Lady Business

It's the start of July. I am trying to review Kameron Hurley's essay collection, The Geek Feminist Revolution. In my wisdom, I have decided an analysis of her essay, "I'll Make The Pancakes: On Opting In And Out of the Writing Game", would make a great entry point for my review. I reread it to remind myself of the piece's fundamental points:

The more women writers I read, from Margaret Atwood and Octavia Butler to Charlotte Perkins Gilman and Toni Morrison, the less alone I felt, and the more I began to see myself as part of something more.

It wasn't about one woman toiling against the universe. It was about all of us moving together, crying out into some black, inhospitable place that we would not be quiet, we would not go silently, we would not stop speaking, we would not give in.

It's hard to see the keyboard when you're trying not to cry.

( Read more... )

This is the fourth installment in my series of posts on the way society talks about boys reading young adult fiction. The purpose of this series of posts is to critique the rhetorical arguments used when people talk about girls and boys reading, looking specifically at whether the structure of these arguments is logical and whether they include sexist rhetoric. This week I’ll be looking at a doozy of a mind twister, the idea that more books that ‘suit’, or ‘are friendlier towards’ girls are being published, than books that suit, or ‘are friendlier towards’ boys.

If we look at the real life situation (the number of boys reading young adult fiction is falling, boys are said to be struggling to find young adult fiction they want to read) it’s easy to focus solely on the genuine concern that boys not reading young adult fiction raises in the minds of readers, educators, parents and people in general. While it is important to focus on why boys aren’t reading young adult fiction, it seems like this topic has been and continues to be focused on plenty. What is rarely discussed is the construction of the argument that rises along the way in many of these conversations: it is presumed that girls have more books around them that suit their needs (the covers being used are traditionally feminine, the books are female orientated, or contain traditional areas of female interest, or the female sex is represented positively), or that more books are being produced ‘for’ girls.

I think it’s important for us to discuss the construction of a phrase like ‘more books are being produced that suit girls' needs’ (which is admittedly paraphrased from blog posts and comments I’ve seen over the last couple of years) because the content of such a simple snippet reveals much about common, negative arguments put forward for why boys aren’t reading. This kind of phrase contains a logically flawed argument, as do the rest of the arguments I’ve talked about so far. It treats girls as a homogeneous cultural group, and I outlined in my first post why it is incorrect to do so. And it poly-fills its logical hole with many pointing fingers, keen to indicate that women and girls are conspiring against boys' enjoyment of young adult fiction. By examining this statement, we can learn a lot about the construction of unhelpful, distracting arguments that pretend to explain why boys don’t read young adult fiction and work our way towards really understanding the real situation.

Unsound logic

My biggest issue with this kind of phrase is that it is based on unsound logic. ‘More books are being produced that suit girls' needs’, but as I said in my second post, girls seem to be recognised as omni-readers. Being omni-readers, girls will, in general, read a bit of everything. They don’t need to find anything especially gender related in their reading to be encouraged to read. It’s tough to maintain that girls are recognised as omni-readers by society AND that they read because they are receiving a wealth of books that ‘are friendlier’ to their gender.

It can be done. Of course it can be done, rhetorical arguments that look logical to many people can be constructed to justify anything, but that doesn’t mean that they’re based on factually correct information. A lot of educated people thought witches existed because rhetorical arguments that seemed to make contextually logical sense justified their way of thinking. A lot of women died. The arguments continued to make contextual sense to many. There still weren’t any witches.*

Imprecise language

But for the minute I’ll keep exploring this argument as if there isn’t a gigantic logical hole in the middle of it. I will avert my eyes from the hole, while being careful not to fall into it. Now I need to address the idea that phrases similar to ‘more books are being produced that suit girls’ needs’ can be described as examples of good points being made with imprecise language. What someone using this phrase actually means, some would claim, is something along the lines of ‘more books are being produced that are designed to appeal to girls’, ‘marketers seem to think that using X, which is culturally difficult for boys to embrace, will attract girls to books’, or ‘more books are being produced that focus on traditional feminine subject matters’.

If that is what these people mean, WHY DON’T THEY BLOODY SAY IT THEN?

