As a kid my husband read plenty of Hardy Boys and no Nancy Drew. He read voraciously, but he never made the acquaintance of the female characters whose stories filled my childhood: no Anne Shirley, no Rebecca Rowena Randall, no Caddie Woodlawn, no Laura Ingalls, no Sara Crewe, no Mary Lennox, no Heidi (whose last name I have forgotten if ever I knew it). No Ramona Quimby or Ellen Tebbits, no Harriet the Spy, no Judy Blume.
I have known this for years, but for some reason we were just talking about it at dinner. "What would have happened if you'd read a Nancy Drew book?" I asked him. He shrugged. "I would have been a sissy?" he suggested, struggling to remember the logic of late 70s/early 80s playgrounds and classrooms.
This morning I read Nicole's recent post (HI NICOLE) in which she mentioned The Mists of Avalon, and it sparked a memory for me of a high school friend who loved that book. I asked Elwood, who read boatloads of science fiction/fantasy as a kid, if he had ever read it. "Nope," he said, "girl book." "ELWOOD," I said with a certain emphasis, "do you hear how ridiculous that is? It would not have caused your penis to shrivel up and wither away if you had read a book about women!" He agreed with me, because that particular piece of logic is inarguable, but I do not expect that he will hasten to rectify the imbalance.
I have known about this asymmetry for years; I perpetuated this asymmetry with the books I gave my own boys to read. But it struck me forcefully this morning: this is patriarchy propagating itself. If girls are expected to read books about boys, but a boy's masculinity is threatened by reading books about girls, we are going to live in a lopsided world. Things get better more quickly when we understand each other's perspectives more thoroughly.
So! Here is my suggestion for anyone who is in gift-buying mode: buy a man you love one of your favorite childhood books, written by a woman for an audience of girls. Ask him to measure the number of girl cooties visible on his body before and after he reads it. Tell him it's for science.
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