Reading Dr. Seuss Can Be Dangerous

I have three important questions to ask but first . . .

Dr. Seuss just never seems to fade away. As recently as 2008 a CGI version of ‘Horton Hears a Who’ appeared and garnered widespread praise. There is a Dr. Seuss theme park in Orlando, Florida, it looks like his ‘Oh The Places You’ll Go’ will be read at graduations for years to come, there are many Dr. Seuss web sites, and even a Broadway musical called Seussical the Musical. Dr. Seuss wrote and brilliantly illustrated about fifty children’s books, almost all in carefully crafted rhyme. His work has been adapted for films and television. His Bright and Early, and Beginner Books, written in consultation with reading comprehension experts, revolutionized educational reading. Dr. Seuss is particularly popular in the United States but his books sell well internationally and have been translated into at least sixteen other languages. Ted Geisel also had a highly successful career as a political cartoonist and an advertising illustrator.

Dr. Seuss has even been referenced by commentators on this board at least three times in recent months. When someone mentions Dr. Seuss I think first of the Grinch. What pops into your head? The Cat in the Hat? Horton the elephant? Sam-I-am? Yertle the turtle? Dr. Seuss taught us to reject racism and anti-Semitism (The Sneetches), to be environmentally aware (The Lorax), to appreciate democracy and stand up for everyone, no matter how small (Horton Hears a Who), and even to avoid arms races (The Butter Battle Book). Dr. Seuss wrote about universal themes with passion and creativity and he was often able to connect with children because he was mischievously subversive himself and he was famous for shunning the pomp and ceremony of the adult world. Many of us have a soft spot for Dr. Seuss, deservedly so. That’s why it pained me when I realized that if you want to see how misogynist culture works when it is not being dramatic, one need only examine the works of Dr. Seuss.

I carefully defined a series of terms in such a way that they could be clearly measured, terms such as Male Character, Female Character, Human Character, Non-Human Character and so on. Then I meticulously went through all of the Dr. Seuss children’s stories counting and identifying characters and counting their words when they spoke, and I discovered something incredible. Of all the words spoken in the books only 2.7% are spoken by females (86.9% are spoken by males and 10.4% are spoken by characters of uncertain gender). Males speak an incredible 32.2 times as many words as females. Females have been rendered silent and invisible. There are:

• 47 main characters - 44 are male
• 170 speaking parts - 148 of them are male
• 6.5 times as many non-human male speaking parts as non-human female speaking parts
• 7.0 times as many human male speaking parts as human female speaking parts
• 7.3 times as many male human non-speaking parts as female human non-speaking parts.

Gender Elements in the Children’s Stories of Ted Geisel aka Dr. Seuss



Over the course of the books female characters fill these positions: laundress, schoolteacher, majorette, noblewoman, housewife and one queen. That’s it. And the queen is mentioned in passing, on one page of ‘The Cat’s Quizzer’ and she doesn’t say a word. Male characters can be found in these positions: King (more than one), Rajah, Prince, Potentate, Lord, Chief, Chieftain, Mayor, General, Captain, Wise Man, Grand Duke, doctor, pilot, soldier, deep sea diver, military strategist, circus owner, magician, military leader, animal handler, charioteer, lumberjack, all manner of musicians, and zookeeper, among others.

In ‘The Cat in the Hat’ a boy and his sister Sally look to be about the same age but it is the boy who narrates, and he’s the one who captures Thing One and Thing Two. Sally is a non-entity; she doesn’t say a single word in the entire story. In ‘The 500 Hats of Bartholomew Cubbins’ various lords and ladies are said to be in the king’s Throne Room. In the accompanying illustration, however, all fourteen people present are either male or unspecified. None appear to be ladies. The main character, Peter, in ‘Scrambled Eggs Super’ spends the entire book explaining to his sister Liz how wonderful a cook he is; she remains silent throughout the book. In that same book Dr. Seuss has Peter refer to two egg-laying Twiddler Owls as “those fellows”. In ‘If I Ran the Zoo’ Dr. Seuss refers to a set of six hens and identifies five of them as male. The words postman, policeman, laundress, and milkman also appear in the stories. There are many other examples of gender imbalance and non-inclusive language in the stories too numerous to mention here.

In ‘The Glunk That Got Thunk’, a small girl has a powerful imagination and decides to take a chance and conjure up a monstrous, green glunk using only the power of her mind. She is unfortunately unable to unthink this Frankenstein’s monster and is rescued by her brother who then advises her not to take any more risks. In the illustration depicting her going back to thinking fuzzy things she is smiling:

Could she Un-thunk the Glunk alone?...
It’s very doubtful whether.
So I turned on MY Un-thinker.
We Un-thunk the Glunk together.
. . . Then I gave her quite a talking to
About her Thinker-Upper.
NOW … She only thinks up fuzzy things
In the evening, after supper.

Compare this with the parade of male figures who go on dangerous missions without needing rescue (‘I Had Trouble In Getting to Solla Sollew’, ‘Oh The Places You’ll Go’, ‘If I Ran The Zoo’, ‘If I Ran The Circus’, ‘Scrambled Eggs Super’ etc.). Furthermore, this is a far more imaginative plot than the plots of the other two stories in the anthology that ‘The Glunk That Got Thunk’ is in. In one the Cat in the Hat’s son makes excuses then runs away from a fight with a tiger (212 words long). In the other a king gets upset that that he has no one to keep his royal tail from dragging on the ground (409 words long). ‘The Glunk That Got Thunk’ has 676 words, more than the other two stories combined but the main character is a girl: however the anthology is called ‘I Can Lick Thirty Tigers Today and Other Stories’ and it is the tiger story that is featured on the cover.

