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.
• 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?...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.
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.
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?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?
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?
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.
And, of course -
*spoilers for Shadow of the Giant but honestly you're not losing out*
- she ends up with a huge batch of unplanned kids*, and then she spends a year being militarily awesome to wind down the last war on Earth, but when she comes home she bemoans the time not spent with her gaggle of babies. And yes, that's an important time and it's sad that she missed it, but she was kind of saving billions of lives. So basically she gets one last flare of being hypercompetent at her job and then she goes off to regret it.
Why the most brilliant war hero left on the planet doesn't look into moving her base or her children to a closer proximity to each other is not addressed, because the important thing is to emphasise that women's careers take them aware from their babies And That's Terrible.
*Which it has just occurred to me she actually tracks down and retrieves from their adoring adoptive parents. I don't have a copy of the book around anymore, but I'm trying to remember if there's a reason for this. There's no particular indication that she has Always Wanted Lots of Babies. It is just an inherent assumption that adoption is a state that must be corrected if possible, or what?
---
I guess that's true about the final shot, but prior to that The Power of Love had already made its presence know with invincibility fields that made Voldemort incapable of harming the rest of the cast, as well as driving the betrayal by Voldemort's favourite lieutenant that made the shell-game possible to begin with. Love had forced events down to that critical moment. What sort of situation would you have preferred?
Posted by: Will Wildman | May 19, 2011 at 11:48 AM
You know, for a while something's bothered me about this specific example only and not the premise in general. I don't dispute the whole "male-as-norm" thing, but I wonder:
Would it change things if the doctor had said "I can't operate -- that's my child?"
Because somewhere in my head, there's a bit of neural linkage for "father and son" that is stronger than "mother and son", as if some part of me thinks that "Son" is more specifically what a male child is to his *father*.
I don't know the answer here, and maybe I'm just speaking from a little personal quirk (My father almost always calls me "son", my mother almost always calls me by my name. And my wife almost always calls me "sweetie" for what it's worth.), but it confuses the scenario a lot for me.
Posted by: Ross | May 19, 2011 at 11:49 AM
Re: Oppression Olympics. Mmy has mentioned it before but there is a concept called 'Kyriarchy.' Basically, 'I oppress you, you oppress me, someone oppresses us equally!' Our society as humans has been organized such that almost everyone can say, "Well, being X sucks, but at least I'm not Y! Yeah, hey, how about those Ys, they're really Z, aren't they? HAW HAW HAW."
As a kid, I read Little House on the Praer... Prarer... Prarie? Praerie? Prairie? Argh, the Laura Ingals Wilder books. The whole series of them. I was fascinated with the description of life back then. And I liked the series, too, at times. But I caught flack in grade school for reading them; they were seen as girls' books. (Why, I'm not sure. I mean, I haven't read them in decades, but I don't seem to remember them being particularly non-sexist.)
I also read Judy Blume's Blubber. That book confused me. But it was also derided as being a girl's book.
The other kids' books I enjoyed was Harriet the Spy, and the McGurk series. (I always liked the girl in that series better than McGurk. McGurk always came off as a bit of a full-of-himself ass.)
Wow... books I haven't thought of in years and years.
I'm disappointed by unsurprised at Dr. Seuss's attitudes. I think someone up above had it right: He could talk on racism and brinkmanship because it wasn't a part of his personality, but all humans, all of us tend to get... hinky, when something gets pointed out to us that is unlikable in our personalities. (An example: Huge pushbutton for me is getting called passive-aggressive. 'Defensive' almost doesn't do justice to the verbal marathon I start to run.)
Posted by: Mink | May 19, 2011 at 11:59 AM
Quoting myself: I've read an interesting stat a couple of times about how boys are the "default narrator" in many children's books because boys aren't willing to read books with female main characters.
I'm glad to hear this piece of accepted wisdom being challenged. I should have thought a bit more carefully, because it doesn't ring true even in my own experience--I remember loving the Pippi Longstocking books, and the Narnia series, despite Susan's oft-maligned fate, features a number of strong female protagonists.
Whether I have sons or daughters one day, I'll certainly be looking for female-centred books (nice reminder about the "Enchanted Forest Chronicles" too), so I'm appreciating this thread.
Posted by: Aaaaaaaargh | May 19, 2011 at 11:59 AM
I do think you've caught something, Ross; if I swap the gender of the child and imagine the surgeon saying "I can't operate - that's my daughter", I think I default to picturing the surgeon as female. (I say 'I think' because in Heisenbergesque fashion I'm sure the act of observing my thoughts influences them.)
When it's "I can't operate - that's my child", I think again I more immediately picture the surgeon as female, presumably because of the extra-awful assumption that fathers will not see their children as 'their children' but as 'sons' and 'other offspring'. The mother has to take care of all of the kids but the father only has to take an interest in Shaping a Man.
Shudder.
Posted by: Will Wildman | May 19, 2011 at 11:59 AM
@Kit Whitfield, 3 a.m.:
Is there any evidence for that, or is it just a guess? Because if the latter, I think Occam's Razor is probably against you...
Actually what I meant to say is that he was, in many ways, a product of his time. He was closer to the progressive end of the scale, but please remember those quotes are from the 1970s, and it was 1970s America. I was a little girl then, about the age of someone who'd most enjoy the Dr. Seuss books, and I remember the Public Service Announcements I'd see on TV then. In those PSAs, racism was an obvious evil, pollution was nasty and needed to be stopped... and women were mostly secretaries, nurses, and schoolteachers. The messages I was getting about feminism in the '70s told me that feminists were wacky women who wanted men and women declared to be the same so that women would grow body hair and be drafted into the army and use the same restrooms as men--or something like that. It was all very puzzling to me then, and it was even more puzzling to me in the '80s when I went back and read some of that '70s propaganda and wondered how anyone had ever believed it all.
I think what I'm trying and possibly failing to say is that Dr. Seuss was progressive on some issues and less progressive on feminism because, at the time, socially-acceptable progressives weren't all that progressive when it came to women. The environment did change within a few years, enough that the idea that a girl like me could grow up to be anything she wanted was pretty non-controversial in leftist-to-mainstream society in the 1980s. But even then--heck, even now--there are more socially conservative folks who are stuck in the mid-1970s.
Posted by: Hummingwolf | May 19, 2011 at 12:02 PM
As for 'boys don't want to read books with female narrators', I expect that's a lot like 'people don't want to see movies about women'. It's not true, it's just treated as true by people with influence in the industry, and then they can find enough selection-biased examples to defend themselves if challenged.
Posted by: Will Wildman | May 19, 2011 at 12:03 PM
I guess that's true about the final shot, but prior to that The Power of Love had already made its presence know with invincibility fields that made Voldemort incapable of harming the rest of the cast, as well as driving the betrayal by Voldemort's favourite lieutenant that made the shell-game possible to begin with. Love had forced events down to that critical moment. What sort of situation would you have preferred?
Honestly, I would've just had Valdemort's spell backfire on him when countered and left it at that.
It also occurs to me that Rowling's explanation for why the spell backfired (the wand wouldn't work against its own master) introduces something about wands that was never established*. It wasn't even established about this wand** until the critical/convenient moment. It makes it feel like a situation of "let's quickly change the rules to fill in a plot hole."
* In fact, the fact that...Lockhead?...tried using Ron's wand against Harry and Ron in book 2 suggest that this is a principle that is in contradictions to most wands.
** And I grant you that the wand in question already demonstrated it's an unusual wand by the fact that it changes masters based on who bests who. So having another property special that's unique to it wouldn't be terribly upsetting if it had been established more up front.
Posted by: Jarred | May 19, 2011 at 12:04 PM
Hummingwolf, the suggestion that an artist's work was Fair For Its Day always does come up in a discussion like this (really, I don't think anyone hasn't considered it already) but the fact remains that there are always more exceptions. People who say that early sci fi was sexist because everyone was sexist back then must ignore the existence of sci fi writers who were more egalitarian. I don't know the children's-book field well, but it seems likely that Geisel was still not the Leading Edge of Progress, which kind of has to lead to the question of why, if he was progressive in some ways, he wouldn't apply those principles elsewhere.
Posted by: Will Wildman | May 19, 2011 at 12:08 PM
I've been thinking a lot lately about some of the sneekier bits of misogyny/misogyny-enabling that seems to have become ingrained into certain parts of the gay community
Do you mean the gay male community, or the gay community in toto?
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | May 19, 2011 at 12:12 PM
Eeeeenteresting. When I imagine the child as a daughter I do default to the surgeon as a woman. And these days I tend to assume doctors are women unless otherwise specified, but that surgeons are always dudes...I've met three pediatric surgeons, and two out of three were male, but I doubt that has a lot of influence on it. It's more the "scalpel-jock" concept, which apparently I don't have a female archetype for in my brain, despite having other -jock equivalents (fighter pilots, etc.)
