Narrative Warfare: Gen X Just Wants To Be Loved

Following up my post on How To Trap Gen X, here's a video for a song released when the prime Gen X cohort started graduating high school and entered adult life.

Matthew Sweet's 1991 album "Girlfriend", with this eponymous song as the lead single, was his big breakthrough. He used clips from the 1982 film version of Space Adventure Cobra, instantly getting attention from an audience raised with Voltron, Robotech, and similar fare. Cobra, like Bond, was set up as a Man's Man who couldn't help attracting the ladies to him and enjoyed their attention.

The song is about a man encountering a woman and expressing a desire to make her his mate for life. The song unveils the man as a socially-awkward lonely heart who goes about this in the manner of a stalker. It's not unlike "Every Breath You Take" by The Police in that respect.

Generation X is an unwanted generation by their Boomer parents. Unlike Generation Y, whose experience with Boomers was being set up to fail via an idyllic childhood, Generation X was set up to fail by being ignored in favor of Boomer careerism and hedonism. It's a divide of attitude that isn't unlike that of a women before and after she hits The Wall, and I would not be surprised if a critical mass of Boomer women hitting The Wall did provoke that change.

The result is a generation whose sense of social normalcy is derived in large part by mass media, and for boys in particular they got set up to fail because their fathers didn't bother to teach them how to become men. That got gleaned not only from mass media generally, but also from the stashes of porn kept by said fathers. If not for remaining, though waning, institutions such as team sports and the Boy Scouts there would be nothing at all to guide boys in what it means to be a man- and therefore what it takes to be worthy of a woman's attention.

If you doubt this, go look at Millennial men- especially the soy brigades.

What the Supreme Dark Lord would formalize as the Social-Sexual Hierarchy was informally acknowledged before this, but Boomer men didn't pass on this knowledge anymore than they passed on any other inheritance bequeathed to them by their elders. The result was the mass of men who have no idea what love is, or how attraction works, or anything else about the relations between men and women in reality. Gen X had to piece it together themselves, and it's no surprise that the majority--the Deltas--are so messed up; take a look at the now-disbanding Manosphere and you'll see the major players being Alphas and Betas trying to fix Deltas, and you'll find mostly Gen X and Gen Y trying to fix their brothers.

The video is an expression of what Gen X at the time believed love to be. The song is the expressed belief; the clips are the imagined fantasy.

Gen X just wants to be loved. Their cynicism stems from this lack; it's how they cope, and without someone they trust showing them how to fix their problems--as their fathers should have done--they end up doing cargo cult behaviors and wonder why it doesn't work until they give up in frustration. It also makes them very vulnerable to love-bombing, as my previous post showed by example.

If Gen Y years to escape to a better past, then Gen X wants the embrace of someone who loves them- they want to be wanted, not merely needed or tolerated. Trapping Gen X means playing on those vulnerabilities.