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SMNTY Classics: Banned Books · Stuff Mom Never Told You

0:05
Speaker 1: Hey, this is Annie and Samantha and welcome to Stephman
0:07
Speaker 1: Never Told You, a production of iHeart Radio. And recently
0:19
Speaker 1: we had an episode where we talked about book banning,
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Speaker 1: specifically what's going on in the United States right now
0:28
Speaker 1: with book banning, which is a lot. But as we
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Speaker 1: mentioned in that episode, book banning has quite a long history,
0:36
Speaker 1: quite a long history, and it's pretty telling. And in
0:40
Speaker 1: that spirit, we do have a classic all about banned
0:46
Speaker 1: books for you to give you more context in this conversation,
0:52
Speaker 1: So please enjoy. Welcome to Stuff Mom Never Told You
0:59
Speaker 1: From housetop dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
1:07
Speaker 1: I'm Kristen and I'm Caroline, and today, by listener requests,
1:12
Speaker 1: we are kicking off a two part Summer book Club
1:16
Speaker 1: two thousand and twelve series, and we're talking about saucy
1:21
Speaker 1: books books. We've discussed romance novels before, the genre unfortunately
1:30
Speaker 1: termed chick lit before, and I would say that for
1:35
Speaker 1: women's literature popular fiction this summer. The title that everybody's
1:42
Speaker 1: talking about is we gotta say it, Caroline, It's fifty
1:46
Speaker 1: Shades of Gray. Yeah, And as I was just telling Kristin,
1:49
Speaker 1: I didn't even really know what this book was until
1:51
Speaker 1: about a month ago. Yeah, and there was a specific
1:53
Speaker 1: request also for our summer book club series do not
1:57
Speaker 1: be about fifty Shades of Gray. So don't worry, We're
2:00
Speaker 1: not about to talk about you know what some might
2:05
Speaker 1: not really appreciate in terms of erotic fiction, that is,
2:10
Speaker 1: fifty Shades of Gray. But all this fifty Shades of
2:12
Speaker 1: Gray buzz got us thinking about books that are hard
2:17
Speaker 1: to get your hands on, and specifically book banning in
2:20
Speaker 1: the US, because I think today in the information age,
2:24
Speaker 1: with the Internet, you know, we can it seems like
2:27
Speaker 1: we can read whatever we want, but that was certainly
2:32
Speaker 1: not the case for a long time here in the US,
2:36
Speaker 1: and going back in history to as far back as oh,
2:40
Speaker 1: I don't know for fifty BC. What happened in four
2:43
Speaker 1: fifty BC? Well, Carol on a guy named Anaxagris an
2:52
Speaker 1: axe Gorris, thank you, Okay, we'll just run with that.
2:55
Speaker 1: A guy with a not easily to roll off the
2:58
Speaker 1: tongue name Anaxagoras. He wrote some stuff and people did
3:03
Speaker 1: not like it. Yeah. He was a Greek philosopher who
3:07
Speaker 1: ended up getting forced out of Athens and had his
3:09
Speaker 1: writings burned after claiming that this crazy notion that the
3:13
Speaker 1: sun was actually a white hot stone and the moon
3:15
Speaker 1: reflected the Sun's rays. So everybody's like, get out out
3:20
Speaker 1: of town. We hate you, you're stupid. And then in
3:24
Speaker 1: three Socrates was required to drink poison for supposedly corrupting youth,
3:31
Speaker 1: leading them to criticize Athens again, what's going on with
3:34
Speaker 1: you Greeks? But I mean seriously, like, as long as
3:36
Speaker 1: there've been ideas or thoughts happening, there's been some form
3:40
Speaker 1: of censorship. Yeah, and people, humans, human animals seemed to
3:46
Speaker 1: really enjoy just having things on paper, other people's ideas
3:50
Speaker 1: on paper that they can then rip up or ban all.
