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Marty Beckerman is a Bitchy Slut Since he started writing a column for the Anchorage Daily Press in 1998 -- when he was just a teenager -- humorist, journalist and self-appointed spokesman for his doomed generation, Marty Beckerman, has managed to do what few writers accomplish. Beckerman has published two books in the last four years: Death to All Cheerleaders: One Adolescent Journalist's Cheerful Diatribe Against Teenage Plasticity, and his most recent work, Generation S.L.U.T.: A Brutal Feel-Up Session with Today's Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace. S.L.U.T. was recently released by MTV/Pocket Books and is being produced as a feature-length motion picture by HBO Films. He's also hard at work on Nation of Retards: America's Sexxxiest Young Journalist Exposes the Bastardly Forces Keeping You Stupid, which is to be released by Simon & Schuster in 2006. S.L.U.T. follows the lives of four fictional teenagers and explores the dangers of a generation obsessed with sexual gratification without emotional attachment and presents disturbing reports, statistics and confessions from real teenagers across the nation. It also includes six of Beckerman's essays including "My Make-Out Session with Watermelon Tits" and "My Unforgettable (Almost) Prom Date with a Dirty, Rotten Whore." He spoke to Arriviste Press about his work, the dangerous effects of the hook-up culture, the future of his career, Jesus freaks, stupid feminists, and his mom who still cries herself to sleep at night.
Marty Beckerman A_P: First of all, are you a slut? MB: Am I a slut? Well, I've had sex with a few girls since high school, but right now I'm only having sex with one girl. A_P: Just one? MB: Yeah, I've got a girlfriend; we've been going out for a year and a couple months. I'm not anti-sex; I'll have sex almost everyday. A_P: Lucky bastard. So how did the book start? I read in an interview with Bob Sassone, of Professor Barnhardt's Journal, that you had been compiling notes and observations since high school for this. MB: I wrote it between the time I was 18 and 20. I certainly didn't see everything that was described in the book; some of it's fictionalized. But definitely, I was going through some emotional crisis from the time I left high school, went to college, and came back. I guess the book's message more than anything is what I saw in high school and college. More and more in talking to these junior high kids is, there's a generation in America right now that doesn't believe in any kind of emotional attachment. They actually view love as a negative thing. It's a generation terrified of getting hurt emotionally. So in shutting themselves off to any kind of emotional pain, this generation isn't having any of the benefits. They're shutting themselves off from having any kind of happiness. The suicide rate is higher than it's ever been. More teens are mutilating themselves than ever before, you know, wrist cutting. According to the Journal of Pediatrics, 40% of nine year olds are trying to lose weight, so you see this trickling down younger and younger, even to pre-pubescent ages. And while I'm not anti-sex, I think this trend is denying them any kind of emotional experiences, which is really screwing up a lot of kids. A_P: So how did they get like this? They know [emotional] pain is a part of life, but why are they going out of their way to avoid it so much? What's going on in their heads? MB: The thing that's going on in most people's heads is they see it as kind of a liberation. If I don't care about anybody else and have a bunch of sex with a lot of people, it'll be fun and I won't be exposed to any risk emotionally. But they don't realize that's what is actually making them so depressed in the first place and why they're searching for some kind of attachment to people. I just don't think human beings can function when the person you had sex with last night at some party is screwing somebody else at this one. When that happens again and again, I think these people start to lose touch with humanity. I've had one night stands, and the metaphor I make in the book is it's like going to McDonald's. If you have a meal at McDonald's every now and then, it's a fine, delicious treat -- but if you're doing it every time you have a meal, you're a disgusting piece of shit. It's kind of a dangerous middle ground because there's so many forces in the culture where they say, "You have to take a side. You're either with the Jesus people or you're with the feminists." And I'm not with the Jesus people or the feminists. A_P: I noticed you talked a lot in the book about people who sign chastity pledges. MB: Yeah, if someone wants to be an abstinent, good for them, I don't really care. That's not my mission. I don't necessarily believe in a place called Hell. I don't think you're going to Hell if you have sex before marriage. I didn't get into politics very much with this book, I did a little bit. But I'm working on my next book now, it's called Nation of Retards; it's set to be released in 2006. [It] goes after both sides, and the whole book is about Jesus freaks versus hippies. I'm seeing more and more that the hook-up culture is kind of designed. People were planning this out for a very long time, more than 100 years. If you go back to some of these writings back in the 1950s and even in the 1920s, you have people in academia talking about how do you get all the kids to have sex with each other without any emotional attachment. I feel the biggest thing ushering that in is the divorce rate, which is now 53% in America... God I sound like -- what's that fucker's name? -- I sound like William Bennet. But still, half the kids in America are seeing these long-term relationships not work out, so they learn long-term relationships don't work. So I feel there's a total link between the divorce culture and the hook-up culture. I think that's what's really, really queer, but