Why We Can't Sleep

by Ada Calhoun

  Armed with the catchphrase “Stranger danger!”—and perhaps a key sticking out from between clenched fingers on especially menacing blocks—we roamed free. We were known as latchkey kids, and we were given independence early, even though at lunch every day, we were confronted with other children’s photos on our milk cartons, accompanied by the caption: MISSING. The image of Etan Patz, who lived not far from me in New York City and had vanished in 1979 at the age of six, spread nationwide. Adults told us that he’d probably been kidnapped and murdered (many years later, this was proved to have been true). Back then, nothing was sugarcoated—except our food.

  As a little girl growing up in the outskirts of Springfield, Illinois, in the 1980s, Valarie loved riding her bike, playing in the corn and soybean fields across the street, climbing trees in the sparse woods, watching the three TV channels on a giant wood-console-encased TV set, and reading Stephen King books.

  Gen X childhoods were lived in a haze of secondhand smoke, including in restaurants and on planes. We played without realizing what peril we were in. Some of Valarie’s fondest memories of her childhood are of riding in the back of a pickup truck, biking with no helmet, and lying out in the sun with no sunscreen. (One woman I know said another name for Gen X could be “the Coppertone Generation.”)

  “My parents would leave me in the car all the time,” said Valarie. “Can you imagine leaving a kid in the car now? Stores literally have signs reminding you to check and make sure you didn’t leave your child.”

  When Valerie was ten, her father left her mother. She says she believes it was, in part, because her mother was overweight in spite of endless dieting with Sweet n’ Low and Tab—which Valarie thinks led to her own battles with food.

  Financially, divorce devastated many Gen X children and their mothers.⁸ When a couple divorced in the 1980s, children almost always went to live with their mother, and a child’s household income dropped dramatically—according to one study, by an average of 42 percent.⁹ While some female-led households eventually came back strong, many never recovered anything like their former wealth.¹⁰

  Meanwhile, the country faced stagflation, Watergate, gas station lines, steel mills closing, and President Jimmy Carter wearing a sweater on TV, encouraging austerity.¹¹

  “Rampant divorce, a wobbly economy, soaring crime rates, and swinging-singles culture,” wrote Jean M. Twenge in Generation Me,¹² “made the 1970s a difficult time to be a kid.” Children of divorce might become mini confessors for their parents’ anxieties and dating problems—treated not so much as kids but as small people who could hear and see with adult ears and eyes.

  The emergence of Russia in the post-2016 headlines has given many members of Generation X flashbacks to the aggressively anti-Russian entertainment of our childhoods. In 1983’s War Games, a teen hacker played by Matthew Broderick has to save the planet from a thermonuclear war that he inadvertently started when he broke into a military computer. That same year, 100 million people tuned in to watch the ABC TV movie The Day After, in which a nuclear war between the Soviet Union and the United States leaves millions dead and society in ruins.¹³ In 1984’s Red Dawn, Russian and Cuban soldiers invade a Colorado town and start killing or reeducating the townspeople. A small group of young people—played by, among others, Patrick Swayze, Charlie Sheen, Lea Thompson, and Jennifer Grey—mount a brutal armed resistance.

  One Gen X woman told me that as a little girl she wrote to President Ronald Reagan to beg him to avert nuclear war. By return mail she received, in place of reassurance, an age-inappropriate packet of detailed information about the nuclear threat.

  Until 1991, it was a major theme of our newscasts and our entertainment that with no warning we could all be incinerated. The partial meltdown at the Three Mile Island reactor in Pennsylvania in 1979 and the Chernobyl nuclear power plant explosion in 1986 helped make nuclear destruction feel plausible. Psychological studies in the 1980s found that the threat of nuclear war led to high anxiety in children. The silver lining, according to one journal article, was that we didn’t stew for long, because: “cynicism and apathy set in rapidly.”¹⁴

  That, and we came to assume that the very survival of the planet was iffy.

  “Every night,” Valarie told me, “I would send out a whispered request to the universe that the apocalypse wouldn’t happen. Sometimes I tried reverse psychology.” Convinced that the universe would deny her what she said she wanted, she would murmur, lying there in the dark, “I hope the world gets blown up.”

