want them to behave? Yeah, well that only works if you intend actually to deliver the punishment. So it went, “Zoe, come to mummy or you’ll not get your toy.”

Ahem; mum was actually in the process of buying the toy for little Zoe-lini as she said this. Do you think Zoe’s going to co-operate when this first threat is blatantly empty? No; this served to show the child that she could go on about her merry way ruining things which were not hers. So then it was, “Zoe, behave yourself or we’ll not go to the fair.”

Does Zoe think this threat is going to hold up? Certainly not, when mum has just picked up the toy from the counter and given it to her. So what a surprise when Zoe doesn’t even turn her head to listen as mum says, “Zoe, stop running around or we’ll not get any fairy floss.”

Yeah, uh, did you not just say if she continued to be a little streak of shit she wouldn’t be going to the fair?

Goddammit, Incompetent Mum, millions of Europeans are going to be persecuted and tortured because of your complete and utter failure to show a child the very simple and essential concept of delayed gratification. Zoe-lini will grow up to be one of those fucking horrible people who have a sense of personal entitlement so large they end up, at 15 years old, defacing MySpace with eye-gougingly horrible emo poetry; at 25 years old, marrying some testicle-free schmuck with a fat wallet and proceeding to make his life miserable; then she will have her own kids, utterly fail to discipline them, and ruin another generation.

“Really, Zoe-lini was fucked from the start,” I want her eventual epitaph to say (presumably, her own offspring kill her, motivated by their own un-sated and overblown senses of entitlement), “having never learned how to be okay with not always getting her own way.”

Let me make this clear: punishing a child for bad behaviour does not indicate bad parenting. It does not indicate a parent who does not love their children. The child will not think mummy or daddy doesn’t love them. The child doesn’t even know what this ‘love’ thing is. Kids under the age of six are hard pressed enough to see their parents as much more than taxi and food services, let alone individual beings worthy or unworthy of affection. If you teach them that the level of punishment for bad behaviours is tantamount to how much love is in the relationship, guess who is to blame when they start emotionally manipulating you later on?

Punishing a child for bad behaviour in fact indicates actually having a pair of balls instead of two dried prunes between the legs. Not only that, it indicates having the wisdom and insight to know that nobody, in the history of the world, ever benefited from getting their own way all the time and never being reprimanded when they were being an utter twat.

How do we learn not to be complete dicks? By having it very clearly indicated to us that we are, in fact, being complete dicks and that we cannot continue being complete dicks! Think of the most selfish, socially retarded person you know; you can bet your arse there was some soft parenting going on back in their history of sticky fingers and eight more rides on the Ferris wheel and all the McDonald’s they could eat. Soft parenting is not loving and sympathetic; it’s cruel and inconsiderate. An adult who does not understand generosity, respect, delay of gratification, working for a reward, self-discipline, or that life just isn’t fair sometimes, will be an adult ill-equipped to deal with their peers and the world at large. Imagine how awkward it feels to realise you’ve been the coddled kid playing in the sandpit while all your well-adjusted friends have grown up and figured out how to, you know, Deal With Shit. How angry are you going to be at your parents then?

Kids. Must. Do. As. Parents. Instruct. Okay? They can scream and kick and yell profanities all they want, but if you’re the parent, you’re God as far as a child is concerned, and your word is law. So stick the fuck to that law which is your word, and follow through on the punishments. Maybe the next generation will, despite the prevailing odds, be normal human beings after all.