Speaker 1: Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve Camray.
Speaker 1: It's ready. Are you welcome to stuff mom never told you?
Speaker 1: From House Towards dot com. Hey there, and welcome to
Speaker 1: the podcast. This is Kristen and this is Molly. Molly.
Speaker 1: A few weeks ago we sent out a request to
Speaker 1: the end of a podcast asking folks to send in
Speaker 1: their summer reading lists. Yeah, this was dangerous for us
Speaker 1: to do, Kristen, this is dangerous. Now I have too
Speaker 1: many books that I want to buy. I know people
Speaker 1: sent in a lot of great lists, a lot of
Speaker 1: great books, And I gotta say, Molly, that our listeners
Speaker 1: are a well read group of people. Is very impressive. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I was impressive and kind of embarrassed about how few
Speaker 1: of those books I had read. Um. But all of
Speaker 1: this was to get a little anecdotal evidence to talk
Speaker 1: about our subject today, which is what is chick lit.
Speaker 1: And by chick lit, we're talking about the babe pink
Speaker 1: and fluorescent green and baby blue section of bookstores that
Speaker 1: have lots of pictures of Martini glasses and high heels
Speaker 1: and dresses and stuff. You know that, the women's kind
Speaker 1: of pop fiction. Yeah, it's sort of got its start
Speaker 1: with Bridget Jones Diary and now it's you know, a
Speaker 1: kind of an umbrella term for any book that features
Speaker 1: us a protagonist. Those female in her twenties or thirties. Um,
Speaker 1: probably has some job, bankst some you know, problems with men,
Speaker 1: shoe fetish, shoe fetish, drinks martinis. It's sort of a
Speaker 1: sex in the City of the book version, which started
Speaker 1: as a book. So right, and I gotta confess, um,
Speaker 1: right now, I'm reading a pretty chick lit book. What
Speaker 1: is it? Well, it's not, it's not. It's an old book.
Speaker 1: It's called The Dud Avocado came out in nine so
Speaker 1: I consider it old school chick lit. It's pretty high brow. Yeah.
Speaker 1: I ran across it um last week. It was written
Speaker 1: by Elane Undine and it's about a girl who's twenty one.
Speaker 1: She is single and she is off in Paris for
Speaker 1: two years. I mean, I don't know if you can
Speaker 1: get much more chick lit than that. And I gotta
Speaker 1: say right now, it's really hilarious. It's a lot of
Speaker 1: fun to read. Sounds good. Yeah, So Molly, what are
Speaker 1: you to start this off? What are you reading now? Um?
Speaker 1: I'm gonna get ready to start. Infinite Jest by David
Speaker 1: Foster Wallace, diving in for the for quite a summer read. Well.
Speaker 1: I don't know if you've heard about this online group
Speaker 1: if an infinite Summer dot org. It's sort of like
Speaker 1: an internet reading group where everyone's going to discuss it together.
Speaker 1: And I feel like I need that motivation to get
Speaker 1: through the book. Yeah, and afterwards you can use it
Speaker 1: as a doorstop. Yeah, perfect or killed bugs with it.
Speaker 1: So let's talk about what our we talked about what
Speaker 1: chick lit was and what we're reading. Um, we got
Speaker 1: in a lot of reading lists from female listeners and
Speaker 1: some males and some males. Yea, So let's talk about
Speaker 1: before we dive into this whole chick lit question, Let's
Speaker 1: talk about what our listeners are reading this summer. I
Speaker 1: got some good stuff. I'll just throw out a few
Speaker 1: Pacific lists. We've got Mikey from San Diego. He's an
Speaker 1: eighteen year old male. He is reading, among other things,
Speaker 1: The Lord of the Rings Complete trilogy. Also a doorstop.
Speaker 1: Also a doorstop if you stack them all up. Start
Speaker 1: Us by Neil Gaiman, The Shack by William P. Young.
