Can we have a little
adult culture, please?

North America’s popular culture is powered by adolescent urges

Gerry Bowler
CW Culture Critic

Driving home from church the other night I noticed the lights on in a shop called “Adults Only Video.” For a brief moment I was buoyed by the thought of a video store catering only to adult tastes: one free of sexual-coming-of-age movies for spotty teens; one devoid of slasher movies, Schwarzenegger demolition derbies, sappy Disney cartoons and films in which flatulence plays a major part in character exposition. Goodbye Austin Powers, hello Jane Austen; farewell South Park, welcome South Pacific.

Then, of course, reality set in and I realized I had just driven past a purveyor of pornography. For the rest of the ride I mused on the curious use of the word “adult” as appropriated by those who cater to buyers with arrested personalities, far from the maturity one usually associates with adult behaviour.

I really shouldn’t have been surprised. For the past 50 years culture in North America has ceased to be driven by adult tastes and has shifted to one powered by adolescent urges. What we wear, what we watch or listen to, what cars we drive and what we eat are largely determined by a market dominated by teenage tastes.

Not by actual teenagers, mind you, but by those lifestyle choices that continue to be adopted by consumers long after their teen years: casual dress (even at work, church or funerals), fast food, movies full of sex and explosions, the reduction of popular music to rhythm, fear of commitment in personal relationships or employment, and automobiles that express a buyer’s fantasies rather than transportation needs. (How else to explain the number of 40-somethings who feel they need an SUV capable of crossing the Kalahari to drive to Starbuck’s?)

This belief in perpetual adolescence also infects the very young, where aggressive and sexualized marketing of teen tastes threatens to make childhood an endangered species.

Rock and roll and suburbia

American journalist Mark Gauvreau Judge has considered this problem in his book If It Ain’t Got That Swing: The Rebirth of Grown-Up Culture.

Among Judge’s targets are rock and roll and suburbia. Rock music, he says, has turned North American culture into one of narcissism, adolescence and a humourless attitude of perpetual rebellion that masks its own forms of intolerance. The flight to the suburbs has deprived us of a sense of community and those places that adults used to meet for recreation, giving us instead strip-malls, parking lots and lives spent at home in front of some sort of screen.

Judge yearns for the days when adult desires ran popular culture, when dances had steps to be learned and when kids wore cut-down versions of adult clothing and longed to be old enough to participate in the kind of fun their elders had. (The last time this sort of society was captured on film was in the 1959 movie The Shaggy Dog when the teenaged Tommy Kirk and Annette Funicello, dressed to the nines, are shown dancing in the same room, to the same music, as parent Fred MacMurray.) To Judge the recent revival of swing music heralds a return to this forgotten world and a rebirth of “grown-up culture.”

Politer and quieter

What would an adult-driven popular culture look like in the 21st century?

It would certainly be politer: good manners would be encouraged at the table, on the road and in public places. Kids would be taught the use of eating utensils, the importance of closing one’s mouth when chewing and the necessity of staying at the table until all have finished eating.

Serving personnel in restaurants would be discouraged from an artificial intimacy and when thanked by their courteous customers would reply “you’re welcome” instead of “no problem” or “uh-huh.” Children would give up their seats to adults on buses and profanity would be rigorously banned from public places.The terms “lady” and “gentleman” would re-enter the vocabulary as coveted titles instead of chauvinist slurs.

It would be a quieter culture. The social scorn now heaped on those smoking in public would also fall on those playing their boom boxes outside of concrete bunkers or speaking on cell phones in restaurants. (There would be a generous bounty on those caught simultaneously driving and using a phone and their heads would be placed on spikes at prominent intersections.)

The use of baseball caps would be restricted to actual baseball players who would be required to wear them with the brim at the front. Tattoos would be restricted to sailors and Polynesian warriors.

All popular music would have to have intelligible lyrics and all band members would wear suits and ties. All Hollywood stars producing children out of wedlock would be banned from the industry and employed as daycare workers in the inner city.

I’m sure you all have your own ideas about reviving adult culture. Talk among yourselves, e-mail me your thoughts and I may discuss them in a future column.

Gerry Bowler is a Winnipeg writer and historian. You can contact him by email at gerrybowler@home.com.