self-infantilisation vs baby's first media criticism: who will win?

[serpentinemalign]

so i read this article today about why we ('we' being, i guess, late millennials and gen-z folks) are considered such a childish generation and the political implications of that. both because we lack the milestones for adulthood that previous generations had, and because people my age are hurtling towards very simplistic views of the world and of relationships, lacking in any sense of personal responsibility. it was timely for me, because hours prior i was discussing this exact topic with my therapist, that self-infantilising and feeling powerless does not lead to feeling capable of maintaining an adult life. who could have guessed.

but while i think the overall thesis was illuminating and pretty much exactly what i needed to read today, i don't agree with all the points, and that's what i'm going to talk about here.

so before we start, what did i agree with? i think these quotations are especially good and hit hard:

'We can aspire towards a different form of maturity: looking after ourselves, treating other people with care, being invested in something beyond our own immediate satisfaction. Infantilising yourself can often seem like a plea for diminished responsibility. Most of us will have encountered someone who, when criticised for behaving badly, appeals to their own vulnerability as a way of letting themselves off the hook. No matter what they do or the harm they cause, it’s never fair to criticise them, because there’s always some reason – often framed through therapy jargon or the language of social justice – why it isn’t their fault. Childishness grants them a perpetual innocence; they are constitutionally incapable of being in the wrong.'

'As such, the struggle against infantilisation has always formed a part of feminist, anti-racist, disability justice and anti-colonial movements, which recognised that there is no better way to rob people of agency than treating them as something lesser than an adult. This is all the more reason not to indulge it ourselves. Even if infantilisation is being pushed upon us, even if the helplessness we feel has a tangible basis in reality, even if adulting really does suck, we can still choose to see ourselves as capable of changing our own lives and the world around us. “The harms are undeniable,” says Cohen. “Bottom line: it’s a way of learning to love your oppressor. It takes an acute loss of agency and control and transforms it into a state to be desired and enjoyed. Once you embrace this way of being, the demands and rewards of adult life are going to seem all the more remote and all the more forbidding and unpleasurable.”'

so, what were the problems? basically it's about the framing of this article, couching it in the context of media consumption. there is at least one viral article per year where the thesis is just that this generation is fucked up because we are consuming too much baby media. it's no longer embarrassing to go to disneyland without kids or collect stuffed animals or watch bluey as a childless adult, and this is the true reason that we are politically disengaged and toxic as a generation.

this article falls unfortunately into this camp for at least half of it, collapsing into the author publicly airing their own hang-ups about maturity and consuming sufficiently complex media. it's tiresome from this end and it's tiresome from the opposite end (the "'immoral' fiction is unacceptable and dangerous and i am superior for reading/writing only the most wholesome fiction" end) too. it's all just dick-measuring, sanctimonious behaviour.

ultimately, my own experience does not line up with the narrative being pushed here, that enjoying kids' media or even just... pop culture as a whole automatically leads to emotional immaturity. i do all of the right things, ostensibly. i consume (ugh, i hate that word!) lots of morally complex adult media and literature and i do it with a critical eye. i used to be in grad school churning out political essays about that. that didn't stop me from being toxic in my personal life until very recently. i am a work in progress. i'm frustrated that i have discovered that maybe being an adult is good... at nearly 26. it took me 8 years to figure this out??? why????*

basically, the obsession with Disney Adults and similar phenomena feels like yet another smokescreen that obscures the actual problem, which is that we are reassured that we can postpone maturing and accepting social responsibility (e.g. to your friends and loved ones) until we're past our thirties, and we live in a world that foregoes kindness and compassion for the performative appearance of it. media does have something to contribute to these ideologies, but it's not the only influence and it is shockingly weighted in this article, perhaps precisely for the virality factor. it will get people riled up. i'm talking about it now, aren't i?

i'm thinking about how i watched the dark knight trilogy recently, and despite the troubling apologism for a xenophobic and racist surveillance state (it is soooooo post-9/11 it is painful), all i could think when i watched the dark knight rises was 'holy shit, this movie led to the omegaverse lawsuit'. i think that proves that there is something so much knottier (sorry) about how we respond to media than can ever be summarised in the pithy generalisations of this article! i wish we could talk about that more when we talk about the supposed impacts of the media we consume, the supposed need of us to 'eat our greens', art-wise, rather than pursuing the media that strikes the core of us, whatever that is to us.

tangent: i think this is related to the phenomena in some internet communities (i'm thinking specifically of rateyourmusic, with which i have personal experience, and /mu/, with which i don't) where there is a snobbish and masochistic desire to endure difficult works because they are Great, rather than actually spending time appreciating them. trying new things, reflecting and cultivating your own tastes and ignoring what other people think is infinitely more fun than feeling pressured into listening to stuff because of its 'canonical' importance. it will make for a more interesting critical experience, too.

so anyway, TDKR is not a kids' movie; in fact you can tell that nolan resents the sillier and more child-friendly aspects of batman. but i watched it as a kid, or at least something close - i was 15. returning to TDKR as an adult shocked me because of how those political undertones just went over my head the first time i saw it. there's lots that we can discover about ourselves when we approach all kinds of art, for all target audiences, as an adult. i love fandom for this reason especially, because it's such an explicit and conscious desire to engage actively with texts, but i think it's true of just... enjoying art and media in general. it's a byproduct of coming to a text with the context of our life and experiences.

tl;dr: i am very tired of this same article being pushed time and again. there were some genuinely helpful insights in this article! like... ones that are meaningful for me at my current stage of mental recovery! but they are sandwiched by clickbait debate shit that reveals, ironically, a lack of critical thinking about how people engage with art and aesthetics. i'm disappointed!