Speaker 1: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen and one, this final
Speaker 1: one has shown up on a lot of list Pride
Speaker 1: and Prejudice and Zombies, and probably the most mentioned book
Speaker 1: of all these ring lists came up in a lot
Speaker 1: of a Male and Female by Seth Graham Smith. So
Speaker 1: that's Mikey he's got and and that's only three out
Speaker 1: of oh, I don't know ten or twelve that he
Speaker 1: sent us. And then we have Jessica who is reading
Speaker 1: Pride and Prejudice as well. She's reading What is the What,
Speaker 1: the Lexus and the Olive Tree, the Botany of Desire
Speaker 1: and Hyperion. There's a nice range, some political science, uh,
Speaker 1: and then drown things off Shelby Friends. Shelby is reading
Speaker 1: the Twilight series. Also an oft mentioned entry. Yes, uh,
Speaker 1: Percy Jackson, Percy Jackson and the Olympians, Gone with the Wind,
Speaker 1: Interview with a Vampire, Emma and the Historian. And I'm
Speaker 1: going to share one that our listeners, Sarah's reading, Sarah's
Speaker 1: reading The Ultimate Hitchhiker's Guide by Douglas Adams, When You
Speaker 1: Were Engulfed in Flames by David Sedaris, who was also
Speaker 1: mentioned a few times, and My Stroke of Insight by
Speaker 1: Dr Jill Bolt Taylor, and she told sort of a
Speaker 1: funny story about carrying that book around. Um. She was
Speaker 1: in uh, she was carrying around and an r end
Speaker 1: that she was working with told her that she was
Speaker 1: too young to be reading My Stroke of Insight, um,
Speaker 1: and instead she should be reading trashy romance novels. And
Speaker 1: so the book My Stroke of Insight is about a
Speaker 1: woman who has a stroke and sort of the effect
Speaker 1: it has on her brain. And so it's sort of
Speaker 1: a memoir slash science book. And when the nurse found
Speaker 1: out that she considered romance novels to be like My Drought,
Speaker 1: the nurse asked her if she was single because she
Speaker 1: had a son that she wanted to set Sarah up with. Oh, nice,
Speaker 1: intellectual reads make for a potential date material. Yeah, I
Speaker 1: mean it just it's I think it sort of starts
Speaker 1: to illuminate our question of do women sort of in
Speaker 1: this age group read a lot of chick lit? And um,
Speaker 1: according to the feedback we got from our listeners, we
Speaker 1: really don't. Um. You know, women, the women who responded,
Speaker 1: do you read a lot more fiction? But it's you know,
Speaker 1: it's a lot of classics, it's a lot of sci
Speaker 1: fi fantasy thrillers, but we're not reading that sort of
Speaker 1: stereotypical romance. Uh fine, love and get a promotional at
Speaker 1: the same time kind of books. And there's some controversy,
Speaker 1: I would say, around this whole idea of the chick
Speaker 1: lit genre. A lot of times it's just dismissed routinely
Speaker 1: by literary critics who say, hey, maybe this is this
Speaker 1: is an okay book for chick lit, you know, but
Speaker 1: they usually just dismiss it as just useless drivel, fluff fluff, right,
Speaker 1: And I ran across a really interesting article by Rebecca
Speaker 1: Trastar on Salon dot com who takes issue with just
Speaker 1: immediately dismissing chick lit drama as completely useless, because she
Speaker 1: makes a good point that this criticism against um chick
Speaker 1: lit and fiction that is targeted towards females as going
Speaker 1: all the way back to the start of the English
Speaker 1: novel in the eighteenth century. Um. And this is to
Speaker 1: quote the Salon article. When the English novel was born
Speaker 1: in the eighteenth century in part to feed a new
Speaker 1: readership of middle class women, critics moaned about the intellect
Speaker 1: eroding effects of sentimental fiction, and that seems to sum
Speaker 1: up exactly what you hear a lot of times about
Speaker 1: chick lit, and to be perfectly honest, things that I
Speaker 1: myself have thought about chicklet right. But I mean when
Speaker 1: you think about that quote in context of the books
Speaker 1: they might have been talking about, Now, those are the
Speaker 1: books that we study in literature courses. It's the classics.
Speaker 1: Jane Eyre. No one's gonna say, oh Jane Eyre once
Speaker 1: she just pick up a cosmo. But and it's also
Speaker 1: you know, I think that shows in every culture women
Speaker 1: are going to write books with female protagonists that reflect
Speaker 1: their reality. And that's sort of why I was intrigued
Speaker 1: by a New York Times piece that talked about chickolate
Speaker 1: across the world and how um, like in Poland, what
Speaker 1: you know we would consider chickla is often pretty dark
Speaker 1: and it has kidnapping, suicides, rapes and murders. I mean,
Speaker 1: it's not you know, all Martinis and Minola Manhattan. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and in Scandinavian chicklate, uh, this New York Times pieces,
Speaker 1: there's a lot of existential angst um in communist Eastern Europe,
Speaker 1: where it's very rare for when it was you know,
Speaker 1: they're coming out of a regime where was very rare
Speaker 1: for young and a married women to live alone. Just
Speaker 1: the fact that they have books that have email protendists
Speaker 1: alone a real reflection of their culture and how you know,
Speaker 1: it really does serve kind of this universal, I don't know,
Speaker 1: theme of wanting to put your experience in writing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: and uh and going to your point, I ran across
Speaker 1: some articles as well talking about the rise of chicklate
Speaker 1: in India and China, and it's really just popping up
Speaker 1: kind of all around the world. So even though we
Speaker 1: might try to dismiss chicklet out of kind of intellectual snobbery, um,
Speaker 1: there might be a little more to it than that.
