Marty Beckerman is Stronger Than You
An edited version of this article originally appeared at PopMatters.com, Sept. 5, 2002. Beckerman has since gone on to publish additional novels and write for The New York Times, Playboy, and Wired, among others. He shares a screenwriting credit on the film American Satan.
“I’M NOT TRYING to be a prick, but I’m kind of a local celebrity.”
Ladies and gentlemen: Marty Beckerman. The 19-year-old journalist and author has just completed a homecoming of sorts in his native Anchorage, Alaska. Perhaps he’s a little wiser now. Stronger, even. It’s been a while. Modest? Nah. When you’re already the author of a notoriously scabrous sledgehammer of a novel at a time when most of your friends can still see high school in their rear-view mirrors, things are a little different.
Exhibit A:
“People will come up to me at parties [in Anchorage] and be like, ‘I’ve been wanting to meet you for so long!’ This one guy came up to me and started quoting shit I wrote like four years ago. I was like, ‘Oh, God.’”
Exhibit B:
“It got me a blowjob once.”
That’s surprising, the blowjob bit. Surprising because his first book, Death to All Cheerleaders: One Adolescent Journalist’s Cheerful Diatribe Against Teenage Plasticity (Infected Press, 2000), wasn’t exactly blowjob-fomenting material. The book included such sensitive pieces as “My Make-Out Session with Watermelon Tits” and chestnuts such as “I wonder if I can nail that dumb bitch?” To no one’s surprise, it missed a Caldecott nomination.
Beckerman’s new book, Generation SLUT: A Brutal Feel-Up Session with Today’s Sex-Crazed Adolescent Populace, is an even more jagged riff on the degradation of his generation. Currently being shopped to big-name publishing houses, the novel’s due to contain nuggets such as “My Unforgettable (Almost) Prom Date with a Dirty Rotten Whore” and a piece on the debauched hypocrisy of frat life that garnered him multiple death threats at his American University in Washington, D.C. Much like his last book, this one isn’t likely to endear him to either parents or those entrenched in the cultural mainstream.
Of course, the young scribe didn’t start out like this. His career began in 1998 as a student at Steller Secondary School in Anchorage, where he penned a teen column titled “A Perfect World” for the Anchorage Daily Times.
“I started out writing Dave Barry-type stuff,” he said. “I had this fantasy of morphing into Dave Barry and living his life. Well, I don’t know — he’s not too cute. But he was the writer that made me want to start writing. I guess as I got a little older, I began to realize the things that really pissed me off.”
One of those things turned out to be the social ladder inherent to almost every high school in America — the way, according to Beckerman, a person’s level of acceptance is directly proportionate to their level of performance. “I was a little bitter about that. A little bitter about the whole ‘girls’ thing. I just took that out on the targets, which were, you know, jocks and cheerleaders and shit. Who weren’t completely undeserving.”
Surprise: the Times fired Beckerman after he asked a teen cheerleader how it felt to be “a urine stain on the toilet seat of America” in the name of the paper. So it goes.
Today, Beckerman’s barbs are more focused. College delivered him an epiphany: everyone displays the same the same superficial, plastic habits. Thus was born Beckerman’s sociological theory: “Generation Slut.”
“The Death to All Cheerleaders era, that was very malicious. What I’m trying to do with this new book is take on a whole generation’s problems. When I was like 16, 17, I was aiming all my hate at just specific individuals. Which maybe missed the big picture, but it was a lot of fun.”
The problem that plagues his generation, he says, is that nobody seems to care about anything that matters. Generation X was an idle one. No direction. This new generation—his Generation Slut—has no common goal, no community. If Gen X had no future, this one has no soul.
“The preoccupation with getting laid is just the symptom,” he explains. “This whole idea of ‘choose a different partner every Saturday night,’ that’s just one way of expressing it, the idea that we don’t feel connected to each other, that we don’t want anything deeper than ‘Wow, this feels really good, HUMP ME BITCH, HUMP ME, FUCK!’ I think people want to feel connected. They want to feel loved and cared about and shit. But people are afraid of rejection, that they won’t be accepted if they don’t follow this hook-up culture. If they don’t buy into it—if they try for something more—then they’ll be shunned or be called a prude.”
He blames his generation’s attention deficit on its disdain for long-term relationships. He cites, among other things, the influence of divorce rates among Boomers and the proliferation of sex in the media.
“There’s this whole hyper-sexual culture marketed towards preteens now,” he said, referring to popular teen magazines and items like thong underwear that are marketed towards youth in major clothing outlets.
“It doesn’t look fucking good. I don’t think a lot of teenagers [today] sit back and think, ‘Why am I on Earth?’ And maybe teenagers never asked that, but I look back at my parents when they were young and I think, ‘Holy shit, look what that generation accomplished.’ I just don’t see the same for this one.”
How do you fix it? I ask.
“I don’t know if there’s an easy solution. It’s hard. It’s such a huge problem embedded in a lot of people. Generation X was at least looking for something. Maybe all they found was Starbucks. At least they were looking.”
He pauses.
“But we’re not. And I guess that’s the fucking difference.”