Nice titties, not droopy titties. I have standards, man.
That's why Masai.
Also they have cheek bones like French models.
Starving Africans never did it for me.
Hacksaw on
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JacobkoshGamble a stamp.I can show you how to be a real man!Moderatormod
edited August 2008
Did anyone but me ever read anything by Tom McGowen? He wrote a bunch of pretty cool kids' fantasy novels - including one where dragons, elves, and humans teamed up to save ancient Atlantis from the Borg - back in the late Eighties and then basically vanished from sight. I've never met another soul who's read anything by him and he's barely mentioned on the internets.
Did anyone but me ever read anything by Tom McGowen? He wrote a bunch of pretty cool kids' fantasy novels - including one where dragons, elves, and humans teamed up to save ancient Atlantis from the Borg - back in the late Eighties and then basically vanished from sight. I've never met another soul who's read anything by him and he's barely mentioned on the internets.
Nope.
I am and always was too lazy to actively search out good books. I've always had a huge number of books recommended to me as an adult, and when I was younger I mostly swiped whatever books my brothers were reading and read them. All the reading, much less of the biking to and from the library!
One of my favorite books growing up was Jacob Have I Loved. It was a sad semi-love story with a female main character. But it was still entirely appealing.
Also, I may be weird, but has anyone else ever done this?
Grab a romance novel off a book shelf at a library/bookstore, find a naughty section and read it in a whisper to your girlfriend?
There is no way I'm going to read 300 pages of relationship stuff for the sake of a couple sex scenes, but you'd be interested to find women are the ones who like the books with sex in them, more so then men I think.
I think the article is getting mischaracterized here. The point of the article is that the books that are being assigned in elementary school and onward aren't holding the attention of boys. You start off on Charlotte's Web and progress through Jane Austen in high school. Huzzah, books about relationships and marriage. The only "girl" book I recall enjoying from before college was Wuthering Heights and that's because everything there is so fucked up. The "gore" criticisms come from the president of the PTA, whom I'm going to assume is as shrill and humorless as every other member of the PTA that I've met.
Jan Harp Domene, national president of the Parent Teacher Association, decries what she calls publishers' "shock tactics" to reach young males. She wants boys to read about the heroes of Greek mythology, the fantasy of Jules Verne and the antics of Tom Sawyer. "Does it all have to be blood and guts and gore?" she asks.
Oh. Greek mythology. That is utterly free of blood, guts and gore. It consists entirely of getting laid, trying to get laid and dudes fucking [other] dudes up. It's all "Zeus turns into a duck and fucks your mom and then the kid goes on a killing spree." Yeah, that's much more appropriate for 10 year olds than Captain Underpants or The Day My Butt Went Psycho.
Also, I may be weird, but has anyone else ever done this?
Grab a romance novel off a book shelf at a library/bookstore, find a naughty section and read it in a whisper to your girlfriend?
There is no way I'm going to read 300 pages of relationship stuff for the sake of a couple sex scenes, but you'd be interested to find women are the ones who like the books with sex in them, more so then men I think.
I've had a few good lunch breaks in high school doing 'dramatic readings' of parts of horrible romance novels to a small audience, not gonna lie.
Dehumanized on
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Mike Danger"Diane..."a place both wonderful and strangeRegistered Userregular
edited August 2008
Pleh. Mike's Reading List in Youth:
-Great Illustrated Classics (eff yeah!)
-The Hardy Boys/Tom Swift/Nancy Drew
-Anything and everything John Bellairs
-those screwy Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark books (actually, maybe this one is kinda true to the article)
Screw all this "boys only read if it's gory" stuff. I work for the local school district's tech services department, and I've been doing a lot of work in the library/media center at the middle school--most of what I see on the shelves is Matt Christopher.
Also, re: bad romance novels, there was an apocryphal story at my high school that a few years back, someone did that "live reading at lunch" thing, but with a book that had actually been written by the school's Creative Writing teacher under a pen name (she had made the mistake of putting one of her author's copies into the school library). The books by that author were all mysteriously "lost" a few years later when the Board of Ed built a new school building. :P
I think the article is getting mischaracterized here. The point of the article is that the books that are being assigned in elementary school and onward aren't holding the attention of boys. You start off on Charlotte's Web and progress through Jane Austen in high school. Huzzah, books about relationships and marriage. The only "girl" book I recall enjoying from before college was Wuthering Heights and that's because everything there is so fucked up. The "gore" criticisms come from the president of the PTA, whom I'm going to assume is as shrill and humorless as every other member of the PTA that I've met.
