Interesting take on "Girlybooks" in the Huffington Post

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/maureen-johnson/gender-coverup_b_3231484.html

What do you all think? Do you judge a book by its cover?

That was a rant about nothing.

A cover might make me pick up a book to investigate it, but the judging occurs when the sentences begin.

Some of the coverswaps were excellent, and very close to the mark based on what I see in the bookshops. I do tend not to pick up a book if the author is unfamiliar and it has a "chicklit-y" cover, so I could be missing some great books. Unfortunately, I have to judge by the cover to some extent as I don't physically have time to pick up every book and read a little bit of it.

It was an interesting challenge, for sure, and some people really rose to the task with quite believable alternate covers.

2wonderY, I see your point as I won't judge a book solely by its cover either, but also by reading the book description for plot and checking out a few sentences for the writing style. However, getting to that point means being pulled in by either a really interesting title and/or a really compelling cover (or in some cases, a recommendation from someone). Like Sakerfalcon, I usually avoid anything that has a cover that looks like it belongs to a Harlequin romance or a super "chicklit-y" book. It's possible I've been missing out on some good ones because the cover looked like something I wouldn't read. This challenge makes you think about that.

Of course, one hopes that marketers know what they are doing and select the right cover to meet the intended audience in the first place, but surely there must also be times when a "girly" cover is picked just because the writer is female and a "manly" cover is picked just because the writer is male, regardless of the actual content. Again, this challenge makes you think about things like that.

For me the ultimate point is that marketing (and book covers are marketing) based solely on the gender of the writer can lead to the ghettoizing of good books, mostly books by women, as it's likelier that more people, knowing nothing of a book's content, will refuse to pick up a girly looking book than will refuse to pick up a book with a more masculine jacket.

I'd think this would be especially true in the world of YA, which Johnson writes. Having a too-feminine jacket might deter male readers who would otherwise be interested in the story.

> 5 Yes, I was also concerned about the YA market where

1 - the books with female protagonists are generally packaged as extra "girly" with hot pink and sparkles, etc. (Of course, there are exceptions - notably, The Hunger Games or even the Twilight series; despite all its flaws, at least the series doesn't have the most girly possible covers.)

2 - grown men (at least some of them) are less likely to be deterred by a feminine-looking cover, unlike teen boys who are much more sensitive about not appearing macho enough on the whole.

Ugh, this whole conversation is started to disgust me as I'm hearing myself anthropomorphize book covers as feminine or masculine.

one of the things she mentions in her article i see all the time - i own a small used bookshop and i get a lot of young boys that want to read and want to be excited about reading but will only read a book if the main character is a boy. they just aren't interested in reading a book about a girl, but (like the article says) girls usually will read whatever. it's limiting, both in what to give them to read, but also in opening their eyes to experience and in how they'll later view boys/girls and men/women.

> 7 Yes, this is something we talked about a lot in my YA literature class. It's sad that male is considered the default, which either boys or girls can read while any book with a female lead is suddenly a book "only for girls." Again, some exceptions -- once again, notably the wildly popular Hunger Games -- but generally this is the norm. In some cases, it starts before YA lit even, which is even more sad.

I think SaraHope #5 nails it. While we older people may look past a cover, young people don't. I recall reading a paperback edition of "Persuasion" by Jane Austen that had a romanc-y cover a la 1968 (the heroine on the front looked a bit like Barbra Streisand with a beehive with a manly man in a billowing coat eyeing her in the background). I was a little ashamed of it.

I do recall, however, a story from a friend who went to an all-boys Catholic school. He said that in his junior year, they spent most of their English class reading Jane Austen's books (the class was taught by a Jesuit priest), and most of them enjoyed the books.

He said that he never even thought, until his wife showed astonishment at his knowledge of Austen's work, about the fact that they were reading "women's literature" because that's not how they were presented.

I often wish I'd been a fly on the wall in that classroom. Sounds like most of the discussions revolved around their judgments of the male characters (Frank Churchill's duplicitous games in "Emma" was apparently endlessly fascinating to the boys).

>8 sweetiegherkin: one of the main problems for me with this whole concept is that most of the books that the young boys read (i'm thinking particularly of a 3rd grade reader that comes into the shop regularly - although he reads below his level, so yeah, he's not looking at ya books, he's looking at beginning chapter books) will feature these boy main characters and sideline any female characters, usually in a way that will later lead these boys to think things like - girls can't be spies, girls can't be engineers, girls can't be...

