Step Backward for Womankind

Happy  International Women’s Day!

I should be a lot more jazzed. A day to celebrate women and womankind? Awesome. Cheesecake? Yes please.

The fact of the matter is, that a day to celebrate women is really nice, but we have a long way to go.

According to The Record, in Canada women still only make $0.71 to the dollar for what men make doing the same job. Women are far more likely to suffer from the stress and anxiety related to a work/life balance. Not to mention that baby girls are still abandoned in China in favour of baby boys, women are still the victims of honour killings, and girls still suffer from the horrors of female circumcision.

But perhaps the biggest injustice to womankind has come at the hands of the publishing industry.

Snooki, Hilary Duff, and Lauren Conrad have all been allowed to write books.

Fiction.

The publishing industry has actually given these ladies money to make up stories and then force them onto the public. And young women are buying them! I’m throwing Hilary Duff a bone here- her book Elixir actually had a story line that she had to make up. LC and Snooki? Just fictionalized their lives. Then again, did you see the font size they used for Elixir to take up an entire book? Like proper book size? Not even a long book. But the font size was like 36.

It’s a Shore Thing and LA Candy though? Really? A Jersey girl moves to the Shore looking for love? A privileged California teen moves to LA to pursue her dream of becoming a fashion designer and her life is chronicled for a reality show?

Sound familiar?

I’m 25. I admit. I watched The Hills. Religiously. I watched The City too. I was hooked. Couldn’t get enough. Will still watch it if I happen to catch it on TV. I don’t need the book version. I watched it happen. And yet. LA Candy was followed up with a sequel because it sold so well.

Why publishers? Why are you inflicting these women on us in our bookstores?

Bookstores should be a safe haven of literature and culture. Filled with the brilliance of Jane Austen, the Bronte’s, Jen Lancaster and JK Rowling. Of course the way life is going, bookstores could well be a relic of the past.

E-readers. I hate them. Oh the kindle doesn’t have a glare? So you can read it in the sun? That’s so cool. You know what else doesn’t have glare? An actual book. You can take a book into the bathtub without worrying about getting electrocuted too. And you don’t have to worry about sunscreen fingers with a good old fashioned book.

An e-reader doesn’t carry the scent of ink and paper. You can’t treasure an e-reader the way you do a well-worn, well-loved copy of your favourite book. An e-reader doesn’t wink at you on your bookshelf, full of the memories you shared.

The written word is not to be deleted off your mobile reading device when you need more space for new titles!

E-readers and Snooki. Together they have the capacity to completely destroy any education and literacy we might have hoped for for future generations of girls. When we take the LCs out of bookstores, we take a giant step forward for womankind.