Guardian interview with Juno Dawson

[RoyalCorgi]

The Guardian is once more peddling male fantasies of what a teenage girl is:

www.theguardian.com/books/2020/may/11/juno-dawson-trans-alice-wonderland-interview-spice-girls

Dawson has written a novel based on Alice in Wonderland, but with a trans lead character:

'Wonderland is also a wake-up call to anyone who believes gender reassignment might be a happy-ever-after. Alice has recently returned to school after three months in hospital following a suicide attempt. “While I’m delighted with my perky little boobs,” she says, “I was profoundly disappointed that my urge to cut myself didn’t vanish with the first milligram of oestrogen to pass my lips.” Her problems, Dawson points out, are those of all too many young women. “When I’m at the Hay book festival or at Yale, these teenagers come into my signing queues and they are scarred. It must be talked about because it permanently affects girls.”'

Yes, teenage girls are really delighted with their perky little boobs, you misogynist little creep.

[T0tallyFuckedUpFamily]

despite having not read the book

Why would I spend money to read soft porn. Yuck. I’m glad that it’s been talked about by women, who all have experience of growing up female. It means that it can be discussed from the female point of view, rather than through the eyes of someone who grew up male and have a pornified view of young women and girls.

[TheProdigalKittensReturn]

When I was 17 "married men from outlying commuter towns" would have seemed about as sexually appealing as an old shoe.

[ScrimpshawTheSecond]

‘notice how the cow is not making a sound like human women do’

Sorry, unintentionally hilarious. Unlike ... cow women?

Why was it the biology teachers, so often? Anyone considering the reason just about zero girls chose biology in my school post S2 might have considered the reason being the grotty, grotty teacher that delighted in 'flirting' with the 12/13 year old girls.

I think he got made depute head, in the end. Probably just trying to keep him the fuck away from the pupils. Euch. Still makes my skin crawl when I think about it.

[JustTurtlesAllTheWayDown]

Honestly, if I knew a 17yo girl was meeting up for sex with random married men via an app, I'd be hugely concerned. That's not healthy sexual development. It's a huge red flag.

[OldCrone]

Ok, the usual suspects are frothing (despite having not read the book) that in WONDERLAND, my 17 year-old trans Alice has a sexual relationship.

Is that Dawson's interpretation of our discussion on here? Because if so, that's an interesting spin on it.

Alice dyes her hair blue and has an “active, app-based sex life with married men from outlying commuter towns”.

Is that now typical behaviour for 17-year-olds?

[TheProdigalKittensReturn]

I don't think even Rowling would start from an assumption that of course everyone should have and must have read all of her books, and she'd have far better grounds for doing so than Dawson.

[JustTurtlesAllTheWayDown]

Ok, the usual suspects are frothing (despite having not read the book) that in WONDERLAND, my 17 year-old trans Alice has a sexual relationship.

The didn’t care about cis Lexi or Jana having sex in Clean or Meat Market so...what can we conclude?

Didn't bother to read Clean or Meat Market so can't comment. I have massive objections to 1) teen girls being displayed as rapists (FFS) and 2) completely unrealistic versions of teen girls sex lives that could be the basis of something on pornhub

[ScreamingBeans]

We can conclude that the Guardian didn't do as good a job at bringing those other books to our attention.

[TheProdigalKittensReturn]

Well, for one thing we can conclude that most people here haven't read any of Juno's other books, which would seem obvious given that we're not the target audience.

[TheProdigalKittensReturn]

We need a proper vomiting smiley for situations like this.

Again, as everyone's anecdotes show, even once teenagers are old enough to be interested in sex they don't want to talk to their teachers or anyone else school related about it. That's just weird and awkward and potentially a bit creepy if the teacher overshares, and from a teenager's perspective almost anything a teacher said about the teacher's own feelings about sex would be oversharing, which is the bit that Juno and friends don't seem to get. Even when kids are in the mid teens rather than the blatantly inappropriate 10-ish range they may well want to talk about sex, but that doesn't mean they want to talk about it with you.