3:55
Speaker 1: Anaxagoras got got so much guff because they thought that
3:59
Speaker 1: he was being derogatory to the gods. Yeah, and that
4:02
Speaker 1: kind of theme of offending people's religious sensibilities is certainly
4:07
Speaker 1: something that we still see with book banning today, and
4:11
Speaker 1: it was something when we go look at the history
4:14
Speaker 1: of book banning in the US, Christianity does play a
4:20
Speaker 1: pretty big role, starting in eighteen seventy three with US
4:23
Speaker 1: Post Service inspector and politician Anthony Comstock, who was a
4:28
Speaker 1: devout Christian and founder of the New York Society for
4:32
Speaker 1: the Suppression of Vice, right, And this whole society's goal
4:36
Speaker 1: was to prevent obscene materials from polluting the minds of
4:41
Speaker 1: the American people. And he really targeted erotica and crime stories,
4:45
Speaker 1: which I think is funny. So it's not just sexy
4:47
Speaker 1: times that he doesn't want people to read about. It's
4:49
Speaker 1: crime too. And he considered dime novels to be pornography
4:53
Speaker 1: for children. Yeah, And this kind of puritanical intrusion on
5:00
Speaker 1: literature and printing was It seemed like it was pretty
5:03
Speaker 1: widely accepted at the time, because Congress did pass the
5:07
Speaker 1: Comstock Acts, which were an anti obscenity bill that Comstock
5:11
Speaker 1: had drafted, which included a ban on contraceptives and also
5:15
Speaker 1: barred obscene literature from interstate commerce. And this kind of
5:19
Speaker 1: puritanical intrusion on literature and what people were and weren't
5:25
Speaker 1: allowed to read legally was I mean, I guess fairly
5:29
Speaker 1: widespread at the time because US Congress did pass the
5:32
Speaker 1: Comstock Act while which was an antip scenity bill that
5:36
Speaker 1: Anthony Comstock had drafted, which included a ban on contraceptives
5:40
Speaker 1: and also barred obscene literature from interstate commerce and by
5:44
Speaker 1: obscene literature. We are also talking about things like Margaret
5:49
Speaker 1: Sanger's early pamphlets on contraception. Oh oh my. I mean
5:55
Speaker 1: even even that like kind of biological reproductive information is
6:00
Speaker 1: considered you know, banned. Yeah, it's so funny. Everybody got
6:04
Speaker 1: their panties on a twist about just learning about women's bodies,
6:07
Speaker 1: just learning about contraception, family planning, anything like that, any
6:11
Speaker 1: any sexy anything, Yeah, was just too much, and all
6:15
Speaker 1: because it had to do with women's bodies. They were like, Nope, nope,
6:17
Speaker 1: can't read it. It's going to pollute everybody's minds. We're
6:19
Speaker 1: all going to be filthy afterward. And something that I
6:22
Speaker 1: didn't know was that Boston was really the hotbed of
6:29
Speaker 1: literary suppression. Bostonians out there, you guys, I mean, claim
6:35
Speaker 1: to fame one books were so often banned in Boston
6:39
Speaker 1: that in the nineteen fifties, stoleacious titles would be labeled
6:45
Speaker 1: banned in Boston to help move them off the shelves
6:48
Speaker 1: because people be like, oh, it must be bad if
6:50
Speaker 1: it was banned in Boston. Yeah, I don't, I don't
6:53
Speaker 1: get it. I mean, you guys had the tea party.
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Speaker 1: You know, you threw tea bags in the water and stuff,
6:58
Speaker 1: and now here you are banning books. I don't get it.
6:59
Speaker 1: But the efforts in Boston were really led by the
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Speaker 1: watch and Wards Society, who kind of like Comstocks New
7:06
Speaker 1: York Society for the Suppression of Ice. Yeah, this was
7:09
Speaker 1: coming from the Boston Globe. Just to give you a
7:11
Speaker 1: sense of how much the Watching Wards Society cracked down
7:16
Speaker 1: and also how much people like I mean, they jumped
7:19
Speaker 1: when the Watching Words Society cracked its whip. For instance,
7:23
Speaker 1: in its heyday, the Boston Public Library kept books which
7:27
Speaker 1: the Watching Wards Society found objectionable in a locked room.