I think its a little more worrying that you apparently live in a local culture that insists that relationships are for women to manage and work on, and just happen to you, and that you seem so turned off by the thought of anything emotional that you can't even stand to read about relationships. Kind of fucked up, dude. :S
Anyway, pretty much all of the lolpanic about boys in school these days is complete bullshit, and in large part, a backlash against female academic success rather than an attempt to remediate any male academic failure. Boys don't suck at school, and educational success and failure in the US depends far more closely on economic position and race than anything else.
People complaining that the classroom environment is suddenly totally hostile to the young male intellect despite the fact that they've done perfectly fine in it since the advent of secular education (and before!) are idiots. The classroom wasn't an impediment 30 or even ten years ago, and suddenly its just not good enough for boys? Coincidentally, as many girls finally start to succeed, and even outdo some of their male fellow students? Yeah, bullshit. The only problem I can see with modern classrooms is that the teachers lack authority to enforce any discipline, and that their authority wouldn't help much anyway because most parents are incredibly permissive and indulgent with their children's behaviour, leading to a cohort of boys who lack the self control to sit down and stop throwing dominoes at each other long enough to learn the five times table.
The Cat on
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Gabriel_Pitt(effective against Russian warships)Registered Userregular
One of my favorite early series was Dealing with Dragons.
Combat was done with SOAPY WATER. Oh noes!
I discovered that book when I was twelve. I read it cover to cover once a day for an entire week. Two bad the other three books in the series weren't that good. I just took a couple thousand dollars in paperbacks to the used bookstore today, and Dealing with Dragons was one of the few ones I saved.
Gabriel_Pitt on
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Psychotic OneThe Lord of No PantsParts UnknownRegistered Userregular
edited August 2008
Last book I really read with much gusto was John Dies At the End. Not so much for gore but for the fact at the beginning they encounter a demon made from Ham. HAM. I think I read like 1/4 the book in one sitting after that chapter.
All analysis of literature seems to kill books for m, though English teachers were remarkably awful at my high school. One good example is Lord of the Flies, I'd read it about 3 years earlier and had picked up a fair few of the connotations and had really enjoyed it as a book.
When we studied it in class, so, what does the use of the word 'the' infer in that sentence or some other shit. It killed all enjoyment I ever had for the book. The same goes for a short story collection of Sherlock Holmes, hated the ones we read in class, loved the ones I read myself.
It was when I was about 15 I started to read properly gory books. But the thing is I'd happily read anything with a good story. I don't look at the blurb and think "Ooh a gory book must buy".
When I started reading it was "The Secret Garden", "Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of N.H.I.M", and "The Black Stallion"... Not exactly the most violent of books. It's more about not picking dull books (like "The Metamorphosis" by that jerk Kafka).
TheStranger on
"Those who live by the sword die by the sword.
Those who cower from tyrants deserve their chains."
-unknown
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jungleroomxIt's never too many graves, it's always not enough shovelsRegistered Userregular
All analysis of literature seems to kill books for m, though English teachers were remarkably awful at my high school. One good example is Lord of the Flies, I'd read it about 3 years earlier and had picked up a fair few of the connotations and had really enjoyed it as a book.
You had analysis?
We had so many books on our required reading list that we had to read some in the summer before class started, and even then we had basically enough time for the teacher to say, "Here's the message of the book. Write an essay describing examples of that message and what you think of it," before moving on to the next book. (We'd already be on the next book by the time the essay was due.)
Then every four or five books we had a test that basically tested our rote memorization of each of the books we'd read in that section.
Feral on
every person who doesn't like an acquired taste always seems to think everyone who likes it is faking it. it should be an official fallacy.
I read stuff like The Mouse and the Motorcycle and lots of Hank the Cowdog, which I don't think is gory at all. Then again, I also read stuff like the Redwall series, Ender's Game and Goosebumps, which aren't really gory, but are probably more violent than the first two. I dunno what age ranges we're really talking about, but I didn't find a gory story more appealing than a book with awesome/fun characters or a good plot back when I was 7-11ish.