Since Dr. Seuss held many progressive views one wonders why there was such a gender imbalance in his work. Though his first book appeared in 1937, his last book, published in 1990, also exhibited a clear gender imbalance. In his book “Dr. Seuss: American Icon” Seussian scholar Philip Nel discusses the issues of misogyny in the works of Dr. Seuss. There Nel notes that it was pointed out to Geisel that there was a line from ‘And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street’ that was sexist (“Say – anyone could think of that, Jack or Fred or Joe or Nat – Say, even Jane could think of that.”) and when asked to change that line, he called the request “beyond contempt”. In 1971 Geisel said, “These gals obviously have a lot of time on their hands to write letters, and I think answering them would just be stirring up a female hornets’ nest.” In reference to those letters again, in 1975, he said, “they were written by Extreme-Fringe-Woman-Libbers” and finally, in 1978, after agreeing to change a racist line from the same book he said that the sexist line about Jane “should never be changed for I am a male chauvinist peeg” (*).

Imagine fifty books featuring characters like a Cat in a Hat named Jane, a Grinch named Grace, a Lorax named Laura, Pam-I-am pushing green eggs and ham at you, and an elephant named Hortense who hatches an egg and hears a Who. Imagine that 89% of the characters are female. Imagine ‘The 500 Hats of Bernadette Cubbins’. Imagine ‘The Queen’s Stilts’ with Lady Droon instead of Lord Droon, and no men in the Throne Room. Imagine every monarch, political leader, musician, police officer, doctor, magician, soldier, military leader and pilot is female. Imagine the few males around saying practically nothing, and being lectured to about not taking risks. Imagine only 2.7% of the spoken words across dozens of million selling books are spoken by males. Imagine all these girls and women also being featured at a theme park, in a Broadway musical, and in a string of television productions and feature films. Imagine all sorts of books analyzing and celebrating all these female-dominated stories. Imagine hearing one of these books read at your graduation, or playing with some of the hundreds of toys featuring female characters from these stories. Imagine all of these female faces, all these female voices, all these female heroes, all these female supporting characters. Imagine being a little boy reading all these books year after year. Something like that has been happening to all the little girls who have been reading the Dr. Seuss books since 1937. Imagine.

So here are my questions:

1. Every individual has their own experiences, thoughts and feelings so responses will vary accordingly, but, how did women respond as children to the Dr. Seuss canon?

2. How does one read a Dr. Seuss book to one’s young daughter (or son) so that s/he isn’t adversely affected by the gender imbalance?

3. Why is someone as progressive as Dr. Seuss (regarding some matters) so savagely critical of gender equity?

Feminist scholars have been examining the gender implications of children’s literature for decades. Has anyone out there noticed any particularly annoying misogynies in the Harry Potter Books? Artemis Fowl? The Oz books? Asterix? The Bartimaeus Trilogy? Madeline? Doctor Dolittle? The Famous Five?

Finally, take a look at the lines from ‘And to Think That I Saw It on Mulberry Street’ which Dr. Seuss adamantly refused to change: “Say – anyone could think of that, Jack or Fred or Joe or Nat – Say, even Jane could think of that.” Imagine you’re Jane. Now imagine your name is Dave and this is what Dr. Seuss wrote: “Say – anyone could think of those, Jill or Anne or Liz or Rose – Say, even Dave could think of those.” Now how do you feel?
____________________
Note – Alison Lurie addresses the issue of misogyny in the Dr. Seuss books admirably in her essay ‘The Cabinet of Dr. Seuss’ which appeared in The New York Review of Books in 1990. Seussian scholar Philip Nel also points out that gender issues in Dr. Seuss are more complicated than they might appear to be in his book ‘Dr. Seuss: American Icon’ (pages 101-117).

* Nel, Philip Dr. Seuss: American Icon. New York, London: Continuum, 2004. 108-109.

--The Kidd


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The Slacktiverse is a community blog. Content reflects the individual opinions of the contributors. We welcome disagreement in the comment threads, and invite anyone who wishes to present an alternative interpretation of a situation to write and submit a post.

Comments

[Nicolae Carpathia]

So, as a member of the group (a fellow reader) I'll throw out a suggestion and would welcome hearing back from other readers what they think. Sometimes two or three individuals clearly would like to discuss/argue some topic or issue that doesn't fit into the post they have found each other on or which will derail that post. What do you think of having those individuals pick one of the old open threads or board posts and announcing that they will continue to argument on it?

Someone refresh my memory; why was everyone so adamant against threaded comments at the Patheos site?

[Kit Whitfield]

why was everyone so adamant against threaded comments at the Patheos site?

Partly because it broke up discursive conversations into small side-groups, but mostly because it made it very hard to follow the progress of large-scale conversations, because new comments popped up all over the place rather than at the bottom of the thread.

A separate thread could be equally discursive and easy to follow, so I don't think the same problems would apply.

