Good article with a great deal of information I did not know about the current state of the literary world. But I find your recommendation of The Bell Jar incongruous. There is nothing uplifting in that work whatsoever. Suggesting women seeking titillation should try digesting a depressing piece such as this will never win any converts.
First off, WOAH! I was not expecting another Pens & Poison article to come this soon. Second, the strange death of literary women is NOT a title I ever expected to see on one of Liza's articles. But after reading this fabulous piece I now understand it. Literary men are now extinct due to being openly discriminated against, but literary women are too because they mostly read trashy romance novels and disgusting smut. This is so sad and yet more conformation of what Liza has been sounding the alarm on all along. Women want to get a thrill and feel a genuine connection. But rather than do that by reading actual good literature like Anna Karenina, The Bell Jar, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Diary of Anne Frank, or To Kill A Mockingbird or meeting a man, they do so by reading a cheap romance novel or a book that is equivalent to a softcore porn. The chauvinists in the Manosphere are partially to blame for damaged gender relations in this country and third and fourth wave feminism which encourages women and girls doing stuff like this is also to blame. Kendra Hope is doing such great and necessary work! Prostitution, pornography, sleeping around, OnlyFans, strip clubs, and erotica have done nothing but bad for our society. Men and women who watch hardcore porn and practice things like BDSM have no idea how to form loving, healthy relationships. Genuine connection is getting harder to come by these days due to the damage done by the gender extremists on both ends of the spectrum, erotica and bad romance novels fill that void for women.
Listen up here, people! Literature is, has and always will be about enriching the soul not helping you get off! As the great Matthew Arnold said, literature is about acquainting us with "the best that has been thought and said." Reading literature is about making us think, broadening our horizons, exploring new ideas, gaining empathy for others, processing life's difficult questions, and steering us toward the good life. Literature isn't just about giving us a thrill. Ladies, you deserve better than what the modern publishing industry has to offer you. So, the next time you sit down to read a book or are shopping at Barnes & Noble, don't waste your time and rot your brain by reading cheap, poorly written garbage. Instead pick up a literary classic that will give you a thrill but also much more, like The Master and the Margarita, Dracula, Frankenstein, Murder on the Orient Express, This Side of Paradise, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, A Christmas Carol, 1984, Animal Farm, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Crime and Punishment, Moby Dick, Danny, Champion of the World, or A Midsummer's Night Dream! Also, if you have a little sister or niece, she'd love a book like How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Horton Hears A Who, Green Eggs and Ham, A Very Hungry Caterpillar, the Curious George Series, the A to Z Mysteries Series, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, or the Magic Tree House Series!
Interesting. I have read most of the books you mentioned…including the children’s books. So it appears we come from a similar knowledge base…at least superficially. Which caused me surprise that you would concur with the authors recommendation of the Bell Jar. Have you actually read it? Of all the assigned reading I have consumed the most disappointing ever is Catcher in the Rye…a close second is the Bell Jar. Neither gives the reader any enlightenment, inspiration or guidance. They are poorly ventilated trains which lurch about and take us on a journey no one wishes to make.
Thank you. Leaving aside the main points of this article, there are so many good reads for women (and men too!) that are rewarding, challenging, sometimes uplifting, and yes, *romantic.*
Just off the top of my head there’s:
- Possession by A.S. Byatt
- The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
- all of Jane Austen
- Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf
All the above novels are accessible, only a little bit challenging, and immensely rewarding.
Recommending The Bell Jar feels slightly farcical. It is, IMO, only a minor classic, and far from a must-read.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it. They won't be just as thrilled by Anna Karenina or the Bell Jar. If people don't read serious literature today, it is because todays "serious literature," its so called "literary fiction," is so turgid and bizarre, a kind of intellectual masturbation that is in its way as pornographic as Fifty Shades of Grey.
And yes, the classics are wonderful, but age and cultural change has made them less and less accessible than when they were written. It would take a revival of genuine serious literature today to build a bridge to the classics for most readers.
Left to choose between the grimly esoteric and the vacantly erotic, the latter choice, though lamentable, is hardly surprising. Perhaps then, we could use fewer novels delving into deviant psychology and more that take the reader on a good old adventure.
I came here for a line like “infantilized by an industry that believes the female brain can handle nothing more than orcs and orgasms (or orc orgasms)”. I did not leave disappointed!
I remember that my grandmother had those 80s novellas, in German so thankfully I could read them. The covers were hilarious. You can escape the Holocaust, but you can’t escape pirates abducting damsels and seducing them in German.
It's sad young women are not having boyfriends or sex and that they have to read to not feel lonely, but at least they're getting some outlet somewhere. It's great they're reading what is to some the female version of porn. I wish men would watch less porn and women would read less erotica and they'd get together and do it for real. But to say women should trade no sex life and erotica for no sex life and "great literature" is to deny their sexuality and is just anti-woman, in my view. Until they get the real deal, leave them be with their erotica. Yeah, go out and meet a mate. Read whatever you want. Read deep stuff. Read what turns you on. Do what turns you on.
Good article with a great deal of information I did not know about the current state of the literary world. But I find your recommendation of The Bell Jar incongruous. There is nothing uplifting in that work whatsoever. Suggesting women seeking titillation should try digesting a depressing piece such as this will never win any converts.
