Well, university has to come first. I get that. I do hope you get to read the second and third ones, though, because they're excellent!
And I want to thank you for the Sparkle Project. You made me think a great deal about anti-female, anti-human messages in YA writing. I had assumed that a lot of the problems were down to Meyer being a poor writer, but it seems that the devaluing of girls in books is much more widespread that I wanted to believe. And the Sparkle Project has led me to other discussions elsewhere about stereotyping, the erasure of female characters, the fact that in paranormal romances, "male" almost always equals "supernatural and powerful" while "female" almost always equals "human, inferior and powerless." Over and over, I see stories featuring jerkass male supernatural beings hundreds of years older than the female lead who, at sixteen or seventeen, is willing to give up her family, her friends, her future, her hopes, her dreams, anything that she might achieve, and often her life and soul for a guy she's known about two weeks. And this is presented as a good thing. Or you have the version where women are either victims of monsters or monsters themselves, but end up just as dead, their voices and stories silenced. (Doubly so, in the case of women of color.)
I've lost count of the YA stories I've found in the past year where the girl leads--loudly proclaimed in blurbs and reviews to be so feminist and so focused on confidence and courage--had exactly one problem: catching a boyfriend. Interestingly, I've found a lot more proactive female characters in children's lit. But once you hit YA lit, the emphasis shifts in most cases to proms and boyfriends and appearance and Being Nice. The cumulative effect of these books is depressing. A girl seems to have no value in most of these books unless she's pretty and attached at the hip to a male. And more than one YA book overtly advises young girls to hide their intelligence so that they'll get along with their peers.
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s and I'm horrified by this.
So thank you for the project. And thank you for getting people to think and talk about this. I cannot believe that anything that gets people to talk, think, learn and improve is in any way a bad thing.
I'll definitely get round to reading them once my term break starts. I need some vampires and werewolves that aren't telling me to go back into the kitchen, woman!
*blush* Wow, thank you so much, I'm glad you've enjoyed the project and gotten something from it. It's so pretentious to admit out loud but my intention was to at least get people thinking about these issues in YA and maybe in media in general. I don't talk about movies and TV anywhere near as much as I should (although the latter's difficult since I don't own a TV).
I've become really frustrated by books where the heroine is described as brave and independent yet disproves this by doing nothing but worrying about a guy, her relationship or her lack of a boyfriend. If a romance is written well - and that's much harder to do than people think, believe me, I've been trying it in my own book and it's nowhere hear as good as I want it to be - then I can get behind it but so many of them in YA right now follow the exact same patterns and just continue the gender imbalances we've had to deal with for god knows how long. Why is it the romantic ideal to have the woman sacrifice her entire life for the man when they share nothing but a physical attraction? We already have to dea lwith this BS assumption that female protagonists are only for books aimed at girls while male protagonists are for everyone (not just in YA but in media in general. Look at the way Disney switched around their advertising for Rapunzel/Tangled to make it seem like the male character was the lead despite the film being all about the princess. Because, y'know, girls are for girls and boys are for everyone! Way to reinforce a stereotype at a young age, one of the most powerful media outlets on Earth!)
And the relationships are all the same! Where are the young gay and lesbian couples in love? Where are young people of colour? The less attractive people? The lower social status? The transgender community? The asexual community? Yes, books with such content do exist but they're so seldom talked about that it's hard to find a lot of them. What about the books that don't treat feminism as a dirty F word? I read Halo by Alexandra Adornetto and was horrified by the blatant anti-feminism contained within. We need to take back the f word and take back our books, and if someone wants to call me pathetic or deluded for doing so then go ahead because wanting to change the world isn't a bad thing!
I don't know if you've seen this or not but it's a fantastic analysis of the Twilight series, line by line!
And I want to thank you for the Sparkle Project. You made me think a great deal about anti-female, anti-human messages in YA writing. I had assumed that a lot of the problems were down to Meyer being a poor writer, but it seems that the devaluing of girls in books is much more widespread that I wanted to believe. And the Sparkle Project has led me to other discussions elsewhere about stereotyping, the erasure of female characters, the fact that in paranormal romances, "male" almost always equals "supernatural and powerful" while "female" almost always equals "human, inferior and powerless." Over and over, I see stories featuring jerkass male supernatural beings hundreds of years older than the female lead who, at sixteen or seventeen, is willing to give up her family, her friends, her future, her hopes, her dreams, anything that she might achieve, and often her life and soul for a guy she's known about two weeks. And this is presented as a good thing. Or you have the version where women are either victims of monsters or monsters themselves, but end up just as dead, their voices and stories silenced. (Doubly so, in the case of women of color.)
I've lost count of the YA stories I've found in the past year where the girl leads--loudly proclaimed in blurbs and reviews to be so feminist and so focused on confidence and courage--had exactly one problem: catching a boyfriend. Interestingly, I've found a lot more proactive female characters in children's lit. But once you hit YA lit, the emphasis shifts in most cases to proms and boyfriends and appearance and Being Nice. The cumulative effect of these books is depressing. A girl seems to have no value in most of these books unless she's pretty and attached at the hip to a male. And more than one YA book overtly advises young girls to hide their intelligence so that they'll get along with their peers.
I grew up in the 1970s and 1980s and I'm horrified by this.
So thank you for the project. And thank you for getting people to think and talk about this. I cannot believe that anything that gets people to talk, think, learn and improve is in any way a bad thing.
Reply
*blush* Wow, thank you so much, I'm glad you've enjoyed the project and gotten something from it. It's so pretentious to admit out loud but my intention was to at least get people thinking about these issues in YA and maybe in media in general. I don't talk about movies and TV anywhere near as much as I should (although the latter's difficult since I don't own a TV).
I've become really frustrated by books where the heroine is described as brave and independent yet disproves this by doing nothing but worrying about a guy, her relationship or her lack of a boyfriend. If a romance is written well - and that's much harder to do than people think, believe me, I've been trying it in my own book and it's nowhere hear as good as I want it to be - then I can get behind it but so many of them in YA right now follow the exact same patterns and just continue the gender imbalances we've had to deal with for god knows how long. Why is it the romantic ideal to have the woman sacrifice her entire life for the man when they share nothing but a physical attraction? We already have to dea lwith this BS assumption that female protagonists are only for books aimed at girls while male protagonists are for everyone (not just in YA but in media in general. Look at the way Disney switched around their advertising for Rapunzel/Tangled to make it seem like the male character was the lead despite the film being all about the princess. Because, y'know, girls are for girls and boys are for everyone! Way to reinforce a stereotype at a young age, one of the most powerful media outlets on Earth!)
And the relationships are all the same! Where are the young gay and lesbian couples in love? Where are young people of colour? The less attractive people? The lower social status? The transgender community? The asexual community? Yes, books with such content do exist but they're so seldom talked about that it's hard to find a lot of them. What about the books that don't treat feminism as a dirty F word? I read Halo by Alexandra Adornetto and was horrified by the blatant anti-feminism contained within. We need to take back the f word and take back our books, and if someone wants to call me pathetic or deluded for doing so then go ahead because wanting to change the world isn't a bad thing!
I don't know if you've seen this or not but it's a fantastic analysis of the Twilight series, line by line!
http://reasoningwithvampires.tumblr.com/
Reply
Leave a comment