[anamardoll]

I am probably not the best person to write this, but here I go anyway:

One of the things that really frustrates me with accusations like "Concern Trolling" and "Tone Arguments" is that eventually it becomes possible to lob those terms at anyone regardless of their point. One of the reasons I left the [redacted by author as irrelevant] website was because any attempt to say, "Yes, I see your point, but I really do think the way you are approaching the issue is perhaps harmful for X, Y, Z reasons", would get the poster immediately labeled a Concern Troll only interested in undermining the cause.

I myself have been labeled a Concern Troll dozens of times. Probably someone, right now, is reading this as Concern Trolling! And I don't know that they'd be wrong - I mean, I don't think I'm a troll, but I'm definitely concerned. It's a pickle. :(

I don't think arguments about tone are automatically invalid Tone Arguments. If I say, "Bigotry is bad and everyone who is a bigot is a [insert abelist term here]," it is perfectly valid for someone to step in and call me on my ableist phrasing. If I were to then turn around and say, "I'm not going to listen to you because you are engaging in a Tone Argument," then suddenly we've entered a weird singularity whereby accusing someone of a Tone Argument, I am in fact engaging in a Tone Argument! (I.e., I am avoiding addressing their points entirely by focusing on what or how they have said something.) This surely cannot be helpful or conducive to discussion. And I think can only lead to a growing pile of bad feelings and uneasiness that prevents repeat visits and extensive discussion.

(This is not, of course, to say that anyone in THIS particular thread said anything abelist or bigoted. I just mention this as a possible occurrence where a tone argument would be, in my opinion, a very valid argument indeed.)

How to fix this? I don't know. I understand that not everyone wants to do 101 training every week; I get that some people want a perfectly safe space. At the same time, I'm very opposed to nuking for much the same reason Jason has expressed - I was raised to say and think some very bigoted things and I think nuking would have just entrenched me further in my wrongness. (I am, in fact, very grateful for the people who did give me 101 training. Bless you folks!) My personal inclination is to drop 101 links into a reply post and then ignore from there on out, but I'm passive-aggressive that way and my way probably doesn't work for everyone. Short of making registration-by-invitation-only and kicking out people who (deliberately or inadvertently) say disturbing things, though, I'm not sure that any space can be truly "safe".

[Mmy]

@Nicolae Carpathia: Someone refresh my memory; why was everyone so adamant against threaded comments at the Patheos site?

Threaded comments are quite a different issue. This is a totally self-policed option to allow vigourous discussions without fear of derailing a post all the discussant think should still be responded to.

[anamardoll]

And, of course, after I clicked post, I finally got it through my head that all this has been moved to an open thread and I am continuing the derailment. *doh*

Apologies, and mods please delete/move my post as the derailment that it is. *wet noodle*

So, BACK ON TOPIC ANA. Kids books. I second the recommendation for the Enchanted Forest Chronicles - I love Wrede's 'Princess Cimorene' and those were my favorite books as a child. Still are some of my favorite books, come to think of it.

I also really like a lot of the Dear America / Royal Diary books, BUT those all have different authors and are rather hit or miss in terms of sexist/racism/etc. On the plus side, I've read and reviewed pretty much all of them, so if you ARE looking into the series, there's at least on Slacktivite's take on them on Amazon / GoodReads. :P

[Doc Rocketscience]

why was everyone so adamant against threaded comments at the Patheos site?

There's also a tech issue of how Disqus handles threads: every "reply" (be it to a top level comment or to a comment that is itself a reply) gets indented. But the page width remains fixed. Thus, after a half dozen replies to replies or so, you're trying to read comments formatted onto a column width maybe 10 characters wide.

[Doc Rocketscience]

Besides, in my experience of slacktivist comments, thread drift is considered a feature not a bug. The perils of unmoderated forums, and all that.

[Deanna Smith]

I would have to agree wholeheartedly with the late Theodor Seuss Geisel (may he rest in peace). He really was, how was it he put it - a male chauvinist ...

I have read some information about his life: he really was quite an odd individual. I think if people would read a little about the man himself, they might gain some insight about why he wrote as he did.

[Kit Whitfield]

I have read some information about his life: he really was quite an odd individual. I think if people would read a little about the man himself, they might gain some insight about why he wrote as he did.

Would you care to share?

[Dash]

Lunchmeat:

If there's one or two that are entertaining to 2 and 3 years olds while still being semi-engaging to an 8 year old, so much the better.

My inclination, with that kind of age spread, would be to go with either poetry (Shel Silverstein, Jack Prelutsky both have poems that have fine rhythms and repetitions to keep the little ones occupied and some ideas that may engage the 8 year old's brain) or else science. The EyeWitness books can be very helpful, since they're full of pictures, and the little ones can focus on the pictures, while the older one perhaps reads the text. EyeWitness books or not, anything with dinosaurs or bugs should keep everyone happy.

Now a request. There's a series of children's books with female wizards, better, I'm told, than the Harry Potter series. I can't for anything remember the author or any of the titles. It's a reasonably well-known children's author. Help?

Also, a more general recommendation (not, i.e., for Lunchmeat's situation, although perhaps the 8-year-old would enjoy it them: for kids in the 6-and-up range, I really rather like the Gerald Morris retellings of the Arthurian legends. Better than the Narnia Chronicles, IMHO.

And, finally, far too belatedly, a HUGE thank-you to The Kidd for the excellent analysis of the Oz stories. Simply wonderful and very telling. It would not have occurred to me to do that analysis, but I shall definitely make use of it (proper credit given, of course). Thank you!

