Terrible Trivium

A friend pointed this book out to me this morning, apparently a #1 New York Times bestseller.

At first I assumed it was one of those satirical children's book covers we've been hearing so much about, the difference being this one would be ACTUALLY SATIRE and not just people dressing up hipster racism in fancy words they don't quite know how to use.

Look. Up is down and day is night and news is fake and Russian involvement in our election is real but that's okay somehow, so these are trying times. And the children's book industry is always guilty of letting people who do and say deplorable things peddle books for kids as long as those people can make them a pile of money (Remember when John Grisham blew off child porn and Penguin kept publishing his middle grade series? That was fun.) 

But. But. But. 

Is it too much to ask that we don't publish a manners book for kids by an accused serial sexual harasser ?

Apparently it is. The President-elect is a KKK-endorsed, neo-Nazi loving bully who was accused of sexual assault by over a dozen women weeks before the election. And a lot of adults voted for him. And the Electoral College is about to tell us: Eh, no biggie; anyway, the people have spoken--and, I mean sure, they voted for Hillary Clinton, but our hands are tied.

Powerful men get to do whatever they want, and they keep their power. The people they hurt get to watch, and remember how powerless they are.

And these powerful men, they do not say please.

Here, a screen shot from the book:

Make America Polite Again! This means speaking in a way powerful men find pleasing, apparently. Ask nicely for your humanity. (As this Guardian article points out, "What’s latent in the pages of Give Please A Chance isn’t politesse. It’s a societal framework where those who have less power are forced to beg from those who do.")

Many of us who are writing for kids are struggling right now. The new administration is poised to hurt our readers in so many ways, from dismantling their education to their health care to their environment to their civil rights. Their futures are at risk, their voices are at risk, their bodies are at risk, their lives are at risk. For kids of color, immigrants, the disabled, we have to figure out how to tell them they are worth something even though the country just told them they aren’t. For girls we need to tell them that even though the President-elect gropes women and no one cares, their bodies are their own, and they matter. We in children's books have to tell every child that while last election told them they didn't matter, they matter to us, desperately. We will do our best to hold them.

But money and power trumps all, doesn't it. And thems the breaks, kids. Here, have a manners book--and when you ask for your humanity, ask nicely. 

When you're a woman, apparently, saying no doesn't do anything. But when you're a powerful man or a corporation you get to do whatever you want. So let me help everyone out here. Let's role play:

Bill O'Reilly: Hey! I'm Bill O'Reilly! You might know me from my sexual harassment lawsuit! How about a board book on manners? It will make so much money!

Hachette: No! James Patterson: No! Scott Magoon and the other illustrators involved in this: No!

Was that so hard?

As for me, I have no power. All I can do is watch, heartsick. All I can do is say, Don't give this guy a platform for kids.

I am not good with the word “fat.” Having had eating disorders off and on since I hit adolescence, my relationship with that word is wholly warped—it is a proxy for something dark and roiling, loaded with everything but actual meaning. So I have really learned a lot reading the thoughts of teen librarians Angie Manfredi and Kelly Jensen on the word—they dauntlessly defang it and bring it back to what it’s actually supposed to mean. As Jensen says in an excellent essay: “Being fat isn’t a disability. Being fat is a physical state of being.”

Nobody tells you this when you’re growing up, but you can be fat and feel good about yourself. You can be fat and healthy. You can be fat and strong. And fat is just a word, that’s all—not an insult, not a feeling, not a moral failing. Having recently seen a ten-year-old get hospitalized for anorexia, heard a first grader scream “Oh, yeah? You’re fat!” to her younger sister,  heard a friend tell of the way her eight-year-old niece gets her food policed by her parents with the warning, “You don’t want to be fat, do you?” I think we need to learn this, urgently—I think we need our kids to learn it.

I am saying all of this  because I was with my son in the bookstore yesterday and came across this book:

Don’t Call Me Fat: A First Look at Being Overweight

So. No. According this this book for kids, you can’t be fat and feel good about yourself. Being called fat is an insult. This physical state of being is terrible thing to be. And, no, the book isn’t some misguided attempt to help overweight kids navigate the world and feel good about themselves, it is about telling them not to feel good about themselves so they lose weight.

Perhaps you guessed as much from the cover, where, as Megan Blakemore observed, the somewhat chubby girl isn’t playing with anyone else at the party; she’s too busy staring longingly at the cupcakes.

See, if you are overweight, you might get bullied. But not just teased; people will try to stop you from playing with them or from sitting next to them.  Because you're not the same as they are. And because, apparently, you are repulsive. Didn’t you know that? Well, you do now.

You obviously are not taking care of yourself, and you need other people to tell you how to do that because you are too dumb to know how to do it yourself (and if you weren’t, why would you be overweight?)

Oh, and you can’t do the same things as other kids. If you’re overweight, you can’t do fun things like run, jump, and climb as well as other kids. You might think you’re having a really good time, but you’re not. And you’re going to feel bad—says this book, telling you exactly how to feel. Look at those thin girls and their pretty clothes and their big smiles! Don’t they look happy? Don’t you want to be like them? Don’t you feel bad now?

Do you feel bad now?

Some people in eating disorder treatment like to personify the ED’s voice. This is pretty much what that voice sounds like.

This book series has titles on autism, special needs, race, shyness—all kinds of things. And I’m trying to imagine the situation in another book in this series where the author explains to the reader that other kids won’t want to sit next to them.

How many people who published this book looked at that language and thought it was fine?

Kids (overweight or no) don’t need a book to tell them to be ashamed about their weight. They don’t need a book to hear that the word “fat” is bad. They don’t need a book to tell them that it’s just better to be thin. They live and breathe in American society, so they get the message just fine. And they don’t need a book to tell them that everyone believes that if they simply ate less and exercised, their troubles would magically be thin, and thus happy. No, the book says, we shouldn’t bully overweight people, they aren’t greedy and lazy—but if they just stopped eating so much and worked harder, they wouldn’t be fat anymore.

