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embeng4096 | 5 months ago

+1 to your point about the type of books being popularized.

I grew up obsessively rereading Redwall, Pendragon, RA Salvatore’s stuff, Ranger’s Apprentice, Enders Game, Tyrant of Jupiter, Maze Runner. Like you said, the me of now can’t recommend things like Tyrant, but still I can’t imagine that would have appealed to any of the girls I knew at that time, let alone the young women of today.

By the same token, although I read Twilight and Hunger Games, I never was obsessed like the girls in my classes were. I can’t imagine that boys today are particularly interested in A Court Of Thorns and Roses and the other spiritual successors of Hunger Games, Divergent, Twilight, etc.

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watwut|5 months ago

> I can’t imagine that would have appealed to any of the girls I knew at that time, let alone the young women of today.

That is just you being sexist tho.

embeng4096|5 months ago

It's funny you say that, because the Tyrant of Jupiter series was written by Piers Anthony, whom I understand to be considered nowadays as problematic and misogynistic. The misogyny shows through, especially in a scene where the main male protagonist is making back room military deals with a woman, and the method of negotiation is, to be rather explicit, a martial grappling match, in the nude, in a zero-G bubble, where the protagonist wins the rounds by physically subduing his woman counterpart and achieving PIV penetration before they separate and go again.

Like I said, I can't recommend that series now that I have a more mature perspective. But I can't imagine that a book written by a misogynistic author with explicit themes of female submission to male authority obtained by use or threats of physical and sexual violence would be particularly appealing to women in general, let alone women who have grown up in a culture that has in recent times had much more acknowledgement of such things, e.g. MeToo, more widespread conversations about toxic masculinity, the oppression of women by physical force and the male-dominated hierarchy that projects that force.

If you disagree and think that young women (and enby people) would find such books appealing though, I'm interested to hear why.

throawaywpg|5 months ago

I was alive in that time and girls did not like those books, at all (of course WOMEN may be a different story). They liked Harry Potter, and LOTR after the movies came out because Orlando Bloom.