Smart Bitches Trashy Books | All of the romance, none of the bullshit.

I’d heard how racy and sex-obsessed the genre is, but it seems to me the race is entered and exited at exactly the same points each time. Chick-lit heroines talk about sex, and occasionally they have it, yet it’s never because they want it, never because they have to have it or they’ll die, even though it’s wrong and there will be hell to pay. Nor is there no hell at all to pay — the kind of sex you just wanted and took, then zipped up or fell unconscious. Nor is it married sex: predictable, satisfying and scheduled. No, chick-lit sex is some sort of subtext for societal temperature-taking. Brr!

Hey, everyone, let’s play a game! Let’s play… Spot the False Generalization! Chick lit is filled with nothing but girls who have sex even though they don’t want it? Well, hell, and here I thought Old Skool romances were bad when it came to rape.

And also: married sex is scheduled? Shiiiit. Nobody ever told ME.

[Chick lit is] not literature; nor is it pornography, which is unoriginal but at least it’s hard and wet, not safe lunchroom gossip lust.

Ooooh, another fun game! Let’s play… Spot the False Dichotomy!

Bitch, please. A book has to be either literary OR pornographic? The mind boggles at what this person would think about the vast majority of books printed, sold and read, which tend to be neither literary nor pornographic NOR chick-lit (which is worse than porn, according to this person’s assessment, and hey, she wrote for Hustler and Playboy, so I guess she’d know).

No literary movement before this one has ever made me angry. People’s taste is none of my business. But this shit is being marketed to young girls, who are already getting weak enough ideas from other media about what being a girl means — why should the few who read be plowed under, too?

OH NOS THINK OF OUR CHILDREN!!!!111 PH3AR TEH CH1CK L1T!!!!

Anyway, that bapping sound you hear? That’s me hitting my head on the desk. WHY do people so consistently underestimate the reasoning abilities of teenagers--especially teenagers who read a lot? I mean, these teens tend to be smarter than average and a bit more introspective than average, right?

Train that impressionable girl right, give her a rock-steady foundation in critical thinking, and I can just about guarantee you that she won’t be too easily swayed into thinking that she needs [insert stupid cultural message about what being a woman means] to be happy or a good human being.

I’d like to take all these books, pile them up and throw gasoline and a lit match onto them. And let my daughter, and all the other girls, see if they can walk into the fire barefoot. Maybe they can’t do it, and maybe they’ll cry and get hurt and go to the hospital. But some of them will succeed. Either way, they deserve to see what they are made of, before they lay down their fierceness and accept what the rest of the world tells them they are, and more debilitatingly, what they are not.

Right. Does this sound like a bunch of self-serving, pseudo-literary horseshit about how Girls Are Precious And Need A Trial By Fire? Or is it just me? Because she starts out like she has a point, then she goes straight into a truly godawful metaphorical conceit and I kinda lost her there. But then, I read romance novels, so I can’t be all that bright.

These are the books I want a young girl to find, all on her own — not clustered together on Barnes & Noble’s Young Girl section, shoved down her throat by a manager shitting out what was shoved down his throat by an army of publicists who know where their bread is buttered: Me by Brenda Ueland; Scribbling the Cat: Travels with an African Soldier by Alexandra Fuller; and Dune Life by the National Audubon Society.

Newsflash: Young girls who like to read will, in general: a) read widely; b) find a lot of different things that they’ll enjoy; and c) enjoy them despite what you think is Good For Them.

And I have to tell you, in all my years of bookstore browsing, I have yet to experience a manager shoving a book down my throat--or any other orifice, for that matter. Bookstore managers are too busy, well, managing, and frankly, I’m lucky if I can catch the attention of a lowly clerk to help me rummage through the C shelves of the romance section to see if Mr. Impossible had been released yet.

Here’s a thought: raise your girls to be strong. Raise your girls to defy expectations. Raise your girls to think independently. And if she likes to read chick lit, it’s not the end of the fucking world.

People who impart fiction with this magical, all-encompassing ability to Educate and Edify--and in fact, expect fiction to do as much--annoy me. Not that allowing fiction to impart Social Messages of Significance is a bad thing (ref. The Jungle, 1984, Animal Farm), or an unworthy endeavor, but shouldn’t the primary instruction come from the home, the family? If your teenager is so weak-minded that she instantly buys into everything she reads, you need to sit her ass down and explain the difference between real life and fiction again, ‘cause I don’t think that first lesson stuck.

Fiction that has a pointed social message: OK, I can dig it, and mostly if the message it tries to provide jives closely with my personal worldview. But I don’t care if most my fiction doesn’t contain Big, Meaningful Messages. I mostly want my fiction to entertain me, and to not insult my intelligence while it’s doing so. Because at the end of the day, it’s not really a fictional novel’s job to teach me life lessons. It’s my job.