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Is it too cynical* to wonder whether the book's title, contents and marketing are specifically designed to provoke outraged responses? Kinda like Caitlin What's-her-name. Controversy = Publicity = Sales
Of course, I agree wholeheartedly with everything you've written, but somehow I don't think we're the book's target audience.
*Trick question. There's no such thing as too cynical.
I don't think we're the book's target audience.
I would have thought so, niobe, but the book had a blog book tour sponsored by MotherTalk, which means that they did indeed want to reach our particular demographic. And I'm pretty shocked that more of us didn't tell them to shove it.
Thank you for taking care of this rant so I don't have to. It seems so obvious! Of course, we could just take the optimistic viewpoint of my cheerful youngest who says, and I quote, "Well, if they have a dangerous book for boys, I'm sure they'll have a dangerous book for girls too." Let's hear it for the feminist daughters who will keep the torch burning!
Phantom: Well, it sounds like you're right and I'm wrong about the people they expect to buy this book.
I still think the book and its marketing sound intentionally provocative, though.
phantom, you are on fire with this post! you are correct on all counts.
i'm particularly pleased with your analysis of how boys are not exactly hurting for risk-taking opportunities. the widespread association of "manhood" with danger and jackass-style risk-taking does not benefit boys individually or as a class.
my personal theory is that by mid-adolescence, the social pressures to conform to those idiotic ideals are great, and that they may be responsible for a good part of any academic achievement gap, as well as the much larger risk that boys will die before they are fully mature. [this personal theory is based in part on field research, consisting of watching my son and some of the boys he grew up with slide into the abyss during their teens, despite the best efforts of their families. the "manly = jackass" formula they adopted as protective coloration in high school did not serve those boys well.]
i'd really like to see some better attention paid to how patriarchial notions hurt boys. i'm not ignoring the girls, but we already all have good ideas of how the patriarchy hurts them.
i suspect the slimy marketing of this book is aimed at exploiting two groups: [1] parents who will buy any parenting book, because parenting is scary and we don't want to screw it up, and [2] parents who want validation for raising patriarchal little godzillas, which they intend to do anyway.
This is a wonderful post. I think the book is being marketed to make mothers worry that they're missing something in raising their sons, and I think it's complete crap. Put a different title on the book (What to Do When You're Bored This Summer would sell well in my house), and it sounds like something I might pick up for Josie, who is currently into making various sword-type weapons out of duct tape and cardboard, just like her brothers.
Argh. I had a long comment written, and Haloscan ate it. Grr.
You go girl. Marketing bad. Subtle (or not so subtle) social messaging that real boys don't like to read bad.
The gender stereotyping in all the marketing of the book is just so appalling. And yet most marketing is carefully researched ... so it seems like more evidence to me that strict gender roles for children are still alive and well in our culture.
I would argue that children of both genders need unstructured, unsupervised time in natural settings, opportunities to experiment and be creative and build tree houses and get muddy and take risks. When I was a kid, that's the kind of thing most kids did all summer long.
It seems that nowadays, kids spend more time indoors and in very organized activities and these activities are VERY gendered. Girls' birthday parties, for example, seem to range from Club Libby Lu to girly tea parties -- ugh. Is this some kind of backlash? How is that childhood seems to be MORE gendered than when I was a kid instead of less?
And for the record, HaloScan is being annoying today.
Yeah, HaloScan is the total sucky today. I'm resisting the urge to post a thread specifically for complaining about HaloScan. Maybe Wednesday.
What's killing me about the gender typing is that WE (parents, and specifically mothers) are the ones literally buying into it. I mean, it's one thing if you're coming from a political or cultural position that specifically posits that rigid gender stereotypes are correct; but those of us who at least pay lip service to the ideals of feminism, equality, gender equity, gay-friendliness -- what are we thinking? I'm not saying that we should be denying kids the opportunity to play true to stereotypes if that's what they want, but to actively hand them the stereotypes and spell out gendered expectations for them? WTF???
