The 17 Magazine list of “books every girl needs to read before she turns 17” includes a love story of two gay boys and a story of a boy coming out as queer nonbinary. Not only are all the books on the list painfully devoid of literary merit, they also teach the young readers the great feminist lesson that women of all ages must constantly preoccupy themselves with the problems of men.
It’s great to see all these feminist advances coming at us from every direction.
Clarissa's Blog 
The good news is there probably aren’t many actual teenagers reading Seventeen. I know Teen Vogue is mostly read by adult women who like to imagine teenage girls reading it, and I suspect at this point Seventeen is the same way.
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A beautiful post about the price of freedom. Have never thought about this before:
The Price of Freedom
Have you ever wondered what happened to the 56 men who signed the Declaration of Independence?
https://paszekpielawski.livejournal.com/2784720.html
Photo from the post:
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On one hand, I support young people reading anything. The habit of reading is an important one and even reading trashy lit helps it along. So I suppose I am glad the Seventeen at least acknowledges reading and books. But on the other hand, I am so weary and annoyed by the whole “YA lit genre”. Putting aside the notion, as you point out, that young girls are apparently expected to be inordinately concerned with the lives of “queer” young men, the books are just so bad. If Seventeen is hell bent on queer literature, why not recommend Oscar Wilde’s Picture of Dorian Grey or Virginia Wolfe’s Mrs. Dalloway? Those are beautiful books that deal subtly with sexuality and the larger human experiences in creative and intellectually rich ways. There are so many wonderful books about a variety of subjects that can enrich and its disheartening to see such books pushed aside for silly flim flam.
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To be fair, the books that Teenybopper mags recommend are probably on about the same intellectual/reading comprehension level as the magazines themselves, so… a good match.
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Unfortunately all lists are like that. All of them. I pulled out the list of must read books for teenage girls from New York public library and it was even scarier.
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Oh, dear.
But then, even when I was the right age for those lists, I didn’t read the stuff on them. I was raiding the regular fiction section of the library, and reading stuff my parents would have found horrifying there. But hey, at least it was horrifying and literate! 😉
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…for the record: I never liked Judy Blume.
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I’m actively glad that there wasn’t much “queer representation” in YA books when I was a teenager because it probably pushed me towards books like that (though that’s hardly the only reason, I loved classic literature at that age.)
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