Books of Sad Realities
Girls and Sex
by Peggy Orenstein
Trigger warnings: Eating disorders, domestic violence, issues relating to sex.
In today’s day and age, many people claim to be progressive, yet sex is still something of a taboo. Sex is never to be discussed even in supposed “safe spaces.” And while this may seem normal, this lack of open discussion and conversation with young women and girls about sex has some devastating consequences.
Peggy Orenstein interviewed over 70 young girls and college-aged women. What she found was shocking. The overall theme is parents need to have more open and honest discussions with girls and young women about sex. To begin, due to the fact that many parents don’t talk to their daughters about sex, said children get their ideas about sex and their “sexual identity” from the media. The media, as in songs, television, and books, mainly discusses sex from the male perspective. This can lead to low self-esteem, hinder academic achievement, and in some cases, can lead to eating disorders.
Another aspect Orenstien covered was that many women find themselves pressured to have sexual relations with their partners and even friends. This is because they fear that they may look like a prude. Many women and girls have difficulty trying to not be a prude but trying not to be labeled a “slut” either. It’s a slippery slope that they feel their whole identity as a human being revolves around. Furthermore, many women, despite having negative sexual experiences, continued to have sex with the same people. This is due to the fact that they didn’t know sex is supposed to feel good for women.
Furthermore, because women only got their ideas about romance from the media, they were more tolerant of and more susceptible to getting involved in abusive relationships and unhappy marriages. Orenstein says this is because we still have this idea that women live to please and serve men. Therefore women do not recongize that they have their own needs both physical and emotional, which should and can be met. I do think this is a very important read, especially for women in college.
Maid
by Stephanie Land
If you enjoyed the Netflix show Maid, you will surely enjoy the book it was based off of. Maid is a memoir by Stephanie Land. She tells her story about how a fling in college ruined her life. She became pregnant with the child of a man who abused her: physically, emotionally, and financially. This resulted in Land making a run for it with her then three-year-old daughter.
Land wrote about her experience working as a cleaning service worker. This book, while being entertaining, opens up some themes about class dynamics. While Land struggled to survive and working herself to the bone, her clients treated her poorly. Either she was completely invisible to them, or some of her clients openly insulted and even physically abused her.
Another aspect was that Land was able to discover a lot about the personal lives of her clients simply by cleaning their houses. This was because she was able to look at their items. For example, she concluded that one of her client’s husbands was cheating on his partner as she discovered lingerie around the house that was much smaller than the client’s size. Furthermore, she recognized that said client was dealing with the infidelity by losing herself in romantic fantasy novels and smoking marajuana and cigarettes.
Another lesson that Land learned as a maid was that money did not buy happiness. Many of her clients lived sad and unfulfilling lives. Overall it is a very good book. Not only does it manage to shed light on the difficulty that poverty brings, yet it also paints a beautiful picture of what really matters in life.
—Jalaine Olks, Books Editor
Six of Crows
by Leigh Bardugo
TW: Death, drug use, violence
Six of Crows is the story of six teenagers: Kaz Brekker the demon, Inej Ghafa the wraith, Jesper Fahey the gun slinger, Nina Zenick the heart render, Matthias Helvar the Fjerdian, and Wylan Van Eck the demolitions expert in the fictional city of Ketterdam. These six teenagers live in a life of crime, and each have their own reasons for it, their traumas ranging from death, slavery, war, prison, abuse, the list goes on. In this book, they have been hired to find a dangerous drug that has been killing the Grisha, individuals with powers, and destroy it. The only problem is it’s in the land of Fjerda, the country that kills Grisha. This book is full of action, mystery, sadness, and dramatics and well worth the read.
—Kelsey Vanderpool
The musical artist Peter Sagar from Montreal, Canada, began releasing music by the name HOMESHAKE since his first studio album in 2014. Sagar was a guitarist for Mac Demarco before he eventually made the decision to venture into his own solo-musical project as HOMESHAKE, where he is the singer-songwriter. He is known for creating much of his music in his bedroom studio, as featured in the photo (at right). His albums are created on his guitar, keyboards, and synthesizers, producing overall electronic, synthpop, and lo-fi music.
In his fourth studio album, Helium (2019), the lyrics of his tracks “Like Mariah” and “Just Like My” feature some of his inspirations: Mariah Carey and the love for his “oma” (grandma). Sagar has stated that he dislikes making “fast-paced” tracks and enjoys producing his soft, ambient music such as his work in Helium. However, in a twinkly song titled, “Nothing Could Be Better” from this album, he veers away from his modest, slower music to a motivational track with lyrics about taking a break from being alone and joining his partner to socialize. Sagar has stated that he dislikes making “fast-paced” tracks and enjoys producing soft, ambient music such as his work in Helium. As many of his songs are about peaceful solitude, this is one of my favorite tracks because Sagar shows off that he can expand on making music with a variety of sounds, motivations, and messages for listeners that also enjoy branching out of solitude.
Code Geass is a good show despite its flaws. The show started in 2006, and unlike many other anime series, it is not based on a manga or anything. It is a show about secrets, mystique, revolution, action, politics, and the bonds between friends and family. Lelouch (lay-loosh) is the main character, and it’s debatable whether he’s a hero or villain. He gains the power to force absolute obedience from whoever looks into his eye and uses it to take control of a rebellion against the fictional Britannian Empire, which has colonized and now oppresses the country formerly known as Japan, where Lelouch lives in hiding from his father, the Emperor of Britannia. To me, this show is most remembered for 2.5 things: the constant forward momentum of the story, the non-sequiturs and weird choices, and the half-point is the egregious fan-service.
The FX original television-series The Bear features a young chef, Carmen, after he leaves his fast-paced culinary career at a Michelin-starred restaurant. When a tragic family event draws Carmen back to his family restaurant, The Original Beef of Chicagoland (“The Beef,” for short), he soon realizes the unorganized working environment and the rocky state the restaurant is in. “The Beef” contains a family-like system in which each person in the kitchen relies on one another on a working and personal level. Carmen feels like an outsider once he returns home because everyone at The Beef feels jaded that he chose not to use his professional culinary skills for their business instead of the fine-dining restaurant. The complicated family dynamics that are intertwined within this show demonstrate why Carmen left Chicago, and these relationships are the foundation of this series.
Based on the book by Dr. Seuss, The Lorax is a musical movie that is perfect for family movie nights. The story follows a boy named Ted (voiced by Zac Efron) who lives in a world where there is no more nature and everything around him is artificial. They even have to buy fresh air in bottles because of how polluted the world has become! When Ted finds out his crush Audrey (Swift’s character), dreams of seeing a real tree, he decides he is going to get her one. He sneaks out of town to go visit a mysterious man named The Onceler, who is said to be the only person who knows what happens to the trees. The man tells Ted about the mythic creature called the Lorax who is the protector of the forest and tells him the story of where all the trees went.
The Giver is a story about a dystopian society based on the novel of the same title by author Lois Lowry. Within this society, the citizens have no memory of the past and are controlled in every aspect of their lives. They are told who they will marry, assigned children who have been genetically perfected, forced to take daily injections for their health, and assigned what job they will have for the rest of their lives. There is no music, no art, no literature, no emotion, not even color! Their world is completely black and white.