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penmageYou know what I love about this article? (And by "love", I mean "insert strongly-worded angry emotion here")
I love the part where she bashes Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants for being too damn empowering:
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is about female empowerment as it’s currently defined by the kind of jaded, 40-something divorcées who wash ashore at day spas with their grizzled girlfriends and pollute the Quiet Room with their ceaseless cackling about the uselessness of men. They are women who have learned certain of life’s lessons the hard way and think it kind to let young girls understand that the sooner they grasp the key to a happy life (which essentially boils down to a distaff version of “Bros before hos”), the better. In Sisterhood, four close friends might scatter for the summer—encountering everything from ill-advised sex with a soccer coach to the unpleasant discovery that Dad’s getting remarried—but the most important thing, the only really important thing, is that the four reunite and that the friendships endure the vicissitudes of boys and romance. Someday, after all, they will be in their 50s, and who will be there for them—really there for them—then? The boy who long ago kissed their bare shoulders, or the raspy-voiced best friend, bleating out hilarious comments about her puckered fanny from the next dressing room over at Eileen Fisher?
How dare we read books about women being friends with women? We are teaching our daughters--our precious daughters--that there is something better than being with A Man. What kind of lessons are these? What are we thinking by leading our impressionable girls astray?
Thank god for Stephenie Meyer and Twilight, which
centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven’t seen that tale in a girls’ book in a very long time.
And thank goodness for Bella, who is
an old-fashioned heroine: bookish, smart, brave, considerate of others’ emotions, and naturally competent in the domestic arts (she immediately takes over the grocery shopping and cooking in her father’s household, and there are countless, weirdly compelling accounts of her putting dinner together—wrapping two potatoes in foil and popping them into a hot oven, marinating a steak, making a green salad—that are reminiscent of the equally alluring domestic scenes in Rosemary’s Baby).
Thank god we have a writer who can remind our daughters--and ourselves--where the woman's place is: in the kitchen, deferring to the man. Thank goodness we're no longer polluting our girls' minds with Ideas. Who thought it was so smart to teach girls that they'd be okay without a man? Who was it?
I would demand that they be found and brought to justice, but I'll settle for insisting that they read all four Twilight tomes instead.
I love the part where she bashes Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants for being too damn empowering:
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants is about female empowerment as it’s currently defined by the kind of jaded, 40-something divorcées who wash ashore at day spas with their grizzled girlfriends and pollute the Quiet Room with their ceaseless cackling about the uselessness of men. They are women who have learned certain of life’s lessons the hard way and think it kind to let young girls understand that the sooner they grasp the key to a happy life (which essentially boils down to a distaff version of “Bros before hos”), the better. In Sisterhood, four close friends might scatter for the summer—encountering everything from ill-advised sex with a soccer coach to the unpleasant discovery that Dad’s getting remarried—but the most important thing, the only really important thing, is that the four reunite and that the friendships endure the vicissitudes of boys and romance. Someday, after all, they will be in their 50s, and who will be there for them—really there for them—then? The boy who long ago kissed their bare shoulders, or the raspy-voiced best friend, bleating out hilarious comments about her puckered fanny from the next dressing room over at Eileen Fisher?
How dare we read books about women being friends with women? We are teaching our daughters--our precious daughters--that there is something better than being with A Man. What kind of lessons are these? What are we thinking by leading our impressionable girls astray?
Thank god for Stephenie Meyer and Twilight, which
centers on a boy who loves a girl so much that he refuses to defile her, and on a girl who loves him so dearly that she is desperate for him to do just that, even if the wages of the act are expulsion from her family and from everything she has ever known. We haven’t seen that tale in a girls’ book in a very long time.
And thank goodness for Bella, who is
an old-fashioned heroine: bookish, smart, brave, considerate of others’ emotions, and naturally competent in the domestic arts (she immediately takes over the grocery shopping and cooking in her father’s household, and there are countless, weirdly compelling accounts of her putting dinner together—wrapping two potatoes in foil and popping them into a hot oven, marinating a steak, making a green salad—that are reminiscent of the equally alluring domestic scenes in Rosemary’s Baby).
Thank god we have a writer who can remind our daughters--and ourselves--where the woman's place is: in the kitchen, deferring to the man. Thank goodness we're no longer polluting our girls' minds with Ideas. Who thought it was so smart to teach girls that they'd be okay without a man? Who was it?
I would demand that they be found and brought to justice, but I'll settle for insisting that they read all four Twilight tomes instead.
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Date: 2008-12-03 11:08 am (UTC)Ah, "bookish." The polite way of saying, "She did nothing else with her free time for the entire series."
And "considerate of others' emotions"? Yeah, she seemed to really give a shit when she was flirting with Jacob to get what she wanted, going places with her friends and treating them like crap, and when she was lying to her parents about Edward.
The "naturally competent in the domestic arts" bit just makes me laugh, too. Because you'll notice she didn't add "modest" to that list, considering the bitchy condescending comments Bella made under her breath every time Charlie said, "Uh, I can take care of myself, you know." But of course, Bella knew better because she'd spent the past sixteen years being "naturally competent" at being more of an adult than her airheaded mother.
Sheesh.
EDIT: Oh, and that story at the end is lovely. "When the boy I was dating was going to ditch school with his friends but changed his mind, thank God he decided to be responsible for once, but when he decided he wanted to ditch with me it was romaaaaantic!"