Last week I wrote to a friend and asserted that boys don’t like to read books with girl characters but girls don’t mind reading about boy characters.
I had heard this repeated many times, but I also have seen it in my sisters’ and my own reading habits as compared to my brothers’. And now that I have kids I’m seeing it all over again.
I thought.
Now an interesting article in Slate questions that bit of knowledge.
According to Emily Bazelon the deal might just be that boys like books that tell them how things work and they don’t care if the book has a female or male character. She quotes Eden Ross Lipson, the author of The New York Times Parent’s Guide to the Best Books for Children as saying, “They [boys] don’t set out looking for story and relationship. They set out looking for information.”
I have a small lab in my home–one boy and one girl. But I gotta tell you, this idea really may have merit. My son loves to read nonfiction books. Way more than fiction. I don’t get it–the shelves are full of wonderful novels and my kid is reading books on martyrs and encyclopedic books on fish.
And, of course, boys have always liked books about astronauts and rocket ships. And girls like the horse books. Why is that? Could it be that you have a relationship with horses and the books on rocket ships are about how things work?
I guess we can’t be dogmatic about this, but I do think it’s true that guys don’t like the emotional pull that girls like. My son cried during Monsters Inc. when the John Goodman monster had to put the little girl back in her closet and he bawled when Travis had to shoot that old yeller dog. It’s not that he hasn’t got emotions, it’s that he can’t stand to have them yanked around. He hates to cry over movies and books.
So what I want to know is where Harry Potter fits into the scheme of things. They don’t jerk your emotions around. I don’t recall crying when Sirius died and I desperately wanted him to live so Harry could have a happy home. But I don’t think they tell how things work, either. I’d say they were more about relationship then about how stuff works.
What about the Spider Man movies?
What about Jackie Chan movies? And the Narnia books and The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy? These appeal to both boys and girls. I wonder if that’s because they are action plus relationship. There is nothing about the way things work in these stories.
So, where does that leave us?
Probably it means that whether we are writing for boys or girls we have to keep it interesting. It may not be, as Bazelon suggests, that boys like the Little House books because there is a detailed practical picture of frontier life (though my son did like that). It may be that they liked those books because there was always a blizzard, or a Nellie Oleson, or leeches in the creek. In other words, it may be because there was conflict. I’m not ready yet to give up on the idea that conflict makes the story interesting.
So if you’re writing for boys it can’t hurt to tell how things work, but conflict is still king, I think.
I’m one who has ascribed to the theory that boys don’t like to read books with a female protag. I still hold to that, but you have me wondering now if it might be because the kinds of conflicts girl protags traditionally get into aren’t of the nature that would tend to interest boys.
Becky
Hi Sally,
I think that you make an interesting point. I would certainly like to think that conflict is still king. What it’s starting to seem like to me is that boys want both. They want books full of information that they can learn from, and they want action-driven sorts of conflict. If you can provide both in one book, you have a hit (like the Anthony Horowitz books, which are a bit like junior Tom Clancy books, and which I couldn’t get into at all). I think that the Harry Potter books do have quite a bit of information – how potions work, how magic works, the different types of Wizard candy, the gags played by Fred and George. And of course there’s plenty of action, too. The whole thing is an interesting debate to me, because I’ve always been so focused on story, story, story.
Giving this a little more thought, I’m of the mind that boys may like to learn things in books, but I think far and away the most important thing is they like to identify with a winner, especially one who came from underdog status.
Thus the superhero stories are almost always winners with boys. And Harry Potter is the epitomy of this–he was maligned in the muggle world and a hero (not an unchallenged one, mind you) in the wizardry world. The imaginative stuff–the candy and moving staircases and broom flying lessons and guiddich are things I think both boys and girls appreciate. Of course, there is also lots of good relationship stuff, so girls love it equally.
Becky
Jen, I love the gags played by fred and george. Those two silly boys add so much to the books. One of the reasons I don’t like the movies very much is that we lose out on Fred and George.
Becky, you bring up a good point about the underdog makes good theme. And girls like that, too, I think. I always have, anyway.