The NYT bleats the alarm, omfg, what about all the boys who don’t have books to read?!
And I quote Michael Cart from said article:
“We need more good works of realistic fiction, nonfiction, graphic novels, on- or offline, that invite boys to reflect on what kinds of men they want to become.”
To which I reply, those books already exist. Women have for centuries managed to read material written by men, about men, and still walk away being able to figure out how those stories apply to them. To be fair, we had to, and in many cases, continue to have to.
News flash: the only markets in which women dominate literature are romance and YA. All the rest of it is predominately male and male-oriented. Somehow, though, James Patterson and John Grisham still manage to be bestsellers– because women are reading their novels.
The problem that needs to be fixed is not kick all the girls out of YA, it’s teach boys that stories featuring female protagonists or written by female authors also apply to them. Boys fall in love. Boys want to be important. Boys have hopes and fears and dreams and ambitions. What boys also have is a sexist society in which they are belittled for “liking girl stuff.” Male is neutral, female is specific.
I heard someone mention that Sarah Rees Brennan’s THE DEMON’S LEXICON would be great for boys, but they’d never read it with that cover. Friends, then the problem is NOT with the book. It’s with the society that’s raising that boy. It’s with the community who inculcated that boy with the idea that he can’t read a book with an attractive guy on the cover.
Here’s how we solve the OMG SO MANY GIRLS IN YA problem: quit treating women like secondary appendages. Quit treating women’s art like it’s a niche, novelty creation only for girls. Quit teaching boys to fear the feminine, quit insisting that it’s a hardship for men to have to relate to anything that doesn’t specifically cater to them.
Because if I can watch Raiders of the Lost Ark and want to grow up to be an archaeologist, there’s no reason at all that a boy shouldn’t be able to read THE DEMON’S LEXICON with its cover on. My friends, sexism doesn’t just hurt women, and our young men’s abysmal rate of attraction to literacy is the proof of it.
If you want to fix the male literary crisis, here’s your solution:
Become a feminist.
Hear, hear! Awesome post.
Thank you so much for reading and commenting!
I LOVE this post. Another thing that guys don’t really realize is that women love men who do things like read YA. I know every time I see a guy perusing the YA section at my local Borders (R.I.P Borders, lets have a moment of silence…………..) I feel like giving them a thumbs up and a pat on the back. Women will flock to men who just enjoy reading and don’t care how they look doing it. So not only is it ridiculous for men to act like they shouldn’t be reading YA books, it is actually better for them to do so. (Don’t men usually win their little contests by how many women they can attract? This is a surefire thing.)
-Best,
Jessica
I was excited to see two boys in the YA section of B&N yesterday too. Of course, they skipped right past the Teen Paranormal Romance shelves and went straight to the Teen Fantasy section, but the way the store decides where to shelve books is kinda arbitrary. Boys are going to miss out on a lot of great paranormal books because they don’t want to be seen buying romances.
Yeah, I don’t get B&N’s shelving scheme at the moment. They put my paranormal gothic in the general Teen Fiction section… I feel bad for guys who are going to miss great books in the paranormal section, but I’m thrilled that they’re still going to the general section and finding things to read!
Hahahah, I was talking to some friends who are finding dates though online matching services, and they said there are TONS of guys who put “Twilight” under the heading of books they’ve read lately. There are guys out there who totally know how to work that angle! :D
I’m standing up and cheering for this! Starting on Twitter…
Thank you so much, Heather! :D
AGREED! Seriously, shouldn’t boys who are at an age to read YA be over the ‘girl have cooties’ phase? Surely we’ve come far enough from the cavemen era that we don’t need ‘girls’ and ‘boys’ lit! Boys always think they can do anything a girl can (and better in their heads), so why can’t they channel the other sex in a book?
Bah, narrowminded people..
Dude, for real. I may not have ended up an archaeologist, but I sure wanted to be one because of Indiana Jones. We need to quit discouraging boys from considering girls’ povs as something foreign and alien.
Excellent response. I have to admit that I only skimmed the NYT article, but I got the highlights. My daughter’s boyfriend is about as macho as you can get, but his reading list is pretty much identical to my daughter’s. Thanks for sharing!
I think KIDS TODAY actually have it way more together than we adults arguing about KIDS TODAY! I see the same shared reading list in action with my son and his girlfriend!
YES!! A thousand times yes!
o/\o High fives!!
You are my new hero. Amazing post. Everything I wanted to say.
Awww, thank you so much for your kindness! <3
LOVE this! And I couldn’t agree more. Both my husband and my son recognize that a good story is a good story. My son couldn’t care less if the main character is a girl or boy – he just wants a rousing good adventure that makes him think. We’ve raised him to appreciate the fact that girls and boys have far more similarities than differences and that gender really shouldn’t matter. Fortunately, the lessons seemed to have stuck. :) And right now my husband’s favorite books are the Mercy Thompson series by Patricia Briggs – and he’s about the most redneck man you could ever hope to find. :D
Dude, I love that mental image. Books really are the great equalizer if we just let them be. I get a kick out of the fact that my 60 year old mother often takes off with new YA novels I bring into the house before I even have a chance to read them. The latest theft was Lish McBride’s “Hold Me Closer, Necromancer”!
Saundra, this post is incredible and articulates PRECISELY what I’ve been thinking about that article and been unable to put into words. You are brilliant. Enough said.
Now off to re-tweet and share everywhere…
Thank you so much for reading, and for your kind words. I really appreciate it!
I’m just kind of sick of the handwringing for boys. You don’t see any articles going “Where are all the girls in movies/tv shows/videogames? Oh noes!”
Sometimes, miraculously, a boy will come across my book and write me and tell me that though he didn’t think he’d like a book with a girl’s face on the cover and a pink-fonted title, he loved the idea of killer unicorns and blood and gore and warriors. And that’s too bad, because aside from the fact that it’s unerringly a girl on Rampant and Ascendant, there is nothing girly about that cover (ditto for covers like Uglies, etc.). This is not the case for the slew of “girl in a pretty dress” covers. I think the cover of something like “Matched” is more about the pretty dress than the dystopia, even if the book inside would appeal to boys (like the boys who love the Giver).
And THAT is a marketing issue.
If we can argue that covers matter for POC, we can argue that they matter for boys and girls, too.
Dude, you couldn’t be more right, yo. So I just say word, and point up at your comment and nod.
One thing that the article pointed out which I believe is key: boys often only see their mothers/sisters reading.
Not having strong male literary role models impacts boys and their ability to read. My step-boys see a house full of books. While my partner doesn’t read a lot, he does read and has kept every single book he’s ever bought since he was in his teens. Since these are Dad’s books, they have to be good (and often are).
And, to be fair, when I was a teenage girl, I had little time for Sweet Valley High and all those kinds of girl books. I still have nightmares…
I agree that modeling is so, so important for teaching kids to read. Our entire extended family, male and female, are huge readers. And I know you’ll be shocked to hear that consequently, both of my kids are also big readers. Visibly reading is one of the most important things we can do for our children, and I would love to see more kids having that modeling experience as they grow up.
