Sulking in the Clubhouse

I have this game I play every Christmas. It's called, "Find A Book For My Little Brother".This game is much harder than it sounds, because while my brother is extremely intelligent he won't seek out books on his own. I've been playing this game since he was 14 years old, so I've gotten pretty good at it. He likes books with a lot of action, and he prefers them with a male protagonist. For those of you who have never tried to buy these kinds of books, they are sometimes hard to find in an age appropriate section. It's a struggle at times, that's why I spend a good few weeks thinking over before making my final purchase. The thing is, every year I find something. Some years are harder than others, and I'm not ashamed to say that The Lightning Thief series supplied a few Christmases, but every year I give him one and he reads it. I'm not saying he loves every single one, but I can at least get him to read it.


When I hear about how hard it is to get boys to read, I can sympathize with the concept. It's a struggle to get my brother, who doesn't outright hate reading, to read for pleasure, so I can imagine the frustration of parents with kids who actively avoid it. I get to hear about it frequently at work, as parents try desperately to find something, anything that will spark their child's interest. But again, I always find something. Most often the parent comes back, saying that he wants more of the same. Those are good days, made nicer because it was somewhat of a challenge.


So I hope I don't sound too dismissive when I say that this article by Robert Lipsyte was the whiniest and most self righteous article I've read in a long time, and that's saying something. This article is purportedly about finding the cause for the lack of boy readers, but it seems to be doing more blaming a large female readership than being concerned with how boys are taught at a young age that they should never try to understand girl things, including books. 
Lipsyte begins the article with a story about a panel at which he and some other male authors have been asked to speak, in hopes that they, as successful and talented writers, could enlighten the audience as to how they can reach out to boy readers. He says, 


"We guys had mixed feelings about the game plan: boys’ aversion to reading, let alone to novels, has been worsening for years. But while this certainly posed a problem for us male writers, we felt that we were being treated as a sideshow.

And so we turned from men into boys. Though we ranged in age and style....we easily slipped into a cohesive pack. We became stereotypes, smart-aleck teammates — and we were very much on the defensive. It was Us vs. Them. This is exactly what boys do, in the classroom and in the library, as well as in the clubhouse."

First of all, if they had intended to treat you as a sideshow, would there be a bunch of authors, any number of whom are probably talented, hardworking and have much better things to do with their time, be waiting to listen to you? If they didn't care to hear your thoughts on it, why would they be there? Oh, right, because it was an "overwhelmingly female audience", they must have just been there to cry and wave their dollies at you. Why did you feel the need to go on defensive? Why the "Us Vs. Them" mentality? If you really care so much about boys reading, why don't you want women to write those books?


Also, this is what boys do because they are children who don't know any better. Just like girls do stupid things when they are small, boys do nonsense that they eventually grow out of if they want to be treated like adults. This happens for both genders, and part of growing up is learning how to tell the difference between you feeling uncomfortable about a certain subject and someone attacking you for talking about it. You learn to distinguish the two and react accordingly. Except for when they are intelligent male authors being sincerely asked their opinions, apparently. 


I get that boys not reading is a problem, although I'd really have loved to see some statistics backing up these claims of lower reading numbers. Instead of this hard evidence, Lipsyte names the "standard answers" to why boys don't read, including that boys, "don’t feel comfortable exploring the emotions and feelings found in fiction. . . . Boys don’t have enough positive male role models for literacy. Because the majority of adults involved in kids’ reading are women, boys might not see reading as a masculine activity.”

I...what? No positive male role models for literacy? Are you kidding? Kids, think back to when you were in school, and since Lispyte writes YA, let's focus on high school. How many of the books you can remember reading were written by male authors? For myself, I remember mostly male authors, certainly most that are regarded as "classics" were written by men. I do remember reading a good number of contemporary books by women, but I went to an all girls school, and I've heard it is less like that at co-eds. Perhaps we are speaking of contemporary role models? While it is true that there are more women authors on the shelves of the young adult genre, there are certainly more than zero. Yes, James Patterson, I'm looking at you. 

My favorite part comes next, when having acknowledged the "standard" (and in my opinion, more pressing) problem of boys feeling that reading is an inherently effeminate activity, he moves on to what he feels is the real problem. What might that be, you ask? 

"The current surge in children’s literature has been fueled by talented young female novelists fresh from M.F.A. programs who in earlier times would have been writing midlist adult fiction. Their novels are bought by female editors, stocked by female librarians and taught by female teachers. It’s a cliché but mostly true that while teenage girls will read books about boys, teenage boys will rarely read books with predominately female characters."

