the lunatics are taking over the asylum

I like to think that this is our time. This time around our generation is going to take control of things are we’re going to do it right – unlike our parents and their siblings, co-workers, and friends. I have recently been reading and looking at photos from youth cultures of the past and I’ve been speaking a lot more to the older members of my family and, after seeing some of my friends and comparing our attitudes and lives in general, I like to think that we’re very different and that we aren’t going to follow in their footsteps.

One thing I think that sets us apart from the older generation is the tolerance we have for tattoos and piercings. I read an article on i-D this morning about the popularisation of body modification and it got me thinking (as usual). I honestly think that having tattoos and piercings won’t prevent you from getting a job in the future. As for the near future, I think that there’ll only be a mild tolerance for a small thing on your arm or something like that because we can’t just rock up with full sleeves and be totally accepted – a lot of these things take time. But by the time we reach the top of the career ladders in a variety of jobs, I doubt there’ll be any issues with having a flower tattooed on your forearm. If singers and models can get them and still hold their jobs; why can’t us regular folk have some cool body art too?

With the release of The Diary of Teenage Girl coming out today (7^th August), I like to think there will also be more tolerance of the female form in our future. We have people like Miley Cyrus plastered all over the media and doing naked photo shoots, and I really think that it’ll be just as accepting for women to pose in barely anything for non-sexual motives. If the fucking human form cannot be accepted then what hope do we have for anything slightly more progressive to be in a magazine? Once you get past the fact that, yes, those are her pubes and, yes, she does have nipple tassels on, you really start to look at the photography and it becomes another great photo or piece of art. We can look at Greek statues of men’s genitals and immediately look past the fact he’s naked so I think it’s about time that the same thing happened for women. But I mean, who makes marble statues anymore?

It’s about time that young people my age had more interest in politics. I'm glad to say that many of my friends are all well-educated and know a fair bit about politics and the ones who were of age voted in the election back in May. But the same cannot be said for everyone I know. I think it’s so important for young people to have a vote in politics because the next five years dictate their future. It’s them who are going to be paying more for university, and its them who are going to be affected by changes to housing allowances for eighteen to twenty five year olds – not the fifty five year old parents or the thirty somethings in parliament. I'm not going to say that older people shouldn’t be able to vote (although I have seen several people who believe that), but I think that young people should be taught more about politics and that they get interested in it. They may not be interested or concerned around the time of the election, but over the next five years whilst that party is in power, their views may change drastically and they need to know what's going to happen to them. With the wide coverage that the general election got this year, I think that the path has been paved for young people in politics and that this could be how we get young people involved, especially with it being all over Twitter etc. Furthermore, the existence of independent political zines founded and written by young adults shows that we are interested and that we cannot continue to be ignored in the eyes of the government.

There are loads of other things that don’t immediately spring to mind but also need changing. As I scroll through the Daily Mail headlines, and see posts on Tumblr or Twitter, I could write a huge list of things wrong with the world that I want to change. And others that really, really don’t need to be discussed any further – the fact that racism, homophobia, and sexism are still issues is, for lack of a better word, disgusting. If no one else is going to pick up a pen and write about these problems, or enter parliament and vote for these changes, or take some photos or make a film, how is anything going to change – I'm thankful that our generation seems to have enough intuition (or common sense) to do these things and I look forward to seeing what we’re going to do. I think I’ll start by going to watch The Diary of a Teenage Girl in the cinema.