It’s like that old saying: “Real men don’t eat quiche.” Ha! Throw a few jalapenos and some steak on it they might. Maybe gutsy books written by women are quiche spiked with meat and hot sauce? Not the best analogy, but you know what I mean. :)
Hee, I don’t eat quiche. Am I real man? Awesome, I’m off to take over the world!
so. true.
plus, as a teacher of many adolescent boys, I can and do find a variety of awesome books for them to read–even books written by women, even books with female characters. It truly is how you sell it to them, and how you foster an environment where it is totally acceptable and normal for boys to read all the books.
I couldn’t agree with you more, and I’m glad that we have fantastic teachers such as yourself creating that fostering environment, that empowers boys and girls to read and read what they like.
Pingback: “But there’s only girl stuff…” | Renae Jones
I feel this post misses the point and is an oversimplification.
Take for example, the cover of THE DEMON’S LEXICON. I like the cover as a guy but I seem to be in minority. My son is an avid reader, but he doesn’t like that cover. He doesn’t like the cover because it looks like the covers of books that he makes fun of: emo girl books. In fact, I think he asked me if it was “TWILIGHT FOR DEMONS” which is funny because the Twilight series doesn’t have any girls on he cover. It doesn’t have anything to do with “girls have cooties” and more to do with the type of cover on books that are not action-oriented, or, worse, action on things that are, from his standpoint, frivolous and or even wrong.
There is a distinct absence of YA books that appeal to him. So he skips the YA genre unless something really wonderful comes along, such as THE HUNGER GAMES. He reads adult books, such as WORLD WAR Z.
That my son reads constantly but skips the YA genre a lot is the telling factor. There are books that he reads, books that he likes, books I myself feel that they have value. They just aren’t teen books. That tells me that there is a problem with YA teen books that appeal to boys and that problem is simply a lack.
My son is 11. He isn’t even a teen yet. In a couple of years it may be impossible for me to get him to read YA at all, which is ironic because my wife and I are in our 40′s and we love many YA books.
There are more factors to book buying habits than parental influence. Many more. I feel the way boys and teens in general get treated when they go into a bookstore compared to how they are treated when they go into a game store has meaningful impact. The ever-popular parental blame game comes up short.
I feel your reply is actually a perfect distillation of my point. Your son doesn’t want anything to do with emo girl books, and he assumes a cover with a dude on it is an emo girl book. And yet THE DEMON’S LEXICON is about a pair of sword and gun wielding brothers who all but burn down London together. There are sword fights, gun fights, magic fights, boys rebuilding classic cars, breaking into buildings, getting into fights at school, and getting hot over cute girls.
Which boys aren’t discovering because they’re growing up in a society that tells them that anything that SEEMS feminine is certainly for girls and doesn’t relate to them at all. But, let me help you out with your son– because as a woman, I also read YA novels that feature boys. Let me recommend to you:
Leviathan, Behemoth and Goliath by Scott Westerfeld
Stupid Fast by Geoff Herbach
Mamba Point and Mudville by Kurtis Scaletta
Struts & Frets and Misfit by Jon Skovron
Ghetto Cowboy and Yummy by G. Neri
Witch Eyes by Scott Tracey
The Fourth Stall by Chris Rylander
Looking for Alaska and An Abundance of Katherines by John Green
will grayson/Will Grayson by David Levithan and John Green
The Monstrumologist by Rick Yancey
Suck It Up by Brian Meehl
Maze Runner by James Dashner
Flash Burnout by LK Madigan
Hidden Talents and True Talents by David Lubar
White Cat and Red Glove by Holly Black
I Will Save You by Matt de la Pena
The Afterlife by Gary Soto
You Killed Wesley Payne by Sean Beaudoin
Gentlemen and Trapped by Michael Northrop
Me and the Morgue by John Ford
The Secret Year by Jennifer Hubbard
The Dark Days of Hamburger Halpin by Josh Berk
Just about any damned thing ever written by Chris Crutcher
And many, many others that I will kick myself later because I didn’t remember them off the top of my head. Books about boys are out there; nevertheless, books about girls should ALSO be books for boys.
Thank you for your thoughtful reply!
Let me clarify I thought LEXICON was a marvelous book. But I don”t think I explained myself clearly.
The publishers, not me, put types of covers on books that bring out buying habits. My son has very distinctive views on girls, women and feminism (there’s a reason for that, let’s just say that when all of my friends had children, they all had girls. Lots of girls. Like, something in the water that makes girls over where we live. He is surrounded by girls. We got girls 24×7 over here.).
He knows, through experience, that when he reads a book with certain looking cover he will not like it. He won’t like it because:
The main character spends to much time thinking about problems than trying to fix the problems.
The MC lets things repeatedly happen to her rather than cause things to happen.
The MC is too obsessed with what people think of her.
The MC is a mess until a boy comes into her life.
There is too much kissing (he is only 11, after all).
These are all valid reasons to reject books as a boy. I’ve tried to explain some of the nuances of come-of-age books and he just won’t buy it. The LEXICON cover is systematic, not problematic, of a cover on types of books that he has rejected.
Which brings me back to why I feel your original point, while valid in some cases surely, misses the mark. It’s not that he doesn’t want to read books about girls. It’s that he isn’t being marketed to effectively, there is a cultural problem with boys and how they are influenced, there is a lack of appealing books for avid boy readers, and that the girls in his life have VERY particular taste in books and influence what he reads.
All these factors swirl around and spit out this: My son knows about emo-girl covers (his words, not mine) because he ran out of books that meet his initial reading criteria and tried them. So he’s shifted to adult books. Many of these books are about boys, but the ones he really likes about girls are similar to the YA books about girls that he likes.
And we’ve run out of those. His book buying dollars (unlimited, we home school) go elsewhere.
But what you’re essentially saying is that we should put covers that appeal to boys on ALL books, market ALL books to boys, because heck, girls will read them any old way, and boys just won’t unless we cater to them. The things your son doesn’t like in those particular books are things *I* don’t like in certain books.
It has little to do with being a male or female reader, it has to do with reading a story that doesn’t satisfy the simple requirement of the protagonist actually being the protagonist. I have those exact same complaints about Jonathan Franzen and Norman Mailer. But no one’s going to say, oh god, all literary fiction by men is emo boy fiction. They’re going to say they think those two authors suck. Not every literary novel will be judged by them, but for some reason, ALL of YA is judged by a handful of books that happen to be about girls, that happen to feature inactive protagonists.
A guy writes a lousy book, and he’s a lousy writer. A woman writes a lousy book, and WOMEN are lousy writers.
But it also occurred to me that Ally Carter’s Heist Society novels and Gallagher Girls series, as well as Y.S. Lee’s The Agency series, might be right up your son’s alley as well. Cons and grifters and spies and more spies. Oh, and the Barnaby Jones novels as well. And now that I’m thinking about it, Steve Bereznoff’s stuff. but if he’s 11, probably when he’s a little older unless you want to read with and discuss the issues.
I agree wholeheartedly with Anthony’s response. He speaks from experience and you can’t argue with his experience. He has not said that all YA is bad – his son is an avid reader and isn’t finding enough of what he considers the good stuff. I work in a boys school library and many of our boys read lots – we provide the best we can based on what they want to read. The girl on the cover thing is about marketing and as much as we work against prejudice about these books (believe me – tlked to boys about it just this week), readers choose what they do and don’t read. Boys who read lots of fantasy, by the way, are fine with girls on the cover. They know their genre and are very happy to read female characters. Boys generally are happy to read books with female protagonists, but when publishers market mainly to girls (as Lipsyte quotes in his article) they will reach mainly girls. They know their business.
