Let's All Bully : The bad influence of kids books

The book industry is a form of entertainment, and as such, should be regulated by parents. Society is more concerned with movies, television, and recently, video games than to even deal with monitoring books.
The excuse for parents is that reading stimulates their kids, and kids who like to read end up being smarter in life. So whatever they read, is okay with me...
But these are the same parents that when asked if they approve of bullying, would tell you that bullying is horrible and should be eliminated.
...so why are you allowing your fourteen year old girl to read a book that makes it look cool and intriguing ?

The book "Gossip Girl" by Cecily von Ziegesar, and all the other subsequent books that follow it, is one of the most influential book (and now television series) for teens and tweens at the moment.
It's also one of the most trashiest, misleading, and unrealistic view of teenage life.
To be popular you have to be rich, you have to live in the Upper East Side of Manhattan, you have to do drugs and have plenty of sex...this is starting to be one of the best teen books out there, already !

According to Barbara Coloroso, a parenting expert and author of The Bully, The Bullied, and the Bystandard (Harper Collins 2006, Toronto), gossip is a type of bullying that she calls Relational Bullying. She classifies this type as something that is associated with girls. Spreading gossip and secrets about others have the same effect as proactive or "traditional" bullying, but leave deeper scars and continue the cycle of bullies.
Bullying according to About.com, is a social weapon and a means of psychological warfare. It leads to a cycle that gains strength as it continues. Based on the article, I've interpreted the stages as so :
The first is the actual gossip, malicious rumors and stories targeted on one specific person or group. This moves onto labelling and name calling, fueling the original gossip, which then leads to ostracizing and alienation. Psychologically this all gets absorbed by the target, and eventually bleeds into his or her life later on. Some in dire consequences.
There have been cases of teens who have committed suicide or attempted to, because of gossip that has ruined their lives, and many of them have been traumatized all the way up to adulthood.
I don't think I have to remind everybody about Columbine and why the shooters did what they did...

And that is just based on the title...
On page 6 of the first book in the series "Gossip Girl", von Ziegesar gives a short description about the habits of her teenage characters. I won't quote the exact passage since I don't know it by heart, nor own a copy of the book. But this is roughly what was described. I paraphrase :

Blair's family took after the quasi-European take on alcohol. They believed that more exposure to alcohol would desensitize them to it, so they were allowed to drink whatever they wanted whenever they wanted as long as it didn't affect their image. The same thing went for drugs and sex...

No sane parent who cares about their child - and the parents seem to not really care about their offspring in the book - would ever give underage kids drinks without them being there to supervise. I live in a European based culture, and many Europeans don't condone massive underage drinking, despite what von Ziegesar has written.
In fact, this is a terrible stereotype that many Americans, who by the way have a really strict policy on drinking, use as an excuse to show that allowing vices can help kids be more mature and open. Von Ziegesar seems to imply that Europeans don't have any problems with alcoholism because they were exposed to it at a younger age.
Wake up !
Rampant illegal teenage drinking happens in every country and Europe is not excluded, so get that Upper East side mentality out of your brain....

To study this even further, I decided to visit the Gossip Girl website, and couldn't believe what von Ziegesar and the CW network was promoting for young teenage girls.
The poll question on the site asked -

The essential must have for Fall :
1. A designer handbag, of course
2. Cute boots !
3. A cashmere sweater...mmm
4. A hot guy on my arm !

Let's forget the last choice for a second.
The credit card debt in North America alone is a huge crisis.
Dave Ramsey has stated that 1 in 5 very young people will file bankruptcy because of outstanding credit card debt. Cases of suicide over financial debts have been rampant in the US, and all over the world because of the financial strain and difficulty in paying back debt.
MP Dunleavy from MSN Money has written in her article "How Teens Get Sucked Into Credit-Card Debt", that the average debt that young adults carry with them is $1585 US. And even though many teens have their parents sign for the card as the guarantor or co-owner of the card, it still does not stop debt from increasing among young people due to irresponsibility.
"Most kids can't hand in a paper on time, let alone pay a bill on time.." says Janet Bodnar, deputy editor of the Kiplinger's Personal Finance magazine. She believes that it's the lack of physical proof of purchase that causes major credit card debt.
"This is funny money to them. It's not real. It's a license to spend, and they're not learning how to manage money on their own." Bodnar continues.
Even with the new types of pre-paid credit cards, many have hidden fees and compromise a teenager's privacy by disclosing vital information to companies for further targeting later on.
Okay, so how does this apply to Gossip Girl ?
Designer handbags, boots, and cashmere sweaters - you tell me where I see the connection.
This just helps to sell the idea of needing these items to be like the girls in the book, and sells the idea of being rich and spending money. Even the message on the site left by Gossip Girl herself even talks about the "problems" of a diva princess when it came to buying stuff. (Paris Hilton's got nothing on Gossip Girl...)

Look, I know it's a work of fiction and that everybody is entitled to have some sort of escape from reality. But if this is the case, then at least show the negatives about everything. Don't try to spin a Romeo and Juliet rip off that somehow shows apparent character evolution when the main character sees the world in a different view since her trip to Europe (and now it begs me to wonder if this is semi-biographical...)
The bottom line is that von Ziegesar does not condone the crap of divaism and shallow appearances, but she does not oppose it and seems to glorify it, even though that was probably not her intention. Gossip Girl is directed at young teens who get impressions from the media, now more so than the generation ten - even twenty - years ago. This is a book trying to reach the young adults, but fails to even impress the real adults out there, the ones who have to deal with the taunting of their children, the spending to make them happy, and the unwanted problems of pregnancy, drug and alcohol abuse.

...way to go, Gossip Girl, you just made Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, and Lindsay Lohan fashionable once again....