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Two memes for the price of one
Apr. 1st, 2012 02:44 pmYou get two memes today, mainly because I wasn't near a computer for most of yesterday. Aren't you lucky?
Day 12: Your thoughts or opinions about Harry Potter.
My feelings about the Harry Potter series are a complicated mixture of pride and disappointment. I loved the books, and enjoyed reading them, and I felt all the feelings I was presumably supposed to feel, crying, celebrating and growing up with the characters. At the same time, I feel disappointment because they are flawed books and they could've been better.
What I am most grateful for is the fact that for at least 10 years, there was a series of books that I could discuss, agonise over, analyse and whose story I could attempt to predict with my friends, and with my generation more widely. While most of my friends are readers, not all of them read as much or as often as I did, and the Potter books were a unifying force. And I feel a rush of curious pride when I think that my generation's Beatles was not a band but a series of fantasy novels.
Day 13: Your thoughts or opinions about Mean Girls.
I knew about Mean Girls before it was a film. It began its life as a sort of sociological self-help book called Queen Bees and Wannabes aimed at mothers of teenage daughters. The irony is that it was introduced to me by the mother of a friend of my sister. This mother breathlessly pushed the book on our family as a sort of Bible of the interactions of adolescent girls, a sure-fire way to avoid bullying. And her daughter had been bullying my sister for the past two years.
The film is pretty good, too.
( the other days )
I'm not sure if you are aware of the minor YA literature kerfuffle that broke out last week when yet another ignorant idiot opined that adults shouldn't be reading YA literature. Kristin Cashore didn't engage, posting the blogging equivalent of 'burn!'
Foz Meadows carried on being awesome, noting a disturbing sexism in the original writer's article:
The bolding is mine; take note of it! Because rather than a critique of the content of YA novels, what this piece actually represents is the following assertion: that it’s fundamentally embarrassing for grown men to share any interests whatever with teenage girls. In fact, according to Joel, it is actually more embarrassing for a man to identify with a teen girl via the medium of literature than if he were publicly demeaning and sexualising her via the medium of pornography!
Ugh. She's also got a rather brilliant post about default narrative sexism in which she makes the point that there's an awful lot of sexism in fantasy novels, so much so that its existence is unremarkable. But curiously, there's sexism, but no sexists.
We are left with sexism as a background detail: one which is used to justify the plight or origins of particular female characters and the total absence of others, but which is never actually addressed. Which, in instances where the protagonist is male, or where the majority of the cast is male, leaves us instantly with a screaming, red-faced anachronism: where are the actual sexists? Why, if sexism in this society is so deep-seated, are the heroes so unusually enlightened? Here is why; I will tell you the secret. Because we are meant to like them. Funnily enough, most authors have cottoned on to the fact that writing openly sexist heroes is less heroic than it is disgusting; that it’s sort of difficult to hail Weapons McFighty, Trueking Noob and Roamer Nomadson as the exalted Lords of Awesome when they’ve spent the majority of the book acting like entitled jerks.
To which I say a resounding 'YES!'
Day 12: Your thoughts or opinions about Harry Potter.
My feelings about the Harry Potter series are a complicated mixture of pride and disappointment. I loved the books, and enjoyed reading them, and I felt all the feelings I was presumably supposed to feel, crying, celebrating and growing up with the characters. At the same time, I feel disappointment because they are flawed books and they could've been better.
What I am most grateful for is the fact that for at least 10 years, there was a series of books that I could discuss, agonise over, analyse and whose story I could attempt to predict with my friends, and with my generation more widely. While most of my friends are readers, not all of them read as much or as often as I did, and the Potter books were a unifying force. And I feel a rush of curious pride when I think that my generation's Beatles was not a band but a series of fantasy novels.
Day 13: Your thoughts or opinions about Mean Girls.
I knew about Mean Girls before it was a film. It began its life as a sort of sociological self-help book called Queen Bees and Wannabes aimed at mothers of teenage daughters. The irony is that it was introduced to me by the mother of a friend of my sister. This mother breathlessly pushed the book on our family as a sort of Bible of the interactions of adolescent girls, a sure-fire way to avoid bullying. And her daughter had been bullying my sister for the past two years.
The film is pretty good, too.
( the other days )
I'm not sure if you are aware of the minor YA literature kerfuffle that broke out last week when yet another ignorant idiot opined that adults shouldn't be reading YA literature. Kristin Cashore didn't engage, posting the blogging equivalent of 'burn!'
Foz Meadows carried on being awesome, noting a disturbing sexism in the original writer's article:
The bolding is mine; take note of it! Because rather than a critique of the content of YA novels, what this piece actually represents is the following assertion: that it’s fundamentally embarrassing for grown men to share any interests whatever with teenage girls. In fact, according to Joel, it is actually more embarrassing for a man to identify with a teen girl via the medium of literature than if he were publicly demeaning and sexualising her via the medium of pornography!
Ugh. She's also got a rather brilliant post about default narrative sexism in which she makes the point that there's an awful lot of sexism in fantasy novels, so much so that its existence is unremarkable. But curiously, there's sexism, but no sexists.
We are left with sexism as a background detail: one which is used to justify the plight or origins of particular female characters and the total absence of others, but which is never actually addressed. Which, in instances where the protagonist is male, or where the majority of the cast is male, leaves us instantly with a screaming, red-faced anachronism: where are the actual sexists? Why, if sexism in this society is so deep-seated, are the heroes so unusually enlightened? Here is why; I will tell you the secret. Because we are meant to like them. Funnily enough, most authors have cottoned on to the fact that writing openly sexist heroes is less heroic than it is disgusting; that it’s sort of difficult to hail Weapons McFighty, Trueking Noob and Roamer Nomadson as the exalted Lords of Awesome when they’ve spent the majority of the book acting like entitled jerks.
To which I say a resounding 'YES!'