The Blue Monkey Review

“You were here today discussing American youth culture,” Nenad begins, and asks me to explain what I mean by this term. He obviously was listening to my presentation, because I began by asking the audience to clarify what we meant by those terms, “youth” and “culture.” The group responded well. Almost all of the 20 or so in attendance were students who came either with Nina or Cindy. They had excellent English by and large, and they clearly found American youth and culture very interesting.

“What are some of the features of this American youth culture?” Nenad continued. I responded a bit generally here, talking about the social events in American high schools. In my presentation I had concentrated on the prom, because the Seventeen magazine that I had with me featured an article on “Great Prom Dresses (Under $100).” Many of the students knew about proms, knew that they were dances at the end of high school. That a prom queen is elected. All correct. “But you have to understand,” I told them, “that for many American girls, and for many boys, too, the prom is the greatest event in life between birth and marriage. And for some, it will be the greatest event of their entire lives.” At this Cindy made a face. Later on, though, TJ, who is the public affairs officer at the consulate and who also came to the talk, held forth at length about his prom. TJ’s prom ranked among the big moments in his life.

“What are some of the influences of American youth?” Nenad asks. It would be hard for me to overstate this because I see the impact of the peer culture everywhere, and not just in American society. I try to keep my shoulders from hunching as I tell him about youth culture and both fashion and music. “From the 1950s forward,” I had told the students earlier, “every new development in popular music began as a fad among youth.” But I could as readily say that American youth fads have set the pace for every new type of popular music worldwide. There are exceptions, of course. I’m not here to coin hyperbole.

“And what are some comparisons between youth culture in America and in Montenegro?” Lovely. Montenegrins love to hear what other people thing about them, though it bears remembering that even though they are their own harshest critics, they don’t particularly care for criticism from outsiders. Later in the evening Cindy tells me that her students complain to her, “You can’t hold us to American standards. We are at a lower level of development.”

“I don’t know much about Montenegrin youth,” I begin, carefully. In fact, much of what I know about Montenegrin youth I had learned in the previous hour. When I had finished the material I wanted to cover and asked for questions, Nina had asked the same question that Nenad later poses, about comparing youth in the two countries. At this I returned to my bag and pulled out a Croatian magazine entitled Teen that I had purchased just a few hours before in Podgorica. The themes and issues in Teen are strikingly similar to those in Seventeen. Fashion and cosmetics take up a lot of room, but so do issues about boys (Decki), dates (one article talked about ways to keep the first one from turning into a disaster), appearance and physical changes (an article about grudi, i.e. breasts), and sex. One girl had written, “I kissed my (female) friend. Am I normal?” Dr. Sanja wrote back very good advice, telling the girl that sexual identity takes some strange turns in adolescents and not to worry about this.

But differences exist, and these may be more important than the differences. “Do you think of yourselves as rebellious?” Cindy had asked. “Does there come a time in adolescence when you feel your parents know nothing?” To my surprise the students who responded said no. They had more respect for tradition and for their parents and grandparents. In the U.S. youth culture promotes both individualism and conformity. Adolescents become so devoted to their peer group that they readily reject much of what their parents stand for. This probably promotes individuation, the separation from the parents that is necessary for adulthood. But that process takes a much different shape in Montenegro. “Many of us live with our parents until we are 30.” One woman referred to herself as an exception, but she recognized that extended dependence was the norm. Everyone else in the room agreed.

The interview ended, I shook hands with Nenad and thanked the cameraman. They will take out all the stupid stuff, I told myself, and felt comforted. I might have congratulated that I had advanced one of my main projects here in Montenegro, to make Seton Hill University better known than Seton Hall, to make Seton Hill one of the best-known American universities in the country. I’ve given away many Seton Hill paraphernalia, and I mention the school when I can and sometimes when I probably shouldn’t. But the press releases for this talk, picked up by five or six newspapers in both Latin and Cyrillic script, and by the Montenegrin web hosting service, identified me as a professor at “Grinzberg univerzeteta.” The struggle continues.