Ever think that these words would come from the mouths of 17 year-olds?
“I feel bad using guys,” said Lana. “I feel like there’s always an obligation.”
“Yeah, Audrey,” Sophie chimed in. “What are you doing?”
“I don’t know!” cried Audrey. “I’ve never done this with any man. It’s just . . . ” She paused. “At least he’s not a 17-year-old boy, you know?”
“I know,” agreed Lana. “I have nothing to say to those boys.”
“I honestly feel like a 30-year-old trapped in the body of a high-school girl,” said Audrey. “I don’t know if that goes for all girls in New York, or just us, if it’s just the life we’ve been living.”
It's like when they watch Sex and the City: What they see is not the story of four women twice their age looking for genuine love in superficial surroundings. They see themselves.
“I’m ready, honestly, to be married and pregnant,” said Lana. “Not children, but just pregnant. I know how it sounds. I don’t care. I want to have my belly and my man.”
Is she for real? If she wants to catch a man, that's the last thing she needs to be saying.
“Me too,” said Audrey. “People say I should be excited about college, but I’m like, ‘Um, no.’ I want to get on with my life.” She sipped her iced tea and added, “I’ve never been in love.”
Yeah, because college is such a useless waste of time.
“Me neither,” said Lana quietly. “We’re going to be single all our lives.” They considered this.
They'll be single, because that alcohol-induced mental haze that impairs the common-sense faculties of the brain usually wears off by the end of the night, at least for most men.
"What are we doing later?”
Apparently, more club hopping to look for even older guys. This group of spoiled rich girls, obviously not really any more mature than their male peers, spends their nights chasing after older men, who are probably the rejects that adult women don't want to be bothered with. Of course, the men probably don't see it that way; some see going out with these young girls as just another facet of the dating game:
“It kind of disturbs me to see all my friends hitting on girls twenty years younger than them,” he says. “I guess the girls just don’t care. Maybe they just care about the money, I don’t know. It all comes down to that because, come on, it’s not like they’re going to fall in love in a place like this. They can’t possibly think they will. I’ll tell you, I feel really terrible for women my age, in their thirties and forties. There’s no market for them anymore. Everything is about girls like these.” He takes a sip of his Heineken and suddenly changes his tone. “But, God, they’re the hottest people in here, aren’t they?”
It's a shame that the girls are reduced to something akin to call girls, but it's a bit ridiculous to feel sorry for mature women because they're not "the hottest people" in the club. This seems to speak volumes about the shallowness of the groups that engage in this activity.
“Guys in their twenties, they feel like they’re getting older. They’re starting to look back. So they come to us, wanting to feel a little younger, a little more free-spirited and lighthearted.”
Translation: Some guys in their twenties are such losers that they can't handle trying to find a free-spirited and lighthearted woman their own age, so they chase after young girls.
In theory, anyway. The reality is more complicated. Lana recently had a bad experience with a guy that age. It all went down at the prom, of all places, the whole debacle an unfortunate reminder of the pitfalls of growing up in a city where no one acts their age. Three weeks ago, the girls made what in retrospect proved to be a poor decision: asking some twentysomething finance guys they were seeing to be their prom dates. The guys did everything they could to get out of it. They didn’t have tuxedos, they said. Didn’t know where to buy corsages. One even confessed that he was being seriously chastised by his friends. And so the girls did everything they could to ease the discomfort: paying for a private table, renting an Expedition instead of sharing a limo with their classmates. But the illusion was already infected by reality, and the night was a disaster.
I guess some people never grow up. Why would some twenty-something guy go to a prom? That is the saddest thing I've heard in a long time. What would they talk about? Oh, right-- what am I thinking?
When these girls actually do turn 30, they'll be wishing that they could be 17 again.
"Manhunting with the High School Dream Girls" (New York Magazine)
