YA Saves

I have been an avid fan of Young Adult fiction since the third grade. I vividly remember standing in the library check out line with the rest of my class during “Library Time” eagerly digging into my Judy Blume while my classmates palmed their Judy Moody books. I think that moment can also be pointed to as the precursor to my reading Anna Karenina in eighth grade when my classmates were reading…well, they weren’t reading. But that’s a self-indulgent admittedly pretentious digression.

I think it’s this deeply ingrained love of YA that caused the low grade rage I felt when reading the recent Wall Street Journal article by Meghan Cox Gurdon. It’s worth reading (in that it’s a piece of crap but will make the rest of this post make sense) but here’s a short summary: YA is shockingly dark and evil and corrupting the youth of America. If teens read the kind of YA that’s about cutting and rape and depression (oh my!) they will be normalized and thus teens will immediately adopt all self-destructive behaviors and situations presented in YA.

Where to even start?

First of all. To assume that teens will blindly imitate what they read in YA, which I suppose is a possible outcome, is to assume the most basely obvious result. It only scratches the surface of the teenage psyche and expects insultingly little of our comprehensive and analytical skills. It’s also the result that (and I am willing to bet my entire YA collection this) happens the least. Reading about cutting, for example, does not make a teen want to cut. A past trauma, depression, or need to control does may make a teen want to cut. Books are not tools used to create armies of mindless drones.

So what’s the most prevalent outcome of reading YA? It’s an outcome so painfully obvious to me that it almost hurts to have to write it, but since some people apparently insist on remaining blind, I’ll type it out. Reading about the darkness that plagues so many teens’ lives – about the rape, the abuse, the cutting, the depression, the reality for many of us — provides a way for the teens who identify with these situations to feel release, to learn that they are able to overcome these situations. To truly understand that they’re not alone.

And for the rest of us? For those of us who were lucky enough to stumble into a life void of these tragedies? Well, we learn empathy. We learn the invaluable lesson that the path we took through life was not the path that most other people have taken, and thus we learn to shape our world views in a less self-centered, close-minded, ignorant way. And it even indirectly explains to those who bully out of ignorance who their victims really are, and thus how torturing them is wrong. In fact, I’m not sure there is any better bridge for teens to cross into a feminist mind-set then the very type of YA Fiction that the author of this WSJ article so admonishes.

Then there’s this author’s tirade of how these books are grotesque. Well guess what? As a generation that was born into images of terrorist-driven planes crashing into a New York City landmark, of catastrophic natural disasters that rendered our people and even our leaders defenseless, of polar bears swimming desperately to no where because their habitat is melting because we just had to have that Hummer and of soul crushing poverty we’re kind of used to things that are grotesque. And beyond that, we are the ones that will have to throw ourselves head first into the grotesque if we want any chance of ensuring future generations a world with any light at all. If we’re protected as young adults, if we’re shielded from the truth of this world, how the hell can our parents or our teachers or anybody else expect us to ever tackle it head on when we’re actual adults?

But in all honesty, the contents of this article – while I found them appalling – weren’t altogether shocking. There have always been whistle-blowers on progress that doesn’t present itself in a neat little package of political correctness, sunshine and rainbows. Older generations always fear younger generations, at least to some extent. What did kind of surprise me, however, were the books that were missing; the books that I think actually deserved to be criticized and the books that actually are a negative force and threat to my generation.

I’m talking about The Clique. I’m talking about The A-List. I’m talking about Gossip Girl. I’m talking about whatever new vapid series of books is in vogue right now.

Okay, maybe it’s a bit of hyperbole to deem these books as threatening to the future of our generation, but really? While the books the Wall Street Journal demonized may be violent or dark, shouldn’t we be worried about the books that are all shiny gloss? These books, which in my opinion have literary merit equal to a middle schooler’s “What I Did Over The Summer” essay, and probably use parallel language, follow young women as they aspire to nothing more than a hot guy and a shopping spree. They teach young women to aspire to beauty over intelligence, to single-mindedly pursue what you want despite whatever harm it may cause others, and to create shallow, meaningless friendship.

But no, we really should be worried about the effects on our teens of reading the tale of the aftermath of a homophobic hate crime, or a young girl recovering from sexual assault.

