Posted By admin on August 21, 2009
Hey, all.
Well, summer is starting to wind down. 
A time of year most teachers get just a little depressed. Still, I’m more than a little pumped up ’cause I know I’m going to have a great set of children to teach this year. 
Last night, my older boys and I went to see the newest Mystery Science Theatre 3000 movie, where the gang from the old Sci Fi channel series made fun of the worst piece of cinema ever made: Plan 9 From Outer Space!
My wife and daughters stayed home. They don’t quite share the same sense of humor that the guys do. Speaking of which…
A female relative told my wife that she didn’t like The Tripods Attack as much as her brother did, in part because the book was ‘too gruesome.’
I answered by rubbing my hands together, cackling evilly and then using one-syllable:
“Good!”
Not that I like being gruesome per se. No, I rubbed my hands with glee because a mother thinks my book is too gruesome.
I know it’s horribly politically incorrect these days to say it, but boys and girls are different mentally as well as physically. A lot of educators and media figures tried telling my generation otherwise, but the fact remained: Come Saturday morning, boys watched GI Joe, Transformers and Inhumanoids, while girls chose to watch shows like Goldie Gold, Jem and the Strawberry Shortcake specials.
Girls liked shows where people wore beautiful clothes, cooked, sang, made new friends or shopped for whatever they wanted on a whim. Guys liked shows where the heroes wore armor and blew stuff up.
Back me up here folks; am I right? Of course.
I speak in generalities, of course. But in general, women are relationship oriented, while men are task oriented. Women are good at making connections between people, while men are wired to provide and protect. As a result, girls rarely go to the bathroom for just one minute, and boys rarely can spend just one minute killing something in a video game.
And, in general, boys like gross stuff a lot more.
As another Catholic blogger put it (I think it was The Sci Fi Catholic), our modern society has, in many ways, tried to ‘put skirts’ on the boys and tell them that what they like is, in so many words, bad.
Mom’s wrinkle their noses at their son’s liking the Garbage Pail kids, and are told they are responsible parents. But if a Dad wrinkles his nose because he doesn’t want to watch Winnona Rider in Little Women for the umpteenth time, he’s excoriated for being insensitive.
Meh!
Well, the point of this little rant is to say that, yes, there are some gooshy parts in my fiction. And I’m a devout, practicing Catholic who unapologetically likes gooshy parts now and again. Maybe it’s because I heard about how David decapitated Goliath when the wee lad was twelve…
My point is this: In much fiction today, and Catholic fiction in particular, the boys are not the kinds of people that young men want to, or even can emulate. The days of Flash Gordon, Buck Rogers or Battlestar Galactica’s Starbuck, where the hero takes out the bad guys and saves the pretty girl from a horrible fate, seem to largely have gone the way of the Rubiks Cube.
Edward from Twilight is a fantasy man that no guy could hope to really be like in real life. Sorry, but I never bought into Luke Skywalker as being a wanna-be, space zen master. And turn on the TV, what kinds of guys do you see? Guys ruled either by baser instincts OR guys so feminzied you might watch them on TV, but you’d never seriously want them at a party.
Bleh. And this goes twice as bad for a great deal of modern Catholic fiction, which often (it has always seemed to me) isn’t written with the teenage boy in mind, but his mother, granmother, or whoever else is in the Catholic bookstore picking out a Confimation present.
…Or, as my daughter put it: “A lot of Catholic stuff out there is girly stuff!”
Amen, sister. Part of the reason I wrote Tripods, then, was to make something that was Catholic *and* would get boys interested, to show that a boy doesn’t have to be a girl to be a Catholic.
….so, when I wrote The Tripods Attack , I wanted to write a piece where a male teenager behaves like a real teenager would, but still operates from a framework of authentic Catholic values. In other words, something I woulda liked to read when I was that age.
True, there are girls and women who like it. There are men who don’t like it. But I’ve yet to hear from the teenage boy who has read it and didn’t like it, and they were the audience I had in mind. Boys who like stories of adventure, with giant robots, spaceships, believeable heroes, dispecible villains, things blowing up, people throwing up, AND the hero coming out the ultimate winner…they were my intended audience.
In my humble opinion, many boys need to be told that, really, God made you the way you are. Don’t sin, and don’t indulge in anything you ought not to. But Chesterton once likened our lives in Christ to children playing on a mountain top, safe behind a wall that protects us from falling down a cliff. Play and enjoy the playground. Don’t hop the wall, and you joy could be boundless.
More later on. I’ve got to go back to The Emperor of North America, and find out how Gilbert’s gonna escape his latest deathtrap.
God bless,
JDM
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Claire is very healthy