Anyway, I thought Robert Lipsyte, Rick Riordan and James Patterson made a lot of sense. This article is the most thoughtful piece I have read in the mainstream press on this complex issue.
“ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh” – conveying my complete love of this response
:D :D Thank you so much!
Thanks to Elissa and all the teachers and librarians who do so much for young readers. And thank you, Saundra for writing this!! Years ago the marketing people asked me to use K. Duey on a series of MG novels and I didn’t argue the point–and have always regretted it. I would love to be part of anything that addresses this antique boybook/girlbook nonsense…
I’m so sad for you for that, Kathleen. I did so much of my early writing as S.L. Mitchell, so I know exactly where you’re coming from. But I totally think you’re helping address the gender disparity. My son took off with Sacred Scars even before I had a chance to read it, girl on the cover or no!
YES! THANK YOU. I like the covers the way they are, and I love tons of books written by female authors with covers that may or may not appeal more to girls. But the point is the novel inside, which, thankfully, some people still realize. I hate that most boys now have a mindset like that. (I don’t!)
I’m glad you don’t, and I’m glad you’re enjoying reading whatever you want to read. That’s really the whole goal here, nobody should avoid a book they’d enjoy just because it’s about somebody who’s not like them. I think we learn the most when we read about people who don’t constantly reaffirm who we already think we are! Keep reading!
This was my reaction:
We (societal) raise our girls to fight for their right to experience all aspects of life and reject gender stereotypes foisted on them. But we raise boys to fear the feminine and cling to only what’s masculine. What a complete disservice. Why is that okay with us?
Generations of boys missing out because of widely accepted gender restrictions. So sad.
I agree with you completely. I have no idea why that’s okay, but I have to believe it’s changing. (Whether the adults want it to or not!)
Yeah, love this post. I write YA and consider my books good for boys and for girls. I have strong female leads that aren’t waiting to be saved but there are many strong male characters as well. I heard the same thing from a boy about the cover of my first book, Katrina the Beginning. If we never read a book with a cover that looked ‘male’ we’d never read!
Elizabeth Loraine, author of Royal Blood Chronicles and Phantom Lives
You ain’t lying! And I really did want to be an archaeologist. I wanted the hat and the whip. Never was interested in the stubble, though…
I have to say, I agree with this post entirely and completely. This is exactly the problem for boys with books today. I remember when I was first getting into Twilight years ago, it was relatively unknown in my high school, and when I let a couple of my guy friends borrow my book, they enjoyed it. But they weren’t very quick to admit it.
Just like my husband loves Twilight, the books and the movies. But when he’s around his friends (who bash Twilight on a constant basis) I always point out that men do like it (see twilightguy.com) and my husband is one of them. He then skirts around the issue, in fear of being bashed on by his friends. And I’ve seen this happen with my male friends (and my husband) on any number of books with female authors that have female protagonists.
If men and society could get over the aspect that it centers more around a female and just read because the book seems interesting, they would find so many amazing books they wouldn’t have picked up otherwise, and maybe even learn something about themselves in the process.
I’m nodding my head 100% here. I agree with you completely!
Amen and thank you. I’ve never understood the belief “books with girl characters are for girls; books with boy characters are for boys and girls.” That fact that people have believed this for a long time doesn’t make it any less sexist, demeaning or wrong. I wonder what would happen if these books were handed to boys without covers? But then, I was taught not to judge a book (or a boy) based on its cover – have we stopped doing that now?
Also, when I worked at Barnes & Noble, I was constantly advising parents about YA/kids books for their kids. I can’t even count the number of parents who said “my son won’t read that book because it’s about a girl” OR said they didn’t WANT their boy to read a book about a girl. Because, you know, he might catch the gay.
And I really think that’s the core of a lot of this issue– homophobia and sexism walk hand in hand, and they’re both all about disgust for the female, and disgust for men who want to “lower” themselves and become more female.
But we have also made HUGE strides, both for women and for GLBT rights in the last 50 years, and I truly believe that this generation of kids, and their generation of kids to come, are going to be a thousand mile ahead of us right now on these issues.
Brilliant. Bravo. Sigh… hate being a pessimist–because this CAN change. And as a YA author, I hope it does. I LOVE my female readers–but I know boys would get just as much enjoyment from my work if they knew it was ‘okay’ to be reading what the girls do.
I really think it IS changing, regardless of the adults flapping their hands about it. I’ve done a lot of high school visits, and interest is high from young men AND women. I am forever seeing guys reading books that “they’re not supposed to like” because of the cover or the content or whatnot. I think we as adults are still fighting the battles we fought when we were that age. The kids seem a lot wiser that we are, in a lot of ways.
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One if the inherent problems here is that anything relating to girls is seen as inferior and deemed less important than fiction written by and about males
Until and unless we attempt to fix this societal problem, no change will be doable.
Word, Connie. Word.
When I read this via Twitter I saw Anthony’s response and wanted to come and respond to it. But you did it SO much better. I hope your son gives those books and more a chance, Anthony.
I’ve heard that androgynous people are often the happiest people. I know I’m happiest when I’m doing what most assume would be “men’s work” around the house. I buy my boys pink sippy-cups and potty-watches (I let them choose the colors of those sorts of things) and we own plastic bugs, trucks and baby-dolls. Already, exposure at preschool has made my 4-year-old son reject all things pink, and start identifying things as “for girls” and “for boys”. It makes me sad. Those distinctions aren’t innate, they’re learned, and it’s a big job to dissuade them–but I shall try my best to do just that!
I bet you’ve crashed right into whether or not they want a “Boy Toy” or “Girl Toy” at McDonalds, too, eh?? I’ve always personally sat more comfortably on the androgynous end of the scale, and it seems to me like it was a lot easier being in the hazy middle when we were younger. Everything is so hyper-segmented now.
It thrills me that I have a daughter who both adores her pink and sparkles, but also has a bug box and is planning to go as Voltron for Halloween. What she likes, she likes, and so far, she’s not shy about liking the stuff that’s marked GIRLZ KEEP OUT. But I know as she moves toward middle school, it’s going to be harder and harder for her to just be.
Hooray! Yes, I totally agree. Fantastic post.
Thank you so much!
Wa hoo! Fantastic sentiments. Nothing to add, just wanted you to know I have read your words and feel all fired up about them. Thank you.
Thank you so much for reading! Glad it got you fired up!
Love this post!! I once had a school librarian tell me that the captain of the football team at her school sidled up to her and discretely asked if he could check out a copy of my first book, The Dark Divine. He said that despite it’s “girly cover” he’d heard it was really good. She “secretly” checked it out to him, and he later told her that he loved it. It makes me happy that he enjoyed the book, but oh so sad that he had to check it out and read it “in secret” because of the “girly” cover. Ugh, what that says about our society makes me shudder.
The funny thing is, if my book cover is “girly” because it has a girl on the cover, and The Demon’s Lexicon is considered “girly” because it has a boy on the cover–then what exactly is the criteria for being considered a girly cover?
