It seems this blog has only three modes: lusty, whingy, and ranty. Well, it seems I pulled the ranty straw today.
As you know, I’m a tad geeky. I was over at the Leaky Cauldron geeking out on Potter, and found this quote from Stephen King:
Both Rowling and Meyer, they’re speaking directly to young people… The real difference is that Jo Rowling is a terrific writer and Stephenie Meyer can’t write worth a darn. She’s not very good… it’s very clear that she’s writing to a whole generation of girls and opening up kind of a safe joining of love and sex in those books. It’s exciting and it’s thrilling and it’s not particularly threatening because they’re not overtly sexual. A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold. And for girls, that’s a shorthand for all the feelings that they’re not ready to deal with yet.
Now, I’ve got no beef with what he said about Meyer. She does suck. And for now we’ll leave aside the question of whether he’s in any position to be criticising the state of other people’s writing.
What’s got me ranting is the second part of that quote, the bit about the young girls and the feelings. ‘Oh, the poor young girls, they have these feeelings, but they’re scared of them, and they’re so confuuuuuused.’ He’s wheeling out that old pernicious idea that adolescent girls are naive and vulnerable and clueless about their bodies, and need to be protected from real boys and real sex.
You patronising cock! It couldn’t be, could it, that young girls like hot guys, and vampires are hot?
When you think about 14 year old boys poring over Playboy, do you think the poor lambs are confused and afraid of their own feelings? No! You think they’re horny and they like looking at hot girls.
‘Oh, but girls are different.’ Fuck off are they. You just want them to be different so you don’t have to think about your daughter as a sexual being.
When I was 13/14 we were all passing round Jilly Cooper and Jackie Collins. Were we going, ‘I’m not ready to be a grow’d up yet, yet somehow I find these books oddly satisfying’? Were we bollocks! We were all, ‘Check this out, it’s hot!’ Partly we were devouring any information we could get about sex because we wanted to know what it was really like. But mostly those books were just plain hot. We were getting our jollies off them just as much as the boys with the Playboy.
But apparently that possibility hasn’t occurred to Mr King. Because god forbid teenage girls have actual sexual feelings. That would just be creepy and unnatural.
“And for now we’ll leave aside the question of whether he’s in any position to be criticising the state of other people’s writing.”
Ha! Oh Stephen King…
When he says:
“It’s exciting and it’s thrilling and it’s not particularly threatening because they’re not overtly sexual. A lot of the physical side of it is conveyed in things like the vampire will touch her forearm or run a hand over skin, and she just flushes all hot and cold.”
I have a serious beef with two points in that quote. Point A, that touching a forearm and or running hands over skin is not overtly sexual– because oh yes it can be. And point B, that if those happened to not be sexual, it’s somehow inferior to something “overtly” sexual. People are so hung up on the trading of spit and the shoving of body-parts into other body-parts. And yes, those things can be fun. But they’re not the be-all end-all of touch and sensuality.
Yes, absolutely! It makes no sense to claim that’s not overtly sexual.
Writing to a generation of girls, and clearly, is what defines bad writing??
This is my mind…. boggling.