Saying that ‘more books are being produced that suit girls' needs than books that suit boys' needs’ makes girls sound complicit in the destruction of boys' reading enjoyment. Here’s the chain of thought I hear laboriously clicking into place every time I hear a similar phrase used: first, girls (all girls, as no distinction has been made about a particular group of girls) have these needs, which they apparently can’t control and telegraph to book marketers through their buying habits. The market reacts to these needs by creating more books to suit the girls’ needs. Such a large amount of resources are being dedicated to satisfying girls’ needs that boys’ needs are being ignored. If only the girls could stop having these stupid, exclusionary needs and validating how important those needs are to their reading experience, then the market would stop producing so many books that respond to these exclusionary needs! OMG girls needs are the reason why boys don’t read.

In case I haven’t said it enough in this series of posts. Um…no.

This phrase and its like implicitly connect girls and their stupid needs to boys losing out when young adult fiction is created. It makes girls an active part of disenfranchising boys in their reading experiences. It points the finger of shame at girls and says, ‘your reading is costing boys their reading enjoyment’. It contradicts all the work people who genuinely think deeply about boys not getting something positive from young adult fiction put into saying that they well understand that girls reading more does not harm boys' reading experience.

Let me be clear, the girls who are reading and shaping ideas about what sells are not in any way enemies of boys reading. Using imprecise language that implies that girls who read take part in destroying boys' reading enjoyment is harmful and it distracts the focus away from a proper search into why boys really aren’t reading young adult fiction. Sometimes people who use this kind of phrase have good intentions and sometimes they don’t. I’m finding it harder and harder to automatically give people the benefit of the doubt when I have to decide whether someone is being a dick, or whether they have just picked their words badly. People with good intentions might like to choose the words they use with care.

Womanly Needs (I just threw up in my mouth a little)

My final problem with this kind of phrase is the way it alludes to girls’ ‘needs’. ‘Needs’ (and other words such as ‘tastes’, ‘interests’ and phrases like ‘books that are friendly to girls’) are such vague terms that they can encompass a wide variety of things. No clarification is provided as to what these ‘needs’ might be. The vagueness of these terms makes it harder for anyone to engage with the arguers points and they allow the arguer plausible deniability. Again here is a hypothetical, hyperbolic version of the way this vague terminology seeks to hide the lack of knowledge and precision this argument is built on:

'Oh no, Ms Opponent, we did not mean to imply that girls have those kind of needs, that would be a sexist claim. No, we meant some other needs that we will again fail to clarify. These needs are still girl specific, but they’re not sexist. Even if you can get us to tell you what we think those needs are and then explain why thinking girls have those needs is sexist, we can still use the vagueness of the term to say ‘Ahha, you have proved us wrong on that count, but there are other nebulous needs we do not have time/all the information to identify right now, but they totally exist. You can’t prove they don’t exist, which means we can prove they do!'

Circular, bad logic at its best there.

Since the nature of girls' ‘needs’ (and every time I write that it feels a little creepier) are often left unspecified, I thought I might present my best guess at some of the things people are really talking about when they say ‘lots of books are being produced that suit girls' needs’. It would take me a long time to debate all these points and this is a long ass post already. So instead of reiterating all these points from scratch, I’ll use links where necessary to explain what I think the points people are referring to when they mentions girls’ reading ‘needs’. I'll also show off some of the good work others have done illuminating the sexist rhetoric of similar arguments:

1.) There sure is a helluva lot of young adult romance out there…

'Over the next several years, the Sci-Fi channel became increasingly feminized, losing many of its traditional male viewers in an attempt to go after female viewers...Scripts were rewritten to have “more relationships” (more drama) and fewer “space battles.” ' - 'The Spearhead'

I’ve seen (and other people like Candy at Smart Bitches have also seen) a few posts from sci-fi fans saying that romance is killing their genre by feminising it.

