Category: Pop Culture

‘Tis the season to give and receive crap you don’t need. Break the junk cycle by giving an affordable, thoughtful gift that your family might actually like.  Check out this piece I wrote for The Daily Muse last year about thoughtful, cheap gifts — an oldie but a goodie!

Just under a year later, Merriam-Webster follows the OED’s lead and adds sexting to its dictionary, among other words. Last year I posed these questions about adding words from pop-culture to the dictionary:

• Is there any danger in, or value to, adding “made up” words to the dictionary?
• When a word becomes legitimized and included in a dictionary, does it become more removed from its original meaning?  
• Since we have control over what is considered a worthy word, does the OED’s inclusion or exclusion of a word really matter?  What is the point of a standardized dictionary if we’re all in control of producing our own content and the dictionaries that regulate it?

You can read the full post here.  A year later — with social media an even larger force to be reckoned with and more and more people generating their own written content online every day — what do you think?

I’ve become obsessed with watching Best Friends Forever on Hulu, and I’m disappointed that it was cancelled.  While the show’s plot isn’t groundbreaking, the two lead actresses, Lennon Parham and Jessica St. Claire, are incredibly funny and talented.

The witty exchanges between Lennon and Jess are punctuated by appearances from the little girl next door, Queenetta.  Though I love the show, Queenetta’s character makes me uncomfortable.  I see this type of character appearing more often: the outspoken black child with and a mouth that spouts adult-only language.  Queenetta is only nine and a half years old, but her in-your-face attitude and sexually-charged dialogue is quite mature.  For example, when Lennon performs a romantic ballet dance with her college friend who has questionable intentions, Queenetta comments “That man is trying to make a baby.” She frequently doles out sexual/romantic advice, telling Jess that she needs to maintain her figure to win back and satisfy her ex-husband.

She’s  not just adult-minded about relationships — she’s also focused on making a buck any way she can and has a bit of a con-artist spirit.  She often demands to be paid for tasks she does not complete, like when she yells “I am paid for my time, not for my results!” when Rav and Joe ask her to buy them sandwiches from a deli they’ve been banned from.  She later tries to turn a profit from selling Jess’s furniture that’s been left on the street by a moving company.

A kid behaving like an adult and making sarcastic, mature comments makes us laugh because it’s unexpected, but is it really funny?  In just six episodes, Queenetta’s character has embodied a number of stereotypes that real-live black women deal with on a daily basis: she’s inherently sexual, focused on making a quick buck with minimal effort, and perpetually angry.  If you take a look at the incessant barrage of literature that attacks so-called “welfare queens” (which, of course, is conservative code for poor black women), you’ll see these stereotypes too, but they won’t be funny.

Queenetta’s behavior is mild compared to that of Ronnie in the 2008 movie Role Models.  His character is obsessed with women’s breasts, routinely uses profanity and foul language, and fights with other children for no reason.  A sexualized, vulgar, hyper-masculine, violent black boy: an exaggerated miniature of the unfair stereotypes that plague grown adult men.

Of course I don’t think the writers of these scripts have racist agendas, but I have to ask: why do we think this type of sexualized black child is so hilarious and would we be comfortable with a white child portrayed in the same way?  In fact, I can’t think of an example of a white child-who-acts-like-an-adult-and-says-inappropriate-things who is also white in contemporary film or television. (Can you?  Let me know.)

What does this reveal about our collective consciousness? It seems like we associate childhood and innocence with white skin.  It also seems to show that many viewers are comfortable with the assumption that black children are inherently more sexual than white.

Should there be more public uproar about this?  What other examples of this trope have you seen in mainstream media?  Tweet me @rikki_rogers. 

I read the first book of The Hunger Games trilogy to see what all the fuss was about, and I’ll admit that by the time I got around to reading it, there were already plenty of talented journalists writing about young adult fiction’s increasing popularity with adult readers. (Here’s an interesting article in defense of reading young adult fiction as a mindless escape from the workday.)

I tried to approach The Hunger Games with an open mind, excited to read a young adult fiction novel that was apparently loved by male and female readers and featured a non-sexualized female protagonist.  But let’s set the record straight, here: Katniss spends a chunk of the book undergoing a “makeover” a la Miss Congeniality, She’s All That, Pretty Woman, etc, and her major flaw is taking advantage of the romantic feelings of a male character.  Just because the female lead doesn’t spend the entire novel naked or being rescued by men (though that does happen a few times), doesn’t mean that this is a feminist book.

