dsudis:

yxffmountain:

timemachineyeah:

tardis-stowaway:

hydrogyne:

thegeekyblonde:

all i’m saying is if an all-girls school crashed on the island in lord of the flies then they would’ve been off the island in a week

lord of the flies doesnt show the base human condition, it shows the base privileged straight white male condition, incredibly when i point this out people get kind of annoyed

Might I direct you to Beauty Queens by Libba Bray, a YA novel in which a plane full of teen beauty pageant contestants crashes on a deserted island.  Instead of descending into violent savagery, the girls are able to work together and become more truly themselves than they could in the patriarchal world outside.  They repurpose the tools of beauty into tools of survival (and some of them work to keep up their appearances too, because that’s what makes them feel happy, while others decide they’re done with all the pressure to be a certain sort of beautiful.)  They fight against evil corporations.  Beauty Queens is enthusiastically feminist.  (Never fear, the feminism is intersectional, exploring issues of race and sexuality as well as gender.)  Also, this book is HILARIOUS, not to mention surprisingly exciting!

Oh, look at this thing I’m going to add to my reading list.

srsly read Beauty Queens, one of the girls is trans!!!

Oh man I AM EXCITE for Beauty Queens! 

When I was a kid I imprinted really hard on Baby Island, by Carol Ryrie Brink–about two girls, age 10 and 12, who rescue four babies/toddlers and are shipwrecked with them, and care for them as well as a (male) hermit living on the island. It definitely meant that when reading Lord of the Flies in high school I was acutely aware of the “ugh this is just a book about how boys are assholes, girls would do this so much better” angle.

Baby Island, published in 1937, was, though, probably loosely a part of the very specific genre that Golding was responding to–one in which English schoolchildren, and particularly English schoolboys, were portrayed as resourceful and brave and the pinnacle of human civilization in all circumstances (the Pevensie children becoming kings and queens of Narnia just by showing up being a particularly extreme example). Golding was pushing back against that stereotype with a look at what English schoolboys on their own were really apt to be like; the fact that the book was widely understood (by… white dudes, mostly) as a parable for all of humanity says more about the people reading it than the book itself, I think.