[The Board Administration Team]

@Ana Mardoll: And, of course, after I clicked post, I finally got it through my head that all this has been moved to an open thread and I am continuing the derailment. *doh*

Apologies, and mods please delete/move my post as the derailment that it is. *wet noodle*

If you repost the comment on the open thread we will delete it here -- but TypePad isn't friendly to moving.

Completely up to you.

[hapax]

Dash -- you might be thinking of the Young Wizards series, by Diane Duane; it starts with SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD. The series has its ups and downs, but some of them are definitely on my all-time "keeper" shelf.

(There's also a companion series about cat wizards, beginning with THE BOOK OF NIGHT WITH MOON. A bit twee for my taste, but I know a lot of folks love 'em.)

Or you might be thinking of Diana Wynne Jones, maybe her Chrestomanci books (although he's male) or the Howl books (although he's male) or the Derkholm books (although ditto), but they all feature magical females (not necessarily human) in prominent roles.

[Ruby]

One picture book I remember from my days in the public library is Cinder Edna:

http://www.amazon.com/Cinder-Edna-Ellen-Jackson/dp/0688162959

Now, I am a sucker for Cinderella stories to beging with, but this one tells the parallel stories of Cinderella and Cinder Edna. The Cinderella story is told straight up, while Cinder Edna, her neighbor, earns extra money by cleaning birdcages, and takes the bus to the ball. Now, she does end up with a man, but he's the prince's goofy brother who runs the palace recycling program, and they fall in love because of their shared interests.

Love book. Must get.

[Amaryllis]

Or you might be thinking of Diana Wynne Jones, maybe her Chrestomanci books (although he's male) or the Howl books (although he's male) or the Derkholm books (although ditto), but they all feature magical females (not necessarily human) in prominent roles.
May I say that I absolutely adored Chrestomanci's wife Millie?

I've been out of the very-young-children's book world for a while, but I recall that my daughter, when she was learning to read, enjoyed the "Pinky and Rex" books by James Howe (author of the very male-centric but still funny "Bunnicula" series). They feature a boy who likes pink and girl who likes dinosaurs, and it's taken for granted that boys and girls can be friends.

She liked the "Dear America" books, too; yes, the quality could be uneven from book to book, but even at that age she thought they were much more interesting than the "American Girl" books. And you don't have to buy hundreds of dollars worth of doll tchotchkes to enjoy them, either.

For slightly older readers, the "Bad Girls" series, by Cynthia Voigt, is both funny and thought-provoking. Who says girls have to be "nice," anyway? Mikey and Margalo have better things to think about!

@LunchMeat: maybe Animalia, by Graeme Base, if you can find a copy? The little ones can look at the pictures and the older child can enjoy finding all the obscure objects; I know we read it for hours.

Or maybe some of Walter Wick's I Spy and Can You See What I See books, for the same kind of visual engagement?

(And did anyone see that exhibit of his work last fall? Amazing stuff.)

And I had better stop now, before I wear out Typepad's tolerance for links entirely.

[Amaryllis]

Oh yeah, one more thing,
@Dash: or Anne Ursu's "Cronus Chronicles"? Only those are more like Percy Jackson than Harry Potter: modern kids entangled with Greek gods, but with a girl as the main character.

I keep trying to think of girl-centered sword-and-sorcery kids' books, and coming up blank: there must be something, surely?

[The Kidd]

TRIGGER WARNING: SUICIDE

@Deanna Smith and Kit Whitfield

Yes, Ted Geisel was an odd individual. He was sensitive to bigotry as a kid because though he was born in the US his family was German (German and English were spoken at home) and his childhood friends made fun of this. He didn't publish his first children's book until he was 33 having already spent some highly successful years in the very male world of advertising. He loved and was comfortable with male company but women were an alien race.

His first wife, Helen, did everything for him - managed his finances, made his coffee, drove the car - he was spoiled by her and he was very immature, like a big kid. When he started the highly lucrative Beginner Books she became one of its presidents. She also did major editing of his work - Ted ran everything by her. The Grinch That Stole Christmas, amongst others, had a lot of Helen in it, uncredited. She published her own successful children's books under her maiden name Helen Palmer. Later Ted had an affair with one Audrey Dimond while still married to Helen, and soon after that Helen, who knew of the affair, committed suicide. Ted married Audrey soon after that. Geisel was fond of practical jokes, hated book tours, was childless and I read somewhere he wasn't particularly fond of children.

He also privately did some pretty elaborate and high quality paintings featuring some pretty other-worldly settings, adult themes and dark ideas. They weren't published until after his death. Yes, he was somewhat unusual.

[Ruby]

I tried a couple of the Dear America books. Indeed, they vary quite a bit. One I kept is A Coal Miner's Bride: The Diary of Anetka Kaminska (Lattimer, Pennsylvanie, 1896). Managed to capture the quite-different-from-today attitude towards marriage, and to deal with the fact that this very young girl was having sex without being too explicit or detailed, yet without avoiding the reality.

[Trinker]

[after some consideration, I'm posting here rather than in the open thread, because I'm referring to things said here.]

@Slacktivites:
It's T*r*inker, not Tinker, please. I realize the former isn't in most spillchuckers, but honest to cats, it's been my nom.de.net for over a decade.

