From: bf455@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Bonita Kale)
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Re: Those damned magazines (was: clearing something up)
Date: 17 Dec 1992 15:42:28 GMT
Organization: Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH (USA)
Distribution: world
Reply-To: bf455@cleveland.Freenet.Edu (Bonita Kale)
NNTP-Posting-Host: remarque.berkeley.edu
Originator: muffy@remarque.berkeley.edu

In a previous article, uunet!infmx!hartman@ncar.UCAR.EDU (Robert Hartman) says:
(after a lot of fascinating and worrying stuff):

>That's where the harm
>lies in soft porn for boys, as well as romance novels for girls--
>combined with the dearth of a culturally favorable and respectable
>views of healthy sexual and romantic expression.  If we made available
>such views to balance the fallacious ideas in Playboy and the romance
>novels, girls and boys would have the perspectives they need to develop
>healthy mores for themselves.
>
>Note that the answer here is not to suppress these forms of
>entertainment, but to make sure that children are exposed to healthier
>influences.  (But of course, that would force us to restructure our
>values around sex, and doing that would imply a restructuring of
>society, and of course, we just can't have that!  Grrrh!)

I agree, but there are some "views of healthy sexual and romantic
expression" available, in books, at least.  I work in the children's room
of a library, and between our room and the young adult section, we have
quite a lot of stuff--some of it junk, but some of it exactly the sort of
thing you seem to be thinking of.  We have novels that deal with kids
facing choices, and finding that the world is not a straightforward,
good-and-evil place.  A kid who reads a lot will get a wide variety of
views, with a "Face on the Milk Carton" to balance every "Sweet Valley
High".

But, in my experience, it's too late for the boys.  By the time they're old
enough to be interested in mature (or any!) sexual expression in reading,
they aren't reading fiction, or at least, not much.  There's a whole bunch
of boys (of the ones who read at all) who go from kid's sports stories to
Playboy or nothing.

My own boys, both readers, were the same.  They didn't want to read
anything that dealt with relationships in any depth.  I don't understand
it, but I have sat in a movie with my no.  2 son, in which almost no scene
held both our interests.  For every scene, one of us would be leaning
forward intently, the other checking his/her watch or fidgeting.  And guess
which scenes?  Of course, the fights and chases bored me, while the talk
and closeups bored him.

In literature, both boys missed a lot of good stuff that my daughter read
and enjoyed.  They never read about Narnia, or the Black Stallion, or Jo
March or Heidi, to mention a few books I actually own and tried to interest
them in.  They seemed to go from picture books to nonfiction to Sherlock
Holmes and Tolkien--the sexless wonders.  Now they're adults and read adult
books (still, by the way, missing a lot of good kid's books that I bring
home).

Sorry this ran on so long.  I don't understand it, myself, but I've seen
how many eager girls we have coming in, telling their friends, "Read this,
it's great!" and how few boys do the same.

Any ideas why?

Bonita Kale





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