  When it came to TV and movies, the problem was not just that a lot of it was terrifying but also that we consumed so much of it. I started watching TV when I got home from school and kept at it until bedtime. For me those years are a blur of Inspector Gadget, The Price Is Right, Head of the Class, MacGyver, Cheers, Family Ties, Family Feud, Knight Rider, Night Court, The Jeffersons, Laverne and Shirley, Small Wonder, The Woody Woodpecker Show, and Benson—with a bit of Reading Rainbow thrown in for culture. The saddest day of the week was Sunday, when the only things broadcasting were football, church shows, and news.

  According to the Gen X “mind-set list,” “The higher their parents’ educational level, the more likely they were to come home at 4 p.m. to an empty house—except for the microwave and MTV.”¹⁵ When it launched on August 1, 1981, with “Video Killed the Radio Star” by the Buggles, MTV would become always-on, must-see TV for those in middle or high school at the time. Friends of mine who grew up outside major urban centers in places where MTV wasn’t widely available (in one place I know of, the town banned it as satanic), VHS tapes of 120 Minutes were passed around like notes about where to meet after school.

  This was before the age of DVR and Netflix, so much of what we saw was advertising. Research from 2017 found that 83 percent of Gen X—more than any other generation—trust ads they see on TV.¹⁶ Gen X has been described as both repulsed by materialism and deeply materialistic, and there may be something to that. Those of us whose formative years were the 1980s were steeped in a bath of greed and gluttony: the yuppies’ BMW and Armani fetishes, sports car posters, Wall Street. We may have rebelled against it later by buying secondhand clothes, but we’re inculcated, deep down, with wanting a lot of stuff.

  I wonder, again, whether our acquisitiveness is not a sign of bad character so much as the inevitable result of a Clockwork Orange–style conditioning campaign. Every second of the day, no matter what else was going on, my brain was looping: “It’s Slinky! It’s Slinky! For fun, it’s a wonderful toy! It’s Slinky! It’s Slinky! It’s fun for a girl and a boy!”¹⁷ I will never, ever forget that chocolate is scrunchous when it crunches, that Mentos is the “fresh maker,” and that only I can prevent forest fires. Until I die, my bologna will bear the first name O-S-C-A-R.

  If you raise children in a culture of economic precariousness while showing them a thousand commercials a week for Sit N’ Spin, Big Wheel, Garanimals, and Hungry Hungry Hippos—not to mention product placements, as in 1982’s E.T. (Reese’s Pieces) and, self-consciously, with a slew of products in 1992’s Wayne’s World—can you blame them for feeling, years later, a deep sense of pleasure in the aisles of a big-box store or a cavalier attitude toward chucking hardcover books, face serums, and children’s pajamas into their Amazon Prime cart?

  The messages we received from the fire-hose spray of advertising, news, and entertainment could be weird and confusing, particularly with regard to sex and drugs.

  When many of the Boomers were teenagers, they had Woodstock and the British Invasion. But for Gen X, there was no consequence-free indulgence.

  While late Boomers enjoyed an air of permission around booze and, in many places, a drinking age of eighteen—which could mean fourteen in a small town where a friendly barkeep would give you a rum and Coke if you showed up with an older sibling—for most Gen Xers there was never an illusion that drinking could be purely a fun recreational activity. Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) formed in 1980. Drug Abuse Resistance Edu
cation (DARE) was founded in 1983. In 1984, the National Minimum Drinking Age Act encouraged states to adopt a uniform minimum drinking age of twenty-one. IDs became harder to forge. Drunk driving laws became stricter. Younger Gen Xers were the “clean-up crew for parties we were too young to attend,” Kevin Gilbert sang in the 1995 song “Goodness Gracious.”¹⁸

  When the Pill was introduced in the early 1960s, sex for anything other than procreation became far less scary—until the AIDS crisis hit, twenty or so years later. Older members of Generation X were adults by the time they knew about AIDS, which meant they faced a retroactive rather than an anticipatory panic. For younger Gen Xers, AIDS destroyed any hope of sexual liberty without danger, just in time for us to become sexually active. In 1987, the World Health Organization launched its campaign to curb the disease’s spread. By 1993, there would be more than 2.5 million AIDS cases globally. My school’s sex ed in the early 1990s featured graphic photographs of STD rashes. My friends and I carried condoms in our backpacks and were convinced that if we didn’t use them we would die.

