Current mood:	calm
Entry tags:	literature

On Boys and Reading
I was recently reading in PNLA about school libraries using graphic novels to encourage boys to read. It apparently works, which is super, and more power to the librarians and teachers who develop these ideas to get boys to read more.

But part of me is troubled by the idea that while girls will read anything, boys need to have their special "boy interests" catered to if they're going to pick up a book. There's an implicit assumption that the average boy won't touch a book unless it's about action, sports, space adventure, gross-out humor, cartoons, and definitely only if it has a boy (or at least male) protagonist. By this reasoning, you just can't expect a boy to read Nancy Drew or a Buffy novelization or Miss Marple or The Wizard of Oz or Alice in Wonderland or most poetry or The Trojan Women or Great Expectations (not enough action) or Robinson Crusoe (way boring) or A Midsummer Night's Dream (where's the sports?) or Rendezvous with Rama (there's some space but little adventure) or The Greensky Triology (no space at all) or The Importance of Being Earnest (the wit's, like, dry).

I'm conflating age groups, of course, and being somewhat hyperbolic. But I worry about our culture's assumption that boys are just too--what?--hyper? intractable? stupid? to wrap their minds around any material not spoon fed to them like their favorite chocolate pudding. Most of the works I've mentioned were written by men. Men (and boys) are not intrinsically incapable of appreciating the written word or wit or high tragedy or interesting women or subtle social commentary. Indeed, it was not so very long ago that most of the world assumed it was women who would never be able to wrap their minds around such things.

Hurray that we don't regard women that way anymore, but we should not regard the other half that way either. Humans of all stripes tend to rise to challenges. If you treat a child/teen as if he's capable of understanding something and support him in his attempts to understand it, he will usually understand it. If you raise a boy to read, he's likely to read: read Dickens, read Shakespeare, read Sophocles, read anything you teach him to value--and it's not hard to find value in the grand old works. That's why they're still with us.

So all in all, my hat goes off to librarians and teachers getting boys to read at all. But as a society, we can do better than that. We can get many boys to embrace the humanities but not if we start with the assumption that they can't/won't/naturally don't like 'em. Boys--like girls--are capable of more; let's treat them accordingly.