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silveradeptMaureen Johnson points out that anyone who says we have a dearth of male authors writing for men on the market needs to recheck their thinking, as just abotu every Srs Bzns author or person you read about in school is male, most of the Classics are written by men, and men still get sold as being serious writers while women are usually sold as fluff pieces, light novels, and candy instead of steak, often by publisher design and intent. A semester of women writers is Women's Studies class, not Literature and the English Language. She also points out that women are expected to be readers of anything, the contortionists of the reading world, while boys are only interested in certain things and won't venture outside those areas lest they suffer hernias, displaced joints, and all sorts of other maladies for having to read "girl stuff". Thus, the idea of a crisis in boy books isn't really the case, and perhaps they would benefit from having to read girl books about girl things, as the girls had to read boy books abotu boy things through their required schooling and literature classes.
My quibble with it is that I think she's got the wrong idea of what the "crisis of boys reading" is about. She touches on it for a bit, but at least in my circle, when someone says, "crisis in boys' books", they mean the problem that young men start falling behind in literacy when compared to women of their same age and grade, continue to fall behind because they start believing they can't read well, and then lose interest in reading as an activity because things have become too hard for them and the topics they hold interest in aren't being encouraged. If it's been corrupted into "there aren't enough books for boys on the market", then we have serious signal degradation going on here. I've seen plenty of boys who read just fine, thanks, if you put a book that interests them in their hands. Or, perhaps, the newspaper, or a magazine of one of their hobbies. Far too often I see parents telling their boy children that what they've chosen to read is too easy for them and has to be put back. Or that they don't like Captain Underpants and the child has to put it back. And in class, they get these narrative, feelings-driven stories that don't have a whole lot of doing stuff in them that they have to read, and then have to write about. And then they start getting harder, even though the last ones were plenty hard as it is. The teachers tell them they should know this stuff by now.
Yeah. It's not hard to see where boys get "off" the reading bandwagon early on and stop reading novels and classic literature, prefering their action-packed graphic novels, their nonfiction and current events material, and the periodicals and video games that give them textual interaction and develop their reading skills, unacknowledged by the rest of the world and derided for not knowing literature and being able to read. Books become things for girls and women, and right at that time, they are expected to be bulky jocks without brains or buffoonish Homer Simpson/Archie Bunkers, so reading anything with the hint of femininity trips the insinuation that the young man is not actually properly manly and heterosexual, and the spiral spins faster downward and away from novels into the arms of what is societally acceptable male reading.
The comment squad makes much of the same point along the way, along with other interpretations and attempts to separate out the issues of women writers being forced into pink book covers, even if their story is about Jack the Ripper, the problems of a society that reinforces the idea that reading novels is inherently a female activity and thus anathema to men, the Old Dead White Guys problem in some required schooling, and the problem that the interests of men and women diverge when it comes to what they want to read in a novel. So, yes, sell the women, most definitely! But also change the society so that reading is an acceptably male activity, recognize that there are structural differences between male and female reading habits and interests, and change the covers so that women authors don't get trapped in pink and thus screwed out of a large possible demographic.
Some of these issues show up in microcosm when the magnifier is turned onto why men who do read are supposedly inclined to hop completely over what we consider young adult (YA) materials and move straight into adult fiction and non-fiction. That may not be as true nowadays, with the filing of the graphic novels in YA, the appearance of popular series that swing squarely in YA, like Artemis Fowl or the Series of Unfortunate Events, and the resurgent techie/steampunk/science fiction and fantasy revival, so it might be that they hit the crossover line and draw from both YA and adult materials faster than expected. On one side of the debate, Hannah Moskowitz says guys avoid YA because women authors have castrated the male characters, making them either the gay friend, the best friend with the clear destiny of getting hooked up with the girl in the end, the bad boy rebel, or the geek boy with the wry sense of humor and social awkwardness who has no real shot and will stay in the Friend Zone, possibly excepting for Wacky Hijinks that finally put him in an attractive light. In all those roles, they've been reduced to secondary characters, the foils of the girl main character. They lack the third dimension that authors have been trying so very hard to craft their females with. In response, Tamora Pierce points out that there's still a lot of material with male heroes in the YA department, especially if you look in science fiction and fantasy, and so there still needs to be gender balancing and strong heroes on the female side. She doesn't see the stereotyping categories Moskowitz does, and is still incensed that so many women characters in stories settle down and stop being powerful characters once the danger is past and they've found their love interest.
Which sort of points out two different worldviews of YA publishing. In the Twilight-romance-Gossip Girls world, where Moskowitz resides, I'd be willing to give decent odds that the stereotypes she's talking about do exist to greater and lesser degrees, because in those stories, the romance and the relationships are the prime focus, and the secondary cast is constructed in how it relates to the relationship orbits. Where Tamora is writing, however, the romance part is usually not the primary focus - saving the world, kicking ass, accomplishing the quest, getting strong and accomplishing your ends are. Romantic relationships are usually subordinate to the quest arc, which requires the supporting cast to have more three-dimensionality at the outset, because they're going to be actors with motivations, pasts, and other things, or they're going to draw ire from the reader for acting capriciously or abitrarily without proper explanation of why. If you're constructing a world based on relationships, it seems natural to make your main character female, because the United States is built on a societal construct that says men court women and women pick, choose, string along, deny, or make fun of the men that press their suit at their whim. You can have an overabundance of fluffy girls interesting in amassing sufficient harem, or stealing someone away from a different harem, or increasing their sexiness statistics to level up and get the attention of more attractive men...and you're only going to get readers interested in those kind of petty power politics. Those looking for a grander narrative arc will go...elsewhere. Usually. Twilight is awful prose, but it did manage to successfully graft the petty politics of harem-gathering and preference-showing on to an adventure with a wider scope.