I do not doubt for a SECOND that this book was planned with its twin (rumored to be THE GORGEOUS BOOK FOR GIRLS) for very specific gender-enforcing reasons.
As Calder said in the car this morning as I ranted, "wait, maybe they were being ironic? Isn't this tongue-in-cheek?" When I assured him that it was NOT, he further asked, "are these folks evangelicals? Is that the market?"
He also laughed about the table-tennis comment at Ask Moxie (one of her list of things in the book that girls wouldn't be interested in), because he was seriously considering teaching it to all three of our kids last weekend. It never occurred to him that it would be considered (a) dangerous or (b) for boys.
I'm appalled that this gorgeous set of content was created to counteract the feminization of boys -- because make no mistake, that's exactly what the authors and the publishers are targeting, and Phantom, they blame rising teen and young adult violence on the lack of risk in very young children's lives, so they'd scoff at your analysis EVEN THOUGH YOU ARE CORRECT. This is ALL ABOUT the too-worried full-time mother who won't let her sons roam the neighborhood, who needs to unhook the apron strings and give her sons back over the care of the menfolk, who will lead them back into the proper masculine pursuits of risktaking and danger.
What any thinking mommy blogger is duing happily reinforcing this anti-mother message is BEYOND ME.
The book and its upcoming twin are also, quite explicitly, designed to teach our daughters AND sons a message about what it means to have a penis or vulva, what boys can and should do with their aggressive risk-taking energies and what girls should do with theirs.
The very idea that ANYONE would argue that because many or most boys are interested in one set of skills or information, and many or most girls are interested in another, we should therefore market and PROMOTE the segregation of information to one sex or another makes me SEE RED.
The idea that anyone would say, "okay, if this is what boys need to know, then girls should know this" and ask for RECOMMENDATIONS just ... just ... KABLAM. My head just blew into the stratosphere.
There is NO SINGLE PIECE OF INFORMATION OR SKILL THAT I WOULD WANT TO SEGREGATE TO ONE CHILD OR ANOTHER BASED ON SEX. The very idea that this would promote freedom, ability, or a joyful life -- confounds me.
And don't come back at me about the boys-and-reading thing, and not just because all those non-reading preteen boys are still managing to get great jobs out of college. (Hell, my tenured-professor husband was one of them. The education gap isn't created by the mythical suburban white boy of this book's marketing, either, it's created by the black and latino boys who aren't going to college while their sisters do.)
No, don't come at me about "we have to do all we can to get boys reading" because whole hosts of books -- Piratology, Egyptology, Dinosaurology, even Fairyopolis -- have already proven that you can have fact-filled books packed with information that intrigue boys AND girls based on their inclinations without slamming them across the head with gender laws.
As another commentator at Moxie said, I don't need to send my six-year old daughter the message that it's TRANSGRESSIVE to want to tie a good knot.
Jody, you are ON FIRE today. I [heart] you.
I'm the one over here, cheering and clapping and jumping down, at this eloquent post and Jody's eloquent comments. Three cheers for you, Phantom!
Anything that encourages you to think of your child as a gender and not an individual is anathema.
Sure, there may be things about her son that a mother doesn't understand and can't nourish easily. But the same may go for her daughter. Isn't the key to try your best to get to know your children as individuals, and to encourage interests even when you don't understand or share them? I may have no interest in great naval battles, but I know how to show my child how to look them up himself, and I can take him to museums, etc.
This is the first I've heard of this particular book, and this post and the comments deserve more careful reading than I have given them so far (and I will go back and reread) but I just have to jump in because some of this stuff in the media that you quote really pushes my personal buttons.
I am particularly sensitive to mothers-raising-sons issues because I've raised the Kid since the age of three without noticeable input from his father (none at all for the last 8 years). Are there things he's missed out on? You bet. But is it because he lacks a specifically MALE parent, someone who can teach him MANLY things that I can't possibly do? Not so sure about that one. Nor do I think he is de-masculinized by having been raised by a mother alone (and with two sisters).