I remember every teacher with a tendency to overshare with varying degrees of "can you just not?" and I'm guessing most people would say the same.

[NotTerfNorCis]

I see Dawson is responding to their critics.

twitter.com/junodawson/status/1260507254211690498

Ok, the usual suspects are frothing (despite having not read the book) that in WONDERLAND, my 17 year-old trans Alice has a sexual relationship.

The didn’t care about cis Lexi or Jana having sex in Clean or Meat Market so...what can we conclude?

[SheSheHe]

Ewww clymene that’s most inappropriate. My Male biology teacher once showed us a video of a cow giving birth and commented ‘notice how the cow is not making a sound like human women do’ implying women were making an unnecessary fuss. I do remember one of the girls in the class pulling him up and saying he was a chauvinist (don’t think we knew the word sexist 40 years ago?!) I just remember feeling uncomfortable and insulted and that he was a bit of creep.

[Clymene]

Even when children are older, teachers talking to them about sexual being fun and enjoyable is all kinds of ick.

Our biology teacher used to tell us that the diaphragm we passed around in class had belonged to his wife (also a teacher at the school). Really, really inappropriate.

Children don't want to think about their teachers having sex.

[Singasonga]

Sure SheSheHe, but the point is that the age at which children are ready to hear about enjoyable, consensual sex is more around the 12/13 mark than the 9/10. It's the pushing back of the age at which children are expected to be interested in what happens after all that tongue-kissing that's creepy, not the generalised wish to support "young people's" natural pubescent development.

Completely agree with you on the "teen girl" expertise.

[SheSheHe]

I do not think Juno is a pervert, paedophile or is even consciously sinister in their sex education teacher mode. I, as a parent, have tried to counteract the way I was brought up by telling my kids, when the subject comes up, that sex should be enjoyable and consensual and it’s not all about making babies. I think it’s important. The world is an even more confusing place if I fail to mention this because sex is everywhere in advertising, comedy, innuendo etc. So I don’t necessarily want to support the notion that Juno is advocating children having sex because I think that’s not what Juno was saying and is unfair.

What I have an issue with is that Juno seems to have a total, utter sense of obliviousness to the fact that they really are maybe not best placed to go into schools and start lecturing young girls on feminism or create stereotypes of broken, self-harming, beautiful haunted teenagers because they, like Shon Faye, seem to be obsessed with this Lana Del Rey-esque cool-girl schtick. I get they clearly love all the make-up, heels, hair, dresses and break-up stuff and feel it’s an important element of their lives now. It must be fantastic if they didn’t get a chance to do all that as young gay men (I don’t think either of them claim to have been girls all their lives) I think they can both be witty and waspish writers and they genuinely make me laugh sometimes. They’d be fun on a night out.

But please just stop with the teenage girl ‘expertise’. That’s what annoys me.

[ScreamingBeans]

The whole point of teaching children about a few sex related things via school was to help safeguarding and give them protection, not try to talk them into being comfortable with something they will regard as scary before their natural hormones start flowing.

And there's enough evidence to show that girls particularly, are being coerced into doing sex related things they're not comfortable with, that are scary even with their natural hormones and which damage them emotionally and sometimes physically. Bad enough that boys and porn are telling those girls some things are normal, without their educators doing so.

[HorseRadishFemish]

I can't get past "young people" instead of children.

Creepy as fuck.

[TheProdigalKittensReturn]

You couldn't film the book as written, with a 12 year old protagonist. It's worth noting that Nabokov specifically requested that the kind of imagery that you see when either book or films are now referenced (girl with lollipop) not be used for the book cover, in fact he had a whole list of imagery he didn't want used.

Hasn't stopped people trying to turn it into porn. Or from basing grubby little male fantasies on it.

