Perpetuation of adolescence in the workplace - Essay Example

In Nine to Five, the female protagonists certainly cause trouble and disrupt the office, but in a positive way, a way that is driven by a legitimate sense of injustice, and which ends up creating positive results in the office (Resnick and Higgins). There is little resemblance to the aimless, unproductive antics of the overgrown adolescent boys who comprise the rest of our examples. Even in the comparatively staid Dilbert, the random workplace shenanigans fall mostly to Dilbert and Wally, while Tina acts out of a sense of ambition and legitimate grievance.

Of course, given Dilbert creator Scott Adams’ ideas about gender, he’s the last place we should look for nonstereotypical gender roles (Adams). This strict gendering is part of a cultural narrative, seen (among other places) on most sitcoms of the past 20 years, wherein men are immature wastrels with crude habits, and women are unfunny, joyless buzzkills. It is worth noting that the second-wave feminist hijinks of Nine to Five were thirty years ago, and have not been significantly repeated.

In this narrative, men must be the pranksters, and women the stern, disapproving “straight men,” like Margaret Dumont in all the Marx Brothers movies. This gendering arises partly from the cultural perception of “Peter Pan Syndrome,” so named in the 1983 book of the same name (Kiley). It describes men (and only men) who refuse to “grow up” and accept what are generally seen as adult roles and responsibilities. The role of women in their lives is to become “Wendies,” temporary surrogate mothers who enable this lifestyle.

As a concept, it’s an old one; the Romans called Bacchus, eternally young god of wine and madness, the puer aeturnus, or “eternal boy.” (Kiley) Of course, all of this cultural context is really just “boys will be boys” in greater detail. There are cultural currents and narratives into which the office-adolescent concept fits, but is that all there is to it? What if the puer aeturnus narrative is just a cover for something deeper? A closer look at some of the preeminent examples of the trope provide some interesting insights, suggesting that the gendering of the trope in narrative is just a cultural gloss on a deeper problem.

Given its prevalence, an exhaustive review of examples of this narrative trope would be impossible, but it is worth examining a few in detail. The popular British sitcom The Office opens with a perfect example, as the character of Gareth is outraged to discover that his stapler, about which he is neurotically possessive, has been neatly encased in jelly. This is part of a campaign of similar pranksterism being conducted against him by Tim, the closest thing the show has to a direct protagonist.

Other examples include gluing his phone headset down, sending him a series of romantic emails under the guise of an imaginary woman, and locking him in an office. Tim’s behavior is presented partly as a semi-admirable effort to puncture Gareth’s self-important pretentions, but largely as an outlet for a directionless energy that his job does not channel into anything useful (BBC). The characters in Joshua Ferris’s Then We Came To The End face a similar problem; a job-related ennui that expresses itself in the most non-job-related activities possible.

“Our boredom was ongoing, a collective boredom, and it would never