Little Earthquakes, by Jennifer Weiner

First of all, I couldn’t possibly overstate the importance of Little Earthquakes (not this book, the Tori Amos album) in my fifth-grade emotional development. I wrote out the lyrics in glitter pen and stared at them while pondering my heart as an impossible cyclone of bittersweet, abstract longing. You too can experience this feeling by watching this YouTube video of the PS22 kids doing “1000 Oceans.” I’m not even embarrassed to admit this, because that album was good.

Anyway, I’m steadily chipping away at my credibility as a person whose blog you should read–but in pursuit of absolutely nothing, I’ll press on. Jennifer Weiner sells a lot of books and In Her Shoes was made into a Cameron Diaz movie so I figured she was worth checking out–and, well, this book is fine. It’s nowhere near as superficial as Lauren Weisberger’s mind-polluting social climber oeuvre, and it details the lives of normal, intelligent working women (with a basketball player’s wife and an ex-celebrity actress thrown in for the always necessary glam-factor). The book is about pregnancy and money and babies and whatever–a bunch of “women things” that will eventually be important to me but will hopefully never be important enough to make me think that every little detail related to said “women things” is automatically interesting.

Jennifer Weiner has vehemently defended the idea of chick lit before–”Female protagonist, urban setting, smart, sarcastic voice. I don’t see why it matters if you’re thrown into this category,” she says in one interview. I realized after reading this book that that’s not my problem with chick lit (and really, that definition is missing a crucial “who thinks about only herself” clause after the female protagonist part). What bothers me about chick lit is the way it makes women–occasionally including myself–glom onto the minutae of someone’s feminine exploits in the vague hope that the accumulation of details will eventually provide some sort of key to understanding (and perhaps also magically transforming) their own lives. I get a feeling that this is a big reason why, for women, every single relationship story seems individual and fascinating; why else would people continue to watch the Bachelor, which is the same every season as well as every episode? Sure, it’s entertaining to watch girls put on tiny dresses and act sincere for some man who probably not only shaves but also airbrush-tans his chest–but there’s a more than a little of “If I see enough love stories, I’ll figure out my own” in the viewership. And, since we assume that the love story is complete once everyone’s partaken of tiny truffle mac-and-cheese bowls at the wedding, this phenomenon can be assumed to go even farther–to a world where stretch marks replace high heels, but the need for shared attention is the same. There are 3.9 million mommy bloggers out there.

When I brought this up with my boyfriend, he said that the energy that women put into this sort of endless, life-normalizing support group behavior is the energy that men put into sports and misogyny. This strikes me as a good assessment, and I don’t mean to imply that either gender has a lock on narrow, superficial fixations. He also said that most people of both genders don’t even see the attraction of not being superficial, which is a chilling (but probably decently accurate) thought. And women may be the primary audience for anodyne, internal-affairs chicky business, but they also make up 80% of the fiction market–so there’s that. Don’t get me wrong with all of this! I think women comprise the better half of the world by a long shot. I just think they (we) are getting fooled by chick lit and everything like it.

The fact is: these stories about women in whatever form have a legitimate veneer of insight on the female experience, but in reality are creating a false idea that a woman’s life has to revolve around an anti-intellectual beehive of relationships, shoes and status; that a woman’s emotional state is something akin to how I conceived it in fifth grade while listening to the other Little Earthquakes–something important, absorptive, and worth hours of daily maintenance and attention. Jennifer Weiner’s Little Earthquakes, despite being very well-written for its genre, was about as insightful as a cocktail napkin with a saying on it.

The Best Little Attempt at Making a Book Out of a Book Blog in Texas

When I saw that cartoon in The New Yorker I laughed out loud and then wanted to run myself over with a truck. Recently I’ve been getting semi-serious about the idea of compiling these book reviews into an organized manuscript, a sort of Drunk Person’s Guide to Book Talk type thing, a to-the-point handbook of all the things that you could have learned by wasting all your time reading novels but thankfully did not. Basically I’m looking to do something with my stupid little online pieces!

