Millennials Monthly: Army-Destroying Voldemort Voters Who Like Food More Than Sex

Hello, my fellow potential voters ages 18 to 34! How was your July? Are marketers of products and politicians delivering their messages in a way that reaches directly into your chest to squeeze your inscrutable, indecisive, '90s nostalgia-driven heart?

In case you chose not to stream either of July's major political conventions on your mobile devices, know that both parties are working hard for your affection. And if this wasn't clear from the trotting out of the Lena Dunhams and the Ivanka Trumps, the Dems took it one step further by having 19-year-old actress and Twitter person Chloë Grace Moretz qualify her pro-Hillary remarks last Thursday with the announcement "I'm a Millennial." (I was really hoping to find a Millennial specimen whose vote was swayed by this clever, highly innovative tactic, but so far no one has stepped up to the plate.)

Anyway, I digress: Another three months remain before we can effectively grade each party's Millennial-courting technique. In the meantime, there are oh-so-many definitive new studies for us to pore over! Studies about ourselves! Studies about what we like, what we don't like, what we're buying, what we're ruining! Here's your monthly digest.

In July 2016, we learned that Millennials are...

Destroying the armed forces with our lack of discipline: The lede here really says it all. "Are younger service members — so-called ‘millennials,’ born in 1980 or later — soft? Are they too reliant on technology? Are they buried so deep in social media that face-to-face communication becomes impossible? Are they too busy questioning orders to follow them?" Guess what the answer is!

Either really bad at sex or really, really into food. A nice click-baity study that made the rounds in July claims to show that "54 percent of men and women between the ages of 18 and 34 believe that 'eating can be just as pleasurable as sex.'" Apparently 35 percent of the nearly 12,000 people polled also said they agreed with the following statement: "Given the choice between sex and an excellent dinner at a restaurant, I would choose the dinner."

This could be interpreted a number of ways, but I'd like to note -- before you assume we're all really bad at doing it -- that the dinner was given the qualifier "excellent," whereas the sex was given none, meaning we're potentially talking a once-in-a-lifetime five-course splurge at Chez Panisse vs., say, an awkward and regrettable one-night stand. I'm just saying, let's check our methodology before we cast aspersions. Also, food is great, shut up.

Still in need of vastly different kinds of managing than our colleagues from other generational cohorts. At least, according to Forbes, which continues its reign in the highly competitive field of listing things Millennials apparently are unique in wanting from their workplaces (respect, training, etc.).

Routinely victimized by our corporate elders' attempts to insert hip Millennial language into their communications. I love this story so much: Basically, someone at Microsoft thought it would be a good idea to use the words "bae," "noms," and "lit" in an email advertising a young people's networking event. Hilarity ensued. Also, by the rule of transitive slang properties and the cringe-inducing law of trying too hard, this event immediately became even less cool than it was originally going to be.

Demanding inspiration from Hillary Clinton. Inspire me! we all yelled in unison, in voices marred by uptalk and vocal fry, as she took the stage at the DNC. If you could stop being yourself and instead be more like, I dunno, the test-tube offspring of Barack Obama, a TED talk on power stances and a "hang in there, baby" kitten poster, that would be good! 

Actual text: "...Millennial voters may not turn out to vote if Clinton fails to inspire them. The central argument behind the Clinton campaign is that she is qualified for office. The problem is that Millennials want a candidate to inspire them, not win by default. Millennials won't just vote for Clinton because Trump is a bad candidate — she needs to convince them that voting for her will make them better off."

All in all, no mention of what Chloë Grace Moretz thinks. Please note that this is the new rubric by which I will be judging "Millennial voters" trend stories. This is a 4/10, needs more Chloë Grace Moretz.

Possibly losing our grip on reality, because we "think Hillary and Trump are worse than Voldemort," who is a fictional evil wizard created by J.K. Rowling for a series of children's books and portrayed by Ralph Fiennes in major motion pictures. I honestly don't even know what to make of this one, except that there are several unexplored nuances here. For instance, when it comes to villains, I'm more of an Ursula the Sea Witch kind of girl myself. I like Jafar quite a bit too. Would I prefer that they run the country, were they running together as an independent ticket against Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump? I mean -- probably? Can I ask some more questions about the universe in which this is possible? How stoned, on average, was everyone involved in this study?

Forgoing college in favor of blue-collar jobs. Why? After I read this headline, I stopped and played a fun game wherein I bet myself $500 the reason was "the overwhelming financial burden of even a basic college education and also years of observing the fallout all around us from the empty promise of the white-collar corporate ladder as a means to happiness, especially in an economy that's been in various forms of decrepitude for our entire adult lives" and then I read the rest of the article and I was right! Good thing it was only a bet with myself, though. I have a master's degree, but I sure don't have $500 to spare. LOL!

Being chased by Matthew McConaughey, bourbon manufacturers. Guys, guys. I'm right here! No, really: Wild Turkey has apparently hired the actor, who has pretty much entirely morphed into the Onion Joe Biden parody version of himself at this point, to hunt us young people down and make us drink more whiskey. Maybe I'm dealing with a relatively small and biased sample size, but "not drinking enough whiskey" is not a problem currently faced by a single young adult I know. Anyone? Where are you? Inquiring minds and chiseled jawlines want to know.

Not buying diamonds, for some inexplicable reason. We'll conclude this month in true lazy Millennial fashion: with Twitter taking care of the analysis for me.

What'd I miss? Hit me: esilvers@kqed.org.