Thank god there are awesome people, like the fabulous YA author Maureen Johnson (@MaureenJohnson), who decided to take action against this article, and promoted the twitter hashtag #YASaves, which gave YA readers from all walks of life a chance to defend YA and the positive ways it has impacted their lives. Because — what a concept! — young adults are able to determine and elocute how literature benefits us.

I hope Meghan Cox Gurdon does herself a favor and reads the #YASaves hashtag. Maybe she’ll actually learn a thing or two about how teens feel about YA. And maybe before she writes another article, she’ll ask us.

Actress Ashley Fink

Every once in a while, usually when 30 Rock is a re-run, I’ll flip over to the CW. And I kind of get the draw of the utterly escapist fantasies that shows like 90210 and Gossip Girl offer. Serena Van Der Woodsen / Blake Lively is like 14 feet tall with blonde hair that cascades over her shoulders as she effortlessly hails a cab on her way to a club – that just so happens to blithely serve the underage – in order to sabatoge another rich, white, tall, thin, personality-less girl in a plan that always seems to involve drugs or faked pregnancies or a trip to Geneva or something that probably could’ve been solved had she invited her nemesis to have a nice talk over Chai tea. But what do I know.

And for so long, this was all teens had. We turned on the TV and we were inundated with gorgeous creatures living our escapist fantasies. Were any of us represented in these shows? Did any of us recognize ourselves or our real problems in these shows? Unless there are more teens inexplicably blowing their trust funds on jaunts across Europe randomly in the middle of the school year than I thought, then the answer would be no. We ate it up because we wanted to be those characters, sure, but also because we didn’t have very many other options.

Then Glee came along.

At first, we thought Glee was just a show that glorified the inexplicable burst into a musical number in the middle of the school hall. Which is cool – I secretly have a dream that some 80′s hit will magically be broadcasted over my school’s PA system and that the entire student body will spontaneously break out into a perfectly choreographed dance, so I appreciated the show from the get go. But then they started to get real. They had a mission to spread the gospel of diversity, and they were not giving up.

There is absolutely no doubt that Glee has the widest range of characters of any show on the air right now – and they actually reflect real teens (WHAT A CONCEPT!). From race to ability to sexual orientation, Glee put it all out there. While we’d arguably been introduced to all of these character “types” before, they’d always been “special” episodes. You know – the whole “this is the episode where the main character meets a handicapable student and realizes it’s great to be different” – then the show goes back to “normal.” Glee introduced these characters as actual members of the cast, with well-rounded personalities and problems and everything! And my peers took it in stride – it was beautiful! Look, my generation gets diversity and we want to accept people! Progress!

Then they introduced the character of Lauren, played by actress Ashley Fink, an overweight, female wrestler, who joins Glee club as a “warm body” so that they have enough participants to compete.

And that’s when my peers began to lose their shit. It’s not just that this Lauren chick was fat – that was heresy enough. As I overheard somebody in my grade saying, “who wants to watch that on TV.” It’s that she was okay with being fat. You guys…she called herself beautiful. She’s secure, confident, and a complete badass despite the fact that her physical appearance does not meet societal standards. And not just societal standards, which are impossible enough to meet, but she’s nowhere near the standard for a female TV CHARACTER. I MEAN FOR GOD’S SAKE THAT IS NOT OKAY. And if that wasn’t hard enough to take, the gorgeous singing football player, Puck, fell in love with her. TOO. MUCH. TO. COMPUTE.

This is where I get really, really annoyed.

Lauren performing with the Glee Club

No girl wants to keep comparing herself to the Serena Van Der Woodsons of teen-oreinted T.V. That is the very kind of image that is driving us crazy. I personally know that despite the fact that my entire body is equal to the length of Serena’s impossibly long legs, I still wish I could be as tall as her, and it drives me insane. We really do want to see other representations of women. We want to see a full figured woman, or hell, just an average sized woman would be progress. Because when those images are in the media, it becomes okay. We can breathe a little bit – she’s on T.V. and she looks a little closer to my size, we think, maybe I don’t have to obsess over the fact that my thighs rub together, when her’s may not be 6 inches apart.

