Today ladies and gentleman, we are going to be taking a walk down memory lane, particularly the lane that holds my previous taste in literature. To be specific, the teen literature of Meg Cabot.
When I was a teen, I had no desire to be a princess. However, I did have a desire to be loved and therefore enter into a relationship as romantic and adoring as that of Mia Thermopolis and Micheal Moscovitz from The Princess Diaries.
Not only are we not going to address the content of that last paragraph, but we're also going to ignore the fact that I didn't need to google the spelling of Moscovitz. #Thoscovitz for life.
Would that be there ship name? Who knows.
Anyway, I digress.
The title we're going to be addressing in today's episode of "I'm in a rare ass mood" is The Princess Diaries 6: Sixational. For those of you who didn't spend hours on the memo boards of the Meg Cabot website, the book centres around some bullshit that vaguely relates to Mia becoming student body president and the pressure that comes with dating a college student, aka genius boyfriend Michael.
I was totally invested in this as a teen and let's face it, would happily re-read the majority of the series.
So, spoiler alert, in the book Mia throws a bitch fit after finding out that her boyfriend isn't a virgin (what even?) and he throws a bitch fit because she doesn't want to bone.
Hello, mid naughties? 1940 called and they want their neanderthalic opinions back.
Side note, I googled it and neanderthalic is, in fact, a word.
As I discussed in my previously unread post To the guy that drove me home, trying to pressure someone into sex is so many different shades of wrong that E. L. James wants her book titles back. This guy's behaviour was bullshit, but I'm a grown-ass woman (*cough*) and I'm able to tell someone to suck a dick when I need to. As a teenager, I was completely unable to do this. At the age of 16, I was nowhere near secure enough to be able to tell someone I didn't want to sleep with them and, as a result, found myself in situations that I really wasn't happy with. For some reason, Meg Cabot felt it appropriate to not only write an entire novel based on someone feeling pressured into having sex with her boyfriend but, after they break up for reasons that had something vaguely to do with Japan that I can't remember at this point, she deemed it appropriate for her protagonist to not only be happy remaining friends with her ex-boyfriend who told her he "wouldn't wait around forever" to have sex with her, but they also GOT BACK TOGETHER.
Seriously, this was an appropriate message to send to teens in the mid-noughties? I'm not convinced. As I said, I'm in a rare af mood today, but it would be impossible to deny that they may be a connection between being told that it's okay for your boyfriend to try to pressure you into having sex, and people allowing others to treat you like shit.
I have various opinions on the #metoo movement, but bro, this is not an okay message to send.
In all honesty, I'm not sure what my conclusion to this post is going to be, But, to summaries, it's not okay to use literature to tell people that it's okay for others to pressure into sex, whether your protagonist is the future princess of Genovia or not.
xXx
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