Book Review: Readings

Generation S.L.U.T.: A Brutal Feel-up Session With Today's Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace

by Marty Beckerman

MTV Books, 224 pp., $11.95 (paper)

Generation Y is fucked. Literally. At least that's the premise of Marty Beckerman's second book (the first being Death to All Cheerleaders: One Adolescent Journalist's Cheerful Diatribe Against Teenage Plasticity – the author clearly enjoys his 40-kilo titles), which skillfully makes the argument that boys these days are more interested in hammering home a line drive past someone's pink paisley thong while girls seek little more than an aerodynamic tummy at the expense of their health and, possibly, someone to love, or at least be battered by.

If you're a parent, or a teen, or perhaps have a passing interest in society as a whole, this is not news. What might come as news, if Beckerman is to be believed, is that the dual core engines of teenage life, sex and popularity, or the surfeit of either, have become so distillated as to be running the whole game. Steamrolled by simplistic, emotionally vacuous hookups and plentiful party drugs, porn, and AIM cyber sessions, kids these days are walking sensualists that might give original back door man the Marquis de Sade a run for his money.

We'll give Beckerman the benefit of the doubt on this, as he's just crossed the double-decade mark while we're approaching the quad, but even if the boy's crying wolf, Generation S.L.U.T. is as disturbing a wad of prurient fun as you're going to find this year, chock-full of freakish statistics (STDs are rampant, anal sex is the new vanilla) surrounding a backbone narrative that tells the story of a group of average American teens, among them Max, the Beatles-loving dweeb protagonist; Trevor, the new pornographer-cum-drug dealer; Quinn, the ex with a metaphorical bright red "V"-for-victim splashed across her brow with all the errant subtlety of a blind man's money shot; and Ashley, the newer, smarter chick with problems of her own, thanks much.

It's tempting to think of this as some sort of quasi-autobiography, and Beckerman, a mean self-promoter who's denying nothing even while a patently false-feeling anti-him Web site has arrived online (www.stopmartybeckerman.com), but that would be missing the point in all its slick and slippery Astroglide awfulness: As a result of an ever-encroaching societal malaise, horndog teens are slipping free of the bounds of propriety and tumbling headlong into an emo-iced abyss of spiritual doom and bad attitudes toward the fairer sex. But since when was sex ever fair, or being a teenager ever anything but a trial by fire and shitstone and inner cacophonies so deafeningly loud that they threaten to drown out all but the hardiest shrieks of libidinous torment? Generation S.L.U.T. may be the most hyperbolic sophomore effort since the Talmud, but there's just no way around the fact that its getting more play than you are.