October 7, 2008
"It's a horrendous problem. I grew up with all brothers and then taught elementary school, which was the complete opposite -- 90% a women's world -- and then children's publishing, which is probably 75%-80% women... I just saw boys not really connecting with that whole world." Jon Scieszka, children's author, in the Detroit Free Press, October 5, 2008
Over the years, I've mentioned that number often -- 75% to 80% women -- when discussing a world I worked in for eight years: New York adult trade book publishing. Most friends and colleagues were skeptical. I was over-reacting to and over-stating a bias. Mr. Scieszka's comments struck me as brave, but foolish, given the feverish politics of the Free Press, the book business, and the media nationwide.
A friend who teaches high school band tells me that many women teachers see boys as "imperfect girls." While studying in Wayne State's classics department, it was not unusual for women professors to call upon female students almost exclusively. That this attitude has now trickled down to K-12 was disheartening and explains in part why boys are, as Scieszka says, "not really connecting" to reading.
Apparently or unfortunately, boys and girls are not the same sex.
But, as Mr. Scieszka -- a fellow babyboomer who grew up in a blue collar neighborhood similar to my own -- knows, it was different in the early 1960s. My friends and I would sit in the backyard reading comics books. But also Heinlein and Clark and Asmiov and Bradbury and Twain and the latest edition of IF and GALAXY and ANALOG. And the teachers encouraged us. On more than one occasion a teacher called me up to the front of the class during study hour to ask me why I wasn't "performing at the level" she knew I had reached in the past.
GIRLS RULE, BOYS DROOL the t-shirt proclaimed. The woman wearing it was leading a group of young girls around a local Borders bookstore. In a McDonalds last week, a young girl walked up to two boys her age and repeated the slogan. One of the boys responded over and over "no we don't! no we don't!" The mother of the boys sat by and said nothing.
Boy Scouts are ridiculed on TV shows and in newspapers and magazines. USA Today grills the president of the Scouts about so-called discrimination against gays. Gay rights groups through the ACLU sue to marginalize and drive Boy Scout troops out of our urban areas where they are desperately needed.
Have we gone from cutting off one half of the population from American education and work to cutting off the other half?
No intelligent and educated man would deny the three centuries of struggle and achievement by American women. But, as in legimate wars, in political struggles there is collateral damage. Boys are the collateral damage of the women's rights movement.
Beyond institutional corruption, there are also economic consequences. The Motley Fool website predicted this week that Borders Books and Music will probably NOT survive the holidays. The company was struggling during good times with over eight straight quarters of red ink. In a recession, it is sinking into that red sea. But Borders, like the shrinking New York book business, is fiercely partisan. The contempt for tradition, religion (read Christianity), the military, the Boy Scouts, male sports... well, if it stinks of boydom, cultural condescension is autonomic. And that contempt is vocal and unrestricted. Most supervisors and managers are women.
Today's Wall Street Journal reports that the Obama campaign is reaching out to white working class males. The unions are spearheading this progam. But if my experience in the UAW and the SEIU taught me anything it was that "boys drool" rules big labor as well. There are platoons of women union executives and labor lawyers. And they are on a mission from Sophia.
If they love their sons, working class men will slap those outstretched hands away.
Sam Macomb
I spent a few years not too long ago substitute teaching part time in a couple of suburban systems. I like to hang around libraries and bookstores and what day I was chatting with the school's librarian--not a particularly young woman, either.
She mentioned the problem she was having getting boys to read. I suggested Robert Heinlein's juveniles--strong and exciting stories even though the science is outdated, and even mentioned that most of the books have intelligent and capable female secondary characters.
She had never heard of Heinlein.
Posted by: Alex Bensky | October 17, 2008 at 06:44 AM