Side note: That same librarian also told me that came upon a group of boys discussing one of my books in the library. She listened in to hear what they had to say–turns out they were in a heated debate over whether or not the girl on the cover was wearing underwear. Nice!
Anyway, great post.
That last thing made me snort. I’m glad I wasn’t drinking anything.
The funny thing is, if my book cover is “girly” because it has a girl on the cover, and The Demon’s Lexicon is considered “girly” because it has a boy on the cover–then what exactly is the criteria for being considered a girly cover?
I know, right? I’m not sure what a boy cover would look like at this point. I know a lot of ostensibly “boy” books just have illustrations on them and no people– but to me illustrated covers look more like middle grade novels.
Dude, that last bit made me laugh and laugh and laugh. And you know what I’m thinking? E-readers, for those well off enough to own them, are going to make a huge difference when it comes to equalizing which books are for which readers. Nobody knows you’re reading pretty sparkly cover Book A when it’s safely ensconced in a grey plastic shell.
I don’t think the books or lack of are the problem it’s that reading in general for this age group is “for girls” we need to get the boys to actually read instead of playing video games. Middleworld is about a boy but I have had a hard time getting my son to read at all though I know he will love it.
I definitely think we need to bring books back to boys as viable entertainment. I feel very lucky that in my family, my mother and her husband read in front of my son; my husband and I read in front of him. His father and stepmother read in front of him. There is no end to reading in our house, and I feel so lucky to have a kid who will give pretty much anything a shot when it comes to fiction.
Showed the cover to my 28 year old boyfriend and he said he wouldn’t read it as it looked like a YA Urban Fantasy Romance – told him what it was and he still wasn’t interested as he’s not interested in the YA genre. Due to the fact that he feels that the writing is too formulaic and sub-par.
He’ll read anything regardless of the gender of the author but isn’t interested in the specific YA genre.
That’s a shame, because there are extraordinary novels of literary excellence in YA. But since he’s already made up his mind, I doubt I’m going to change it by offering recommendations.
The boys are welcome to wander to my shelf and pick up sci-fi. If the YA doesn’t suit there are plenty of sci-fi books with young male protagonists: Ender’s Game, War Child, Young Miles…
There’s even YA sci-fi with, gasp, males! And females! And aliens! Oh my!
I’m beginning to wonder if the New York Times even reads books any more. All of their recent articles on books, especially YA and genre fiction, have been so far off the mark that I can’t even guess where they are coming from. They aren’t reading the books, and they need to quit commenting on them.
I agree with you; it’s really frustrating. OH NO THERE ARE NO BOOKS WITH BOYS… well, um, actually there are. OH NO THERE ARE NO BOOKS WITHOUT VAMPIRES AND DARKNESS… well, actually, there are…
I think Maureen Johnson hit the nail on the head when she said people make a lot of money by writing about the latest thing that will hurt your kids. Nobody made a dime on being positive!
You make some excellent points. Thank you for putting this out there.
Thank you for reading and commenting, I appreciate it!
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There is so, so much truth to this. I’ve been working in bookstores for the past two years, and I notice a significant difference between people coming in asking for books for the daughters, and books for their sons. If I recommend something “boyish” for the girls, there’s no problem, but if I recommend something “girlish” for the boys, the parents get uneasy and worried the boys won’t like it.
Boy loves Enid Blyton as much as girls do. Girls love Robert Muchamore as much as the boys do.
Brilliant article!!
I really think that it’s the adults more than the teens who are upholding this divide. I do tons of school visits, and arguably, I have the GIRLIEST cover in the known universe… but there are always guys who have read it and there are always guys at the book clubs. We should give them more credit and quit trying to “protect” them from something that’s not an issue to so many of them anyway!
Hear, hear!
Aaah. Saundra, why can’t you be publishing the articles instead? The world is so much brighter on this end of the web.
Great post!
Dude, you’re sweet, thank you!! I don’t care who writes it, I would just once like to see an article in a major newspaper that’s positive. “Hot damn, y’all, look at how much fantastic fiction is available for teens now!”
Fantastic article! I think there’s good reason to be hopeful that this will improve in the future. There was a time when girls would have been teased for liking “boy” stories with robots and monsters and ray-guns (or cowboys and rifles) (or PIs with fedoras and handguns).
As gender roles continue to evolve, I think we’ll see a time when these fiction boundaries will break down further. Alas, I suspect it will also be a slow process…
I agree with you entirely. Things really have changed drastically in the last 200 years, and I do think we’re going to get to the point where gender is considered a mostly neutral construct. And personally? I think we’re a lot closer than the adults would like to believe. I have a high schooler, and it’s extraordinary to me how much has changed since I graduated 20 years ago!
thank you for this post, saundra. you rock.
Awww, thanks, Kirsten! <3
You know what, this is a gross oversimplification of the issue. Not only do I think that you pulled one quote from the article and used it out of context, I also think that you are oversimplifying the issue and vilifying people who are simply trying to come up with ways to get boys to read more.
Should boys be open to reading books with more feminine topics or covers? Yes. I think when boys ignore great books with female characters, they’re selling themselves short.
But let’s get real: boys and girls are different people. I had plenty of girls tell me they didn’t pick up my book for the longest time because the cover was too masculine. For the record, the cover was gender neutral. But girls are just as guilty of cover discrimination as boys are. Girls are drawn to different things than boys are and vice versa.
This kind of “if boys don’t like it, screw them” attitude does absolutely nothing to help the problem. Within the same article that you quoted, the author also said, “At the 2007 A.L.A. conference, a Harper executive said at least three-quarters of her target audience were girls, and they wanted to read about mean girls, gossip girls, frenemies and vampires.” Publishers are obviously targeting girls. They target them with the covers, with the content. My own publishers have asked me to add more romance to my books to entice female readers. So why shouldn’t we do more to bring boys into the fold? Efforts to get boys to read do nothing to diminish girls. This feeling that anything we do to help boys inherently hurts girls is counterproductive and just plain not true.
Nobody is suggesting that anyone kick all the female writers out of YA or female characters out. Books should empower everyone. All anyone is suggesting is that we help boys find the good literature that’s out there, and that we help expose boys to more books that speak to their individual conditions.
You can’t generalize for an entire gender. Each individual child is different. However, there are shared experiences that ARE gender specific. Judy Blume was able to write books that spoke to both genders uniquely. A boy growing up is never going to understand the fear or excitement or confusion that comes from getting his first period. Just like a girl is never, ever going to understand the shame of an unexpected erection. Girls and boys experience the world differently and they each need books that explore those unique experiences.
Boys and girls are both worthy of literature that explores their strengths and their weaknesses, that exposes their differences and shines a light on their similarities.
You brought up THE DEMON’S LEXICON, and I have to say that I hated that cover. I went so far as to order the British version because I hated the cover. However, you’re right that society should change. Boys should be raised NOT to be afraid of reading a book just because it’s got a cover they might find embarrassing. BUT…society can’t change overnight. Change takes time. And in the meantime, boys are not reading. Telling them to suck it up and deal is in fact punishing them. That’s cutting off your nose to spite your face.
There is no one-size-fits-all approach to marketing books. Somewhere there is a middle ground where boys learn that it’s okay to like things that are generally considered feminine and where girls don’t feel threatened every time someone brings up the topic of boys and reading.