Some well-meaning person could have given me this book as a kid. I was a pudgy child whose grandmother made pointed comments about how nice all the other girls in ballet class looked in their leotards. And I wasn’t unhealthy (though yes, I couldn’t run, jump, or climb as well as other kids because I’m really uncoordinated and would much rather read a book, thank you very much). But it was made clear to me, at an early age, that something was wrong with me. That it would be better if I were thin. And I wasn’t allowed to eat in the same way other kids were.

I am forty-one years old, and standing at the bookstore looking at this book I felt like that kid again, the one who learned that being overweight is bad, the one whose pediatrician muttered that my weight was heading in the wrong direction, the one who went on her first diet in second grade. Then I flashed forward to seventh grade and the way I felt about myself. That was the first time I stopped eating.

*****

I posted this cover and a couple pages on Twitter and got some equally enraged responses from authors and librarians. We’re all a little sensitive about kids, see. And we have this crazy opinion that books are supposed to help kids be in the world, to help them feel okay about themselves—that that is Job #1. This series seems like it’s trying very hard to do just that—other titles include I Am Feeling Bashful—A First Look at Shyness, I See Things Differently—A First Look at Autism; I Can Do It—A First Look at Not Giving Up! (Though I have a lot to say about Don’t Call Me Special, but I digress.)

And there are not many books out there to help fat kids be okay with themselves. Because thinness is such an inherent value in our society that we don’t think we’re supposed to tell overweight kids be comfortable in their skin—we’re supposed to tell them to be uncomfortable. Like in the rest of media fat kids—especially fat girls—are invisible in kids books. And when they are visible the book is often about the problem of their fatness; overweight kids don’t get to just exist and be in the world and have stories of their own.

Manfredi and Jensen speak passionately about the way fat girls are treated on covers of YA books—often, fat characters don’t get on the cover at all. If they do, they’re portrayed with food (cupcakes seem to a popular item of choice), or only part of their body gets shown, or the models used aren’t even close to fat.

I scanned the shelves of the bookstore yesterday looking at the images on the books. Girls on middle grade covers, whether photographed or drawn, tend to be thin—rarely are they even average. On YA covers, the models look like, well, models—and some of them look dangerously thin.

I’m a grown women, and I find these covers triggering. I can’t imagine what it feels like to be a teenage girl and see them.

*****

In my high school, we all had to take a health and fitness class. I remember the teacher explaining that it was really unhealthy to sustain too high a heart rate when your exercised, and one of the cool senior girls scoffed, “But how will we burn off calories?”

As part of the class we had to report to get our BMIs taken. I dreaded this day all semester, and I can still feel what it was like to walk down to the basement toward my appointment. The gym teacher used a caliper to measure our fat on our arms and stomach and inner thighs, pinching and squeezing at the fat as if trying to figure out how much excess needed trimming off. Twenty-five years later, I can tell you exactly what he told me my body weight was supposed to be, and exactly what I weighed. I don’t know what my face must have looked like, but I can still hear some internal writhing in the gym teacher’s voice as he said, “So you, uh, might want to, uh….have this information….” and dismissed me.

I personally knew eight girls in my small school that had diagnosed eating disorders. I have no idea why anyone thought this was the information we needed. I now know so many girls and women who have given up years of their lives to hating their bodies, to obsessed and starving and purging and bingeing. Because they learned early on the worst thing anyone could call them was fat.

We learn to hate our bodies, and so when something traumatic happens—we take it out on our bodies. After a break-up in college, I couldn’t keep down any food. I lived like this for a couple of months until one day I woke up and realized my whole day was planned around eating and throwing up. I broke down and went into health services sobbing. They shrugged and said they couldn’t help me and sent me back home after scrawling one single word on my chart—bulimia. Then they threatened to kick me out of school for the semester if I didn’t get help—standard procedure—and brushed their hands of me.

*****

I forget, sometimes, what it’s like to be around women who treat food as an enemy every day. In my group of friends, women don’t talk about their weight. They don’t ascribe morality to food as “good” or “bad.” They don’t perform the self-shaming routines we’re somehow supposed to do when we eat a lot. It’s surprising then to go out in the world and hear the way women talk about themselves—how “fat” they’ve gotten, since they’re no longer a size 2. How “bad” they were at dinner last night. How they “shouldn’t” eat what they’re eating. How they’re trying to get one size down. This self-flagellation ritual, the “I’m fat” kabuki, the ceremonial public confession of sin—passed on from woman to woman, mother to daughter, friend-to-friend, forever and ever—shaming themselves, yes, and teaching everyone around them they should be ashamed, too.

What they might not know is the person next to them is sick—that the words they use warp into nourishment for a dormant eating disorder. What they might not know is they’re teaching the girls who listen to hate their bodies.

Your daughters are listening.

And maybe we can’t help ourselves anymore. Maybe it’s ingrained too deeply. But maybe we can help our kids.

*****

A few years ago, I left my marriage and moved back to my home in Minneapolis with my three-year-old son. I was on a diet at the time—having gained weight a little past the capacity of my pants. After a while, I reached that ideal weight I’d learned about in high school—but it didn’t seem quite enough. Five more pounds, the voice said. That’s all.

My ex-husband and I had a really nebulous parenting agreement in place, and it created a great deal of conflict for us. Something would happen, I’d feel wrenched apart, and each instance summoned the ghosts of all the ways I’d ever felt ignored and patronized and powerless. They are heavy, those ghosts, and they take up a lot of oxygen.

