Life is Short. I Give Up on Some Books.

I finished Hex, because it was 85% awesome and 15% spooky boobs. But the spooky boobs were jarringly hilarious. I remain torn about whether the author is afraid of boobs or if he thinks boobs are inherently scary or if he thinks women have unnamed horror about people touching their boobs or what. But women have a named fear about people touching our boobs. It’s not cool. I don’t want to understate that. But when you’re all “And then they captured her and then they poked her boob!” Like, yes, it is horrifying but he seemed to think  it was horrifying level 9 when it’s really like horrifying level 4.

I still think I mostly liked the book.

I tried to read Bird Box which people just loved the shit out of, but I could not get into it. I read about the first quarter, flipped to the end to see if it was going to get any less stupid and, when it wasn’t, I quit reading.

It also contains what I consider to be a massive misjudgment of women in that a woman gets pregnant during an apocalypse and decides to have the baby and everyone she tells is like “Oh, okay, sure. I hope you’re okay.”

There are two obvious fixes–have her have the baby right before the apocalypse or have her get pregnant further into the apocalypse. But instead, during a time when people are like “Something’s pretty massively going wrong,” but people are still around to notice it, she gives no serious thought to an abortion.

Of all the reasons to have an abortion–or at least to strongly consider one–“the world as I know it appears to be ending in ways that are painful to humans” has to be way up on the list. If you were being held captive by a serial killer of children in order to produce children for her to kill, and you had ways to abort your pregnancies, I think even the most anti-abortion people would struggle with and deeply contemplate whether abortion in that case was moral. The scenario in the book is basically that.

But it is as if abortion doesn’t exist in the world of Bird Box. And it just rang false to me. Like the author hadn’t really given much thought to being a woman in this situation.