7:31
Speaker 1: The Museum of Fine Arts kept parts of its Asian
7:34
Speaker 1: collection behind doors. And again the you know, the label
7:37
Speaker 1: band in Boston became a selling point for smutty literature. Yeah,
7:42
Speaker 1: well they weren't the only ones. The nineteen fifties were definitely,
7:47
Speaker 1: definitely a stretch of time that was big on book banning. Yeah,
7:51
Speaker 1: for sure. In nineteen fifty three, for instance, Senator Joseph McCarthy,
7:56
Speaker 1: whose name should be very familiar, had his AIDS search
7:59
Speaker 1: US Information and Service libraries in Europe and Asia for
8:02
Speaker 1: subversive books and libraries were accused of circulating communist materials. Yeah,
8:07
Speaker 1: all the McCarthyism that was sweeping the nation at the
8:10
Speaker 1: time seemed to kind of replace banning books on the
8:14
Speaker 1: basis of immorality to banning books on the basis of
8:18
Speaker 1: subversive communist undertones, right, just making everybody scared, yeah, and
8:23
Speaker 1: burning books and such. But then, thank goodness, in nineteen
8:28
Speaker 1: eighty two, the Supreme Court stepped in with the case
8:31
Speaker 1: Board of Education Island Tree School District versus Pico with
8:36
Speaker 1: a little bit of a little bit of sensibility about
8:41
Speaker 1: this whole book banning issue. Yeah, they ruled that public
8:44
Speaker 1: school boards could not remove a book from the library quote,
8:47
Speaker 1: simply because they disliked the ideas contained in those books.
8:51
Speaker 1: Basically saying that there needs to be a balance between
8:54
Speaker 1: school's role as an educator and student's right of access
8:57
Speaker 1: to the material. So a book has to be pervasively
9:01
Speaker 1: vulgar to be banned. Yeah, And this case sprang out
9:06
Speaker 1: of nineteen seventy six issue where a bunch of parents
9:11
Speaker 1: and school staff ordered that certain books be removed from
9:15
Speaker 1: a junior high in high school library. And to give
9:18
Speaker 1: you an idea of some of the books that they
9:21
Speaker 1: wanted to ban Slaughterhouse Five by Kurt Vonnegut, A Go
9:24
Speaker 1: ask Alice, which is a commonly banned book, A Reader
9:28
Speaker 1: for Writers edited by Jerome Walter Archer, The Naked Ape,
9:33
Speaker 1: The Best Short Stories by Negro Writers edited by Langston Hughes,
9:38
Speaker 1: a lot of other race related titles as well. And
9:41
Speaker 1: they claimed that the books were anti American, anti Christian,
9:44
Speaker 1: anti Semitic, and just playing filthy, and thankfully the Supreme
9:49
Speaker 1: Court stepped in and said yeah, yeah. And there was
9:52
Speaker 1: another case in nineteen eighty nine Texas v. Johnson, where
9:56
Speaker 1: a Supreme Court Justice William J. Brennan, Junior, said that
10:00
Speaker 1: there is a bedrock principle underlying the First Amendment. It
10:02
Speaker 1: is that the government may not prohibit the expression of
10:05
Speaker 1: an idea simply because society finds the idea itself offensive
10:09
Speaker 1: or disagreeable. So we have people like this saying things
10:12
Speaker 1: like this, which are wonderful and supportive of knowledge and
10:15
Speaker 1: access to knowledge. But book banning efforts to ban books
10:20
Speaker 1: are not going away, basically no. And the thing is,
10:23
Speaker 1: even though we have Supreme Court justices like William J.
10:26
Speaker 1: Brenner who have in the past supported First Amendment rights
10:31
Speaker 1: and the freedom of expression. That is not to say
10:35
Speaker 1: that obscene literature is legally protected in the US. So
10:42
Speaker 1: a case that christ and I actually learned about in
10:45
Speaker 1: our journalism days at college and in our legal ethics
10:50
Speaker 1: course exactly we had a very dynamic professor. I really
10:53
Speaker 1: liked that class. This case is called Miller v. California,
10:57
Speaker 1: and it basically established a three point test for scinity.
