Don't Believe the Hype about Young People and "Peer Pressure"
Lately I’ve been thinking about Blind Tom. (Who am I kidding? I’m always thinking about Blind Tom.) I learned about Blind Tom from my mother, who’s a historian.
Basically, England became a Protestant nation under Henry VIII, and remained so under Henry’s son, Edward VI. But when Edward died, he was replaced by Mary I, aka Bloody Mary, who restored England to Catholicism. Once Mary was on the throne, church officials set about trying to eradicate any remaining Protestant heresy in England.
Which is where Blind Tom comes in.
Blind Tom was a young man who got hauled before the Chancellor of Gloucester, John Williams, because he had been heard saying that the actual body of Christ was not offered at Communion. Williams demanded that Blind Tom tell him who had taught him such a terrible heresy. To which Blind Tom responded along the lines of: “You did, last year. On the pulpit.” Williams begged Blind Tom to forget what Williams had preached last year, and stick to what he was preaching this year — to go along with the new orthodoxy the way everyone else was doing — but Blind Tom wouldn’t change with the times, so he got executed.
The reason I’m thinking of Blind Tom especially right now is because there’s a lot of chatter about peer pressure.
The other day, Pundit Supreme Nate Silver stated that students take part in protests, in part, because young people “face more peer pressure” than older people. Which flies in the face of everything I’ve personally observed. Yeah, young people deal with a lot of peer pressure, but they also have the ability to change cliques, or graduate from a school and reinvent themselves. Adults, in my experience, face tons of peer pressure — from co-workers, from social groups — and have arguably a much harder time resisting it. (Because the older you get, the harder it is to make new friends, and the harder it is to start over if you are ostracized for going against the social consensus. Not to mention, you could lose your job.)
To be sure, adults are somewhat less likely to be executed, as Blind Tom was, for failing to adjust their views to fit the latest consensus. But there are still consequences for failing to follow the pack, and most adults are startlingly good at not just conforming to the latest groupthink, but convincing themselves that they always believed whatever everyone currently believes. It can be kind of disconcerting to watch this process in real time — it’s a bit like that Star Trek episode where the clock strikes and polite, well-behaved people suddenly transform into violent fiends.
Again, I’m not denying that young people have a lot of peer pressure too — I was bullied rather a lot, so I know firsthand how nasty the pressure to conform can get. But I’ve seen plenty of in-group/out-group dynamics and groupthink among adults as well. (Ahem. Social media.) My sense is that most adults are largely unconscious of the ways they bend to social pressure, and the worst conformists tell themselves they are fierce independent thinkers.
This notion that young people are especially beset by, or susceptible to, peer pressure bothers me for various reasons.
It’s a way of denying agency to people who are pointing out truths that make everyone else uncomfortable. Of stripping full personhood from people who are standing up for their principles. It’s a time-worn technique for delegitimizing protests when we don’t want to engage with the real and substantive reasons why people are protesting.
But the “peer pressure” accusation is also frequently used to discredit young trans and gender-nonconforming people — by claiming that they’re just modifying their genders in order to be “cool.” This is what lies behind the specious, scientifically illiterate garbage around “social contagion” and “Rapid Onset Gender Dysphoria.” Basically, young people take the scary step of embracing their true identities and coming out as trans or non-binary, and adults launch a hair-on-fire, fact-free moral panic — and yet, somehow it’s the teens who are succumbing to peer pressure, rather than the adults.
Anyway, back to poor Blind Tom, who wouldn’t change his mind when everyone else did.
I wrote before about the intense whiplash that followed 1992, which was the “Year of the Woman.” On the heels of Anita Hill’s allegations of sexual misconduct by Clarence Thomas, plus a host of other scandals, everyone in American political culture decided to believe women, and even to help women achieve more political power. More women were elected to the House and the Senate than ever before, and women’s issues were being taken more seriously than ever. For a relatively brief period, everyone seemed to be embracing feminism — and then once Bill Clinton took office, the backlash was brutal. Several years ago, I read daily newspapers from 1993 in real time, and was startled to see how sudden the lurch backwards really was. One day, all of American political culture was talking about how Republicans needed to adapt or die — and the next, there was nonstop hand-wringing about the need for society to cater to “Angry White Men.”
