While I’m out of commission and on my way to the ER, please enjoy the most ridiculous article I have read all week. The gist of the article is that while posting photos of yourself online (selfies) is empowering and feminist, posting photos of your bookshelves (bookshelfies) is elitist and wrong.
I like taking selfies and posting them on this blog, but I don’t do that to feel “empowered” (I don’t even really know what “empowering” is supposed to mean.) I do it because it’s fun and my readers seem to like being able to put a face to a bunch of endless rants. I also don’t get what’s so elitist about having books. According to the linked article:
Owning large quantities of books, being familiar with them, frequently referring to them, working in an industry where books are valued, these are all markers of upper middle class status, reflecting education, purchasing power, and social privilege.
The statement is too ridiculous and offensive for me to analyze in detail, especially now that I’m not feeling well. But I knew my readers would enjoy this completely idiotic piece and would have fun with it.
You can also find two interesting responses to the linked piece here.
Clarissa's Blog 
I have no personal knowledge on what’s going on with (book)selfies, so the following is my impression from her post and guesses.
I do agree that books are a social marker and that some people may use bookshelfies to display status. However, there are many different ways to do the latter, which some people use in (Book)selfies/etc., and many people post (Book)/selfies for entirely other reasons.
She says that:
“showing off your books is a form of elitism, and framing it in a way that suggests it’s superior to the selfie is misogynist and gross.”
which could be one of the reasons for approach of people, who claim that bookshelfies are superior to selfies.
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What the post’s author doesn’t realize is that her vocabulary of “privilege, empowerment, etc” is more elitist than any bookshelfie. These words have currency only among a tiny swatch of general population and mark her as a certain kind of very condescending, stuck-up pseudo-progressive.
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And what a terribly conceited thing to say, that the lower classes don’t read. And then she goes off and fills half the article with bookshelfies, after she presented them as a form of elitism. Methinks she’s telling us bookshelfies are elitist just so we don’t think she’s just taking pictures of herself in front of her books.
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Why is showing of your books misogynist? Too many hard and stiff bookspines? 😀
No seriously, why misogynist? Because selfies are something female and to selfie one bookshelf is to deny them their empowerment?
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I understood “misogynist” as refering to people, who criticize female selfies as vain and praise bookshelfies as worthy.
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“Why is showing of your books misogynist? Too many hard and stiff bookspines? 😀
No seriously, why misogynist? Because selfies are something female and to selfie one bookshelf is to deny them their empowerment?”
– This entire comment is absolutely brilliant. Thank you, Tim.
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// Why is showing of your books misogynist? Too many hard and stiff bookspines?
Unfortunately, in older paper books bookspines are anything but hard and stiff. They barely exist, if at all.
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I got as far into the article about the author strategically placing her John Green (a sappy terrible sentimentalist writer who thinks there’s nothing creepy about being 36 and speaking like you know exactly how 14 year olds think) books to look hip before I burst out laughing and decided to take some shelfies when I get back from my vacation.
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This John Green sounds precisely like the sort of fellow I hate. There was this novel by Tom Wolfe written from the perspective of a teenage girl, and it was just awful. The whole point if the novel was to warn female college students from having sex. Ridiculous crap.
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I enjoy the guy’s youtube videos, though I haven’t really gotten into his books.
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I’ve never read John Green, but the idea that no author should write characters who are not their exact age, sex and ethnicity (which you seem to be implying) strikes me as a rather odd and bad idea.
If that were true, very, very few books would be written.
When I was 13 or 14, I completed most of a novel in which many of the characters were in their late 20s and 30s, one of whom was disabled. Should I not have done that?
Should anyone who writes about someone not exactly like them hire out the work? Or would it not be creepy if a woman did what you accuse John Green of doing? If it would in fact be creepy, most YA would not exist as the absolute majority of it is written by women over the age of 30 (Suzanne Collins, et. al.)
I just don’t understand this point of view. I think it’s completely demented, to be honest.
I once was a 14-year-old, and hung around with many 14-year-olds. I remember very well what I and they thought then, for that matter. I am sure John Green was once 14, too.
This is an outgrowth of the ascendancy of identity politics, I think, but I am not sure.
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“I once was a 14-year-old, and hung around with many 14-year-olds. I remember very well what I and they thought then, for that matter. I am sure John Green was once 14, too.”
That doesn’t mean he can write them well. Do the characters sound like teenagers? Or do they sound like an adult who’s straining to sound like a teenager or using the teenager as a wooden mouthpiece for the older adult’s ideas/feelings/thoughts?
It’s not enough to have memories of being a teenager. There are writers who can’t tap into those thoughts and feelings and bring them to their work. Or they try to sound hip and appeal to young readers these days, but it comes off forced (and sometimes, depending on the context, creepy). If Green really is a “sappy sentimentalist” (I haven’t read his work) there’s probably much that feels false in his work. Sappy sentimentalists are often awful at writing young children as well, even though they were once young children too – they tend to make the young kids cloying little angels or cute accessories to the adults with ridiculous habits of speech.
I didn’t get the implication from Leah Jane’s comment that she suggests that you should never write characters who aren’t exactly you. You can write any character you want, but if you don’t do it well, the results can be false and ugly. Especially when you write a character who has had very different life experiences than you – stemming perhaps from a different socioeconomic background, ethnicity, historical background, gender – you’re taking some big chances with your work. Maybe you’ll pull it off or at least not make the characterization too painfully false. Many writers, however, can’t do this well.
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That’s projecting a lot that I never said onto my comment. I never spoke a word about nobody over 30 being forbidden to write teenage characters ever; I just find John Green’s books (and his online persona) to be cloying, obnoxious, and filled with weird ideas of what teenagers are like. If you ever pick up any of his work, it reads like a bad cocktail of nostalgia and fantasy that left me cold on plot, characterization, and life as a teenager, coming from someone whose teen years are a more recent memory for me than John Green’s.
Whatever age your characters are, they’re supposed to be fully fleshed out and interesting, not empty vessels for your fantasies and ideologies.
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Wait I missed something. Are you okay?? Going to the ER?? Hope you’re okay!!!
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Yes, I’m fine. It’s just that after everything that happened to me, the smallest thing makes me freak out. It seems like I had a sports injury but this is such a new experience for me that I took it for something much worse.
As the old joke goes, “Honey, bad news. This thing we thought was an orgasm turned out to be asthma.” 🙂
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Should I “check my privilege” before mentioning that the last time I moved, I didn’t count books, but instead was informed about how much they weighed?
Because of that experience, I know of a number of kilograms, and it is five digits.
Also because of that experience, I remember how much that move cost me, and it is also five digits … 🙂
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