[handmaiden]

May I suggest a series of books that should be collected and burned?

As a child, I was introduced to the Trixie Belden mysteries. At the time, they seemed harmless enough, but I have since come to compare them against the light of the great Truth of the Bible.

Trixie Belden is a 13 year old girl who prefers blue jeans to skirts. She hates housework and attempts to avoid it whenever possible. She shirks her responsibility to look after her 6 year old brother. In all these ways, she is a horrible role model for young women.

Trixie does like horses. She loves to ride them whenever possible. Putting aside for the moment the deeper disturbance this indicates, one can imagine that her Godly freshness seal has been damaged.

Trixie likes to solve mysteries. She intends to go to college. She dreams of having a home someday that has no kitchen and is run entirely by push button.

Throughout the series, there are numerous references to sexual activity. A major male character is always looking at her "fondly". He tugs on a curl of her hair repeatedly. She, in turn, has lust for him in her 13 year old heart, thinking him to be "supple" and athletic. At one point, he and she . . . okay, this is a little hard to write, because God has shown me the error of my ways and I cannot believe that I read and re-read and relished this particular filthy scene over and over again . . . well, let me just come out and say it-- she and the boy held hands-- in public, on an airplane for crying out loud.

What makes all this children's "literary" content even more objectionable is that the first book in the series was written in 1948. Back then, a few scant years after our country single-handedly won WWII, the writer of these books was striving to destroy our great country from within.

This was subversive literature ahead of its time. Back when women were washing off the grime of their war-factory duty and joyously giving over their jobs to their returning hero-men and re-cloistering themselves in the kitchen and popping out children in God's baby-boom, Trixie was dreaming of becoming a detective. Seriously, a detective. She didn't just want to go to college to become a teacher or a librarian, but a private detective.

Trixie was held at gunpoint numerous times during the series. She bossed around the boy characters. She regularly followed up "leads" to her mysteries and kept her parents out of the loop.

I'm convinced all this started because of her love of horses. Once she spread her legs limbs around the muscular torso of that first horse, she started getting in trouble continuously through the entire book series.

She was cheerfully and unrepentantly unfeminine.

It is for this reason alone that I urge all parents to make certain that the Trixie Belden mysteries never enter their homes. That, and the hand-holding scene, easily the most steamy moment in tween fiction.


Concernedly Yours,

Handmaiden