Unwritten Rules of The Young Curmudgeons: A Series of Impossible Demands

WARNING [unbelievably one has to issue one, see below]: the following words are ventriloquism with extra added unconscious stuff rendered as speech. The interesting question is, who or what is being ventriloquized?

If you have a child, it means you might spend up to forty five minutes not surfing the web with your credit card, as you cuddle. It also means you might hesitate a crucial three seconds  before you buy something, wondering whether it's safe or not, and that's time wasted from a strictly market penetration point of view.

Taking your time is not allowed. There must be insta-affect, not thought. Scholarship agrees. There must be huge, autistic swarms of sensation that pull us into gigantic flocks of birds twittering rape threats or “I am [suffering person].”

Everyone now gets to be an objectified woman. Unlike in the 70s, where a woman and a man became indistinguishable owing to long hair, such that in the words of my very sexist high school English teacher “A woman is just a man with a [xxxx],” now in effect a man is just a woman with a [xxxx]. Everyone gets to be equal, insofar as everyone gets to be their own paparazzo.

All men must shave all pubic hair, and not look at anyone [viz. this actual hilariously self-defeating article headline from Huffington Post a few weeks ago]: MY BIKINI TOP HAS NOTHING TO DO WITH YOU.

Remove all traces of sex hormones. But don't waste time not always sexually displaying in the most aggressive way possible. Warn everyone not to look as you do it.

Never trust anyone over thirty, not because they conform, but because they do not conform. For instance, some men may still have pubic hair.

Don't dare look at anything, especially not lingeringly. Do display everything of yourself to everyone everywhere, all the time.

Down with marriage and parenting--because you can't afford them and they take time. Remember, you are totally free--to obey our thirst for the giant waves of insta-affect.

The body is an unformatted surface waiting for me to do whatever you think you want to it, and preferably you should wish to be photographed having done that. And this is post-patriarchal.

Do not hesitate. Do not linger. Do not see the irony. Prevent every chance of ever seeing how irony and love can bend into one another, and be the same thing.

Write off these paragraphs as symptoms of an old curmudgeon.