>10 overlycriticalelisa: Yep. Same with most minority characters as well. Like I said before, it's sad ...

so true. can you imagine how it would sound if instead of saying "he'll only read books if a boy is the main character" the mom told me "he'll only read books if a white kid is the main character?" shudder. but we totally accept it with gender.

I think that choosing only to read male identified books still extends to choice of authors as well. There is a reason that JK Rowling was published as JK and not Joanne Rowling, even though her main character was male. I also wonder a lot about how gender affects genre. Someone pointed out to me that Nicholas Sparks is not shelved in the Romance section.

All of this is happening on a subconscious level, I'm sure, but it perpetuates stereotypes and needs to be changed. I guess just raising the issues is a starting point.

oh, i totally agree. i don't sell romance books in my shop (because they perpetuate dangerous stereotypes of women) but i do sell books labelled "romantic suspense" because i believe that they are actually just thrillers that happen to be written by women. i'm told by readers of them that there usually isn't even a love story on the side in them. like you said, if nicholas sparks (or james patterson or many, many male authors) was a woman, they would likely be labelled differently, from a genre perspective. this makes me crazy.

The initials game goes back to the 1860s, when Mary Elizabeth Braddon published as M. E. Braddon up to the release of Lady Audley's Secret, when she was "outed" as a woman (and had the critics come down on her like a pile of bricks). That these manoeuvres were intentionally designed to hide the author's gender is obvious from the career of Elizabeth Thomasina Meade, who from about 1870 onwards write popular children's fiction under her own name, and crime fiction as L. T. Meade.

> 12 As you rightly point out, no one would actually say the words "my child only reads books with white characters." BUT - tacitly this is done (although probably in many cases, subconsciously) and publishers cater to this. There have been several cases of the "whitewashing" of book covers for children and teens - i.e., the main character is actually non-white but the child on the cover has light skin - the idea being that white children (the "norm") will only read about other white children whereas non-white children (the "special interest" readers) are used to not reading about kids like them so they will also buy books where the main character is white. (Basically, it's the same argument that little girls will go see movies where the main character is a boy, but little boys won't go see movies where the main character is a girl, ergo we need more movies with boys in the lead - never, do we have data to back up our presumptions about this? or even, why is this case and what can we do to change it so that boys don't view girls as "less than" boys?)

Covers aside, it's the also reason why in many books, TV shows, and movies, there is the "stock" character representing the "other" (sometimes a woman, other times a racial or ethnic minority, or in some cases a LGBT character). The character is there to make some nod toward diversity and reaching out to the "special interest" group but without alienating the white male reader/viewer. Sometimes that character is so little fleshed out as a real person and so periphery to the story that their presence is hardly needed/noticed. There are of course many notable exceptions and we are making progress in many respects, but there's still a lot of issues that need to be worked out.

On another thread, this group, "Books by men you'd recommend to women," the appearance of "lad lit" suggests that the chick lit formula is moving across gender lines to influence male writers.

Would be interesting to see the demographic info on lad lit readers (elisa.saphier, any thoughts?). Are they mostly women?

My son, 17, loved "The Hunger Games" (first installment, anyway), and anything by Nick Hornby because he's really funny. But he actually reads, so maybe he's not typical ...

>16 sweetiegherkin: oh most definitely. in books, movies, tv. anywhere they can do it the most likely scenario is still to have the main character be white or light. there are always exceptions, but that doesn't mean the rule holds. i do think we're moving forward, but slowly, slowly.

>17 nohrt4me2: hmmmmmmm. demographics of lad lit readers - "are they mostly women?" i don't think they are, from my limited (it's not a very successful store, yet) perspective. but i get *way* more male customers than i thought i would, which would skew the data. about half of my customers are men or boys. i guess the majority of the men who come in buy clive cussler, michael connelly, or authors like them, and science fiction. but i do sell a good amount of nick hornby and i feel like pretty equally to both genders. i'll have to look out for this lad lit genre and start noticing who buys it more...

Having drafted a novel with a very strong woman as main character, and a corresponding point-of-view, I'll probably use initials like Rowling, and no jacket photo, so women are not put off without looking between the covers. (I'm a large, hairy male person.)

While not a reader of "chick-lit" in the most shelf-conscious sense, I do enjoy writers such as Jeanette Winterson, Robin Hyde, and Edna O'Brien.

>#19. Actually the contrary is true. The whole point here is that women are not generally influenced by whether the author or the main character is male or female. After all, women grow up in school primarily reading assigned books written by men about men. It is men (or more accurately, boys) who won't pick up a book by a woman author or with a female protagonist. Thus, identifying yourself as a male author could only help your sales.