So, if you have any suggestions–title suggestions, books-to-read-for-the-book suggestions, any suggestions or advice or feedback at all–let me know. I’m going to really get into it with this: I’m talking the Koran, the Kama Sutra, science fiction, Goodnight Moon, even some of those grocery-store paperbacks that I always try to read to understand the American common man and then just throw aside instantly out of boredom. I’m actually going to try to read everything!

Note: I will refer to females as “targets”

So today, Jezebel posted this email written by some guy in Kappa Sig at USC–a treatise so desperately aggressive towards women that its publishing will hopefully render its loser author unable to snag any “cock-pocket” (as he puts it) for quite some time. But maybe not, because there’s always the “Loop n’ Doop: A target that is very easy to take down. All she takes is a good amount of liquor (loop) and she will be good to go for you to fuck her (doop).” The email is long and far from ground-breaking, but here are some highlights on this guy’s treatise on how to be a “Cocksman”: “Note: I will refer to females as ‘targets’. They aren’t actual people like us men. Consequently, giving them a certain name or distinction is pointless.“

Another: “Don’t fuck middle-eastern targets. Exhibit some patriotism and have some pride. You want your cock smelling like falafel? Filth.“

And my personal favorite: “1.) Non-consent and rape are two different things. There is a fine line, so make sure not to cross it.”

Now, I was in a sorority at the University of Virginia, and I’m dating someone who was in a frat there as well. Generally I stayed away from the Greek scene in college because I preferred my sexual marketplace to be a little less… structured; however, I don’t think that this this email is an occasion to bemoan frat culture, which is not universally terrifying and often really fun. More importantly, it’s something in which girls participate by choice. While it genuinely disturbs me that men like this often end up as millionaire CEOs, it’s a girl’s responsibility to have enough self-respect–and better things, or people, to do–than to have to resort to making slutty eyes across the beer pong table at a guy who’s wondering only about your ability to “gobble cock.”

But set this email up against the New York Times and Houston Chronicle coverage of an incident in Texas in which at least seventeen men gang-raped an 11-year-old. The articles are already being lambasted by bloggers for their total victim-blaming and focus on the “plight” of the guys in trouble. From the Times article: “Among [the community's questions] is, if the allegations are proved, how could their young men have been drawn into such an act? ‘It’s just destroyed our community,’ said Sheila Harrison, 48, a hospital worker who says she knows several of the defendants. ‘These boys have to live with this the rest of their lives.‘”

From the Chronicle: “Local officials say the attack has devastated this close-knit community, leaving many to wonder who will be charged next. There’s talk that a star athlete at Cleveland High School was seen sexually assaulting the girl on the video.” Oh no, a star athlete? He had such a bright future ahead of him. He was probably going to go to college, join a frat, and be able to safely walk that “fine line” between non-consent and rape in a place where the alcohol is flowing and none of the girls are 11.

“Carter Williams, 64, seated at a small card table playing dominoes inside a local grocery, does not think laying blame is the right response to the sex assault. ‘This is a praying time for the young men and the young girl,’ Williams said. ‘Seems like everyone in this whole town needs some God in their life.’“

The 11-year-old girl is repeatedly described in a way that would suggest that she “asked for it.” She wore makeup and dressed like she was older. She “made flamboyant statements about drinking, smoking and sex.” While the implication of these details is appalling, I’ll go as far as I can and imagine that the girl did indeed want to sexually experiment at the age of 11 (despite the fact that she was driven to the site of the rape and told she would be beaten if she didn’t take off her clothes and do what the guys wanted her to–a small detail that these news stories seem to be completely ignoring in their tone). To use common parlance, let’s say she was a budding slut.

What, and who, do you think would be responsible for such a thing? The reporters (male and female) who choose to think like the Kappa Sig frat boy and treat obviously victimized girls as targets even after the fact. The culture that created both the frat email and these news stories, which are absolutely two branches of the same tree. The men and women who would read “R.D.A (Raw Dog Assassin): A man that refuses to wear condoms because no feeling on earth can compare to a warm piece of pie coming in contact with your cock” and laugh rather than hold back their vomit. And most of all, the idea that a girl isn’t anything but a target–the sum of her face (maybe), tits, and “spunk-pot”–a piece of objectification whose only path to interaction with the opposite sex is through marketing herself in a misguided and alarming campaign for attention. The child did not grow up in a vacuum. If she was ever indeed acting out sexually, even if she were to have stood in the park and screamed, “I’d love to have violent sex with seventeen adult men in the next hour,” she’s still eleven. The most “blamable” possible eleven-year-old would still be nothing more than a product of all our heinous cultural practices.