[Singasonga]

I've always just assumed that people who think Lolita is about a sexy young temptress haven't read the book and are referencing a few stills they've seen from the Kubrick movie.

[OldCrone]

It's not until you see a group of women just being women and in among them someone performing 'young sexy woman' that you suddenly realise what an insult to womanhood this is.

This is why I was surprised that Maria Miller was surprised that the women who objected to her transgender report were feminists. It seemed obvious to me that feminists would object to the idea that men who perform femininity are women.

www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/maria-miller-says-only-hostility-to-transgender-report-came-from-women-purporting-to-be-feminists-a6830406.html

[R0wantrees]

And that was before the little-girl voice emerged. It's not until you see a group of women just being women and in among them someone performing 'young sexy woman' that you suddenly realise what an insult to womanhood this is.

Dr Em & Jennifer Bilek have written recent articles on the harms of the sexist objectification of women rooted in transexualism/ transgenderism:

uncommongroundmedia.com/sexist-science-transsexualism-part-i-benjamin-ihlenfeld-money-ehrhardt/

www.mumsnet.com/Talk/womens_rights/3900484-Dr-Em-article-Sexist-History-at-the-Heart-of-the-Science-on-Transsexualism-Part-II-Robert-Stoller-True-Trans-an-ideology-which-is-antithetical-to-feminism

uncommongroundmedia.com/deconstructing-the-good-transwomen/

[NotBadConsidering]

Do I think Dawson is a paedophile? No. Of course not. I don’t know why I do reallyDawson said on Twitter that this thread was making such accusations. No one has, not even the deleted posts.

Do I think it’s...odd that Dawson said in an interview that a type of music makes Dawson imagine pretending to be Lolita rolling around in the garden? Do I think it’s odd that Dawson remembers Nabokov’s glorious prose describing sunbathing on heady summer New England days as something rather nostalgically grand, than being the fantastical twisted memories of a predator sighting his prey for the first time? Yes, I think that’s a little...odd. I find it odd that a person in their 30s finds Lana Del Rey’s music transports them to the life of a 12 year old victim of sexual abuse. I find it odd that anyone would want to put themselves in Dolores’ place at all.

www.theguardian.com/travel/2017/aug/05/summer-holiday-plans-writers-djs-broadcasters-celebrities-lorraine-kelly

Maybe Dawson didn’t quite get Lolita, and that how Humbert describes life in New England wasn’t Dolores’ perspective, and it may not have exactly been all cherry colas and suncream for her. Who knows?

I’m probably just being silly, overanalysing a throwaway comment in a piece about holidays....

[Shedbuilder]

AbsintheFriends, I don't know if it was the same event, but certainly when Dawson came on in the micro-mini with a lot of hair-tossing (that and the leg crossing went on throughout the hour) it was clear something wasn't reading right and there was a lot of fluttering in the audience and people looking at each other with a wtf? sort of response. And that was before the little-girl voice emerged. It's not until you see a group of women just being women and in among them someone performing 'young sexy woman' that you suddenly realise what an insult to womanhood this is. I imagine most of us there, even if some didn't understand why, were at the very least irritated and annoyed like your friend.

[Singasonga]

It's also a dangerous lack of interest in the fact that children are not the slightest bit interest in sex. Even the idea of kissing beyond a dry peck is gross to them, for heaven's sake. Anything involving body fluids elicits a cry of "Ewwwwwww!" You don't talk your prepubescent children through an adult's appreciation of sex any more than you bang on about how you're going to die one day and they'll need to learn to be self-sufficient.

The whole point of teaching children about a few sex related things via school was to help safeguarding and give them protection, not try to talk them into being comfortable with something they will regard as scary before their natural hormones start flowing.

[ScreamingBeans]

It's a total unawareness of appropriate boundaries isn't it.

And the push to abandon appropriate boundaries when teaching sex and relationship lessons is a charter for the sort of people we're not allowed to name. On a parenting site. [Hmm ]