No one is trying to kick girls out of the playground. They’re just trying to find their own space to play and maybe find a way for everyone to play together.
I think perhaps you should read my follow-up post about this, because this post is not mad at boys, and I don’t *want* to keep books from boys, nor do I want to discourage the male experience in YA. Lipsyte’s thesis statement is this:
The summary of which is: all these chicks are just also-rans for the adult market; their place is writing unimportant fiction for adults. Instead, they’re writing all this YA, and this whole Ya Ya sisterhood is conspiring to make sure only chick books get published.
Then he goes on to say:
Which is why I wrote my post. Because while this may be true, it’s- forgive the french- bullshit that in 2011, we still have articles in the New York Times about why we should continue to uphold that status quo.
Once upon a time, we men weren’t so put upon! Women were underrepresented, and that’s how we liked it!
Why, even including a vagina in our masculine books ruins them. He’s complaining about something that happens to everybody*, from a point of view that straight up says the mere presence of women somehow damages his masculine space.
I find it fascinating that both you and Lipsyte both cite FOREVER by Judy Blume as gender neutral reading. Blume herself said the reason she wrote FOREVER was so there would be a book out there where the girl was allowed to have sex, and didn’t have to suffer as a consequence.
But my point, and I do have one, is that I’m not actually saying to hell with boys, they need to learn to suck it up. The whole “Hey, Demon’s Lexicon would be great for guys if it weren’t for the cover!” is a quote straight out of kidlitchat, and I think it’s endemic to this attitude. When a multiply-starred, award-winning novel is not good enough for guys to read because of the cover, then the problem is NOT the books. The problem is the attitude toward the books, and hence this entry.
* I was asked to take the tampons out of my first book so that it would appeal more to boys. (For the record, I removed the tampons.)
Saundra, I think I may love your deconstruction of that article in your comment even more than the original post!
It’s one thing to talk about how to more effectively market books to boys. It’s another to blame boys not reading on some sort of female conspiracy.
I agree with Shaun; it’s all well and good saying that societal attitudes need to change, but, as he says, in the meantime what are young male readers supposed to do? As a secondary school teacher and someone who’s just completed his first novel, I know that A LOT of boys would only consider reading a story if it contained a lot of violence, weapons, explosions and/or monsters. Is that as a result of the way they are brought up? Partially, yes. But if a kid is a reluctant reader, it’s no good trying to force them to read something outside of their comfort zone and hoping it will change their entire outlook on books and reading.
As for the front cover issue, I reckon about 90% of us are conscious on some level of how the cover art comes across to other people, especially if reading in public.
I suggest that in the meantime, they read the books about boys that are already out there. Of which there are actually many. There’s no dearth of YA books about the male experience, no matter how many Chicken Little articles the NYT publishes to the contrary. The problem is not the books.
(ETA: I also suggest that adults start counting graphic novels, manga, scrolling storyteller video games and subtitled anime as reading for reluctant readers of all genders, but that’s a different soapbox for another day.)
Hi, I think many of the respondents do not understand how hard it is for boys to be true to themselves in our society. I am a school librarian in an all boys school. Yes we have many wonderful books written by female authors that I promote but I do not get many takers. Why because any boy who takes out a book by a girl or with a girl on the cover or if the cover looks girly will be teased unmercifully. This does not happen only in my school but with all other school librarian at boys school.
Yes we would all love to live in a society were we can all be true to ourselves and to be accepted for who we are. But we don’t, I work at the cutting edge will continue to buy great books written by brilliant women writers but I know it takes a brave boy to take one of those books out of the library and to be seen reading it.
I think you underestimate what we understand. My position is that we, as a society, need to change so boys don’t HAVE to be afraid to take a book out of the library because of it’s cover.
The status as it is now, sucks. It needs to change. And the best way to change that is to stop making being female a BAD thing. Homophobia and sexism come from the exact same place: the reflexive disdain society has for men making themselves lesser by acting like women. We fix that, and boys will be able to check anything they want out of the library.
Great post! For some reason, I find quite a few teen boys have read my books, especially the FROST Series (which features a picture of a girl who looks frozen with blue lips). I was surprised to hear my husband’s high school football player friend’s son was an avid fan. This series and quite a few more of my YA series like PULSE, Wicked Woods, and DESIRE had strong main girl/women characters; but had attracted some male fans. Meanwhile, my series with a main boy character, The Alchemists Academy, had attracted many girl fans. The Alchemists Academy features a boy (a cute real teenage boy) on the cover though, but the series is gender neutral.
I think overall, though, what speaks to the boys who do read my books are the action, adventure, and sense of heroism they have no matter what the gender of the lead is (for instance: Hunger Games), and when someone recommends these books to them by word of mouth, they do read YA books despite any “girly” connotations because the message trumps the image.
I think we don’t give boys enough credit, actually. I know plenty of young men who read just about anything that’s put in front of them, regardless of what’s on the cover. When I get hugs at a school presentation, inevitably, it’s from guys. (And I’m a middle-aged woman who wears her experience proudly, so I’m pretty sure they’re excited about the books and not me. :)
Utterly brilliant. Thank you. I have linked wherever I can. Thank you for such a great post.
Thank you so much for reading and sharing, I appreciate it!
Wow! Well said!
Thank you for reading!
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This is a wonderful read, and as a feminist I applaud you. But, as a mother of three boys? Here’s the problem–the problem IS in fact the books. It’s that they are BOOKS.
In Ontario, Canada, we have standardized literacy tests for students starting in grade 3. And one of the things that has come out of the results is that the boys don’t do as well as the girls, especially post elementary school. The reason? Generally speaking, studies find that males do not read the same things that females do. Yes, there are women who like instruction manuals and game sites, and yes there are men who like novels, but generally the studies show that girls who like to read will read novels from their earliest years all through their adulthood. Boys will read the books they HAVE to read through school, but their novel-reading begins to fall off in high school, and in post-secondary life, falls off even more.
I live in a house FILLED with reading material–books, magazines, GNs and comic books. I read all the time. My youngest child, the only girl, reads all the time. My husband reads all the time–but only non-fiction books or comic books. No novels. Ever. Absolutely no interest. The middle two boys? We force them to read. We have to FORCE them to read. So, they find anthology manga collections to read. They read magazines and comic books. They’ll read histories of their favourite games or the current books out about Lego mini-figs. They will not read novels. They do not live novels, YA, girl-centric, boy-centric or otherwise. And when I complain to other mothers or the boys’ teachers, they all say, “Well, they’re boys…”
It’s been suggested in Ontario, that part of the problem with the Literacy Test is that they’ve been written by elementary school teachers–who are primarily female. So, these tests reflect what THEY are interested in reading, and not necessarily the reading of boys. Boys may not read novels–but they do read comics, and the forums on games sites. They read complicated instruction manuals, and the quickie paperback novels based on their favourite games or movies. They read card game instructions, and they read books about those card games.
Waaaaaaaaaay back when, when RL Stine was ‘a thing’, there were parents who raged about how crappy the books were–but the readership was primarily boys, so educators actually loved them and kept school libraries stocked with them. It’s why school libraries (in Ontario) are filled with comic books and graphic novels–because boys will read them. The problem with boys’ literacy is not to get them to read novels–it’s to understand that they are literate, they are reading…it’s just not the way that we do.
