Yesterday, I read a piece on CNN's website by William J. Bennett called Men Become the Target of Jokes.
It was kind of interesting to me, because Bennett points out something that I think is relevant about our culture, and he questions the depictions of manhood and masculine character traits which seem to be generalized by popular art forms (television and film).
I admit I don't know very much at all about TV shows and movies. It is a deficit, and I own it: I do not watch television, and cannot sit through most movies, either.
But a friend sent me a message on Facebook and Twitter yesterday that struck me as a strange and cosmic kind of coincidence to the Bennett piece.
A few friends had tweeted to me how they had written in Stick as their vote in the Opening Round for the Goodreads Choice Awards 2011 in the "Best Young Adult Fiction" category.
That was very nice of them to do that. Maybe 5 people I know took the time to do it.
I also do not read anything on Goodreads. Ever. I have an account, but I never read or write reviews there. I have said this many times before.
In the afternoon, I received a message from a friend who wondered why, of the fifteen "Nominees" on the Goodreads 2011 YA page, there was not one single title written by a man.
I do not know the answer to that.
I'll have to guess it is because men do not write good shit.
But I also wonder what kind of unstated message such displays give to Young Adult boys who happen to be readers, or who happen to enjoy creative writing. I would post a link to the page here, but I don't want to. I'm kind of offended.
I admit, too, that I have only read one of the fifteen books displayed as nominees.
I also do not read "YA."
But I wonder, too, if some intrepid and sociologically-minded reader could read all fifteen of these books and put together an aggregate image of the boys who float through the pages as characters, and what kinds of depictions of adolescent males are being presented to our American young adults as iconic and elemental images of our boys.
It could be an eye-opening aggregate, I think.
10 comments:
That was the first thing I noticed as well. How estrogen-heavy that list was, not only in terms of writers but in terms of characters. That and the fact that I'd only read one and had no real desire to read the others.
Wasn't aware that write-ins were an option. Will get to that today!
Shit. I may have written my vote in on the wrong page. I thought it was best book. Not best YA book.
Oh god. Now I went back. I see what you mean. I'm not calling my book YA ever again.
Looks like the one I voted on was, Favorite Books of 2011, because that's where Amy's link sent me. Still, I wrote Stick in, and it still applies for me in that category too.
Ha! I am definitely not campaigning for anything, Matthew. I just wanted people to look at those fifteen book covers and consider a few things.
Jeez, if you move on to the YA Fantasy and SciFi category, you get another near-perfect score for women. Which intrigues me as well, because when I was growing up those genres were pretty male dominated. When did that shift happen? Was it all the rise of paranormal and dystopian books in the wake of Twilight and Hunger Games, or even earlier than that? On the other hand, the mix for Middle Grade books is rather nice - gender wise, genre-wise, and even format wise.
And I'm with Matthew. I skipped YA altogether and wrote-in Stick for favorite book. Which is also strangely girly-YA heavy. I suppose the goodreads population is self-selected, which is a major sampling bias.
No campaigning suspected, sir. That's my job.
Actually, I am campaigning for something: I am campaigning for literacy and fairness and re-empowering our kids, as opposed to covert discouragement of literacy among young adult American males.
I haven't seen any of the lists. My visits to Goodreads aren't that often. But I wouldn't be surprised if the picture of young men is a bit, ahem, skewed by the aggragate of books considered as part of some YA categorical "best of".
My rage about this continues to pace around inside my head. My boys and I had a series of conversations this week about their education and the books they read.
The messages they get. My boys have checked out every copy of every book by you and Joe L. and Michael Grant and G. Neri and John Stephens and Daniel Kraus. My boy who emailed you told me that you emailed him back and even though I knew you would I almost wept at his happiness and the discussion he had about you and your books with his classmates.
Those are things worth campaigning for.
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