I read a lot as a child. Once I learned to read, it only took me a few days to devour a chapter book. After my father passed away, reading became my solace, and I eventually started reading one book per night. More often than not, I was reading.
As I grew older, my taste in books changed. At some point in high school, I began to favor “slice of life” type novels instead of sci-fi and adventure. More often than not, I would search out protagonists that I identified with: chubby girls, outcasts or queer girls.
However, as anyone who has ever picked up a young adult book would know, girls are more often used as a hot girl trope than anything else, and these books definitely sent me the wrong idea. In the rare case that I did find a book featuring a fat heroine, she followed a man blindly, and only won his affection once losing weight. Outcasts are treated as manic pixie dream girls, and forget finding a book featuring a queer protagonist at all.
Now, as an adult, I can look back and think, “wow, this is actually really damaging,” but as an impressionable 14-year-old, I got the idea that I would have to lose weight and start favoring makeup over books to get a boyfriend. In fact, young adult literature gave me the very idea that having a boyfriend should be a young girl’s only goal.
Even in books with strong female protagonists, such as "The Hunger Games," there’s still a love triangle as a secondary plot. I’ve searched far and wide and is yet to find a book where a girl is driven, smart and doesn’t give half a shit about finding a boyfriend. I would’ve loved if Katniss would’ve told Peeta to shove it because she had a president to overthrow, and honestly, he was a bit of a jerk. I mean, who throws bread to someone they’re supposedly in love with? Who doesn’t even know anything about the girl they’re supposedly in love with?
That brings me to my second point, which is that often times a guy will become completely obsessed with a girl that he knows nothing about except that she’s hot and listens to indie music, and she’ll date him for some reason, because that’s totally not creepy and toxic at all. This sends the idea that a pretty girl is meant entirely to be an accessory to a man, and you should have no aspirations of your own other than finding a boyfriend. I’m looking at you, John Green.