>19 bitser: what 20 said.

do people think that readers assume an initialed author is a female or are there enough men doing it that readers can't be sure? just curious what people think everyone assumes, or doesn't assume...

>#21. I don't consciously think about it when I acquire a book, but I do remember reading Possession just a few years ago and assuming that A.S. Byatt was a man.

Edited to add: Oooo, look what I found Elisa.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_initials

Overwhelmingly male.

oh interesting. way more men. i guess that's why it still works.

(from the list, i love that the second z in zz packer is "decorative.")

I'm fine with letting readers decide (or guess) about my gender (male). My interest in writing from a woman's point of view comes in part from the fact that I'm terribly interested in women and how they think, but will never be one, so it makes the imagining and writing a greater challenge, which attracts me. To write in a woman's voice that is believable to women is an accomplishment, I think.

>24 bitser:

I'd agree, and it goes in many directions. For a human to write a character that is believable to other humans who share characteristics with the character, but not with the author is a worthy achievement, be that for the able-bodied writing about the disabled, women about men, men about women, one nationality about another, whatever.

The empathy to feel with a stranger and the skill to articulate it are among the hallmarks of a great author.

Re:1/the article

I agree that usually when a book is attacked as being "trashy" or "breezy" or not serious enough, it is usually a book written by a girl-- and by people who take themselves *far* too seriously. "Twilight" is the perfect example of this-- attacked for no real reason, other than that its feminine. It's actually a rather slow-moving, thoughtful book, but I suppose that this is the problem for some people-- it's too soft and feminine.

And I do think that the word feminine does have real meaning, and that books written by girls are different from what boys write. But I really, really don't think that this should be a negative issue for the girls. Only putting value on super-serious crap means excluding everyone who doesn't take themselves way too seriously, and snobbishly, really, and has the added issue of only putting value on thing written by men, or women who hate themselves enough to imitate men, while everything that is clearly feminine is hated for no real reason.

And I absolutely detest "The Hunger Games"-- girls trying to gain acceptance by being more violent, lending support to violence, in a society that already has a chronic overdose of violence.

Just stop the hate. Stop hating "Twilight", stop hating Jane Austen, stop hating girls-- stop hating girls, for being *girls*. Girly ones.

Peace & Love.

>26 fearless2012: well...but...see. the thing about twilight is that she perpetrates messages that are actually quite dangerous, especially for adolescent girls. calling it romantic when a man sneaks to your window or room and watches you while you sleep instead of totally creepy and stalker behavior that he should be arrested for. the messaging that basically comes down to 'i want to have sex with you but then i'll have to kill you' which looks different in this series, but ends up being the same awful thing that many girls and women are actually faced with. many of the signs of living in domestic violence (as put forward by the american national domestic violence hotline) are in the edward/bella relationship. bella is over and over again described as needing protection, to be kept safe, as fragile.

i could go on. all this to say - i think there are very, very valid reasons people "attack" this series of books that have nothing at all to do with if and how much they are "feminine."

certainly i agree with you that we need to change the culture of violence and girl hate that we live in. but i think there is really good reason to include twilight in the list of things we need to do better.

Re: 27 I think that most of the criticism against it is much more superficial than what you're describing, so I guess that that was what I was reacting against. What you said I'll have to think about, and maybe tomorrow I'll reply back. Thanks for your feedback.

>28 fearless2012: other people say it much better than me with far more details from the books since i've just heard a lot and flipped through them a little. search twilight and feminism or twilight backlash and you'll get better critiques.

Re: 27 Okay, now I can actually give at least a partial response, although part of it I can't answer fully. And that part is that which relates to Edward. I'm not sure, personally, whether or not it's fair to criticize him, or in what way or how far. Personally. And I don't know, maybe it doesn't make sense for me to stick up for him or to be his fan. This might sound stupid, but Stephenie Meyer's vampires kinda remind me of Led Zeppelin, and I'm more of a Beatles guy. Although even One Direction has that one song where she goes, "I want you to hit the pedal, heavy metal, show me you care"-- and nobody accuses those guys of being violent criminals: quite the opposite. Although of course I see that saying that could be interpreted as being offensive. Sometimes there's no really right answer to give-- anything that you say could be wrong.

