all my icons are too funny for when I'm grumpy

[ichthyocentaurs]

I started reading the Virgin Suicides and while adding it on BADreads I scrolled down a tiny bit and saw the top answered question asked if anyone else was repelled by the masturbatory view of 50s girls by 50s boys who don't even see them as human. I'm not even done with the book and...

I feel like we're at the point where we're past people having poor reading comprehension when it comes to books and more like, people will just read things with intentional bad faith. I understand that some people have this kind of gut reaction to literary works for various reasons and just want to paint with a wide and sloppy brush that it's all bad and it's like... but it's not... like that. And I don't think a good reaction is to retreat into "safe"books or like, YA novels. (Nothing against YA at all, I read a lot of it. but there's like, different genres for different things, and I think reading only YA is basically the same as your shitty dad who only reads WWII books. They're nice and safer because they are for children. They are often enjoyable because they can defy genre and norms expected of adult fiction. But they also can't push other boundaries or touch on certain topics. Breadth is one of the joys of varied media.)

Like, I'm a fantasy/scifi reader. I have read repellent, masturbatory books by men about girls that you would not believe could be published, you know? Stuff that is just some dude's personal spank bank lightly stitched into a story that passed an 80s editor and they were like sure, who gives a fuck. Please try to understand that what you're reading is so beyond tame and is absolutely intentional. If you can't tell the difference between literature and Father Knows Best you need to fucking go back to school or something. jfc.

Comments

[miscellanium]

it's frustrating how so many of these people are just regurgitating rhetoric that we already saw a few decades ago. the lack of cultural/historical awareness is exhausting, and more so if the ignorance is intentional.

and that's a good comparison wrt reading only YA, i'll have to remember that.

[ichthyocentaurs]

Yeah, if you don't like something or think the author did a bad job, it's one thing, but when you clearly haven't even read the book (which I can tell in this situation they didn't because it's not even set in the 50s, but in the 60s, though it isn't 100% obvious in the beginning), you really need to like. tone your ass down lol.

And thanks! I started thinking about it like that recently, if all you want to read is comfort material that's fine, but it's not exactly the way to open your mind to stuff.