  Younger Gen Xers received an anti–sex ed lesson from Anita Hill’s 1991 “Coke can” testimony about Clarence Thomas’s sexual harassment (complete with patronizing questions from senators about whether she was “a scorned woman”)—and, of course, from The Starr Report. Published in 1998, the document described in prurient detail President Clinton’s sexual encounters with Monica Lewinsky, with cold-shower lines like “Ms. Lewinsky turned over the dress that proved to bear traces of the President’s semen.”¹⁹ Evidently, when sexual activity wasn’t killing you, it was threatening the political stability of the most powerful country in the world.

  I learned about underwear as outerwear from Madonna’s gyrations to “Like a Virgin” on TV in 1984, when I was eight,²⁰ and about romance from Alex P. Keaton and Ellen Reed on Family Ties when I was nine. Finally, at age thirteen, I gathered from Dirty Dancing that I should only be so lucky, when I turned seventeen, to meet a twenty-five-year-old dance instructor who would school me in both sex and the merengue.

  As a bookish pre-internet adolescent, I found an ancient book at the library that told me vaginal orgasms were superior to clitoral ones. I finished the book with no clear sense of how one might achieve either. I saw ejaculate onscreen for the first time when a prisoner threw cum at Jodie Foster in The Silence of the Lambs (1991). My other information on the subject came from Cynthia Heimel’s satirical Sex Tips for Girls, which said you should swallow sperm, because spitting it out is “not considered sporting.”²¹

  “Remember when it was a fun thing for kids to go see a dirty movie?” my friend Rebecca said recently as we checked Common Sense Media to see if a certain PG-13 film would be okay for our middle schoolers. “You’d say you wanted to go to Porky’s and they’d say, ‘Oh, okay,’ as if they were giving you an extra piece of candy.”

  In the 1990s, third-wave feminism filled in some sex-educational gaps. Many Gen X women gradually embraced sex positivity as a way to counteract the anxiety instilled in us by AIDS. There was Sassy magazine, and there were often photocopied, stapled zines by women at record stores and bookstores. Writers and artists like Susie Bright, Annie Sprinkle, bell hooks, and members of the Riot Grrrl movement offered more interesting approaches to sex in all its risk and promise. Liz Phair’s vital 1993 album, Exile in Guyville, was a refreshing and relevant combination of sexual enthusiasm and romantic disillusionment.

  In 1994, Esquire described leaders of the third-wave movement as “Do Me” feminists. The title: “Yes.” It was followed by: “That’s the message from a new generation of women thinkers, who are embracing sex (and men!) … But can they save the penis from the grassy field of American history?”²² Because of course that’s the aim of feminism: to save the endangered penis.

  “Girl Power”—a Riot Grrrl mantra—was co-opted by the Spice Girls as a demand for the right to wear miniskirts and crop tops while singing about female friendship. In 1993, Saturday Night Live mocked the Sexual Offense Prevention Policy of Antioch College—a program that was created in the wake of sexual violence on campus and designed to create a culture of explicit consent. In a vicious game show skit called “Is It Date Rape?” one of the contestants, played by Shannen Doherty, was a girl with a hyphenated last name who was majoring in victimization studies and won the game by calling almost every scenario date rape.²³

  That same year, my high school English literature teacher screened The Accused, which had come out a few years earlier, for our class. In the film, Jodie Foster’s character is raped on a pool table while other men in the bar cheer. Partway through the scene, a girl in my class turned pale and ran out of the room.

  Mötley Crüe made it clear how they wanted us with songs like “She Goes Down,” “Slice of Your Pie,” and “Girls Girls Girls.” We might have slow-danced to Poison’s “Every Rose Has Its Thorn” in middle school, but then we listened to their other songs, like “I Want Action,” in which Bret Michaels vows not to give up until the girl gives in. If she’s not willing, he will “take her and make her.” The original cover of Guns N’ Roses’ 1987 album, Appetite for Destruction, featured a cartoon of a ravished woman and what appeared to be her robot rapist.