Five more pounds.

A year later I was in partial-hospitalization, where I met many people who learned as young girls and boys that extra weight was bad, and that it was worth anything to lose it. And the core belief, that they were bad because of their weight, was with them, always, and the only way they knew how to cope with anything was to take it out on these bodies they were taught to hate.

One of the things I discovered in the last couple of years is that I didn’t know how to be angry. I can remember so many times in my adult life backing down from being angry, feeling like there was something wrong with feeling that way. It was not my right. No, no, I would say. I’m not angry. When what I should have said is, Hell, yes, I’m angry. And here’s why. I was so angry that year, and didn't even know how to name it, and  every time something would happen to force a conflict I dealt with it by eating something and throwing it up. It was the only way I knew to deal with it. Emotion, anger, it can’t go outwards, so it goes inwards. And since we learned so early on that our bodies were our problems, everything was our bodies’ fault.

Thanks largely to some magnificent friends, I know how to be angry now (as anyone who has read this Tumblr probably knows.) I know how to live with the feeling, and how to express it. I know I have the right to be angry.

The thing with girls and women is, we’re just not supposed to take up any space. We’re just not supposed to be angry, stand up for anything, be loud. The author Heidi Schulz told me a story of being on a plane and the man next to her was spilling his personhood all over her space—arms draped over the armrest, legs sprawled out. And she said she spent the first half of the plane ride responding by shrinking herself, because that’s what we learn. Be small. But then halfway through she realized: I can take up space. And she spread out.

We are not taught to take up space. We have to learn it.

We can take up space.

It is good to take up space.

****

I can't help but wonder how much of weight shaming for young kids is actually about health and how much is about the self-image of the parents. That the parents believe that if their kid is pudgy, it will make them look like they’ve failed—because all you have to do to be thin is make “good” food choices and exercise, right?

And, I know, it’s so hard to be a parent. You want the best for your kids and it's really confusing about what that means. And it’s natural to worry about your kids and want them to be happy—thinness is so ingrained in us as a virtue that it seems like our kids would just be happier if they were thin. But it just doesn’t work like that. Your kids will be happy if they feel okay about themselves. A child’s weight does not turn a kid into a bully. And being thin does not equal being happy. By the end of high school I’d learned that all those popular girls, the skinny ones—they weren’t any happier about themselves. And given the ways some achieved this thinness, they certainly weren’t healthy.

If you buy everything the culture is selling, you are never happy with your body. You are never thin enough. If you believe “fat” is an insult, and being overweight will cause you to be repulsive to other people, thinness is never going to solve anything. If you internalize every message society sends you about weight and about girls and how they’re supposed to act—the two quickly become intertwined and you do whatever you can do to take up less and less space.

I think we need to reframe our notion of healthy when we talk about weight. Because I can’t believe there’s anything healthy about telling kids people won’t want to sit next to them if they are fat. I believe that is dangerous. I believe it plants seeds in young kids that can very easily grow into something poisonous.

I can assure you, whatever the health issues of the extra pounds I carried on me as a kid might have been, they’re nothing like ravages of eating disorders on my body.

As you may have heard, John Grisham gave an interview with The Telegraph in which he lambasted the US judicial system for excessive incarceration—including that of “Sixty-year-old white men in prison” whose only crimes were consuming child pornography.  

“…But they got online one night and started surfing around, probably had too much to drink or whatever, and pushed the wrong buttons, went too far and got into child porn.“

I’m bemused that someone who writes legal thrillers thinks being drunk is exculpatory when you break the law. (Or maybe he just thinks it is for white men? I can’t imagine why he’d think the system works differently for rich white guys.) Regardless, as proof of his thesis, Grisham spoke of a friend who was caught in a child porn sting and served three years in prison:

"His drinking was out of control, and he went to a website. It was labelled ‘sixteen year old wannabee hookers’ or something like that. And it said '16-year-old girls’. So he went there. Downloaded some stuff - it was 16 year old girls who looked 30. 

"He shouldn’t ’a done it. It was stupid, but it wasn’t 10-year-old boys.

See, it wasn’t THAT bad; Child porn isn’t so terrible when the subjects are teenage girls. We have no idea what website his friend actually looked at***, but the way Grisham chooses to demonstrate the relative frivolity of the crime is to describe the children on the site as “sixteen-year-old wannabe hookers.”

 I do not have the stomach to engage in a discussion about levels of acceptability in child pornography—even writing this post is making me physically ill. The point here is that, yet again, we have someone using teenage girls (especially, I suppose, slutty ones) as a signifier for people who aren’t worth quite as much as other people. And when you speak this way about teenage girls who are victims of sex crimes, it perpetuates the culture that creates these crimes.

 Is Mr. Grisham under the impression that these hypothetical girls actually aspire to prostitution? And this is, what, resumé-building? Or is he just trying to imply that they are super slutty, and so really are choosing this? Does he believe that child porn featuring teenage girls can in any way be a consensual act? Or does that part not matter?

 I’m guessing it’s that last one—it doesn’t matter— since his entire discussion is based around the act of looking at these images with little to no awareness of the humanity of the children in them.  What matters, to him, is the excessive persecution of the pedophile. Because it’s they who are the real victims here.

 That’s the thing—implicit in his comments is the idea that child pornography just happens, and when men of a certain age get drunk and poke around on the internet they cannot help but stumble upon it. Ah, well. No harm done. Who put that porn there? It’s not like they’re perverted or something. 

 So, what does it mean when comments that diminish the harm of consuming child pornography come from someone who writes bestselling books for children?

