From Publishers Weekly:
For nearly two decades, I have been speaking about the ways adult gatekeepers encourage girls to read books about boys but discourage, prevent, or even shame boys from reading about girls. A couple of years ago, a helpful industry professional let me know that gendered reading wasn’t an issue anymore. “We’ve moved past that, you don’t need to keep talking about it.”
I’d heard that before, always from those who live in large coastal cities. I can’t say if those parts of our country have evolved beyond it, but I live in a flyover state, and that very same week, five women had come into my home office one by one to work on a non-publishing project. All were mothers who had at least one son and one daughter, and as copies of my books were in the room, I offered to sign some for their kids as a thank you. Every single one asked me to sign them to their daughter. When I learned their sons were also the target age of the books, I asked if I could sign one for them as well. It was almost comical how identical their reactions were. Uncomfortable. Confused. More than one even spoke those words: “But… it’s a girl book.”
So I gave my spiel: how we assume that boys won’t want to read about girls, but that’s our own bias. How kids don’t look for books based on gender but by genre and interest. How boys should definitely be encouraged to read books about other boys—all kids deserve to see themselves reflected—but that denying boys the opportunity to also read from another point of view is doing them a disservice, because understanding and developing empathy for more than half the human race can only help them as they navigate their lives, and so on and on. I could go on for hours. I promise, I try not to!
I didn’t know if I convinced them, but they did take the books, and weeks later one of the women reported to me—in shocked tones—that her son had read the books and actually liked them!
And this is how the effort goes. We slowly try to change things, one parent, one book, one kid at a time. It feels like the ol’ teaspoon and the ocean, and sometimes I worry that nothing really gets better. When I hear how many people in my own industry don’t think the problem exists at all, that worry dips toward despair.
But I would say most of the gendered reading bias I’ve encountered is not fueled by bad intent. It’s ignorance. Ideologies work their sneaky best when they feel “natural,” as in, “That’s just the way things are.” And our cultural ideology has for so long taught us “girls will read about boys, but boys won’t read about girls” that it feels like truth. That statement is putting an innocuous mask on this foundational belief: girls should (and for their own survival, must) learn to understand boys, but it’s demeaning for boys to understand girls. It reveals that we’ve created a hierarchy out of the binary opposites of male and female, asserting that the masculine is aspirational and the feminine is degrading. And excluding non-binary individuals entirely.
When my husband and I first had the idea for The Princess in Black series, we wanted to write it specifically for the mostly pre-third grade audience, partly because third grade is the age when kids have already absorbed that ideology and it’s so much harder to unpack. But if, from a young age, boys have read and loved books about girls, the ideology will have a harder time infiltrating their brains.
Here is the advice I got from many people at the time: boys are never going to willingly read about a princess. If you want boys to read about a girl, you need to disguise that the book is about a girl.
But that’s the whole point! The book has “Princess” in the title! And a princess on the cover! There is no denying it’s about a girl—and the boys will still read it and like it. That’s an experience their third-grade brain won’t be able to erase. And that will show the naysayers!
Eight years later, I am happy to report that the naysayers have been shown. Alas, they continue saying nay. Especially on Twitter.
Link to the rest at Publishers Weekly
So, what’s the problem?
If you were going to write a book that appealed to both boys and girls, why would you make the main character a princess? You only need to look at the book (on Amazon, easily found, part of a 9 book series) to see that no self respecting boy would bother with it, even in the 3rd grade. This is another case of an author trying to tell her audience what they should or shouldn’t like. Good luck with that.
Yeah. I wouldn’t have touched this with a ten-foot pole when I was in school. It just looks like a series written by a girl, about girls, for girls.
If you want boys to read books about girls, don’t make them look like they’re written for girls. Not hard.
Of course, the catfights have little to do with the quality or suitability of the books themselves but about the indoctrination they reinforce, one way or the other.
Can’t start the 2036 campaigns too early.
How about quit worrying about spreading your ideology, and just write good books?
If a kid likes to read good books, they’ll read good books, whether they’re about girls, boys, or aliens.
The real problem with the OP is that it doesn’t adequately identify the “adult gatekeepers” in question, pretty much assuming that all of the “adult gatekeepers” operate in the same way from the same assumptions.
Yeah, the two-decades-of-experience school librarian in East Overshoe, Kansas has the same assumptions and methods and resources and everything else relevant to being a gatekeeper as the marketing intern at the YA/middle-grade imprint in NYC whose only trips west of the Hudson were for family vacations a decade ago, but has the entire imprint’s resources to call upon.
Not. Comparable. Data. Sets.
But then, the OP is PW, which explains the biases and knee-jerk defense of whatever is currently fashionable in NYC commercial publishing all by itself.
I always knew I was doing stuff wrong. I introduced my two testosterone-enhanced kids to Alanna and Kris Longknife (and others) before they were middle-school age.