Similarly, the fantasy/science fiction realms have historically male characters because the U.S. is also built on a tradition of reality that said sons were more important than daughters, that a man's worth was determined by the work he did and how well he fought, and a woman's worth was determined by how much bride price she fetched, what alliances she could cement, and how many sons she could bear. It is an easier narrative to write of the first son going off for glory, conquest, and swiving than it is of explaining how the first daughter successfully managed to break out of her societal confinement (more often than not, by dressing and acting male) and go off to have an adventure, loving the thrill of it all while being deathly afraid she's going to be caught, exposed, and then societally punished for stepping outside her bounds.
Not to say either of these is inherently right, just that you don't have to spend as much time on the setup if you decide that the defaults are good enough. If you're Ursula K. LeGuin, though, you've got an anthropological background to draw upon, and you can not only see the pillars that support the defaults, you know how to crank them so that they change just enough to create interesting situations and then build up from there into what their defaults are. What if, instead of gendered beings, the bipeds had no genitals or sexual characteristics until they went into heat, and then could choose what gender they wanted to be? Ask Genly Ai what he thought of Gethen and its society. What happens when you provide a solid sorcery narrative and wait until you're almost halfway through before mentioning, oh, yes, the main character is black? What does a functioning anarchy look like? Or, what happens when you have women who will take no shit from anybody about their role in society and go off to become swordswomen, mercenaries, or Companions of Valdemar? (Kethry, your granddaughter Kerowyn made quite a name for herself, didn't she? Not that she's a slouch herself.)
To loop back to where we started, we are suffering from a lack of female writers in the canon of Literature. Some part of that may have to do with the fact that women writers have not been recognized and celebrated for their work until recently, and another part of it may have to do with women being consigned to the departments of Genre Fiction, where the college academics look, but the people who write textbooks and design curricula feel there is no use. We need to balance those things out. There's also the problem of boys checking out of the idea of reading for pleasure, as the difficulty of reading in school gets beyond their development curve, the material shifts away from the things they are interested in, trading action and facts for conversations and relationships, because a significant amount of Literature has little action-packed content, and societal pressures feminize the act of reading and insist that MEN have nothing to do with female things. These two problems are not exclusive, and drawing in more action-oriented stuff that has guy appeal into the curriculum, written by women, might be able to make progress on both of those problems.
My quibble with it is that I think she's got the wrong idea of what the "crisis of boys reading" is about. She touches on it for a bit, but at least in my circle, when someone says, "crisis in boys' books", they mean the problem that young men start falling behind in literacy when compared to women of their same age and grade, continue to fall behind because they start believing they can't read well, and then lose interest in reading as an activity because things have become too hard for them and the topics they hold interest in aren't being encouraged. If it's been corrupted into "there aren't enough books for boys on the market", then we have serious signal degradation going on here. I've seen plenty of boys who read just fine, thanks, if you put a book that interests them in their hands. Or, perhaps, the newspaper, or a magazine of one of their hobbies. Far too often I see parents telling their boy children that what they've chosen to read is too easy for them and has to be put back. Or that they don't like Captain Underpants and the child has to put it back. And in class, they get these narrative, feelings-driven stories that don't have a whole lot of doing stuff in them that they have to read, and then have to write about. And then they start getting harder, even though the last ones were plenty hard as it is. The teachers tell them they should know this stuff by now.
Yeah. It's not hard to see where boys get "off" the reading bandwagon early on and stop reading novels and classic literature, prefering their action-packed graphic novels, their nonfiction and current events material, and the periodicals and video games that give them textual interaction and develop their reading skills, unacknowledged by the rest of the world and derided for not knowing literature and being able to read. Books become things for girls and women, and right at that time, they are expected to be bulky jocks without brains or buffoonish Homer Simpson/Archie Bunkers, so reading anything with the hint of femininity trips the insinuation that the young man is not actually properly manly and heterosexual, and the spiral spins faster downward and away from novels into the arms of what is societally acceptable male reading.
The comment squad makes much of the same point along the way, along with other interpretations and attempts to separate out the issues of women writers being forced into pink book covers, even if their story is about Jack the Ripper, the problems of a society that reinforces the idea that reading novels is inherently a female activity and thus anathema to men, the Old Dead White Guys problem in some required schooling, and the problem that the interests of men and women diverge when it comes to what they want to read in a novel. So, yes, sell the women, most definitely! But also change the society so that reading is an acceptably male activity, recognize that there are structural differences between male and female reading habits and interests, and change the covers so that women authors don't get trapped in pink and thus screwed out of a large possible demographic.