Secondly, geezum crow, can't we get over all these gender stereotypes already? I've been parenting for 30 years and it feels like we're going backwards here. I've run across a lot of the "feminists are ruining the world" bs in conservative Christian circles, but it seems to be more widespread than I'd thought.
For the record I learned to tie knots in Girl Scouts and I wanted nothing more than a tree house when I was a kid. I'm one of the most risk adverse people you'll ever meet when it comes to physical things, but I loved to swing. Sheesh.
Sorry for the rant, and thanks for the great post.
Oh, I have no doubt that gender stereotyping is alive and well today. I'm not a mom, but I can still see it. And it totally drives me batty. Especially when it comes all wrapped up like this- that you might be failing as a mother because you are not raising a manly man-boy. (It reminds me of when my sister said, during her first pregnancy, 'I can't have a boy, I just can't! I don't know how to raise a boy other than a girly boy, destined to be gay). She's had two boys now and they are just.fine - not too girly not too boy-y, just right as far as I am concerned. One is a total risk-taker and one risk-averse).
I mean, really, do we (in the royal we sense) need more reasons to be guilty as mothers and women? Do we need to be guilty of wholesale emasculation of the future generation of men? Um, NO.
And I say all this as a former girl who just LOVED swings and treehouses and playing cops and robbers (and ashamedly, cowboys and indians), thank you very much. Had someone told or implied me it was somehow wrong to do so, it would have very much confused me. My brother recently admitted that he loved playing Strawberry Shortcake with me, although he would never have admitted that as a kid, not even under pain of torture. I've read so many blogs where the male kids of the bloggers are made fun of for having long hair, for liking the color pink. And I've read the horror after Ayelet Waldman admitted that she'd like her son to be gay. Give me a break - can't we just let kids be themselves, do we have to jam them so early into a box which they may or may not like? So much of this is pervasive later in life, can't we just let them do what they want when they are little ones? And if that means not tying knots (personally I find/found this activity to be deadly boring, and yes, we did that in Girl Scouts, it's not just Boy Scouts that learn to tie knots) or not climbing trees as a boy, well then, no harm, no foul. /rant.
I hear it's gorgeously written only in that the content follows the title very closely, in that there are little ewww girls! asides all the way through. (But that the how-to stuff is well-done.)
hee, hee, revdrmom, maybe we were in the same Girl Scout troop, learning to tie knots...and really has this ever been a skill you needed? Not me... UNtying knots, now that would have been more useful!!! ha!
Thanks to Jody for her post and comments, too. And Jo(e), I keep wondering the same thing about going backwards.
What I forgot to include in my comment above was this: it's just plain smart marketing on the publisher's part to attach gender to the title, as they'll now sell two books to the same family, potentially. Gendered disposable diapers and baby clothes and even now strollers and carseats, which come in pink and princess patterns are all about getting us to consume more, at least at some level.
Bravo! Bravo!
I can actually see the argument that "males and females are different." We have different body parts. We have different hormones. Females can give birth, Males can't. And so on.
So, I'm cool with the "different" argument.
For example, I probably wouldn't buy "our bodies, ourselves" for my son. (depending on his level of interest in that sort of thing...if he wants it, I'll get it. He's only 4 now, so it's not really even in my radar screen. who knows?) It will be required reading for my daughter.
But, my god - something about this book bothers me. If I were to give this book to my son, would he not somehow get the message that "Oh, this is boy stuff." Or if I got the book for my daughter, wouldn't she feel a bit put-out by all the boy references?
So, why in the world would I ever buy this book?
And why in the world are so many bloggers reviewing it?
Jody and Phantom thank you for these posts. I read a few of the reviews here and there I was just so agape that no one seemed pissed about the gender stereotyping, so I'm glad a few people came out to write about it.