 I am not going to complain about celebrity authors writing children’s books—guaranteed bestsellers mean publishers can take chances on books whose success is not guaranteed. I cannot comment on the quality of Grisham’s middle grade series, and I cannot say whether or not these books are a cash grab on Grisham’s part or if he truly feels called to write books for young readers (though he has joked that he started the books because he was bitter at being displaced by JK Rowling as the bestselling author in the world.) 

Whatever his motivations, these books have sold the requisite crapload of copies; in other words, lots of people are making lots of money on John Grisham: Children’s Book Author.

So my question is: When one of the most famous authors in the western world uses his platform to say that viewing child porn isn’t so bad, really, does the industry have an obligation to respond? Does his children’s book publisher? When he argues that a guy should get a free pass for downloading pornographic pictures of underage girls, what does that mean to a business that depends so much on the dollars of underage girls? How much of a stand do we take for our customers? What is the line here?

 Sure, Grisham has apologized. Naturally, a statement was issued. Mistakes were made. Words were said. Regrets were regretted. 

But is that enough?

 I do believe that when you profit off kids, you have a moral obligation to serve and honor those kids, and I know that this industry is full of people who care a great deal about that obligation. So, what happens now?

 Authors are allowed to be jerks and still get book contracts. But when an immensely powerful man with international visibility essentially excuses the consumers of child pornography, when he acts like child pornography is a victimless crime, what does it say if the children’s book industry continues to give him a platform? When we profit off selling his books to the very kids he has essentially pooh-poohed the exploitation of?  

I don’t know the answer. But I think it’s worth asking the question. 

My friend Christine Heppermann’s book POISONED APPLES: POEMS FOR YOU MY PRETTY released this week. This collection is an unabashedly feminist look at girls, body image, and eating disorders told through the lens of fairy tales, designed for young adults. 

The book is arriving at an interesting cultural moment; when the already ridiculous should-adults-read-YA conversation, has taken a bizarre turn. Did you know the patriarchy was dead? It must be true, as I learned that by reading it in an essay printed in the newsletter of the patriarchy.

For New York Times columnist A.O. Scott, the patriarchy’s demise is not even significant in and of itself; no, it symbolizes a greater issue: “The Death of Adulthood in American Culture.” Now, the equation of the death of the patriarchy and the death of adulthood is a problematic one at best, and if you’re expecting Scott to address the troubling implication here or at the very least explain himself, well, he won’t. Because apparently the fact that patriarchy=adulthood, too, is something we can all agree on.

Part of the essay takes on YA, of course, because apparently we have to do this again. Scott pats the head of everyone who gets offended when people put them down for reading YA, saying that of course they bristle; people don’t like it when someone else attacks, in his words, “the juvenile pleasures of empowered cultural consumers.” Scott also spends a lot of time talking about women in the arts, ascribing to them some kind of plucky-but-aimless adolescent rebellion:

 Why should boys be the only ones with the right to revolt? Not that the new girls are exactly Thelma and Louise. Just as the men passed through the stage of sincere rebellion to arrive at a stage of infantile refusal, so, too, have the women progressed by means of regression.

He later asserts that the predecessors of the “modern man-boy” had “something to fight for:”

…A moral or political impulse underlying their postures of revolt. The founding brothers in Philadelphia cut loose a king; Huck Finn exposed the dehumanizing lies of America slavery; Lenny Bruce battled censorship. When Marlon Brando’s Wild One was asked what he was rebelling against, his thrilling, nihilistic response was “Whaddaya got?” The modern equivalent would be “…”

Author Laura Ruby, in her response to this essay, says it well: "The implication that our art, our characters, our stories, represent nothing but a certain adolescent pleasure in bucking the system, that only white men can be truly serious in their subversion, is as laughable as it is enraging. "

Yes. Scott’s assertion is remarkable in so many ways, but I suppose if you’re going to argue that the patriarchy is dead then obviously women can’t be making conscious political actions, because whatever is there to fight about? Women, by nature, cannot be intentional in their art. It’s almost like he’s infantilizing them

Pulling up his own big leather armchair in Club Patriarchy is Christopher Beha, who wants us to know what he thinks of this whole conversation. In his New Yorker essay, “Henry James and the Great YA Debate,” Beha muses on what makes a book YA. “It does seem,” he writes, “that many books have the YA label slapped on them purely because of their subject matter. (After all, there is little cost to a publisher for labeling something YA if the label doesn’t put off adult readers.)”

This is a rather adorable conception of how publishing works, but, okay. He continues:

On the other hand, the label is sometimes wielded to make a real literary distinction. It is obviously possible to give a subject a treatment that is more appropriate for a young audience. For the most part, this involves simplifying things—first the diction and syntax, but finally the whole picture of life. There is nothing dishonorable about this simplification—it is a way to make material accessible to children.

Wow, thank you! Gosh, I’m so flattered! I don’t think your simplifications are dishonorable either.

Beha is speaking with a lot of confidence for someone doesn’t seem to have any exposure to YA, but part of having an endowed chair in Patriarchy HQ is no one asks you to question your assumptions much. Though apparently it’s perfectly fine to call yourself a completist and yet make blanket statements about a field for which you’re vaguely familiar with three books.

But the real problem in this essay is Beha’s assumptions about the creation of these books—and here he uses Henry James to show where YA books fail. According to him, James makes for great reading because, “…there is always a governing intelligence at work behind the page. I missed this intelligence when I read novels by other writers, which so often gave me the enervating sense that things were happening for no reason except that it had occurred to the author to make them happen.”

To which I might suggest he read more children’s books, because our readers don’t have any patience for that masturbatory crap. But I digress. Beha continues:

What is being lost here [in the “Great YA Debate”] is a distinction that James himself insisted upon, between the artist’s subject matter and his treatment of that matter. In “The Art of Fiction”, he noted, “Of course it is of execution that we are talking, that being the only point of a novel that is open to contention… it is in the execution that the fatal weakness is recorded. ”

So, Beha posits, the problem with YA novels is in execution and in a lack of governing intelligence, and that’s why it’s “strange” that adults read kids books. YA books are necessarily simpler, and therefore cannot possibly contain the same aesthetic or intellectual pleasures as reading literary adult books.