Posted by: Lonespark | May 19, 2011 at 12:13 PM
Do you mean the gay male community, or the gay community in toto?
Good point. I'm talking about gay men. My apologies for that.
Posted by: Jarred | May 19, 2011 at 12:13 PM
Also according to Wikipedia, he did support the internment of Japanese American citizens during the war
Not at all surprising. As anti-racist as he may have been in later children's books, he certainly had racist attitudes during WWII. If you look at his political cartoons from that time, Germany is represented by a very recognizable Hitler, Italy by Mussolini, and Japan by... hordes of identical mosquitoes or alley cats with slanted eyes (need I say that none of them looked anything like the Japanese Emperor?).
Posted by: Hummingwolf | May 19, 2011 at 12:14 PM
Thanks to all those who actually read my post with understanding - thank you mmy, Kit, MG, arc, skreader and Jenny Islander, among others. I often started composing responses to ill-informed, defensive, illogical comments only to find someone else said exactly what I was planning to say so thanks again - a few points:
- The comments about how to read the books to one's offspring, and how one responded to the books as a child were particularly fascinating
- thank you, mmy, for pointing out the dangerous and devastating ways in which the concept of mosogyny is twisted by some, how it relates to racism, homophobia etc., and how Geisel didn't have to be consciously hateful of women for his books to perpetuate a culture that is itself contemptuous of women (I don't think he was consciously misogynist)
- thank you, Kit, for, among other things, pointing out that sexist comments should be treated with contempt, and for talking with insight and sanity about the issues raised - e.g. talking about Thidwick - I noted in the Note that Philip Nel points out that the gender issues aren't straightforward; one thing he talks about is the gender-related behaviour of Thidwick, which I think is important
- thank you, MG, for both justifiable anger and civilized restraint
- I said if you want to see how misogynist culture works when it is not being dramatic so to all those who think misogyny only includes dramatic violence, think again. Read paragraph eight again (the one starting with "Imagine") and, yes, use your imagination.
- It took a long time to careful define terms, go through all the books, do the counts, double check the counts, and try to remain unbiased. It would have been tempting to identify "Sam" in 'Green Eggs and Ham' as male but I didn't; for example (she could be Samantha). I did, however, make note of quite a few other instances of gender imbalance, and collected other statistics, all of which I left out of the post for lack of space.
All I ask is for people to look at the numbers, figure out how to respond to them, consider the complexities the numbers reflect, and henceforth be aware of similar hard-to-see biases in every book, film, television episode, and music lyric one encounters, and prepare one's children for dealing with such realities.
Posted by: The Kidd | May 19, 2011 at 12:15 PM
Strictly speaking (I love debating the rules of magic) when Lockhart was going to blast Harry and Ron, neither of them were armed, and when Voldemort tried to blast him at the end, there's no indication that it wouldn't have killed Harry just fine if Harry didn't do anything. The way it does get shown, they both cast at each other, and when the spells interact, Harry basically exercises Admin Privileges on the wand and says "No, I'm firing at that dude".
I definitely agree that it would have worked even better if she had established the rules more clearly beforehand, but I also think that just having it backfire in Voldemort's hand would be a much bigger step away from established rules.
Posted by: Will Wildman | May 19, 2011 at 12:16 PM
There's your male-as-norm culture right there.
It's more than that. Don't get me wrong, the correct answer makes it clear that it is designed around the idea that males are normal. But being stumped doesn't just require you to have a blind spot the size and shape of a female surgeon, it also requires that you don't consider any of the possible ways the boy could have more than one father (five come to mind off the top of my head.)
For that to leave someone without an answer the person needs to assume that a mother could never be a surgeon, the child couldn't possibly have been adopted or have a step father, he couldn't be the child of a gay couple, that the parent who gave birth to him couldn't have transitioned, and that polyandry is right out.
-
Though, I wonder if it might still throw someone like me if it just said that "his parent" died in the crash. I don't remember when I first heard it or what my reaction was, but I feel like I probably was so focused in on the information given, which never even alludes to the possibility that his mother might have been alive at the time of the accident, that I just assumed he had become an orphan when his only mentioned parent died. We were only ever told he had one living parent, after all, and that person died in the second sentence.
I'm strange like that.
I think, though am far from sure, that if the thing were "A boy and his mother were in a car accident ... How is this possible?" I'd guess step mother, adopted mother, or lesbian parents before it occurred to me that his father could be the answer because the question mentioned mother so I'd be thinking about mothers.
Posted by: chris the cynic | May 19, 2011 at 12:25 PM
Huh. In the version I heard first, the father brought the kid to the ER. Which probably confused me slightly more than the question is meant to, because surely the father would know who the mother was? Not that it's specified they actually talk to each other...funny how our brains just love to fill in more details.
Posted by: Lonespark | May 19, 2011 at 12:33 PM
Clearly, the question assumes that marriage is between one surgeon and one accident victim.
Posted by: Ross | May 19, 2011 at 12:40 PM
Ross; It was love at first suture.
Posted by: Mink | May 19, 2011 at 12:45 PM
@Will Wildman, on misogyny in the movie business: Have you read the series of posts at The Hathor Legacy about this very topic? Illuminating and rather infuriating.
Posted by: Jenny Islander | May 19, 2011 at 12:52 PM
It's amazing how many great writers who are incredibly progressive on most social issues still have these colossal hangups when it comes to women — Charles Dickens and Steven Moffat come to mind as well.
Posted by: Nicolae Carpathia | May 19, 2011 at 12:55 PM
Hummingwolf, the suggestion that an artist's work was Fair For Its Day always does come up in a discussion like this
Oh, I know. I was just trying to give an answer to question 3, not trying to give a non-obvious answer to question 3. :-)
Basically, from what I remember of the '70s, I don't think he was all that progressive for his time--a little to the left, but not extremely so. If his ideas about race seem progressive to people now, that may be because societal ideas about race have regressed in recent decades.
Posted by: Hummingwolf | May 19, 2011 at 12:55 PM
@The Kidd - you're welcome!
Thinking about the gender issues some more, I remember my other favourite was Yertle the Turtle. A nicely straightforward morality tale, two speaking parts, both male, but in a way making Mack female would have made it a story of sexism rather than all kinds of oppression, and Yertle ...
...well, possibly another reason I liked it was that Yertle was bad in a traditionally male way. It generally is men who climb up on other people's backs and crow, not because they're inherently worse than women but because society gives them many more opportunities and much more encouragement to do so. At five or six I was, I think, already aware of that on some level - certainly male crowing wasn't unfamiliar - so in a way, seeing Yertle's downfall kind of functioned as a punishment for sexist behaviour despite the absence of female characters.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | May 19, 2011 at 12:58 PM
I didn't even notice TypePad had signed me out. Yeesh.
You know, for the longest time I couldn't even figure out how this one was supposed to be perplexing - isn't it OBVIOUS that the surgeon is the boy's mom? Why wouldn't that immediately occur to anyone? Why was this in a book of brain-teasers? What was the challenge?Yeah, I was naïve as a kid.
Posted by: Nicolae Carpathia | May 19, 2011 at 01:00 PM
It's amazing how many great writers who are incredibly progressive on most social issues still have these colossal hangups when it comes to women — Charles Dickens and Steven Moffat come to mind as well.
Dickens's progressivism is a bit more complicated than that. He wasn't usually in the forefront of progressive protest, if I remember right: he was more likely to be inveighing against evils that had become widely acknowledged as a problem and were consequently on their way to being fixed, or indeed were somewhat issues of the past. And he could be quite inconsistent in his sympathies: he was very much a man of one idea at a time, and also of conflicting tastes, so he could espouse opposite opinions on different days. Calling him a progressive is, let's say, arguable.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | May 19, 2011 at 01:02 PM
While I'm here:
"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?"
Didn't answer this last night, but I think two things that helped me as a girl were:
A. Having plenty of other books with interesting female characters around. Including books with stories about real women helps--I loved reading about Harriet Tubman, for instance, and I can't imagine any kid being bored by her story.
B. Knowing that the times were a-changin'. In a weird way, it helped that my parents kept my older siblings' books around, including a slightly-inaccurate children's book about the Moon which ended with a hopeful paragraph about how maybe humans could visit the Moon one day. If you know that people have already visited the Moon, and slavery is over, and that sort of thing, it leaves you wondering what else can change.
Posted by: Hummingwolf | May 19, 2011 at 01:06 PM
skreader: question of boys not wanting to read about female characters - anecdotal - I have heard that too, but my son (now 13) says he's just as happy to read a book where the main character or hero is female (provided that it's the type of book that he likes).
