"The salient fact of an adolescent girl's existence is her need for asecret emotional life—one that she slips into during her sulks and silences, during her endless hours alone in her room, or even just when she's gazing out the classroom window while all of Modern European History, or the niceties of the passé composé, sluice past her. This means that she is a creature designed for reading in a way no boy or man, or even grown woman, could ever be so exactly designed, because she is a creature whose most elemental psychological needs—to be undisturbed while she works out the big questions of her life, to be hidden from view while still in plain sight, to enter profoundly into the emotional lives of others—are met precisely by the act of reading."
The utter generalization of this paragraph made my head explode the first time because I'm sorry, not all readers are built alike and certainly, not all adolescent female readers are built alike.
Not to mention that it completely ignores adolescent boys. "Adolescent boys? THEY don't read! In fact, they probably don't even know HOW to read! They spend all their time looking for their dads' stash of girlie mags, jerking off, and playing whatever the newest violent video game is. Furthermore, adolescent boys have NO need of an 'inner world,' as that would make them sissies who will probably turn out gay, or at the very least, cross-dressers."
I mean, *seriously.* I get that all cultures have inherent gender stereotypes, but is it too much to ask someone to *think,* even a tiny bit, before they write such widely disseminated claptrap?
t /gender bitch