“Does Your Girlfriend Act Her Age?” tells us that “the women you date should behave—and look—like grown-ups, not characters from High School Musical.” It also explains that with each new episode of The Hills,Gossip Girls and each new tabloid story “chronicling the dysfunction of the Lindsays, Britneys, Nicoles, Heidis, and Laurens” this grown-up type of woman gets harder and harder to find.

I get the feeling that a lot of women are dressing and acting that way because they think that that’s what guys want,” says Jean Twenge, associate professor of psychology at San Diego State University and author of Generation Me, a book about American youth culture. “It’s the same thing as older women getting plastic surgery. The idea is that what men want is a woman who looks 18. Although they don’t usually want a woman who acts 18.” Twenge laughs, then adds, “And that’s where the problem comes in.”

“I’ve been meditating on the question of why women in their twenties seem to be obsessed with all things teen—fashion, slang, gossip, et cetera,” says Anastasia Goodstein, publisher of ypulse.com, a marketing website. “The reality is that teen culture has come to define pop culture.”

As the usual markers of American adulthood—marriage, career, kids—get more and more delayed, the simple-minded distractions of adolescence have extended their grip on the adult brain.
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