Publishers are hawking more gory and gross books to appeal to an elusive market: boys -- many of whom would rather go to the dentist than crack open "Little House on the Prairie."
I read Little House on the Prairie for fun in elementary school. We had a small library in my defense. (It wasn't that bad.)
[Michael] on
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Mike Danger"Diane..."a place both wonderful and strangeRegistered Userregular
I am and always was a total nerd. My school had the AR program, but I'd always rather read the non-fiction books instead (although many of the "non-fiction" books I read were about aliens or cryptids). When I did read the AR stuff, the only ones that ever got my attention were the high level books.
I can't think of too many right now, but I do remember that I both read and enjoyed "The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm" and "Journey to the Center of the Earth" in elementary school.
Hexmage-PA on
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MrMisterJesus dying on the cross in pain? Morally better than us. One has to go "all in".Registered Userregular
edited August 2008
The Samurai's Tale was the first for-real book I read, and it was most excellent. It was also set during a war and had its fair share of violence.
Nonetheless, I resent the implied gender roles--if anything, the marketing of these books is contributing to the gender roles boys and girls fall into, rather than acknowledging some immutable fact of male or female interest.
Anyway, pretty much all of the lolpanic about boys in school these days is complete bullshit, and in large part, a backlash against female academic success rather than an attempt to remediate any male academic failure. Boys don't suck at school, and educational success and failure in the US depends far more closely on economic position and race than anything else.
I dunno about the US (or Aus), but the gap in attainment between male and female pupils in the UK is pretty large.* Something's going wrong somewhere. Whether it's institutional or cultural is another matter**, but the idea that worries over boys' education is simply a backlash against women succeeding is totally wrong. It's not unreasonable to try and fix this - the sexes should be getting the same results if everything's equal.
* White boys do even worse than black boys, oddly.
** Probably the former. The only real change in structure over the last couple of decades has been more of an emphasis on coursework, which girls do better at.
Anyway, pretty much all of the lolpanic about boys in school these days is complete bullshit, and in large part, a backlash against female academic success rather than an attempt to remediate any male academic failure. Boys don't suck at school, and educational success and failure in the US depends far more closely on economic position and race than anything else.
I dunno about the US (or Aus), but the gap in attainment between male and female pupils in the UK is pretty large.* Something's going wrong somewhere. Whether it's institutional or cultural is another matter**, but the idea that worries over boys' education is simply a backlash against women succeeding is totally wrong. It's not unreasonable to try and fix this - the sexes should be getting the same results if everything's equal.
* White boys do even worse than black boys, oddly.
** Probably the former. The only real change in structure over the last couple of decades has been more of an emphasis on coursework, which girls do better at.
I'm not convinced that pandering to another gender stereotype is really the answer we're looking for though, which is what this article is saying.
Also Jane Austen managed to achieve some pretty uniform revulsion in my year, though that's largely coz we had some retarded "equal time" idea going through - it was felt since we did "male" texts in Yr 11 that clearly we could balance that out with "female" texts in Yr 12. This ignored the fact that everything they assigned was terrible - I mean The Removalist is basically a story about a guy beating his wife and corrupt cops. It's boring as fuck.
electricitylikesme on
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Nova_CI have the needThe need for speedRegistered Userregular
edited August 2008
I don't remember having 'girly' books foisted on me in school. Of course, I read like crazy in elementary school, but the only books I remember being assigned were the ones in high school (To Kill a Mockingbird, Grapes of Wrath, 1984, etc). I've never had to read Jane Austen in my life.
Cat, that strikes me as a leap. Although I haven't really thought about this a whole lot since, while I accept the fact that some people don't like to read (My best friend and father both hate reading), it's not something I've ever been able to understand. Books are just so awesome. :P
Anyway, pretty much all of the lolpanic about boys in school these days is complete bullshit, and in large part, a backlash against female academic success rather than an attempt to remediate any male academic failure. Boys don't suck at school, and educational success and failure in the US depends far more closely on economic position and race than anything else.
I dunno about the US (or Aus), but the gap in attainment between male and female pupils in the UK is pretty large.* Something's going wrong somewhere. Whether it's institutional or cultural is another matter**, but the idea that worries over boys' education is simply a backlash against women succeeding is totally wrong. It's not unreasonable to try and fix this - the sexes should be getting the same results if everything's equal.
* White boys do even worse than black boys, oddly.
