reading and gender part deux

i love candy from smart bitches who love trashy novels. i really really love her. this text of hers is a good example why:

...Yes, women read more action books than men. You are more likely to see a woman reading a Tom Clancy than a man reading Maeve Binchy. I’ve covered this before in “You Read Like a Girl". You can see this phenomenon extend beyond literature; once something is feminized, it’s seen as tainted, unworthy, less rigorous. Chick movies, chick cars, chick books: these are not compliments. These are terms of derision. Even the most reasonable men and many, many women are afraid of being tarred with the girly brush.

You see this happening in the working world and in academics as well. One of the first fields to attract large numbers of female students was literature and the arts, and nowadays, these fields are mostly written off as the territory of floppy-haired nancy-boys with even floppier wrists. The sciences, baby! That’s where it’s at. Only, once biology started attracting more and more women, the field started to be written off as less rigorous, too. Right now, the attitude seems to be that the REAL sciences are chemistry or physics--preferably the wackier theoretical branches of physics, where it’s still largely dominated by men.

And let’s talk about primary school teachers, something Johnson mentions in the article as having more males than females because of the “paedophile hysteria.” This flagrantly nonsensical explanation ignores the simple fact that more women than men get degrees in primary education, and more women apply for those jobs. Being a grade-school teacher is one of THE quintessential chick jobs of the modern world, with all the earmarks of a typical chick job: it has a large built-in nurturing component, it puts you in constant contact with people, it’s difficult to do yet rarely appreciated, and it pays shit.

There seems to be a rule regarding female critical mass in any area of life: if enough chicks are into it, it can’t be very good. It can’t be worthy. This goes for books, careers, movies, TV shows, cars, subjects of study, sports, clothing--hell, just about everything.

And reading seems to have been delegated as, well, a kind of girly thing to do. But it’s not just the stigma of effeminacy working against boys who read, I think. Kids who love to read and to learn for their own sake, especially the more quiet ones, have been picked on, bullied and called ugly names for a long, long time, and these sorts of things hit kids a lot harder than adults--as we grow older, we’re able to latch onto the anti-cool cool of being a nerd and say it out loud, I’m a geek and I’m proud. I imagine it’s even harder on boys than on girls, because boys are expected to act a certain way. ...

here's the entire post, it also goes into the "feminization of education" quite a bit (apropos of a claim that boys are doing worse in school than girls these days because education is less competitive than it used to be, which doesn't sit well with boys. um, yeah...). read it.

the "you read like a girl" post mentioned is just as excellent, i just saw it and i can say i've almost never agreed more with something in. my. life.:

...generally speaking, women tend to read more, and more diversely, than men do. ...

Would the average guy be caught dead reading, say, Jewels of the Sun or Irish Thoroughbred? Not on your fucking life. On the other hand, most women wouldn’t be ashamed to be seen reading books by Tom Clancy, Lawrence Block, Robert Ludlum, Clive Cussler, Harlan Ellison, etc. Hell, a significant number of women read lad lit penned by the likes of Nick Hornby et al, or gritty urban tales with a distinct masculine bent like those written by Irvine Welsh and Chuck Palahniuk, but I’m willing to bet that the numbers aren’t reversed for Helen Fielding, Jennifer Weiner or Maeve Binchy. In fact, I’m willing to bet that a woman who reads mostly male-oriented fiction, fiction that’s considered gritty and dark, is seen as exponentially cooler than a woman who reads mostly female-oriented fiction about relationships and (god forbid) squishy emotions like love and grief. The former is one of the boys. She’s cool. She’s not squeamish. She gets it. She’s not into all that girly shit.

It all boils down to the stigma of effeminacy. To be called “girly” is rarely a compliment. “You throw like a girl.” “Stop being such a girl.” “You write like a girl."

And God forbid that a man, well, read like a girl.

i have another post on this subject. because it's one of my favorite subjects. not sure why, but it is.