Comments on: Educating Children About Who’s On Top

By: ZoBabe

ZoBabe — Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:37:35 +0000

My little girl, about the same age, has been really enjoying “The Sisters Grimm” for her bedtime reading. So far, so good.

By: Narya

Narya — Mon, 01 Dec 2008 21:42:01 +0000

late to the party–but have you read the Olivia books? Olivia totally rules. (My ex-stepson liked her a lot, too.)

By: Fred

Fred — Sat, 08 Nov 2008 05:33:06 +0000

Super busy! Sorry. Check back late next week.

By: belenen

belenen — Fri, 07 Nov 2008 22:31:35 +0000

hey, where ya been?? I miss your posts!

By: Fred

Fred — Tue, 14 Oct 2008 00:32:13 +0000

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.

By: Freida

Freida — Mon, 13 Oct 2008 22:17:21 +0000

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.

By: Fred

Fred — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 16:27:06 +0000

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.

By: Tei Tetua

Tei Tetua — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 04:03:46 +0000

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.

By: belenen

belenen — Tue, 23 Sep 2008 18:52:52 +0000

Your child is AWESOME! I love that! ;-)

—

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.