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Speaker 1: And those points are one, the text must appeal to
11:04
Speaker 1: prurient interests when taken as a whole, it must involve
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Speaker 1: patently offensive sexual conduct. And it must contain no literary, artistic, political,
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Speaker 1: or scientific value. And these are points that have come
11:16
Speaker 1: up again and again in various cases because there is
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Speaker 1: a desire to protect literature that is actually out there
11:22
Speaker 1: to inform and to educate it. This will prevent people
11:27
Speaker 1: from this willy nilly being like, well, that's against my
11:29
Speaker 1: religious beliefs or my moral beliefs, and I don't want
11:31
Speaker 1: anybody else to read it. Yeah, And in the in
11:33
Speaker 1: the past, the way that the law approached obscenity was
11:38
Speaker 1: more narrowly focused on whether or not there was a
11:41
Speaker 1: particular obscene scene in the book. For instance, in Ulysses,
11:48
Speaker 1: which we'll get to. It all sprang out of one
11:51
Speaker 1: episode where the protagonists masturbates rather than the entire work,
11:56
Speaker 1: and the law used to focus just on and how
12:00
Speaker 1: it might affect vulnerable populations, particularly to miners. Yeah. So,
12:05
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty three, in the wonderfully named case United
12:09
Speaker 1: States versus one book called Ulysses as opposed to what
12:12
Speaker 1: I don't know, the judge ruled that Ulysses was not obscene,
12:17
Speaker 1: and he didn't use the Hicklin test as it had
12:19
Speaker 1: been recognized prior, which was just focusing on the vulnerable
12:22
Speaker 1: population and how obscenity affected them. The judge ended up
12:25
Speaker 1: saying that it should be judged by its effects on
12:28
Speaker 1: the average person. Right, because all of this that was
12:31
Speaker 1: in nineteen thirty three, as you mentioned, and up until
12:35
Speaker 1: that time, the sale of ulysses in the US, or
12:38
Speaker 1: mailing it through the mail that's really descriptive, right, that's right,
12:42
Speaker 1: email it through the mail had been banned since nineteen
12:47
Speaker 1: twenty two because of the masturbation scene that a younger
12:50
Speaker 1: girl had read, freaked out, her parents freaked out, and
12:52
Speaker 1: then you know, we have a legal case spring up
12:55
Speaker 1: from that end. The nineteen thirty three case usv. One
12:59
Speaker 1: book called Ulysses was a test case brought on by
13:03
Speaker 1: Random House actually that wanted to publish Ulysses. So they
13:06
Speaker 1: were testing the waters with that, and like you said,
13:10
Speaker 1: the judge ruled that, hey, it's not obscene. Let's move
13:12
Speaker 1: on from there. But some other controversial publishers and writers
13:19
Speaker 1: who have rankled conservatives throughout the twentieth century, Going back
13:23
Speaker 1: a little bit before that Ulysses case, we have hl
13:26
Speaker 1: Mancin aka the Sage of Baltimore, who seemed to love
13:32
Speaker 1: just making conservatives really mad with his writing. Right. He
13:37
Speaker 1: was actually arrested in nineteen twenty six in Boston for
13:40
Speaker 1: distributing copies of American Mercury, which was a publication that
13:43
Speaker 1: he put out. The publication had been banned by, as
13:48
Speaker 1: we mentioned earlier, the Watch and Wards Society, who contended
13:52
Speaker 1: that the periodical was obscene, and the judge disagreed with them.
13:56
Speaker 1: Mancin turned around and ended up suing the society. He
13:59
Speaker 1: was based kind of lawsuit happy because he thought, here,
14:03
Speaker 1: I am, I'm going to prove that this stuff is
14:04
Speaker 1: not bad for the public, that society is not being
14:07
Speaker 1: affected for the worse, and I just want my voice heard. Yeah,
14:10
Speaker 1: and he used a satirical style that allowed him to
14:14
Speaker 1: poke fun at the thoughts, words actions of the US
14:18
Speaker 1: and it's more conservative citizens, and he often spoke out
14:21
Speaker 1: directly against religious fundamentalists and fun fact, hl Mancon first
14:26
Speaker 1: to use the term Bible belt right. He also coined
14:29
Speaker 1: the term monkey trial of the Scopes trial. So, moving
14:34
Speaker 1: on from Mancon, one guy who we can thank for
14:39
Speaker 1: some of our smuttiest books in our home libraries Barney Rossett,
14:45
Speaker 1: who founded the publishing company Grove Press, and essentially the
14:50
Speaker 1: aim of Grove Press was to breach the dam of
14:54
Speaker 1: American Puritanism, as he called it. He brought a bunch
14:58
Speaker 1: of writers to Americans attention, including Samuel Beckett. He published
15:02
Speaker 1: che Guivara, and in the nineteen sixties he published D. H.