K, so many bloggers are reviewing it because Andi Buchanan and Miriam Peskowitz at MotherTalk sent out emails to all of us asking us to review the book.
THIS IS ME STANDING ON A CHAIR CLAPPING FOR PHANTOM! AND JODY!
jody, you are awesome!
so many great comments here, too.
Thank you, Phantom, and thank you, Jody.
I had read the fabulous reviews and thought, "Oh, this is just the kind of book J. would get into!" I didn't like the title, but figured I'd say "You know that should be AND GIRLS, you know we've talked about how girls can do anything boys can do."
I was thinking the title was mostly a marketing tool, and didn't expect to see it reflected in the content, based on the reviews I'd read.
But the book contains tons of asides about "eeew, girls"? about how these are things specifically for boys and not for girls? AAARGH! I am now removing it from J's library list, and feeling sheepish that I put it on there. I should've thought more about it and realized that since I've spent so much time trying to counter the gender emssage, I shouldn't get him a book that subverts it completely.
An old book, yes, because then we always talk about how that isn't how it is now. But a new book specifically written that way? Argh.
This was a book originally written for the British market, by the way, and had to be rewritten to change some content for the American market (conkers are out, for example). So it's British marketing we should be thinking about.
"Mothers, don't you know, can only teach their sons girly skills, like making origami teacups and laying out place settings for twelve."
You made me laugh so hard I choked at that.
My mom took us on survival trips in the wilderness, taught us knot-tying, and many other "manly" skills. My father taught us, um, how to hustle a pool game.
Yeah, I don't buy it.
I'm stealing five minutes here from hosting the in-laws, so I've no time to say more than "hear, hear" and that I think you should send this, as is, to the New York Times as an op-ed. Of course, that would mean outing your pseudonymous self, I just realized, so never mind. But really, you have a gift for crafting compelling and highly relevant arguments.
oooh, yeah, I think Margi has a good idea (NY Times op-ed). Maybe you could send it in under (another) pen name. Is that allowed? More people should hear that there is another viewpoint out there!!!
Thanks for this, Phantom. And if this kind of post is what happens after you rest your brain and process all your conversations of the last week? Take brain breaks whenever you need.
We don't know what kind of little scuba diver we have in the oven yet (sorry about the metaphors there, yikes), but this is certainly food for thought in either case.
Holy crap. Not being a parental person, I hadn't heard anything about this book, but I cannot BELIEVE it. (Which means, sadly, that I can indeed believe it, I just wish I didn't have to.) Great post, Phantom.
Both this and the girls version "The Brilliant Book for Girls" have been out here in UK for a while...no hype, not much excitement...My youngest bought himself the book a)because he thought it was a spoof, - sending up the sort of book he inherited from his grandfather (who was born in 1911) and b)because he was keen on leaerning more knots than either of his parents could remember to teach him...but he has kindly shared his new found knowledge with his addled mother. I don't think anyone here has taken it seriously at all - the style of the book is so much akin to the Edwardian gems it mimics, most of us assumed, like young Dufflepud, that it was a joke! If it is really intended to key in to parental angsts and inadequacies, that's horrid...but I thought, myself, it was pretty harmless.
PS The Brilliant Book for Girls tells you how to light a fire with no matches...as one of the kids at my non Sunday non school proudly told me, when we were discussing Jesus cooking breakfast on the shore. She reckoned she could have grilled the fish for him before the dozy disciples had even realised they were invited for breakfast ;=)
This is so creepy. And a hearty BOOO to the publisher, Collins.
I just wrote a comment so long that Haloscan cut me off. I'm posting on my blog.
Long story short, I ordered the book because both Bert and Mallory wanted it.
I've already ranted all over other people's comments about this one..... I think I just need to add another "preach it sister!" to Jody, since I already did it once today (on her blog).
