Adults determined to remain kids - écrit personnel en anglais

Par : Cameron, Amy, Maclean's, 00249262, 8/2/2004, Vol. 117, Edition 31

Section :Essay

It's been dubbed a Peter Pandemic: adults determined to remain kids

HERE IS MY CONFESSION. Sometimes, late at night, I put on the tiny, sparkling T-shirt I wore to clubs when I was 21 and dance to Salt-N-Pepa's Let's Talk About Sex. Occasionally, when I'm supposed to be working, I play The Sims computer game for hours -- starting fights between lovers, buying new outfits for the gay couple and killing off characters by drowning them in swimming pools. I buy clothes in the teen departments of the Bay and Winners. I have a child's pink plastic microphone in my shower. On weekends I'm out until 2 a.m. with friends at the local pub.

I'm 32. Am I too old for this?

Over the past few years, researchers, marketing firms, gaming companies and social trend experts have paid more attention to what's been dubbed a Peter Pandemic. You know, people in their 30s, 40s and even 50s who, to all intents and purposes, refuse to grow up. We've seen the extreme cases -- the 35-year-old rollerblader wearing a belly shirt that reveals the enormous dragon tattoo on her butt cleavage; the father in his 50s who gets together with his pals once a year to drop LSD; the 44-year-old who spends hours sewing tiny sheets and duvets for her new dollhouse. But there are tamer examples, too. Men who spend Friday nights playing Grand Theft Auto III, or women out on "girls night" doing body shots off the hot young bartender.

In the dystopia conjured up by Margaret Atwood in Oryx and Crake, a new breed of perfect people die, without pain or illness, as soon as they turn 30. Today's reality is perhaps even stranger: many people simply stop maturing intellectually or emotionally after they turn the big 3-0.

These "kidults" or "adultescents," as the marketing industry calls them, now have an enormous impact on the economy. Music, film, books, games, clothing, even furniture are pitched with these Dorian Gray professionals in mind. There's Diet Pepsi's "forever young" campaign, for example, or the lite-beer-heavy-taste ads for paunchy professionals who want to guzzle like the lads they once were without getting bigger love handles. The Italian Web site www.kidultgame.com caters directly to the new breed of overgrown teenagers with its motto, "Never stop playing." Harry Potter now comes with adult-friendly covers, while narcissistic heroines like Bridget Jones become pop icons. And the recent film Raising Helen, a disappointing effort starring Kate Hudson, revolves around a party girl in crisis. When her sister dies, leaving Hudson's character the custody of her three children, she's forced to choose between her fun and frivolous lifestyle and the heavy chains of responsibility (naturally, she blows the parenting bit -- at first).

And things you'd expect to hold little interest for anyone over 25 are hauling in the oldies. At a showing in Toronto last month of the film Mean Girls, a smart teen comedy about nasty high-schoolers in competition with one another, the theatre was filled with groups of adult women. Not a teen in sight. The teen-dominated prime-time soap The O.C., meanwhile, is a huge hit with all ages.

The popularity of sitcoms about people who've rejected all things serious, a.k.a. adulthood, also underlines this change in the traditional social fabric. Seinfeld. Cheers. Friends. It was fun while it lasted, but eventually the characters we loved had to change. Friends had babies and bought homes outside (gasp!) Manhattan. Buffy the Vampire Slayer grew up. Hell, even Frasier -- after a son, a divorce, and a breakdown -- finally accepted his adulthood. Once the characters accepted some responsibility, the shows had to end. Growing up, these comedies seem to say, is a major drag, not worth watching.

As traditional markers for maturity disappear, parents and grandparents flounder while academics scratch their heads. Roderic Beaujot, a sociology professor at the University of Western Ontario in London, struggled with defining "youth" while researching his recent

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