All of a sudden it's twelve-year-olds who are contacting me, fifteen-year-olds, and they have very, very fascinating questions. However, they speak in a language of their age group which I have to learn first.
I've never had a 12-year-old try to explain to me about groove.
I sit and talk to kids all day, because I feel like they carry the most wisdom.
Boys! Are they always this impossible? Do they always say cryptic, indecipherable things? (Note to self: work with Liz to adapt her boy-to-English translator into a more mobile form—like maybe a watch or necklace.)
You have to excuse me because I AM a teenager, so I'm allowed to sound illiterate and make stupid comments like 'I'm not into hard-core feminism.'
Doesn't matter if you're fourteen or if you're eight, there's an incredible vernacular that I do believe has become more and more plausible to talk this way in the public sphere, I think because we live in such a coarse and pornographic era. Years of this has produced a certain amount of misogyny that is just a given of life in America at this point.
Maybe this is the secret to talking to boys--maybe you just have to be angry all the time.
Everyone who deals with teens seems to agree that the most important and toughest job is staying in connection and conversation ... not delivering a lecture but saying what we think.
