Give Your Sons Books About Girls

The title of this post is misleadingly titillating…I don’t mean that you should rush out and get your son Playboy: The Complete Centerfolds. First of all, it’s kind of an expensive book. More importantly, though, encouraging your male progeny to view women primarily as sex objects probably qualifies as a parenting fail, even in this age of parent-as-friend. The good news is that winning at parenting in this situation isn’t hard: try seeking out books with female protagonists who have meaningful storylines, like The Book Thief or The Illyrian Adventure.

Earlier generations would have had a tougher time with this. My mother defaced most of my childhood storybooks – especially the notoriously gender-biased Little Golden Books – by crossing out “him/his” and writing in “her/hers” or amending “he” to “she.” It was not a sexist act. Stupid and malevolent characters were changed as indiscriminately as intelligent and heroic ones. Mom just wanted to make sure my sister and I could see ourselves in the worlds we were exploring through words.

Things are changing, albeit slowly and not universally. A 2011 study analyzed 20th century children’s literature and found that, while human characters approached gender parity by the 1990s, animals were still predominantly male. Additionally, while adult men or male animals appeared in every single book from the three sources surveyed, only a third featured adult women or female animals. In other words, women have grown up reading books from a male perspective, but men haven’t necessarily grown up reading books from a female perspective.

It is worth wondering how useful it is to talk about a male versus female “perspective,” especially given recent evidence that biological sex isn’t binary. However, the biology of sex is beyond the scope of this post, and it is well established that, on average, men and women experience the world differently, whether it is because of biology or socialization. Consequently, given the literature available for most of books’ history, one gender has had a far greater opportunity to experience the other’s point of view.

Even equal gender representation doesn’t inevitably lead to parity in portrayals, though. In the 1980s, cartoonist Alison Bechdel (of Fun Home fame) and her friend Liz Wallace developed the Bechdel test to gauge gender equality in works of fiction by divining the depth of the female characters and their storylines. To pass the test, the book or movie must have two (named) female characters, they must speak directly to each other, and the conversation should be about something other than men. While I would add a whole host of other topics to the conversation caveat (make-up, fashion, kids, weight), many works of fiction fail even the simplest version of the Bechdel test. The early Harry Potter books, for example, only barely squeak by because Hermione – cast as the stereotypical, know-it-all shrew – has occasional, brief interactions with female professors at Hogwarts that can be interpreted loosely as conversations. Unfortunately, Harriet Potter likely would not have been a publishing sensation.

Even if authors write more meaningful storylines for their female characters, though, it will only generate true equality if kids are reading as many books with female protagonists as with male ones. Lloyd Alexander wrote wonderful young adult novels, including two series: one with a young male as the primary character, one with a young female as the primary character. Guess which one is out of print. Girls read his Prydain Chronicles, but people probably didn’t give their sons and nephews the Vesper Holly books as birthday presents, despite the fact that she rivals Indiana Jones for adventure and hijinks, which supposedly interest boys. If parents encourage their sons to read stories about girls, they can help not only to move young adult literature closer to equality but also, hopefully, to foster a better understanding of half of the world’s population.

*Special thanks to Gustavo Belotta, the general manager at This House of Books in Billings, MT, for the scintillating conversation that sparked this post.