@Ecks:
Re: proof. Sauce for the goose, indeed.
Perhaps I'm mistaken in inferring a culture of No Nuking, but a culture of critiquing Nuking as always being too hasty is semantically different while being pragmatically identical.
No one has explicitly said "no Nuking", but I keep seeing comments indicating that Nuking is seen as deplorable inextricably tied with flamewars, without acknowledgement that Slacktivist does not current have an auto-Nuker participant. It seems to be an attack on a straw-Nuker.

@LMM:
It is perhaps worthwhile to note that while I enjoy Making Light, I find it an oppressive and white-default space, and that many PoC (and social justice-identified white allies of PoC) I know eschew participation there because it's perceived to be PoC-hostile space. I have a great deal of respect for the erudition and civility of Making Light, but would not uphold that space as a bastion of safety. (I will not reignite dormant fires by citing specifics, but the Nielsen Haydens are not the best example one might wish for non-Nuking.)

obTopic:
I rather like the Olivia the pig books for my kids right now (aged nearly 4 and nearly 2). There's a bit of indulged brattiness that I notice them emulating, but the general tone of exploration and negotiation is one that I appreciate.

We've also been reading the Frances books. (I've banned Max & Ruby for lack of parental figures.)

I'm looking forward to introducing them to the Swallows & Amazons, even though the depictions of Mate Susan are a bit traditional. I figure that Nancy and Peggy make up for it. (There's a bit of RaceFail in there, but we'll be discussing that anyway.)

I've yet to find anything that manages race, gender, sexism, and ableism simultaneously well. Ah well. I've already had to explain the lyrics to Biko (by Peter Gabriel) to them. There's a long road ahead.

[Ruby]

Now I am thoroughly confused. Where are we discussing board civility/nuking/etc?

[Mmy]

@Ruby: Since people are attempting to discuss books on this thread I think it would be a nice idea for the people who want to discuss nuking to take it to the open thread -- however that is just my personal opinion.

Re: children's books. I have pretty much accepted that almost all of my most cherished children's books (and all the most cherished books from my childhood -- which are not the same things) have serious issues. And yes, I didn't notice most of the them when I was a child and no, I can't simply pass them on to the next generation in my family.

[Dash]

hapax, it was the Diane Duane I was thinking of, I'm pretty sure. But I am glad to be reminded of Wynn Jones. Thank you! Also, Ruby and Amaryllis, thank you for the additional recommendations.

[Trinker]

@Mmy:
(Incidentally, do you prefer that capitalised or not?)

I noted the racefail and a bit of the genderfail in my children's books even at a relatively young age. (Being raised with white-default books when one is an ethnic minority in the U.S. makes it harder to ignore...) But I catch a lot more now than I did then.

I remember rather vividly the sense of shock when my elementary school reader, which featured "Eefee and Me" was supposed to be taken as if "Me" represented *myself-the-reader* rather than a white male character called "Me".

I'd been to Disneyland, and I knew from the Small World ride that people of my heritage were supposed to be drawn as having slanty lines for eyes! (That baffled me, but I accepted it then as a drawing shorthand. Until confronted with kids who did the slant-eye thing as taunting. :P)

I'm afraid of what I'm going to discover on rereading Harriet the Spy.

[sharky]

...blamed the issue entirely on female fans' dislike of female characters.

I wish I still had the link, but I was looking at a "Top 100 Hottest Video Game Women" list. Clicking through it was frightening, because every one that unseated the previous as hot looked less and less like a real women, from the imbalanced poses to the body parts to the proportions. To me, the list ended up sunk in the Uncanny Valley, but the male who put it together seemed quite pleased with his #1.

But the message was that a woman had to look a certain way: sexually accessible, nonthreatening, unrealistic, with a nonintimidating, feminine personality. And what that was god only knew, since parts of the Top 100 seemed to hint that a feminine personality couldn't take care of it herself.

But the point is, you get this... unease with how women look, how they're supposed to look, when they look that way and when they don't. Women see how men react to female characters, and I think women build what they want to see from an odd combination of aversion and adoption.

I'm watching one particular fandom take off on stories myself. The fandom is pretty slash-oriented. It's striking how many women are writing slash or het, but the female characters act in certain predictable ways, and the readers ignore and/or don't comment if the females aren't acting as they expect. I'm not sure if there's a basic female dislike of female characters, or an automatic undervaluing based on what women think will probably happen to these characters, a stable comfort zone that's slightly misogynistic (but safe,) and a remaining focus on the men because these are women and the guys are hot.

[Mmy]

@Trinker: @Mmy:
(Incidentally, do you prefer that capitalised or not?)

TypePad thinks I am Mmy and I tend to sign mmy. Not something that really bothers me one way or the other. But thanks for asking.

I noted the racefail and a bit of the genderfail in my children's books even at a relatively young age. (Being raised with white-default books when one is an ethnic minority in the U.S. makes it harder to ignore...) But I catch a lot more now than I did then.

TRIGGER WARNING: DISCUSSION OF BIGOTRY/RACISM/CLASSISM

Ah, that makes sense. The things that I noticed as a child were the presumptions that "normal people" (non-French, non-peasant, non-immigrants) were Protestants of some kind and that Catholics were all French/Irish/immigrant/peasants/superstitious. My dad can remember seeing signs on buildings "no Blacks, Jews, or Catholics allowed" (note: I doubt they used the word "blacks", and may not have used the names "Jews" or "Catholics" but they made it clear who couldn't come in).
Dad can also remember when the first Catholic got hired to work for the city he lived in.