'But somehow, everyone has a very firm idea of what the average romance reader is like. We bet you already know her. She's rather dim and kind of tubby — undereducated and undersexed — and she displays a distressing affinity for mom jeans and sweaters covered in puffy paint and appliquéd kittens. So even though repeated surveys conducted by independent research reveal that an astonishingly diverse and often affluent population reads romance novels, in popular depictions, we're all the same.' - 'Beyond Heaving Bosoms: The Smart Bitches Guide to Romance Novels'

Readers of adult romance often ask questions about why a genre/subject that has a mostly female readership is so often derided, despite it being extremely commercially successful and despite rallying cries from many genre fans in defence of other, male dominated genres.

I think it bears considering that when people link young adult romance and female needs with the fact that boys don’t enjoy reading young adult fiction, there may be an element of sexism in this argument.


2.) …and there are tons of books that look like they suit the traditionally feminine girls needs too.

This comes back to what I was saying in my first post: girls are not all part of a homogeneous cultural group just because they are all female. While many books may look like they’re designed to project traditional ideas about femininity to attract female readers, these tactics often do not work, because not every girl responds positively to traditional ideas about femininity. Saying that this kind of book suits girls’ needs is to make assumptions based on false premises (that all girls are the same and that because something looks traditionally feminine it suits a girl's needs). In doing so, the arguer makes an incorrect link between marketing and real women.


3.) There are an awful lot of books with heroines as well.

'We've stripped boys of substance and we did it to empower girls. Somehow, the message "girls can do it too" became "only a girl can do it," and men became the weaker sex in YA.' - 'Invincible Summer'.

I don’t mind the general argument here (that maybe there should be more and varied young adult novels with male leads because boys need representation - although I still want to see some numbers on this). On the other hand, I reject the idea that novels featuring heroines are expanding outside their segment of the pie, and in doing so are knocking out available resources for books featuring male leads. That argument seems to claim that because there are novels about girls flying on dragons fighting with swords, no one is going to publish any more books about boys flying on dragons with swords, so boys miss out on seeing themselves represented. I really don’t see that – if books about fighting on dragons with swords are popular, surely publishers will rush to publish all books about fighting on dragons with swords, right? And again, the idea that books with heroines are eating the slice of the pie allotted to books with heroes seems to link boys not enjoying young adult fiction with girls expanding their areas of representation and reading interests.

'Backlash is when a movement toward equality for a marginalized group gains momentum and the privileged group(s) freak out. This usually takes the form of denying that there's a problem or firmly announcing that the problem has been taken care of, all while doing a little dance in the opposite corner of the room to refocus the attention on who's really suffering.' - 'Manifesta'

I say hell yes to this post and the way it corrects the mistaken idea that as girls grow more empowered and see more diverse representation of themselves in young adult fiction boys automatically see less representation and find less to enjoy in YA. It turns reminds us that when someone points a blaming finger at the ladies in error three fingers point back at them.


4.) It’s time to make vague gendered assumptions about what girls' want and need. Again. Hurray, I never get tired of this carousel ride.

Girls like pink covers, or reading about romance. They are actively involved in the pink cover/romance domination of the young adult market. Blah, blah, blah, these arguments progress in a predictable way, probably with assumptions about natural behaviour thrown in. Need I repeat myself? Assumptions of homogeneous culture…. link to girls actively encouraging market to alienate boys…total fucking crap.


5.) Girls reading actively keeps boys from reading.

'Let’s face it guy readers, we are pwn3d by female book bloggers, let alone female readers. And considering the fact that we are tremendously outnumbered by them, we will continuously be pwn3d over the next millenia.' - 'Guy Gone Geek'

Please see the rest of this post and hear me shout NO, NO, NO, NO, NO. To borrow some words from Renay:

'the WHAT ABOUT THE MENZ?!?!?! meme is a staple of being a lady in the world who sees arrows in her entertainment.' - subverting the text

These are the kinds of implicit sexist rhetoric I hear behind every bit of vague talk about how the majority of young adult novels being published are 'friendlier' towards girls because they fit with girls 'needs'. Prove me wrong - clarify your ideas opponents.