As a girl who would have loved the content of that book, as the parent of a boy and a girl who would both love it as well... I'm so tired of everything having to be marketed to a specific gender.
And the thougth that the companion book is going to be "The Gorgeous Book for Girls" literally makes me want to throw up. Not just a little in my mouth, either. I can feel my spine curling up in defeat.
(The same defeat I felt when I realized that the last Star Wars movie, made in what - 2004? 2005? -- actually had a LESS active heroine than the first trilogy did. We're going effing backward for girls like I was, like several of my friends were, like I suspect my daughter will be).
Well said, PHantom! BTW, I think the MRAs are in this somewhere.
The part of me that ran the knot-tying clinics at Daughter's Girl Scout camp (for lefties, btw), says: bullshit.
The part of me that is a librarian and has been for lo! these almost 40 years says (re the "quality"): bullshit.
The part of me that's a middle school teacher watching what these stereotypical boxes are doing to children says: bullshit.
Then there's the part of me that sees the career-changer Dr. A come home from the urban high school in one the poorest cities in the US where he teaches the lowest kids with very near 100% success - heartbroken because another of the boys has died: the one from the undiagnosed heart defect? not this time. the one who was shot? not this time. no, the one who was practicing a DANGEROUS flip off the monkey bars hour after hour til he fell and broke his neck, suffocating from the swelling that ensued - the one who was an excellent math student and a gifted artist who felt he had to be one of the guys doing dangerous things - that one.
Someone want to tell me again about well-written? about appropriate roles? about the things we should teach our children? please.
Maybe they should go see my husband teach young women and young men become confident because they are succeeding against all the odds. Maybe they'd like to know that his kids' SAT scores went from 380 before they had his class to 670s eight weeks later? That his kids CAPT scores brought the school achievement level up by 25% last year? That some of his kids won complete scholarships (tuition, room, and board) when they suddenly could "do math"? Nah! They're more like the judge who ruled it was ok for the BS of America to exclude women from leadership because they couldn't do important male things, like pound their fist in their palm or kick out their foot in anger (I kid you not)
That they can market this book to some of us - and successfully - is terrifying, both for us and for all of our children.
Everyone else has beat me to congratulating you on this post, but I will anyways. This is absurd.
kathryn, if the brilliant book for girls really does include cool survival skills information, that is great. i would have eaten that up as a girl. [honestly -- i, the wimp of the universe, desperately collected survival tips and hoped to be stranded on a desert island as a kid. i read a lot of novels that were probably written for boys.]
and it is also good to hear the books have not made much of a splash over the pond.
but i still don't understand why books like these should be gender-separated.
A, i am so sorry to hear of your husband's latest loss. so amazed at the excellent work he does. what you wrote is very eloquent and moving.
What is the companion book called? I looked for "brilliant book for girls" on amazon.co.uk, and didn't find it...I did find the Big Glorious Book For Girls which looks stylistically similar, and promises to remind me how to make elderberry cordial and play cat's cradle...but it's published by Viking, rather than Harper Collins.
Either way, I'm not impressed.
I love this post and whole-heartedly agree. And I think you should go straight out and write a you-don't-have-to-take-stupid-risks-to-prove-your-
manhood book for boys.
Reflecting on this hours later after reading all the comments, it seems to me that as the mother of a male teen, the harder message to get across is that being a guy doesn't mean that you have to buy into all the macho male bullshit our culture pushes--the sexist crap, the violent crap, and so forth. What he does not need and hasn't needed is encouragement to do even pseudo-dangerous things, to take risks, etc.
Big cosmic sigh for our lack of progress here.
Somehow, I don't think that MotherTalk thread is going to have an entry like:
May 21: Over at Phantom Scribbler, the book is trashed for being thoroughly paternalistic. What a fantastic take on this most excellent tome!
(Also, I wanted to know what interest in history has anything to do with this. Women aren't supposed to be interested in the Declaration of Independence and the Ten Commandments? I never knew. Not even in stereotype format.)
