From "Elementary Particles"
" But it was at precisely this time that the consumption of prurient mass-market entertainment from North America (the songs of Elvis Presley, the films of Marilyn Monroe) was spreading all over Western Europe. Along with the refrigerators and washing machines designed to make for a happy couple came the transistor radio and the record player, which would teach the adolescent how to flirt. The distinction between true love and flirtation, latent during the sixties, exploded in the early seventies in magazines like Mademoiselle Age Tendre and Vingt Ans, and crystallized around the central question of the era: "How far can you go before you get married?" The libidinal, hedonistic American option received great support from the liberal press (the first issue of Actuel appeared in October 1970, and Charlie-Hebdo in November). Although their politics were notionally left-wing, these magazines embraced the ideals of the entertainment industry: the destruction of Judeo- Christian values, the supremacy of youth and individual freedom. Torn between these conflicting pressures, teen magazines hastily cobbled together a compromise that can be summed up in the following life history.
In the first stage (say, from twelve to eighteen), a girl would go out with several boys (the semantic ambivalence of the term reflected a very real behavioral ambiguity: what did going out with a boy actually mean? Did it mean kissing, or did it include the more profound joys of petting or of heavy petting, or even of full sexual intercourse? Should you allow a boy to touch your breasts? Should you take off your panties? And what should you do with his thing?) For Patricia Hohweiller and Caroline Yessayan the problem was far from simple; their favorite magazines gave vague, often contradictory answers. In the second stage (once she left high school),the same girl needed a serious relationship (referred to in German magazines as "big love"). Now the defining question was: "Should I move in with Jeremy?" This was the second and final stage. The flaw in the solution offered by girls' magazines – arbitrarily recommending contradictory forms of behavior in consecutive periods of a girl's life-only became apparent some years later with the inexorable rise in the divorce rate. Nevertheless, for many years girls, naïve and already disoriented by the speed of social change, accepted these improbable rules and tried their best to stick to them."
" But it was at precisely this time that the consumption of prurient mass-market entertainment from North America (the songs of Elvis Presley, the films of Marilyn Monroe) was spreading all over Western Europe. Along with the refrigerators and washing machines designed to make for a happy couple came the transistor radio and the record player, which would teach the adolescent how to flirt. The distinction between true love and flirtation, latent during the sixties, exploded in the early seventies in magazines like Mademoiselle Age Tendre and Vingt Ans, and crystallized around the central question of the era: "How far can you go before you get married?" The libidinal, hedonistic American option received great support from the liberal press (the first issue of Actuel appeared in October 1970, and Charlie-Hebdo in November). Although their politics were notionally left-wing, these magazines embraced the ideals of the entertainment industry: the destruction of Judeo- Christian values, the supremacy of youth and individual freedom. Torn between these conflicting pressures, teen magazines hastily cobbled together a compromise that can be summed up in the following life history.
In the first stage (say, from twelve to eighteen), a girl would go out with several boys (the semantic ambivalence of the term reflected a very real behavioral ambiguity: what did going out with a boy actually mean? Did it mean kissing, or did it include the more profound joys of petting or of heavy petting, or even of full sexual intercourse? Should you allow a boy to touch your breasts? Should you take off your panties? And what should you do with his thing?) For Patricia Hohweiller and Caroline Yessayan the problem was far from simple; their favorite magazines gave vague, often contradictory answers. In the second stage (once she left high school),the same girl needed a serious relationship (referred to in German magazines as "big love"). Now the defining question was: "Should I move in with Jeremy?" This was the second and final stage. The flaw in the solution offered by girls' magazines – arbitrarily recommending contradictory forms of behavior in consecutive periods of a girl's life-only became apparent some years later with the inexorable rise in the divorce rate. Nevertheless, for many years girls, naïve and already disoriented by the speed of social change, accepted these improbable rules and tried their best to stick to them."
