Magnifisyncopathological

I don't use "sexist" much because I think the term has lost a lot of the power it once had in its context: someone who believes one gender is fundamentally superior to and better than another. And there is an argument I'm willing to entertain that says I'm abusing the term somewhat here. However, read the quoted section below and decide for yourself.

What Girls Want:

The salient fact of an adolescent girl’s existence is her need for a secret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she’s gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading.

I hated the scenes in the seven K-12 schools I attended. The superficial drama, the endless posturing, the obsessions with who had been labeled what and into which category that placed him or her. I did my best to scurry into class early; not because I wanted to grab my preferred seat every time, but because the act of getting there fast equaled less time avoiding the social landmines cloistered around lockers, bathrooms, and vending machines. I had a few friends in these schools but I did not think the time offered between classes was enough to have for a proper conversation.

I truly felt alienated from 99% of the student body. I shared none of their specific interests (assuming you could find someone literate enough even to elucidate something beyond soundbites and societal conditioning). I felt more adult than adolescent but the adults were no help because I was either just another cog in a machine on a four-year flush cycle or "someone with potential" who wasted my time hanging out with the grunge rock/stoner kids and adopting too many of their outward appearances. My parents never divorced, separated, nor do I even remember a substantial argument between them that threatened their relationship. They were "always there for me" even though Dad hated my entertainment, haircut, and clothing preferences.

In fact, I'd say my domestic life was far, far more stable than my friends'. My sisters (younger, fraternal twins) were insufferable, but nothing out of the ordinary. No parental infidelity, no abuse, no addictions, no (in hindsight) unreasonable restrictions on my growing freedom as a human. Hell, I sometimes looked forward to hanging out with my friends just to hear the crazy shit happening in their houses as an antidote to the boredom at mine.

I am an Army Brat. You write about the emotional consequences of a young girl pulled from her hometown? Hometown doesn't mean anything to me, not when you move to Alaska two weeks after birth in New Jersey, not when you ditch what social network you've labored to build every three to four years. People nod when I tell them this, but living it is different from understanding it.

Given all that, I suppose Ms. Flanagan would think it impossible for a male like me to need "to be undisturbed while [working] out the big questions of [my] life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others" through reading.

I don't know you, Ms. Flanagan, but you are dead wrong and I think your airy assumption that no human male could ever be "designed" (a term, Ma'am, fraught with absurd implications) for reading is sexist. I discovered reading as a pastime right around the time I hit 10 years old. No, the books I read weren't paeans to unanswered teenage puppy love, filled with aching and confusion and quick glances filled with possibilities. But the stuff I read established emotional connections to what I feeling just as well as anything you read while playing hooky from school. The structure and complexity I found in Tom Clancy's novels mirrored what I wanted to see in the real world.

Why do you think young males devour sci-fi and fantasy writing? Some are certainly in it for the base expressions of violence and competition, but how can you discount the many who see that material as a way to explore something new and seemingly impossible? This work "introduces into a household the adult passions and jealousies that have long gone to ground in most" parents, too. Do you think guys can't lead a "double emotional life (half real boy, half inhabitant of a distant world)," a world lit with a writer's words? Do you really think boys are constitutionally unable to let literature take them to "a place I had never even heard of before picking up the book but which [they] could navigate, in the landscape of [their] imagination, as easily as [they] could the shady streets and secret hillside staircases that connected [their houses]"?

I had "secret emotional life" of my own created through intense reading in my youth (one so secret I couldn't tell most of my peers about it because it would seem "weird" to prefer reading over sports). I would often prefer a bowl of popcorn, a mug of iced tea, and a book to anyone else's company and I cannot tell you how frustrating it makes me feel to hear that passion dismissed and apparently downgraded to less than female. My experience is just as valid as as anyone's, regardless of their gender.

The rest of your article is great. I actually want to try one of the Twilight books now. But that paragraph I quoted was utterly unnecessary to the rest of your work and you should be ashamed for writing it.