But, as Glee’s Lauren has indicated, that want for the representation of “real” women is apparently still on a less than conscious level for teens. Girls reject representations of women like Lauren not because they don’t want to see them, but because we’ve virtually never seen them before. I feel confident stating that we’ve never seen a female character either as large as Lauren, and the larger characters we have seen are constantly crying about their size or being teased, or something. It’s okay to be fat, the media tells us, as long as you’re trying to do something about it, as long as you want to “fix” it and try to achieve that image of perfection. When we see women like Lauren, the sad truth is that we don’t even know what to do with them, despite the fact that we desperately want, and arguably NEED to see them.

And what about when girls like Lauren get the guy like Puck? Well then we have to deal with the reasons WHY we idolize unattainable bodies in most TV shows, and why we use the escapism of replacing ourselves with perfect TV stars to be that girl and be in that relationship. Our whole relationship with hating our body gets called into question. Well she’s big, we start to realize, and she’s okay with it. And she’s with the “ideal” guy. Wait…why do I hate my body again? And then not having that reason why we must, must, must be skinny anymore becomes very unsettling. We’re left somewhere between still hating our bodies (those years of damage can’t be erased with one character on Glee) and getting a glimpse that it might actually be okay to not be…well, perfect.

What do we do with that?

Well, we hate Lauren.

Some might see this Lauren-hate phenomenon as an indication that girls reject images of larger women in the media, that we’re not ready for it or don’t want it. On the contrary, this reaction is evidence that we need more images of Lauren-like characters. Girls really, truly look to the media – especially T.V. – as a guide of sorts, and this backlash to Lauren only illuminates the sad truth that we don’t even know what a real woman looks like when she appears on our T.V. screen – even if we might be living with or best friends with somebody who looks exactly like her.

For the record, not all of us hate Lauren. A lot of us get that she’s awesome and that her character is super progressive. I personally LOVE her and think she’s the most empowered female character I’ve ever seen on T.V. And the more we see Lauren-esque characters, the more we will ALL learn to be okay with the way we look. We will learn that it’s’ not only a reality that our bodies are not going to look like Blake Lively’s, but that it’s possible to like, even love, ourselves for this very reason.

This post is part of the WAM! It Yourself Blogathon! WAM! It Yourself is a multi-city decentralized conference on gender and media run by Women, Action & the Media. Events are taking place in seven cities and online from March 20th to March 27th. Check out the full schedule of events here!

Teddy from 90210: Closeted Gay = Open Homophobe

I would like to preface this entire post by mentioning that most actors who play high school students in our favorite dramas are really, really old. Though they have not yet succumbed to the allure of Life Alert and Jello three times a day, they are a shockingly false portrayal of what teenagers actually look like. I’m going to postulate that shows such as 90210 and Gossip Girl have female dominated audiences, so I suppose having really old male actors serves to sexualize high school beyond its sordid reality?

In any case, Trevor Donovan, the 90210 regular whose character is slated to come out of the closet this season, is 32 years old. Though this is largely a case-in point statement, I’m going to drag out my story even further. Because I can.

Donovan’s character, Teddy, begins to struggle with his sexuality this season in 90210. He gets drunk at a party and accidentally (or not so accidentally) makes out with a gay kid in his class. He doesn’t remember it until later, and the shit hits the fan. Teddy can’t deal with what he has done, so he proceeds to act like a total jerk towards the gay kid, who doesn’t even want to coax Teddy out of the closet. But because Teddy is so paranoid, he calls the kid a faggot, and then gets into a brawl with him in the hallway. All of this nonsense happens because Teddy can’t accept himself.

The exact same scenario happened in Gossip Girl a couple of years ago. Erik Van der Woodsen comes out of the closet, and his lover/boyfriend/fellow gay who isn’t out yet/classmate calls him a faggot as well in order to preserve his manliness.

I guess I’m just perplexed as to why it’s only the closeted gay kids who end up being so awful to the out gay kids. Of course, one could argue that these kids are so repressed that they have to attack anything that may cause their secrets to come spilling out, but I think that this is only partially true in real life. It is the infallible, absolute truth of television.

I’d like to see a few storylines in television where straight kids who aren’t doubting their sexuality go after gay kids, and then realize they were wrong. I think that many series are missing this aspect to their shows, and it’s an important perspective to incorporate into any teen series. For all of the closeted kids who berate the out kids, those kids eventually come to terms with who they are and accept the world and there are happy bunnies and cupcakes and rainbows. Hooplah. The lack of storylines where inherently biased people learn to accept others in spite of their differences is somewhat scary. It’s encouraging bigotry through omission. Gay people aren’t the only ones who have to overcome the hurtles that come with being gay. There is an entire world that has to learn to accept gay people, and the silver screen does not portray this in the least. The closeted gay kids call others fags because they’re closeted gay kids. But other types of people aren’t encouraged or discouraged from partaking in the verbal abuse of LGBT youth. That message needs to be projected to everyone through showing scenarios where all different types of people overcome their presumed notions.