Speaker 1: And if I can go back to Rebecca Tracer's article
Speaker 1: for a minute, because I don't really know how to
Speaker 1: better sum up um this point she made, so I'm
Speaker 1: just going to read it verbatim. Uh. And this is
Speaker 1: from Salon dot com and she says, for the first
Speaker 1: time in Western history, a population of privileged urban adult
Speaker 1: women is single by choice. They live alone, they can
Speaker 1: have sex with whomember they want. Uh. They have incomes
Speaker 1: with which to buy overpriced footwear and stupid cocktails. Sometimes
Speaker 1: the Cosmo is just a cosmo and Chicklet it may
Speaker 1: be shorthand for an independence and selfishness that is a
Speaker 1: revolution of its own. Chick lit chronicles exactly what the
Speaker 1: sentimentalist Gothics and pious sentimentalist could not. The young female
Speaker 1: experience a professional, sexual and economic power. And I thought
Speaker 1: that was a pretty interesting perspective that I had never
Speaker 1: really thought about, when you know, just looking at Bridget
Speaker 1: Jones's diary and you know, snubbing my nose and walking
Speaker 1: onto I don't know whatever fo highbrow fiction I was
Speaker 1: gonna pick up. But the fact that it is sort
Speaker 1: of something you know, we take for granted, the right
Speaker 1: that we have, the ability of that lifestyle. And the
Speaker 1: fact of the matter is Molly then probably aren't gonna
Speaker 1: be reading Chicklet because they might just not relate as
Speaker 1: much to a female single protagonist who is, you know,
Speaker 1: trying to data wealthy businessman. It just might not appeal
Speaker 1: to them. But one thing that has emerged there's been
Speaker 1: puzzling public book publishers now for a while, is this
Speaker 1: overall fiction gap, as it's called um with men and women.
Speaker 1: According to a story that we saw on NPR, women
Speaker 1: make up eighty percent of the fiction market. And that's
Speaker 1: not just chicklet, I mean that's fiction in general. Yeah.
Speaker 1: The the a the story has a good quote that is, basically,
Speaker 1: if we're saying chicklet is the stuff that women read
Speaker 1: than things like Hemingway are chick lit. All these books
Speaker 1: that are thought of stereotypically male uh books, women read them.
Speaker 1: Women will read pretty much all fiction you throw at them, right,
Speaker 1: And I thought it was interesting that women are reading
Speaker 1: even more like gritty crime fiction and thrillers. Um. Thing
Speaker 1: that comes to mind right now is you know Dan
Speaker 1: Brown series with angels and demons, um, and women are
Speaker 1: are gobbling those up even faster than men, even though
Speaker 1: we might think of, you know, gritty crime detective novels
Speaker 1: as being more male centric. But what's interesting is that
Speaker 1: of that tent you know, fiction market that represents males,
Speaker 1: they're probably only going to read books by other males.
Speaker 1: There's also in this fiction gap and addresses the fact
Speaker 1: that males don't really seem to be ready to read
Speaker 1: a book written by a woman, which sounds stilly when
Speaker 1: you say it out loud, but a lot of surveys
Speaker 1: seemed to hold it out that if a guy is
Speaker 1: going to read a book it's written by a guy
Speaker 1: like Hemingway or Kurt Vonnegut or who else. Beat poets
Speaker 1: like these sort of stereotypical, you know, men's men. But
Speaker 1: I will say that that might be a little bit
Speaker 1: of a reductionist perspective on things. I don't know that
Speaker 1: many men are just, you know, gonna see an interesting book,
Speaker 1: and as soon as they see that it's written by
Speaker 1: a female author, they're just going to toss it out.
