On Young Readers, Growing Up, Moral Outrage, and Other Nonsense

Ender's Game and the two series that spawned off of it were my favorite books in High School.  I read them every year or so for a while, because I would start to miss the characters, like friends I hadn't seen in a while.  I'm told that they're not as good as I remember.  I'm told that people who still cling to those books tend to have the same crazy beliefs as their writer, which is disconcerting.  I was shocked when OSC started with all his defense of marriage stuff, because the main things I remember about his books were that they were about accepting people for who they were without judgment.  Maybe I was reading different books than I thought I was, but those books had a big impact on my development and how I chose to interact with the world, and that's meant trying to understand people's intentions and seeing the humanity inherent.  I almost want to read these books again (it's been quite a few years), but I'm almost afraid of what I will find with fresh, adult(ish) eyes.
This brings me to this article, about the privilege of being a young reader.  It starts with a discussion of Ender's Game and brings it around to talk about the way that adults talk about children's literature.  People who argue loudly for free speech, against censorship, take a different stance on children's books, because children are "impressionable" (read: "stupid").


I can see where they're going with this.  I'm often surprised to trace certain ideas or feelings of mine to their source.  Sometimes they're things that bother me, on some level.  Take this:

As a child fascinated by fantasy and mythology, I encountered a lot of bound, helpless damsels.  These damsels were always the romantic interest of the heroic knight, and thus, no matter the benign-ness of the image, there was always a hint of sexuality in these women.  I loved the story of Andromeda, but really, it wasn't the story that I was fascinated by, it was the image:

(This isn't Andromeda, but it's pretty close, and it is Gustav motherfucking Dore, my favorite illustrator of all time.  OF ALL TIME.)

Now I feel a bit awkward sharing this with you all, because quite a few of you know me and Husband, and, well, it's a bit personal.  But it speaks to my point.  This interest that I have bothers me on some level, because I'm aware that it comes from this place, from stories and images encountered in childhood, which bother me as a feminist, because it should not be so common for a child to encounter bound, helpless women.  Children (and adults, for that matter) should not be taught that desirability in a woman means being beautiful and weak.  

Then again, I find the 50 ft of rope that I keep in my bedside drawer incredibly liberating.  I try not to examine this too much, because it's too fun to let it be ruined by overthinking.  I'm also aware that this little secret (which is, I guess, less secret now) is somewhat empowering for me.  It's about me taking control of my own sexuality, even if that seems backwards.  A lot of people don't understand that this is one of those things that doesn't work if there isn't an accepted equality between members, and in reality, it's the sub that has the ultimate "power" in the exchange.  Point being, I didn't learn that women should be powerless, I learned a fun and empowering hobby...or however you want t look at it.  I didn't learn the lesson everyone seems afraid that women will learn from these kinds of portrayals, I learned my own lesson.

Or another example: after deciding to marry Husband, I found myself contemplating the sort of man that, as a child, I had hoped to marry one day - older, intellectual, a professor maybe, someone who wears tweed, someone somewhat emotionally distant, someone abrasive on the outside with a secret squishy inner heart, someone named Henry...wait a minute...

That's right.  I've been in love with Henry Higgins since the second grade.  What?!  And as it turns out, I still find the symptoms of Asperger's sexy.  Sexy.

Now I don't imagine that when my mom bought fantasy/mythology books for me, introduced me to My Fair Lady, that she ever figured this is where this would end up.  Children are impressionable.  Children do start to form their identities around literature and other media.  The problem is, you can't know what a kid's going to pick up.  It could be something great.  It could be something weird.  It could be something terrible.  It could be any combination of adjectives.  But they will get this stuff from anywhere.

Bringing it back to the article, she says, 

"One of my college friends once called the Harry Potter books her moral compass; and, for a generation of now-young moderate-progressives who have a keen sense of fighting social inequality, fear of difference, entrenched hereditary privilege, and racism, that might well be true on a mass scale. J.K. Rowling may turn out to be the most influential ethical preceptor of a generation...To some extent, we become what we read.

Except when we don't. And maybe we should credit the sensibilities of youth with a little more resilience than some wary parents would allow...As I read the (The Horse and His Boy) to Henry, I was thinking to myself that C.S. Lewis, not to put too fine a point on it, was a racist and sexist pig. Henry, however, proves completely and blissfully oblivious to all the politically incorrect baggage that saddles the book, and simply wants to hear the story. He didn't want to analyze, criticize, evaluate, or explicate the book. He wanted...to find out if Shasta and Aravis would get to Archenland in time to warn King Lune that his castle was about to be attacked by evil Prince Rabadash and two hundred Calormene horsemen."