TOO. MANY. GIRLS. How DARE these women want to write books that girls would relate to, and how dare women teach as they have been doing ever since we told them they couldn't join the business world?! Quick, run up to the tree-house until the sea of estrogen has ebbed! I also love the casual back-handed compliment paid to the female authors of YA, "talented sure, but they should really be writing in the male-dominated adult fiction section so that their works don't get as much attention". Then the diatribe reaches new levels by suggesting that female teachers don't take into consideration the needs and tastes of their male students, which is even more insulting, if that's possible. 

Lipsyte's ending solution is for people to buy/teach kids his book, or at least write things like it, which he apparently feels are the only good contemporary offering for boys. I don't doubt that his books have inspired children to read (after all people who win awards are ALWAYS suitable to be teaching life lessons to children), and I'm a fan of anything that gets kids reading, but seriously. The solution is to put MORE books by male writers on the syllabus? Especially ones that, oh gee, have sports as the main subject line? Well fellas, we could only reach you if we do it through sports, which if you don't like then clearly you are a girl. Christ man, it's almost like you'd rather not have guys learn to read books by women. 

This, I feel, is the real sticking point of the article. Rather than try to tackle the issues of shaming and gay bashing that are a staple of a young man's life by standing against them and insisting that there is nothing wrong with reading things from a female perspective, it seems that he would rather hide in his club-house and blame it on the girls. Ah, it is indeed amazing how many solutions are MORE SPORTS AND LESS GIRL, and how caring and intelligent the men are that suggest it. Again, I do believe that he believes in getting boys to read, he just seems to think that somehow this could be solved if women just wrote less, or if we had more books that are clearly not selling anyways. 

Are there a lot of female authors on the shelves in the YA section? Yes. Is a lot of it too focused on the romantic attachments between girls and their oddly elder supernatural boyfriends? I mean, I think so. But my definition of what makes a good book is my own, and it may differ from others. I have learned not to behave like a spoiled child if not everyone likes what I like. If it allows a bridge between the unrealistic Disney Princess movies into the realm of the written word, then, well, maybe that Vampire Diaries fan will read Paper Towns next. It will be interesting to see if this crop of girls who are growing up in this YA boom will be more active readers in the future. My guess is that they will. 


As with the last rant I did on critiques of an entire section, I would also argue that a good bookseller will help you navigate these apparently treacherous shores, and find something that will appeal to boys to recommend. Do I wish there were more authors who wrote for boys? Sure, but somehow I think they become less inclined to do so when the male author they go to for advice starts ranting about how their inherent female-ness gets his back up. I also think that this is more of a problem of how the books are marketed as opposed to their content, but rather than asking books to all conform to a male sensibility, there has to be a way to get to the root of the problem: our faulty gender stereotypes.


What infuriates me beyond belief about this article is how much it de-values the cognitive capacity of young male readers. Boys are just as capable of reading girl books as visa versa, it is only that we do not expect them to do so. Women don't have some special gene that allows them to enjoy reading from a male perspective, they read male authors because as Maureen Johnson says, "We have little choice in the matter." Women read things by and about boys because they must, but you might notice that before all those female authors burst onto the scene, girls read less in their teenage years than they do now. (If you don't believe me on YA reading rates increasing recently, check out this NEA survey on reading, which ironically has male readership numbers up as well as female.) It's just that there wasn't the ridiculous amount of shaming on girls who read "male" works, so they could at least read something. This is mostly due to the fact that men write good things, and women write girly things, which are not good. If you don't believe me on this, ask any bookseller why Nicholas Sparks is in the fiction section instead of romance. 


I propose that instead of shaking the finger at women authors and readers, who have every right to be proud of their success, instead ask why it is that a boy might hide the book he is reading for fear of being called a sissy. Ask why playing sports is a "male" activity, while reading is a passive and "female" activity. Then, stop asking why and start working to undermine that conception. After all, gender is a construct, so maybe we should be asking how to show boys that they won't turn into girls if they read about trying on dresses, just like girls don't turn into boys when they read about refusing to sleep with a prostitute. I may not have liked that book, but it gave me insight into the struggles that boys sometimes have. After all, isn't learning to read inherently the task of learning to view the world through another's eyes? Why is the female perspective on the world any less valued and needful than the male?


I'll give you a hint Mr. Lipsyte: it isn't. The sooner we come down off our fences and work together on this, the sooner we can get those sensitive grown men you so desperately desire.