Here, he is tacitly agreeing with Scott; YA writers write without vision or intent—and Beha adds artistry on for good measure. We must—we’re infantile.

So, what makes a work adult, then? Beha gives us a pretty good clue:  “If we really are,” he writes, “living through the decline of the cultural authority of the straight white male, that seems like a rich and appropriate subject for a sophisticated work of narrative art.”

Ah, here we are. Appropriate subjects for sophisticated narrative art. A serious novel is about things these gentlemen find serious—like the decline of the cultural authority of the straight white male. It astonishes me how endlessly fascinating some men find themselves.

Both writers cite Leslie Fielder’s Love and Death in the American Novel, a work of literary criticism from 1960 that is in Beha’s words, “a long engagement with the fundamental childishness of American fiction. Fiedler saw Twain’s Huck Finn, Melville’s Ishmael, and countless other canonical American literary characters as boys who refused to be civilized, who preferred a perpetual, homosocial boyhood to the responsibilities of adulthood—in particular the responsibilities of mature heterosexual relationships.”

It’s funny (haha/hmmm) that they are basing their ideas on a book published in 1960, before post-structuralist/ postmodern/ feminist/ postcolonial critique, before people started getting all weirdly rebellious about this patriarchy thing. But, really, it was a simpler time back then, at least for some people.

(For further analysis, please see Sarah McCarry at The Rejectionist.)

According to Fielder classic American fiction is, in essence, not about adults either. Or, as Scott says, “…notwithstanding a few outliers like Henry James and Edith Wharton, we have a literature of boys’ adventures and female sentimentality. Or, to put it another way, all American fiction is young-adult fiction.”

And there it is. ”Boys adventures and female sentimentality” defines YA fiction. Because even though this book was written in 1960, we still use the phrase “female sentimentality” like it’s perfectly appropriate.

But apparently when describing YA fiction, it is.

Because this is the insidious undercurrent of all this head-shaking. YA literature, after all, is thought by anyone with a three-book-deep knowledge of the field to be the province of female authors and the silly teenage girls they write for. The books are simple, with simple world views, and they definitely do not address “appropriate subjects for sophisticated pieces of narrative art.” Because how could literature written for and about teenage girls be sophisticated pieces of narrative art?

If there’s one thing our culture tells us, again and again, there is no one sillier or less significant than a teenage girl.

We know the drill. Boys don’t read. Girls read. Boys certainly don’t read YA, because it’s all women writers writing about girls, and we absolutely cannot ask of boys that they read about girls, and we’re going to keep telling boys that they don’t do that in case they accidentally do.

 A piece ran in the London Times this year with the headline: “Are Boys Not Reading Because of All Those Women in Publishing?” The article, only half-available in its original form, but recapped here, is an extensive interview with children’s author Jonathan Emmett who asserts: “But there is a literacy gap – boys are underachieving, boys do not like books as much as girls. I am arguing that this is because the industry is dominated by female gatekeepers.”

And women, apparently, ruin everything.

Julia Donaldson, another children’s author agrees: “Emmett probably has got a point,” she says. “He wrote a book where there was some bad character who bashed up people, but a gentle female editor thought we couldn’t even show someone bad doing bad things or doing destructive things.”

Gentle female editors? She sounds like she’s arguing that women shouldn’t have the vote. 

As for girls, according to an unnamed editor in a breathtakingly sexist 2011 New York Times essay by YA writer Robert Lipsyte, they want “to read about mean girls, gossip girls, frenemies, and vampires.” Lipsyte juxtaposes this assertion with a quote from a male librarian that says that boys want to read books that invite them “to reflect upon the kind of man they want to become.”

Unlike girls, see, boys want serious, important stuff.

 As for the authors (the ones who aren’t him), Lipsyte says:

The current surge in children’s literature has been fueled by talented young female novelists fresh from MFA programs who in earlier times would have been writing midlist adult fiction. Their novels are bought by female editors, stocked by female librarians and taught by female teachers.

Can we just stop and unpack this one for a second? Why are these women destined to be mid list? Is it their female sentimentality? Is it their inherent lack of artistry? Is it just that women can’t write important books? 

So, anyway, girls read YA and write YA, and no one is doing the serious work of taking care of boys. Everyone knows this. Never mind that eight out of ten current NYT YA bestsellers are male authors, or that the last four Printz winners have been men and the last five have had male protagonists. That’s irrelevant when truthiness in on the line.

It’s remarkable how both of these articles end with the authors talking about their own work, which is exactly what boys like, and their own struggles with publication as proof of their theses— that this oppressively matriarchal system is to blame for not just ruining boys in general, but keeping them from having the success they deserve. What does that sound like to you?

Now, all of these arguments are equally offensive to boys, but no one making them seems to realize it—it might interfere with their own self-promotion. And to the outside world none of it matters—YA is written by women, for girls. And with its sparkly vampires and “female sentimentality” it can’t matter because it’s not doing the important, serious work of telling male stories.

I heard a teacher joke that forcing boys to read Pride and Prejudice in high school was turning them off from books for life. And, haha, hilarious. It’s an important work and gives students plenty to analyze. But we just can’t expect boys to appreciate the merits of the book, to engage with it, to grow as readers, because, girl book. We cannot ask boys to think outside themselves. They won’t do it, say these particular men who refuse to think outside themselves.

