How Gender Stereotypes Hurt Book Lovers, Too.

This post will be a rant on gender stereotypes in literature, a place that I think this problem is most the most rampant, second perhaps only to advertising (which is also in play here).  This is something that’s been brewing for awhile and been touched on in other posts but I feel is deserving of its own venue.

I am in no way new to this conversation.  My opinions here are heavily influenced by a wonderfully sage article by author Maureen Johnson (whose novels I have not yet read) on Huffington Post which you can read here.  I highly recommend it.  I’m tempted to quote the entire thing but I’ll limit myself to this for now:

…if you are a female author, you are much more likely to get the package that suggests the book is of a lower perceived quality. Because it’s “girly,” which is somehow inherently different and easier on the palate. A man and a woman can write books about the same subject matter, at the same level of quality, and that woman is simple more likely to get the soft-sell cover with the warm glow and the feeling of smooth jazz blowing off of it.

She goes on to explain an experiment she conducted on Twitter where she asked for her followers to design traditionally marketed “girl” books with new “boy” covers and vice-versa.  One of my favorite examples is put side-by-side here, the classic beatnik novel On the Road by Jack Kerouac:

See the difference?

So, you may be asking, why blog about this now and why just quote some author whom you’ve never even reviewed?  The reason is this: it’s become recently annoying to me as a reader, reviewer, book lover, and someone who is passionate about sharing books with others.

My dear friend Jen had this fabulous idea: a book exchange among many of our friends from church.  She has invited all of us over to her house for a potluck of food, wine, dessert, and everything that cultivates great community among friends with this added bonus: everyone brings a favorite book, wrapped, that we can all exchange so everyone leaves with a new book that someone in the group thought was important enough to share.  This sort of thing is right up my alley; I absolutely love learning what books others love and sharing mine too.

But then I got to thinking.  The book I really want to bring is The History of Love by Nicole Kraus, a book that we’ve mentioned a few times here but never formally reviewed because Justine and I read it years before we started this little book blog project.  It’s on my favorites shelf on Goodreads and the first time I read it I really did find it breathtaking; it’s an inspiring story of a love that endures world wars, the time of several generations, and the span of continents.

Although the cover isn’t particularly “girl-y” (ugh, I’m fighting to urge to vomit just at using that term), I still worry that if a guy that comes to the party receives my choice he could be disappointed:

And then I find myself frustrated that this is even a problem.  I’m not dictating that everyone or even anyone has to like the books that I do, nor that people can’t or shouldn’t have preferences as to what genres they typically do and don’t enjoy.  For example: I know that I don’t really care for romance or erotica or really long war novels.  You probably won’t find me in those sections at the bookstore.  I want you to have an opinion!  God knows, there are too many things in this world that are competing for our attention, don’t drown yourself in books you wish you weren’t reading.

But, here is my challenge.  Examine the books you usually say you don’t like, the books you judge by their covers.  Ask yourself why that book doesn’t appeal to you.  As Ms. Johnson’s cover flips prove, the marketing can have very little to do with the content inside.  And aren’t the values of love, adventure, truth, grace, revenge, beauty, redemption, and more all themes that should appeal to both men and women equally?  I would hate to be in a world where my young boys are encouraged by the marketing sections at bookstores that they can only enjoy books that look like this:

Instead of the equally compelling content that could be in this novel:

Or this one:

Instead of this one:I shouldn’t have to justify one of my most favorite books to a man that may receive it as a gift simply because it contains the word “love” in the title, yet the pressure is there for me.  I hate that.  Like I said, I encourage you to form your own opinions about the books you enjoy and the ones you don’t.  But make those opinions just that: your own.  And no one else’s.

I end this rant with another favorite quote from the above-mentioned article, because I sure as hell can’t say it any better:

This idea that there are “girl books” and “boy books” and “chick lit” and “whatever is the guy equivalent of chick lit” gives credit to absolutely no one, especially not the boys who will happily read stories by women, about women. As a lover of books and someone who supports readers and writers of both sexes, I would love a world in which books are freed from some of these constraints.

Amen.

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