I'll thank my parents (esp. my mother) for exposing my brother to books with female main characters, and treating them as just as worthwhile as books with male main characters (or, rather, not treating stories differently based on the gender of the main character). For years, I read aloud the Anastasia Krupnik books during long car trips--everyone, including my bro, loved them.
So a few weeks ago, I introduced Angus and SIL to Big Love. They both enjoyed it, but Angus was the more interested of the two, saying at one point that it was funny that Bill was alone on the cover of the DVDs, because the story was clearly the story of the wives. And that after Barb, Nicki, and Margene, he found the most compelling characters to be Sarah and Lois.
Posted by: Ruby | May 19, 2011 at 01:12 PM
Phoenix: That being said, I enjoyed Dr. Seuss as a kid (who didn't?)...
*raises hand*
I never liked Dr. Seuss. I especially disliked the Cat in the Hat, a bully with his two bully henchmen.
Posted by: Ruby | May 19, 2011 at 01:14 PM
Posted by: Nicolae Carpathia | May 19, 2011 at 01:30 PM
I find it somewhat difficult to believe that they were "issues of the past" in nineteenth-century England.
Not in their general character, but in some of their specifics.
I think it's telling to look at the timeline of his work
I'm basing this on John Carey's The Violent Effigy, but there were contradictions in his views that weren't simply a case of a gradually changing mind. They were more a case of being a writer before a progressive, and taking sides with whatever he found interesting or captivating at that moment. (I'm too tired to look it up, sorry.)
--
So a few weeks ago, I introduced Angus and SIL to Big Love. They both enjoyed it, but Angus was the more interested of the two, saying at one point that it was funny that Bill was alone on the cover of the DVDs, because the story was clearly the story of the wives. And that after Barb, Nicki, and Margene, he found the most compelling characters to be Sarah and Lois.
Did you like how the series ended? It really got my goat.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | May 19, 2011 at 01:34 PM
I don't know that I loved Dr. Suess so much. My parents did, I think. Maybe it was a feature of their childhoods? I did and do love language and rhyme and he does remarkable things there. If we're going with problematic-yet-well-loved authors from early childhood, I go back to Tolkien every time.
Posted by: Lonespark | May 19, 2011 at 01:35 PM
What I find unusually weird about Moffat - at least in Doctor Who; I don't know a lot about his other works although I hear some are cringeworthy - is that the messed-up views he states outright ('Women are always hunting for and clinging to men, while men just want to do their own thing and will try to avoid getting tied down') are not the messed-up views that actually get expressed ('Women are flightly and condescending, while men are meek and cling to their mother-surrogates').
He plainly is messed up in this area, but he doesn't seem to able to decide what flavour to stick with.
---
Ruby: Although as mentioned I adored the Lorax, I share your powerful distaste for the Cat in the Hat.
Posted by: Will Wildman | May 19, 2011 at 01:39 PM
On the note of internalized misogyny... When I was eleven or so, I was reading things like Tolkien and Lewis's Space Trilogy (this is normally where I'd say I was an odd child, but I have a feeling it's not so odd around here), as well as being intensely interested in fantasy stories of all stripes (though my parents being RTCs-of-a-sort (and sort of bad at it) meant that there were some really weird and inconsistent standards in what was and what was not acceptable reading, but that's not of interest right now). I was also very interested in fairy tales, of the original and dark variety, not Disney.
I remember one day setting out to write a story as epic as Lord of the Rings, only about girls, and another time trying to write a fairy tale where the hero was a girl. The trouble was I had never read any books where the girls were heroes in the same way (by which I mean getting to go out and Do Stuff, actiony and having exciting adventures, without succeeding on virtues that were coded female (though being eleven and surrounded by people who didn't see anything wrong with that, I couldn't have begun to put my need to see a female hero (as opposed to a damselly, pure-and-good heroine) in clear words). I discovered halfway through that I had no idea how to write a female character who didn't need rescuing every few pages, because I had never seen it. I was very clear on what I wanted to do, but having never read a book or seen a movie that did it, I didn't have the faintest idea of how to give my female character the agency of her male counterparts.
Posted by: Akedhi | May 19, 2011 at 01:39 PM
I mean, I know racist and misogynistic* gay people around here.
And the transphobia. The transphobia you can find in the gay community is stunning, and some of the worst is of the appropriate-and-invisible kind.
Where's that link about intent again?
Intent! It's Fucking Magic! A favorite of mine.
Some of this is because a lot of those books are structured around a plot of a woman entering a man's world, a la Song of the Lioness.
You should try, if you haven't, some of Pierce's later books. The duology about the Lioness's daughter is particularly good, and easily half of the major characters are strong women. The Circle of Magic books are good, too.
@The Kidd Glad I could help.
Posted by: MadGastronomer, the big meanie | May 19, 2011 at 01:49 PM
Kit: Did you like how the series ended? It really got my goat.
Nope--I felt they pretended that little-to-nothing was wrong with what had been going on all along.
Naq rira nfvqr sebz gur jubyr Ovyy guvat, V qvqa'g yvxr ubj zhpu Avpxv'f pnfhny pehrygl jnf vtaberq be cbegenlrq nf ab ovt qrny. Rira nsgre gjb rcvfbqrf, Nathf fnvq ur jnf tbvat gb unir n uneq gvzr ebbgvat sbe Avpxv, orpnhfr fur'f fb qnea zrna. V gbyq uvz ur jnfa'g jebat.
Posted by: Ruby | May 19, 2011 at 01:51 PM
Will: Although as mentioned I adored the Lorax, I share your powerful distaste for the Cat in the Hat.
The Lorax always made me cry. And I didn't like stories that made me cry. :(
Posted by: Ruby | May 19, 2011 at 01:52 PM
And the transphobia. The transphobia you can find in the gay community is stunning, and some of the worst is of the appropriate-and-invisible kind.
Yeah, that's something that I'm slowly becoming more aware of. Unfortunately, TG issues are something I'm still quite ignorant of*, so I'm afraid I'm a lot less aware of the subtler transphobia. I hope and plan to change that, though.
-----
* At least compared to racism of misogyny, though I'm sure I have a lot more to learn about those, too.
Posted by: Jarred | May 19, 2011 at 01:56 PM
Speaking of misogyny (and racism), there's a piece in the Baltimore Sun about an urban myth regarding Opra Winfrey, back in the eary days of her career as a news anchor for the Baltimore Group-W affiliate.
It reads a *lot* like the anecdotes in Fred's various Bad Jackie / Bad Faith / Proctor and Gamble articles.
http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/zontv/2011/05/oprah_frank_perdue_and_wjz_the.html
Posted by: Ross | May 19, 2011 at 01:57 PM
@ The Kidd: wow, I didn't realize you did all that tabulating yourself -- figured you had a suspicion, then went out and found the data. Very impressive.
I realize we've probably moved on now, but to the posters wondering whether Suess should be given the benefit of the doubt re sexism vs. misogyny. I would say no. All the people who say things like "well I guess that makes me a sexist peeg, then" have in my experience fallen into the actively misogynist camp. (ooh, interesting, note the vocab change -- back then, male chauvinist, now sexist...)
The mocking "peeeeg" is what really gives it away, along with the adjectives. This person is saying, yes I'm aware of the criticisms, and I refuse to accept them, and I embrace the label proudly. This is the sort of person who says, not said, says, that "women should not have the vote because they're too irrational."
Despite being reared by parents who tried their best to be egalitarian, with girls fixing bike tire flats and boys doing laundry. It's painful when it's your own family, with every advantage, good parenting, college, a secure suburban life, still spouting this stuff.
Sorry, but this guy wasn't just sexist, he was actively misogynist. Didn't like Cat in the Hat for reasons Ruby cited, (thanks Ruby for articulating my discomfort) but I did appreciate his way with language, and this makes me a little sad.
Posted by: woodland sunflower | May 19, 2011 at 02:14 PM
@Akedhi: It's funny how kids adjust what they read sometimes. I just assumed that Merry was a girl.
Posted by: Jenny Islander | May 19, 2011 at 02:27 PM
Juxaposition causes me to realize that a lot of Seuss characters are basically *bullies* who go around forcing people to do things they don't want to do "for your own good".
The Cat in the Hat is *totally* a bully, and a recurring theme in Seuss books is "What *you* want doesn't matter."
Posted by: Ross | May 19, 2011 at 02:28 PM
@Akedhi: It's amazing what a difference our entertainment makes in learning how to craft stories. I've been writing (and before I could write, making up stories) since I was small, and I've noticed a sea change around the time I was thirteen, when I went from all-male casts to more mixed casts, including a fair share of female protagonists.