The girls, though, everybody believes the girls should read Huck Finn and Heart of Darkness and Lord of the Flies and The Old Man and the Sea, because those books are Literature. They are Serious and Canonical, and a book becomes Canonical simply by objective worth, certainly not by a system of biases that keeps self-perpetuating like an undead Ouroboros. And the girls, they’re all right. They’re reading. We don’t have to worry about them.

Except the girls aren’t all right. Not at all.

According to the National Association of Anorexia Nervosa and Assorted Disorders, 91% of women surveyed on a college campus had attempted to control their weight by dieting, 22% dieted “often” or “always,” and 25% of college-aged women binge and purge as a way of controlling diet. 1% of female adolescents are anorexic, and 20% of anorexics die from complications of their eating disorder. Hospitals are now reporting cases of anorexia in girls younger than ten.

Girls are told in ways large and small, that they are silly, that they do not matter, that their job is to become invisible. And so they become invisible.

The way women get treated in the media, on the internet, casually, is, among many other things, a serious failure of empathy in our society. Women who speak out, who dare to exist and have opinions, get rape and death threats, get slut-shamed, get pictures of their bodies leaked on the internet. The failure of empathy gets repeated, again and again, by organizations and institutions that see rape threats (or actual rape) as a cost of doing business and nothing worth acting upon. 

You don’t matter, these institutions say.

And girls hear the message, again and again.

The girls are not all right. They wage wars on their own bodies, and should they dare to speak out about something, people will wage war against them. 

Books for girls matter. Books for kids, teenagers matter. And that’s why we write them.

That’s why we tend to bristle when people come in to eruditely piss in our sandbox. It never occurs to people like Scott and Beha that we might be choosing to write for young readers for reasons other than money or our own mediocre skills. (Or as some kind of female hobby, like pianoforte and needlepoint.) But, see, to those of us who write for children and young adults, men and women, this isn’t a market. These are people. We are writing for someone. And they deserve the best we can give them of ourselves.

We write for young readers because we care deeply about our readers. We work hard because we give a damn. We pick our words and sentences and forms to serve our stories in the best way we can—not to talk down to readers, but to talk up to them.

Me, I find the idea of writing for someone to be much more adult than wistfully sighing about how much more grown-up you are than everyone else. Though I suppose this idea of taking care of children is, to the glass clinkers in that particular corner of Patriarchy HQ, women’s work. Separate spheres and all. And, so not really that adult, if you know what I mean.

 Scott and Beha are advocating a certain literary solipsism as “adult,” while proudly demonstrating an incuriosity about an entire field of books. I don’t believe I could give them or their very grown-up friends a single children’s or YA book that would change their minds about the field, but I also don’t think that has anything to do with the books. And I can’t help but think that people who can’t find a single YA or children’s book worth their time also have serious issues with empathy.

Isn’t this really the marker of adulthood? Learning to look beyond yourself to others? Isn’t a marker of intelligence a hunger to see the world outside your own experience? Isn’t that maybe why so many people outside of traditional power structures are draw to this lit in the first place? Everyone who insults reading these books is not just denigrating the quality of the books themselves, but of the very act of using your time to give a crap about kids and the things they give a crap about.

And here, from inside the HQ, C.S. Lewis turns around in his swivel chair, clinks his glass, and tells everyone in that particular corner that they are full of crap:

Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. … But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.

                                 -“On Three Ways of Writing for Children”

We do not fear childishness, and so we write for children. We write with intention. We write with awareness. We write with artistry. And sometimes we write about girls. And in this culture, as the essays above prove, writing about girls is a political act.

I wish every single teen and adult in this country would read Brandy Colbert’s Pointe and Meg Medina’s Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass. Both books do an exquisite job of letting the reader live in the bodies of girls who are getting told again and again how worthless they are, and both meticulously demonstrate how girls might come to feel that way. They do the work of art. Pointe shows how girls are taught to internalize shame over abuse, Yaqui Delgado unflinchingly demonstrates how bullying can destroy a girl’s sense of self. I suppose some people might call this “female sentimentality;” I call it giving a damn.

Now that the patriarchy is dead, Poisoned Apples might seem out of date to someone, since, you know, there’s no beauty myth anymore, no sexual shaming, no more eating disorders. It might seem small to someone of Scott and Beha's, as its concern is teenage girls, and infantile, because it uses fairy tales. Personally, I think it’s one of the most adult works of art I’ve ever seen.

 Like her peers, Christine Heppermann has decided that the best way to be a grown-up is to help those who are just about to become grown-ups—to give them emotional vocabulary for so many unnamable things. (And, with fairy tales, she allows them the ability to live in metaphor.) It’s challenging to write narratives of eating disorders in a way that isn’t seductive to a disordered mind, but by using the language of fairy tales Heppermann can engage with the compulsions while at the same time laying bare their brutality.

 From Poisoned Apples, reprinted with permission from the author:

Blow Your House In She used to be a house of bricks, point guard on the JV team, walling out defenders who could only huff and puff and watch the layups roll in. She traded for a house of sticks, kindling in Converse high-tops and a red Adidas tent. At lunch she swirled a teeny spoon in yogurt that never touched her lips and said she’d decided to quit chasing a stupid ball. Now she’s building herself out of straw as light as the needle swimming in her bathroom scale. The smaller the number, the closer to gold, the tighter her face, afire with the zeal of a wolf who has one house left to destroy.

 Girls matter. Books like Pointe, Yaqui Delgado, Poisoned Apples tell the young female reader: I see you, I see what’s happening to you, I see how you feel, but it does not have to be this way. Let me show you.

I would buy every middle and high school library and classroom a copy of this book if I could. It deserves to be read, studied, discussed. By girls, yes—given them a space to converse about the issues this brings up freely. But boys too.

