Sarah Kershaw: Manning the It's-Not-1954-Anymore Beat

Intrigued by Sarah Kershaw's "idiot-ass stupid-dumbfuck-balls article" about teen hugging (which we featured earlier today), Women Do! reader Jenna Scherer hit the NYT vault to see what else Kershaw had perpetrated lately. Looks like she's an expert in the field of People Defying Garbage Gender Stereotypes In Irritating Ways.

Somehow I missed her April 23 feature, "Mr. Moms (by Way of Fortune 500)." Is it as bad as I think it is, you ask? No! It's worse!

Even for the Times, this is pretty rich stuff. Dads who used to make more money than you now have to go to PTA meetings! Where they are hailed as saviors, apparently. Because everybody knows women can't do math. And who do you turn to when you can't do math? The guys who just got laid off from their fantastically highly-paid Wall Street finance jobs for DESTROYING THE KNOWN UNIVERSE.

The new prevalence of fathers around town is bittersweet for mothers, teachers and others. On the one hand, the PTA can use all the help it can get from men with financial expertise at a time when the proposed school budget is under enormous pressure. And women are happy to see stay-at-home husbands building closer relationships with their children. But one little-spoken effect is an uneasy feeling that these highly successful men are facing the pain and potential shame of being out of work.

Oh, the shaaaaaaaaaaame! Who knew being a regular person was so dirty?

Sarah Kershaw, we're onto you.

The Youth Of Today: They Hug One Another With Abandon

Hot off the presses of our nation's paper of record: teenagers hug each other. Even the boy kind! No! It cannot beeeeeeeeee!

Our intrepid reporter Sarah Kershaw ventures boldly into the halls of Pascack Hills High in Montvale, New Jersey, where she is informed by junior Danny Schneider that gender as we know it has ceased to exist.

“We’re not afraid, we just get in and hug,” said Danny Schneider, a junior at the school, where hallway hugging began shortly after 7 a.m. on a recent morning as students arrived. “The guy friends, we don’t care. You just get right in there and jump in.”

And it's not just in New Jersey. All across the nation, the flower of manhood are bravely flinging their arms around one another, risking the ire of school administrators.

[S]chools from Hillsdale, N.J., to Bend, Ore., wary in a litigious era about sexual harassment or improper touching — or citing hallway clogging and late arrivals to class — have banned hugging or imposed a three-second rule.

Youth vs. authority! Shifting social norms! My God, it's a trend! We have here the elements of a newspaper story. But it's not really meaty enough for the New York Times. To make it worthy of the Grey Lady, we have to know: Will somebody make some sciencey noises for us? Is there a pop-culture buzzword? Can we make an incredibly awkward reference to hip-hop culture? And can we blame it on the Facebook?

But Amy L. Best, a sociologist at George Mason University, said

Yep.

The prevalence of boys’ nonromantic hugging (especially of other boys) is most striking to adults. Experts say that over the last generation, boys have become more comfortable expressing emotion, as embodied by the MTV show “Bromance,” which is now a widely used term for affection between straight male friends.

Check.

But some sociologists pointed out that African-American boys and men have been hugging as part of their greeting for decades, using the word “dap” to describe a ritual involving handshakes, slaps on the shoulders and, more recently, a hug, also sometimes called the gangsta hug among urban youth.

Er, check.

“Maybe it’s because all these kids do is text and go on Facebook so they don’t even have human contact anymore,” said Dona Eichner, the mother of freshman and junior girls at the high school in Montvale.

Okay, we're done here.

Words Of Wisdom

Here's a riddle for you: What is strong enough to ruin an entire generation of American men, yet so weak that I could cripple it simply by choosing to wear the wrong sort of shoes? The answer, of course, is feminism. If you believe what you read in the papers, that is.

This post, a savage takedown of Ad Age/Details writer Simon Dumenco's irritating how-can-I-be-a-man-when-you-keep-making-me-empty-the-diaper-pail schtick, is six months old (quelle horreur!), but the sagacity therein is as fresh as a pail of new milk. My favorite bit:

Here's the deal: men and women are dicks, men and women cheat and otherwise do the wrong thing, men and women succumb to everyday selfishness and resentment and feminism doesn't have a good goddamn to do with it.

What she said.