Moonrat, still at Editorial Ass, is making me think a lot lately. She did a recent post here about sexualized violence in print ads, and connected the dots to sexualized violence in books and other media, which got me thinking about how I treat girls and women in my books. To be clear--I'm a feminist. I believe in equal pay for equal work and reproductive choice, and the whole ball of wax. I'm not going to go into detail about all that here because, frankly, there are people out there whose blogs are dedicated to that kind of thing (like Jezebel *) and they do it way better than I ever could. But that's my political orientation, in case you care. So when I was writing The Book, it was very important to me that my female protagonist S did not fall into any of those "heroine needs saving by the hero" tropes that so many books for teenage girls do. Sure, there's something very "romantic" about the hero swooping in and rescuing the heroine, right? ...
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