Some of these issues show up in microcosm when the magnifier is turned onto why men who do read are supposedly inclined to hop completely over what we consider young adult (YA) materials and move straight into adult fiction and non-fiction. That may not be as true nowadays, with the filing of the graphic novels in YA, the appearance of popular series that swing squarely in YA, like Artemis Fowl or the Series of Unfortunate Events, and the resurgent techie/steampunk/science fiction and fantasy revival, so it might be that they hit the crossover line and draw from both YA and adult materials faster than expected. On one side of the debate, Hannah Moskowitz says guys avoid YA because women authors have castrated the male characters, making them either the gay friend, the best friend with the clear destiny of getting hooked up with the girl in the end, the bad boy rebel, or the geek boy with the wry sense of humor and social awkwardness who has no real shot and will stay in the Friend Zone, possibly excepting for Wacky Hijinks that finally put him in an attractive light. In all those roles, they've been reduced to secondary characters, the foils of the girl main character. They lack the third dimension that authors have been trying so very hard to craft their females with. In response, Tamora Pierce points out that there's still a lot of material with male heroes in the YA department, especially if you look in science fiction and fantasy, and so there still needs to be gender balancing and strong heroes on the female side. She doesn't see the stereotyping categories Moskowitz does, and is still incensed that so many women characters in stories settle down and stop being powerful characters once the danger is past and they've found their love interest.
Which sort of points out two different worldviews of YA publishing. In the Twilight-romance-Gossip Girls world, where Moskowitz resides, I'd be willing to give decent odds that the stereotypes she's talking about do exist to greater and lesser degrees, because in those stories, the romance and the relationships are the prime focus, and the secondary cast is constructed in how it relates to the relationship orbits. Where Tamora is writing, however, the romance part is usually not the primary focus - saving the world, kicking ass, accomplishing the quest, getting strong and accomplishing your ends are. Romantic relationships are usually subordinate to the quest arc, which requires the supporting cast to have more three-dimensionality at the outset, because they're going to be actors with motivations, pasts, and other things, or they're going to draw ire from the reader for acting capriciously or abitrarily without proper explanation of why. If you're constructing a world based on relationships, it seems natural to make your main character female, because the United States is built on a societal construct that says men court women and women pick, choose, string along, deny, or make fun of the men that press their suit at their whim. You can have an overabundance of fluffy girls interesting in amassing sufficient harem, or stealing someone away from a different harem, or increasing their sexiness statistics to level up and get the attention of more attractive men...and you're only going to get readers interested in those kind of petty power politics. Those looking for a grander narrative arc will go...elsewhere. Usually. Twilight is awful prose, but it did manage to successfully graft the petty politics of harem-gathering and preference-showing on to an adventure with a wider scope.
Similarly, the fantasy/science fiction realms have historically male characters because the U.S. is also built on a tradition of reality that said sons were more important than daughters, that a man's worth was determined by the work he did and how well he fought, and a woman's worth was determined by how much bride price she fetched, what alliances she could cement, and how many sons she could bear. It is an easier narrative to write of the first son going off for glory, conquest, and swiving than it is of explaining how the first daughter successfully managed to break out of her societal confinement (more often than not, by dressing and acting male) and go off to have an adventure, loving the thrill of it all while being deathly afraid she's going to be caught, exposed, and then societally punished for stepping outside her bounds.
Not to say either of these is inherently right, just that you don't have to spend as much time on the setup if you decide that the defaults are good enough. If you're Ursula K. LeGuin, though, you've got an anthropological background to draw upon, and you can not only see the pillars that support the defaults, you know how to crank them so that they change just enough to create interesting situations and then build up from there into what their defaults are. What if, instead of gendered beings, the bipeds had no genitals or sexual characteristics until they went into heat, and then could choose what gender they wanted to be? Ask Genly Ai what he thought of Gethen and its society. What happens when you provide a solid sorcery narrative and wait until you're almost halfway through before mentioning, oh, yes, the main character is black? What does a functioning anarchy look like? Or, what happens when you have women who will take no shit from anybody about their role in society and go off to become swordswomen, mercenaries, or Companions of Valdemar? (Kethry, your granddaughter Kerowyn made quite a name for herself, didn't she? Not that she's a slouch herself.)
To loop back to where we started, we are suffering from a lack of female writers in the canon of Literature. Some part of that may have to do with the fact that women writers have not been recognized and celebrated for their work until recently, and another part of it may have to do with women being consigned to the departments of Genre Fiction, where the college academics look, but the people who write textbooks and design curricula feel there is no use. We need to balance those things out. There's also the problem of boys checking out of the idea of reading for pleasure, as the difficulty of reading in school gets beyond their development curve, the material shifts away from the things they are interested in, trading action and facts for conversations and relationships, because a significant amount of Literature has little action-packed content, and societal pressures feminize the act of reading and insist that MEN have nothing to do with female things. These two problems are not exclusive, and drawing in more action-oriented stuff that has guy appeal into the curriculum, written by women, might be able to make progress on both of those problems.
