Two Questions...

[leahbobet]

...both spawned by the never-ending parade of posts about how terrible Twilight is.*

1) So two major YA series hit big in the last ten years: Twilight and Harry Potter. In the early part of each series, you saw what can be charitably called low production values in terms of craft, plots that revolved around blatant wish-fulfillment, and wholesale rips of the tropes of already established subgenres. Potter is the poster child for mainstream acceptance. Twilight is excoriated regularly in newspapers, the internets, and local bookstores in reenactments of the Five Minutes' Hate.

What's the difference? What causes that?

I have my own theory, but I want to hear yours.


2) Where do people get the idea that exposing a child to a worldview or idea at all means the child will automatically agree with, adopt, and adhere to that worldview or idea?

Really, peoples. You met kids?


*Haven't read it, not gonna, no opinion on the matter.

Comments

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Because even if you know intellectually that kids aren't necessarily going to be sucked into the maw of evil wrongthinking simply by reading a book, it's hard to let go of the desire to protect your spawn from even knowing about things you think are evil wrongthinking.

I can't fault crazy religious folks from wanting to protect their kids from liberal secularism, except insofar as I am a liberal secularist and think they are crazy religious folks. On this point I feel fine calling it a "culture war" and insisting that I want my culture to win.

In its ideal form, liberal secularism believes that merely being exposed to ideas won't corrupt someone, that tolerance for all ideas will allow the better, more useful ones to thrive, and all sensible people will see that Intolerance, Bias, and Selfish Materialism will be revealed as the worst destructive forces and ought to be avoided.

Unfortunately, the larger world I live in is one where 50% of all people are below average intelligence. This is not a bad thing, but it does make tolerance for everything a dangerous proposition.

Not all kids will be seduced to the dark side of the force by merely reading about it, but enough children are influenced by what they read, both for good and for bad, that it's not an unreasonable fear.

Idealistic secular liberals may permit their kids to read Twilight, but they at least want to make sure their daughters understand that there's more to life than being an uneducated, teenage mother with an abusive, stalker husband. There are quite a many young women these days who are from mainstream (read: not crazy religious kooks) households who obsess about getting married and having babies, to the point where they don't think critically about the traits of a suitable male partner. So disliking anything that seems to reinforce that attitude is highly understandable.

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

Because even if you know intellectually that kids aren't necessarily going to be sucked into the maw of evil wrongthinking simply by reading a book, it's hard to let go of the desire to protect your spawn from even knowing about things you think are evil wrongthinking.

Heh. I would be more on board with this explanation if more of the internet fuss were about One's Own Spawn. Instead, it seems to be about Everyone Else's Spawn.

There are quite a many young women these days who are from mainstream (read: not crazy religious kooks) households who obsess about getting married and having babies, to the point where they don't think critically about the traits of a suitable male partner.

This was always so. And it was normative and encouraged until about thirty-forty years ago. And, hell, if you look at people's dating habits during high school and for many, through the rest of their lives, still is so.

[pnkrokhockeymom.livejournal.com]

But that IS the approved message from that camp, and I don't think those girls are getting that message just from Twilight; they're getting it everywhere, wrapped in many other colors. They are getting it from the federal government in the form of abstinence-only sex education ("do you want to be the used and chewed up piece of gum? ewwwww. save yourself for your one true love or you are dirty"). They are getting it from EVERYWHERE. It is the approved narrative on that side.

[barbarienne.livejournal.com]

Exactly. And it has become the approved public narrative at a time when many of the parents are people who grew up during the time when the message was completely the opposite: free love, destroy the sexual double standard, who needs a piece of paper to approve their love, wheee isn't the pill cool!

The tail end of the baby boom and the early folks in generation X are the parents we're talking about. Those of us from upper-middle-class-white-America families (by and large the liberal secularist set) are freaking the fuck out at what the religious right is doing to our country. We don't want them to brainwash the next generation. We thought we were the generation that broke the cycle of badness and now women could get on with claiming their equality.

As for it being about Everyone Else's Spawn... Well, heck, you can't make a public case about it if it's only about your kids. That you take care of in your home. Unfortunately, the asshole opposition who would like to see women barefoot, pregnant, and uneducated, don't hold back from pushing it into the public, so there we must fight.

Said, of course, as a childless woman. ;-)

[leahbobet.livejournal.com]

("do you want to be the used and chewed up piece of gum? ewwwww. save yourself for your one true love or you are dirty")

Is that like a for serious ad?

I wonder if large portions of Americans would find some of our subway ads shocking. ("Being Desi doesn't stop AIDS. Use a condom.")