With this post (and with this series in general), I hope to affirm that there is a sexist slant to arguments about why boys don’t read young adult fiction. In doing so I want to demonstrate that a false barrier has been identified between boys and how little young adult fiction they may read (girls and their needs). Focusing on this incorrect barrier distracts people from defining and combating the real barriers that keep boys from enjoying young adult fiction. Focusing on this barrier also reinforces sexist culture. Neither of these things get me any closer to the cultural society I want to live in.

* Yes, ok, my dissertation topic was rhetorical arguments for witchcraft – it is still a good example.

Next Wednesday: The final installment (or thankfully I can stop talking about this after one last, angry post)

Previously: 'Ladies, Gentlemen, Somebody Ring the Alarm', Girls Omni-reading, Girls Like They're Boys

‘Omni-reader’ is a term Maureen Johnson used on her Twitter feed two week ago. She used this word as a way of describing beliefs that girls are readers who will read about anything regardless of whether the subject matter looks traditionally masculine, or traditionally feminine. Articles like this one by Sarah Pekkanen of The Washington Post agree that girls 'tend to accept a broad range of books' and will 'read a book featuring a boy on the cover' (and since non-fiction is not specifically mentioned in this article I'm going to assume that when commentators generally talk about boys and girls reading they’re talking about boys and girls reading fiction). My personal experience of seeing girls and women reading fiction is that they'll read a lot of stuff, because they're interested in a lot of stuff. They (and I am a woman who sees her own behaviour in this statement) don't shy away from books that are written by male authors, star male protagonists, or are focused on traditionally male subject matter.

Society cheers girls for being omni-readers and at the same time questions the hell out of why boys aren't omni-readers. What mainstream society and its cultural commentators like Pekkanen rarely question, is why girls have become omni-readers and whether we're cheering these girls' diverse reading habits for the right reasons. I’m not questioning whether girls being omni-readers is a good thing. What I'm interested in is how society's gendered perspectives might affect the way that people shape their arguments about girls as omni-readers, boys as non-readers (of fiction) and what these people think needs to be done to encourage boys to read more.

Many of the answers arrived at for why boys aren't reading are often along the lines of 'It's natural for boys to be interested in boys stuff and male ways of storytelling’ (there are areas I would more wordily call traditional male culture and male focused stories). Boys, as a consequence of their biology, can only gain enjoyment from entertainment if traditionally masculine culture is present. Asking a boy to be interested in anything that does not exhibit signs of traditionally masculine culture is asking them to deny their maleness and become girls.

People talk a lot about this made up thing called reverse sexism that feminists apparently use to justify hypocritical stances, but few people seem to recognise genuinely negative gendered arguments, like the one above, when they're being aimed at boys. To my feminist ear the argument that boys, can't possibly be expected to enjoy or take interest in areas that aren't traditionally masculine, because they’ve been born male, sounds like a neat reversal of the average Victorian man’s arguments on women. Having escorted her to a divan, lest she faint, he would have patted his lady love's hand, murmuring 'There there, you can't be expected to be interested in science/literature/serious thought/maths/politics -- these are men's areas and naturally your female brain cannot handle stepping outside its gendered comfort zone.' Imagine if we were to say something similar about girls and how their sex defines their reading interests…oh wait, some people do that, but we don't like those people so THAT'S OK. Anyway, the relevant point thrown up by this comparison is that boys should be outraged at being told that they are limited creatures, men should be outraged as well. I will talk about my theories on why the outrage seems to be lacking in a later post.

Now that the majority of society would disapprove of talking about girls interests as exclusively, traditionally feminine and pre-determined in this way by a girl’s sex, people must find new ways to describe girl’s reading habits. Let us assume that the general description of girls as omni-readers is agreed on by the majority of society and that it is correct. Let us also assume that the majority of society agree that boys are naturally influenced by their sex in what they enjoy reading. For complex reasons which would need someone much cleverer than me to explain, society needs to reconcile these two ideas. Now, how does society go about reconciling the idea that girls are omni-readers, whose reading interests aren't dictated by their sex, while boys are infrequent readers whose interests are dictated by their sex?

