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Point Books have a 'T' rating ('rated for teens only') on some of their books already, SSax (see this for an example).
Actually, now I come to think of it, this book - Kate Cann's Footloose - is a great example of the kind of sexually explicit teen literature Naomi Wolf would probably approve of - or an even better example would be her Diving In trilogy, which is basically an entire trilogy about the emotional ramifications of a girl's first experiences of sex. Words like 'feminist' and 'empowering' come to mind. I'll allow that it's pretty heterocentric, but within that it does an excellent job of talking about how a young straight couple negotiate their different ideas about sex and sexuality, and it has a very strong narrative argument about young women's sexual autonomy. I completely love it and I wish I'd read it when I was starting out with sex, though I doubt it would have done me any good. But it's very clearly designed to provide a set of emotional and conceptual resources for young people having/thinking about sex. Which makes it sound sort of preachy, which I don't think it is, really, that's just the way I read books.
I'm still thinking about Gossip Girl, though. I think this:
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.
is kind of key. I think it's a misreading of 'the great reads of adolescence' - Wolf is talking mainly, it seems to me, about the mission of adult literature with teenage narrators (The Catcher in the Rye etc). A lot of young adult fiction is about negotiating the passage into an adult world: using an adolescent character as an 'outsider' to critique a corrupt and banal society is a great literary device, but I'm not sure how useful it is to teenagers (especially without some sense of how they might become full agents for change within a corrupt adult society, rather than just remaining marginalized - which is not actually possible if you equate 'marginal' status with teenagerhood, given how time has a way of continuing to pass).
I see her point about there being a problem with books that teach girls how to 'squeeze ever more compliantly into' a social world based around commodified heterosexuality. I remember, though, having a sense of real joy and - something almost transgressive, like, are they allowed to do this? - when I first read the Gossip Girl books. Girls smoking! And drinking! And looking incredibly glamorous! And getting jobs as models and being in rock bands and making films and applying to NYU Film School and shaving their heads! It's like a school story populated entirely by the kinds of girl that were systematically ostracized and destroyed at Malory Towers!
I don't know. I think the narratives tend to go against Naomi Wolf's reading: there's commodified sex in there, there's an awful lot of designers' names and other markers of this-is-how-to-be-cool, there's casual and not-so-casual cruelty, but - I don't know how else to say it. They feel good-hearted to me. Where they overtly give advice, it's good advice. The plots are often about the value of friendship and the complexities of negotiating relationships and other such useful things. I'm not sure that Wolf's got it right when she says:
The books have a kitsch quality — they package corruption with a cute overlay.
I'm not sure that the cute overlay is the 'package' and corruption is the 'content': I'd be inclined to give them more of the benefit of the doubt, and say that 'corruption' (ie commodification, glamour, Mean-Girls-style popularity wars and consumerist codes of behaviour) is the thoroughly enjoyable package for a set of pretty cute stories.
And one more thing. Where Wolf says The narratives offer the perks of the adult world not as escapist fantasy but in a creepily photorealistic way she's sort of got a point, but I'm not sure how useful it is to tell children on the brink of the adult world that it's an 'escapist fantasy', given that, well, it isn't. And one of the cliches of children's literature is the question of how to get rid of the parents - that is, how to make the children free agents, negotiating the difficulties and challenges of an adult world. I supposethe most interesting point for me in Wolf's criticisms of these novel is the question of what sorts of worlds we want to see child/young-adult characters conquering: Wolf's thing about how
Sex and shopping take their places on a barren stage, as though, even for teenagers, these are the only dramas left.
Why are sex and shopping less worthwhile, more barren, as the mythological backdrops to a coming-of-age story? Because they can be taken more literally than swords and sorcery? This is an open question, by the way - I'm genuinely interested in whether realist (or even 'photorealist') fiction has a different set of responsibilities than non-realist.
(Oh, and when I said 'gatekeeping', I meant precisely that: control over what cultural productions a child has access to. Obviously adults are always going to recommend, dispraise, even forbid, certain things to children, just like they do to each other: that's different from having or attempting to have control over all points of access to culture.)
(Oh, too, Haus, you should totally post about Nina won't tell which is a Great Book.) |
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