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If you’re poor, the only way you’re likely to injure someone is the old traditional way: artisanal violence, we could call it – by hands, by knife, by club, or maybe modern hands-on violence, by gun or by car.

But if you’re tremendously wealthy, you can practice industrial-scale violence without any manual labor on your own part. You can, say, build a sweatshop factory that will collapse in Bangladesh and kill more people than any hands-on mass murderer ever did, or you can calculate risk and benefit about putting poisons or unsafe machines into the world, as manufacturers do every day. If you’re the leader of a country, you can declare war and kill by the hundreds of thousands or millions. And the nuclear superpowers – the US and Russia – still hold the option of destroying quite a lot of life on Earth.
So do the carbon barons. But when we talk about violence, we almost always talk about violence from below, not above.
[…]

People revolt when their lives are unbearable. Sometimes material reality creates that unbearableness: droughts, plagues, storms, floods. But food and medical care, health and well-being, access to housing and education – these things are also governed by economic means and government policy.[…]

That’s a tired phrase, the destruction of the Earth, but translate it into the face of a starving child and a barren field – and then multiply that a few million times. Or just picture the tiny bivalves: scallops, oysters, Arctic sea snails that can’t form shells in acidifying oceans right now. Or another superstorm tearing apart another city. Climate change is global-scale violence, against places and species as well as against human beings. Once we call it by name, we can start having a real conversation about our priorities and values. Because the revolt against brutality begins with a revolt against the language that hides that brutality.

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– Call Climate Change What It Is: Violence, Rebecca Solnit.
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I’m about to be more sexually explicit than I normally am on Twitter …
This NYT story about girls and sex made me wish I’d put masturbation scenes into all my YA books. Normally my authorial lens doesn’t focus on sex, and I don’t think it HAS to or SHOULD – but girls need women to talk about sex more.

In a review for Eleanor & Park, some guy wrote that Park wasn’t a convincing 16-year-old boy because he doesn’t think about his penis enough. And I thought, one: I’m pretty sure male authors aren’t required to make male characters talk constantly about the D just to prove something. And two: It didn’t bother this guy (or the guys in the comments) AT ALL that Eleanor never thinks/talks about her CLITORIS. (Like, maybe these guys don’t know about the clitoris?) (It’s possible.) I mean, also, I think 16-year-old boys do lots of thinking/feeling above the belt. But the assumption that girls do NOTHING below theirs …

People frequently ask me whether Eleanor and Park, or Cath and Levi, or Simon and Baz have sex within their books – and the answer is no. I really want all three of those couples to be mature and ready and emotionally safe with each other before they have sex. (My headcanon.) But I also want all of those characters to feel great about sex and themselves, and to masturbate and know their own bodies … I’m really not sure how much of that I’ll ever get into a book, or what my responsibility is.

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