Rant
By now, many of you will have read Naomi Wolf’s article in the New York Times, entitled Young Adult Fiction: Wild Things.
It filled me with a vast disappointment.
It’s pretty much a condemnation of ‘pink books’ like GossipGirl and the A-List. These books, implies Wolf, will corrupt our children’s moral fibre. Parents be warned! These books may look cute, you may want to buy them for your teenager, but you would be shocked at the content if you opened one up.
Scott Westerfeld has very sensibly pointed out on his blog that this kind of attitude is ridiculous. He asks, Does anyone buy books “without a second glanceâ€? Really?. Shouldn’t parents be talking to their kids about what they’re reading?
Furthermore, if you think that restricting your child’s reading is going to protect them from becoming moral degenerates, you are simply deluded. Even if you throw out the TV, forbid computer games and only let them read wholesome books like Little Women or Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants, they are still going to talk to other young people. And I very much doubt that there is anything in GossipGirl that you couldn’t hear about in the school yard.
But I am missing Naomi Wolf’s point.
In case you haven’t read the article, here is the concluding paragraph:
The great reads of adolescence have classically been critiques of the corrupt or banal adult world. It’s sad if the point of reading for many girls now is no longer to take the adult world apart but to squeeze into it all the more compliantly. Sex and shopping take their places on a barren stage, as though, even for teenagers, these are the only dramas left.
This is the bit that really gets me, and makes me wonder if she has actually read any of the books, and if so, how much attention she gave them.
I’ve read three or four GossipGirl books. I quite like them. They’re not the best ever, but they’re alright. And they’re interesting, because they offer very complex points of identification. When I read GossipGirl, I do see that “sex and shopping take their places on a barren stage”, and really, this is the point. The point is, that these girls have money and status and clothes. They have perfect lives, but every single one of them is miserable. Their triumphs are short-lived and hollow. They live completely empty, vacuous lives, and they make the Normal People who read about them feel superior.
Except not entirely. Sure, we laugh at these girls. We despise them and we heap scorn upon their pathetic lives. But there is this tiny, tiny piece of us that wonders. Just wonders: if we were given the opportunity to swap places with them, would we?
And any assumption that might be made, that today’s teens are not capable of reading a book on these multiple layers of identification… Well that’s just uninformed and patronising.
