I'm in your water.

As a rabid consumer of mediocre and bad media (movies especially ) I often find myself questioning the motivation of those who create and consume that media. Tonight I listened to Friday’s episode of Cort and Fatboy, with Friday guest Mike Russel, who routinely discusses bad and mediocre films. (Culture Pulp) They talked about Twilight: New Moon, which made me think about the success of the first film and why that happened.

Crazy Girl by Sharon Pruitt (cc:by)

First, a few facts. It’s well known that most mainstream media is garbage. Okay. That might be an opinion. Here’s a fact. Teenage girls who’ve reached menarche suddenly find themselves subject to the influence of large amounts of estrogen, thickening the endometrium and causing all kinds of other pretty, flowery things to happen. To the vast discomfort of our collectively sex-negative culture, this influences the young female with an impetus toward sexual activity. (This is not about my opinions on whether or not young teens should be having sex. I think that’s for them to decide. It’s about the biology.) So the result is a highly social creature, entering the fringes of preparation for an adult culture they have no experience with. This produces a sexually-driven taste for media which doesn’t necessarily have to be high quality in any other way. Enter Twilight, every boy band ever, and a number of other phenomena which may confuse someone of more discerning taste, someone with a much higher cognitive capacity than say, a person distracted by the wild hormones screaming through her young body for the first time.

This would be fine, if these things would stay snugly isolated in a cultural pocket to be ferociously consumed by the pubescent fires of this squealing subset of humanity. Unfortunately, money talks, as always, and once those numbers get up, no matter what demographic a piece of media appeals to, we’re going to be forced to hear about it, ponder it, make fun of it, etc.

Some adults find themselves dismayed by this. Especially vocal about their distaste are the young-men-not-getting-laid subset, who are not only infuriated and confused by women in general, but especially enraged by women of all ages cooing over some guy who’s way cuter than them up on the big screen. Never mind that the young man is probably not interested in vagina, or that he probably has a small penis, or any number of other issues. But while they’re gnashing their teeth down to stumps, trolling blogs, and getting their colons all tied up in knots, I’m laughing at these phenomena, at these girls, and at them, just like anyother ridiculous thing in our ridiculous existence. Tschuess!