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Yeah, children's books are fucking terrifying these days. Our local library, that our daughter's school occasionally takes the older kids too, had a bit of a kerfuffle with them pushing inappropriate books on kids, Gender Queer chief among them. There were protest, the usual mealy mouthed euphemisms about "book burning" to dodge the issue of graphic novels with graphic depictions of gay sex being recommended to children. Instead of removing the books or putting them in an "adult only" section, they created some fake "New Adult" section, which really changes nothing? Because their terminal goal seems to be showing pornographic material to children.
Turns out the library was being run by an NGO despite being funded 75% by the county. The conservative county has now forced a conservative board onto it by threatening to withhold funds. So I guess sometimes you can vote your way out of problems. At least until the state or the feds decide to steal the institution away from you, or some interloper in a black robe decides "Actually, making pornography available to children is mandatory".
I could swear having LGBTQ themes is now mandatory in children's publishing. I made the mistake of wondering into a random bookstore with my daughter in my state capital, and virtually every book was queer. A curious girl falls in love and kisses a mermaid. A curious girl falls in love and kisses another girl. A curious girl pony falls in love with another girl pony and they kiss. Some lesbian unicorns, etc, etc. Basically there was a book for every type of little girl with the subtext of "Have you considered being gay?" With rainbows and sparkles, and god damnit the mermaid one really caught her attention because she loves mermaids. It was virtually every book prominently displayed cover out instead of spine out. That and some picture books proselytizing about Taylor Swift. Weirdest fucking shit I ever saw. Had to distract my daughter with something shiny behind her and then make an excuse about needing to be somewhere.
My wife, who does more of the shopping and the picking out of books notices this shit a lot more than I do, and virtually every day she comes home with tales of what she saw in a kid's section today.
Just, what the fuck? It's exhausting all the directions this shit keeps flying at us from. And then some parent you've been friendly with the last few years of your daughters school invites you to see a "family friendly drag show" and you wonder if all the people in your life have been replaced by pod people. There was a before time right? Like.... 5 years ago? 10 years ago? I'm not imagining it, am I?
Edit: Upon further research, the library in my anecdote chose to have their funding cut rather than accept a more conservative board of directors from the county, and ceasing showing pornography to children. I guess some thing you actually can't vote your way out of, and these.... people get to destroy one of the oldest libraries in my state. Alas.
Luckily, that kind of propaganda is only a small subset of the children's books available in Germany.
Most is still propaganda of the sort of "be a good little meek cheek-turner", "work smart, not hard, or don't work at all" and "a just-so solution will come to you", or ethically incomprehensible gibberish. And why, just why, must nineteen out of twenty children's books feature anthropomorphic animals? It's not a new trend, I didn't mind it as a kid, and I don't want to make a big deal out of it now, but it does frustrate me.
Other than those, we subsist on children's books from 30+ years ago. Those are far from perfect too, of course, but at least you needn't worry about the very modern maladies. Something something C.S. Lewis.
There is something fundamentally entertaining about an animal acting like a person to a vast swathe of humanity. Look at YouTube videos where a cat or dog is "talking" or using a doorknob. Or flushing a toilet. I don't personally get it, either, but YouTube view counts tell a compelling story.
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Err...
Yeah, I'm not arguing. I just feel like after decades of that being water to swim in, I'd like to know why.
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As a father of a young children I recommend Usborne books. They are high quality and lack all that stuff you just mentioned.
I have never in real life discussed Gender Queer. I think people would think I am a crazed conspiracy theorist if I gave a plain description of it. Rather than accept an actual published book available in schools and libraries across America and recommended for 8 year olds has cartoon gay porn in it.
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I should be the change I want to see. Who would buy my half-written (in heroic couplets!) children's book about heroicism, exploration and science? I can put a fire under it.
Try pitching it to BRAVE Books? They are an explicitly conservative and Christian children's book company.