The easiest and in my opinion the worst way is to go the well travelled route of reminding everyone that boys and girls are different. I mean cisgendered girls have vaginas, cisgendered boys have penises and the differences don't stop there, they extend into the biological brain makeup of the different sexes. Someone wrote a book about it remember? ‘Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus.' It must be true. Men and women are almost separate species. It's not a stretch, using this really stupid argument, to say that boys are naturally inclined to prefer traditionally male culture, while girls are naturally inclined to enjoy bits of traditionally male and traditionally female culture. We don't need to take note of the fact that until the late twentieth century society was determined to underline the fact that girls only naturally enjoyed and understood girls stuff, in the same way that boys are now thought to only naturally enjoy and understand boys stuff. Instead, what we can do is just say historical people wrongly identified quite how sex naturally influences the areas that girls enjoy, but continue to maintain that they were right, that sex does naturally influence girls bookish enjoyment in a different way. Yes, this is a smart argument.

From my sarcasm you'll guess that I'm against arguments that human cultural enjoyment is influenced by sexual biology. Sorry, but I think many ideas that see a natural relation between a person’s sex and behaviour are super creepy and pretty uninclusive of people with non-traditional sexual and gender presentations. I'm suspicious of ideas that human beings are naturally inclined towards any kind of culture because of their sex, because historically ideas like this have been proven wrong. Many girls do show an enjoyment of subjects like science or politics, when in decades past the thought of women being capable of understanding, let alone enjoying, these subjects would have been thought absurd by large numbers of people, because women were, well...women. Shifting the goal posts to ostensibly provide a more inclusive view of what women are naturally interested in doesn't seem like a positive shift to me. It seems like people are desperate that old ideas not collapse, so they rearrange their logic without changing their essential, previously damaging central position. Basically I have no faith in these kind of rhetorical constructs.

My own ideas about why girls are omni-readers and boys aren’t lie along cultural lines. Girls are not naturally inclined to be comfortable reading about masculine culture. They're also not naturally inclined to be interested in reading solely female centred stories. Girls (and boys) are not naturally inclined to align themselves with one particular gendered culture, they are taught which cultures to align themselves with by society. Typically boys are taught to align themselves solely with traditional male culture. Girls are generally taught something slightly more complex; they should align themselves with traditional feminine culture in certain areas (for example appearance) but align themselves with male culture in other areas (for example intellectual pursuits, such as literature). If we're very lucky (and it seems that with each generation of girls we're becoming luckier, if the widely accepted status of girl as omni-reader is anything to go by) they'll grow up aligning themselves with traditionally masculine literary culture, traditionally feminine literary culture and everything else that exists besides that binary set of poles.

So, as a general rule I believe the trend of girls being omni-readers is a socialised trend, not a natural one. That's not to say that all of girls' reading interests as individuals, aren't genuinely their interests just because there is the potentially for them to be socially constructed interests. Many girls like books about fashion (traditionally female interest), or about fighter jets (traditionally male interest) and I would never seek to rob any girls of agency by saying 'the only reason you like these things is because the gender culture in our world impacts on you', that would be as creepy as saying their sex naturally predisposes them to enjoy certain things. I'm just saying that gender culture has an impact on girls becoming omni-readers. At the same time it's not the only thing that has an impact, but the sex someone is born as is not, in my opinion, one of these other impacting factors.

If I apply the same rules to boys as I have done to girls hopefully you'll be able to see that I don't agree with the idea that boys are naturally unable to enjoy certain kinds of books. What puts them off these books? Again a combination of the gendered culture we live in (that reinforces the idea that boys shouldn't like certain traditionally feminine things, or even masculine culture that incorporates traditionally feminine elements and should only like traditionally masculine culture) and other factors, none of which are a natural link between a boys sex and book enjoyment. So, in my theory boys could become fictional omni-readers, the potential is there, but there are cultural roadblocks in the way – roadblocks that can, unlike perceived natural roadblocks of sex, be removed to the benefit of both boys and girls.