What happened when I was thirteen?
The Slayers happened: a hilarious, awesome anime I still heartily recommend, which took the standard heroic-fantasy-adventure-for-boys formula and swapped the genders of the leads: the main character is an anti-heroic, hot-blooded, adventure-seeking teenage girl, and the kinda-useless tagalong sort-of-love-interest is a tall, blonde, well-built teenage boy.
And since 13-year-old me fell immediately head-over-heels in love with Lina, I immediately started putting characters like her into my stories. And no character like Lina was going to settle for anything less than full agency!
Looking back, I can't really make an argument for Slayers being exactly feminist, but I definitely think it had that effect on pubescent me. Babylon 5 coming hot on its heels probably helped, too--it blew pretty much all TV SF before it out of the water in terms of strong women.
Posted by: Froborr | May 19, 2011 at 02:34 PM
@Ruby: V flzcnguvfrq jvgu Avpxv, ohg V whfg pbhyqa'g fgbznpu gur jnl gur raqvat cerfragrq Ovyy nf n xvaq bs cerfvqvat natry, nf vs ur jnf erfcbafvoyr sbe rirelguvat gung jnf tbbq nobhg gur snzvyl. Ur jnf erfcbafvoyr sbe abguvat tbbq nobhg vg: ur fvzcyl pbyyrpgrq jvirf sbe frysvfu ernfbaf, naq gur tbbq fghss jnf nyy perngrq ol fnpevsvprf gurl'q znqr naq ur'q orarsvggrq sebz. Vg sryg nf vs gur fubj unq obhtug Ovyy'f yvar bs gnyx jvgubhg tenfcvat gung vg unq orra cbegenlrq nf *nyy* gnyx.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | May 19, 2011 at 02:47 PM
Typical for the time. Geisel was not the only offender or even the most egregious one; I grew up during the 60's reading textbooks geared toward middle-class kids in which girls and women (aside from Jane and Mom*) were very rarely seen and almost never heard. The illustrations jibed with the text: in street scenes of the kind which are supposed to feature anonymous throngs of people, almost all the figures were male, so that what you ended up looking at was basically a drawing of a large group of men, with a few token female figures thrown in.
When I was a kid I used to wonder what was up with that, in a way which is now alien to me. (I'm female, by the way.) I didn't see the point of drawing women at all. If only men were supposed to be people--kids pick up cultural hints faster than adults expect, and internalize them more thoroughly--why draw women, even a few? What for? This was during an era, remember, when most of the adult males were stowed away in offices and factories and businesses all day long. You simply did not see them on the street after about 8:00 in the morning or before 6:00 at night. Yet this was a reality which could not be recorded in the illustrations of kids' textbooks, because women in groups could not be represented any more than the aftermath of a car crash or a marijuana plant.
Literature intended for children during this period was written according to two rules: first, omit women; but second, if you absolutely must include them, make certain they're visible rather than audible. I imagine that Geisel knew what his publisher wanted and wrote with their preferences, stated or unstated, in mind. Some kids' authors wrote books in which girls had starring roles, but it was understood that they were writing girls' fiction and thus were out of the mainstream. (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.) Theodore Geisel was absolutely in the mainstream and of the mainstream; heck, at that time he was the mainstream, so I can't blame him for knowing what the mainstream was about. He knew on which side his bread was buttered; that's generally considered to be a virtue, not a fault.
Oh yeah, and in the 70's, a lot of things did change, but that's a whole 'nother post.
*No, I didn't forget Sally, but it would have been excuseable if I had forgotten her, because she is forgettable. And no, I would not be amazed were I to learn that she was made forgettable by design.
Posted by: bekabot | May 19, 2011 at 03:00 PM
Ross and Amaryllis: Exactly, it's not just Hermione singled out for that neglect. It's everyone, and that's why that epilogue never stood a chance with me: I had been hoping fervently for something glorious like the epilogue of The World According to Garp, which tracks everyone twenty or more years into the future in excruciating detail. Garp is a book I enjoy only bits and pieces of - the Grillparzer story, the Bensenhaver story, and I can appreciate the heavy forboding of chapter 13 - but the epilogue does everything I want an epilogue to do. The Fire Emblem games (and off the top of my head, at least a few others, such as Vandal Hearts) perform similarly in the epilogue department. I heart encyclopedic epilogues.
Posted by: Andrea | May 19, 2011 at 03:07 PM
Off topic, but possibly of interest to some people around here, Ginmar has an excellent rant about the accusation of false rape accusation.
Posted by: MadGastronomer, the big meanie | May 19, 2011 at 03:09 PM
I figured that one out the first time I heard it at about the age of 8, but then I had a leg up. When I was five and my late mother was very ill, my father got permission to take us kids to see her. (This was the early fifties, and children did not get to visit people, even parent people, in hospitals.) My father introduced me to a woman in a white coat and made the point that she was a doctor - not a nurse, a doctor.
This confused me at first because up to that point I had no idea nurses and doctors differed in what they did, only in whether they were women or men. So I added in the new data and concluded that nurses were assistants to doctors, who could be men or women.
Posted by: Coleslaw | May 19, 2011 at 03:09 PM
What I like about _Solla Sollew_: the author doesn't sound like he's on the side of the bullies. The main character is constantly being bulled by one person/creature or another, and he clearly resents it and wants it to stop; this is presented as reasonable and admirable. The bullies are not "cool" the way the Cat in the Hat is, nor do they win the way Sam-I-Am does.
And as a roleplaying gamer I *totally* identify with:
Then I rounded the corner and found that, alas/There was more than one Poozer in Pompelmoose Pass./
And General Ghengis Khan said to his mean/'This happens in war every now and again./
Sometimes you are winners, sometimes you are losers/We never can win against this many Poozers.'
I have rounded that particular corner so many times, and I think of Seuss every time it happens. Also:
'We call it Teamwork. I furnish the brains/You furnish the muscles, the aches and the pains.'
I think that the many calls for diverse books for one's kids are on the right track. There are a lot of sexist, racist, kyriarchal things from my childhood that it would nevertheless have been a loss not to have read. (If nothing else, I credit figuring out why I hated _The Last Battle_ with some important developments in my thinking about sexism.) But no one should subsist totally or even mainly on a diet of stories that deny their existence or personhood.
When my adopted son was a little younger and newer to the family, incidentally, I read him a lot of fairy tales. One of the best collections was _The Practical Princess_ which is very feminist. He didn't seem to care. I don't know whether he noticed or not, but certainly female main characters do not put him off.
Oh, and as a data point, I asked him about the surgeon's son and he said "She's a woman surgeon" with a look indicating that this was a stupid riddle. I don't know if that means he'd heard it before or if it was simply too obvious.
Posted by: MaryKaye | May 19, 2011 at 03:13 PM
I remember one day setting out to write a story as epic as Lord of the Rings, only about girls
Interesting. I did a similar thing, not about girls but including them. Originally it had Boy from Our World, but he was stupid and quickly jettisoned. The High Queen who must unite and lead the armies was clear in my mind from a very young age. She was androgynous and sometimes mistaken for a boy in her youth, blonde and involved with an ambiguous prophecy, so looking back I think maybe she was based to some extent on book-Eowyn? And there were some little people, and fairy-people, and people loosely based on characters from Oz (the HBO show about prison, not the books...), and people loosely based girls I played soccer with...
There are two or three stories I've been telling myself in my head since I was very, very young. They evolve and acquire new elements a lot. That one's clearly inspired by LOTR, and another is clearly based on Star Wars, but they have the thing going where the major characters and struggles aren't my focus, and the plot isn't really either...
Posted by: Lonespark | May 19, 2011 at 03:24 PM
I read a few Dr. Seuss books as a child, but he wasn't my favorite. Part of it was that I was a little too old for most of his books. Horton Hatches an Egg debuted when I was 11 years old, Green Eggs and Ham when I was 13. By that time I was reading Nancy Drew and a lot of adult books. I did like Dr. Seuss for reading to my little students who were poor readers. The man really was a genius at writing stories that were both easy to read and interesting to read. Fox in Socks is a prime example. (Of course, the illustrations helped.) So, yes, it is a shame that female characters are invisible in his works, and moreso that he was so resistant to seeing that and correcting it.
Posted by: Coleslaw | May 19, 2011 at 03:27 PM
And about the belief "boys won't read books with female characters". The first chapter book my son read on his own initiative was Harriet the Spy, and he saved up his allowance to buy it.