So religious (and class) bigotry was the thing I was most likely to notice as a child.

[Brin (not Meir)]

you might be thinking of the Young Wizards series, by Diane Duane; it starts with SO YOU WANT TO BE A WIZARD. The series has its ups and downs, but some of them are definitely on my all-time "keeper" shelf.

*nods*
I love them and recommend them, but I distinctly remember having to mentally chant "It's not actually autism. It's a supernatural condition the characters are calling autism in a sadly failed attempt to find a fitting word for it." during A Wizard Alone.

[Trinker]

TRIGGER WARNING: discussions of perceptions of race/ethnicity/religion/belonging

@mmy:
It's fascinating to see how different perceptions can be based on personal identifiers and circumstances. I went to a school run by fundamentalist Southern Baptists (of the Bob Jones University) sort for a while, and despite their anti-Catholic railery, the reality around me was that there was a substantial Catholic population and the lines were drawn with Christians of all stripes and Jews on one side, and everyone else on the other. And that "American" meant white or black, but not brown/red/yellow.

It leaves marks.

It took considerable effort in my teens to understand intra-white bigotries. Between the IRA issues and the Quebec issue, I got a pretty thorough external grounding, but it's not like a lived experience.

I take it your background is Québécois? I find my perception there is highly colored by contact with Cirque du Soleil and recent travel to Montréal. (Being a visibly non-Anglo person, as well as lacking the classic Anglophone accent in my halting French, appears to shield me from a bunch of things there.)

If I'm not mistaken about your francophone status, I'd appreciate any tips on suitable children's books in French, as well. Back in another life (figuratively, not reincarnation) someone left behind <>, but I'd love to have more. I'm aiming for both "hexagonal" French and the Québécois variety, as I have no idea which will be more useful for them.

[Ruby]

Trinker: I noted the racefail and a bit of the genderfail in my children's books even at a relatively young age. (Being raised with white-default books when one is an ethnic minority in the U.S. makes it harder to ignore...) But I catch a lot more now than I did then.

I enjoy some of the sites that snark on The Baby-Sitters Club books, which I read as a kid:

http://bscrevisited.blogspot.com/

http://neonspandex.blogspot.com/

http://thedairiburger.com/

I don't think there's a Baby-Sitters Club snarker out there who hasn't pointed out the usual Chapter-Two introduction to the character of Jessi: "Jessi loves ballet and reading and has a baby brother. And guess what? She's black!"

I adored Harriet the Spy with a passionate intensity as a kid. Probably the class issues would be the biggest issue today: I remember trying to wrap my head around the idea of a nanny...

[hapax]

[Geisel] also privately did some pretty elaborate and high quality paintings featuring some pretty other-worldly settings, adult themes and dark ideas. They weren't published until after his death. Yes, he was somewhat unusual

I'd recommend checking out the graphic novel MYSTERIUS THE UNFATHOMABLE by Jeff Parker. One of the major characters is pretty clearly based on Geisel, and has some ... interesting theories about his alter ego as Dr. Seuss.

(Note: Not a recommendation without reservations -- it's a particular kind of noir metafiction that I personally love but grates on a lot of readers' nerves. And definitely NOT for kids! But if you're interested about Geisel in popular culture, worth tracking down)

[Ruby]

"Those issues would be the biggest issue..."

Bah. Fail.

[Mmy]

@Trinker: I take it your background is Québécois?

No -- though for a confluence of reasons I would register "Québécois" if I was travelling in France. My dad/mom were both working class/poor and dad was career military (Canadian) at a time when a disproportionately large percentage of those who entered the Canadian military as "other ranks" (without highschool or college) were Catholic and/or French* (there are a variety of reasons for this.) We learned French in school (from grade 3 on)from people who spoke not only Québécois but a non-urban dialect of Québécois. It is actually closer to the Cajun dialect of French than anything else I have heard.

I understand "proper" French but I have never been able to shed the Québécois accent that gets looks if you are travelling in France.

*The complexities of language and religion in the Canadian Army is worthy of a dissertation -- and I am sure someone is writing it right now. There was also an incredible consciousness of class. Indeed it was not until WWII that it was firmly established that Canadians would not go to war** with British officers.

**You get a group of people together mainly made up of the descendants of Irish immigrants who fled to Canada during the Potato Famine and Québécois who felt that they were an occupied people and the feelings ran rather high***.

***This feeling was very, very class based. My dad and his friends who spent time in England during the war loved much of the country and many of the people.

[hapax]

Was it HARRIET THE SPY or the sequel THE LONG SECRET in which the girls sit around talking about getting their periods?

Yes, it's classist, but I do remember that as one of the funniest, most touching, honest scenes in children's literature.

E.L. Konigsburg holds up pretty well on the sexist, racist, ablist front, although all her characters that I remember are upper middle class Yankees.

[Ruby]

@hapax--It was definitely The Long Secret. I remember vividly because I read Harriet the Spy aloud on a car trip, then The Long Secret, and my parents yelped when we got to that part and made me skip it due to the presence of my seven-year-old brother.

