I’m Dr. Drew, and yes, I am a pain in the ass.
That’s my reaction to a recent “School of Thought” column in Time Magazine, which I should totally stop reading. The topic is “Off to College,” and columnist Andy Rotherham* very unwisely turns things over to Dr. Drew Pinsky, a previously unknown to me radio dude who, Andy tells us, has been dubbed “surgeon general of youth culture” by an obviously drunken New York Times.
I totally cannot imagine why the Times would call this guy “surgeon general of youth culture” since his basic emotion towards the “youth culture” is that it shouldn’t exist. Pizza? It’s bad! It’s bad! “Tell them [your college-bound kinder] that if it comes out of the ground, it’s healthier than if it comes out of a package.” Alcohol? “Point out to them [again, the kinder] that a single binge — that’s four shots of liquor — can affect them for up to a week, and studies show it can affect grade-point averages.”
Drugs? “If you have a family history of addiction [that is, if you ever smoked a joint, you pathetic loser], you must have the conversation about risk — even occasional use can trigger the addictive process. Have a conversation about prescription drugs and the use of stimulants for studying. They can induce mania, depression and addiction.”
In other words, basically, don’t do anything, because if you do you’ll get fat, you’ll flunk out, and you’ll turn into a raving drug addict. But, hysterical as all this sounds, Dr. D is just getting warmed up. Naturally, it’s sex that transforms mere mania into frothing hypermania. In the time-honored tradition of hyperventilating scolds of all ages, he seizes on the “worst” thing that kids are doing (that is to say, the one thing we didn’t do when we were young) and makes that the only thing that kids do.
“Hooking up is institutionalized. But when you study hooking up, you find a lot of unhappiness in college women. Why are they always intoxicated when they’re doing it? When I give talks on campuses and I ask the men about this, they say it’s because ‘I could get rejected.’ ‘I drink so I can pull it off.’ ‘I’m medicating my anxiety.’”
Um, doc, you were talking about women, and then you started talking about men. Can’t you tell the difference? But, again, there’s more:
“When you ask the ladies, it’s always absolute silence. Because they just heard something different [from the boys] than what they expected. I could blame the alcohol, but some courageous girl will say, ‘I drink to make sure I don’t have any feeling.’ And again the room goes silent. Because that’s different than what the guys say.”
The “ladies,” doc? Is that where you’re coming from? I’m afraid it is. Put this guy in a time machine and send him back to the 19th century, where he can sell band instruments to high schools in rural Indiana, because that’s obviously where he came from.
*Andy’s preferred moniker is “Andrew J. Rotherham,” I guess to distinguish him from all the other Andrew, not to mention Andy, Rotherhams roving about the landscape.
