GIRLS ON THE RADIO, OUTRAGEOUSLY

Now that I'm back I should be posting about something serious, but I want to talk about the last David Brooks column (read it free here). You might have read it already -- it's the one about recent pop songs Brooks thinks are signs of the apocalypse, otherwise known as our scary marriage-delaying hookup culture.

The songs are "Before He Cheats" by Carrie Underwood ("This is a song about a woman who catches her boyfriend in a bar fooling around with someone else.... As she rages, she's out there in the parking lot rendering a little frontier justice -- slashing his tires, taking a baseball bat to his headlights, carving her name into his leather seats"), "U + Ur Hand" by Pink ("She snarls at the pathetic guys who come up offering to buy her a drink"), and "Girlfriend" by Avril Lavigne ("about a woman who tells a guy to make his loser girlfriend disappear so she can show him what good sex is really like").

Brooks writes:

If you put the songs together, you see they're about the same sort of character: a character who would have been socially unacceptable in a megahit pop song 10, let alone 30 years ago.

This character is hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fedup, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving. She's like one of those battle-hardened combat vets, who's had the sentimentality beaten out of her and who no longer has time for romance or etiquette. She's disgusted by male idiots and contemptuous of the feminine flirts who cater to them. She's also, at least in some of the songs, about 16.

This character is obviously a product of the cold-eyed age of divorce and hookups. It's also a product of the free-floating anger that's part of the climate this decade. But as a fantasy ideal, it's also descended from the hard-boiled Clint Eastwood characters who tamed the Wild West and the hard-boiled Humphrey Bogart and Charles Bronson characters who tamed the naked city.

Um, there weren't hard-boiled, foul-mouthed, fed-up, emotionally self-sufficient and unforgiving characters like this in megahit songs 10 years ago, or 30?

Well, there certainly were 40 years ago -- Mick Jagger singing "Under My Thumb," John Lennon singing "Run for Your Life," or just every band in the English-speaking world, Jimi Hendrix's band most memorably, doing the neo-murder ballad "Hey Joe."

I know, I know. Obviously Brooks isn't thinking of them -- they were men.

But he doesn't say gender is the issue here. He says the issue is emotional coldness in a hookup/divorce era. He says the issue is this:

Now young people face a social frontier of their own. They hit puberty around 13 and many don't get married until they're past 30. That's two decades of coupling, uncoupling, hooking up, relationships and shopping around. This period isn't a transition anymore. It's a sprawling life stage, and nobody knows the rules.

Once, young people came a-calling as part of courtship. Then they had dating and going steady. But the rules of courtship have dissolved. They've been replaced by ambiguity and uncertainty. Cellphones, Facebook and text messages give people access to hundreds of "friends." That only increases the fluidity, drama and anxiety.

See? It's young people he's worried about -- romantically cold, callous young people, all of them trapped in a scary new world.

It just so happens that all the singers he's citing are female.

Why won't he say that what's bothering him isn't the coldness, but coldness on the part of the gender that's supposed to make nice?

At Tapped, Dana Goldstein points out that two of the allegedly marriage-discouraging teenyboppers Brooks cites are married women in their twenties. (The third is single and 24.) So what's up with Brooks's assertion that their composite character is, "at least in some of the songs, about 16"?

I don't know, but judging from this two-year-old column, Brooks has a son who right now would be about, er, 16. A son whose manly manliness was being regularly manifested (according to the column) in the healthful pursuit of league baseball play.

At least it was at the time. Let's hope some cheap angry teenybopper slut hasn't sapped all the kid's manly essence by now, right?