15:06
Speaker 1: Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover, which originally appeared in Italy in
15:09
Speaker 1: nineteen twenty eight, and Henry Miller's Tropic of Cancer, which
15:13
Speaker 1: was a very controversial, sexually explicit autobiographical novel that had
15:19
Speaker 1: been published in Paris in nineteen thirty four and banned
15:22
Speaker 1: since then in the US. Yeah, and I gotta say
15:24
Speaker 1: that Tropic of Cancer is in fact so sexually explicit
15:27
Speaker 1: it is almost I find difficult to read. Really, Yes,
15:31
Speaker 1: there was just so much penis interesting. Yeah, but Lady
15:36
Speaker 1: Chatterley's Lover was a really important book because the case
15:41
Speaker 1: started out the obscenity case started out in England in
15:44
Speaker 1: nineteen sixty with the case of Crown v. Penguin Books,
15:48
Speaker 1: and essentially Penguin won and they were allowed to sell
15:53
Speaker 1: the books, but in the US you still couldn't get
15:55
Speaker 1: your hands on the copy until Barney Rossit fought the
15:59
Speaker 1: legal battle in the United States and Lady Chatterley's Lover
16:03
Speaker 1: got into our hands here. And there's a great scene
16:05
Speaker 1: in I believe it's the first season of Madmen when
16:09
Speaker 1: they pan to the secretary's breakroom or something and they're
16:12
Speaker 1: all passing around a copy of the unabridged version of
16:15
Speaker 1: Lady Chatterley's Lover, which because initially the publishers said, hey,
16:19
Speaker 1: if you cut out all of the dirty stuff, then
16:23
Speaker 1: we can publish it, and D. H. Lawrence was like, no, no,
16:29
Speaker 1: my woodsman's sex scenes will remain, and he did a
16:32
Speaker 1: little d snap formation with his fingers. But actually Rossa
16:37
Speaker 1: had to fight several battles over Lady Chatterley's Lover because,
16:41
Speaker 1: like the earlier book we mentioned, the main distribution method
16:45
Speaker 1: was through the mail. Yeah, the Postmaster General actually barred
16:49
Speaker 1: the book from the mail, but a federal judge ended
16:52
Speaker 1: up overturning the band, ruling that the book had redeeming merit,
16:54
Speaker 1: And that is the key. Does the piece of literature
16:57
Speaker 1: have redeeming merit? Yeah? And Tropic of Cancer, as anyone
17:01
Speaker 1: who has read it can imagine, was a whole lot
17:05
Speaker 1: of trouble for Barney Rossett. He faced more than sixty
17:08
Speaker 1: legal cases seeking to ban it in twenty one states
17:10
Speaker 1: and even led to Rossett's arrest, although the grand jury
17:14
Speaker 1: decided against an indictment. But it was It's interesting to
17:18
Speaker 1: hear or read interviews with Rossett because he was so
17:25
Speaker 1: just persistent and really didn't care whether what it took
17:29
Speaker 1: to bring racier titles to the US exactly. Well, some
17:37
Speaker 1: of these people who are out to ban books for
17:41
Speaker 1: whatever reason. You can't just get a book band willie
17:44
Speaker 1: nilly out of the gate right away. You have to
17:47
Speaker 1: actually raise a challenge, and so that's an attempt to
17:50
Speaker 1: remove or restrict materials based on the objections of a
17:53
Speaker 1: person or group. Most challenges are unsuccessful, and libraries and
17:57
Speaker 1: schools are typically able to retain the challenge materials. But
18:01
Speaker 1: between nineteen ninety and two thousand, according to the American
18:04
Speaker 1: Library Association, there were six thousand, three hundred and sixty
18:07
Speaker 1: four challenges raised against books, and that number for ten years.
18:13
Speaker 1: I feel like that's pretty high. I feel like that's
18:15
Speaker 1: a lot of challenged books. Well, especially when you consider
18:18
Speaker 1: it in the contemporary context of all of the more
18:22
Speaker 1: sexually explicit or racy stuff, racy stuff that we see
18:26
Speaker 1: on television, on the internet. Yeah, you know, the fact
18:29
Speaker 1: that we're still so concerned about books I find I mean,
18:32
Speaker 1: do kids even go to libraries anymore? I hope so
18:34
Speaker 1: I walk upset too. But I'm just saying, like, is
18:37
Speaker 1: really these books are the thing that you're worried about
18:40
Speaker 1: the most, Like, shouldn't you maybe take the internet away first?
