Wednesday, June 11, 2008

Friends Are The New Lovers [Bonus Video]

This week on NPR's Day To Day, we'll test out the theory that Friends are the New Lovers. Our proven scientific method included wrangling our "What's The New What?" writers and asking what they think about the "Friends With Benefits" lifestyle.


4 comments:

Anonymous said...

If you are "too young" and your "brain hasn't finished developing" therefore you arne't able to take on a relationship, then you are OBVIOUSLY TOO YOUNG and immature to have sex and prevent/deal with the consequences that it entails!

Anonymous said...

There is nothing new about friends with benefits. But it's cute you think you've invented sleeping around.

Anonymous said...

Pul-eeze! "Back in the day" we called that "dating". Sure, the sex was clandestine and we would have gotten in deep, serious trouble for having sex before marriage. Not to mention gaining a not-altogether-positive reputation for "sleeping around". It is a generational thing. Youth today are so cavalier about sex they have to find a label for it in order to justify it, when they shouldn't be persuing it any more than--we weren't supposed to be persuing it way back when. Hypocritical? Of course. It's that generational thing.
Society has lost control of our youth, somewhere between the cavalier acceptance of teens having sex way too young, and the puritanical refusal of adults to acknowledge that we've given youth the tools, opportunity and unfettered artistic exposure to what was once considered strictly an adult activity... one that was not for public consumption and should be reserved for marriage at that. It's no wonder that kids are left with the aimlessness of shallow relationships they can't handle, yet crave so much that they give them justification by naming them and glorifying the trend with reports about it on national radio programs.
Then again, maybe its just a fad of urban youth (though I doubt that). But who can tell? I find it bothersome that NPR allows a small band of Northern inner-city kids to speak for their entire geographical as well as chronological generation. Can we not hear the voices of suburban and even rural youth from the South, the Inter-mountain West and the Heartland Plains? I think it is the media's fault that with their emhasis on the top 50-100 largest cities in America, urban fads and fashions are pushed into areas they might not otherwise have caught on. Youthful pre-maturity being only one of many such areas where this has taken place. But I digress...

Anonymous said...

What sex means to the people of our generation is a conversation we need to have. As a growing woman in her early twenties I was encouraged by this broadcast. As you guys mention in the segment, we don't see relationships working out for adults. We aren't always taught what sex is supposed to mean or how to navigate relationships. For the last five years I have been searching for ways to understand sexuality but have not been finding many reliable resources.

So we do experiement. And as it is nothing new, of course not. Where do our older generations think that we learned these behaviors from? Friends with benefits is not necessarily a commentary on our being sexually loose, nor is it helpful to hear that one is too young for this grown up play. This is a topic which does not have a place for condemnation, but rather for earnest conversation and frank, present honesty.