[Ruby]

Also @hapax--It's got class issues, but I really have mixed feelings. Harriet and Beth are both upper-class (very upper class, with multiple servants in their homes), Janie (IIRC) is upper-middle, and Sport is...not. (btw, do you remember why Sport goes to their school?) Anyway, I remember at one point Harriet says that she hates money, and Sport immediately snaps that she'd like it an awful lot if she didn't have any. And Ole Golly does her best to introduce Harriet to other ways of living. So there is some effort to shake Harriet out of her assumptions.

[Ecks]

Perhaps I'm mistaken in inferring a culture of No Nuking, but a culture of critiquing Nuking as always being too hasty is semantically different while being pragmatically identical.

Nobody has said that is always too hasty either. There have been some specific instances of it that have been criticized as too hasty. That horse doesn't need beating any more though :)

No one has explicitly said "no Nuking", but I keep seeing comments indicating that Nuking is seen as deplorable inextricably tied with flamewars, without acknowledgement that Slacktivist does not current have an auto-Nuker participant. It seems to be an attack on a straw-Nuker.

Slacktivist does not currently have an auto-nuker participant. There, I've said it for you now :) I haven't seen anybody argue that nuking is either always appropriate or never appropriate. The debate has happened entirely on the ground in between.

[Scribejay.wordpress.com]

Jenny Islander: @mmy: The bright-kids enrichment class I was in during my higher single-digit ages included a lot of brain stretchers. Here's one: [...]

Question: was the brain-stretcher written on paper, or read out loud? And if the latter, was your teacher a man or woman?

[Nicolae Carpathia]

E.L. Konigsburg holds up pretty well on the sexist, racist, ablist front, although all her characters that I remember are upper middle class Yankees.

Agree 100%. I particularly enjoy Father's Arcane Daughter, which is actually a rather brutal indictment of ablism (and, to a lesser extent, classism), and one of the best I've ever read.

[Scribejay.wordpress.com]

bekabot: (Sometimes their work was so awesome that they were able to transcend the barriers, but that was pretty rare. Madeline L'Engle was an example of this.)

Thank you for mentioning L'Engle, because I was racking my brain trying to remember the books I owned and loved as a child. I could think of Green Eggs & Ham, The Monster at the End of This Book, the Winnie-the-Pooh books, and, later, things like the Phantom Tollbooth. So for a moment, I was wondering if I'd enjoyed any girl/woman-protagonist stories. But I loved A Wrinkle in Time, and it never bothered me that the lead was a girl.

Oh yeah. Alice in Wonderland, too. Never bothered me that she was a girl. Read and re-read that book many times.

On the other hand, I owned Hardy Boys 1-50 and, somewhere along the way, one (1) Nancy Drew, and for whatever reason I had no interest in Nancy Drew. I think I was "aware," at some level, that it was a book intended for girls. Plus, I already had the HB series going, and might very well have felt like ND was just HB all over again.

[Kit Whitfield]

It is perhaps worthwhile to note that while I enjoy Making Light, I find it an oppressive and white-default space, and that many PoC (and social justice-identified white allies of PoC) I know eschew participation there because it's perceived to be PoC-hostile space.

That's useful to know. Given that all your friendly neighbourhood TBATs are white, I think there's a good chance we'll need the odd wake-up call if we're going to avoid the same problem, so I hope people will let us know if we're screwing up. If anyone has suggestions for how to improve, it'd be great to hear them.

[Amaryllis]

I know I'm committing thread necromancy here, and on this of all threads. But just in case The Kidd is reading, I wanted to share something I ran across today.

Christopher Cerf is a son of Phyllis Wagner, who founded Beginner Books with Ted Geisel. He was steeped in Dr. Seuss books from and early age; he grew up to be, among many other accomplishments, one of the original writers and producers for Sesame Street. He writes:

It could be argued that if Ted hadn't created The Cat in the Hat, then Sesame Street, with its own unique mixture of serious education and inspired nonsense, would never have been conceived.

Perhaps not. But Sesame Street's Muppet cast is notoriously male-dominated, itself. And I can't help wondering what that show, which for good or ill has had a major impact on four decades of children, might have been like if the writers and producers who grew up with Dr. Seuss had been a little more used to seeing female characters rasing their voices in Katroo, or roaming around in Motta-fa-Potta-fa-pell, as a matter of course.

[The Kidd]

@Amaryllis
Thanks very much for passing this on. The effects of Geisel's gender imbalance is more extensive than I thought. This might not only explain the dominance of males in the Muppet cast, but also a rare dominant female character being presented as a pig (Miss Piggy).
Thanks for this.

[Raj]

Mmy: Over the years I think few of us on the board haven't posted something we wish could be unposted and few of us haven't wished we wrote something when we didn't.

AAAAAAAAAMEN! WRT *ahem* certain things I have posted, I realize that technically, the posts in question could be unposted by TBAT, but I wouldn't make such a request for a couple of reasons:

1.) I'm leery of doing or supporting anything that smacks of censorship even if it somehow improves my own image.

2.) Deletion of the posts in question would not change the fact that I did put them Out There, and whatever effect they have had is now a part of history that cannot be undone; an integral part of the continuum of communication that is The Slacktiverse.

The best I can do at this point is to work hard to counteract any damage caused and prevent such damage from recurring.

BTW, I am speaking only of certain comments that I have made. I am not saying that asking TBAT to delete a comment is always a Bad Thing that no one should ever do.