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It seems likely that the "before time" was when they were actually successful in their propagandizing, before the snake started eating its own tail. Back then, they knew to slip subversive material in subtly - one gay book in a stack of normal ones, not a whole stack of gay books. The parent's less likely to notice the one gay book in the normal stack, and even if the parent does notice, it's likelier to be dismissed as a harmless aberration. The whole stack of gay books isn't actually more useful for their aims - it's a self-defeating result of their fifty-Stalins purity-signaling spiral.
For a middle-school student, I think one gay book in a blue moon would be kind of ideal. You want 99% of books to portray kids and adults in the world and how they live virtuously despite adversity, and 1% of books to provide a framework which the child can latch onto if they find themselves at puberty with no opposite-sex attractions. Where I have problems with the genderqueer books is when they tip over into pornography or into brainwashing. There's a fine line between having a gay character who is happy with their life and telling kids that it being nonbinary is a shortcut to being cool, special, or rebellious, or even worse, telling them that coming out as trans will solve their feelings of being lost in the world.
Of course, I also assume middle-school students are sufficiently exposed to portrayals of gay characters in other media, be it sitcoms or movies...
The average middle-schooler is aware of media portrayals of lesbianism. Actually, the upper half of elementary too provided they have an older male sibling. They won't admit it to you, of course, but they do know.
The actual issue isn't "muh gayness".
Actually, it isn't even the naked people[1].
It's the fact that, more than anything else, it's oppression pornography. It hopes to show oppression, either real or imagined, as the only virtue you need. Hence, if you can find some oppression (the demand vastly exceeds supply in modern societies), or identify with some oppression, then you have the cheat code to life.
That is the harmful message, why people whose political identity is wrapped up in being as much of a victim as possible love reading and writing these books, and they should be removed because books that are written like this are inherently garbage.
[1] Adult traditionalist men usually call this "pornography", but that refers to media that's supposed to be sexually stimulating, and these books are very far from that. Everyone but them understands this instinctively, though, so that complaint falls on deaf ears.
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They're also more likely to be actually a decent book (since they had to at least try and be convincing). Now, it's just taken for granted that the gayness makes the book good (since the group progressives form their identity around hating takes for granted that the gayness makes the book bad, and they think that reversed stupidity is intelligence), so you just get a bunch of Chick tracts.
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You need a new filter bubble.
Children grow up to be members of communities and not to be whatever their parents want. That means they absorb whatever is fashionable among their peers. If that means cutting their breasts off and pretending they want to kiss other girls, they’ll do that. If that means joining the army they’ll do that. If that means committing crimes and bragging about it on SoundCloud they’ll do that.
Children also like to rebel against the status quo. Zoomer's increased relative conservatism compared to millennials is partially explained by the dominant culture being progressive. You're not completely wrong, but you're not completely right either.
Adolescents like to become adults. Young men turned to the right because they thought the right was at least trying to help them do that. ‘Rebelling against the status quo’ is usually either 1) fun thing the status quo doesn’t like or 2) burning down rules they identify as keeping them from growing up.
The first one is straightforward, but I'd love to see you expand on the second. I think everyone has seen it happen, but I don't think I've ever seen it framed quite that way.
You know teenagers generally don’t actually like beer? They drink it because that’s what grown men do, and the valence is only there because of relevant laws. If it was about enjoyment they’d drink margaritas(which actually taste good when you aren’t used to alcohol).
Lots of things are like this. There’s an interesting psychological study I once saw- teenaged boys who worked in workplaces alongside normal grown men(think specialty stores, country clubs, etc as opposed to fast food) behaved better in aggregate and had a few other outcomes society would mostly consider ‘good’. This is because their role models for how grown men behaved were normal working class men as opposed to frat boys(and you can’t stop high school and college aged types from being exposed to each other, they’re too close in age). I can’t find it right now, and no doubt it has the usual issues of psychological studies, but it accords with what we’ve all seen.
Our society’s understanding of a woman’s role is too messed up to show the same thing for them. But I would expect it to be true for them too.
Beer isn’t the best tasting drink in the world but I don’t remember it tasting bad as a teenager.
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