18:42
Speaker 1: But the two top challenged topics basically are sexually explicit
18:48
Speaker 1: material and offensive language, followed by things with occult themes, violence,
18:54
Speaker 1: anything that seems to be perceived to promote homosexuality, as
18:58
Speaker 1: well as religious viewpoints and speaking of occult themes. Between
19:02
Speaker 1: two thousand and two thousand and nine, the Harry Potter
19:06
Speaker 1: series the number one most banned books in the United
19:11
Speaker 1: States because of the wizardry teaching out children to be wizards.
19:16
Speaker 1: It makes people very upset. My French professor in college
19:20
Speaker 1: went on a rant about how you know you see
19:22
Speaker 1: these people wearing black around campus. They're not God, they're
19:26
Speaker 1: witches and they're doing voodoo when they are evil because
19:29
Speaker 1: of Harry Potter. Yeah, because one of my classmates had
19:31
Speaker 1: given a presentation in French on Hairy Potter. So well
19:34
Speaker 1: with the offensive language stuff as well. There are still
19:36
Speaker 1: issues over Huckleberry Finn because he refers to Jim as
19:42
Speaker 1: the inn word. It's like, well, what do we do?
19:44
Speaker 1: What do we do with that? Because that was you know,
19:47
Speaker 1: writing in the time. How does it apply now? And again,
19:50
Speaker 1: if you apply that Miller test and look at the body,
19:53
Speaker 1: the entire body of the work and whether or not
19:55
Speaker 1: it has literary merit, usually things shake out in favor
19:58
Speaker 1: of the book. Right. Well, there there are people, don't worry,
20:02
Speaker 1: there are people supporting books out there. There's this whole
20:06
Speaker 1: band Books Week, which I believe this year is in
20:09
Speaker 1: September and of September. Yes, it is from September thirtieth
20:13
Speaker 1: to October sixth, So that gives listeners plenty of time
20:16
Speaker 1: to get a lot of a lot of books to
20:19
Speaker 1: read openly. Yeah, and not burn and not burn them. Well, yeah,
20:24
Speaker 1: it's definitely. It's not only to kind of feature the
20:27
Speaker 1: band books to get more people to read them, but
20:29
Speaker 1: it also the whole point of it is to celebrate
20:31
Speaker 1: the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment. Yeah,
20:35
Speaker 1: because we've talked a lot about racier literature, but a
20:38
Speaker 1: lot of common books that have been banned over the
20:41
Speaker 1: years include titles like The Great Gad speed Catcher in
20:43
Speaker 1: the Rye, Grapes of Wrath, to Kill a Mockingbird, the
20:46
Speaker 1: Color Purple, all of which deal with difficult themes. But
20:50
Speaker 1: I couldn't imagine not having them to read, and you know,
20:54
Speaker 1: all of the the rich imagery that they bestow upon us.
21:00
Speaker 1: I mean, except for the Grapes of Wrath. I don't
21:01
Speaker 1: know what happened to me. Why I didn't read that
21:03
Speaker 1: in high school, but I read I read these other
21:05
Speaker 1: ones in I guess in high school. Yeah. So next
21:09
Speaker 1: up in our Summer Book Club two parter, we are
21:14
Speaker 1: going to dive deeper into racer material and talk specifically
21:19
Speaker 1: about erotica. Warning to those who have younger listeners in toe.
21:26
Speaker 1: In the meantime, I want to hear from listeners curious
21:29
Speaker 1: to know if your library has ever tried to ban books?
21:35
Speaker 1: Have you ever challenged a book? Have you read banned books?
21:37
Speaker 1: I don't know, what do you? What do you think
21:38
Speaker 1: about censorship and all of that? International listeners are what
21:41
Speaker 1: are the state of book banning and censorship in your
21:46
Speaker 1: countries as well? Let us know, mom. Stuff at Discovery
21:49
Speaker 1: dot com is where you can send all of your
21:51
Speaker 1: letters that we love to read. And speaking of which,
21:55
Speaker 1: we have two letters here, both about manic Pixie dream guys.
