Hello, Boys!

Do you have a thing for Justin Bieber, or the floppy-haired nymphs from One Direction? You are not alone. LML takes a closer look at the age of the tween boy crush and asks, are we perverts?

A few weeks ago I was sat on my sofa with a friend watching X Factor, not a usual position for LML to be in but I figured if I didn’t want to remain a perpetual social outcast I should try and engage with the cultural zeitgeist. I did in fact, rather enjoy it, and I wasn’t the only one. “Oh my god, I love Harry Styles, he is so fit!” panted my friend next to me. Really? Even though his legs are the size of tree stumps and he drinks Smirnoff Ice through a straw? Is it just me who wants to give him a quart of milk and a cookie before affectionately ruffling his curls and tucking him up with the latest Tin Tin?

My friend is just one of an increasing number of twenty-something women harbouring a crush on a much younger man. Where once women lusted after the likes of distinguished older gentlemen like George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Harrison Ford, now we’re going for a new, younger brand of sex appeal: Robert Pattinson, the boys from Skins, even Harry Potter has an element of geek chic. They’re young, talented and gorgeous with none of the emotional baggage of the older generation. Who wants to fantasize about a 48 year old with a dodgy beard going through a mid-life crisis?   

Another friend recently embarked on a rather ill-advised, romantic tryst with a 17 year old with braces (and no not the jaunty fashion statement kind favoured by ageing history professors, the other kind). Her justification was “well, he’s legal.” Isn’t that the same thing 30 year old men say to themselves when they’re prowling bars on the look out for impressionable young women?! To be fair to her I get the impression he was wise beyond his years, and most importantly, a very enthusiastic participant in said trysting.  

Admittedly I am somewhat biased in the old vs. young debate given I have a penchant for old(er) men, mostly for entirely superficial reasons. LML is not ashamed to admit to adhering to the life philosophy that the older your boyfriend, the younger you look. The same goes for boyfriends who are curvy / tall, making you appear slim / petite. It’s illusory dating, and before you all throw your hands up in mock horror (‘me? superficial? I SO go for personality…’Whatever love, I saw you out with that Calvin Klein model with the reading level of a 3 year old) just remember that all these old, chubby, tall boyfriends are gaining some serious cool credentials by dating comparatively skinny, young, short girlfriends. It’s win-win!

LML believes that unless there are serious mitigating factors (yacht ownership, for example) if a man has significantly less wrinkles than you then he’s a no-go. Do you really want to look all pruney and haggard next to the taut creaminess of your lover’s youthful visage? Enough respect to Madonna for nailing bonafide hottie Jesus, if I have a tenth of her chutzpah and devil-may-care irreverence when I’m her age I’ll be a very happy woman, but doesn’t she ever stop and think “I’m actually dating a toddler”?

On balance, I suspect that we are not perverts. Most women might harbour a secret crush for the likes of Harry and co but if actually confronted with the possibility of a little extra-curricular activity behind the bike sheds I suspect most would gracefully decline. After all, real life so rarely lives up to the wistful fantasies we construct in our heads. I remember what a 16 year old kiss felt like and I think I can best describe it thus: Imagine being whipped round the back of the knees with a soggy skipping rope. Then imagine that in your mouth, over and over and over again whilst your neck tilted to one side gets increasingly sore and you wonder wearily when this slimy ordeal will be over so you can race back to your friends and boast about how amazing your first kiss was. You’d forgotten, hadn’t you? Reliving the moment? Relieved it’s all over? Exactly.   

After all hard liquor, broad shoulders and a steamy, knee-buckling kiss is what sorts the men from the boys. Sorry Justin.

Please Sir, Can I Have Some Work? A Lamentation from the Lost Generation

It’s been 162 days since I was last in paid employment. Not that I’m counting or anything, unless counting means monitoring with an intensity that borders on deranged.  I first heard the phrase ‘Lost Generation’ a few days ago and for some reason it reminded me of Steven Spielberg’s The Lost World, as if unemployed graduates are like pre-historic dinosaurs threatening the very survival of the human race with our futility.

My first proper paid job was with a quango for a year and a half, mostly doing administrative jobs taking overpriced sandwiches to overpaid suits who would complain about working past 4.30pm on a Friday. They generously offered to extend my contract for another few months – incidentally, at the time I would have used the word ‘generously’ in a sardonic fashion but in retrospect I appreciate just how generous it really was – but I declined. Now the words: Make, Bed, Your and Lie might be flying around, and to that I challenge you to spend a year and a half as a poorly paid paper-shuffling android and then jump for joy when you're offered another 3 months as a poorly paid paper-shuffling android, after which you'll probably be fired.   

At the moment I’m doing an unpaid internship made possible by the fact that my long-suffering, generous-hearted mother is happy to let me continue to loaf around her house looking morose and eating chunks of cheese out of the fridge like a very depressed, oversized rodent. She knows she can’t get away with the “when I was your age” lectures because she’d have to finish them with “I didn’t have the urge to drink lukewarm pinot grigio out of a jug whilst watching reruns on ITV2”.

There are quite a few interns at my workplace, all with good degrees, clean shirts and the kind of can-do, pumped-up attitude that has recruitment consultants drooling into their lattes. Every morning it’s the same old, “So, found anything?” False, beaming smile, “Yeah, yeah I found a job filing tax returns for an Icelandic fish-gutter based in Svalbard. It’s unpaid, but at least it’s some more experience on the CV.” Then we shuffle mournfully over to our desks, clutching our own-brand cups of tea and continue with our data entry. Ctrl+C, Ctrl+V, Tab, Enter, Repeat, Sob.     

I almost wish I’d gone for one of those sales jobs you see advertised with a title like “Senior Managerial Retail Executive, Earn 100K in your first year!£!£!£!£!”. At least I’d have some money to go with my misery.  And yes okay, for all of you thinking what a self-indulgent, jumped-up little twerp I am, I must admit that thinking about my situation rationally I am in a much better position than most.

I am fortunate to be able to live in central London with an obliging parent whilst many of my acquaintances have been forced back home to far less glamorous locations: Basingstoke, Burnley, Bolton. There's nothing wrong with any of these places of course, unless you are an eager young graduate keen to make your fortune in which case it's like being promised the world and then finding out that, actually, the world's not for sale but how about this nice 1 bed semi off the M6?

I am lucky to have savings so I can afford to do CV-plumping internships rather than having to graft in a cafe or bar to earn rent money. I met a friend in India who is an incredibly bright, motivated young woman from oop North, keen to work in the international development sector. She scrimped and saved every penny for months so that she could go to India to do research with a disability charity, to get the requisite developing country experience you need to make it in the industry. She's back home now, applying for everything and anything she might be remotely qualified for, desperate to make it to London to kick-start her career (I don't have the heart to tell her things in London are almost as dire as the rest of the country).

And yet, whilst I can appreciate my good fortune compared with some, misery is not objective. The woman who has just lost a beloved parent doesn't, in the immediate aftermath of her grief think ‘thank god I'm not a Somalian orphan.’

So, is there any hope? Of course there is. It takes just one application and one employer to see a job, a skill or a spark on your CV for you to be lifted out of the wastelands of unemployment and elevated to a higher state of being. As a loved one is fond of saying to me, I need “relentless positivity” and a firm conviction that I am the ideal candidate for someone, somewhere. 

After all, tomorrow is another day. Lucky number 163…