At this point, I am not sure why I'm bothering to answer you, because clearly anyone who disagrees is somehow a fascist who wants to mutilate little girls' genitals.

No, I would have gone the Hitler route if I wanted to compare to fascism. I don't think it's fascism. I think it's overthinking at a dramatic scale, where everything becomes a dramatic issue that will destroy society.

Granted, I'll concede genital mutilation is up there with a Godwin, so consider that withdrawn. In my defense, my most recent reading in feminism was on that and the evolution of the right to vote for women, so sexual restrictions on women is on the top of my head in a very big way.

I don't think parental discussion is bad, and I'm even fence sitting on parental restriction of reading material; there's very little I'd deny my son, but I'd mull a bit on Anarchist Cookbook. My worry hovers far more in the idea of female weakness this always seems to express when there's discussion of teen girl literature. And most frustrating to me, this comes up when too many girls like it. It's a correlation between popularity == garbage, that leads to examining the text for, and dammit I have no non-inflammatory rhetoric for this one, so take it with a grain of salt, looking for the devil because they wouldn't like it if it was truly good for them. Things that are good for you are not pleasurable, while things that aren't are obviously hidden with evil. That's the attitude that irritates me, and otherwise sane people get absolutely terrified when it comes to how girls think.

Do I think there's a huge problem with how society views women? Yes. Do I think that needs to change? Christ, yes. I don't think the platform to do it on is their pleasure reading. I think that making what they fantasize about a platform for social change doesn't make feminism, or hell, equality advocates, any different from thousands of years of men telling women their sexuality was evil. We're doing it from different motives, but the end result is the same, and both sides can claim it's for the sake of the girls.

Teenage years are so short, and so intense, and so utterly miserable at the best of times. They already deal with the real world fucking with their heads on clothes, make-up, educational goals, breast size, and how short their skirts are. They already deal with a strong patriarchal tendency to try to protect an imaginary standard of purity in how they live their lives. They worry about date rape because a lot of society still cannot imagine it exists. They deal with damned cheerleader uniforms. It's too much to ask them to give up how they want to fantasize. I can't accept that there's no part of a girl that can't belong to herself and herself alone; if it's a weird fascination with the entire Friday the Thirteenth series or an idolization of the perfect boyfriend who thinks not being a white, blonde, blue-eyed cheerleader slash gymnast with a nice car and a dozen popular friends is fantastic. Edward is a creepy stalker, but he's also something else; he's a hot guy who thinks the clumsy girl who will never be a perfect ten is amazing and doesn't care about her skirt length, her make-up choices, or her social rank and doesn't want to make her a notch on the bedpost.

The attitudes expressed in the book are problematic when they are used as a literal application to real life, just like literal interpretation of say, the Bible becomes hugely problematic. But despite popular belief, not many girls will grow up and consider this a good idea. Just like not a lot grow up to go on a killing spree for video games. There has to be a place a girl isn't hyperexamined for her orthodoxy, and frankly, I do not see a single other place outside her imagination this can occur. Taking that away as well--I can't under any circumstances conceive of it as other than utterly wrong.