Flashlight Worthy Book Recommendations invite us to “stick it to the prudes” by celebrating 11 of last year’s “most challenged” novels for Banned Book Week.
Among those challenged (but not yet widely banned thanks to parents, teachers, and American Library Association) are old favorites such as Catcher in the Rye and To Kill a Mockingbird, but new releases have made the cut this year. New York Times bestseller My Sister’s Keeper, gay-family friendly And Tango Makes Three, and our favorite neutered teen-vamp fantasy Twilight are all on the list as being sexually explicit, full of offensive language, and “unsuited to the age group to which it's targeted.”
And according to Peter Steinberg and Eric Muller of Flashlight Worthy, most of these challenges just end up gaining more exposure for the books they seek to silence, so it sounds like a good thing more young people are getting to know The Color Purple—even if it is through controversy.
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Back in the day, the National Football League’s plan for catering to female fans was “shrink it and pink it,” but it seems times have changed.
Women make up 44 percent of NFL fans, so now team-logoed jeans, flip flops, yoga mats and other fashion accessories are being made available to women in a $10 million marketing campaign launched by the gridiron giant. With taglines like, “Who says football isn't pretty?” the new corporate tactic tailors its team products to mesh with current fashion trends.
As Tracey Bleczinski, the league’s vice president of apparel said, “We're giving women the opportunity to be themselves and still love the game.” Well, if you say we need slit shoulder tops in order to be our—oh, hey, is that Alyssa Milano?!
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A Michigan high school encountered some controversy this week when its rightfully elected homecoming king was denied his crown—because he’s still enrolled in school as a girl.
Oakleigh Reed was born Oakleigh Marie, but now goes by just Oak, and for the most part it seems he’s been widely accepted. Not only do his teachers all refer to him by male pronouns, but he’ll also be allowed to wear the male cap and gown for graduation and the majority of the senior class voted for him as king of the homecoming dance. But school administrators invalidated the election because he didn’t have the right equipment for the job.
“It's the senior class that votes for their representative,” Reed said. “What they did was taking away the voice of the senior class.”
But the supporting students have created a 2,000+ member Facebook page titled “Oak is my King” which offers such enlightened insights as “we must stand up to assert the rights of Oak, and transgendered students everywhere.” These are the hands that we’ll be turning the world over to in a couple of years—and they’ve done us proud.