Thanks! Somebody’s getting a lot of books for Chanukkah…
Boys and girls are different, and generally they are interested in different sorts of things. Don’t have a problem with these books at all.
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Cosmo was a great source of sex information pre-internet.
Totally. My mom didn’t read it (born in 1929, she thought it a tad racy for her tastes), but for a while my older sister got it, and I’d read all the sex-and-relationship stuff in there cover to cover (blowing off the fashion pages). I may have been the only 5th grader to have a fair idea how to locate a G-spot with no actual… uh, field experience in the entirety of W.D. Hall Elementary.
So the gist here is “Stop liking things I don’t like.”
If smashing the customers age and gender-normative ideas of who should make books available and unavailable is fungible, then the herms have already won. No wait, I wanted to say something about this being adaptive if the kid wanted a gentle slope into tolerance of Mormon and Amish in the same week, but the farm stand beat me to it. Leaving this book in the ‘kids who will not greet people at the greenmarket’ category.
Oh man, I would have never believed it if someone had told me ten years ago that this would be a dominant line of thinking on the “progressive internet”.
I think this whole thread really nails down one of the main disagreements you find on the internet today which, I think, reflects a broader disagreement inside the political left. Is it more important to enforce our own morals or to let everyone have their say.
I’m all for “boycotts of speakers” if that means we walk away from speakers we dislike. I am really disgusted by the idea though that we should try harder to actively silence others. Taking an idea off the marketplace by force, whether it is done by the government and enforced by laws, or by groups of people and enforced by social pressure, is rarely necessary and should be reserved for extraordinary scenarios.
I’m a bit sad that boing boing seems to be increasingly erring on the side of moralizing in these matters.
edit: After reading Constance Coopers reply I see that I misunderstood her point, i.e., that its great that her daughter chose to complain about it, not that it was taken off the shelves. (The title of the boing boing post didn’t really make that clear). Except for the last line, my post still stands though.
The rapture into absolution of billions of poorly bent online social personas per the NSA Palin affinity parameter could be a good thing. Then again maybe they’re treating Amazon one-click and itchy hands with a lassiez-faire library donation abandon in the first place.
Beautifully put.
(And I know I’m not contributing to the conversation, but there’s no downvote button, so sue me!)
Since you mention BoingBoing, I must admit I’ve been hoping Cory would chime in with his actual opinion on this whole thing. He essentially posted it without comment of his own, and I’m frankly curious about what he thinks here. He’s a parent, an author, a free-speech advocate, and squarely opposed to sexism.
Whaddaya say, @doctorow?
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That’s not the point. You should speak up and tell people about it, and kudos to the girl for doing so, but as a general rule, we shouldn’t be eager to celebrate people silencing ideas, no matter how objectionable we find them.
There’s some budding conservative who really wanted to read that book and affirm his or her traditional gender norms, and by taking that book off the shelf we took that option away from them. That’s not entirely ok. We’re supposed to be the people who fight bad ideas with better ones, not by taking them off the marketplace. (Not that I expect that of an eight year old, just of us)
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Not “THE” Invisible Man, rather Invisible Man - no “the”. The Invisible Man was an H.G. Wells novel. Big difference.
My father-in-law actually teaches African American literature at a traditionally Black university, and knew Richard Wright and wrote a very good annotated bibliography to Wright’s work. He has an “Intro to Af-Am Lit” course every semester, and it is popular, not surprising given where he teaches, but it doesn’t mean everyone is paying attention. He typically has each student do an in-class presentation on a novel or short story, and the day came for one young man to give his presentation on Invisible Man.
Student: “The Invisible Man is a novel about a scientist who creates a potion which turns him invisible.”
(Class completely breaks up with laughter)
Student: ‘What’s so funny?"
Professor (my FIL): “Umm. I think you may have read the wrong book.”
Student:“What do you mean?”
Professor: "I think you read H.G.Wells’ THE Invisible Man rather than the assigned novel, Richard Wright’s Invisible Man, which has no actual invisible characters."
Student: “That explains why there weren’t any African-American characters in the book. Does this mean I fail?”
Professor: “See me after class.”
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- The books are sexist–and probably racist and elitist as well.
- In my experience as a middle school teacher most boys and many girls could really benefit from reading the social problems book.
- I know that both boy and girls would enjoy the dangerous situations book much more than the social problems book, and so I think that the choice to gender there books and split them into two smaller produces might not have been the best–from a slightly longer term marketing vantage.
- I would still encourage my daughter or my students to read either book for the interesting conversations the books might spark. Because while I would prefer books that challenged gender normative constructs, it’s important to remember that children need to master simpler models of the world before they can begin the process of deconstructing them.
This is like putting out the eye if it offends.Rather than banning books encourage the child to select whatever appeals.
THE Invisible Man is an interesting allegory on social exclusion though. But it is very white 
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The problem for me with the “this is censorship/book banning” line of argument is that the point “hey, a bookstore is not a government” really has tremendous weight that isn’t getting acknowledged much.
These books? Are available on Amazon, among many other places. They got tremendous press when they came out in 2009, mostly of the “OMG can you believe this crap??” type, but I’ve known about them since their release thanks to loads of blogging and Facebooking and etc. Obviously their sales didn’t do all that well since they’re remaindered at Half Price books, but I feel pretty confident that, should anybody really want a copy they can get one. For 17 cents plus shipping, even.
The difference between “we chose not to carry this because it’s not the kind of thing we want in our store” and “this book is being censored” is vast, particularly in the age of the Internet. Yes, in the Bad Old Days (aka Kansas), sometimes stores say “we don’t want to carry this book on gay people/teen contraception/evolution/etc. because we don’t want it in our store.” Anyone who objects to EITHER decision is free to express their objection to the store in question, or to the Internet at large, just as you’ve done here. And then other people can object to the objections, and on we go into the sunset of Free Speechlandia. But in no sense in either case has a book been “banned.” Bookstore owners can vote with their dollars, just as individuals can.
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Didn’t we go through this over Chik-fil-A?
The difference between a bookstore choosing not to carry a book on teen contraception, and a book that is saturated with sexist ideas, is that we are at no risk of a shortage of general sexism available in the culture at large.
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I could have used a copy of “How To Survive A Crush” forty years ago. And pretty much every year after.
Let the kid(s) read whatever the heck they want, only keeping a parental eye on content that might be inappropriate for their developmental stage. The only really important fact in the matter is that they are reading. It’s pretty basic info that kids are generally going to gravitate towards cartoons, it what they relate to, it’s what gets their imaginations going. At least for things they are going to try to read on their own.
The only thing to really try to avoid is where the child only wants to read books on one subject or based on one character. Variety is the proverbial spice of life.
My recommendations for your reading to him though: search used books stores (and eBay can be excellent) for the old Classics Illustrated comic books and you get the best of both worlds. You can introduce the youngster to classic literature, in a shortened form so it doesn’t take six months to get through a story, with the addition of pictures to help develop their imagination and understanding of the story taking place. They are pure excellence for the young. Also, there were a few series of Big-Little Books that basically work the same way.
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