------------------

@Amaryllis:

Thread necromancy is frowned upon by some as a Dark Art, but IMNSHO, it is quite acceptable if it is for a good cause.

------------------

*double-checks to make sure he's posting to the right thread this time*

[P J Evans]

It is perhaps worthwhile to note that while I enjoy Making Light, I find it an oppressive and white-default space, and that many PoC (and social justice-identified white allies of PoC) I know eschew participation there because it's perceived to be PoC-hostile space.

You don't know how many PoC are there, because skin color isn't part of posting, and it doesn't come up unless someone decides to talk about it. Maybe the problem is your expectations of what online communities should be like?

[Raj]

Trinker: It is perhaps worthwhile to note that while I enjoy Making Light, I find it an oppressive and white-default space, and that many PoC (and social justice-identified white allies of PoC) I know eschew participation there because it's perceived to be PoC-hostile space.

PJ Evans: You don't know how many PoC are there, because skin color isn't part of posting, and it doesn't come up unless someone decides to talk about it. Maybe the problem is your expectations of what online communities should be like?

Speaking as a POC who has had jobs that involved communicating online, allow me to assure you that it is quite possible to detect POC-unfriendliness even when "skin color isn't part of posting".

[Mmy]

@Raj: allow me to assure you

Raj, that comment just gave me a moment of joy for the simple reason that, years ago, someone publicly attacked me as racist because I used that very phrase "allow me to assure you" in a letter to him. He took the floor of a meeting to "explain" that that phrase is only used by racist people of privilege to talk down to someone they think is racially inferior. The fact that several of the people in the room who were attempting to explain to him that it was a normal phrase in Canadian English were also POC did not deter him from explaining that although English was not his first language he understood it (and our secret coded meanings) far better than did we.

Of course, in his words, I am far smarter than any of you because I am a man. And yes, he actually said that phrase out loud. In front of his wife. Who was a graduate student in the same program. And getting better grades than he was.

[Elizabeth]

I posted this on FB: (no grammar requirements): just read the cat in the hat again. To my "kid lit" and Psych, and English major friends, you'll understand my tardiness to the realization that Dr. Seuss is a misogynist. The kids are abandoned at home by their mother (dad is never mentioned); there are cakes to be baked, things to be raked, gowns to be worn, milk to be drunk, etc. The male cat solves everything and then even brings in a vacuum to clean up. Seuss's take on how a dad would deal with a Saturday if he were home with the kids while mom is "gone for the day?"

added here: the cat is the dad; I was a math and econ major

[Lonespark]

I am thrilled this thread is being resurrected, because I was just thinking last night that I need suggestions for stuff with cool pictures and wacky rhymes that's not like this.

My son is big into If I Ran the Circus, but he also liked...the one about the eggs....Scrambled Eggs Super. And that one has some pretty racist imagery in it. Also The Places You'll Go makes me want to stab things, because it's so unnecessary to make the central character male, and it's a pretty good graduation gift otherwise.

[Mary Kaye]

My niece is very much into _Mister Lemur's Train of Thought_. I thought it would be too old for her (she's three) but not at all. Some of the poems have a Roald Dahl not-parent-approved quality to them, but I didn't (in a single readthrough, admittedly) feel it was racist or sexist.

The website has sample poems so you can judge appropriateness: my favorite is "Bad Bean Defect."

[Ross]

Hm. The way Roald Dahl is so fast to dehumanize and be just generally wretched to anyone he disapproves of in any way, I find it kind of surprising that he never drifted into at the very least Racism-by-not-caring-about-the-implications-because-he-thinks-intent-is-magic. But I can't think of any examples of him ever doing it.

[findthesun]

I like this post. I will say, though, that I think your "imagine..." doesn't quite fit. I don't see that situation in the "imagine" as a problem, because in our world every single other piece of media shows men having varied roles/being in positions of power/being acknowledged for their words? That's one of the really nefarious things about misogynistic culture: one bit isn't necessarily harmful, but all together it's a nasty nasty thing -- when I look around me and almost everyone held up for me to be like is male, when about 80% of authority figures at my college (not to mention governmentally) are male, etc., that is what makes things like the Dr. Seuss books so draining.

As a kid I mostly found the Seuss books annoying because I couldn't get the point of the rhymes, so I can't really advise what happened there. I will say, though, as a FAAB feminine-identified person (this is important to the sentence) who admittedly has an autism disorder, the boy narrator being the default made me think the default pronoun was "he" and I still use it in my head for my actions despite being a woman and preferring feminine pronouns from other people. So I guess that's a pervasive way it infiltrates -- I knew "she"s never did anything in the books I liked from the age of 5 :).

[Lonespark]

Wait, are Ooompa-loompas not racist now? Also sometimes one can avoid this by never writing about POC... but Henry Sugar something something India, I thought.

[Kish]

Wait, are Ooompa-loompas not racist now?

Plus, his original plan was to have actual, explicit pygmies from Africa. To what little extent credit is deserved for Oompa-Loompas not being...quite...that overt, it goes to Dahl's editor, not to Dahl.

[Kit Whitfield]

Plus, his original plan was to have actual, explicit pygmies from Africa.

Yep. This is the original illustration:

http://coreybechelli.com/Images/Comics/Wonkaimages/WonkaOompaLoompa01.jpg