Netta Baker

that deal with issues of authoritarian governments, with patriarchal religious control of women, with misogynistic cultures, with economic inequality, with imperialism, and this sort of feminine rage and a heroine who then is able to exert some control over that society.

which given our moment is something a lot of women feel is not available to them.

It's understanding.

I forget theorists who have talked about you have to accept books on their own internal logic.

Or you're faced with arguing they should be didactic texts teaching us virtue, which is actually what we kind of were doing in the 18th and 19th centuries, particularly with women, viewing it as this is how you, in a very patriarchal way, deliver goodness and virtue and values.

And women or other readers are passive receptors for what authorities have determined about

should be input, right?

Yeah, we do have a lot of documentation of the way people worry about women reading romanticy now is an exact mirror of what they worried about women reading romance in the 18th century.

Oh, wow.

And we're saying the same things.

It's dangerous to them.

It could give them wrong ideas about

Sex and sexuality, it's potentially hazardous.

And in doing that, we both ignore actual psychology of how value systems and doxa are developed.

But we also treat women as children.

Like violent video games, we say women and romance, this is dangerous.

It will teach them.

wrong things and they need to be protected from it.

And their reading material needs to reinforce what we deem as correct values.

I think that's an interesting question because it does often come back to reader interpretation and perception, right?