I don’t usually break the book review format to write about other things, but this is just too ridiculous. I don’t think that our new acquaintance at Kappa Sig makes it a pastime to gang-rape preteens. But I also don’t think it’s a stretch to imagine that he’s had sex at least once with a girl who didn’t want to have sex with him but was too drunk to fight him off, which is, let’s say it: rape. And I doubt that he would find that too much of an issue.  The attitude that his email reflects is the same attitude that makes reporters at top publications portray this poor 11-year-old as someone who deserved it, and the men who raped her as solid all-American men whose upcoming legal ordeal will rip apart the town. Everyone needs to get some goddamn self-respect here. Girls shouldn’t reduce themselves to “Loop ‘n Doops.” Guys shouldn’t be borderline rapists posing as normal people. Reporters shouldn’t be idiots. It’s not difficult to start being a reasonable person who does not contribute to the acceptability of sexual assault. So here’s to these reporters getting a big slap at the next editorial meeting, and to this Kappa Sig cocksman having only “filth, fatties and uglies” on all forthcoming Gullet Reports.

The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

You probably know what this book is about even if you haven’t read it, since it’s been on at the top of the bestseller lists for about a hundred weeks. But if you don’t, The Help is a story about the black maids of civil rights-era Jackson, Mississippi, and the white woman who decides to write a controversial book about their lives. That sentence is boring, right? That’s because you can read it and instantly know exactly what you’re going to get from this book: aging white debutantes who care only about appearance and the Junior League; black maids who run the ever-nuanced Black Woman in the South gamut from saintly to sassy. Now, I think The Help is a relatively well-written book about a subject that’s tricky to portray, and it’s a pleasure to read: great plot, lively, with a note of unexpectedness that keeps it out of Oprah territory. But unless you’re a sort of unwitting racist type and it helps you come to the revelation that yes, white people have (in general) historically been very cruel to those “beneath” them–The Help is really not as insightful or important as people seem to find it.

Kathryn Stockett, who is herself white (a fact that becomes pretty obvious as soon as you start reading), wrote this book out of guilt and affection for the black woman who raised her as a child in Jackson. She’s great at writing from the perspective of Skeeter, the awkward and mildly subversive white girl (who is repeatedly described as not-cute in the book but is obviously going to be played by Emma Stone in the movie version). Considering the touchiness of what she’s trying to do, she’s not too bad writing as either of her two black narrators, who were originally intended to be the only narrators before Stockett decided it was too weird.

But as a Duke professor asked, “Who gets to tell these stories in a way that they earn public attention?” We trust the filter of a white female author; we’re comfortable with the fact that she writes the black characters in dialect, while the white characters’ accents were probably just as strong. There’s a significant, subconscious current of nostalgia in the writing, and I suspect there’s a bit of old-South nostalgia in the reading of it too. But also, no one said that every book involving black people has to be Invisible Man. So kudos to Kathryn Stockett here for attempting to write about something real. I can overlook tacky earth-mama sentences like “Truth. It feels cool, like water washing over my sticky-hot body. Cooling a heat that’s been burning me up all my life” for that.

Forever, by Judy Blume

Like every other half-assedly “creative” type who would really love to write a masterpiece (or something publishable) but in reality gets distracted by shiny objects and dark beers too often to ever amount to anything, I come to most of my “writing ideas” already preparing to shut them down.

Still, I’ve gone through phases where I briefly got behind a lengthy project: a literary novel about an evangelical camping trip where the sun never comes up, the chick-lit novel that got stolen, a series of travel essays that were also pilfered by some anonymous Kyrgyz dick. I’ve toyed with the idea of gimmick-authorship, doing something stupid for a year and writing about it (although saying yes to every guy who asks you out and abstaining from toilet paper and elevators is out, I think I could make My Year Stalking Junot Diaz into a real charmer). There’s also the possibility of writing a heinously bourgeois nonfiction niche-history, like Salt: A World History or Cod: A Biography of the Fish that Changed the World. I threw a legitimate tantrum a few weeks before my college thesis was due because I realized that writing about all-homosexual beauty pageants in the Byzantine Empire would have been just as obscure and stupid, but much, much easier.