I know that my reading had a profound impact on me as a child.  I was inventing myself.  I knew myself more profoundly as a child than I have since then, and as an adult, I find myself rediscovering things that my child-self had known all along - from my kink to my feminism, from my love of atmospheric horror to my distaste for anyone who thinks they're better than other people. (I'm way better than anyone who does that.)  These are all things that I had forgotten in the flurry of growing up, or under the pressures of High School to fit in.  My child-reader-self picked a lot of this up from her reading and other media consumption.  We, as humans, are constantly creating ourselves, and our consumption defines us as much as our political allegiances or our religion.

However, child readers are remarkably privileged - privileged - with this inability see past the story.  

I think this is what irritates me about the fact that Husband and a couple of my other friends gave up on the Harry Potter series.  They stopped reading at 11, at 12, at 13, because they were just so over fake-latin spells and Deus ex Machinas.  As tweeners.  How dried up and crusty were you at 12 that you couldn't latch onto the joy and wonder of the Harry Potter universe?  That you couldn't overlook some (admittedly glaring) narrative failures for the sake of great characters?  Were you never children?  What is wrong with you people?

I have a non-religious friend who was sad she hadn't read Chronicles of Narnia as a child, because she was aware that she would have loved them, but as an adult, she had trouble getting past the obvious religious allegory, as well as some of these other issues.  (Seriously: really, really racist.  Sorry.)

I had trouble when I got to the end of His Dark Materials, because it isn't until you're utterly engrossed in the story that you recognize these books as anti-religious.  I didn't stop because I couldn't.  I needed to find out what happened to Lyra.  I still have a lot of issues with the last book.  However, I wouldn't argue that I was too young to read it, but that I was too old.

For all we want to protect children and not let them be brainwashed by whatever thing is threatening to destroy them, we can't protect them forever, and they are their own beings.  You can't know what they're going to pick up from media, because they view the world in a different way from you - not just because they're children, but because they are other people.

You see this not only in media, but also in parenting: My mother-in-law tells me that she as very deliberate about her parenting.  She made a point to always stop what she was doing if her children wanted to talk to her, to impress upon them that they were important and that people should receive your full attention.  What they actually picked up was that it's ok to interrupt mom any time you want because she has nothing better to do than cater to your every whim.  Ouch.  

My step-mom tells me that her dad went to see his first horror movie at 18 and was so frightened by it that he vowed to desensitize his children to that sort of thing, so they would be strong and fearless.  He made them watch horror movies as children.  Rather than creating adults who weren't afraid of anything, he made adults who are afraid of the dark and sleep with nightlights.

My mother punished lying more harshly than any other offense, to teach me that lying is the worst thing you can do.  Instead, it taught me to be a better liar (so you never get caught), and I came to have pride in my ability to lie convincingly.  Eventually, I gave this up, but it was my own adult decision, not due to considerations about my mother.

This is scary, because it makes you wonder, "How can I ever raise a child at all?"  I used to worry that I would fuck my kids up all the time.  Then I realized that everyone fucks their kids up, and the goal is not to produce perfect human beings, but to produce functioning adults.  As Christians, we have a further directive: to raise them in the faith.  ("The only thing you can take to heaven with you is your children.")  Still, that's not something we can force on our children, and it's another thing that can come from odd places.  Even as a Christian, I avoid "Christian media," but tend to find religious meaning in secular works.  (Why? This short article sums it up perfectly.)

My point is: yes, media does affect children, but no, it's not in the way you think.  It's this desire to herd our children into safe moral/ideological places that leads to the ridiculous amounts of gender disparity in children's toys and media, in my opinion.  If we can't see children as independent, individual thinking and reasoning beings, we are forced to boil them down to the lowest common divisor, which is usually gender.  There is far more gender disparity in children's lives than there is in the life of an adult, which is odd considering that the lack of secondary sex-characteristics makes the difference between boy and girl children much smaller than the difference between men and women.

Now I come to the end and realize that I don't have much of a conclusion, just a string of connected thoughts.  I haven't got any answers, and I haven't got any children, so who knows?  Will I let my little girl play with Barbies?  Probably, because she'll probably think I hate her if I don't, and I don't know that she's picking up bad body image from the doll or if that's my adult vision seeing things that children don't see.  Will I let my kids watch Disney's Peter Pan, with it's wildly inappropriate, horrible depiction of  the "Red man?"  ...I don't know.  They probably won't see it the way I see it, but it's something I'll have trouble getting past.  These are all decisions that parents must make day-to-day, in the moment, based on their personal knowledge of their individual children, not decisions that should be made after encountering another constructed Christian outrage.  We need to understand that books and movies tell us how to be human - tell us what being human means and entails, but it is ultimately up to the individual what they take away from it.  We can see bad things and learn good lessons, we can see good things and learn bad lessons, we can do anything in between.  The process of constructing an identity is complex and personal, and HOW ABOUT TEACHING CHILDREN TO THINK FOR THEMSELVES?