Books for Boys

I discovered the below blog post hidden as a draft in my archives.  I have no idea what happened there.  This is still an important topic that I feel pretty strongly about, so I'm going to share this now, backdated to the day I first wrote about this.

Yesterday I came across this blog post, written by author Shannon Hale.  Please take a moment to go and read this post.  I'll wait.

Hale is the author of a number of highly-acclaimed books for children, including The Goose Girl, The Princess Academy, Rapunzel's Revenge, and The Princess in Black.  She's a great writer.  Many of Hale's books do feature girls as the central characters and they do often feature fairy tail-esque characters and settings.  But her characters also have a lot of spunk and many of her books feature adventurous plots.  In my opinion, there is nothing to be found in these books that cannot be appreciated by boys and girls alike.

Yet when I look at all of the reader's advisory that I have done over the past several years, how often have I given one of Shannon Hale's books to a boy?  I'm not sure that I ever have.  I do, however, regularly give her books to girls.

I truly don't think that this is a choice that I have consciously made.  I think that it's just the sort of response that comes from years and years of social conditioning regarding what boys want versus what girls want.

This phenomenon is not something exclusive to libraries.  We see situations like this at toy stores all the time.  Think about LEGOs, for example.  There are "girl" LEGO Friends sets, hued with pink bricks and featuring larger character figures great for storytelling.  The good news is that we live in a refined enough society that we know that it's also okay for girls to pick up a Star Wars LEGO set, or the Pirates set.  But is it socially acceptable for a boy to play with the pink LEGO Friends set?  Not so much.

I'm glad that we've become the sort of society where girls have, for the most part, been told that they can do whatever they want.  They can read "girl" books, or they can read "boy" books.  But we still have a ways to go when it comes to gender equality.  We now need to also lift our boys up and tell them that they can play with the girls and read "girl" books and play with the "girl" toys.  Let's dare to take this even a step further.  We need to stop categorizing books and toys in this way at all.  Let's just call them "books" and "toys" and be done with it.

It's one thing to have these noble ambitions in one's head.  It's one thing to understand them logically.  It's another thing entirely to actually put these gender-equalizing views into practice.  After all, we're looking to undo more than a 200,000 years of gender bias. 

So my challenge to myself is this:  When a child comes to the library asking for a book suggestion, if it seems appropriate to the child's interests I will attempt to give a boy a book with a female protagonist.  I will not apologize for it.