Just as we can tell girls that they are worth poetry, we can tell boys that they are worth our faith in their empathy. We can give them credit for the ability to step outside themselves and their own concerns. We can show them not just that we expect them to care about issues other than their own, but that we believe they’ll want to. They are worth that.

It matters, that boys read about girls, that they engage closely with books that speak to what it is to be a girl today. It matters that they understand how it feels to be catcalled, to be touched in a way you don’t want to be touched. And that they understand how it feels to wake up every morning desperate to be skinnier, having that desire consume you like fire. How it feels to get by on 1000 calories a day, 500, 100. How it feels to schedule your whole day around exercise, or around eating meals and then throwing them up. It matters that they engage deeply with the forces in society that might cause a girl to feel this way. This is a human issue.

It matters, greatly, that we all engage with literature that treats girls like people, so perhaps we can we actually can celebrate some small crumbling of the patriarchy some day, so more boys are equipped to take on the rampant misogyny in the world, so that everyone understand a feminist critique of, say, video games, isn’t designed to threaten anybody, but to better us all.

It matters greatly that YA literature exists, that books like Poisoned Apples exist, that girls and boys and even some enlightened grown-ups read them.  

Right now, children’s literature is seeing an intense flare-up in the ongoing conversation about the diversity crisis in children’s books. While this conversation has been going on for decades, now social media has given the people having it megaphones, and they are using them to brilliant ends. The conversation is loud, important, and people are listening.

So naturally the mainstream media uses this time to publish pieces that give a straight white guy credit for revolutionizing the industry.

 Last Sunday, the New York Times Book Review featured a rather bizarre review of John Corey Whaley’s Noggin by AJ Jacobs. Noggin is about a boy whose cryogenically-preserved head gets attached to another boy’s body. Remember that part for later. Jacobs begins the review, adorably, by discussing how confusing being a teenager is and how Whaley’s book is a really metaphor for teenage alienation. And then, well, I really need to quote this part:

With Noggin, Whaley is straddling two genres. Its most obvious allegiance is to the category of teenage romances featuring supernatural characters.

 Well, obviously. Guy with cryogenically frozen head gets used to new body=supernatural romance. It must be embarrassing for Whaley to have his influences be so patent.

 Jacobs continues:

 But “Noggin” actually owes more to the John Green genre, which I like to call Greenlit. Green is the master of first-person, funny-sad young adult novels. His most popular — “The Fault in Our Stars” — also has a main character who is battling cancer.

 Ah. “The John Green genre,” and “Greenlit!” Sure! Jacobs is talking with a lot of authority for someone who has no idea what he’s talking about. He’s not alone, though—lots of people who have no idea what they are talking about believe that YA is two genres: Twilight and its imitators and John Green and those he supposedly inspired. Guess which one they think is better?

 The idea that first person funny-sad contemporary YA realism is “the John Green genre” might come as a surprise to all the women who have been writing it for a decade or two or three. I’m sure it came as a surprise to John Corey Whaley, too, who thought he was writing his own books. But both books have cancer in them, so Noggin obviously owes a big debt.

 Jacobs concludes:

Whenever I finish a novel with a high concept, I do a little test and ask if the book would hold up if the conceit were magically stripped away, if you removed the gimmicks and were left with only the emotional skeleton.

 First off, the equation between “high concept” and “gimmick” is reductive, demeaning, and highly revelatory. We could spend a long time unpacking the biases there. Secondly, how is this any different than evaluating realism? Don’t we, as readers, hope for all our literary stories to have a strong emotional skeleton?

 Finally, Jacob’s “little test” is critically suspect at best. Remember the part about the cryogenically-preserved head? This isn’t a gimmick, it isn’t frou frou; it’s an essential part of the story, a deliberate choice made by the author to deliberate ends. And I’m just not sure you’re supposed to evaluate surrealism by removing the surreal parts so you can evaluate the parts you understand.

 One thing we’ve learned: it’s all-too-easy to let popular narrative guide your views on YA—certainly much easier than ever researching or reading in the field you are talking about. These articles about YA are based entirely on accepted truths from people who live entirely outside the field; they keep getting perpetuated, and everyone nods sagely as someone else proclaims John Green is saving poor teenage girl readers from those silly silly vampire books.

 Why, just yesterday the WSJ featured a big profile on Green in conjunction with The Fault in our Stars release. And it would have been so easy for them to just write a good, accurate profile of a highly successful, really interesting author with a movie coming out. But the article just has to overstep:

Some credit him with ushering in a new golden era for contemporary, realistic, literary teen fiction, following more than a decade of dominance by books about young wizards, sparkly vampires and dystopia. … He's thrown his weight behind several young-adult authors who write realistic novels and are now regarded as rising stars, including Rainbow Rowell, E. Lockhart, and A.S. King.

Well. Yes, some do credit him with that. But not anyone who knows what they are talking about.

 Rainbow Rowell is a star, but she rose to prominence last year, so calling her a rising star isn’t wholly ignorant, just a little behind the times; more, while John Green did give her a good review in the NYTBR, it’s demeaning to Rowell’s talent and accomplishments to credit her blockbuster success to it. And, speaking of demeaning, A.S. King and e. lockhart are John Green’s peers. They are stars, entirely on their own merit. They are blazing trails, not following them.  The idea that their success has anything at all to do with John Green’s weight can only be entertained if you think that stuff men do is just inherently more important. (And that John Green can time travel.)

Of all the ludicrous and sexist things that have been said about YA of late, this one is the most ludicrous and sexist. But it’s a particularly flagrant example of what’s been happening in the conversion for years. And there’s something really troubling about it all—in a field where the books supposedly appeal primarily to teenage girls, where the stars are innovative and brilliant authors who are predominantly female, we’re telling these readers that maybe they can aspire to growing up to be influenced by a guy, too.