I saw something similar in 2020 and afterward: for a relatively brief period, every white person I knew was talking loudly about antiracism and interrogating their role in white supremacy. Everyone’s Instagram had a black square, every apartment window had a Black Lives Matter sign, and there was a lot of talk about police misconduct. I was amazed, but not entirely surprised, to witness how quickly white people lurched toward fear-mongering about crime and demanding more, not less, power for the police. (And then there’s covid. Sigh. I really feel like a lot of people have selective amnesia about how bad it was, plus a touch of denial about how lethal it still is for vulnerable people.)
When I first saw Nate Silver’s comments, my immediate reaction was to insist on Bluesky that older people have more peer pressure than young people, because we have more to lose from rebelling against the current orthodoxy. Honestly, I may have been overstating the case slightly — but I do think adults are at least as susceptible to peer pressure as young people, and our peer groups tend to be much more ossified and harder to move on from. And my whole adult life has left me convinced that most grown-ups are very happy to proclaim that we’ve always been at war with yadda yadda.
This is one reason I love young adult fiction (and why I was so excited to try my hand at writing it.) Part of the process of coming of age is recognizing all the compromises that adults have made, and all the ways that adults have rationalized or made themselves forget those compromises. I know for sure I’ve made plenty of those compromises myself, and I’m plenty in denial about some stuff. But one of the things I try to make an effort to do, as an older person, is to listen to young people, because they are usually at least more aware of the bullshit that us olds are embracing than we are.
Also: You can protest at any age! Protesting is awesome! Marching for peace and human rights is one of the most heroic things a human being can do. I’m always in awe of grandmas and great-grandmas who are out there on the front lines.
Anyway, if you find yourself fervently holding a point of view that everyone else also holds but which is the opposite of what you thought yesterday, maybe stop and think. (This also one of the things that fiction is good for, it can show the moving target of groupthink in a way that’s harder to dramatize in real life.)
Stuff I Love Right Now
I’m listening endlessly to Xenia Rubinos’ second album, Black Terry Cat, which came out in 2016 but still feels utterly fresh. An Afro-Latina musician who trained in jazz composition at Berklee, Rubinos creates some irresistible melodies for her own high soprano voice. This album is kind of a blend of jazz, hip hop, pop and indie rock, with some lyrics that crawl inside your brain and give birth to wild thoughts. A standout is “Mexican Chef,” about the brown people who do all the invisible labor that keeps everyone else’s life going, but honestly every song is brilliant. Also worth checking out: her cover version of the Clash’s “Should I Stay or Should I Go?”
Also, I’ve been watching the gonzo Mary & George on Starz: a somewhat fanciful account of the real-life story of George Villiers, whose mother pimped him out to become the lover of King James I. Julianne Moore is having the time of her life playing a scheming, manipulative mom, who will do absolutely anything to rise in status in a harsh world. Tony Curran, as King James, is off the chain in the best possible way.
My Stuff
This Saturday is the Trans Nerd Meet Up! Come hang out with us!
My young adult Unstoppable trilogy is on the Lodestar Awards ballot for the third time in a row — and if you’re a Hugo voter, you can read the whole shebang for free in your voter packet. This is a great chance to jump on board this beautiful queer starship.
The latest episode of Our Opinions Are Correct is about how science fiction and fascism, plus why you should fight back against book bans.
My latest SFF book review column in the Washington Post covers books by John Wiswell, Elaine U. Cho, Sofia Samatar and Samantha Mills. (Gift link.)
Your local comics shop (or bookstore) can still order New Mutants Vol. 4 and New Mutants: Lethal Legion, featuring Escapade, the trans superhero I co-created for Marvel. (To get the beginning of her story, you need to track down the 2022 pride issue.)
More books! Never Say You Can't Survive is a guide to writing yourself out of hard times. Even Greater Mistakes is a weird, silly, scary, cute collection of stories.