Posted by: Coleslaw | May 19, 2011 at 03:29 PM
//I asked him about the surgeon's son and he said "She's a woman surgeon" with a look indicating that this was a stupid riddle. I don't know if that means he'd heard it before or if it was simply too obvious.//
This inspired me to ask the xCLP, whose first stab was "The daddy must have come alive again." Second effort, quickly following the first, was "The mummy doctor!" Strangely, for someone who has a daddy and a gestational daddy, the idea that the boy might have two fathers didn't occur to hir without prompting.
Posted by: Nick Kiddle | May 19, 2011 at 03:29 PM
MadGastronomer's link reminded me of something I'd like to share. I'll put it in ROT13 given that it talks about an attempt at abduction of an adult woman:
Na npdhnvagnapr bs zvar jnf nyzbfg noqhpgrq gur bgure qnl. Fur jnf jnyxvat qbja gur fgerrg ng 3cz gbjneqf ure jbexcynpr jura fbzrbar pnyyrq bhg gb ure. Fur fgbccrq naq ghearq gb frr jub vg jnf, bayl gb or vzzrqvngryl tenoorq ol n pbhcyr zra naq qenttrq gbjneqf n ina. Fur znantrq gb svtug urefrys serr nf n cbyvpr bssvpre pnzr ehaavat bire. Gur cbyvpr bssvpre fnvq ur fnj gur jubyr guvat naq nfxrq ure vs fur xarj gur gjb zra va dhrfgvba. Fur fnvq ab, gubhtu gur zra gevrq gb pynvz bgurejvfr. Gur bssvpre neerfgrq gur gjb zra, gbbx gur jbzna'f anzr naq ahzore, naq cebzvfrq gb pnyy ure (fur unq gb trg gb jbex) jura ur unq neenatrq sbe n yvar hc fb fur pbhyq pbzr qbja naq vqragvsl ure nggnpxref. (Fur tbg gung pnyy, naq fur vqragvsvrq obgu bs gurz va gur yvar-hc.)
Gur guvatf gung bpphe gb zr, guvaxvat nobhg guvf vapvqrag:
1. 3cz! Guvf jnfa'g fbzr yngr avtug nggnpx va n qnex nyyrl. Guvf jnf va oebnq qnlyvtug ba n ohfl pvgl fgerrg.
2. Ubj yhpxl guvf jbzna jnf gung gurer jnf n cbyvpr bssvpre cerfrag ng gur gvzr.
3. Onfrq ba ZnqT'f yvax, V srry gur arrq gb nqq gung fur'f nyfb yhpxl gur bssvpre jnf fb flzcngurgvp gb ure engure guna gelvat gb znxr rkphfrf sbe gur zra naq qbjacynl gur vapvqrag.
4. V'q yvxr gb fnl vg fgevxrf zr nf vafnar gung gur zra jbhyq npghnyyl gel gb pynvz gurl xabj gur jbzna juvyr fur'f fgnaqvat evtug gurer naq pncnoyr bs pbagenqvpgvat gurz, ohg onfrq ba #3, V'z abg fb fher nalzber.
Bu naq nf na nfvqr, jura gur bssvpre ena obgu zra'f VQ'f ba gur fprar, obgu pnzr onpx nf nyernql orvat ertvfgrerq frk bssraqref.
Posted by: Jarred | May 19, 2011 at 03:37 PM
But anyway, on an earlier topic:
I doubt such readers actually exist, but the rule is still enforced by many publishers "just in case."When Rowling was first looking for a publisher, they insisted that she write under initials rather than her full first name, because apparently boys won't even pick up books by female authors, so "J.K. Rowling" would sell more books than "Joanne Rowling."
Fun fact: she doesn't even have a middle name. "Kathleen" is her grandmother's name.
Posted by: Nicolae Carpathia | May 19, 2011 at 03:38 PM
Ginmar FTW.
Posted by: Lonespark | May 19, 2011 at 03:44 PM
Long-time lurker, very infrequent poster here, and I just wanted to state that this post and its comments have blown my mind (in a very good way). The misogyny of Seuss is no surprise to me, but back on the first page of comments (I think it was the first page), there was a discussion of how boys mainly like to read books with male protagonists. It's an argument I have often heard, and generally breezed by, because I love books with female protagonists, and always have.
This time, I had a (belated and in retrospect blindingly obvious) epiphany. Of course I like books with female protagonists. I was raised on them, just as surely as I was on male protagonists.
Almost every night from the time I was 2 to when I was 12 (which was the first time I had a room of my own rather than sharing with all my siblings), my mother read to us. She read Seuss, and she read The Hobbit, and she read The Secret Garden and the Laura Ingalls Wilder books. She read the same books to all of us, and if I had a breakdown of the list, I'm almost certain it would be near to an even split. It never occurred to me before that this was exceptional, and I always assumed she just read us books that she herself enjoyed. But thinking about it now, I know my mother, and I would wager large sums of money that I do not possess that it was absolutely deliberate. In so many other ways, she taught me that men and women are equally capable, equally interesting, equally deserving of attention, but I think the books she read to me were one of the ways that message got through to me most clearly.
So this has been a long aside to basically say: thank you, everyone, for helping me to appreciate how awesome my mom is even more than i did before.
Posted by: Matt Doyle | May 19, 2011 at 03:48 PM
Me too!
The Tolkien pastiche is mostly abandoned, but the future history remains alive and well, and every now and again I'll add in something new or flesh out one of the human or alien cultures.* Currently I have the crab-like people who just invented agriculture bubbling on the back burner of my brain. They have a rather odd religion related to the fact that the earlier stages of their lifecycle are parasitic and nonsentient and they thus honestly believe that they are spontaneously created as adults inside dead birds.**
*Yes, each species has multiple cultures, and some cultures have multiple species. Suck on that, almost every space opera ever!
**No, I didn't read any of Digger until after I came up with this. And technically, they're not birds, since they (a) share no common ancestors with birds, what with being from another planet and all, and (b) don't have feathers or beaks or, technically, vertebrae. They're close enough, and I'm a firm believer in calling smeerps rabbits.
Posted by: Froborr | May 19, 2011 at 03:48 PM
@Kit, re Big Love--
Gur jevgref naq Cnkgba qvq fhpu na vaperqvoyr wbo bs znxvat Ovyy n znfgre znavchyngbe. Naq, yvxr znal terng znavchyngbef, Ovyy raqf hc ohlvat uvf bja zngrevny. Ohg va gur raq, fb qbrf gur fubj vgfrys.
Naq bar guvat gung ernyyl gvpxf zr bss nobhg Ovt Ybir snaqbz: gur frtzrag ibpnyyl pelvat bhg sbe Ora gb zneel Znetrar. V'z fbeel, ohg JUNG???
Posted by: Ruby | May 19, 2011 at 04:10 PM
@Jarred: That's both horrifying and relieving. Horrifying in that it happened, relieving in that at least the police officer was there and did the right thing.
Posted by: Froborr | May 19, 2011 at 04:12 PM
This is all over the place; the author of the long-running Animorphs series was credited as K.A. Applegate, and I've similarly heard that her middle name of 'Alice' was also supposedly invented for the sake of an initial.
Personally I just kind of like it when writers go by initials+surname. TS Eliot. JRR Tolkien. At some point I think I decided that, should the opportunity arise, I would prefer to be credited as TG Wildman, because saying 'double-U' is such a speed bump. (My initials, TWGW, have as many syllables as my full name. Gah.)
Posted by: Will Wildman | May 19, 2011 at 04:19 PM
Unrelated to anything Seuss, I wrote a very silly Rapture ficlet today, set roughly to coincide with His Majesty's Dragon, and thought some of y'all might find it entertaining. :)
Lonespark, that sounds like fun.
Posted by: Sixwing | May 19, 2011 at 04:25 PM
@Will: I'm curious, are you counting "William" as two syllables or three? Likewise for Wildman? In my own accent the first is two syllables and the second is three, but I know there are accents where that count differs.
I like first name, middle initial, last name for myself, but then again, my first and last name are both monosyllables.
Posted by: Froborr | May 19, 2011 at 04:43 PM
Froborr: Good point. I hadn't thought about it, but I'm also counting William as two and Wildman as three, even though 'wild' is... not two syllables. Which is the problem I always have with syllable-counting in English; words like 'up' and 'sponge' are technically both monosyllabic (by my layperson definition of 'single vowel sound', at least) but really, 'sponge' should count for 1.5 or something.
This may explain part of why I like languages that have syllabaries instead of alphabets.
(If 'Wildman' becomes two syllables, then my initials actually contain more syllables than my full name.)