But the gender implications aren’t the only reason I struggled to finish the book.  Throughout the novel I was frustrated (and bored) because the author leaves no room for reader interpretation.  Katniss explains and re-explains each thought and action.  Here’s an example: After Peeta and Katniss have won the games, Peeta’s leg is replaced with a prosthetic and Caesar tells Katniss that her tourniquet kept Peeta from bleeding to death.  Her response:

“I guess this is true, but I can’t help feeling upset about it to the extent that I’m afraid I might cry and then I remember everyone in the country watching me so I just bury by face in Peeta’s shirt.  It takes them a couple of minutes to coax me back out because it’s better in the shirt, where no one can see me.”

Part of the joy of reading is the pleasure of discovery — interpreting the characters’ actions and understanding what they imply to both predict the plot and understand the text’s deeper meaning. But this isn’t possible in The Hunger Games or many novels like it.

You may be thinking, Woah, book-snob, not every book has to have six layers of meaning. And this book is intended for young adult readers, not adults.  The adults that read it are just reading it for fun.

I don’t have a problem with adults reading young adult fiction for fun, per se.  I’m an advocate of reading in all its forms. What worries me, though, is that some adults are only reading young adult fiction. And some young adults never graduate into adult fiction. In fact, when I was teaching at the University of Utah, many of my students admitted to me that they started reading “teen fiction” in middle school and never stopped.

Being a “good reader” — someone who is able to interpret, understand and analyze texts — makes us better citizens of the world.  We’re more likely to question political fluff and less likely to be swayed by senseless propaganda or social gossip.  We’re more willing to form our own ideas and less apt to blindly accept the opinions of others.  (In her most recent book, Swagger, Lisa Bloom has an entire chapter dedicated to showing how childhood reading is a key indicator of success in adulthood).

So here’s my suggestion, adults of the world: instead of heading straight to the “Teen Paranormal Romance” section in Barnes & Noble (yes, this is a legitimate category now), try something just a little bit more challenging (ie better). I’m not asking you to trade in Fifty Shades of Gray for the Ulysses.  There are millions of books that are light, fun reads that also require some good old fashioned thinkin’.

I could write hundreds of blog posts on book recommendations, but, for brevity’s sake, here are my suggestions of some alternatives to poorly written YA fiction, including only books I’ve read in the past couple of years.

Like “chick-lit”? Do you buy “beach reads” out of season?  Replace with

• Tina Fey’s Bossy Pants
• Mindy Kaling’s Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?
• Barbara Kingsolver’s The Bean Trees, Pigs in Heaven, and Animal Dreams

Like high school drama/romances like Gossip Girl?  Replace with

• Walking Naked by Alyssa Brugman.  This is actually a YA novel but makes some very interesting points about the similarities between reading texts and reading people.
• I Think I Love You by Allison Pearson
• The Adults by Alison Espach
• The Marriage Plot by Jeffrey Eugenides

Like fantasy/sci-fi like Harry Potter and Twilight?  Replace with

• Phillip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy.  This is another YA series, but it’s a bit more challenging and the author wrote the introduction to a recent edition of Paradise Lost, so you know he’s a smart one.
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Her Fearful Symmetry by Audrey Niffenegger

Like millions of other people, I love Glee.

When the pilot aired in 2009, I was skeptical.  But Glee won me over immediately.  I fell in love with it, at first, for the way the show takes songs that I hate and re-makes them into songs that I must illegally download and add to my running playlist this minute.  But the catchy, over-produced songs (how do they afford those pyrotechnics when they can’t even rent a handicapped bus without a bake sale?) isn’t what has turned my fling into a serious relationship.

What has transformed me from a fan into an advocate is how Glee tackles homophobia — an unacceptable prejudice that is often ignored by high school adminstrators and, in some sad cases, perpetuated by them– and calls it what it is.  It unapologetically shows that homophobia is bigotry, and that parents, teachers, and people of all ages need to understand the destructiveness of its reach.  There’s no tiptoeing around it, no white space left for religious differences or generational gaps.  It’s a brave stance to take in primetime.

Glee portrays the two same-sex relationships on the show as loving, committed, and stable, in fact, more stable than some of the straight counterparts on the show.  It’s also worth noting that the show refuses to distill the characters’  relationships–both gay and straight– into hot teen-on-teen action.  Almost all of the characters’ sexual escapades happen tastefully off-screen, with only the occasional kiss making its way into the episode.  This is quite the departure from shows like Gossip Girl, which is really just a string of soft-core scenes between teenage hardbodies punctuated by closed ups of designer handbags (and yes I watch it).

Is the high school world of Glee realistic?  Of course not.  There’s no public school district in Ohio where students can switch schools at will and harmonize in the quad and get married at city hall after winning regionals.  But, despite its over-the-top plots, its treatment of gay high school students and homophobia, and its rampant popularity (on a channel like Fox, no less) shows that many American minds are headed in the right direction.