Speaker 1: I would, I'm just gonna throw this out there, mining
Speaker 1: but I'll see what you think. I think it might
Speaker 1: have to do with something in our brains that are
Speaker 1: called mirror neurons. Okay, and this was also mentioned in
Speaker 1: this NPR story. There's a lot of research that has
Speaker 1: been done on mirror neurons and they're pretty fascinating cells
Speaker 1: in our brains because scientists think that they are the
Speaker 1: key to human empathy, as being able to relate to
Speaker 1: other people. They fire especially when you know, we see
Speaker 1: other people initiating actions like if you If I'm really
Speaker 1: thirsty and I see you drinking a glass of water,
Speaker 1: my mirror neurons are gonna start firing off because I
Speaker 1: want that glass of water so bad. I'm relating to
Speaker 1: your experience of drinking glass of water. So it thought
Speaker 1: is that, as you were saying earlier, a woman would
Speaker 1: have an easier time reading, you know, the stereotypical chick
Speaker 1: lit for example, because she's reading about a female protagonist,
Speaker 1: someone she can identify with getting the head of. And
Speaker 1: that's probably why they why women are fairly good at
Speaker 1: reading all fiction ists because they can just you know,
Speaker 1: empathize better with uh any sort of character. The thinking
Speaker 1: is that women have these stronger mirror neurons than men,
Speaker 1: and a lot of our experience of empathy in the
Speaker 1: mirror neurons goes uh back to that whole idea, like
Speaker 1: you said, of relating to people. UM. I was reading
Speaker 1: looking through a book um on this called Mirroring People,
Speaker 1: and it was describing a study they performed using fm
Speaker 1: r I scans of male ballet dancers brains and female
Speaker 1: ballet dancers brains, and they found that when men were
Speaker 1: watching a video of male um ballet dancers performing, their
Speaker 1: mirror neurons fired at a much more rapid rate than
Speaker 1: the females, and then vice versa when females are watching
Speaker 1: female dancers on screen, their mirror neurons were firing more
Speaker 1: rapidly than the male dancers, and it's probably because they
Speaker 1: could simply relate to the specific movements more closely when
Speaker 1: it was you know, someone of the same sex dancing.
Speaker 1: And a good example of how this relates to fiction
Speaker 1: is that more males than female surprisingly have read the
Speaker 1: Harry Potter books UM. And it's especially a series that's
Speaker 1: gotten a lot of young boys hooked on it because
Speaker 1: they had, you know, this very uh central male character
Speaker 1: to latch onto. And if you know, the mirror neuron
Speaker 1: theory holds up, then those boys that have had a
Speaker 1: lot more to relate to in that book than something like, um,
Speaker 1: I don't know, Baby Sitter's Club, which is such a
Speaker 1: great it's a good series, such a good series of
Speaker 1: podcast of its own shaped my idolescence. In addition to
Speaker 1: this mirror neuron theory that we're talking about, there's also
Speaker 1: an idea out there that girls just have longer attention
Speaker 1: spans for sitting down in reading a book. Going back
Speaker 1: to this NPR article, um uh Luan present Adine, the
Speaker 1: author of The Female Brain UM, attributes this quote unquote
Speaker 1: fiction gap to that UM attention span that girls have
Speaker 1: at a younger age, even and other general brain differences.
Speaker 1: You know, Chris and I have discussed the difference between
Speaker 1: male and female brains before, and even though things you know,
Speaker 1: sound kind of reductionist when you simplify them like this,
Speaker 1: but the fact that women have better language centers, for example,
Speaker 1: and may just feed into why they read more. You know,
Speaker 1: you see these statistics about women talking more and just
Speaker 1: having this sort of you know, natural affinity for language
Speaker 1: might play a part and why they read more. But again,
Speaker 1: sort of a sticky subject to just say women talk
Speaker 1: more and therefore they read more, because we did do
Speaker 1: a lot of research and found out what men are
Speaker 1: reading when they do sit down to read. Right, the
Speaker 1: fact of the matter isn't that men simply aren't reading.
Speaker 1: They just don't read as much fiction, but they are
Speaker 1: definitely beating women in the nonfiction categories. UM and surveys
Speaker 1: that have been done by book publishers and other groups,
Speaker 1: they continually find that men want to get usable knowledge
Speaker 1: out of what they're reading, and let's you know, frankly,
Speaker 1: they probably won't get that much usable knowledge out of
Speaker 1: reading Jane Eyre as they would reading something like one
Speaker 1: of Jessica's picks, the Lexus and the Olive Tree. Research
Speaker 1: is showing that a lot of men do. They're they're
Speaker 1: reading through periodicals. You know, something you sit down then
Speaker 1: you throw away, as opposed to something you put on
Speaker 1: the shelf. And I think that when we ask people
Speaker 1: to send us their reading list, you know, we asked
Speaker 1: for books, and so they're sort of I think this
Speaker 1: almost inherent bias in the language, that it's not that
Speaker 1: men read less, they just read differently, right, um. And
Speaker 1: talking about what kind of books men are reading, there
Speaker 1: was a Harris poll that was conducted in two thousand
Speaker 1: and eight and the number one genre that men read
Speaker 1: and this probably is not going to come to a surprise,
Speaker 1: come as a surprise to anyone, but history was the
Speaker 1: number one genre that men have read. And that was
Speaker 1: above mystery thriller and crime fiction and um, above science
Speaker 1: fiction and um. Just to give you an idea of
Speaker 1: the difference between men and women and nonfiction, of the
Speaker 1: men polled had read history in the past year, whereas
Speaker 1: only of women had read history in the past year.
