Definition of Adult Changes With the Times

Ralph Conn of Newport Beach is confused about the meaning of adult . He feels that it no longer means what he used to think it meant.

“I have a 23-year-old stepdaughter,” he says, “who frequently tells her mother and me, ‘I’m an adult. You can’t tell me what to do.’ This usually occurs when her mother and I feel her behavior is not that of an adult.”

I feel that Abigail Van Buren or Ann Landers is better qualified to advise Conn on his parental problem than I am; however, I certainly agree with him that the word adult seems to have changed in meaning with the times.

When I was a child I had no doubt what it meant. It meant a person who was free to do all the things I couldn’t do. It meant a person who was free to drink liquor, have sex, stay up late, drive a car, not go to school and--the least resented privilege of all--vote.

In most homes, and according to most familial moral codes, those restraints still rankle non-adults, whether children or adolescents. The closer to adulthood a child comes, of course, the more eager he is to attain it, and the more resentful he is of being denied its privileges.

As everyone knows, though, today’s teen-agers are less likely to deny themselves liquor, sex, staying up late, driving a car, not going to school and otherwise acting like adults than their parents did. I am not, of course, speaking of all teen-agers.

Adult used to mean physically and legally mature. Webster’s says, “adj. grown up; mature in age, size, strength; 2. of or for adult persons (an adult novel); n. a man or woman who is fully grown up; mature person.”

When a person is fully grown up in size and strength it is pretty obvious; but when is a person mature? In this age in which we are so concerned with our own emotions, I doubt that anyone ever becomes fully mature. As I said recently, most men are perennially infantile; one look at this warring globe confirms that.

The second adjectival use of the word is the one that has been changed most by our sexually lenient times. “Of or for adult persons (an adult novel).” When I was in school I would have thought of a book by Honore de Balzac, Henry James or Sinclair Lewis as an adult novel--one dealing with the concerns of a mentally and emotionally mature reader.

Now, of course, that meaning of the word is lost. An adult novel is one so full of pornographic excesses as to be unfit for display in an ordinary bookstore. Its place of sale is, inevitably, an adult bookstore.

Even D. H. Lawrence’s notorious “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” which was banned from import into the United States for years because of its frank language and its explicit treatment of adultery, would hardly be considered adult today.

As for movies, adult has also come to mean pornographic--or beyond the limits of conventional morality. An adult movie is one in which sexual intercourse, in all its imaginative forms, is explicitly portrayed.

A movie like “Children of a Lesser God” or “The Last Emperor” is not considered adult. Movies that are judged suitable for mature audiences only, are not labeled adult , as they might have been in less brazen times; they are rated R, which means that no one under 17 may be admitted to the theater unless accompanied by an adult. I have often wondered how the ticket seller knows whether the adult accompanying the teen-ager is a parent or a pedophile.

Adult books and movies are not for adults at all; they are for grown-ups of arrested development, who have never outgrown their infantile fantasies about sex. For truly adult people, they are likely to have the opposite effect of sexual stimulation. To paraphrase Erica Jong (paraphrasing to make her comment suitable for publication), “After the first 10 minutes I want to go home and make love; after the first 20 minutes I never want to make love again as long as I live.”

Oddly, adult retains it respectable meaning. If we say of a man, “He’s an adult,” we don’t mean that he likes dirty movies.

We mean that he’s old enough to vote.