Until I was about sixteen, I lived in my own head a lot, daydreaming about what I wanted to happen in my life. The BSC don’t seem to do that much, except in Chapter 2s where one of girls is riding their bicycle on the way to a meeting and thinking really, really hard about their friends and almost crashes into a telephone pole.

I suppose my tendency to drift into a fantasy world, especially when I was thirteen, was because I had no friends. Perhaps my tendency to fantasize had more to do with that than age. Perhaps the lack of daydreaming in the BSC (except for thinking about their awesome friends) has to do with their active social lives organizing carnivals for children and having sort-of boyfriends.

But then when I really think about it, it’s Claudia and Stacey, the coolest (arguably) members of the BSC, who daydream the most. My favorite fantasy sequence in BSC, the one that inspired this whole post, is the one in Claudia and the Phantom Phone Calls where Claudia imagines a situation where she and Trevor are on a field trip to a place with a garden maze, and they find a secret door in the garden and it turns into a winter wonderland and it is very romantic. It is exactly the kind of stupid thing I would have imagined at that age. I also like it because it seems like it would lead into a very strange magical pornographic film.

Stacey usually dreams about future careers and money, so hers aren’t as funny. Stacey in a red convertible! Stacey the famous movie director!

Do I just have a selective memory? Did the other girls daydream more frequently than I remember? Was I just a loser nerd with no friends? (Yes.)

I think that my hatred of Logan is one of my strongest and most steadfast BSC opinions. Thus, I can’t help but look at this book through special Logan-hating goggles.

One of the biggest illusions that the BSC gives its young readers is that the mousy, shy girl who can barely speak to the opposite sex will end up with the cute Big Man On Campus, despite the fact that if Mary Anne were a Monopoly property, she’d be WaterWorks. But I think that all of middle school losers should be thankful the boys made fun of us instead of making out with us, because we could have ended up with boyfriends like Logan.

In this book, however, Logan seems pretty sweet, being very understanding when MA doesn’t want to dance after clocking Mr. Kingbridge in the head with her shoe, or when MA runs away from her own birthday party. He doesn’t really show signs of the Draculogan he will become in the future, the one who gives iron chain bracelets as presents after being dumped.

One of the essential questions that this book will ultimately raise in a reader is, “Why Mary Anne?” After all, sophisticated Stacey seemed interested. I have two answers for this. One comes from what we know about Ann. Mary Anne is an exaggerated version of Ann, and she wanted to give her doppelganger the chance of a dreamy junior high school romance that she never had. The other answer I have, from a very biased perspective that affects my analysis of Logan’s character, is that Logan wanted a girlfriend he can control. Looking at the character of Lyman Bruno, it’s not hard to see where that stems from.

Sorry for the long time between updates, but in the last couple of weeks I didn’t have time to sleep, let alone write a thoughtful and coherent blog post. Next on the agenda: my review of Best Friends and a look at Stacey and the Bad Girls.

I am posting this from my blackberry while I am vacationing (?) in Russia, so forgive any errors in typing.

Something that I’ve always found confusing is the character of Ben Hobart. When he and his family move in, he and Mallory begin dating and it is so cute! He has red hair and glasses too! Plus an accent, which is always hot, even when it is rendered annoyingly on the page and the speech includes words people only use in the copy for menus for Outback Steakhouse. Mallory and Ben do four basic things together: library, movies, school dances, eating Ben’s mom homemade cake (jealous!). He doesn’t seem to be a Chin-Tipper like Quint, which is a good thing. Sure, he does seem to show his Logan-y dark side occasionally–witness the fights over caroling and the proper way to use the library card catalog–but he is only eleven, after all. Ben and Mal’s relationship chugs along in its innocent sixth grade way for quite some time.

But then. Something totally weird happens. Ben stops being mentioned in chapter two as Mal’s boyfriend. He starts being mentioned not as an equal and paramour to a BSC member, but begins to be treated as a charge. Witness the bathing cap contest at the country club, which Ben enters and Mal judges. There is no mention of their history at all. You’d think someone would cry foul–totally a conflict of interest. Worse still is that he is just lumped in with the clients, like he hasn’t turned the magical age of eleven. Did Ben perhaps sustain a head injury which reversed the effects of the Age of Maturity?

When Mal has her “spaz girl” issues, it’s mentioned that Ben tried to reach out to her and she pushed him away. Yet Ben had been relegated to attending BSC events as a charge before that ever happened. The answer to the question, “What happened to Ben Hobart?” will never be truly answered.