But it’s that time again where I feel my creative-fertility clock ticking and want to start something for real. To get things going, I was making a mental list of books that have influenced me, and under the “scary” category was Forever by Judy Blume, which I read as a seven-year-old and then instantly decided that I was going to be repelled by sex forever.

This book, like all of Judy Blume’s, has been banned repeatedly for its frank discussion of teenage sexuality. It’s technically about a girl losing her virginity while in a relationship she thinks is “forever” (she actually ends up being the one who moves on)–but really, it’s about how fucking gross it is to name your penis Ralph. That’s what her boyfriend does. He names it Ralph. Ever since this book was published in 1975, the name Ralph has fallen completely off the radar. No young person wants to look at her child and think about this:

‘Don’t,’ he said, wiggling out of his pajama bottoms. He led my hand to his penis. ‘Katherine . . . I’d like you to meet Ralph . . . Ralph, this is Katherine. She’s a very good friend of mine.’

Then later, after he comes and it gets on her: ‘That’s all right . . . I don’t mind . . .’ I pulled out some tissues.

He took the box back. ‘I’m glad,’ he said, wiping up his stomach. I kissed the mole on the side of his face. ‘Did I do okay . . . considering my lack of experience?’

He laughed, then just put his arms around me. ‘You did just fine . . . Ralph liked it a lot.’

Sick nasty. Which brings me to my newest book idea: a compendium of the most awkward and gross sex scenes in literature. Which is to say, pretty much all of them.

Redwall, by Brian Jacques

During Peace Corps, I used the Internet a lot more than I thought I’d be able to. But because of the brisk 56k connection on my cell phone modem, I still wasn’t able to dick around online very much, and as a result so many things of and about the Internet–the celebrity fixation, the way it allows you to process a lot of information without having to think for yourself, the intensely detailed information about stuff that doesn’t matter at all–were completely absent from my last year.

I enjoyed living this way to a point. The Internet is often an intrusion on the life of the mind, and being in the Peace Corps necessitated a constant mental dissection of stupidly large issues: poverty, aid, whatever. You’re constantly trying to understand your situation without judging the people around you–and then you do, and then you judge yourself. I hated how almost every conversation I had with locals was simplistic and banal, but then I’d remind myself that critical thinking is a privilege. The capacity for serious analysis is largely off-limits to subsistence farmers. And, when the most popular article on Slate is an etymological analysis of Charlie Sheen’s verbal diarrhea, who’s to say that these high-level skills are so very important?

In a great example of analyzing things beyond all reason, here’s an excerpt from the Wikipedia entry on Redwall, the bestselling children’s fantasy (but non-magical) series about small, nice woodland creatures who live in an abbey and fight larger, evil woodland creatures. I read a couple of these when I was little and loved them, although I don’t remember much beyond their constant feasts on twinky little meat pies and elderflower wine drunk out of thimbles or whatever.

“The books have been criticized in some quarters for allegedly promoting an overly simplistic view of race and ethnicity… The characteristics of the animals in the novels are fixed by their species, making them quite predictable. Critics point out that the good and bad characters are drawn almost exclusively along species lines, with a few rare exceptions. These criticisms have been advanced as a concern, as the books are primarily read by children and young adults. There is also a class element involved in these criticisms, with the denizens of Redwall being either educated, aristocratic animals such as badgers, or rustic, simple creatures such as moles.”

What the hell is wrong with people? There is no child on earth (and these books have been translated in all sorts of languages, including Swedish and Hebrew) who has ever read Redwall and thought “When I grow up, everything about life will be exactly like this imaginary society of Old English mice and badgers.” And who cares if all the creatures of the same species act similar? That’s what species do. I’m more offended at the idea that someone’s drawing a connective line between species and race, period.

Also, Redwall isn’t real. There is that to keep in mind.