But it's interesting to look at things from Bella's perspective. (And I do of course admit that Bella is a girl who you can easily get frustrated with, but we'll come to that.) Now, "usually", if there is such a thing, the girl has a certain role, which is allotted a certain importance-- so much "air-time", if you will. And that is to be rescued from the dragon or whatever, and the hero doing the sword-battle bit is usually the one who gets the lion's share of the air-time. There are exceptions even to this, however, since not all stories are the same. Cinderella isn't rescued from a dragon or anything of that sort, to the extent that she is rescued, it's more in the sense that a life coach rescues you from a crappy life-- something like that. And the person who does the rescuing is her fairy godmother-- an older woman. The prince doesn't even have the opportunity to meet her until all that is accomplished. There's no military angle to it-- the story actually takes a rather dim view of the military, or at least the film does.

But anyway, if the "usual" arrangement is not satisfactory, it can, I think, basically be modified in two ways. The first is to let the princess do her own rescuing-- maybe she can escape on her own, say. The second is to let her keep the same role-- being rescued-- but to make it happen in a somewhat different way. (Connected to this is the delicate question of what the hero "deserves" for doing the right thing.) That is, she can still be a princess, but the story is told from her perspective, even though she's not so much on the military end of things. She gets the "air-time". And this is obviously where "Twilight" is-- Bella gets her say; it's from her perspective. (Indeed, she gets to talk until readers get tired of hearing from her, sometimes.) So then there's the question of how well Bella plays her role of being the civilian, which, truth be told, is sometimes not all that well.

For example, an instance comes to mind when she is supposed to stay with Jasper and Alice (her boyfriend's siblings), because this is the safe thing to do. There are predators on the loose, but they can protect her, so long as she is reasonably cooperative. But, she doesn't really cooperate-- she escapes. (But not from the Tower of London or something-- from her defenders.) Now, Bella's inability to play her role well is interesting, because what it falls to her to do can be rather difficult, and this is a difficulty that usually gets overshadowed by the challenges of battles and so on. Like, what if Bella has an anxiety problem? And I've had problems with anxiety-- sometimes the result is that you are very very restless, you just don't want to stay in the same place, even if there's *no reason* to leave the room, but you just can't stay. So, you have this problem where you can't just simply say, "Bella, stay with Jasper and Alice", and have that be the end of it and then totally shift to something else and forget all about her for awhile, since even just having her stay put can be an issue for her.

And, on an even more fundamental level, there's the question of Bella really just not taking care of herself even on the most basic level, and the issue of how much her will to live really is-- how much does she want to live. (Does she want to die? Is she suicidal?) Because, after she "escapes" from the pair assigned to look after her, she goes to find this wild killer type, and nearly gets herself killed. It was nearly a suicidal thing to do, and she did end up badly injured. Her reasoning behind this, (later revealed to be based on false information), was that she was helping her mother-- she was saving her mother, and putting herself in that bad spot instead of her. She even accepts that she may be about to *die* for her mother, and she seems to pass this off not so much as a suicidal thing, as a sorta noble thing, coming from love, since it's for a loved one. The problem for me, I guess, is how *easily* Bella accepts and puts herself out there as the victim, without really looking for alternatives, without taking care of herself, and without letting others take care of her, because on some level she expects to die, and has this almost neurotic acceptance of unnecessary death.

Which is, sure, plenty of reasons why it's not actually my favorite novel-- I just think that it many ways it's more real and relevant than alot of the 19th-century lit that gets passed off as Important and Mandatory, even though not all of us live in some crazy czarist monastery with good old Leo Tolstoy. ("Twilight" has its paranormal elements, obviously, but it does actually occur in Washington State.) That's my perspective, anyway.

But, yeah. I also remember there being-- and I don't have the book on me, but I want to say that the chapter is called, "Port Angeles" or something-- where there is some serious stalking. Whatever it is, it's certainly not all fluff. Or "candy floss", as I heard David Crosby call that sort of thing in an interview once. "Candy floss". I wonder where he pulled *that* phrase from. Anyway.

Re: 29 (You posted that while I was writing the other one, lol) Well yeah, on the most fundamental level they wouldn't like it because she's not fighting anyone herself, basically. She's not even good at sports. With some people, you have to at least be good at sports, or else they just look at you like a push-over. Some girls aren't good at sports, though, and they shouldn't be dismissed as human beings, I think. I hope that doesn't sound too brusque or whatever. I'm just sayin'.

One can like and respect "girls" while recognising that Twilight is shit from every point of view.

That is what I was referring to when I said that most Twilight-hating is simple generalized anger, rather than a sort of elaborate argument, or something.