Please understand, I'm not saying that girls and boys aren't inclined to seek out representations of themselves in things like literature. I think everyone wants to see themselves reflected somehow in the entertainment they consume. Typically when we talk about racial diversity in young adult fiction we're encouraged to think that we need more racial diversity in the main characters who appear because people need books which mirror their experiences, as well as books that open up other experiences to them. I do think teenagers seek out representations of their own sex and gender presentation, whether they be cisgendered boys and girls or transgendered boys and girls. So once again I'm not saying boys need to just deal and start reading books about girls and traditionally feminine situations all the time, exclusively, any more than I'd be cheering if girls were told to read books about boys and traditionally masculine situations all the time exclusively. Boys need to see themselves represented in fiction, just as girls do. We need books featuring cisgendered male characters doing all kinds of traditionally masculine things, for the cisgendered, traditionally masculine boys out there just as we need representations of every other cultural group.

I'm just asking if we can knock off this idea that boys 'can't' enjoy books that are in some ways less traditionally male. Might we be able to stop pushing the absolute idea that boys can only enjoy reading if they're given a wide range of traditionally masculine boys engaged in traditionally masculine situations, or written in what might be seen as a traditionally masculine way (lots of plot, fast pace, romance not a central feature). I'd like to see people address the blocking culture in which boys live, in the same way that society has spent several decades recognising and trying correct the gendered, blocking culture that girls exist in. Maybe if society took a double pronged approach where it agitated for more traditionally masculine young adult books, but also encouraged boys to see the value in other kinds of novels boys might become omni-readers too.

The reason why society should be invested in helping boys to become omni-readers, like girls, is simple. All the cheering society does about girls being omni-readers must mean that omni-readers are viewed as having a positive approach to reading. Girls interest in reading about everything is often implicitly linked to their interest in being able to read and their large reading consumption, so if society is really invested in getting boys reading they might want to take the hint that encouraging boys to be omni-readers might have appositive impact on concrete things like boys literacy and boys views on reading for pleasure.

Book lovers have more personal reasons reasons for wishing boys were also omni-readers. Omni-readers get to read about everything and that just sounds so cool to us as booklovers. We want boys to be having the same experience and that's why so many of us become frustrated when boys seem to be culturally anchored to rejecting a lot of literature, because they are missing out on a whole heap of interesting things. I do not intend to make boys 'be girls' (although if society could stop using that phrase as if it should horrify men everywhere that would be cool) or say 'be interested in 'Twilight' because I think that to prove they're not sexist boys should fully embrace all culture traditionally perceived as female unreservedly. I just want boys to stop knee jerk rejecting anything that sounds bit like something a girl might like. I just want boys to really understand something, to really see something and make a fair assessment about whether something is 'not for them' rather than making a gender biased assessment.

Before I close out this post on the problematic culture that produces the positive effect of encouraging girls to be omni-readers I have to mention one final thing. I am fully behind the idea that if the majority of girls are omni-readers they'll be having a fantastic and diverse reading experience. However, I'm willing to be a grown up and admit that while girls being omni-readers is awesome for them, awesome for booksellers and fills the world with more pleasant shiny feelings for us booklovers, there is a certain amount of implicit gender bias swirling in all this cheering. Is society (including me) cheering so loudly because being omni-readers means girls will experience all sections of literature, or are we cheering because being omni-readers means girls won't mistakenly miss out on all the coolness we assume books that intersect with traditionally male culture have to offer them? Are we as excited when girls read books about horses AND fashion AND vampire boyfriends AND all kinds of different girls, as we are when girls show an interest in reading about all these things and battles on space ships? If your answer is closer to the former than the latter then you are a fabulous omni-reader supporter, when I really examine my mind I find my own answer is less fabulous.

It's an issue. I will work to correct it and I’ll have more on this in my next post.

You can go away now and think 'well she's a woman (and so naturally prone to thinking girl stuff is interesting, haha, oh, please refer to Maureen Johnson’s tweet again) and as a woman she's also an omni-reader, so naturally interested in everything, so of course she thinks girls stuff is interesting, but boys naturally wouldn't think that.’. I cannot control your thoughts and I cannot make you agree with me on any point. I can just show you my hand as openly and honestly as possible and we can discuss things in the comments.

Next Wednesday: How we would react if we talked about boys girls reading the same way we talk about boys reading

Previously in this much too long series: Ladies, Gentlemen, Somebody Ring the Alarm