Meaningless sex! Rampant drug use! Teen debauchery!

In "Generation S.L.U.T.," 21-year-old Marty Beckerman blows the whistle on Gen Y, chronicling its sexual excesses and perversions.

By Rebecca Traister

Mar 2, 2004 | Last week, MTV Books/Pocket Books released "Generation S.L.U.T.," the second book by 21-year-old writer Marty Beckerman. And while his name may sound like that of a guy who tees off with your grandfather on the Coral Gables golf course, Beckerman is actually making his young living as the chief whistle-blower on his own Generation Y, chronicling its sexual excesses and perversions in extremely frank and intimate detail.

Beckerman grew up in Anchorage, Alaska, where he wrote his first book, "Death to All Cheerleaders: One Adolescent Journalist's Cheerful Diatribe to Teenage Plasticity," a collection of pieces from his column in the Anchorage Daily News, at 17. Now a contributor to the New York Press and a junior about to graduate early from American University, Beckerman was once named one of Teen People's "Ten Teenagers Who Will Change the World."

Perfect for those who don't remember a world without MTV, "Generation S.L.U.T." ("sexually liberated urban teens") is written in a graphic, chopped-up format that brightly hammers home its angry message again and again: that American teens are boffing like bunnies, and hating themselves and each other because of it.

Beckerman has written a fictionalized story about self-loathing, bed-hopping, gang-raping high school students in Anchorage, Alaska, which occasionally morphs into a comic strip. Woven between the short fictional chapters is the diary of Marty Beckerman, high school student, with entries like, "My Unforgettable [Almost] Prom Date With a Dirty Rotten Whore." Then there are a handful of quotes from real teenagers like 19-year-old "Jonathan R.," who told Beckerman, "I don't have anything against having sex with drunk girls ... if she says 'yes' she says 'yes.' And if she's too drunk to say 'no' ... Well, basically she's saying 'yes.'" The whole thing is riddled with statistical buckshot about rape and suicide rates, and quotations snipped from articles (including several from Salon) that reinforce the fear that teenagers are not in school but instead in their parents' beds cutting themselves while engaging in anal sex.

It's enough to make parents either reconsider the educational potential of nunneries, or scratch their heads and wonder if we haven't heard this kind of alarmism before -- in less graphic terms, perhaps. Salon talked to Beckerman from his dorm room in Washington, and asked him to clarify a few things.

You sound stressed. What's bothering you?

I'm a junior, but I'm graduating this year. The book's coming out, and then there's graduation stuff and then figuring out what I'm doing next. It's a pretty stressful time, to be honest. This is my big shot to be a 21-year-old author.

Why is it so important to you to be an author at 21?

I've always wanted it: I started writing humor for the Anchorage Daily News when I was 15. I was a teenage Dave Barry fan. My columns were wacky, but I guess pretty popular in the teenage Anchorage community. I got fired from the paper a couple of times, once for asking a 13-year-old cheerleader what it felt like to be a urine stain on the toilet seat of America. I was 17 or 18 then and I was reading more extreme authors, like Hunter Thompson and Craig Kilborn on "The Daily Show." I was trying to emulate that in print -- that vicious stuff. I fancied myself a shock humorist.

Was that the inspiration for your first book?

Yeah. "Death to All Cheerleaders" was a collection of all the shock stuff I wrote. Then I went to college and saw college life -- one constant orgy of booze and sex and pleasure seeking, which is fine every once in a while.

And are you judging that pleasure seeking in "Generation S.L.U.T."?

It isn't meant to be an anti-sex book or about making better choices and sexual responsibility. It's supposed to start a discussion within Generation Y about why things are the way they are. This is not a book for parents, not a book for religious leaders or reviewers or social critics or anyone other than teenagers and college students.

Why did you write it?

I think something's really missing for American youth. I mean, other generations have had it too -- Fitzgerald in the 1920s, Bret Ellis in the '80s -- but I think something's different with this one. We grew up in prosperity, with no war until now. The whole of Generation Y is one that doesn't really search for anything meaningful or substantial.

But other generations -- like the baby boomers, or even kids in the '80s -- grew up in relatively peaceful prosperity.

Well, in the '80s there was the threat of nukes and shit all the time. And before the Vietnam War it seemed like the world was black and white: America is good, everyone else is bad. But then there were young American soldiers being sent over there to die for a meaningless cause, and it moved the country toward relativism -- they realized that absolutism had flaws. Generation Y was raised by relativists -- we were a generation raised with no morals.

Your argument is that increased relativism and the encouragement of individuality left you without morals?

Well, we were raised with some values.

Like learning to see everyone as equal?

Right. But there are thongs for preschoolers, while 50-year-olds are trying to be 16 again with Botox and cosmetic surgery and boob jobs. The whole atmosphere has bred some really bizarre and morbid results.

So what is your own morally corrupt existence like these days?

I'm a 21-year-old boy. I have a girlfriend. I have sex with her. I have had one-night stands, I like to drink, I like smoking. I'm not against these things. It's like McDonald's: a fun and delicious treat if you go every once in a while. But if you're going every single meal you're a disgusting piece of crap.

How sure are you that you are really having more sex than previous generations? Isn't it possible that people are just more open about their sexual activity now?

Well, the birth control pill probably did change everything. Now, by the end of high school, 80 percent of kids have had sex. It's supposed to be making us happy. And sex does make people happy. It's one of the cool things about life -- get your fuck on! But instead of freedom and liberation, why has it led to so much sadness and emptiness?

Next Page: "My mom's gonna need to be pumped up with Thorazine before she reads a single word"

• View blog reactions