Posted by: Will Wildman | May 19, 2011 at 04:56 PM
Syllables are determined by spoken vowels. It doesn't matter how many consonants are clustered around the vowel; one vowel=one syllable. Some people do insert vowels in consonant clusters, though, "athalete" is a common mispronunciation of "athlete", for instance, and one of my SLP coworkers caught herself saying "Guhrace" for "Grace". There is a name for this kind of error, which I naturally cannot remember at the moment. Ah, Applications of Phonological Analysis is close at hand, because I never could decide what to do with it when I retired. It's "epenthesis": a process that results in the insertion of a schwa between two consonants of a cluster.
Posted by: Coleslaw | May 19, 2011 at 05:05 PM
Yeah, I never really got any especially weird aliens happening. Everybody was humanoids. There were frog/fish-people, and the originally Han-Solo-esque character was half-frog/fish-person, and he was adopted by the originally vaguely Kenobi-esque character, who lived on a desert-ish planet, and ended up having him surgically altered to survive there and live a more normal life, and then aaaaaanggst, and space piracy, and unrequited slash, and character death (because space piracy is dangerous, y'all!), and mooooore aaaangst, and eventual resigned frenemies-with-benefits relationship with a bounty hunter who is also half-frog/fish-person...
And the Darth Vader-ish character was of course somebody's mom, and...now that I'm thinking about this, I'm kind of proud of it, except for the part where it has no real plot...Then again, "Empire declines, rebel idealists seek to replace it, screw up and fail, eventually sort of succeed and probably are well on the way to becoming what they hate," isn't completely hopeless...I just like characters and setting way better than particular events that happen in some order and lead to some end.
Posted by: Lonespark | May 19, 2011 at 05:10 PM
Intersectionality - Tamora Pierce's "Trickster" duology (of which MG spoke)
has been criticized by WOC as being a "white person saves POC" story, among other things. Just FYI.
Posted by: renniejoy | May 19, 2011 at 05:51 PM
Definite props to the Anastasia books, The Secret Garden, Ramona, and the Paperbag Princess. I was not a girly girl at all and I loved these books to death.
Posted by: storiteller | May 19, 2011 at 06:20 PM
Dammit renniejoy I was gonna say that. Also also also.
Posted by: MercuryBlue | May 19, 2011 at 06:37 PM
@renniejoy and MercuryBlue *sigh* True, I forgot about that. *points finger at self* Fail.
Posted by: MadGastronomer, the big meanie | May 19, 2011 at 06:43 PM
One of my favorite stories to work on/daydream about is another one of those space opera things - it's a little Star Wars-y, a little Cowboy Bebop-y, and a little 'my brain is a very odd place'-y. I refer to the draft as 'scifi light' because while I'm attempting not to commit any egregious errors, I'm also not writing anything jargony. One of my favorite things about it is that almost none of the aliens are humanoid, though - I think we (because it's a shared story with a friend of mine) have one humanoid species, but the rest vary pretty wildly.
Posted by: Akedhi | May 19, 2011 at 06:52 PM
@storiteller--One of the reasons I love the Anastasia books is that Anastasia is not a girly-girl. She cares about boys, but in a rather casual, not-a-big-deal way, and she wears comfy clothes and shoes, and she likes what she likes no matter what anyone else thinks.
And I'll admit that Anastasia was probably the heroine I most identified with at that age. Right down to odd little details like having an artist mother who is amazingly awesome in every way, but whom she hates and resents at the age of thirteen, and a genius little brother for whom she feels, almost simultaneously, jealousy, deep love, and protectiveness. Anastasia even had a plump best friend who loved classic literature, and they loved going to garage sales together. It was downright uncanny! :D
Posted by: Ruby | May 19, 2011 at 06:57 PM
Wow, this took off at a running start. So, way back when I had only read the article, and I was sad, but it explained a lot... sometimes the sense that I was reading someone else's books.
At "Dr. Seuss" age, my favorites were Hurray for Captain Jane! and a book I cannot find online which I believe was called "The Polka-Dotted Girl" and was a bit Alice-in-Wonderland-y about a girl who was lonely because she was different (polka-dotted, in fact). As soon as I got to be school age, there were tons, Noah Streatfield's "Shoes" books (where the main characters make a vow to make something of themselves because they are all adopted and have given themselves the last name of Fossil and no one can say it's because of their fathers), The Secret Garden, Nancy Drew, etc. That's the age where girls are (or were?) expected to be the readers and the boys "won't" read because books are girly (involve sitting still and being quiet, was how I figured).
Anyway. Wow. I'm really disappointed with Dr. Seuss now.
Posted by: Thalia | May 19, 2011 at 07:35 PM
Will Wildman: because saying 'double-U' is such a speed bump.
W
The King sent for his wise men all
To find a rhyme for W.
When they had thought a good long time,
But could not think of a single rhyme,
‘I’m sorry,’ said he, ‘to trouble you.’
-James Reeves
Okay, now I'll go read the rest of the thread...
Posted by: Amaryllis | May 19, 2011 at 08:02 PM
MercuryBlue - I hadn't seen those links before, thank you. :)
MG - I don't think anyone is responsible for remembering everything all the time... :)
Posted by: renniejoy | May 19, 2011 at 08:26 PM
I'm going to be guilty of drive-by posting, but I'm leaving work and I'll try to get back to this as soon as I can, but I wanted to chime in on a few things:
I'm a priveleged white dude in the U.S.A.; you really don't get much better than that unless you were born into wealth. And I had the same knee-jerk reaction when I saw the word "misogyny". "Misogyny? This guy may have some gender-bias, but there's none of the nastiness and meanness I've come to associate with that word.
Unlike some others, I decided to push past that "knee-jerk" reaction, because I know I've got biases due to my priviledge, and I also know that the authors of pieces like these don't use words lightly or carelessly.
So I pushed past my initial reaction, down to the next paragraph, which highlighted his reactions to observations about gender bias. When someone carefully, respectfully points out your bias, if your reaction is to dismiss those points and belittle the speaker, well, hey, there's that mean-spirited nastiness I was expecting earlier!
"Almost all your characters are male; why isn't there a story with a female protagonist?" < gender-bias, possible sexism >
"SCREW YOU, YOU HYSTERICAL HOUSEWIFE! SHOULDN'T YOU BE IN THE KITCHEN, FIXING DINNER?" < misogyny! >
3. Why is someone as progressive as Dr. Seuss (regarding some matters) so savagely critical of gender equity?
Because fish don't know that water is wet. That's how privilege affects your perceptions: the default narrator is always male, because they always have been, in everything you've read, and that's how it's always been as far as you know. Why should it be different? I've never been pulled over for no reason, so why would a black person assume the police are pulling him over just because he's black?
It's a form of projection. (I'm working on a blog post on this subject) If I don't know you, and I don't know who you are, I assume you're like me until I know otherwise. Because I've never been harassed by the police, catcalled on my lunch break, or threatened with violence for wearing an earring, my assumption is that if those things happen to you, there must be a reason other than you just being yourself.
If I say "the overwhelming majority of rapists are men", it's inevitable that some jackhole will pipe up and say "Hey, I'm a man, but I'm no rapist!" Great, jagoff, then it should be obvious I wasn't talking about you! But because of privilege and projection, said jagoff is assuming I'm talking about men like him, because he assumes all men are like him. Which is more or less what happened almost immediately in this thread.
I admit, I hadn't really considered the implications of the erasing and silencing of women in these books. So let me say thank you to The Kidd for opening my eyes. I'm still guilty of bias, I still have a ways to improve, but it's writings like these that help me see the world with better eyes.
Posted by: Rodeobob | May 19, 2011 at 08:53 PM
Not that they're unalloyed good, or anything (particularly as regards race and "swarthy/dirty" = bad character). However, Joan Aiken's books do a pretty good job with female characters who are strong, smart, and proactive, both as good and bad characters. In fact, there's a rather disproportionate number of slightly clueless male characters who get pushed into action or inaction by their female counterparts. For the younger set, there's Mortimer and Arabel; for the older ones, the extended Wolves of Willoughby Chase/Black Hearts in Battersea/Nightbirds on Nantucket is lots of fun.
Posted by: fizzchick | May 19, 2011 at 09:01 PM
Rodeobob - thanks for the thanks. Many don't get past that initial knee-jerk reaction. You make some important points I hadn't considered. The point of my post was to examine something hard to see, and elicit responses from others that help me understand it, so thanks for your insights. I look forward to your blog post on privilege and projection.
Posted by: The Kidd | May 19, 2011 at 09:10 PM
Gah! I need to not read any of these posts that get into the subject of children's books. First Narnia and now Dr. Seuss... Y'all are ruining my childhood!
I'm going to crawl into a fetal position now.
Posted by: Neohippie, a woman who learned to read from Dr. Seuss books | May 19, 2011 at 09:12 PM
@fizzchick--Everybody is bringing up my favorite childhood books! LOVED Wolves of Willoughby Chase.
