It's an Ancient Russian Proverb

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The problem that needs to be fixed is not kick all the girls out of YA, it’s teach boys that stories featuring female protagonists or written by female authors also apply to them. Boys fall in love. Boys want to be important. Boys have hopes and fears and dreams and ambitions. What boys also have is a sexist society in which they are belittled for “liking girl stuff.” Male is neutral, female is specific.

I heard someone mention that Sarah Rees Brennan’s THE DEMON’S LEXICON would be great for boys, but they’d never read it with that cover. Friends, then the problem is NOT with the book. It’s with the society that’s raising that boy. It’s with the community who inculcated that boy with the idea that he can’t read a book with an attractive guy on the cover.

Here’s how we solve the OMG SO MANY GIRLS IN YA problem: quit treating women like secondary appendages. Quit treating women’s art like it’s a niche, novelty creation only for girls. Quit teaching boys to fear the feminine, quit insisting that it’s a hardship for men to have to relate to anything that doesn’t specifically cater to them.

Because if I can watch Raiders of the Lost Ark and want to grow up to be an archaeologist, there’s no reason at all that a boy shouldn’t be able to read THE DEMON’S LEXICON with its cover on. My friends, sexism doesn’t just hurt women, and our young men’s abysmal rate of attraction to literacy is the proof of it.

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“ No single word in English renders all the shades of ‘toska’. At its deepest and most painful, it is a sensation of great spiritual anguish, often without any specific cause. At less morbid levels it is a dull ache of the soul, a longing with nothing to long for, a sick pining, a vague restlessness, mental throes, yearning. In particular cases it may be the desire for somebody of something specific, nostalgia, love-sickness. At the lowest level it grades into ennui, boredom. ”

“ What did you just call him? You use that word, you’re talking about him…. You use the ‘N’ word? How about retard? You call that nice girl on the Cheerios with Kurt a retard? But you think it’s okay to come into my house and say faggy? I know what you meant! You think I didn’t use that word when I was your age? Some kid gets clocked in practice, we’d tell him to stop being such a fag: shake it off. We meant it exactly the way that you meant it: that being gay is wrong, that it’s some kind of punishable offense. I really thought you were different…. that you were some new generation of dude who saw things differently—you just kind of came into the world knowing what it’s taken me years of struggling to figure out. I guess I was wrong…. I can’t have that kind of poison around. ”