The Spectacle of Adolecence

You know that annoying thing that happens when you are watching a show on a streaming platform, and the marketing algorithm or whatever just constantly gives you the same commercial over and over again?  

A few years ago, this was the commercial I was inundated with: 

Scene: A white-passing, nuclear family comprised of a mother, father, school-age son and teenage daughter are gathered in a very middle-class kitchen.  The girl is telling her parents a story. It's the kind of stereotypical narrative that is typically associated with teenage girls, specifically white, middle class teenage girls. 

Her story is about a social interaction. It's conveyed in a rapid and enthusiastic manner.  But what the commercial most wants the viewer to understand is that the story is very silly and trite. Something we should dismiss. 

We know this because of her parent's reactions. They patiently, but obviously, exchange bemused smiles and an eye-roll or two. We also know this because the narrator, in the same paternalistic and knowing tone as the parents, explains that this story had "30 minutes left"  until the teenager girl [ugh...finally] stops speaking because of the apparent deliciousness of "real cheddar, aged to perfection for six long months" in Stouffer's Macaroni and Cheese. 

I HATE this commercial. I felt tortured by it, and its insidious messaging that young women don't say anything worth listening to, that their interests and concerns are vapid and shallow- something to politely endure, or silence, rather than interact with. This commercial became symbolic to me of a pervasive dynamic that exists in our culture: We love to hate on teenage girls. 

I have been on the receiving end of this dynamic during my own adolescence, and also as an adult ally in the effort to lift up the voices and experiences of young women. I have spent a lot of my career trying to counter the wide spread harm this "love to hate" has caused, on both an individual and systemic scale.  

In Reading Act your Age! (which I have to say is also the first piece of critical theory I've ever read that creates meaningful access points to practice), I was reminded of this specific commercial, and it's role in the dynamic of panoptical time that Lesko borrows from Foucault's analysis of Bentham's Panopticon. This stupid Stouffer's commercial is mechanism of panoptical time in regards to our social construction of adolescence.  

As adults, and watchers, this commercial affirms our watcherness.  It whispers to us "This is the teenage temporary state in which nothing of substance can exist since nothing is acknowledged to be truly at stake." And we nod, and smile, both mildly annoyed at the nothingness of the teenager, and nostalgic for the time in which we too meant nothing. 

For teenagers watching this commercial, especially teenage girls, it normalizes the watching, as Lesko describes. It is a mechanism for internalization. 

And for me, that's where I go one step farther.  Let's bring some more grim, post-modern French theory into this. 

In Debord's Society of the Spectacle, he reworks Marx's communist manifesto, and asserts: 

In societies where modern conditions of production prevail, all of life presents itself as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has moved away into representation.

We are inundated with cultural images of adolescence, which, in turn, define the experience of adolescence. These images, or spectacles, as typified in the Stouffer's commercial, self-perpetuate the marginalization of young people, and the imposed minutia of adolescence.

And adolescence is unique.  It is the one marginalized identity that is universal. Unlike race or gender or class, every adult (aka person who holds social power) was once a teenager (person who is marginalized). 

And as Lesko theoriezes, everyone who eventually becomes a watcher of the spectacular, panoptical time of adolescence both was watched, and watched themself. This creates a cyclical, cultural echo chamber of stereotypes which perpetuate the marginalization: The spectacle of adolescence, divorced from the reality and needs of actual adolescents, in which we all have been both the spectator and the spectated.  

Yesterday, my fifteen year old niece told me "I have so much social anxiety. I say cringe things, then I think about all the times I said cringe things. So I don't know what to say when I talk to people and I just feel awkward."  I remember feeling that way too. I'm sure a lot of us do. 

How much of that metacognition is biological, the product of a developing brain? And how much of it is because of that f-ing macaroni and cheese commercial?