And OMG did anyone see the strange and trippy movie based on it???
Posted by: Ruby | May 19, 2011 at 09:15 PM
@fizzchick, I read them out of order - and still haven't got to Nantucket - so The Cuckoo Tree was my first introduction to Dido Twite. She's definitely a strong and capable character, and I identified quite strongly with her for a while.
Posted by: Nick Kiddle | May 19, 2011 at 09:43 PM
*applauds RodeoBob* I also am looking forward to your post.
Posted by: Thalia | May 19, 2011 at 10:14 PM
Neohippie: Y'all are ruining my childhood!
Well, I hope it's not that bad; it was my childhood too!
And these young kids ("get off my lawn!") may not quite realized how dreary so many pre-Seuss children's books were. Books for very young children and beginning readers, I mean; there were plenty of good books, even good books about girls, for older children. But the little ones were reading Dick-and-Jane, or being read what Ogden Nash referred to as the Fee Fi Ho Hum, No Wonder Baby Sucks Her Thumb kind of books.
The sheer fun of the wordplay in books like Fox in Socks, and the glorious chaos of The Cat in the Hat, and the sense of joyful wonder in One Fish, Two Fish, Red Fish, Blue Fish, and the speak-truth-to-power of Bartholomew and the Oobleck, really were revolutionary. (Oobleck! I still love that word!)
This is true; it's also true that, as a body of work, the books contributed to a culture where women were ignored or marginalized, and his own comments seem to show that he had no problem with that. The '70s "male chauvinist peeg" and the 21st-century "politically incorrect" reactionary are brothers under the skin, only back in the '70s such misogyny was even more widely expressed, and tolerated.
One Fish etc. was my favorite as a child. But this evening I went back at looked it over. It features a boy and a girl, presumably brother and sister, and a day full of strange and wondrous creatures. During the day, the children do almost everything together; so far, so good. But when you look at the illustrations-- when they ride a Wump, he's on the front hump. When they ride a tandem bike, he's in front there too. When they play Ring the Gak, he's tossing a ring while she's standing by holding one-- waiting her turn or waiting to hand the ring to him, but not at that moment playing herself. When they use a Zans to open cans, he's doing the opening and she's standing by, holding the cans. And so on and so on, page after page.
I certainly didn't notice all that when I was six, but I can't help seeing it now. And even now, just as much as when I was six, I'd rather read Dr. Seuss than, say, the story of how Mrs. Goose cut up her wool blanket to make a skirt, and it was just too hot to wear comfortably, and then when night came her bed was just too cold, and she had to rip up the skirt and sew the blanket back together-- the plot of one of the stories in a collection my grandfather gave me when I was six.
An occasional Seuss, as part of a balanced diet so to speak, is innocuous. As a steady bill of fare, it's harmful in its limitations. Fortunately, there are much wider choices available today.
Ross: a recurring theme in Seuss books is "What *you* want doesn't matter."
Just to be contrary, I submit I Am Not Going To Get Up Today! In which the main character very strongly wants, well, not to get up. And doesn't. In spite of the sunshine and the birds and the alarm clock and the policeman and the fire department and the whole brass band.
That was one of my daughter's favorites, as a child; I should have known then...
Posted by: Amaryllis | May 19, 2011 at 11:53 PM
Wonderful thread (except where it wasn't). I feel sad now that I wasn't able to join in all the rough-and-tumble.
Some scattered notes --
The only Seuss I remember liking was HOW THE GRINCH STOLE CHRISTMAS, TEN APPLES UP ON TOP, and FOX IN SOCKS. Those, along with THE FOOT BOOK were the only ones I read my kids. I don't remember much with gender issues as a child (much more concerned with the bullying) or as an adult.
Of course, I always preferred P. D. Eastman, who probably had the same gender bias, but since his books weren't examined in this post I shall pretend not for a little while longer.
---
I can't say for sure about children, but I can state as a teen librarian that teenage boys will, as a rule, still reject books that feature only girls (or even prominently features girls) on the cover (the protagonists is another issue). This rule holds fairly constant over four different states and the past thirty years, and alas includes my son.
Generally speaking, white teens will also reject books that prominently feature perceived "low class" ethnicities on the cover (e.g. Latinos or African Americans) but are fine with those that feature "cool" ethnicities (any Asians, Native Americans, Africans in native dress, ancient Aztecs and Mayans, etc.)
Make of that what you like.
------
Mostly as a child I read fairy tales -- both the "Color Fairy Book" bowdlerizations and the original Grimm version when I could. They were filled with female characters with agency, as those who filled more stereotypical passive roles. A whole spectrum, there.
I do remember falling in love with and reading to tatters Lloyd Alexander's Prydain books, primarily because of the character of Eilonwy: A princess! Who had adventures! Who preferred sword-fighting and climbing trees to embroidery and cooking! Who had powerful magic of her own and often won the day! How daring and revolutionary and different!
It wasn't until I read them to my daughter -- who had been raised on THE PAPER BAG PRINCESS and later Wrede's Enchanted Forest tales and everything by Jane Yolen and Tamora Pierce -- and saw Eilonwy through *her* eyes, that I realized how girly and forced and stereotypical Eilonwy's "tomboyish" character was.
(I still loved them and cried when I got Mr. Alexander to sign a copy of THE CASTLE OF LLYR for me, though)
******
You know, for the longest time I couldn't even figure out how this one was supposed to be perplexing - isn't it OBVIOUS that the surgeon is the boy's mom? Why wouldn't that immediately occur to anyone? Why was this in a book of brain-teasers? What was the challenge?
The one that infuriated me was the book of brain teasers that included this me (let me see if I can remember the wording): There is a remote village with only one barber. No one can leave the village to be shaved. Every man who does not shave himself is shaved by the barber. Question: Who shaves the barber?
The book gives the answer: "There is no answer. The situation described is impossible." Even at a young age, that made me so angry, that for the first and only time in my life, I defaced a library book by writing in large letters, "No, THE BARBER IS FEMALE!!!"
Posted by: hapax | May 20, 2011 at 12:50 AM
Gah, I loved the Tortall books as a teenager, now I'm all bummed. I had never noticed how very problematic it was- I just remember the thrill of finally finding a book about girls with swords and got to have adventures.
Does anyone have any recs on similar books- girls with swords- without the horrendous fail attached?
Posted by: Asha ( EHHH??) | May 20, 2011 at 01:06 AM
Wait... why couldn't a male barber shave himself? Or just grow a beard? But, yeah, the female barber solution was the first in my head.
Posted by: Winter | May 20, 2011 at 01:09 AM
If the male barber shaved himself, he would be a man who shaved himself, and therefore not be one of the men shaved by the barber.
I'm guessing, mind.
Posted by: Robin Zimmermann | May 20, 2011 at 01:36 AM
The King sent for his wise men all
To find a rhyme for W.
When they had thought a good long time,
But could not think of a single rhyme,
‘I’m sorry,’ said he, ‘to trouble you.’
I cannot find the author, but on a similar subject - you know how it's proverbially hard to rhyme 'orange'?
I cooked some oats in boiling milk
And ate them from a porringer.
Next time I'll add some citrus juice
To make my breakfast oranger.
--
@Ruby - V qba'g sbyybj gur snaqbz, ohg va n jnl, vs ur jnf tbvat gb or qbja gb bar jvsr, vg jbhyqa'g or gur jbefg. Cheryl orpnhfr fur'f gur bayl bar bs gur guerr jub frevbhfyl fgnaqf hc gb uvz. Oneo vf frys-fnpevsvpvat, Avpxv vaqverpg, ohg Znetrar pbasebagf uvz qverpgyl jura fur jnagf fbzrguvat, fgvpxf gb ure thaf, naq graqf gb trg jung fur jnagf. Fbzrobql nf ntterffvir nf uvz, onfvpnyyl. Gubhtu lbh pbhyq nyfb fnl gung Avpxv jbhyq jbex orpnhfr fur'f gur bayl bar jub ernyyl funerf uvf frkvfg inyhrf. Gur ynfg crefba V'q jnag gb frr uvz jvgu jbhyq or Oneo, orpnhfr fur ernyyl qrfreirq orggre naq jnfa'g ntterffvir rabhtu gb qrznaq vg sebz uvz.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | May 20, 2011 at 01:41 AM
@Hapax: The paradox, stated rigorously as it was originally by Bertrand Russell, includes the stipulations that the barber is male and lives in the town in question, and shaves all men and only those men in the town that do not shave themselves, which results in a genuine contradiction.
If your version of it is what the book had exactly, then it also allowed the possibility that the barber was male but shaved himself (because it didn't specify that he only shaved those men who did not shave themselves), and that the barber shaved himself or did not shave himself but lived in another town, and therefore did not fall into the class of men of the town.
