#YASaves, Twitter Response to WSJ Article

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Cookie
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Re: #YASaves, Twitter Response to WSJ Article

Post by Cookie » June 28th, 2011, 4:20 pm

sierramcconnell wrote:Seriously. Teens, as I'm learning, are not all just babies and children. Some are adults. Some were forced to grow up way way waaay too fast. When I started cutting, it wasn't because of a book. It was because I wanted to get attention because I got into a fight with my mom. And then when I did it, it felt good! And I realized, hey, I liked it, I wanted to keep doing it, and I didn't want people to see it. So I hid it.
Very true. I was in the had to grow up young camp. Romeo and Juliet did not make me want to go out and commit suicide.

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maybegenius
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Re: #YASaves, Twitter Response to WSJ Article

Post by maybegenius » June 28th, 2011, 4:57 pm

I think what really irks me is:

1.) The assumption that in order for a teenager to "go through hell," they have to be an extreme outlier case, like a severely abused child. A teen can go through hell by a million small cuts a day. It doesn't have to be some momentous, tortuous incident. Sometimes it can be as simple as feeling like no one understands them. Pain is pain. You don't have to reach a certain plateau of rape/abuse/incest/depression/escapism/whatever in order to experience intense emotional turmoil.

2.) The implication that media as a whole is "getting darker" and that THIS is the cause in the upswing of darkness. Yes, there ARE a lot more dark-themed YA novels these days then there used to be. There are a lot more dark video games and movies. That's absolutely true. But it's not because our times are more bleak than any other time period, or because more people relish in writing about "ugly" things. There are more dark books because more books have been published. These are not new "fads." Rape, incest, self-harm, mental illness, murder... these things have existed since the very dawn of humanity. They are not new. We've just finally reached a point where people can write about these things and not be immediately hushed up. Shhh, you can't talk about that! It's unsavory!

Yeah, there's more of that stuff out there. Because our population is bigger than it used to be. Because the amount of media we have available to us increases every day. Because it's only in the last century or so that people have been able to talk about these things without being immediately silenced. Because it's only in the last 20 YEARS that YA has become a significant genre at all.

I mean, duh. Yeesh.
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