Alex Rider: the proof that boys should be boys

Alex Rider: the proof that boys should be boys

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article...269130,00.html
http://tinyurl.com/m5dsl

The Times July 15, 2006

As Stormbreaker, the first film about children's favourite junior
spy, opens in cinemas, Amanda Craig talks to his creator, Anthony
Horowitz, about adventures, kissing and growing up

"I STILL REMEMBER THE tremendous exuberance of being a boy,"
Anthony Horowitz, the creator of Alex Rider, says. "It has an almost
abstract quality that you can't create by artificial means."

I reflect on this as I walk round my local park every morning and see
my son slay an entire Roman legion with a sword, track rabbits with a
wolf and race against time to decode a complex computer virus invented
by a fiendish villain bent on destroying every trace of human life.

The sword is really a stick, the wolf a dog and the computer virus a
last-minute piece of maths homework. But to a boy aged between 3 and
13, these are an essential part of being himself. To be a boy these
days, however, is to be born under a cloud. That natural exuberance is
frowned on or even medicated; children are kept indoors instead of
being allowed to run free.

Suddenly, however, the secret life of boys is being given much more
support. The film of Horowitz's Stormbreaker is coming to our
screens, complete with death-defying car chases, jaw-dropping gadgets
and enough adrenaline to boot James Bond into a bin liner. And the
old-fashioned pleasures described in Conn and Hal Iggulden's
bestseller The Dangerous Book for Boys reassert such traditional
pastimes as making a tree house, skinning a rabbit or peeling a
thistle.

"I don't think the imaginative world of boys has changed as perhaps
that of girls has," Horowitz says. "There's something that is
just pure, abstract Boy, which hasn't changed since the 19th century.
They still like violence, slapstick humour, gadgets, and Alex Rider
very much plays on that.

"I deliberately don't use slang or refer to fashionable clothes
because those are so transient. I never set out to target boys, I just
wrote for the boy in me."

Despite the easy allure of computers and films, books are at the heart
of the secret life of boys. Like Philip Pullman, J. K. Rowling, Eoin
Colfer, Terry Pratchett and Michelle Paver, Horowitz is popular with
both sexes, but he is one of those increasingly rare children's
writers who create heroes without heroines to support or match them.
This, I think, is significant. The feminist revolution has expanded the
imagination and ambition of girls largely by invading the kinds of
narrative that used to be reserved for boys, and boys resent it.

Alex Rider gets boys back to their essential daydreams. He may not want
to be a spy or a saviour, but he knows how to do all kinds of cool
stuff, from martial arts to speaking three foreign languages.

Unlike those of Andy McNab's deadly serious children's heroes, his
adventures have a touch of comedy in them - such as when he breaks
out of a tank with a killer jellyfish by squeezing zit cream on the
metal frame.

"I did dream of being a spy, and even went as far as building radio
receivers out of matchboxes when I was 9 or 10," Horowitz says.
"What I'm against is wrapping children in cotton wool. Modern life
is squeezing danger out of children's lives, because parents fear a
paedophile on every street corner. Where is the spirit of
Shackleton?" It is rare to find the type of unambiguous, confident
hero celebrated by Rider Haggard, Conan Doyle, Hergé or John Buchan in
more modern books or films. (The Aragorn that Tolkien created in The
Lord of the Rings, who never doubts his moral strength, is a very
different to that in Peter Jackson's screen version.) Yet any parents
who try to ban guns will find their sons biting them out of toast.
Guns, swords, lavatory humour, practical jokes and dreams of glory are
hard-wired into the male sex, and the adult failure to find this
endearing and funny is why so many authors do not reach boys.

Until recently, children's literature portrayed a prelapsarian age:
magic depended upon not growing up, like Peter Pan. Ged, Ursula K. le
Guin's "Wizard of Earthsea", specifically binds himself to
chastity and only loses his virginity once he has lost his magic;
Superman gives up his powers to have sex with Lois Lane.

Comic-book heroes may love the girl next door but Spiderman and
Wolverine are always prevented from doing more than kissing them; in
one of the most popular Playstation games for boys, Prince of Persia,
the hero fights innumerable demons only to have his beautiful princess
lose all memory of her saviour at the end. In Pullman's His Dark
Materials the ability to pass into other worlds ends after Will and
Lyra kiss. For boys, who take on average two years longer to reach
puberty, chastity is an essential part of the fantasy life.

Classic children's novels, such as Geoffrey Trease's Cue For
Treason or C.S. Lewis's The Horse and His Boy, often ended with the
hero and heroine (sometimes disguised as a boy) marrying when they grew
up, and this was as satisfying as the ending of a traditional
fairytale.

Today, much-loved series such as Michelle Paver's Chronicles of
Ancient Darkness which feature a boy and a girl are read with
increasing anxiety by boys who realise that the nature of relationships
may change.

Paver's Torak is, in one sense, a classic boys' hero, surviving in
the Stone Age with just a slate knife, a bow and a wolf - but how
long before he and the girl, Renn, start behaving like Adam and Eve? It
is obvious that some kind of sex is going to happen - the latest
novel, Soul Eater, ends with some tantalising facts about wolf cubs -
but boys do not want hero and heroine to become involved emotionally.
When Harry Potter snogged first Cho Chang, then Ginny Weasley, half his
fan base among the under-12s evaporated.