22:03
Speaker 1: So Brandon wrote in with a couple of suggestions about
22:07
Speaker 1: manic Pixie dream guys, and he says, there are two
22:11
Speaker 1: candidates that I can guess, the sort of prince charming
22:14
Speaker 1: archetype that pops up sometimes in movies to be the
22:17
Speaker 1: object of his affection and his all glamor and gentlemanliness
22:21
Speaker 1: and just so perfect who usually sort of convinces the
22:24
Speaker 1: heroine that there's more to love than all that He's
22:27
Speaker 1: almost never given any real sort of dimension and is
22:30
Speaker 1: defined only by his interactions with the female main character
22:33
Speaker 1: and sometimes by her friends. He may not have pixie ust,
22:36
Speaker 1: but his smile is usually slightly blinding because of how
22:40
Speaker 1: white his teeth are. The other option maybe fits less well.
22:45
Speaker 1: He is the male character who is in the perfect
22:48
Speaker 1: on paper life the female protagonist has at the beginning
22:51
Speaker 1: of a movie, but ends up being kind of Sometimes
22:55
Speaker 1: he's an outright jerk, other times he's just dull. He
22:58
Speaker 1: pops up in those kind of movie these reesed. Witherspoon
23:01
Speaker 1: stars in a lot where she's dating him or engaged
23:03
Speaker 1: to him or something, and then goes off on some
23:05
Speaker 1: kind of adventure and ends up believing him triumphantly at
23:09
Speaker 1: the end of the movie. True, it's often for a
23:11
Speaker 1: true love interest of some kind, but occasionally we also
23:13
Speaker 1: see this happen when she decides she doesn't need to
23:16
Speaker 1: define herself by the man she's with. So too excellent candidates,
23:21
Speaker 1: Thank you, Brandon. Okay, this one's from Amber. She says
23:24
Speaker 1: that she loved the man Pixie Green Girl episode and
23:27
Speaker 1: that it raised such paradoxical views that we in the
23:30
Speaker 1: US have about women. However, when you asked about male
23:33
Speaker 1: equivalence to this female caricature, My brain instantly jumped to
23:37
Speaker 1: Matthew McConaughey. If Zoe Deschanelle is the girls girl, he
23:40
Speaker 1: is the guy's guy. With the exception of a few
23:42
Speaker 1: dramatic roles time to Kill, Cadillac, lawyer, and amistad, he
23:46
Speaker 1: has played roles to portray very happy male qualities, travel
23:50
Speaker 1: to exotic places, expensive cars, great figure, I agree, power, freedom,
23:55
Speaker 1: and he always gets the girl. Another celebrity that fits
23:58
Speaker 1: would be Christopher Pine for the same I do wonder
24:00
Speaker 1: why the social discourse is not addressed in male counterparts
24:03
Speaker 1: but has only focused on the female pixies. Hopefully the
24:06
Speaker 1: uproar over this will die down and we can just
24:08
Speaker 1: enjoy people for who they are. I guess my response
24:12
Speaker 1: to this would be I don't know if there is
24:14
Speaker 1: a total male equivalent to a Mani Pixie Dream girl.
24:18
Speaker 1: I think that a lot of I was thinking about
24:20
Speaker 1: this a lot of Jason Siegel's characters, like in I
24:23
Speaker 1: Love You Man, Yeah, Manic Pixie dream because he's the catalyst,
24:27
Speaker 1: for instance, for Paul Rudd's transformation, and while it may
24:31
Speaker 1: not be romantic, and he kind of goes through his
24:34
Speaker 1: own transformation as well. I don't know he tends to
24:36
Speaker 1: kind of play sort of hippie drippy dudes. Yeah, and
24:40
Speaker 1: I love him. Yeah. If in case you're listening to
24:42
Speaker 1: Jason Siegel, that's true. So if you are a Jason
24:46
Speaker 1: Siegel and would like to get in touch with me,
24:48
Speaker 1: or if you have any any thoughts you'd like to share,
24:51
Speaker 1: moms Stuff at discovery dot com is where you can
24:54
Speaker 1: send your letters, and you can also find us on Facebook,
24:56
Speaker 1: follow us on Twitter at Mom's Stuff podcast. And if
25:00
Speaker 1: you would like to learn more about the history of
25:03
Speaker 1: banning books and how people go about getting those books
25:06
Speaker 1: off of the library shelves, you can read the article
25:09
Speaker 1: how Our Books Banned by Kristen Conger at HowStuffWorks dot com.
25:17
Speaker 1: For more on this and thousands of other topics, visit
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