Sixteen Candles

(I’m not sure which of the Sailors is responsible for today’s bracketology. Peanuts sent it, but Ewok had warned me about it. Whatever. I’m totally lost with it, not watching the show myself, but I do wonder about Richard Alpert [!] and Rousseau…)

Life is a series of milestones, each of them marked by rituals. Insofar as these milestones are universal to humans as humans, they are reflected in virtually all cultures. We are born, we reach adulthood, we mate and reproduce, we die. These are universals for the species, and they are universally ritualized by the species’ cultures. We may make more of some of these than of others, given the nature of that culture, but we mark them all as important events. Curiously enough, being born probably gets the least play, at least for the person being born. There’s no real cross-cultural tradition of birth rites, although lots of us like to commemorate birthdays, both our own and those of various cultural icons. On the other hand, reaching majority, and the rite of passage from childhood to adulthood, looms quite large. Initiation rituals, circumcision, the whole maturation song and dance—these are about as universal as you can get, from religion to religion and from culture to culture. Mating rituals are obviously also universal. And we’ve been ritualizing death since at least the Neanderthals.

Not all of our milestones live up to expectations. We might say to the 13-year-old Jewish boy, now you are a man, but then the next day he goes back to middle school. Marriages in many cultures are not the life-affirming end-all be-all they’re supposed to be. And no doubt dying won’t be any great shakes, if I measure it from the point of view of the center of attention at the funeral. Yet despite the failure of various rituals to measure up to what they’re ritualizing, we have, at least in our culture, created even more rituals to celebrate life’s milestones than just the obvious ones shared across all cultures. I would suggest that complex, post-Industrial civilizations like ours might all create these extra rituals as a result of their complex post-industrialism, but I’m not arguing that at the moment. I’m simply saying that, for one reason or another, we’ve created a lot of extra baggage for ourselves on the ritual side, by finding more and more occasions worth ritualizing. And, of course, those occasions fit in with the culture in which we live. We celebrate the occasions that our culture has created, in addition to those native to humanity. We do this with varying degrees of commitment and energy, but we do it. And as I say, not all our milestones live up to expectations, so if we’re adding new milestones as part of our cultural development, we are probably adding new failures in living up to them. Which leads me to the one that I’ve been thinking about after reading a piece in Sunday’s Times, to wit, the occasion of the Sweet Sixteen birthday party at the Ritz.

A little history first, although you already know this. Turning sixteen years old has been around for a while now, as has the expression sweet sixteen (although I was unable to track down a clear etymology in a cursory attempt through Google). In my particular high school dark ages, girls turned sixteen and there might be a little party or something, but that was about it, and when anyone turned any age, there might be a little party or something. In the ensuing millennia, the Sweet Sixteen birthday party has become, for some, a Christian Bat Mitzvah, not insofar as the ritual is concerned (cf. Confirmation), but insofar as the party is concerned. There are rooms rented, meals catered, fancy dresses donned, extravagant gifts bestowed. (Maybe it’s an atheist bar mitzvah? Evidence suggests otherwise, but it’s worth considering.) And as I’ve implied, it’s only for girls. Guys don’t turn any particular milestone age comparable to girls turning sixteen. How has this happened? Why did this event come into being in recent years? What’s going on here?

First off, it’s not the sixteen-year-old girls that made this happen. It’s the parents of the sixteen-year-old girls. If teenagers could simply will themselves into a situation when they’re treated like royalty, they’d be doing it all the time. But this is the only situation where that happens that I can think of, short of the traditional cultural rites of passage. So parents, for some reason, celebrate their daughter’s theoretical majority with an all-out blast comparable to the most serious celebrations, spending as much on the affair as many people spend on weddings, and inviting as many people. They’ve made this into a major event. They’ve created a secular rite of passage that raises the question: a passage from what to what? And by the way, keep in mind that traditionally the bride’s family pays for the wedding, the other big traditional blowout in the female life, which means two big parties for the girls in the family. The feminist implications are clear. And frightening. What we’re seeing is the institutionalization of the princess concept, fostered by the parents. Those little Disney princesses were cute, going to their little banquets with the “real” princesses in their little princess dresses. But what, exactly, is a sixteen-year-old princess if not a virgin offering to society, the opening salvo in an anti-female proclamation to be concluded by the wedding that secures the older virgin to wedlock. You’ll be the princess at your SS party, and later the princess at your wedding. The bad news, that they won’t tell you, is that it’s not real. I’m sorry to say it, but you’re simply not a princess, no matter how much money you spend, and in fact, there may be some detrimental aspects to this belief you’re holding that you are some sort of royalty, given what that really means. You should be treated as special, they say. But you’re not special. It’s okay to think you’re special when you’re a little kid. But when do you grow out of it? More importantly, when are your parents going to grow out of it?

You could compare this to the old “coming out” tradition (read your Wharton or, for that matter, watch GWTW), but that at least really did introduce you to society in that it allowed you to commune with young men for a couple of years with a clear intention of marriage before hitting the ancient age of twenty. So while there are parallels to what I’m saying here, the rationales no longer exist that at least made debuts make some sort of social sense, however class-oriented.

Anyhow, I’m trying not to be merely curmudgeonly here. Since there is no analog to this phenomenon for boys, thinking there is a feminist undercurrent is a natural assumption, especially if the pre-feminist debutant is a historical precedent. If something unessential affects only one sex, it bears study. If that something fosters unrealistic expectations in someone because of their sex, it bears serious study. I would suggest that any belief in fairy tales is not a good thing at the point where one can no longer tell the difference between the fairy tale and reality, or when the fairy tale makes the reality worse. How many marriages are harmed, I wonder, by unrealistic expectations of the princesses who learn that they only married some guy, and not prince charming. The SS party is, theoretically, sending you off officially on the road to finding that prince charming. Today you are a sixteen-year-old princess, but tomorrow you’re the same schlub (female persuasion) that you were two days ago. You’ve accomplished nothing special by surviving sixteen years. People do it every sixteen years, regardless of who they are. Now you’ve done it too. Huzzah?

The Aztecs did things differently. When they had a sixteen-year-old virgin, they killed her as a sacrifice. I’m not suggesting this as an alternative to SS parties, but at least this particular culture had a handle on exactly how many princesses one ethnological group could support. We like to believe that every girl is a princess. And since there’s no comparable rite for boys, then I guess every one of them is…a subject. Isn’t that great?

I worry about girls. What I'm saying here is garbled, and I'm groping more than usual. But some things drive me crazy. I would have hoped to see a more feminist-informed society in my lifetime, but I don’t think I really have seen all that much. Some growth, but nothing exponential. And there’s plenty of institutionalized social norms that go on despite all logic that would seem to undermine them. Sexual identities and mores and roles are so ingrained, it seems so hard to move expectations even the slightest inch. And the fact that change is hard does not justify not changing.

Yeah. I worry about girls.