Alex Rider does have a girl friend, Sabina Pleasure, but she is not a
girlfriend. He kisses her only once, at the end of the third book
before saying goodbye to her for ever. Originally, the kiss was
described in some detail, but when Horowitz read the scene to his sons,
then 12 and 14, they reacted so strongly against it that it was cut.
They felt, he said, that although James Bond has sex, they were "
uncomfortable" about a boy their own age having such feelings.

"Alex doesn't have sex," Horowitz says. "Sex erodes what I'm
writing about, it interferes with childhood, with that total immersion
of creating a world within a world."

Our sons need this world badly, and the fact that their innocence will
end naturally some time during their teens does not mean that it should
be brought to a deliberate halt. The success of The Dangerous Book for
Boys (which includes a sensible chapter on talking to girls) has hit a
nerve precisely because the secret life of boys retains all of its
essential characteristics, despite having received very little
encouragement over the past 20 years. "I think that a lot of authors
who try to write books for boys because they think there's big money
in it have fallen flat on their faces because you can't reinvent it
if you've lost it. The most horrifying thing I heard at a school was
that a child was allowed to read my books for pleasure because they had
passed an exam."

Today's boys may no longer want to join the scouts, but the Just
William types still want to build dens in woods, dam rivers or race
through the streets on their bicycles just as Alex Rider does in
Stormbreaker's most thrilling chase sequence. They want danger. The
fact that many parents are too busy, or too frightened, to allow it has
done most to push them into the sort of fantasy where the only action
is the pressing of thumbs on console buttons - and where the heroes
are bold, brave and living in a world of their own.

Amanda Craig's website, http://www.amandacraig.com recommends books
for children, especially boys.

Nice try, no cigar. Surf for the PBS FRONTLINE "Yaqui Valley" study on
Autism. The valley was taken over by agribusiness to grow produce for
American supermarkets.

Turns out that when plants are exposed to herbicides and pesticides they
produce phyto-estrogens in their tissues. The FDA was unconcerned; they
knew it didnt cause cancer. After all, phyto-estrogen is in the birth
control pill.

But when you raise boys on food with it, you get autism, ADD, ADHD, and
other problems Frontline did not mention, like faggots. I mean, if what
you *wanted* was a fag for a son, what else would you try?

There are nutritional deficits as well. Every fag I talked to told me
that he was raised on sugared cereals. I contrast this to my own neck of
Ozark woods, where the boys are still raised on food from home gardens,
and where faggots are really rare.

Day Brown wrote:

Nice try, no cigar. Surf for the PBS FRONTLINE "Yaqui Valley" study on
Autism. The valley was taken over by agribusiness to grow produce for
American supermarkets.

Turns out that when plants are exposed to herbicides and pesticides they
produce phyto-estrogens in their tissues. The FDA was unconcerned; they
knew it didnt cause cancer. After all, phyto-estrogen is in the birth
control pill.

But when you raise boys on food with it, you get autism, ADD, ADHD, and
other problems Frontline did not mention, like faggots. I mean, if what
you *wanted* was a fag for a son, what else would you try?

There are nutritional deficits as well. Every fag I talked to told me
that he was raised on sugared cereals. I contrast this to my own neck of
Ozark woods, where the boys are still raised on food from home gardens,
and where faggots are really rare.
----------------------------------------------------
Hate to tell you, ****-Brain, but there are exactly the same percentage
of "faggots" in the Ozark woods as anywhere else, they just don't dare
reveal that fact till they grow up and move to San Francisco!!

This has been quite intensely investigated. And you need improvement
in your supposed endocrine knowledge, as that isn't causal.
Steve

R. Steve Walz wrote:
Day Brown wrote:

Nice try, no cigar. Surf for the PBS FRONTLINE "Yaqui Valley" study on
Autism. The valley was taken over by agribusiness to grow produce for
American supermarkets.

Turns out that when plants are exposed to herbicides and pesticides they
produce phyto-estrogens in their tissues. The FDA was unconcerned; they
knew it didnt cause cancer. After all, phyto-estrogen is in the birth
control pill.

But when you raise boys on food with it, you get autism, ADD, ADHD, and
other problems Frontline did not mention, like faggots. I mean, if what
you *wanted* was a fag for a son, what else would you try?

There are nutritional deficits as well. Every fag I talked to told me
that he was raised on sugared cereals. I contrast this to my own neck of
Ozark woods, where the boys are still raised on food from home gardens,
and where faggots are really rare.

----------------------------------------------------
Hate to tell you, ****-Brain, but there are exactly the same percentage
of "faggots" in the Ozark woods as anywhere else, they just don't dare
reveal that fact till they grow up and move to San Francisco!!

This has been quite intensely investigated. And you need improvement
in your supposed endocrine knowledge, as that isn't causal.
You are kinda behind the times Steve. The redneck crankheads have moved
to the city where the welfare benefits are better for their women. They
have been replaced by those wanting to use the clean environment to go
into organic truck farming and stock raising.

The clean environment has also attracted high tech professionals from
both coasts moving into the strip city on US 71 near Fayetteville. So
many in fact, that there is now a net *immigration*. Rich retirees are
also moving in; my son makes good money building timber frame starter
castles for them. The only really obvious fairy anyone knows in one of
the local small towns... *moved* there. Nobody gives him any **** even
tho he is an obnoxious jackass. But the folks still here mind their own
business. And do it without ad hominum.