I’m always complaining about how Gossip Girl and 90210 and that crap are completely unrealistic to teenagers’ lives. They depict angst…but not the angst we feel – the superficial angst that everybody thinks we feel. The truth is boys, popularity and eating disorders are not all teenage girls stress over (though that is part of it…) but even more so than the topics explored, the characters in these shows don’t look like me or really act like me or anybody I know.

I always say that I wish somebody would have the guts to make a T.V. show that more accurately depicts the teenage experience. But as it turns out, they tried that in the 90′s with My So Called Life and Freaks and Geeks. And it didn’t go so well. 

Both shows tried to break from the stereotypical teen show model and both lasted for only one season. However, they also both still have cult-like followings of kids who like watching something closer to their reality. 

Freaks and Geeks was actually produced by Judd Apatow. It stars Chutney from Legally Blonde (aka Linda Cardellini) and Seth Rogen, Jason Segel, Busy Phillips and my favorite, James Franco (the man who has a perfectly symmetrical face). Basically, it follows a girl as she transitions socially from being a “mathlete” to an underachieving “freak,” and her little brother and his friends, who are “geeks.” 

My So Called Life stars Claire Danes and Jared Leto, who I used to be in love with but then completely lost interest in after learning that he fronts 30 Seconds to Mars. My So Called Life follows your everyday 15-year-old-girl as she tries to figure out what the hell she’s doing. 

The pilots are both below. While I don’t think either of these shows necessarily have feminist agendas, I think they’re honest. And I always like to give solutions to the problems I complain about so I feel better about 500+ words of whining. 

Freaks and Geeks

My So Called Life

Thoughts? Reactions?

Judy Blume: the mother of teen fiction

Over at Salon, they’re talking about Lizzie Skurnick’s new book “Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading.” And it really got me thinking about the books I read as a kid (relatively speaking as I am 16) and how they really stick with you.  I know Judy Blume is basically the goddess of my Mom’s generation and whenever her name comes up they all share a knowing smile. All I ever read was Blubber, which I personally kind of found upsetting, but apparently Judy Bloome introduced millions of girls to their period, which in a way is cute that millions of women have this shared experience.

this book stole my innocence

I found out a much less fun way – a family friend gave me the American Girl book ”The Care and Keeping of You.” for my 9th or 10th birthday. I read the section on “menstruation” and very distinctly remember sort of looking up at the heavens and whispering under my breath, “Oh, so this is how it’s going to be, hm? WELL I’M NOT HAVING IT.” Yeah. Fighting my body didn’t really go so well for me.     

Anyway. I also read a lot of Paula Danziger. Not because she was relevant to my generation – she started writing in the 70′s. But because when I was in 3rd and 4th grade we had “library class” once a week, where we had to go to the library and pick out two books to check out. In 3rd and 4th grade most kids were into Junie B. Jones, but I was really over that, so I went for the teen section — which evidently as of 2002 hadn’t really been updated in a while. I read classics like The Cate Ate My Gymsuit, The Pistachio Prescription, and Can You Sue Your Parents for Malpractice? like it was nobody’s business. 

Jerry Spinelli was also the man – I found Maniac Magee delightful. Harriet the Spy, a classic, inspired me to start taking notes on people. I was an epic failure though – I wrote one observation about my then babysitter, which was something along the lines of, “She has brown hair and doesn’t look like she wants to be here.” Groundbreaking. Lois Lowry, Margaret Peterson Haddix, Madeline L’Engle, Sharon Creech, E.L. Konigsburg: all just some of the greats I read through lower and middle school.

They all had such great characters and stories that really meant something. It just makes me sad that girls are now growing up with books like “The Clique” and “Gossip Girl” and “The A-List.” It’s not even that they’re not written that well – it’s that they literally are devoid of meaning.

the title. the cover. sweet jesus.

They don’t teach girls anything – if anything the spoiled brats who live without consequences these books portray are only doing harm. To some extent you expect T.V. to be a little trashy — but I never would have guessed that this is what books for kids would come to.   