 Also, A.S. King and e. lockhart do not write realism. There’s so much ignorant and insulting about the way they were positioned in that article, and it seems particularly cruel to deny these authors their immense sophistication and ingenuity—and then credit their success to someone who writes much more conventionally. King’s books are magical realism, as is lockhart’s latest (and her previous books all use postmodern techniques). Magical realism is actually an entirely separate genre from realism. 

 This is important: when the magic in magical realism is treated as irrelevant or erased, critics are taking a profound literary tradition and robbing it of its significance and import, erasing it altogether. And since this is a genre that rose out of and has been perpetuated by authors from Latin America, the Middle East, and Africa, (and whose practitioners in this country are predominantly female and of color) that gets pretty disturbing.

 The American literary canon defaults to realism. Novels that don’t fit in this mold are seen in dominant literary culture as other—a deviation from the norm. You can see this bias all through this article—the quotes from editor Zareen Jaffery and agent Michael Bourret as presented* imply that only characters in realism can be relatable, and only realistic stories can be character-driven.

 Which is poppycock.  

 (*For the record, I don’t buy for a second that either of them said those words in that order.)

 Realism is a construct, the same as any other genre. In America, it sits in a place of privilege as something more literary and authentic—but this is about nothing but tradition. And it’s a tradition of white male authors and the white male critics who canonized them.   

 In American theater in the mid-20th century, serious plays tended to work a certain way; this is the well-made play—realistic domestic dramas with unity of place and time. This is the theater of Eugene O’Neill, Arthur Miller, and Tennessee Williams—all still considered the titans of American Theater. But around the 1960’s, voices started to rise up from the margins, and the dominant form didn’t work for stories they wanted to tell. The feminists, the writers of color, the LGBT writers exploded conventions in the structure and language of theater. For so long, realism was the standard, but for these writers, form was political—and they had to remake it in order to tell their own stories.

 Naturally, certain people get unhappy when anyone from the margins remakes anything. Young playwrights are still often taught that the correct method of storytelling in theater is the well-made play. And those game-changing contributions from feminist, black, Latin, Native, and LGBT playwrights still get treated as “other,” as fodder for diversity day on the syllabus instead of essential texts in understanding the history and capacity of theater.

 And, as much as those who clutch to realism as standard would deny it, this too is political.

 So the peculiar canonization of John Green and this string of bizarre articles that anoint him as the vanguard of a post-sparkly-vampire seriousness in YA isn’t simply about taking a white male more seriously than everyone else. It’s also about privileging a certain narrative structure—the dominant narrative’s dominant narrative. It’s not only that Green is a straight white man, it’s that he writes in the way that generations of straight white men have deemed important and Literary. And in art, the remaking of form has historically made the establishment very uncomfortable. There’s so much innovation in YA (and, hi, middle grade!) and its audience is wonderfully open to new stories told in new ways. By holding up Green as an exemplar, by shoving his peers into his shadow, these critics are telling writers who might be innovating: if you want to be important, write like him.

 It’s not just YA, of course. Recently the New Yorker posted an essay by Junot Díaz about his experience in an MFA program, "MFA vs POC."

 The title pretty much sums it up. The essay is devastating if you care about literature, young writers, or, you know, human beings. Díaz recounts the misery of being a person of color in a program where whiteness is considered the norm, and where no one ever thinks there’s any reason to question that norm. Of course, this showed up in everyone’s writing:

 From what I saw the plurality of students and faculty had been educated exclusively in the tradition of writers like William Gaddis, Francine Prose, or Alice Munro—and not at all in the traditions of Toni Morrison, Cherrie Moraga, Maxine Hong-Kingston, Arundhati Roy, Edwidge Danticat, Alice Walker, or Jamaica Kincaid. In my workshop the default subject position of reading and writing—of Literature with a capital L—was white, straight and male.

  This is a literary tradition perpetuating itself by ignoring other voices, treating them as unserious. It’s normalizing one type of storytelling and casting the others as suspect. And, among many other things, it’s going to make our literature really boring.

 This isn’t to say that contemporary realism belongs to white men alone; for recent example, Pointe by Brandy Colbert and Yaqui Delgado Wants to Kick Your Ass by Meg Medina use the form beautifully, and to affecting, important, and political ends. In their hands, realism becomes a tool for speaking truths about gender, race, and class.

It is one way. But it is not the only way.

 Fantastical elements, non-linear storytelling, unconventional language, postmodernism, experimentation and innovation—these elements tend to otherize a book in our literary culture. But why? Why is a fantasy less serious? Why is it okay to strip the magic from magical realism? This is a reactionary response, based on long literary history, and it’s all about power.

 We need diverse books. In children’s literature, this is urgent for the well-being of our kids. But it’s also about the well-being of literature itself. Art thrives on being challenged and questioned and pushed—and it’s not the establishment writers and critics who are going to do it. Every single writer benefits from reading stories that play with language and structure and reality—and so do the readers.

I want to read this a thousand times. This is a lesson I am in the process of learning, and she has articulated it so beautifully:

I’m a white, university educated, able-bodied, cis woman. I experience sexism but in the long and hard game of life, I’m playing with a relatively full deck. I’ll never experience racism, transphobia or ableism. When I talk to someone who does experience these awful examples of discrimination, I listen to them and don’t interject with my uninformed opinion because I will never experience any of these things, meaning I really don’t know what I’m talking about. I don’t dismiss them or laugh at them or tell them how it really is. That would make me an arsehole. Now, sometimes I am blinded by my privilege because I don’t know how to live any other way and don’t always see where I’m going wrong. When someone calls me out on this, on my privilege, I learn from it because I don’t want to hurt anyone or perpetuate harmful ideas and stereotypes that have destroyed countless lives.