6/9/24
Just Being Fair
This is number sixty-five in the blog series, “My Life in Erotica.” I encourage you to join my Patreon community to support my writing.
I’M NOT BEING POLITICAL. Honestly. Of course, I can’t say I’m not interested in politics because if you don’t take an interest, you are basically saying “Whatever everybody else wants is fine with me.” A lot of times I seem to have characters who float along with the tide of whatever comes along. They don’t make decisions and let the women in their lives rule. I see and hear ‘alpha males’ cringing at that thought.
But despite sometimes dealing with what could be political issues, I try to be fair in representing them and not generally campaign for my own viewpoint. Take, for example, the generation gaps.
To many people my age, there are only two generations: Boomers and Millennials. So, everything that is wrong with the world today is because Millennials destroyed it, cancelled it, promoted it, or lived it. This viewpoint tends to ignore the fact that we Boomers raised the next generation to be what we wanted them to be.
On a visit with Jim, a fan down in Arizona, we had a rather intense discussion regarding whether the current generation of young people were generally disrespectful, lazy, and ignorant. We had different perspectives. And I find I’ve had that same conversation with others with varying degrees of passion.
I think it’s important first to take a look at the seven generations since 1901. They’ve actually been described and defined in sociology by birth date.
1901-1924: The Greatest Generation. Defined by participation in WWII.
1925-1945: The Silent Generation. Defined by living through the Great Depression at a vulnerable age.
1946-1964: Baby Boomers. Heavily influenced by Vietnam War, integration, and civil rights.
1965-1980: Generation X. A generation of prosperity, home ownership, and a bridge to technology.
1981-1996: Millennials. Grew up in the internet age and are known as the first global generation (as in not specific to the US).
1997-2012: Generation Z. Grew up with heavy demand for college education. Also known as Digital Natives.
2012-present: Generation Alpha. Heavily influenced by COVID-19, a true 21st century generation to whom personal technology and AI are givens.
Okay, now that we have these out of the way, how do we handle these age groups in writing erotica?
In 2018, I published Devon Layne’s Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain. It’s the story of a group of Digital Natives, born about 2000-2001. In studying the characteristics of these kids, I made some startling discoveries. They were mostly the children of what they called ‘Xennials,’ a mix of early Millennials and late Gen Xers.
Difference 1, as recorded by Jett Black: Most of his generation didn’t have sex until last year of high school or in college. His grandfather, a Boomer, had been in the generation that coined the term ‘free love.’ Along with women’s liberation, they also were sexually liberated, though most held very traditional opinions of marriage. The Xenials had practically invented the terms ‘hook-up’ and ‘friends with benefits.’ Jett’s generation saw it all online, but had little experience with actual physical sex.
Difference 2: Jett’s parents bought their music on CDs they played in the car or on their stereo. Jett bought only the specific songs he wanted and played them through his iPhone earbuds. His grandfather had a stack of vinyl records and a turntable with big room-filling speakers.
Difference 3: While Jett’s parents were mostly raised in an environment of “Go play outside,” Jett and his friends spent incredible amounts of time on their devices. And no wonder. When Jett arrived home at birth, his room was equipped with a digital monitor that was always tuned to by his parents. He learned his ABCs from YouTube videos. His parents learned them from Sesame Street. By the time he was ten, he had his own iPhone. He and his friends were ‘connected’ from childhood to adulthood and shared everything with each other—as long as they weren’t in the same room IRL (in real life).
Of course, there were dozens of other differences, but those were called out in the first few pages of the book. In writing about this group of Digital Natives, I had to get into the mindset of the kids of that age. I had to deal honestly and fairly with that generation.
Drawing on the Dark Side of the Brain is available on Bookapy.
I have to be honest with you: Being fair with people can be exhausting. I make a lot of shit up when I’m writing, but I spend hours and hours researching ideas and concepts. That informs some of my opinions in ways I didn’t expect.
For example, I was the first person in my family to go to college and get a degree. (My oldest sister was in college just long enough to get her MRS—about six months.) I got scholarships, grants, and a ministerial discount for being a preacher’s kid. Despite all that, I took out a thousand-dollar student loan for my freshman year, and another thousand the following year.
When I realized that I could come out of college $4,000 in debt, I panicked. That would be equivalent to $30,000 today—a bargain for a college education. I stopped taking out loans and got student work study that would carry part of the load. I moved into a one-room apartment over a Styrofoam factory ($45 a month) and bought my own groceries instead of eating in the school cafeteria. And it still took me over ten years (in addition to the four-year deferment while I was still a student in undergrad and graduate school) to pay back that damn loan. I paid more for it than I paid for my first house.
With everything that was happening in my life, I count it a miracle that I woke up to the fact that I’d be so deep in debt if I continued to follow the advice of both the school financial office and my banker. And even my parents, who had nothing to contribute to my continuing education.
By the time Gen X and Millennials came along, a vast shift had occurred in society. We had fully entered an age of technology and the minimum entry-level job requirement for anything that touched that industry was a bachelor’s degree or higher. By the time Millennials came of age, home ownership had become an unreachable goal for most. The cost of that required college degree had risen to $13-26,000 per year! Millennials’ parents were unable and unwilling to help foot the bill, so the college tuition loans could easily top $75-100,000 by commencement.
So, we come to the issue that faces the country today. An issue that I refuse to take a stand on in this blog, but feel the reality needs to be dealt with fairly.
I discovered I had several misconceptions regarding the issue of student loan forgiveness. I hear things like $62.8 billion in loan forgiveness and I immediately think, we’re going to give away $62.8 billion to these college students who couldn’t manage their debt like I did! But we’re not. Though there are various programs for debt repayment that depend on income, by and large the loan forgiveness is made only to those who have already completed ten years or more in payments. During that time, most will have repaid the amount of their original loans plus reasonable interest. Many will still, however, owe almost as much as they started with, or in some cases more.
So, the write-off of student debt is of future interest payments.
And, by the way, that interest is not paid to the US government. It is paid to the banks who funded the original loans—without security. Hmm. How many times have we bailed out the banks for just that?
I’m obviously not an accountant and I know there are lots of different bookkeeping methods and there are even more levels of need. I’m also aware that we would not have the number of doctors we currently have without the loans they took out over the years it takes to get that education. We would not have anywhere near the number of computer programmers—keeping the internet, cell phones, software and operating systems, and air flight computers functioning—accountants, teachers, architects, politicians, lawyers, and preachers that we currently have.
I’m not saying we should or shouldn’t forgive student debt. I am saying we need to fairly consider what it costs and what it gains. That’s being fair regarding generations, just as seeing how much sex they have is.
I got a little long-winded with that one, but I don’t want to revisit it, so I had to get a lot out in a single post. I deal with these subjects because they are issues the characters in my books have to deal with. The main character in my current WIP was born in 2005. He’s near the end of the years for those digital natives and is faced with how to earn a living while preparing for the Olympics. Next week, I’ll talk about “Knowing Where to Start.”
Please feel free to send comments to the author at devon@devonlayne.com.
