Rebecca's Rambles…

After reading a recent (condescending) article from The Guardian I find myself flabbergasted. The opening line offers a complimentary label to the recent female graduates of 2012 as a “ ‘fuck it’ generation”. This seems to be an acceptable way to refer to the hardworking students who have just finished their final year of blood, sweat and tears and look forward to starting a new era, chapter or adventure. The majority of the ‘fuck it generation’ are frantically job hunting, starting a new job or are undertaking unpaid work experience to increase their chances of future employment.

Writer of the article, Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett, then begins to list three, near impossible, things female graduates will not be doing: walking into a job at Vogue, relentlessly partying and worrying about getting married. Her well-informed judgement is taken from the deep and meaningful plots of reality television programmes and mainstream films. Cosslett can be praised at this point for her in-depth research.

The first is not impossible nor an ambition or aspiration that should be so easily squandered. In Cosslett’s fierce words she argues, “But the chances of your waltzing into Condé Nast with a portfolio of clippings from your university paper and being offered a massive kudos-inspiring position on one of their magazines are exactly nil.” I beg to differ. Having applied to Condé Nast last year around winter time, I have just received an invitation for an interview. Just goes to show what studying and determination can get you these days: interviews at renowned companies.

Moving swiftly on, the subject of alcohol becomes a cheeky dig at the Sainsbury’s Basics range and a student’s preference for a cheaper bottle to get ‘wasted’. This inevitably opens Pandora’s Box and the free-flying debate surrounding students and binge drinking. Let us not go there but instead move onto the cynical tone surrounding marriage and relationships for us young, female creatures.

“Instead, you opt for a long string of brief and sexually unsatisfying one-night stands with guys who are every bit as clueless and lost as you – and don’t cuddle afterwards or make you breakfast. The good news is that marrying any of these guys is about as appealing as electric shock therapy, although at least with the latter you feel something.” Who said romance isn’t dead, certainly not Cosslett? Her vision of relationships really does leave something to the imagination. I wonder how much research she conducted to reach this conclusion…

This evocative statement promptly leads Cosslett to state how most female graduates are in fact more worried about; STDs, moving back in with their parents and finding out the difficulties of communal living. If there had to be one sole reason why female graduates face bad press, this article is living proof. It certainly does not give any positive exposure on how graduates are determined to find internships such as those offered by successful magazines such as Elle Internship 2012, nor does it attempt to report the competition facing graduate jobs and offer helpful advice or tips.

It is degrading, disgusting and in itself a disease for subjective readers to digest; spreading an awful picture of how female graduates are spending their days post university. As a fair judgement, some of these worries could be applicable to a small minority but instead Cosslett chooses to smear her distasteful tone throughout the entire article, addressing female graduates as nothing more than mindless, disease ridden and ambitionless.

Admittedly some graduates are blinded by ignorance and come out of university thinking they are ‘special’, however this is only a small proportion and this soon changes. Even so, aren’t twinkly eyed, overly enthusiastic graduates a god given gift to mould anyway?

Coming up next week: The Guardian compares graduates to their parents’ era of the ‘golden age’…