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Sep. 12th, 2009 01:46 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
polutropeSo, I was stumbling, as you do on a boring Friday night when you have no school and thus no homework, and I came upon this. And it's fine - well, mostly fine: Point 2, Better Editing includes this sentence: And if a hefty book isn't super popular, its length can easily overwhelm many young readers," which may be true, but I trust kids more than she seems to - until Point 5: More Boy Books.
I'm afraid this won't be popular, she starts, and she's damn right it won't.
I've noticed that lots of books with female characters aren't really about being female. In fact, in many cases, the main characters could just as easily have been males—and that would make my job a lot easier.
Which is simply infuriating. Take Sabriel, a book whose heroine really could just as well have been a hero. First, that's one of the reasons it's great. As a female reader, I enjoy heroines, especially of SF/fantasy novels who don't think about being female all the time, and who are just as competent as heroes. And boys like Sabriel. I know multiple boys who do, even now, at least ten years after publication. Why? Because it's well-written. That's the problem, not books with icky girls in. There's a lot of junk out there.
But a novel like Ann Halam's Siberia could have included a male protagonist. And Gloria Whelan's The Impossible Journey could have featured an older brother and a younger sister—instead of 13-year-old Marya and her younger brother, Georgi.
Right. Because competent girls are such a threat to men that their penises will fall off just from reading about them. No, if you want to include a girl (and why would you do that? girls can read about boys, so why would you bother having a heroine?), she has to be younger so that she can be protected by her brother and so that he can do the interesting stuff.
Am I being silly? Probably, but some of our boys have never read a complete book in their lives. It's important to offer them good, appealing stories, and, sad to say, that means stories with prominent male characters.
Yeah, the first part is not even close to the problem of the evil publishing industry for printing too many books with female protagonists. It's a cultural attitude, a mistrust and incomprehension of reading (e.g., the guy who tried to hit on me outside of Strand, who told a girl who obviously loves books that he can only read for ten minutes at a time and doesn't understand people who like reading).
And the second part is the worst sentence in the whole thing. "Good, appealing stories" = "Stories with prominent male characters"? If there's a prominent female character, it's automatically unappealing and bad? Men are, of course, the default. Girls should read about boys, because male characters are what makes a story appealing. The same story, the author of this article tells us, is bad for boys with a female character, but would be great with a male one.
On the bright side, I guess some progress has been made, if people complain about too many strong female protagonists!
I'm afraid this won't be popular, she starts, and she's damn right it won't.
I've noticed that lots of books with female characters aren't really about being female. In fact, in many cases, the main characters could just as easily have been males—and that would make my job a lot easier.
Which is simply infuriating. Take Sabriel, a book whose heroine really could just as well have been a hero. First, that's one of the reasons it's great. As a female reader, I enjoy heroines, especially of SF/fantasy novels who don't think about being female all the time, and who are just as competent as heroes. And boys like Sabriel. I know multiple boys who do, even now, at least ten years after publication. Why? Because it's well-written. That's the problem, not books with icky girls in. There's a lot of junk out there.
But a novel like Ann Halam's Siberia could have included a male protagonist. And Gloria Whelan's The Impossible Journey could have featured an older brother and a younger sister—instead of 13-year-old Marya and her younger brother, Georgi.
Right. Because competent girls are such a threat to men that their penises will fall off just from reading about them. No, if you want to include a girl (and why would you do that? girls can read about boys, so why would you bother having a heroine?), she has to be younger so that she can be protected by her brother and so that he can do the interesting stuff.
Am I being silly? Probably, but some of our boys have never read a complete book in their lives. It's important to offer them good, appealing stories, and, sad to say, that means stories with prominent male characters.
Yeah, the first part is not even close to the problem of the evil publishing industry for printing too many books with female protagonists. It's a cultural attitude, a mistrust and incomprehension of reading (e.g., the guy who tried to hit on me outside of Strand, who told a girl who obviously loves books that he can only read for ten minutes at a time and doesn't understand people who like reading).
And the second part is the worst sentence in the whole thing. "Good, appealing stories" = "Stories with prominent male characters"? If there's a prominent female character, it's automatically unappealing and bad? Men are, of course, the default. Girls should read about boys, because male characters are what makes a story appealing. The same story, the author of this article tells us, is bad for boys with a female character, but would be great with a male one.
On the bright side, I guess some progress has been made, if people complain about too many strong female protagonists!