  Those bands seemed indifferent to women who were not there to sleep with them—and sometimes they snubbed even those who were. In the video for the romantic ballad “Patience,” baby-faced Axl sways and sings while Slash, holding a large snake on a hotel bed—this was not a subtle era—ignores one lingerie-clad groupie after another.²⁴

  Gen X girls grew up aware that we were vulnerable while being told that we were infinitely powerful. Meanwhile, Gen X boys and girls both learned early that whatever hurts we suffered, we would need to soothe ourselves.

  On January 28, 1986, an announcement came over the crackly loudspeaker system of my school. Usually, the intercom was reserved for either the Pledge of Allegiance or the cryptic proclamation “The eagle has landed,” which we eventually learned meant that the teachers’ paychecks were ready to be picked up in the office. But on this day, the office had, for us, far more exciting news: the intercom lady told us, the pride in her voice evident through the static, that it was finally time for the Challenger launch.

  My fifth-grade science teacher, Mrs. Morledge, wheeled a big boxy TV into her classroom as we settled in to watch the space shuttle take off.

  In that year, the oldest Gen Xers were college-age and the youngest ones were not long out of diapers. Those of us in the white-hot generational center were in our formative childhood years. I was ten.

  NASA was trying to get kids more excited about space, and the hype was intense, with lessons planned around the launch and daily briefings both from our teachers and on the news. Rumor had it that a substitute teacher at our school had been “in the running” for the program. (I have reason to believe that this same tale circulated at nearly every elementary school in America.)

  There had been talks, we knew, about shooting Big Bird into space. That plan was scrapped. The man behind Big Bird, Caroll Spinney, said it may have had something to do with the capsule’s compactness and the fact that Big Bird was more than eight feet tall.²⁵

  Instead, a cheerful and enthusiastic New Hampshire teacher named Christa McAuliffe, winner of the NASA Teacher in Space Project, would be the first civilian to take part in a space mission. We had all seen innumerable pictures of her. We knew she had two little kids at home, one of whom was about my age.

  The launch had been delayed several times, but this was the real thing. On our TV screen, we saw the live video of the Kennedy Space Center.²⁶ T minus fifteen seconds … We counted down from ten … “And liftoff!”

  We cheered. For a minute or so, we watched the Challenger climb into the sky.

  And then, while the announcer commented on the delays that had preceded the launch, the screen lit up.

  The boosters forked in two directions. In between, where the rocket should have been, we saw only a trail o
f smoke that looked a little like a bunched straw “snake” expanded rapidly by a drop of liquid. Where was the shuttle?

  The announcer stopped talking. We stared at the screen, waiting for an explanation of what we were seeing. Seconds ticked by.

  No, really: Where was the shuttle? Had it zapped into warp speed?

  We looked at our teacher. We looked at the TV. We looked at one another.

  Twenty-five seconds passed before the announcer said anything. Twenty-five seconds in which millions of kids across America stared at their classroom TVs, slowly beginning to wonder if that kind, happy teacher had really just died in a fireball—if her own children had, with us, witnessed her violent death.

  The anchor returned to say, in far too casual a voice: “Looks like a couple of the solid rocket boosters, uh, blew away from the side of the shuttle, in an explosion.”

  Long pause. Another voice: “Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously, a major malfunction.”

  A major malfunction.

  That woman—that mom—whom they’d taught us to love and root for, had just been blown up, along with other people whose faces we’d come to know. The grown-ups had made us watch. And now they were using weird language like “major malfunction.” Twenty-five seconds of silence. And silence after that, too. I don’t remember what Mrs. Morledge said, if anything, except that it was time for lunch.

  My son’s New York City public school, after what feels like every major news event or school shooting anywhere in the country, has a group discussion. The school counselor is available for questions. The dance teacher has them dance about it.

  Gen X mothers, too, are all about processing when it comes to their own kids. Here is a message I received from a Kansas City woman I was scheduled to interview: “Hi, Ada, hoping we can reschedule our talk today. Our dog was run over by a school bus yesterday. My daughter saw it happen right in front of our house. All pretty traumatic. I’ve got the kids home from school today and we are hunkering down. I would really love to be interviewed for your book. I just want to be in the right headspace and that is not today.”