You make great points Saundra and I do believe that they point out many of the issues that plague this type of book. It’s a bit similar to the science fiction dilemma, it’s all typecast due to just a few samples that people take to be more than just a tip of the tip of the iceberg. Many people will avoid science fiction because of the prejudices they form from the similarities between a few popular titles. My favorite author, Octavia E. Butler, addressed this often by trying to tell people not to shoehorn her book into genre’s or that they were moreso fantasy fiction, not science fiction. She wrote books about people and practical sociology that used science in fantastical ways. Or at least in forms that would differ greatly from a Star Trek-like book.
Books are wonderful creations, they show how powerful the imagination can be. The best books take advantage of the readers imagination through the craftsmanship of the author. Today we have a wonderful market that is flooded with product. People only have so much time to invest in reading. Books must compete with many things that have made people very jaded in judgment and hesitant in book buying today. Disinterest in reading, other books and marketing of the core elements of the book.
YA may suffer with young men not only because of a perceived femininity but because there are so many other things vying for their attention. YA doesn’t need to focus solely on men in marketing and creation but if a demographic isn’t purchasing the books in significant numbers then that means that it doesn’t appeal to that group or doesn’t actively try to attract that group.
Let’s take a look at video games for a moment. We will look at Nintendo’s Gamecube and Wii consoles. The Gamecube has sold approximately 24 million units in a time frame of approximately 5 years worldwide. The Wii did that in approximately 2 years. Both systems featured Nintendo games, but they presented themselves differently to attract different markets. The gamecube was a system that was designed for people that already played games of increased complexity that liked the 3D direction of the industry. It attracted men and women, but disproportionately. Not only that but its main audience were the enthusiasts. The Gamecube controller is an intimidating thing for someone that doesn’t play games, the 3D focus is a barrier for people because it required them to control the game in a non-intuitive form while playing something that doesn’t have a distinctly simple gameplay core like Checkers, Pacman, Mario or Contra.
The Wii was the opposite and sold during a rougher economy, with supposedly more attractive competition and at a higher price then the Gamecube. The difference is that the controller was changed to be more simple and less threatening to non-enthusiasts. The games were simplified in the beginning to allow anyone to play, and even after adding complexity they were able to still attract non-enthusiasts and keep them because the way that games were played changed and broke a huge barrier to their consumption. Not only that, but core of games remained mostly the same but the presentation of them matched the interface by allowing people to swing bats instead of pressing buttons and moving sticks to hit balls. Players used one stick to move and used the controller in an extremely intuitive way to play 3D games and shooters more easily. It also showed the customers that the original focus of game development was being returned to by focusing more on the framework on the game along with content instead of non-gaming features like having control taken away form the player.
I think that I strayed a bit too far, but YA may have trouble attracting non-fans to it, a significant portion of which is men, because the few pieces that get attention in a males world focuses on items that don’t have value to them. I’m a man and I love romance, passion and many other things that society tries to say is just the domain of women. There are certain forms of it that I personally do not care for but I read something from just about every neck of the woods. Covers are a significant part of attracting readers and I believe that YA would appeal more to men if the more diverse forms of YA fiction were placed into the mindshare of men more often. It’s difficult to fight against the training of dislike that can grow from typecasting but it isn’t impossible. Another set of examples to look at for help in this would be Cola and Ubuntu.
Cola asked what else did people want to drink that they didn’t offer and they entered the bottled water market and saw a surge in profits. Ubuntu is a linux based operating system that rose from obscurity and into being the face of desktop linux today. They offered many types of ambassador like initiatives along with reaching out to people that had no idea what they do and why they should care. They did so by giving away the system for free, focusing on the user experience, and in general exciting people by giving them a different and exciting product that still retained its’ core structure and fundamentals of being linux. Most users probably don’t care that it’s linux, most Android users don’t care that they use linux or open source software. YA needs to find healthy ways to get people to not care that their books have similar covers and shared themes of other books like Twilight that carry a negative stigma among certain demographics.
Book readings at Borders and other stores would have been a great way to change perceptions and gain word of mouth growth but in todays world there are bound to be many solutions to resolving this problem. When it comes to customer service and experiences that is the sole domain where the customer is almost always right. In most cases it is not right to blame the customer for not understanding the product, instead it is moreso about how we have failed. The excerpt above speaks about getting men more books that Saundra says already exist. Great, the product exists. Break down the barriers to entry and education and go grab your customer. Give them that wonderful experience, show them that you have what they want. It’s like what Einstein said about racism and prejudice. Education is the key but it’s a slow and painful process. The best thing that I can suggest to do is to study how male customers are created and attracted to YA books that feature the covers that you believe society says are unattractive. I believe that those covers will only be an issue for a minority of male readers once you learn how to speak to them.
Hello! I have been lurking and coming back here multiple times to read the comments. Just so you know, I agree with you SO MUCH.
As a kid growing up, I remember having initial difficulty getting through LOTR because there were no women and I didn’t understand why all the guys got to be heroes and the women just stayed in the villages and stuff. (Obviously, one female character changes this later on, but I’m talking about the first book.) But my point is that I DID READ IT and I LOVED IT so yeah. Actually, over the years, I’ve read TONS of books about boys growing up into men and the male experience. I’ve been a pretty good sport about it. Sometimes I gravitate more towards these stories, because historically they’ve been more likely to get the heroic journey treatment (thankfully that’s changing now in some BIG WAYS).
So when stuff like this comes up, it makes me feel like my experience isn’t important. Negated. People who look like me, dress like me, have my interests, my concerns, MY experience of growing up, are not important. Not enough for boys/men to read about. Not enough for boys/men to care about. So take all that pink and tall dark brooding man meat off the cover – even though I would gladly read something blue with a hot lady, even though I have lots of friends who would. Because this street apparently only goes one way.
But I agree that it is HARD for boys. Because of our society. Because it’s more desirable to have male attributes (or rather the male experience), it’s even “stronger” for a woman to appropriate them (at least sometimes), but feminine things will lead to you being called a sissy and getting made fun of on the playground. So I understand. (Partially because guess what I’ve been READING BOOKS THAT TALK ABOUT THAT.)
The Problem Is Not the Books.
The Problem Is Not the Readers (Boys or Girls).
The Problem is Society, and People Who Are Old Enough to Know Better But Still Write Passive-Aggressive Articles in the NYT.
Awesome article :)
One thing I’d like to note is our boys highschool library experience with twilight. When we first got the series it was in high demand, and well liked. We are a boys school, so it must be for boys, right? Once the hype really started up however, there started to be judgements about it being ‘girly’ or ‘romance’ or even badly written (all from those who had never read it) because of what our boys were being told about it by adults in the media. What changed? It wasn’t the kids, the stories or the covers, just the societal judgements being pushed at them. And because there’s no hype about it, some of those boys then went on to read Halo ;)
OMG, I love this, and I want to frame it. Thank you sososoos much for sharing!
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I agree with Anthony, Shaun and others of similar attitude. My son is now 20 but we had the EXACT same experience Anthony described.
You said, “Women have for centuries managed to read material written by men, about men, and still walk away being able to figure out how those stories apply to them. To be fair, we had to, and in many cases, continue to have to.”
