There’s this John Waters quote that I see passed around the internet a lot- “We need to make books cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have books, don’t fuck them.” Although it’s not a bad sentiment on a surface level, a statement like this is problematic on several levels.
This sort of mentality is, first and foremost, extremely conservative. Media forms change over time and new media are introduced all the time- in the past 100 years, for example, we’ve seen the introduction of numerous new media forms- including film, video games, and television, as well as the refinement of forms such as sequencial visual arts (i.e graphic novels). Likewise, cultural focus shifts constantly in regard to media to reflect these changes- the fact that books are “dying off” does not mean that people are getting dumber. It just means that current cultural focus is gradually shifting to new and different forms of creative expression.
Second, this sort of statement is ultimately incredibly judgmental and assumes a lot of inherent value in the act of reading. I like to believe that I possess a relatively critical eye when it comes to media analysis, but I don’t read fiction and do not consider myself a reader. You can cultivate an interest in critical analysis of media without being a reader of books, and likewise, not every reader of books is reading them at anything deeper than a surface level. There’s nothing wrong with being a casual reader but it doesn’t make you “better” than someone who chooses not to read at all and instead focuses their attention on other forms.
If you go into someone’s house and they have books, it simply means that they like to read. If you go into someone’s house and they don’t have books, it means that they don’t like to read. If you’re into books, that’s great, but please don’t ever delude yourself into thinking that the very act of picking up a book is any particular indicator of intelligence one way or another.
I think a better quote would be “We need to make critical thinking about the world around us cool again. If you go home with somebody and they don’t have anything they’re particularly interested in or enthusiastic about, don’t fuck them.”
