my interpretation of “Fairy tales do not tell children the dragons exist. Children already know that dragons exist. Fairy tales tell children the dragons can be killed.” – G.K. Chesterton
Reminder: it is called pro- CHOICE, not pro-DEFINITELY-GETTING-AN-ABORTION. it is about allowing women or couples to CHOOSE what happens with their own bodies. It is about the fact that maybe *you* would never get an abortion, but still not shaming the fact that other people might choose to have one. It is about the fact that *you* might get an abortion but not shaming other women about deciding to go through with the pregnancy even if they are young, unmarried, or not in a condition *you* would want to have a child in. It is about choice, and respect that we all have different opinions and morals.
From the archives: An oldie that feels special, because sitting on the floor reading through a stack of comics was one of childhood’s great pleasures. For the Weekly Standard back in 2014.
Actually, I think girls in middle school and high school should still feel comfortable having fuzzy pillows and lava lamps and glitter pens and sequin tops and a colorful wardrobe and whatever else they think is pretty or cool. Maybe we shouldn’t, like, try to beat the personality and life out of the youngsters, neither should we expect them to act like anything other than their actual age.
People wonder why kids are so obsessed with video games when I see grown adults telling *elementary schoolers* that they’re too old to play with dolls or play food or train sets, or that they’re being “ridiculous” for pretending to be animals or Frozen characters. I’ve met so many kids who are completely ashamed that they want to play with my toys when I offer because it’s for “babies” despite desperately wanting to.
Also as soon as you hit 22 you will be running straight back to the fuzzy pillows, lava lamps and glitter pens there’s just this bizarre spot where you’re a teenager when society says you shouldn’t do those things
Most people my age have at least one stuffed animal in their bed, trust me you don’t actually need to let that shit go
The qualities that divide good children’s literature from bad children’s literature:
1) The dragons are real.
2) The adults don’t believe you.
will elaborate
what I’m getting at here is that being a child is an experience defined by marginalization—by powerlessness, not being taken seriously, not being believed.
when you are a child you are aware of the terrible things in the world and terrified by them, and you feel everything so intensely. Before you learn to manage your emotions, they are consuming, incandescent experiences that are almost impossible to access again as an adult. You are small but your emotions and experiences are as large and as vivid as anyone else’s, but they are not taken as seriously as everyone else’s. You recognize that adults condescend to you and dismiss you.
As a child, you know that the world ought to be fair, that people ought to be helped, and you ask “Why?” And you ask “What is the point?” And as you become an adult you learn to repress those things. The answer to every question you ask as a child is “Because you have to” or “Because that’s the way it is,” and these are bullshit answers and we all know it, but defending an authoritarian relationship to someone weaker is easier than defending things about our world that are indefensible if we look at them honestly.
In The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, when Lucy first enters Narnia, she is not believed. Narnia has so much about it that makes it THE quintessential children’s book series, the archetype for children’s book series, and it all centers around how Narnia cannot be understood by adults.
Imitators have reduced this down to something about the Wonder of Childhood, something about how children are innocent and special that means only they can see magic because only they are able to believe in it. This is Not Correct. Books that do this are saccharine and awful because this is fake and we all know deep down that it’s fake.
Here’s the truth. Children do not live in an idyllic fantasy land where bad things aren’t real, adults do. For kids who have dealt with grief, abuse, trauma of all kinds—and let’s be real, that’s most of us—it’s condescending and idiotic to treat children as if they’re innocent about the evils in the world. Almost every child experiences evil early and is unable to communicate that experience to adults, whether this is in the form of a relatively innocent childhood fear or deeply damaging abuse.
There is much that has been said about how the Narnia books are about the trauma of World War 1, but most of that can also be said about how Narnia is about childhood in general—the traumatic nature of the return to the Real World is left unstated, because it is understood by the audience. Children have a vivid inner world that they do not have the vocabulary to explain to adults, and this is what Narnia is about.
There’s a reason why Neil Gaiman’s children’s books are so memorable, and it’s the same reason that they scared the living shit out of adults. There’s a reason why Where the Wild Things Are and Shel Silverstein’s poetry have had such a long cultural shelf life. These are not cozy, comfy stories that affirm adult perceptions of the childhood world as flat and innocent; they are troubling and ambiguous.
There’s also a reason why the children’s books that are so important often piss adults off. The best example I can think of is the Captain Underpants series. I never read any of them and yet I remember the extraordinary disdain people had for those books; they were the poster child for What Terrible Thing Has Become Of Literature.
And sure, maybe to an uncritical adult eye the adventures of misbehaving kids thwarting the rules of the world with poop jokes has no value, but I would argue the opposite—the poop jokes are, in fact, fundamental to the anti-authoritarian message. Adult attempts to suppress the scatological sense of humor children have hold a very important message about power.
Because here’s the thing: poop and farts are funny because they’re taboo, and especially so to children because we are constantly telling children what they Can and Can’t say. It’s not about poop, it’s about how adults betray themselves every time they get in a tizzy about a seven year old saying “turd,” because the fact that “turd” gets such a reaction means that uptight adults don’t have the power over kids that they want kids to think they have.
Scatological subjects embarrass adults, and the more uptight and controlling those adults are, the more devastating the embarrassment is. Kids are super conscious of the power dynamics in all their dealings with adults—how could they not be? And the explosion of raucous laughter that results from an elementary school teacher saying something that sounds sort of like “doody” wouldn’t happen if elementary school teachers weren’t constantly trying to reassert and solidify their position of power.
They, too, can be mortified and laid low by a humble “doody,” and if it did not have the power to do so, they wouldn’t try so hard to stop the kids from saying it.
I’d argue that where that all stands for Captain Underpants, part of it is also that it’s a comic book series for kids that features two kids who constantly disobey their teachers and principal. Dav Pilkey, the author of Captain Underpants, has ADHD and dyslexia and has been open about the fact that he was punished very often for both of these things. The reason why many adults find Captain Underpants distasteful is not only because of fart and poop jokes, though that is certainly a factor, it’s that the series is for those kids who can’t focus, who struggle in school academically because the author himself was a kid like that, and as a result Captain Underpants has some pretty strong anti-authority messages. For example:
Dab Pilkey genuinely has the best ‘about the author’ I’ve ever read and I think it’s a crime that it hasn’t been included yet
Dav Pilkey is not even in the vicinity of fucking around, is he.
In this piece we are showen that the boy is representing war. The boy is a skeletal and manourished figer. He has been bonded to weapons from all eras of human history, the industries that drive them as well as the pollution and waste that is bound to follow such endeavors. The very world surrounding him feels his destructive touch, withering and decaying much like the boy has.
He looms over a tiny figure, a young and seemingly carefree girl. The girl in this represents peace, in it’s purest form. The boy who one might speculate, was once much like the girl before he was slowly deformed by the sins of war that his fathers were drenched in? the sins of his fathers? the people who followed the same realgion has him?
We also see that war reaches down to the young girl, holding out the gift of a small flower. This does show that war and peace go hand in hand. That for one to exist so must the other? Perhaps he is her guardian? war must exist so peace can be protected? Oh maybe war is more sinister? He is trying to corrupt the innocence of the child from the start to make them believe that war is right? Maybe the boy sees himself in the girl of how his innocence was taken from him by mind washing? and how he changed because of war?