Posted by: Andrew Glasgow | May 20, 2011 at 01:59 AM
If I say "the overwhelming majority of rapists are men", it's inevitable that some jackhole will pipe up and say "Hey, I'm a man, but I'm no rapist!" Great, jagoff, then it should be obvious I wasn't talking about you! But because of privilege and projection, said jagoff is assuming I'm talking about men like him, because he assumes all men are like him. Which is more or less what happened almost immediately in this thread.
Seems very possible. I wonder if there's another element too.
A book I was reading about partner abuse pointed out that abusive men pretty much never do their fair share of work around the house and with the kids. The author remarked that such men tend to denigrate their partners as lazy, but that on some level they must know how heavy her load was - if for no other reason, then because they fought so very hard to avoid having to share it.
I suspect that sexist men have this reaction partly because, while they would insist that they don't discriminate based on gender, on some level they know just how unpleasant their thoughts are when they consider women as a group, and consequently fight very, very hard against any suggestion that anybody might think of men as a group - just in case they find themselves taking a dose of their own medicine. Of course, pointing out that most men are rapists does not necessarily mean what they say it means, but I suspect that their attitude towards gender grouping is so toxic when they're dishing it out that they're really scared of one day having to take it, even in the mildest form.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | May 20, 2011 at 02:37 AM
Incidentally, I'd like to thank the men in the thread for this kind of speculation. The sexists seem to have crawled back under their rock, and I strongly suspect that to a sexist, having your 'wisdom' greeted by a bunch of other men saying thoughtfully, 'Hm, I wonder why it is this guy is such a loser?' is a pretty good deterrent.
Posted by: Kit Whitfield | May 20, 2011 at 02:41 AM
Holy cow, I never noticed or cared. (And yes, I'm female.) Long live Dr. Seuss! :D
Posted by: Nicole | May 20, 2011 at 03:16 AM
Maybe the barber paradox was supposed to trip up people who had never met a man who wore a full beard and whiskers.
Posted by: Jenny Islander | May 20, 2011 at 04:07 AM
you know how it's proverbially hard to rhyme 'orange'?
Ogden Nash once said,
"I was once slapped by a young lady named Miss Gorringe,
And the only reason I was looking at her that way was, she represented a rhyme for orange."
Has anybody ever come up with a rhyme for "silver"?
Posted by: Amaryllis | May 20, 2011 at 07:01 AM
Oh, and if any of the mods are about, you'll notice that the spammers are back. Who knew that inexpensive knitwear had opinions about literature and politics?
Posted by: Amaryllis | May 20, 2011 at 07:02 AM
Gotta say I love arc's deconstruction of perceived types of prejudice. I wrote a psych PhD (experimental, social-cognitive, not interpretive) about stereotyping and prejudice and the motivations to avoid it... and yes, in social psych we absolutely do distinguish between "old fashioned" racism (the blatant hatred, actively dehuminizing form), and "modern racism", (the more coded "those people make too much of a fuss" type). There's also "ambivalent sexism" which is the whole Madonna/whore thing - on the one hand women are revered and put on a pedestal, and on the other hand, they're incompetent and weak and need protecting by their menfolk and shouldn't forget it.
We also find distinctions between prejudice (emotional dislike), and stereotyping (cognitive expectations about groups), and between implicit and explicit prejudice (often they are almost entirely uncorrelated within the same person, and predict different kinds of crappy behavior). Some people also have motivations to AVOID prejudice, but they mostly aren't activated until some cue trips in making it salient (I have a motivation to eat healthier, and that isn't activated all the time easier - it's how motivations work). When you see derailing loud protests from white guys in these threads, what you're seeing is that motivation kicking in with force ("Woha, yeah, racism! Don't be like that! Take a stand, man!"). There's also straight up authoritarians - people oriented to social dominance. These are the jerkwads who actively use the various 'isms' (race, sex, non-christian, non-muslim, whatever) as a tool kit for making sure that there's a very clear top and a bottom, and that they personally are on the former. I'm thinking the abusive husbands Kit is talking about a few posts up from are likely to fall pretty heavily into this camp.
FWIW, it sounds like Geisel was in the modern sexism camp with his "geez, quit hassling me" reactions. The fascinating lack of female characters (great analysis, BTW Kidd) looks an awful lot like implicit prejudice - that tends to leak into unmonitored behaviors like body language, or seemingly innocuous decisions like deciding whether a given otherwise androgynous character gets an innie or an outie... Seuss made that decision hundreds of times, and over the course of all those individual non-diagnostic decidings a pretty clear pattern emerges...
So yeah, there are lots of layers and subtleties to prejudice and how it plays out, and they're actually pretty interesting to start dissecting.
MMY makes an excellent point, though - just because modern racism and stereotyping may be in a different league than "old fashioned" racism/sexism, doesn't mean they aren't also highly pernicious and destructive. As she ably catalogues, the fact that someone doesn't straight-up hate you doesn't help a whole lot when they still end up blocking you out from gainful employment or getting a reasonable apartment, or forcing you into uncomfortable and alienating awareness of your social 'otherness'.
Posted by: Ecks | May 20, 2011 at 08:17 AM
I did read some books with female lead characters as a kid - though as has been noted, there weren't many of them around back in the day. That said, I recall watching He-Man but having moderately open contempt for She-Ra. I'm not sure I could break down exactly why, as I was actually raised in an unusually egalitarian environment - especially for its era. My mom had a PhD and worked outside the house just as much as dad, my parents shared the cooking and housework, and the ethos to the neighborhood was verging on openly hippy-ish (or a British version thereof)... My gender awareness tended to be more around thinking girls were all into boring stuff like My Little Pony and playing kitchen (my sister loooved that stuff). As I got older I didn't understood the female versions of teenage angst at all - the whole social/sexual object, having to psychologically monitor your place in a given room, etc, etc - that stuff was just opaquely weird to me. Any books featuring it just went totally over my head until I was maybe 20... all of which made them officially "boring"). Towards the end of high school, though, I was blown away by Stone Angel, and early in undergrad I read "She's Come Undone", and that was a revelation to me in terms of being the first time I was able to see inside the mindset of a vulnerable and abused girl - I recall reading it as a "penny drops" epiphany. For the first time that kind of inner world seemed sensible and tractable. Whatever the merits of the book itself (it's been years, I'm rather hazy about it), I think the experience of it opened up a vein of women-centered books as enjoyable to me, as I started to have a place from which to understand the characters motivations, concerns, and reactions. I wonder if that isn't a broader phenomenon - you have to hit the right book or experience to help you see across parts of the gender divide? Or do girls typically grow up with a better understanding of boys than vice versa? I don't know.
--
I don't think anyone has mentioned yet the HP books absolutely miserable coping with the love plots. Harry seems to get paired off with a series of anonymous cardboard girls who exist for no other reason than for him to have someone to be interested in. Not well played, JKR, not well played.
--
Charles Dickens was a fabulous writer, but a douchenozzle of the 23rd degree to his wife. She had a whole raft of his babies, and then he ditched her for a pretty young actress because, basically, she was getting older and heavier and wasn't hot any more. But at least he didn't throw her out the house! Oh no, she got to stay so long as she kept doing his housework, and bringing him meals and stuff. Talk about humanitarian award material.
Posted by: Ecks | May 20, 2011 at 08:17 AM
Kit: Of course, pointing out that most men are rapists does not necessarily mean what they say it means
I presume you mean "Most rapists are men," and late-night typing got in the way.
Figured I'd check before I was insulted.
Posted by: Chuck | May 20, 2011 at 08:31 AM
You skipped over the long paragraphs of 'if it's not about you, don't make it about you' and just grabbed that one sentence, eh?
---
Um, the 'series' you refer to consists of two people. The arc for the first one (Cho) takes places over the course of about 2.5 books and serves mostly to highlight the shallowness and immaturity that often accompanies early romance. True, large parts could have been easily cut without affecting the overall plot, but it wasn't exactly This Week Harry Macks With Yet Another Girl.
In the case of the second girl, I do wish she'd been given drastically more pagetime and significance, and would tend to blame it on JKR's tendency (as someone noted earlier in the thread) to assume that readers will come to the same off-page conclusions that she does. As with the announcement that Dumbledore was gay, she seemed surprised that anyone was left wondering what the big deal was about Ginny.
Posted by: W | May 20, 2011 at 09:33 AM
Blar, finger slipped while I was putting in my name; "W" above is me.
Posted by: Will Wildman | May 20, 2011 at 09:34 AM
...and not a former president with hidden depths.
Posted by: Lonespark | May 20, 2011 at 09:46 AM