Entry tags:

books, oops! had an opinion, teaspoons: the reckoning

Or SLJ says: Screw You, Girls! Boys Are More Special Snowflake Than You!

Over on School Library Journal, there was a post. I read this post around the day it was published. I got so angry I wanted to throw my computer at the wall! I am not sure what to do with my habit of getting rip-roaring, expletive-spewing, I-cannot-respond-because-when-I-type-all-that-comes-out-is-;SLdjflsjhdfsdas,das,dd angry, but it is my habit to walk away and come back later.

I tried this! It turns out I am still pissed. Let me quote the section that makes me want to punch myself in the face from frustration.

I'm afraid this won't be popular, but I need more books for boys—as do most librarians who work with young people. I've noticed that lots of books with female characters aren't really about being female. In fact, in many cases, the main characters could just as easily have been males—and that would make my job a lot easier. ... Am I being silly? Probably, but some of our boys have never read a complete book in their lives. It's important to offer them good, appealing stories, and, sad to say, that means stories with prominent male characters.

Wow! Damn right it's not popular! This has gone past not popular into mind-bogglingly offensive and epically short-sighted. Hello, this is a woman? Oh, wait, like that matters, women can spew sexist crap, too. The solution to making boys read is to...make sure books not about "girl stuff" or about being female have male narrators? I read that and I am fairly sure I lost about 17,000 IQ points and somewhere, a few feminists woke up from nightmares. Am I dreaming? Did a librarian actually suggest that books should only have female narrators if the book is about, what? Bleeding from the vagina? Making babies? Cooking? [Insert female gendered activity here]? Because it would make her job easier?

Why yes! Girls should have to read about boys because you know, they're used to it, but boys shouldn't have to pick up a book with a female narrator, because they might get cooties. It's not like girls need to see people like them in situations other than female-gendered ones. On and on with the "male is default" meme, and I'm tired of it! Oh so tired, I cannot even express the depth of my exhaustion. Boys need books with male narrators because they can't see themselves in a female perspective, because they've been trained not to by a society that is hostile to women and girls. The answer is not to cater to this hostility, it is to come up with creative ways to make the books appealing. I cannot believe this that I'm reading, that a librarian, who might serve girls like me, who likes to read about adventures and magic and male-gendered things, would suggest erasing the female to comfort and entice boys into reading. Hells yeah! That's exactly the way to make boys more likely to grow up and not care whether or not the books they're reading have women as the main charac—oh wait.

Fuck that noise, and it is noise, and it's ridiculous, and why is no one else enraged. Why I am the only one over here steaming from my ears?

Girls should not be invisible or shunted to the background. Books with girls should be everywhere. Books about and with girls in main roles, doing whatever it is they're doing in the book. Librarians shouldn't advocating invisible and background girls because it would make their job easier. You know what would make my life easier? No more sexism. How awesome would that be!

Pretty awesome. Too bad it's not possible! Too bad we have to work for the hard wins.

We've been shoved to the background and hidden long enough: it's time for the culture to stop actively treating girls in such a way that asking boys to read about them is asking them to do something horrific. "Here's this book with a female MC," and a boy hears "Here's this awesome ROOT CANAL!" or "SURPRISE CASTRATION!" or the zinger "All your friends think you might actually respect girls—run!"

Yes, it takes teaspoons to swim against the tide of sexism and the never-ending push of the patriarchy. It takes teaspoons to fail again and again and again with boys who probably will shun all attempts to convince them that a book is awesome because the main character is female and everything else in their life is telling them that they are better than girls. Who said it should be easy? It's not easy to maintain and advocate for the presence of girls in literature, or the authors who write for girls, or about girls—but we should. We shouldn't give up and throw in the towel and actually advocate the erasure of the female to publishers!

NO. NO.

This quote is asking us to actively harm our girls for the benefit of boys. 2009 and we're still seeing this mess. Our girls deserve better and our boys do, too.