According to a new campaign, Let Books Be Books, we’re taking the gender out of books by preventing them being stuck on shelves labelled ‘for boys’ and ‘for girls’. Is it really that simple? What about the content? Are we also going to remove all those saccharine fairies, magical ponies, unicorns, mermaids and so forth…
A study by Florida
University in 2011, tells us that 57% of children’s books have male central
characters while only 31% are female. Likewise for young children, 23% are male
animal characters, while only 7.5% are female animals.
‘The imagination has no
gender’, said author Bel Mooney recently. I’m not so sure. As a parent observing
boys and girls at play I would have said that they inhabit quite different
imaginative worlds. Girls tend to be exclusive - I can’t play with you because I’m playing with her and this is a game for only two
people. Whereas boys tend to be inclusive – the more aliens, cowboys, agents,
monsters or footballers the better. I’ve never yet heard a boy say - ‘you can’t
play with me cos I’m playing with him and we only need two aliens to take
over the world…’
We’re told this is an
offshoot of the ‘Let Toys Be Toys’ campaign. Toys are no longer to be served up
in boys/girls categories, but all mixed up and gender free. A worthy aim
perhaps, but again I don’t think the problem is packaging so much as genuine choice.
When my children were
younger, I nicknamed the girl’s aisles in our local Toy MegaStore the domestic drudge department: an endless
landscape of household chores, mini ironing boards, washing machines, buggies,
cookers, and nappy bins, all served up as play. Surely the problem is not
whether you package these toys in pink boxes, or stick them on certain shelves,
but the sheer tedium of what they represent. Bad enough when you have to do it
all for real…
I remember my disbelief when
my daughter bought a Barbie dog, to discover that the plastic pooch popped out
tiny poo-pellets which had to be swept up into a mini poop-bin. Perhaps if
Mattel had managed to make it fart as well, we would have had a genuine
gender-equality toy.
But of course, this gender argument
is nothing new. The biggest row my brother and I ever had, way back when, was
whether his action man was a doll or
not. I didn’t hold it against him, but I was determined to win the academic
argument (tis not!…tis too!..tis not…) Standing firmly on his seven-year-old
dignity, big bro maintained action man couldn’t possibly be a doll because he moved too much, hence the action in action man.
In a way this encapsulates
the whole argument – GirlyDoll is defined as a doll not just because she has a
gazillion outfits to put on and off, but because she is rendered passive by her
limited mobility. Action man can appear to leap, run, climb… most booby-dolls
can only raise their arms or legs at shoulder or hips in a stiffly passive way (a
sort of heil bimbo) just enough to
squeeze that frock on. I used to wonder, why doesn’t someone market a Lara-croft
style action girl doll? One that can run and climb, and kick-box and generally
kick ass.
Despite all this: isn’t it
what children choose to do with their
toys that count. I don’t ever remember my son spending hours debating whether
action man should wear the blue shirt or the commando-Tee, and which would be
better for his upcoming party… but I do remember him being hilariously
entertained by a book character called Captain Underpants, who’s daft
behaviour, bottom jokes and farting antics, left my daughter completely
unmoved. And trust me, putting the Captain in a pink sparkly cover wouldn’t
have changed anything…
Which brings us back to
books. Now my children are older, unicorns and dragons have fallen by the
wayside. But what takes their place? For example, is it the packaging of the
Twilight series that makes it gender specific or the content?
Not sure many guys are going
to work their way through the Twilight novels, with their formula love
triangle. As my late-teens son said one day ‘How can anyone compete with… Edwaaard… he’s made of diamonds for
chrissakes.’ Doesn’t matter how you package it, the character of Bella is
desperately passive, drops all her friends to build her life entirely around
her boyfriend, and as a consequence falls spectacularly apart when he dumps
her. Having spent years trying to work out ways to help my daughter value
herself, I was horrified by this female role model.
Clearly there are gender
differences, whether in children’s or YA literature, but is the answer to homogenise everything? We could, I suppose, serve fiction up in neutral grey covers
to avoid gender-tagging, but until writers create more fantastic characters
that speak to both genders, what will
change? Can’t we just accept that at certain ages girls and boys have different
interests, and celebrate our differences.
What next? Should we abandon
commercial women’s fiction despite the fact that a lot of women get enjoyment from it because, well geez,
it’s for women and that’s wrong isn’t
it?
