Jensen says that belittling 
  adults for reading 
  "Twilight" or other young 
  adult literature is 
  “connected to the idea that 
  work/creative pursuits with 
  an intent to reach teens or 
  children is feminine.” She 
  also points out that women 
  who write the genre are 
  frequently overlooked while 
  men are celebrated.

JK Rowling wrote Harry Potter, which are literally the most popular young adult books of all time, right?

This article just seems like much ado about nothing, people make fun of everything that isn’t something they like. Seeing a bunch of girls screaming at a concert is a little scary. Going to an evangelical church makes me feel the same sort of creeped out feeling, when people engage in “worship” which consists of listening to music and swaying and crying and all this weird stuff. I think I’d get a lot more flak for busting out my old Eminem albums than I would if my sister busted out her old *NSYNC stuff.

She's known as JK Rowling rather than Joanne Rowling for exactly this reason. Her publishers thought her book wouldn't become popular if they were obviously written by a woman.

Ah, so that is why J.R.R. Tolkien and T.S. Eliot and H.R. Giger and Mr. T only used first letters. OK, you've got me there on Mr. T but for the rest, what utter silliness. It is not as if female authors/artists have not had success before J.K. Rowling entered the stage. If this is true - and to me this is a big 'if' as this thing about her publisher trying to hide the fact that she was a woman could well be part of a political message - that publisher had some seriously skewed idea of what makes people like (or buy) books.

You’re attempting to reason backwards. Rowling’s publishers abbreviated her name to hide she was a woman. This does not imply that everyone who uses an abbreviation for their first name when being published. So your attempted counter-examples are meaningless.

I suggest brushing up on basic logic to prevent these mistakes in the future.

...or maybe I did so to indicate that using abbreviated names is a common thing among authors, men and women alike?

In a market where authors like 'Suzanne Collins', 'Jean M. Auel' and 'Marion Zimmer Bradley' (who happen to be the first three somewhat recent female authors who popped up in my head) manage to sell millions of books without hiding the fact that they are women this 'explanation' sounds more than contrived. Women write books, this has been a thing since Hildegard von Bingen picked up her quill somewhere in the 1100's. The idea that people somehow shy away from female authors is preposterous - which is also why I suggested it may be a political statement.

I do wonder whether J.K. Rowling dressed up like a man and turned her voice to sound real low when she did readings from her books, when she appeared to receive the multitude of prizes she won for those books and for all those other occasions where she appeared in public.

Perhaps this article will show you what your interlocutor means: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/aug/06/catherine-nich...

It is not a new phenomenon for women writers to be taken a shade less seriously than their male counterparts.

> If this is true - and to me this is a big 'if'

This is pretty easy to verify.

https://www.cnn.com/2017/07/10/world/amanpour-j-k-rowling-in... > my publisher, who published Harry Potter, they said to me, we think this is a book that will appeal to boys and girls. And I said, oh, great. And they said, so could we use your initials? > Because, basically they were trying to disguise my gender.

She doesn't actually have a middle name, the K was just arbitrarily added to make a better initialism

That is her inference, not verified fact.

Maybe the author thought that using initials sounded more mystical or authorative, more in keeping with the corpus of fantasy works.

> Maybe the author thought that using initials sounded more mystical or authorative

Unless she's lying, the author tells what she thought in the previous quotation

> they were trying to disguise my gender.

That‘s insane!

Doesn‘t change the fact that most people who know her name also know that she‘s a woman though.

I didn't know she was a woman the first time I read the first three books. Granted, this changed quickly.

Comic books are stupid too. (And teenage boys are absolutely mocked for their entertainment. Let me tell you about Dave Matthews Band, the direct-to-dvd sequels to Starship Troopers, etc.).

However, sports and shopping aren't stupid. Fangirldom and fanboydom is generally looked down upon.

Sports is a way for us to satisfy a primal part of our mind and pretend we’re going to war with people from other towns.

Shopping has been tailored by very smart people to break down our psychological defenses, cause analysis paralysis, at which point we succumb to marketing and buy whatever has been had the most advertising dollars spent on it, thereby being emblazoned in our mind as what’s best regardless of its actual quality, because our brains aren’t well suited for the sheer number of choices we’re presented with while shopping.

Maybe “stupid” isn’t the right word for shopping or sports, but both of the modern versions of these things are designed to exploit and extract profit by manipulating built in human circuitry.

Teenage boys are also mocked for their obsessions, ie. computer geeks etc.

> teen girls are often very intentional about what they're interested in and aware of the social influences behind those media products, and they deliberately use excitement and passion as the foundation for community-building and empathetic development.”

I think this is a more important part of it than the article does credit, this kind of feminized excitement is really stigmatized (hysteria)

I don't see how that's any different from other fandoms, sports clubs fans for example, but those usually have to deal with the far worse stigma of being "dumb and violent".

In that regard, I don't see how the author can differentiate between "deliberate use of excitement and passion" vs "accidental use of excitement and passion" or whatever else is supposed to be the opposite of that.

Adding the gender angle to this feels kinder surplus, especially in the context how it's usually done in one direction. I'm pretty sure with a bit of time and effort one could write a similar piece about the culture of the "seduction community" and how their antics are just a manifestation of "community building and empathetic development" with their fellow peers.

No need to talk about objectification, after all, I didn't see it mentioned in this piece either, even tho it should be equally relevant.

I think it's the hysteria that is hated more than anything. Boys like teenage girl bands too but don't have the same obsession in their behaviour. No idea the reason for this, environment?

It's also an act of jealousy: so few man in the world get an unrealistically huge amount of female attention (and set the bar extremely high), that as a teenage boy was impossible to compete with for most of us guys.

"Dear Stephanie Meyer" by Lindsay Ellis touches on this as well.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8O06tMbIKh0

Well, this is certainly fascinating. Apparently this whole time we've all been the cool kids and the cliques of teenage girls are actually the uncool outsiders!

This article feels like an extreme example of confirmation bias, and yes, I'm fully aware of the potential reflexive symmetry in that observation.