Thread by @brooklynmarie

Here's something I've been wanting to talk about for a while but have had a hard time articulating. I've been revisiting a lot of old novels I used to love for escapist purposes, and also because at the end of the day I'm so mentally exhausted that I can't really do much else

So the other day I dug out an old book by Tom Robbins, "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues." It was one of my all-time favorites when I was a teenager. I loved Robbins' patter and tone and surreal scenarios. In this book, a woman born with freakishly large thumbs becomes a hitchhiker

in a nutshell. It was an apparently truly awful movie starring Uma Thurman:

That actually looks like a hell of a cast... but no. Anyway. I got like fifteen pages in and Robbins starts talking about how by "nature's clock," having sex with 12-year-olds is absolutely biologically correct. He didn't put that into a character's mouth, it's the narrator.

I was pretty appalled but kept reading for a few more pages for the greater points that I remembered, and got to a part where the hitchhiker as a little girl gets picked up by men and has one rule: they can do whatever they want to her but just keep driving. Then it goes on to

describe what these old men would do to this 9-year-old character. One man managed "French licks," whatever those are, in heavy traffic, for example. And then he describes the little girl's "moist excitement." Anyway, at that point I threw the book across the room

It was just too gross. But I got curious to see if anyone else had noticed so I looked it up and found that the sympathetic main characters of a book I never read (because it started out present tense/second person and I just can't take it) were pedophiles.

Then I started thinking about it and literally every book I ever read by him is justifying old men having sex with teens and tweens, at best. Even "Still Life With Woodpecker," whose main character I found charmingly and refreshingly eccentric when I first read it at 14, is

19 years old and involved with a man in his 40s who is described in the book as, well, he's describing himself. Ewwwwwwwwwwwww!!!

All of them. Every single book either excuses, justifies, or even praises pedophilia. And I read these when I was a kid. I have no memory of any of this showing up in any of the books and yet there they are, as impossible to miss as a turd on an angel food cake.

It's not the only thing I've been noticing but it's definitely a biggie. He was my favorite author for years. I mean, I just loved his work as a teen. I was an edgelord back then, and enjoyed that he wrote about sex all the time. But now I'm wondering, like, did that fuck me up?

Did it affect my attitude toward sex and other women? (Yes.) Did it affect my behavior? (Probably.) But what I find most disturbing is that I have absolutely no memory of any of the pedophilia justification. I didn't notice it, I think, because it was fucking everywhere.

But why? Why was this part of the discourse? What was the end game? And where else am I going to find it? Besides those awful V.C. Andrews books, of course, which every little girl I knew absolutely devoured. I feel like we're entering a major cultural change and with it, I'm

seeing what we've all had to maneuver. Especially girls and women. This is a shift that's loooooong overdue.

Also Tom Robbins does not hold up, ewwwwwwwwww.