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;-)

Difficult woman extraordinaire Elizabeth Wurtzel has written the ultimate bitch-book titled "Bitch. In praise of difficult women". It's a wowzer of a book! Trying to read it is a bit like running down hill at top speed and feeling like you're about to trip in your own feet. Sounds scary? Read an excerpt.
Wurtzel is writing like her pen is on fire. It is sometimes hard to keep up with her string of thought, and being slightly eurosentric doesn't make the read any easier. There are lots of references to people and politics in America that I've never heard of, but don't let that scare you away from a good read!
The theme she explores is "difficult women" and what happens to us when we stick our necks out. From biblical Delilah to modern Madonna, Wurtzel races through histories and events at breakneck speed(and knowing her, she probably was doing speed at the time).

The book cover shows Elizabeth naked and giving the finger. It caused an uproar in the U.S. Here, we didn't think twice of it.
I guess being a difficult woman is more difficult in America than anywhere else on this planet. Sigh...

I just started blogging, but as I read up on how to make good personal blogs, I stumbled across this page and it really got me thinking. She said that recent studies in USA show that the really influential and most visited pages are made by white men. And who do they link to? Why, of course, to other white men(glass ceiling, brotherhood, bla, bla, bla). How to stop this from happening in Norway? Don't link to pages written by men who write about boring man-stuff(american politics, middle-east politics, war in general, war in middle east, and all technical boring men-things)!
Be a b.i.t.c.h! Write about personal things that concern you. Link to other bitchy girls. Be "difficult" and life gets, well, more diffucult. But also more fun.
Be a bitch. Always.