Of course there are still great books out there for younger girls, and girls can still always read the books of past generations. But these trashtastic books are sadly popular, and girls are sadly reading them. I know I work at an after-school care program for K-6 graders, and I’m always shoving one of these classics into their hands, trying to counter act whatever else is permeating their little worlds. I think the “coolness” of a teenager giving them a book counteracts the “coolness” of the trash they would be reading.  I hope all the book lovers out there are doing the same and keeping the love alive!

This reminded me that Will Arnett ( of Arrested Development fame – the best show EVER) just read a little bit of “Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret” on Light Night with Jimmy Fallon. He makes her sound a bit like a serial killer, but nevertheless. It’s relevant. 

Anyway this summer was crunch time. Every night so far, I’ve cranked out all the illegal sites (bad. baaaad) that provide me with my nightly fix of Gossip Girl, 90210, and even Skins (Britian’s take on the teen melodrama).

Look we're all in bed together...sexayy

beds are for losers...over at skins we just have orgies on the floors of clubs we party in even though we're 16...

And I loved every single second of the grossly exaggerated depiction of what teens lives are. But I enjoyed them despite my unquestionable knowledge that the display before me was complete bullshit…that was why I liked them. Over-exaggeration can be fun. But I’m hoping that everybody else feels that way, too. Because “teen shows”- the ones that are supposed to relate most closely to our lives- the ones full of drinking and drug use and sex – the ones that don’t spare the nitty gritty- aren’t actually in reality. T.V. networks just sell us the images we think are cool by saying that they are our lives – that way we feel cool and feel cool consuming their product – sex, drugs and lies. And here’s how they do it:

No Parents

These kids are sophomores/juniors in high school…and apparently they’re all emancipated minors living lavish life styles. Yeah, 16 year olds have parents. This is an especially salient point of Gossip Girls- the parents are there merely to serve as an additional plot line, not as the anchors of reality, or actual parents. The most parenting I saw from Lily on Gossip Girls was when she had her daughter arrested. Clap clap clap. And then Blair and Serena just decide to go to a swanky bar on a weeknight- no carding, of course, they’re the elite after all. They have inconsequential sleepovers at their boyfriends’ houses. No big deal.

we don't have involved parents! yayyy!

And I enjoy watching these shows through the lens of a completely unreal, fantasy teen world. But I worry that little girls in Kansas who have never been farther than a few hours from their house won’t see it that way. And maybe it’s patronizing of me to think that – that they wouldn’t be exposed to anything. But I think to some extent, in some places, it’s the truth.

Drinking, Smoking, Sexing OH MY!

These “teens” (late 20′s cough cough) drink like fish, further elevating their chance of liver damage later in life every episode, smoke cigarettes and pot, and are promiscuous as what. Yes it is true that teens actually do drink, smoke and have sex. But it’s not all of us…it’s not even most of us…and it’s rarely at the alcoholic and addictive points displayed in these shows. It’s just not the norm. You know, some of us are actually responsible and conscious about our health.

OMFG is right...OMFG this is a billboard in public

Drama, Drama, Drama

I’m pregnant…with your best friend’s baby! I’m going to rehab! My mom is marrying your dad even though we’ve slept together and can’t seem to get over it! Oh dear god. Are they serious with this shit? And there’s nothing wrong with drama in what are really just glorified soap operas…but that’s my point. These shows tout themselves as representing reality. And the thing is…most teens do not live each day like a party funded by their trust fund. That’s just not how it goes.

I'm pregnant and it's not your baby but let's stay together anyway kay? Kay! Just another normal 90210 day!

Because, let’s all face it, our lives on average would make a pretty freakin boring t.v. show. WHICH IS ACTUALLY FINE, IT TURNS OUT. I hear all these teens bitching about how boring their lives are, because whether conciously or not they’re comparing it to the lives of Gossip Girl and 90210 which just promote irresponsible promiscuity, drug use and other dumbass moves. We watch these shows and we roll our eyes because most of us realize that life isn’t like that. But then we go and strive to match it anyway.

Considering that we all know better and it has such a strong effect on us…I’m seriously worried about those girls in Kansas, the 6th graders watching, and even the parents who now think that this is what we’re like. “What teens are really like” my ass.