I have a file on my computer where I paste funny quotes from the books. Here’s one from Mary Anne and Too Many Boys:

We all walked down to the water’s edge, and I noticed that Stacey and Toby never took their eyes off each other. Stacey seemed thrilled to see Toby again, but I reminded myself that she had acted exactly the same way around Pierre, a boy we met at a ski lodge. And there’d been Scott, the Sea City lifeguard, too. Toby was at the top of the list for the moment, but who knew if it would last?

Yes, MA basically calls Stacey a slut here, despite the fact that MA herself forgot she was going out with Logan when she saw Alex! Why are you so judgmental, Spier? Stacey’s a free agent and can ogle as many boys as she wants!

The Baby-sitters Club’s readership is generally thought of as a girls’ club. Whenever a man shows up on BSC message boards or livejournals, it’s something unusual. Posters are generally assumed to be female until proven otherwise.

Now, if some of us girls feel strange reading the BSC once we’re actually older than our childhood idols, well, I can only imagine what happens when sex/gender plays into it. If I feel weird reading the BSC being a relatively normal 21-year-old female college student who enjoys dancing to electroclash and shopping for clothes that only a Stacey would wear, I can only imagine how a 21-year-old male college student feels.

I know that my brother would occasionally read them in the bathroom, and that The BSC Companion is run by a man, and we occasionally get men on the livejournal. There are people who make their SOs read the books. I’m really curious about the experiences of a male who reads the BSC, and what reactions they get from people.

There is also the fact that these books are without a doubt written with a female audience in mind. Yes, there is a token male sitter, but, like Lyman Bruno, we pretty much all accept the fact if it weren’t for his relationship with Mary Anne, Logan probably wouldn’t be in the Club. The boys I know who baby-sit do just as well as the girls, but it is still kind of stigmatized, even nearly twenty years after Logan accepted Kristy’s offer to be a Associate Member.

I don’t really know where I’m going with all this, and in fact I don’t know if I have any male readers. But I am interested in their perspective on what they like about the BSC, and whatever problems they’ve had with their families, etc. because of their love for it.

Karen’s Brothers is a really weird book. After making my post yesterday, I was inspired to dig into the box of LS books I won in an ebay auction and chose this one to read. Basically, Karen gets jealous that her pretend husband, Ricky Torres, was hanging out with Bobby Gianelli instead of her and wouldn’t allow her to play football with him and the guys. For this book, Karen is really good at football. Then, while at the big house, Sam and Charlie are going to go to the movies with their friends and they don’t let Karen come along. The fact that David Michael is also not invited to go the movies does not faze Karen and she starts a new project: The We Hate Boys Club. Karen refuses to speak to any boys, even boy animals, and she gets Hannie and Nancy to do the same. Pamela Harding, sensing the opportunity to steal Ricky, decides to start the We <3 Boys Club. Their activities include baking stuff for the boys and telling the boys they're great all the time.

Karen does not understand why Ricky starts acting nicer toward Pamela than her. Which is stupid because Karen, if you’re not talking to your pretend husband anymore, how can you expect him to want to spend time with you, or not spend time with another girl while you’re treating him like crap? You are, after all, telling him you hate him. Stacey’s reverse psychology does not apply here. Stacey knew it well too–look at her success with men.

So after basically just ignoring every boy, and being upset that Pamela is moving in on her man, Karen is invited to play football with her brothers and has a great time and forgives all boys and blah blah and throws a “brother” party and all is good. Karen is forgived for being annoying and all is well.

But the book is really, really, really weird. First there is the emphasis on second grade marriage. Karen’s feelings for Ricky, and Ricky’s feelings for Karen, and Pamela’s plotting seem really advanced for seven year olds. Also at the end Karen watches happily as Nancy and Bobby Gianelli appear to be getting closer. Perhaps most disturbingly is the part where Ricky and Bobby play something called “Lip Tag.” Perhaps Karen’s jealousy of Bobby was not being melodramatic.

Is this book essential? No, but it is certainly bizarre.

Another belief I inherited from BSC books was that as soon as one crosses the threshold of middle school, one is instantly blessed with mini-adulthood (the mental age and behavior gap between the triplets and Mal was as wide as the one between Mal and Claire), and in addition, no matter how interested in boys a girl may be, and no matter how awkward and sturdy she is, she will be plagued with men fawning over her.

While not sturdy, I certainly was awkward and probably no boy even said something nice to me in middle school, let alone tipped my chin. I doubt that I am alone in this–I can remember only a handful of girls in my middle school who got genuine male attention before high school. Bearing this in mind, let’s review the BSC members.