Boys don’t have to. They can play video games, watch sports, hang out on FB or worse, do absolutely nothing at all. If we want them to read we can’t expect them to adapt to what we offer, which in my opinion as a middle school teacher and an avid YA reader does not always resonate with them. (Any hint of romance has to be dealt with VERY differently for young boys than young girls). We have to offer what does resonate with them. Yes there are lots of boy books. However, I know for a fact that it doesn’t take an avid reader long to get through that whole section.
People can argue and rage that women have been reading from men’s POV’s for decades. And we have, we do, and we will. What is the point in the argument? We want young men to read so they grow into men who read. That is the issue that matters. Sexism, feminism, gender bias’, marketing for money — whole different issues and we shouldn’t sacrifice our YA’s reading experiences to fight that adult battle. We need books that appeal to our boys, not books we have to teach them to appreciate. Like Shakespeare. Because we all know who much that inspires young adults to continue to read for pleasure.
Yes, but here’s the rub. There are already YA books ABOUT boys. There are a rather lot of them, and there are more being published all the time. On top of that, there are a rather lot of books by women, or featuring girls, that would still appeal to boys if they would read them. There’s not a lack of reading material. There’s a dearth of reading material that boys are willing to pick up because of outside influences.
The point of the argument is, we can write all the books that appeal to boys in the world, but if they continue to grow up in a society that diminishes women and their contributions, that belittle boys for straying from the stereotypical masculine role, that there will still never be enough books for them. The problem is not the books. This is not just about elevating women; sexism ALSO hurts men. It hurts men who aren’t allowed to be visibly interested in babies and children. It hurts men whose roles with their own children are frequently derided as “babysitting.”
Sexism also hurts men who continue to have to find their self worth in their employment; it hurts men who want to work in the creative arts. It hurts men who want to be early childhood educators, and librarians– it hurts men who could, and WOULD be in a position to find the right book for the right boy reader because the perceived femininity of these careers diminishes and discourages them. This not just about competing with video games. This is not just about a single list of books.
This is about a feature of society that hurts EVERYONE in that society. I’m not against handing books about boys to boys; I’m not against books about boys, period. But it is high time that we, as a society, start teaching boys that books about girls are for boys too. It is high time that we make a concerted effort to equalize and democratize reading. We need to teach boys that they are entitled to the same fullness of experience that we have been insisting that women be allowed to enjoy since suffrage.
Our boys should be allowed to grow up to be kindergarten teachers AND fighter pilots. Our girls should be allowed to grow up and be the same. But that’s never going to happen if we spend ALL of our time making sure that boys never ever have to actually stoop to reading books about girls. You can cater to tastes only so far; eventually you have to start learning about and appreciating people who are different from you.
The spirit of your posts are admirable, but off base. It isn’t about reading about girls so much as the style of the book. Boys generally plot-driven stories, not character driven ones. This isn’t a universal attitude, but it is generally true. Look at it from a video game perspective. Plenty of boys and men, when given the opportunity, will create and play with the female characters.
The roadblock is the emotional exploration. We generally don’t care about that. Boys are different from girls, and they like different stuff. And that’s okay. It’s not an issue of sexism, it’s that boys and girls are different. I mean, the physical differences are obvious, and there is no reason to assume there aren’t mental ones as well. I am not suggesting that boys shouldn’t read girls books, and I never said that girls shouldn’t read boys books.
But to insist that everything is fine now in YA, and that boys should read what is out there, isn’t fair and is a great disservice to the poor boys who have already read everything on your list. Please don’t post your list again. I’m not saying there is none. I’m just saying there isn’t enough that appeals to boys. You aren’t a boy, so you shouldn’t presume to know what I want any more than I should for you. When there are men tell you that we just don’t see the appeal, don’t assume it’s because we are sexist or that it’s society’s fault. Maybe, just maybe, we just don’t want it.
When we suggest there isn’t enough that appeals to us, consider that, from our male perspective, it just might be true.
Thank you for bringing up such an important issue in YA literature, and literacy as a whole.
But just as the only other male that’s commented on here, I think you have to remember that publishing is a business. And way more girls read than boys. If 8 out 10 customers are going to be girls, you’re going to want to market to them.
My main counter-point to your post is this, however: Instead of blaming society, why not simply acknowledge a simple fact: almost all boys don’t like stuff that girls like. Plain and simple. BOYS are the ones with more specific (and narrow) tastes. Girls have a greater capacity for empathy, and relating to almost ANY book they read.
Boys…not so much. It’s more difficult for adolescent boys. And it takes time. Putting forth the effort to treat boys and girls exactly the same way will always fall flat on its face. Boys and girls are different. Instead of trying to fight against nature, I say celebrate it. As a high school English teacher, I know that for the most part, their brains work in such different manners. And no amount of coercion is going to change that.
Your idea that teaching boys that girls books are for girls too is absolutely right on, but only in a perfect, genderless world. Anyone who studies neurology and/or psychology will tell you that boys and girls think differently. You give them the same riddle, they will each use different regions of the brain to come up with the answer. You ever see a brain scan of such an experiment? You’ll notice the girls’ brains will light up in more areas at once. With boys, you’ll see more focused energy in one region at a time.
Girls, in general, are much better at multi-tasking than boys. Boys have better depth perception and 3-D visualization (i.e. seeing the world through the eyes of an engineer).
Acknowledging these inherent difference, while allowing for those that do not follow those generalizations is the key. Some boys can multi-task just as well as girls, and girls can certainly become engineers. But these are generalizations after all. In college, I was the ONLY male taking Y.A. Literature in the entire university. Ever visit an engineering school? 75% male.
Is this society’s fault? Nope.
Now as boys mature, that’s where I believe the potential exists to get them outside their comfort zones. But we have to keep them engaged as readers. Sometimes, it involves a little trickery (i.e. female authors hiding their gender by using their initials) or making a cover more gender neutral (i.e. The Hunger Games with a very female protagonist). But we have to keep them reading, as we somehow lose them right around 5th/6th grade. We keep them reading, and as their psyches mature, that’s when we can expand their horizons.
Keep young boys reading, and hopefully some day they’ll pick up a Nicholas Sparks novel or give Twilight a try.
Why not simply acknowledge a simple fact: almost all boys don’t like stuff that girls like.
I DO acknowledge that. And I point out WHY they don’t stuff that girls like. Because again, if the contents of the Demon’s Lexicon would be good enough for a boy to read, but they won’t read it because of the *cover*, that’s a symptom of a society where boys don’t like stuff that girls like because society tells them that doing so will make them lesser people.
Plain and simple. BOYS are the ones with more specific (and narrow) tastes. Girls have a greater capacity for empathy, and relating to almost ANY book they read.
Because we had to. You know, I’m not going to re-argue my entire post with you. I never said boys and girls are identical, nor did I say they have the same tastes. I didn’t even say WOO HOO BOYS SUCK IT, though you seem to think I did.
However, I am going to highlight this:
Sometimes, it involves a little trickery (i.e. female authors hiding their gender by using their initials)
Because you, sir, prove my point. If women have to PRETEND TO BE MEN so boys will deign to read their books, what’s at work is not biology or neurology, it is sexism,
Quite right! Just for the record, my book has a female main character but a 13 yro boy (one of my beta readers) loved it. I don’t think it’s the fault of the books, it’s society’s perception of what is suitable for boys to read. This particular boy may never have picked my book up in a shop, but he enjoyed it nonetheless. You tell ‘em, Saundra!