I'm not sure people really have the analytical skills to realize that they're acting on it. A_P: Do you think we blame the media for teenage promiscuity? MB: I blame the feminist left for the divorce rate, but you can also blame the corporate right for Britney and Paris Hilton and all these false idols. A generation ago, my parent's generation had real heroes like JFK, Martin Luther King, the Beatles and John Glenn. And we have these media whores that we worship, like Paris and Britney and on and on. They're like fucking prostitutes. A_P: But your parents still had Marilyn Monroe, Jayne Mansfield. Those things have been around, but have they not been that prevalent? MB: I think at this point most 9 year-olds want to be 19 and most 50 year-olds want to be 19. I think the concept of age is disappearing in America. Planned Parenthood is trying to get statutory rape laws overturned. We're kind of seeing in academia and intellectual circles the emergence of the attitude of age as a social construct. They've already done it with gender, but now age is the social construct. I feel that this is coming from the left and the right. I've got all this stuff in the book about how [Abercrombie & Fitch] makes hundreds of millions of dollars selling thongs to 3 year-olds and 13 year-olds. I feel that there's forces conspiring in the culture to sexualize pre-pubescent children. Girls are entering puberty way earlier than they ever have. A_P: So what's the solution? MB: The solution is to read "Generation S.L.U.T." $11.95 at your local bookstore. A_P: Speaking of which, I found your book in a bookstore in Shreveport, LA, under the Teen and Personal Growth section. MB: It winds up in weird sections. I've seen it end up in half fiction and half non-fiction. I've seen it in fiction sections. I've seen it in sex sections, in inspiration. I don't how it got there, it's a depressing fucking book. It's kind of hard to classify. The publisher didn't even know what to do with it. Personally, I wanted it to be called non-fiction because I thought it would be better for sales. But since it was a novella and some of the stuff based on it was stuff that actually happened, we have to say it was fiction or else I'd get sued. A_P: I remember you said earlier your high school friends had gone through a metamorphosis. Were they based on any of the characters? MB: All of the characters were to a certain extent based on parts of my own personality, but some of the characters were composites of people that I knew. It's weird because the story in some ways is 99% true, and in other ways, it's totally fictionalized. But there's no character that, I'd say, is directly based on one person. A_P: I also noticed you put yourself in the book. MB: Yeah, that was my moment of self-indulgent glory. A_P: Is that going to be in the movie? MB: I don't know, I'd like to have a cameo in the movie. I haven't suggested this to HBO yet because I know they're going to turn it down, but my idea is to have one of the party scene characters looking around trying to find a bathroom or something, and they open a door to a bedroom and I'm having sex with a horse. A_P: HBO might swing with that. MB: Maybe, the movie's coming along. We already have a director from Six Feet Under (Miguel Arteta who also directed The Good Girl), and the screenwriters are finishing up the script. They've told me that if any actors are under 18, everybody involved in the movie would go to jail for 25 years. A_P: In the book you split up the novella with stats and your essays. MB: We're doing that for the movie. There won't be the non-fiction parts. Those parts of me won't be in there. "Watermelon Tits" won't be part of it. There will be the narrative fiction broken up by the statistics and documentary footage, so it'll follow that same fiction/non-fiction theme, which I think works for the book because of what I was trying to accomplish while I was writing it. When you're writing a book trying to define a generation, you're a pretentious piece of shit already. (laughs) You can either write Less Than Zero or a fictional novel that tries to make an emotional case about a generation's tales like The Great Gatsby or whatever. You can get six characters and say these are composites of people who represent the kind of people you'll find in this age group in America. And you can also write a non-fiction book where you're journalistically saying these are my interviews. I tried to combine that so you've got the emotional case with the non-fiction that I hope readers can relate to. A_P: How have the reviews been? MB: People seem to like the mix. The feedback I've gotten from anyone under 20, the feedback's been really, really positive. Jesus freaks have criticized the book. Stupid feminists have criticized the book. But I didn't write it for Jesus freaks or stupid feminists, I wrote it for kids still in high school, and maybe college, who are still going through this stuff and having to make a lot of these choices and face some of the consequences. The best part of this whole thing is getting feedback from those kids who say things like, "I've felt this way for years but I didn't know how to put it into words, and this book was everything I wish I could've said about it."
[The]
message of the book is essentially conservative. The Jesus freaks don't
want to face reality, they live in a fucking fantasy world. The stupid
feminists, some have wanted it both ways. They've campaigned for decades
to legalize abortion and all that. Then once they become totally sexual
and have got this anonymous sex scene where girls are more victimized more
than they were before sexual liberation, then they just got on how all
boys exploit girls, and all men are rapists and blah, blah, fucking blah.
So I don't even take the criticisms from feminists seriously because
they're just so fucking stupid. They're spoiled children, and I want them
all dead.
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