There’s a lot of White Feminism TM going on in there about “I experience 1 form of oppression, therefore EVERYTHING I DO IS OPPRESSED” as well as some serious Choice Feminism, i.e. “I demand that because I am a woman and I chose to read this that I be considered an empowered feminist because I made a choice”.

I definitely agree there is room for conversation about internalized misogyny on a college campus; I just don’t think Dessen’s books are the ones that would provoke it. Maybe Speak is too associated thematically with rape, but I would think that was a better fit regardless—there’s a wider point there about how not…

I’m with you—it’s really surprising that people don’t seem to be okay with her books being acknowledged as for younger readers and a bit fluffy. It’s totally fine for books to be those two things! I definitely read things in those two categories because they’re fun! But just because something is fun to read doesn’t…

This is an excellent point; given that Nelson is later quoted talking about the book she did support, one that was clearly a very thoughtful choice, I’d be really surprised if there weren’t wider, more legitimate things she said about Dessen as well.

I feel like he’s the kind of man who goes to therapy just to talk about how attacked he is for his genius and his poor therapist is sitting there listening and thinking ‘well, you’re obviously never going to get anything out of this but your checks still clear, so...’

Funny you bring up Clare, who’s well-known for her (alleged) plagiarism.

Oh this one is a GEM:

You couldn’t write a caricature of him that’s actually funnier than he is unintentionally. That’s a feat.

Sorry, what I was trying to imply there was that even as fluffy as Perkins’ stuff is, I still think it’s better than Dessen’s.

Wow, what a coincidence, so did I. Unfortunately my professors saw much greater merit in books like say, Northanger Abbey, which was written precisely because Jane Austen was so annoyed by how much ridicule teen girls had to put up with for reading Gothic novels, and Frankenstein, notably written by a teen girl.

“If you look for me, I’m in the fiction section. Romance has its own section,” he says

That is not at all what I said.

I’m cracking up right now, I’d not known that he’d said that until now. THANK YOU for enlightening me.

Right?

asdkfjdk my GOD woman, get your head out of your ass. Sarah, you write shitty teen romance YA, you’re not out here writing the next Booker Prize novel. Of course a college junior, who is presumably in her twenties and you know, at university to challenge herself academically, wants to read something with more…

My school literally did not have a full week of school the entire month of February that year. He quickly saw the error of his ways when it became apparent that if we had to make up all our days, we’d be going to school until the middle of June. He ended up reversing the decision and never ended up actually taking…

So when he was first elected, he tried to take them down to three for the 2011-12 year, then they were supposed to go down to 0 the year after that.

Of all the meet-cutes so far, I think yours is the one I’m most jealous of.

Every time Kasich pops up in the news, high school Adrastra emerges from the depths of my subconscious to remind me that he is very, very dumb, because only the dumbest of men would decide to eliminate snow days from the Ohio public school system.

*BUYS BOOK IMMEDIATELY*