Educating Children About Who’s On Top
Large and in charge
My little girl is getting close to five now and I’ve read her hundreds of children’s books, from the bookstore and from the library. I’ve also watched hundreds of hours of children’s TV with her. I have no objective statistics to back up my general finding, but I defy anyone to disprove that sex bias is universal in children’s education and entertainment.
I can pick up five books at random and every character in them, even if they are androgynous-looking animals, will be male. In the remainder of rare books with female character, she is never the lead character, always a character observed by the main character or supporting the main character. It’s not that the girls are bad characters. It’s simply that they never have the center stage, unless it’s a girl book about princesses or something like that.
The default character in children’s literature is definitely male. Considering how many women write children’s books, it’s almost tragic. Many men and women in our world today will look askance at this obvious truth and ask me “What’s wrong with that?” Well, it’s fundamental training to put girls in their place, for one thing. Book after book celebrates and demonstrates that only men can have the center stage, only men count, even that only men exist.
My little girl really doesn’t like boys that much. She’s not friends with any of the boys at her school and refuses to wear boy colors, which are pathetically limited and easily-identifiable by any parent: Dark blue, brown, black, and anything with violent graphics or male superheroes. I can’t blame her a bit. When I was a kid I didn’t have to wear ultra-butch clothes to try to force me from seeming the slightest bit feminine, or insufficiently masculine, whichever the case may be.
So she has me change the gender of characters she likes to female when it makes sense to her, such as when they are genderless animals, and there is no conceivable reason why they should be one sex or the other. And this doesn’t even begin to even the score. But she likes it, so I do it happily. This is something she decided on her own, with no prompting from her mom or me.
When you consider that boys do worse in school than girls, while being the center of attention on shows and books for kids, you have to wonder if we were to switch the bias whether the boys would start to do better than the girls.
September 23rd, 2008 at 11:52 am
Your child is AWESOME! I love that!
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I think girls do better in school because it’s the one place where they at least have a SHOT at an equal opportunity. If you get the right answer, you get credit for it (hopefully), which is not true in the career or relational world. And it’s a way of proving that you are smart. Whereas the boys are already ‘winning’ simply by having male parts — they don’t have to prove that they are smarter because it is already assumed that they are. Also, males are not prohibited or discouraged from other ways of winning such as sports. In a very subtle way boys are discouraged from thinking, because it is ‘nerdy’ and it’s considered worse to be a boy-nerd than to be a girl-nerd. And there seems to be some kind of ‘macho’-ness to not doing your homework, but that’s just a vague impression. (I think this is because a thinking person would come to be dissatisfied with society, and a dissatisfied man has more power to create change than a dissatisfied woman, so society discourages men from thinking while not caring if women do.)
For boys to do better in school, the whole world would have to change, not just the attention-center bias.
September 23rd, 2008 at 9:03 pm
It’s been claimed for a long time that stories with a female protagonist just don’t sell. The girls aren’t enthusiastic, and the boys won’t get interested at all. Or maybe it’s the parents who want male heroes. But anyway, there’s a definite expectation that anything interesting that gets done in the world, or in the world of fantasy, will be done by a male. You might say, you’d buy books about girls, and your daughter would love them–but would Mr and Ms Normal and their kids want such a book? There has to be a market before anyone is going to publish that kind of material.
September 24th, 2008 at 9:27 am
Male supremacist argument number one: We can’t stop being sexist, our hands are tied! We can’t help it! The market won’t let us.
October 13th, 2008 at 3:17 pm
I’m pretty sure that if you switch the bias, boys would do much worse than girls, not better. You know, only a weenie reads books about girls, so they wouldn’t read at all. The Harry Potter series would never have had such an impact if the main character had been Harriet. I think the bias is there to encourage boys to read.
October 13th, 2008 at 5:32 pm
I just wish that there was gender neutrality, and that all this cultural garbage was history. You couldn’t have stopped me from reading everything I could when I was a boy, but I drew the line at books about horses. I never could see the attraction of horses, maybe because I grew up under city streetlights. I was actively biased against them because they were girl books, like a good little misogynist.
But oh my god how I loved Harriet the Spy! She was my greatest hero.
November 7th, 2008 at 3:31 pm
hey, where ya been?? I miss your posts!
November 7th, 2008 at 10:33 pm
Super busy! Sorry. Check back late next week.
December 1st, 2008 at 2:42 pm
late to the party–but have you read the Olivia books? Olivia totally rules. (My ex-stepson liked her a lot, too.)