First off, WOAH! I was not expecting another Pens & Poison article to come this soon. Second, the strange death of literary women is NOT a title I ever expected to see on one of Liza's articles. But after reading this fabulous piece I now understand it. Literary men are now extinct due to being openly discriminated against, but literary women are too because they mostly read trashy romance novels and disgusting smut. This is so sad and yet more conformation of what Liza has been sounding the alarm on all along. Women want to get a thrill and feel a genuine connection. But rather than do that by reading actual good literature like Anna Karenina, The Bell Jar, Pride and Prejudice, Frankenstein, The Diary of Anne Frank, or To Kill A Mockingbird or meeting a man, they do so by reading a cheap romance novel or a book that is equivalent to a softcore porn. The chauvinists in the Manosphere are partially to blame for damaged gender relations in this country and third and fourth wave feminism which encourages women and girls doing stuff like this is also to blame. Kendra Hope is doing such great and necessary work! Prostitution, pornography, sleeping around, OnlyFans, strip clubs, and erotica have done nothing but bad for our society. Men and women who watch hardcore porn and practice things like BDSM have no idea how to form loving, healthy relationships. Genuine connection is getting harder to come by these days due to the damage done by the gender extremists on both ends of the spectrum, erotica and bad romance novels fill that void for women.
Listen up here, people! Literature is, has and always will be about enriching the soul not helping you get off! As the great Matthew Arnold said, literature is about acquainting us with "the best that has been thought and said." Reading literature is about making us think, broadening our horizons, exploring new ideas, gaining empathy for others, processing life's difficult questions, and steering us toward the good life. Literature isn't just about giving us a thrill. Ladies, you deserve better than what the modern publishing industry has to offer you. So, the next time you sit down to read a book or are shopping at Barnes & Noble, don't waste your time and rot your brain by reading cheap, poorly written garbage. Instead pick up a literary classic that will give you a thrill but also much more, like The Master and the Margarita, Dracula, Frankenstein, Murder on the Orient Express, This Side of Paradise, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory, A Christmas Carol, 1984, Animal Farm, For Whom the Bell Tolls, Crime and Punishment, Moby Dick, Danny, Champion of the World, or A Midsummer's Night Dream! Also, if you have a little sister or niece, she'd love a book like How the Grinch Stole Christmas, Horton Hears A Who, Green Eggs and Ham, A Very Hungry Caterpillar, the Curious George Series, the A to Z Mysteries Series, The Hardy Boys, Nancy Drew, or the Magic Tree House Series!
Interesting. I have read most of the books you mentioned…including the children’s books. So it appears we come from a similar knowledge base…at least superficially. Which caused me surprise that you would concur with the authors recommendation of the Bell Jar. Have you actually read it? Of all the assigned reading I have consumed the most disappointing ever is Catcher in the Rye…a close second is the Bell Jar. Neither gives the reader any enlightenment, inspiration or guidance. They are poorly ventilated trains which lurch about and take us on a journey no one wishes to make.
Thank you. Leaving aside the main points of this article, there are so many good reads for women (and men too!) that are rewarding, challenging, sometimes uplifting, and yes, *romantic.*
Just off the top of my head there’s:
- Possession by A.S. Byatt
- The Fountain Overflows by Rebecca West
- A Tree Grows in Brooklyn by Betty Smith
- all of Jane Austen
- Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
- Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
- Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner
- Orlando by Virginia Woolf
All the above novels are accessible, only a little bit challenging, and immensely rewarding.
Recommending The Bell Jar feels slightly farcical. It is, IMO, only a minor classic, and far from a must-read.
Well, that's the thing, isn't it. They won't be just as thrilled by Anna Karenina or the Bell Jar. If people don't read serious literature today, it is because todays "serious literature," its so called "literary fiction," is so turgid and bizarre, a kind of intellectual masturbation that is in its way as pornographic as Fifty Shades of Grey.
And yes, the classics are wonderful, but age and cultural change has made them less and less accessible than when they were written. It would take a revival of genuine serious literature today to build a bridge to the classics for most readers.
Left to choose between the grimly esoteric and the vacantly erotic, the latter choice, though lamentable, is hardly surprising. Perhaps then, we could use fewer novels delving into deviant psychology and more that take the reader on a good old adventure.
Hear, hear!
All books can be indecent books
Though recent books are bolder
For filth (I'm glad to say) is in
The mind of the beholder
When correctly viewed
Everything is lewd
(I could tell you things about Peter Pan
And the Wizard of Oz, there's a dirty old man!)
Tom Lehrer, Smut, 1965.
I came here for a line like “infantilized by an industry that believes the female brain can handle nothing more than orcs and orgasms (or orc orgasms)”. I did not leave disappointed!
I remember that my grandmother had those 80s novellas, in German so thankfully I could read them. The covers were hilarious. You can escape the Holocaust, but you can’t escape pirates abducting damsels and seducing them in German.
This is the classic example of "its not happening, but if it is, it's good that it is."
It's sad young women are not having boyfriends or sex and that they have to read to not feel lonely, but at least they're getting some outlet somewhere. It's great they're reading what is to some the female version of porn. I wish men would watch less porn and women would read less erotica and they'd get together and do it for real. But to say women should trade no sex life and erotica for no sex life and "great literature" is to deny their sexuality and is just anti-woman, in my view. Until they get the real deal, leave them be with their erotica. Yeah, go out and meet a mate. Read whatever you want. Read deep stuff. Read what turns you on. Do what turns you on.
Two words: orc orgasms.
Insightful! Maybe it’s got to do with the sheer lack of romance and fantasy and great sex in women’s life.