** Probably the former. The only real change in structure over the last couple of decades has been more of an emphasis on coursework, which girls do better at.
The trouble with the US dialogue is that all the proposed 'solutions' pretty much are anti-female - and anti-male, frankly. Single-sex schools with massively dumbed-down curriculums for girls that deemphasise maths and science and physical activity (unless its ballet!) and a boy's curriculum that outright enforces rigid pecking orders and encourages them to fight each other and never acknowledge anything not directly concerned with building things, blowing things up, or football (thinking is for sissies!).
Leonard Sax, as I recall, is the main guy pushing for this sort of thing, and he's getting a lot of attention from the "I wish it was the imaginary 1950's that lives in my head" crowd. The media attention he gets in the US is making it easier for his ideas to be exported to places with actual problems, but those ideas won't actually fix anything. If enacted on a large scale, they'd be Big Trouble for a generation of kids.
I'm kind of disgusted that it takes books like The Day My Butt Went Psycho and Sir Fartsalot Hunts the Booger to get some boys to read. I read a few books like Captain Underpants back when I was in grade school, but these books just seem trashy and vulgar.
I read a whole lot during grade and middle school, and don't see why today's kids wouldn't like books I enjoyed back in grade school like Hatchet, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or even Goosebumps. I remember when I was in third grade, almost all the boys in my class were nuts about Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It shouldn't take the Adam Sandler movie equivalent of a book to get boys to read.
I'm not sure exactly what it takes, but I think reading classes could use some adjustments. I remember I hated having to read through books at a slow pace, hated answering pointless questions about the book, and I really hated when we all had to go around the class reading out loud. I like reading aloud to others, but listening to a bunch of other kids, many of who weren't very engaging readers, was not fun for me.
Posts
Combat was done with SOAPY WATER. Oh noes!
Earliest book I can remember caring about as a teeny weeny kid was this one about a kid rescuing a sea turtle and making a habitat for it.
Clearly this explains my raping and pillaging.
National Geographic?
National Geographic.
That's why Masai.
Also they have cheek bones like French models.
Still better fed than actual French models.
Nope.
I am and always was too lazy to actively search out good books. I've always had a huge number of books recommended to me as an adult, and when I was younger I mostly swiped whatever books my brothers were reading and read them. All the reading, much less of the biking to and from the library!
Grab a romance novel off a book shelf at a library/bookstore, find a naughty section and read it in a whisper to your girlfriend?
There is no way I'm going to read 300 pages of relationship stuff for the sake of a couple sex scenes, but you'd be interested to find women are the ones who like the books with sex in them, more so then men I think.
arrrgh fuck that book arrgh
Seriously, the number of girls in grade school who showed it to me and laughed? Not cool.
Oh. Greek mythology. That is utterly free of blood, guts and gore. It consists entirely of getting laid, trying to get laid and dudes fucking [other] dudes up. It's all "Zeus turns into a duck and fucks your mom and then the kid goes on a killing spree." Yeah, that's much more appropriate for 10 year olds than Captain Underpants or The Day My Butt Went Psycho.
I've had a few good lunch breaks in high school doing 'dramatic readings' of parts of horrible romance novels to a small audience, not gonna lie.
-Great Illustrated Classics (eff yeah!)
-The Hardy Boys/Tom Swift/Nancy Drew
-Anything and everything John Bellairs
-those screwy Scary Stories To Tell In The Dark books (actually, maybe this one is kinda true to the article)
Screw all this "boys only read if it's gory" stuff. I work for the local school district's tech services department, and I've been doing a lot of work in the library/media center at the middle school--most of what I see on the shelves is Matt Christopher.
Also, re: bad romance novels, there was an apocryphal story at my high school that a few years back, someone did that "live reading at lunch" thing, but with a book that had actually been written by the school's Creative Writing teacher under a pen name (she had made the mistake of putting one of her author's copies into the school library). The books by that author were all mysteriously "lost" a few years later when the Board of Ed built a new school building. :P
Anyway, pretty much all of the lolpanic about boys in school these days is complete bullshit, and in large part, a backlash against female academic success rather than an attempt to remediate any male academic failure. Boys don't suck at school, and educational success and failure in the US depends far more closely on economic position and race than anything else.
