Culture
Book Review: ‘Girl on Girl: How Pop Culture Turned a Generation of Women Against Themselves,’ by Sophie Gilbert

“The nature of how women were being treated in mass media wasn’t an aberration,” Gilbert goes on. “The women we were being conditioned to hate were too visible.”
Her examples are abundant, and span genres. In music, there was the replacement of the defiant and gutsy female icons of the ’80s and early ’90s — Madonna, Janet Jackson, Kathleen Hanna — with Y2K pop’s much younger and less opinionated girls: Spears, Jessica Simpson, Christina Aguilera. In fashion, the sidelining of powerful supermodels who demanded to be paid their worth (Naomi Campbell, Cindy Crawford, Linda Evangelista) in favor of frail, passive, American Apparel-esque teenagers.
The phasing out of the golden age of rom-coms made way for a surge of teen-sex and adult bromance comedies — “American Pie,” “Scary Movie,” “The Hangover” — that either fetishized younger female characters or cast adult women as “shrill, sexless nags or trampy, adulterous harpies.”
“Movies in the aughts hated women,” Gilbert writes, and she has a stack of receipts to prove it.
Then came the explosion of makeover shows that disguised cruelty as tough love, and reality dating shows that continue to pit a parade of interchangeable women against one another for the affections of the same male stranger. Women’s personal desires, the author says, have become indistinguishable from the desire to satisfy men’s “perennial fantasy of an emotionally uncomplicated, sexually available woman.”
In the 2000s, the emergence of streaming and social media swiftly cleaved the self to accommodate a digital counterpart, making “reality” content ubiquitous and blurring it with actual reality. The transition gave women especially the ability “to assess in real time how the world wanted to view us — and adjust ourselves instantly in response.”

Culture
Test Your Memory of These Classic Books for Young Readers

Welcome to Lit Trivia, the Book Review’s regular quiz about books, authors and literary culture. This week’s tests your memory of books you may have read during your school days — specifically, the plots of much-loved novels for young readers. In the five multiple-choice questions below, tap or click on the answer you think is correct. After the last question, you’ll find links to the books.
Culture
Test Yourself on These Cartoons and Comics Adapted for the Screen

Welcome to Great Adaptations, the Book Review’s regular multiple-choice quiz about printed works that have gone on to find new life as movies, television shows, theatrical productions and more. This week’s challenge highlights cartoons and comic strips that were later adapted for the screen. Just tap or click your answers to the five questions below. And scroll down after you finish the last question for links to the books and some of their filmed versions.
Culture
I Want This Jane Kenyon Poem Read Aloud at My Funeral

You can hear a reading of this poem at the bottom of the page.
“The Pond at Dusk”: It’s a title that presents an image of calm, touched with the faintest shimmer of dread. You might picture a peaceful summer evening in the countryside somewhere, but you might also feel the tug of a somber metaphor in the word “dusk.” Night is falling, and this poem proceeds, nimbly and observantly, toward an unsentimental confrontation with death.
In one called “Twilight: After Haying” — there’s that dusk again — she writes that “the soul / must part from the body: / what else could it do?” What else indeed. This fatalism provides its own kind of solace. “The day comes at last.” The end is inevitable, inarguable, and there may be a balm in acknowledging that fact.
Not that “The Pond at Dusk” quite dispenses such consolation. It isn’t Kenyon’s style to offer homilies or lessons. Instead, she watches, with sympathetic detachment, standing back from the implications of her words and letting them ripple outward, toward the reader.
This is not the kind of nature poetry that gazes in wonder at the glories of creation, taking the world as a mirror of the poet’s ego. Kenyon parcels out her attention carefully, removing herself from the picture as rigorously as a landscape painter at her easel.
The Pond at Dusk
A fly wounds the water but the wound
soon heals. Swallows tilt and twitter overhead, dropping now and then toward
the outward–radiating evidence of food.
The green haze on the trees changes
into leaves, and what looks like smoke floating over the neighbor’s barn
is only apple blossoms.
But sometimes what looks like disaster
is disaster: the day comes at last, and the men struggle with the casket
just clearing the pews.
Listen to A.O. Scott read the poem.
THE POND AT DUSK by Jane Kenyon
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