Anybody ever read Speak?

[conuly]

It's a YA book about a girl who doesn't, in fact, speak, because (sorry for the spoiling, but it's necessary to understand the post) she was raped over the summer.

One of those books that makes high school reading lists when teachers are bored with reading the classics.

Well, this unmitigated fool has determined that the rape scene in Speak is "softcore pornography". (The link is not to him, but the post where I first read about this.)

Pornography, to my understanding, has to be stimulating, titillating, and fun. The rape in Speak is sickening. And not - let's be absolutely clear here - sickening because I think children are reading softcore porn in school, but sickening because reading it makes me feel nauseous at the very thought of what's going on.

It's well-written, and it's never once been what I've pulled off the shelf because I was bored and thought a little masturbation would help with that.

It's not pornography. Not in any sense of the word. What's very sad is that it seems like for many girls and young women this might be one of the few ways they have of dealing with their own rape. The library book with accounts of rape and assault written on the back pages parallels a scene in the book itself where the protagonist writes her rapists' name on a bathroom stall, and comes back to find whole conversations written about what else he's done.

And it's not that this book is so wonderful in and of itself. Any other well-written book would do. It's that this asshole's attitudes (which he didn't just make up out of the ether) are the same exact ones that keep these people from speaking up! This twit, this misbegotten barely-literate pest, he's part of the problem here! Oh, it makes me so mad. I could absolutely spit.

So, you know, though I don't want to give this person any more attention (let's not encourage him in his ignorance here), I feel I should spread the word so that if somebody tries giving you that line, even if you have no idea what they're talking about, you can smack them hard and tell them why they're wrong.

Comments

[erisiansaint]

I'm sorry, but I have to disagree. Violence is a part of our world and part of how children are socialized to understand it and condemn it is through literature. Should Dickens's "A Tale of Two Cities" be taken off reading lists because people get beheaded in it? Or Tess of the D'Urbervilles? That has a rape in it. Grimm's Fairy Tales, (and Andersen's Fairy Tales,) are plenty violent. Just look at the original Snow White, where the evil stepmother was forced to dance in iron shoes on a red hot floor until she died, at the end of that tale, or the way the Little Mermaid, when she walked, felt like she was walking on knives with every step.

If one removes all reference to anything disturbing from a child's view, then what tools do they have to deal with it, later, if they see it, or God forbid, it happens to them? Especially given the horrors one can read about daily in the newspaper, that I still don't seem to get immune to.

Obviously, this is my personal opinion.

[conuly]

Let's not say what hasn't been said. elenbarathi said she didn't want books like this to be required, not that she didn't want them to be available. That's a huge distinction.

(And it's certainly true that for whatever reason high school reading lists are FULL of depressing or "uplifting" (aka "depressing except for the last three pages") books. There ARE classics that are happy, but nobody thinks teenagers should read them I guess.)