• (oh it's a bullet rather than an asterisk because i'm editing in markdown oops idk how to fix it. anyway this epiphany unlocked why i had such a tumultuous time while getting to know my fantasies and kinks. of course it didn't feel right to indulge a fantasy of letting go of all responsibilities and letting someone else handle them for me, when i truly felt that i had no capacity to take care of myself and this was actually what i deserved inherently. indulging was just a band-aid for a miserable existence i would do absolutely anything to escape, rather than a hedonistic break from an overstimulating world in which i still wanted to exist. i now emerge from my fantasies happy to be back in the world as an active agent. that is huge. it makes me feel less absolutely garbage about it all. i am healing, i think.)

Comments

[deadfinch]

media does have something to contribute to these ideologies, but it's not the only influence and it is shockingly weighted in the article, perhaps precisely for the virality factor.

that's a good thesis, i think.

the popular discourse around "media consumption" is really bizarre to me - i expect these sorts of conversations in fandom contexts because "having an intense relationship with a particular work of art" is kind of the definition of the hobby, but the degree of mainstream obsession with popular culture as a political arena kind of alarms me. obviously art has always been political - obviously the politics of art can be very, very important - but also, like, i don't know. it's easier, materially and psychologically, to obsess over the politics of children's cartoons than it is to organize for better housing rights, which is something i feel like this article is simultaneously doing (without really being aware of it?) and criticizing.

that said, i think it's spot on that market actors benefit from this self-infantilizing ideology; that mainstream media to some extent encourages it; and that these big brands would really, really like it if you built your whole identity around your relationship to harry potter or marvel movies or whatever, which are all things people need to be vigilant of, and which are all things that also very much alarm me.

tl;dr the article gave me similarly mixed feelings!

i definitely do feel like a 26-year-old teenager. that was an "i'm in this picture and i don't like it" moment, lol. it's heartening to hear you've been making progress on that front and that you've been feeling better for it.

also - i followed you not that long ago, and we've never spoken, so: hi! i'm finch. nice to meet you. let me know if this is or isn't the sort of engagement you want.

[serpentinemalign]

Yes!!! Oh my god you're so right about how the article just kind of falls into the traps of which it's accusing other people? I have also been concerned about the ways that the obsession with pop culture and it delivering the Correct messages (rather than, like... making one's own art) has led to this behaviour where people are convinced that consuming the right stuff is activism. I've realised in retrospect how much it fucked with my enjoyment of fandom as it got more and more focused on consumption defining one's morality - like my earliest fandom where I remember reading fic was almost nothing but very violent and/or dead dove works and I think I viscerally miss that sometimes lol.

It's such a complex topic and I totally agree, I feel... hollow about how mainstream media Is right now. It feels so easy to be manipulated and caught up in it all. Especially in fandom because the media monopolies have figured out how to monetize fandom and turn being a fan into another means of squeezing as much money as possible out of you.

It's lovely to meet you!! I really appreciate your comment and your kind words, thank you so much <3 I've been a little bit isolated the past couple weeks and haven't had much headspace for very much beyond void yelling, but I'm looking forward to seeing you on my reading page when that passes! :D

[pendulumscale]

thanks for sharing this article and your thoughts! i feel like we're just going to see more and more of these kinds of articles now that people in our general age demographic are entering whats considered prime adulthood but not meeting whatever the bar is for maturity. i definitely agree there's this odd trend of self-infantilizing thats become more common. it makes me wonder if this is an ideology that ebs and flows, like if there were other eras with this same sort of self-infantilizing that gets reinforced by how broader society thinks of a generation. i think a lot of it also has to do with a person's background, too, like the article mentioned. like can one ever meet some of these apparent milestones of adulthood if it's something wholly out of your reach?

i think a lot of the childish adult stuff ties a lot to a person's nostalgia reaction, especially as a trauma response. and i know many companies feed into this nostalgia, so it's likely that a lot of these feelings are manufactured rather than genuine. i know there tend to be waves of nostalgia around societal traumas going back through the early 1900s (probably even earlier), though im not sure if it was on such a wide and easy to market to scale as today.

sorry if that got off topic...many thoughts. TDKR is such an odd film. id love to hear your thoughts about that trilogy (or just film in general)

[serpentinemalign]

yeah you're so right!! and also. what's perceived as childish changes over time too. i know people from older generations who do share that same sense of not becoming An Adult the way that society expected them to but the expectations and goalposts were different back then too. it just sometimes feels like an unattainable goal.

you're so right on it being a trauma response like 100%, that is the reason i go back to things from my childhood. and it is nice to be in a position where doing that is relatively normalised, but the underlying contributors are fucked up. especially the commodification of nostalgia.

aa thank you, maybe i will write more about it at some point!! i feel like having grown up with nolanverse batman and then returning to it was just such a weird experience! the person i watched it with commented that it didnt feel like tdkr was a batman movie and i think that's so true. it's almost like a generic action movie that just incidentally has batman there.