Speaker 1: So men might be closing the fiction gap in just
Speaker 1: a different kind of way. But I do want to
Speaker 1: point out, you know, of the of the reading lists
Speaker 1: we received from our listeners, UH, nonfiction was very well represented.
Speaker 1: We had about a hundred and thirty seven books on
Speaker 1: these lists. Nine were fiction, forty four were nonfiction. And
Speaker 1: the most popular nonfiction books that are readers are listeners
Speaker 1: who are reading uh, memoirs and history. So the stereotype
Speaker 1: is that women will read everything, men will read some history. Yeah,
Speaker 1: it's really important to just think about that. I mean,
Speaker 1: so much of this marketing UH goes down to, oh,
Speaker 1: your female, you might like this pink book, and oh,
Speaker 1: your male, you might like this book with a dead
Speaker 1: president on it. Uh. Is that useful do you think, Kristen?
Speaker 1: I mean, I think that it's useful to publishers, and
Speaker 1: I think that it's made for an interesting discussion. But
Speaker 1: at the end of the day, to me, as long
Speaker 1: as people are reading in general, then that's a good thing. Yeah,
Speaker 1: you know, I like I I honestly wouldn't want to
Speaker 1: just read only fiction and never read any any newspapers
Speaker 1: and have no idea what's going on in the world.
Speaker 1: So you need a balance, yeah, which I think is
Speaker 1: why you know, it's it's kind of sad that we
Speaker 1: see so many articles about how men don't read or
Speaker 1: men don't read fiction. It's almost like we need to
Speaker 1: expand the definition definition of reading so it includes these
Speaker 1: things that appeal to men more like newspapers. I was
Speaker 1: reading about how to get young boys to read more
Speaker 1: and basically just telling young boys that like comic books
Speaker 1: and graphic novels and that they gravitate to they can't
Speaker 1: as reading. You know, we don't have to just push
Speaker 1: Jane Air into their ten year old hands and wonder
Speaker 1: why they don't like reading, which is probably which probably
Speaker 1: helps explain the success of Pride and pred Some zombies, yeah,
Speaker 1: because that's where the you know, men's and women's genres
Speaker 1: can intersect and it's probably just kind of funny. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I want to read that one. Everybody likes to laugh.
Speaker 1: And zombies. Yeah, So what have we learned, Molly. We've
Speaker 1: learned that chick lit can as it can be laughed at,
Speaker 1: no more, well, chicklet as interpreted as what chicks quote
Speaker 1: unquote are reading. It's pretty much anything, and that men
Speaker 1: don't need to be dismissed as nonreaders. They're simply reading
Speaker 1: different things. That's true, And you know, what that's fun.
Speaker 1: That is fine. I think that's just fun. All you're
Speaker 1: reading it, how stuff works counts is reading. So go
Speaker 1: to how stuff works dot com and read things like
Speaker 1: our blog. We've got a blog called how to Stuff
Speaker 1: written for both males and females. And I just wrote
Speaker 1: a blog post on how how to buy a book
Speaker 1: for Dad that kind of recaps all of this. Uh,
Speaker 1: all these stats that Molly and I were tossing out,
Speaker 1: you want to go check that out how to Stuff
Speaker 1: And perfectly, I wouldn't mind getting more reading list because
Speaker 1: they were fun to look at. They were fun to
Speaker 1: look at, And thanks to everyone who sent us a
Speaker 1: reading list. But if you have a reading list, or
Speaker 1: just to question or a comment, you can email Kristen
Speaker 1: and Me at mom stuff at how stuff works dot
Speaker 1: com for more on this and thousands of other topics.
Speaker 1: Because it how stuff works dot com. Want more how
Speaker 1: stuff works, check out our blogs on the house stuff
Speaker 1: works dot com home page. Brought to you by the
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