IT’S BEEN A WHILE since we last visited the friendly denizens of Caffe Generique, including the mom-and-daughter punk rockers Janis and Anais.
A lot’s gone on in their drama-enriched lives, needless to say, during that time. But what’s worried Janis lately is what hasn’t happenned. She’s been all a-moaning and forlorn over the fact that her otherwise-perfect punk daughter is still a virgin at, what, almost 17!
Janis is beside herself with fret, and won’t stop asking her coffeehouse friends what’s the matter with Anais anyway. Is she just foolishly saving herself for Mr. Wrong (the man who will overtake her heart and leave her with a wrecked car and thousands in debts, to her lifelong sighful appreciation) or what?
Janis is sure Anais must have spied on at least a few of the many Janis boyfriends who’ve paraded through the house in assorted stages of undress over the years. Hasn’t the girl learned from her mom’s example about the wisdom and joys that come from sampling from the ever-vast variety of penile experience?
“But that’s probably it,” exclaims Kirsten, the sullen barista at the coffeehouse. “Your kid thinks of sex and promiscuity as mom things, and therefore as that which must be rebelled against, or at least as something dull and passe. The kid has to define her own sexual personality. It’s your job to show her the way without letting her know you’re doing it. And the best way to do that is to overtly look like you’re trying to steer her in the total opposite way.”
So Janis does all she can to set Anais up with a Riot Grrrl boyfriend–a repressed, almost mute, short haired boy of slight build, a child of a badly divorced mom, a boy forever ridden by universal-male-guilt trips, a boy so afraid of his own masculinity that he can’t even look at a girl without worrying whether he’s looking misogynistically.
Janis’s initial plan is to show Anais, through the boy’s example, that obsessive virginity is a no-fun way to live, to make the girl crave a real boyfriend relationship with all the fun, all the heartache, and all the drama-queen turmoil that make female adolescence such a special stage of life.
But instead of outright rejecting the boy, Anais falls in hopeless teenage crush with him. What’s worse, they announce to Janis, after coming home from their school clique’s “anti-prom” party suspiciously early, that they’re agreeing to take the intimacy part of the relationship slowly, because the boy still has to learn to love his own body.
Still, Janis loves Anais and the meeting ends in a big hug–albeit one in which Janis tries to maneuver her daughter’s hand toward the boy’s butt.
NEXT: The British TV you’ve probably never seen.
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