Maybe it is, but saying so won’t make the boys read it. We are dealing with reality here, not theory or wishes. The boys think like this, and if it is sexist, that’s no good, but telling them they are the problem and that they should like it anyway won’t make them read it.
No, Steven, I’m dealing with reality here, you’re just throwing up your hands and saying “Let’s go with an unequal status quo that hurts everybody ’cause that’s what we’ve already got.” I don’t blame boys for the society in which they were raised. But I do blame society as a whole, and I do believe it ALL needs to change.
It is an unequal status quo, you got that right. There are too many girl books and not enough boy books. Try making a list like the one you posted in your link for girls, and it will be a heck of a lot longer.
As a mother to both boys and girls (yes, my job outweighs yours as a teacher) I find your post distasteful and demeaning to both genders. Read her original post again and this time take your blinders of and read what she is REALLY saying.
And for the record…my son read all four TWILIGHT books.
As one of those female engineers, I must say: Yes. Yes it is. Even a cursory review of some of the research into women in STEM fields will enlighten you as to the huge bias that starts before primary school to drive women away from these subjects. You yourself make a classic error in your own post, where you link 3D visualisation skills (which it is true men have a slight advantage) with engineering; it is simply not true for the vast majority of engineering disciplines. Analytical and mathematical skills are FAR more valuable in my own field, control system engineering, for example (and the gender gap in raw mathematical ability has been proven to be so slight as to have no effect). Yet this sort of presumption causes girls to think that they cannot enter the entire field.
For the benefit of your female students, I urge you to investigate this issue, and not simply chalk it up to some innate and immutable difference.
Gender gap in spatial abilities depends on females’ role in society– looks like science proves that it is, in fact, society’s fault (and not a magical natural aptitude that only men have) when engineering schools skew 75% male!
Brava!
My little brother reads the warrior cats and gaurdians of gahoole (the owl books). I think there’s a lot of male and female characters in those. I’m glad my school and public library had lots of typically banned books in its library. I got to enjoy 1984 and fight club and catcher in the rye because I heard they were cool and wanted to. My friend got me interested in Scott Westerfeld’s Uglies series, (all female protagonists) when I had only read the Peeps and Last Days books. And he’s a very avid male reader. Also, a loooot of boys in my high school were reading Twilight because their girlfriends got them into it. So there’s hope.
I SOOOOOO agree with you! It bothers me that some books are considered “only for girls” while others might be considered “boy” books. I think we need to stop genderizing (yep, made that word up) everything and just start realizing that as females, it’s ok to like “shoot ‘em ups” while as males it’s ok to like “romance.” C’mon folks, we’re in 2011 now, it’s time to get rid of these stupid gender stereotypes!!
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I grew up reading books like “Where the Red Fern Grows” and was able to identify with the male protagonist. I don’t think it is the books causing the problem. It’s the teaching.
Michelle
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I’ve had teachers using my historical novel, The Well of Sacrifice, in the classroom say that it works well because girls like the strong heroine and boys like the gory stuff. Hmm, well, I didn’t include human sacrifice and bloodletting to appeal to boys, but rather because they were historically accurate to the Maya. I guess whatever works. I wonder how many boys would pick the book up on their own, but at least these teachers aren’t only choosing books with boy main characters, and boy readers have an excuse for enjoying it.
This is the best post on the subject that I have ever seen. Thank you!
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I’m going to say something which may be very unpopular. But I’ve been saying this since back when I worked in a children’s library for nine years. I became sick of parents who turned away suggestion after suggestion for books their reluctant-reader sons should try (including “The Phantom Tollbooth”), because the books were too “girly.” Their sons, brainwashed by gender-stereotyping adults, declared that it was natural for them to “hate reading,” and stayed on the computer for hours, playing shoot-‘em-up games which were evidently “natural” for them.
To paraphrase Dorothy Parker, you can bring a boy to literature, but you can’t make him think. If boys refuse to read because they don’t want anything except “boys” books, fine. Stop wasting your time with them, and concentrate on those children, male and female, who want to read, anything and everything.
I want to see girls and women dominate this nation. It used to be men utterly controlled America, because they had the good educations, the best jobs, the higher incomes, the law on their side. If girls become better educated and therefore hold the highest paying, most powerful jobs, then bravo. If males are left behind and are limited to lower paying service jobs, technical and mechanical jobs, that’s okay with me. (I worked for a year at a technical/engineering college, 94% male.)
It’s not natural and inevitable for males to shun reading. I used to tell anti-intellectual, flag-waving parents who didn’t want their sons reading “girl” books like “A Wrinkle in Time” that George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Abraham Lincoln loved reading (of course, the majority of books then were written by men, for men). When the parents would complain that all Tommy had offered to him were girl stories by girl authors, I’d hand them a copy of Joseph Addison’s “Cato.” “It was George Washington’s favorite play,” I’d say. “All the characters are men who run a country. You can’t get more of a Boy Story than this.” But of course they thought I was joking, and of course Tommy didn’t read it, because Tommy was dumb as a brick, and proud of it, just like his parents.
(I also used to say that there was no excuse for a five year old child to not be able to read, that it was the parents’/adults’ fault if they couldn’t. That went over well, too.)
There ARE plenty of books, old and new, for the Tommys of America. What the “Too Many Girl Books” people really mean is that girls and women have too much influence. They write too many books and they hold too many jobs that introduce those books to children. They want things to go back to how they were when I was a kid in the late 50s, when Boy Books ruled, and the only books girls had were “Tammy, Candy Striper,” “Joanie is a Nurse!” and the most radical book on the shelf was “Pippi Longstockings.”
Help the boys who want to read, and stop bending over backward for those who refuse. I want to see girls become well-read, educated women who run America, and boys who are too cool and too male to read girly books to be the drones.
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Great post, thank you. I remember my freshman brain being blown when watching a documentary about gender bias by the Media Education Foundation, in which it was pointed out that 95% of violent crime is committed by men, but that it’s never referred to a “male crime” problem in any media or commentary. It’s just “crime”.
I grew up in an all-female household, and attended an all-girls school, where everything was about “girl power”. Being so sheltered, I honestly thought that sexism belonged in a past era. Imagine my surprise upon entering the workforce and discovering how wrong I was. Since I grew up almost entirely surrounded by women, I was not attenuated to the way that many, many men put down women in daily life, whether obvious or subtle, consciously or unconsciously. It’s made me extremely sensitive to it, perhaps, because I see it everywhere and it truly shocks me day in and day out.
So yes, I do agree: I believe that there is a bias so ingrained that it’s hardly perceptible, and permeates everything, including reading preferences from a very young age. If I, as a young girl, can identify with the protagonist in “Where the Red Fern Grows”, there should be no reason why a boy cannot identify with a female protagonist. (“Should” being the operative word. )
While I’m not sure I am totally on board with those people who are determined to raise their children completely gender neutral, I do acknowledge their good intentions. When my nieces were very little, I would buy them gifts like craft supplies or books or an outdoor game. Yet everyone else was buying them princess dolls and hair accessories. I wondered, is it because those little girls truly want the princess dress, or because they’re being trained from an extremely young age that these are what girls want?