People complaining that the classroom environment is suddenly totally hostile to the young male intellect despite the fact that they've done perfectly fine in it since the advent of secular education (and before!) are idiots. The classroom wasn't an impediment 30 or even ten years ago, and suddenly its just not good enough for boys? Coincidentally, as many girls finally start to succeed, and even outdo some of their male fellow students? Yeah, bullshit. The only problem I can see with modern classrooms is that the teachers lack authority to enforce any discipline, and that their authority wouldn't help much anyway because most parents are incredibly permissive and indulgent with their children's behaviour, leading to a cohort of boys who lack the self control to sit down and stop throwing dominoes at each other long enough to learn the five times table.
When we studied it in class, so, what does the use of the word 'the' infer in that sentence or some other shit. It killed all enjoyment I ever had for the book. The same goes for a short story collection of Sherlock Holmes, hated the ones we read in class, loved the ones I read myself.
It was when I was about 15 I started to read properly gory books. But the thing is I'd happily read anything with a good story. I don't look at the blurb and think "Ooh a gory book must buy".
Those who cower from tyrants deserve their chains."
-unknown
What did Saul (the king at the time) want with 100 foreskins? Was he going to make a scarf?
You had analysis?
We had so many books on our required reading list that we had to read some in the summer before class started, and even then we had basically enough time for the teacher to say, "Here's the message of the book. Write an essay describing examples of that message and what you think of it," before moving on to the next book. (We'd already be on the next book by the time the essay was due.)
Then every four or five books we had a test that basically tested our rote memorization of each of the books we'd read in that section.
the "no true scotch man" fallacy.
I read Little House on the Prairie for fun in elementary school. We had a small library in my defense. (It wasn't that bad.)
I had the boxed set foisted on me one year at Christmas. As I recall, the first 2 books weren't too bad.
I can't think of too many right now, but I do remember that I both read and enjoyed "The Ear, The Eye, and The Arm" and "Journey to the Center of the Earth" in elementary school.
Nonetheless, I resent the implied gender roles--if anything, the marketing of these books is contributing to the gender roles boys and girls fall into, rather than acknowledging some immutable fact of male or female interest.
I dunno about the US (or Aus), but the gap in attainment between male and female pupils in the UK is pretty large.* Something's going wrong somewhere. Whether it's institutional or cultural is another matter**, but the idea that worries over boys' education is simply a backlash against women succeeding is totally wrong. It's not unreasonable to try and fix this - the sexes should be getting the same results if everything's equal.
* White boys do even worse than black boys, oddly.
** Probably the former. The only real change in structure over the last couple of decades has been more of an emphasis on coursework, which girls do better at.
Mostly greek and norse mythology.
I loved that book! My brother showed it to me when I was younger, and I couldn't put it down.
Also Jane Austen managed to achieve some pretty uniform revulsion in my year, though that's largely coz we had some retarded "equal time" idea going through - it was felt since we did "male" texts in Yr 11 that clearly we could balance that out with "female" texts in Yr 12. This ignored the fact that everything they assigned was terrible - I mean The Removalist is basically a story about a guy beating his wife and corrupt cops. It's boring as fuck.
Cat, that strikes me as a leap. Although I haven't really thought about this a whole lot since, while I accept the fact that some people don't like to read (My best friend and father both hate reading), it's not something I've ever been able to understand. Books are just so awesome. :P
Leonard Sax, as I recall, is the main guy pushing for this sort of thing, and he's getting a lot of attention from the "I wish it was the imaginary 1950's that lives in my head" crowd. The media attention he gets in the US is making it easier for his ideas to be exported to places with actual problems, but those ideas won't actually fix anything. If enacted on a large scale, they'd be Big Trouble for a generation of kids.
I read a whole lot during grade and middle school, and don't see why today's kids wouldn't like books I enjoyed back in grade school like Hatchet, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, or even Goosebumps. I remember when I was in third grade, almost all the boys in my class were nuts about Scary Stories to Tell in the Dark. It shouldn't take the Adam Sandler movie equivalent of a book to get boys to read.
I'm not sure exactly what it takes, but I think reading classes could use some adjustments. I remember I hated having to read through books at a slow pace, hated answering pointless questions about the book, and I really hated when we all had to go around the class reading out loud. I like reading aloud to others, but listening to a bunch of other kids, many of who weren't very engaging readers, was not fun for me.
this article gets more and more ridiculous