Lady Loud

"Reading - its good for ya". Or so I said in an earlier post. Then I read the tabloid rag Dagbladet and thought "hmf, I was right. I love it!".
In http://www.dagbladet.no/kultur/2005/06/20/435158.html they explore female reading throughout the ages, and the conclusion is that women who read was a dangerous thing. Sitting alone reading novels she could fantasize freely, or worse, create her own thoughts on the world. Women were(and are?) conceived more perceptible to new ideas and could easily suffer hysteria from reading to much.
Reading was for women a way to escape mind-control and was therefore conceived by society(men) as utterly harmful. It could lead to ruin between couples. Reading "Madame Bovary" was closely associated with adultery. Moral and marriage was threatened, so women readers were ridiculed and harassed into thinking that reading was harmful to them. And eventually we began believing that it really was harmful to read. In "Gone with the wind" one of the ladies at a barbeque laughs at the thought of reading and prides herself in being illiterate, for it is the mark of a true lady.
Well, those days are over. Women readers are in power these days. Bookclubs prefer female writers because they sell more than male writers. Women buy more books than men. Girls read more and therefore get better grades than boys in school.

Reading really is good for ya;-)