I only hope that no-one imagines that my opinion is being influenced by all that mindless hate. Yeah.

I'm 60 and read all four of those goddam Twilight books (OK, I did skip large portions) because they were a literary phenom, and I like to know what's going on, for better or worse.

For several years, I've wanted all those hours of my life back ... until I read Fearless's stream-of-consciousness debate with herself about fairy tales and "Twilight," and heroines in general.

From Led Zep to Cinderella to Tolstoy to David Crosby. Man, there's my reward for having read those Meyer books. Thank you, Fearless. It was a long time coming.

>27 overlycriticalelisa: *%$& AMEN !!!!!

I was SO bothered by the "vampire genre" of teen books (and TV shows) when Twilight first came out, because my daughter had just hit puberty and was all over these books. I hated them. I even wrote a little rant about it at my blog in 2010:

http://letteradicorsa.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/fatal-attractions/

>#30. Candy Floss is a children's book. Quite a good one, I might add, by the almost legendary author, Rumer Godden.

I will confess, #34, that I am your age and I also felt almost compelled to read the Twilight books because of their huge popularity. Almost. For my generation, I think, Ann Rice wrote the definitive vampire novels. And while there was some sort of erotic undercurrent in her books, drinking blood was not just a euphemism for sex, and her books are not romance genre books in the slightest. Fueled by the author's grief over the death of her young daughter, Rice's vampire books brooded mostly about immortality.

HRH, enjoyable rant, and nice restoration of the vampire to its rightful place as a symbol of the one-way predator. Not a coincidence that satirists sometimes make capitalists and bankers secret vampires.

vwinsloe, I think all vampire literature has an undercurrent of eroticism, beginning with Polidori's "The Vampyre" to "Carmilla," "Dracula," etc. Sex is how vampires attract prey. It's why some of them are pretty or at least compelling.

> 36,37 i definitely think there was a weird erotic undercurrent going on in the anne rice vampire series, but it seems distinctly different to me than what went on in twilight. it didn't come with all the social commentary about girls in their place and the crazy stalker stuff. it's a fair argument to say, though, that rice was still perpetuating the link between sex and violence against women that is so prevalent and so dangerous, i just hadn't thought about it until now.

>38 overlycriticalelisa:. I disagree about Ann Rice's Vampire Chronicles perpetuating the link between sex and violence "against women," elisa. There were many significant women vampires in Rice's books, and most frequently male vampires preyed on other men (often criminals or street people.) The Queen of the Damned herself was a female vampire. The themes that Rice's books conveyed were more existential--a link between sex and death would be more accurate. Actually, even more about the nature of evil and what it means to be human.

Note also that Rice's Mayfair Witches centered on strong female characters. I don't find Rice's books to be at all anti-feminist.

#34 You are most welcome. I'm glad that someone benefited and *enjoyed* my writing. Not everyone does. And it's nice that you know who the Byrds are-- one of my long-term goals is to track down all of their CDs. And incidentally, I am a boy, and I even think that boys and girls are very different, but for some reason I'm tinkled that you'd think I was a girl. Call me naive, but I admire their *innocence*. And I did name myself after a Taylor Swift album, and a new-age-y year, so it's not like I'm not playing mind games with myself, or something.

But anyway-- you're very welcome. I try to see the connections between diverse things, and to make something that's *enjoyable* to read, rather than a dull dry old bore. I'm delighted you liked it so much.

#36 Ah, so that's where that came from. Thank you very much.

>39 vwinsloe:

yes! i think this is true. it's been so long since i'd read them that i'd forgotten this. (whew! i'm glad to be reminded of this.) and i did agree with your original post (36) about her books being more about immortality than anything else. (i didn't know she'd lost her daughter; puts a really sad spin to it.) i guess my main point was that there was a weird sexy thing going on in those books. or maybe it translated to more than she intended when they made the movie of the first one. maybe it was just the time i was reading them (high school) but i definitely found them a little titillating. but yes, more about nature of evil and everything else you wrote. i agree, and stand corrected, thanks!

>41 overlycriticalelisa:. Anne Rice is a fascinating person. When she returned to Catholicism after the death of her husband and started writing books with religious themes, she lost a lot of her audience. In 2010, she left the church again, apparently because of her disagreement with its social dictates on gay rights, abortion, and contraception. It would be nice to see her become popular again.

One interesting factoid about her is that her birth name was actually "Howard Allen." Unlike the female authors who use initials or change their names to mens' names when they publish, Rice apparently never felt as though it would be an advantage to use her real name.