“YA books are brain rotting at any age” okay I know booktok is annoying but please get offline
For real though I may make jokes but YA is great and an absolutely valuable resource for tweens/teens and isn’t completely represented by the love triangle romances it’s become associated with (which tbh who cares if it does have that). YA includes Holes by Louis Sachar, Speak by Laurie Halse Anderson, A Wizard of Earthsea by Ursula K Le Guin, The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas, The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros, Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, Brown Girl Dreaming by Jacqueline Woodson, The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton. And y'know I grew up reading a bunch of Sarah Dessen books, the Flowers in the Attic series, Thirteen Reasons Why, Twilight, Maximum Ride, etc etc and even though I probably wouldn’t recommend those books now, they nurtured a love of reading that followed me afterwards!!! I’m grateful that people eventually realized that there is a tumultuous period between childhood and adulthood and gave that period of life a space in literature
Stop hating on YA and just admit you hate teenagers, especially teen girls.
banning pornography will not stop people from horny posting on your website but instead all the horny posts will now be about how someone wants to be a 2008 Volvo and have a butch mechanic change their oil and stuff like that
Learning that certain things that you thought were widely accepted at the time actually had a lot of pushback kind of shakes up your perception of the world a little.
Like for example when a lot of people in the 1400s and 1500s read the Malleus Maleficarum, basically the book that set off the trend of witch trials in Europe, they knew it was bad and even called it unethical. And before 1400 most people in Europe didn’t even believe that witches existed. Because most Christians before the 1400s didn’t even believe that magic existed. Because “magic” was thought to come from pagan gods, and, you will note, most monotheists don’t believe that other gods exist. So witches weren’t even something that people thought about.
And when Christopher Columbus was off committing crimes against humanity a bunch of people were like “Hey, this guy is committing crimes against humanity. Someone stop him.” And eventually they did, even if they did stop him far too late. He was fired from his position as governor. He was arrested and banished from Spain. And there were people, both native South Americans and Spaniards, who actively opposed the colonization efforts while they were happening.
The book How to Plan a Crusade goes into detail about how much propaganda and recruiting efforts were needed for each crusade because people didn’t just abandon their lives and ride off into the desert without incentive or convincing, and even then plenty of people thought it was a waste of manpower or (often rightfully!) considered crusaders to be bandits not to be trusted.
When I was growing up in Virginia it was heavily implied that the abolitionist movement was a fringe thing in some Northern states up until just before the Civil war, but no. Apparently it was so large that when Jefferson bought the Louisiana territories there was a push by abolitionist lawmakers to immediately end slavery and provide all freedmen the means to found their own communities in the new territories as a form of reparations, since one of the southern arguments for the continuation of slavery was basically “Well, we’ve treated them so poorly that if we freed them then the damage we did to race relations is so great that coexistence is impossible.”
there have always been, in past times as today, a range of people in every society, some of whom were even then fighting for a more just and compassionate accord with their fellow man and some of whom let their greeds and hatreds rule them to the worst allowable excesses. the goal of classics and history education is to teach you enough context to discern between the two, not only in the past but in the present
do you all remember in the early 2010s where people were talking about freeing the nipple and that mixed-gender sports should become a thing and the removal of period tax and all of that and then some people realised that would mean trans people too ans they instantly decided to revert to bioessentialism 101 and now i have to see grating sentences like Well maybe jeopardy should be gender-segregated because males have a biological advantage in pressing a button
tbh y'all get too caught up in the idea of like. whether someone is “"genuinely”“ experiencing a certain -ism or -phobia aimed at them if they are not genuinely part of that group. as if it matters. as if a guy getting attacked for holding another man’s hand has actually ever had sex with another man or if he actually is married to a woman like it literally does not make a difference. he is a victim of homophobia in actual reality in the actual world. stop being pedantic and drawing little circles around words and realize that people are getting fucked over regardless.
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