This seems to be a rather common misconception, ianqui! Kiddos in my school are always visibly surprised when their (mostly male) social studies teachers use me as a resident "expert" and let the kids in on the secret that I'm certified in secondary social studies and history as well as librarianship.
In the same vein, it's sometimes hard to get the young ladies to understand just how important learning the lessons of history, including the "guarantees" in the Constitution and their patchy application, should be to them!
But guess who gets to take the lead (and the responsibility) when social studies curriculum work needs to be done? The big boys will generally go along with my proposals - as long as I do most of the thinking AND the work.
harumph!
Sooo glad to see your post and off to read Jody's. I was away for the (long, in Canada) weekend and just came back to sort of saying - hrumph?
Amen, my sisters.
Even if it is ironic, there's such a LARGE segment of the American population that truly believes in rigid gender stereotyping. That makes it not at all funny, as far as I'm concerned. And I do completely agree- danger does not need to be romanticized; there's plenty to go around.
Beautifully put, Phantom and Jody and all the other pixies here. From my vantage point of a economically and ethnically diverse suburb near a large central city, I'm not quite sure what boys this "feminizing" trend applies to.
My wonderfully talented and witty teen son doesn't want to be in honors English next fall because he is afraid of being considered weird or a sissy. At his middle school and future high school, the jocks are disproportionally rewarded socially. Too many of the students try to emulate the ghetto sub-culture from MTV because that is the only notion of ethnic pride many of them seem to understand. Several of the major first-generation ethnic groups also subscribe to this kind of herd mentality and kids like my son have to try and dodge the identity politics that spawns violence all around.
I just fail to understand who this book hopes to reach beyond a narrow prep school set. However, my experience with that crowd in high school as a scholarship student was that they were also reckless but had the connections and money to get off essentially scot-free. Obviously, this didn't apply to all of my classmates but a large enough percentage of them.
I haven't seen the book, or any professional reviews of it, and hadn't heard any of the hoopla over this, for some reason, and I'm really glad I read your review and all the comments. The marketing of it does sound pretty sickening.
We have "The Big Book of Boy Stuff" in my library, and for some reason that doesn't bother me as much, though now I'm wondering why not. Maybe because it's devoid of "eww girls" snipes? Maybe because it doesn't hype on danger? Not sure. Must think. Time for which is in short supply, these days.
This just sticks so hard in my craw that I am choked from commenting intelligently.
Well put, Phantom and Jody.
FYI, Roy Edroso has an efficiently worded take at Alicublog, here:
http://alicublog.blogspot.com/20...ok-
club_22.html
Oh, my. That is some excellent linkage there, Tom. Many thanks.
(Be sure not to miss Doghouse Riley's comment if you head over there, pixies!)
Haven't read it. Haven't seen it. But your excellent reveiw has me thinking that this book and its fanfare-blowers are really anxious about WHITE masculinity somehow "falling behind" in power (read: violence and "danger"). Seems to me that the concern is that middle-class white boys need more danger and risk-taking because they are growing up to be pansies whose potency is lower than not-so-white boys.
Hello again, Nineteenth Century Ideologies that Won't Die.
. In fact, you could write a book containing most of the same information, and market it as "safe and healthy" alternative to video games, TV, overscheduling, underscheduling, whatever.
that's EXACTLY what I thought when I looked through this book.
Wow. Just read your article on the Dangerous Book for Boys -- RIGHT ON! Lyn Mikel Brown and Mark Tappan and I are following up our Packaging Girlhood:Rescuing Our Daughters from Marketers' Schemes with a book called Packaging Boyhood. Thanks for your thoughts on this, and if you ever see something like this kind of packaging of dangerous stereotypes to boys, please send me an email on it! We're still in the research stages, playing with LEGOS and watching car chases. Best wishes, Sharon Lamb
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