I wasn't going to post this article
Sep. 28th, 2018 02:09 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
conuly"Girls read more than boys, it's awful, how can we fix this!?"
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/09/why-girls-are-better-reading-boys/571429/
But the commentary I've seen elsewhere positively infuriates me.
I'm all for stocking schools and libraries with a wider range of books to appeal to a greater variety of tastes. We should definitely increase funding with an eye towards this goal.
But it absolutely kills me to see the same people who either a. earnestly explain that we can't have gender parity in films because men and boys won't watch movies about girls and women and then the filmmakers wouldn't make any money (women have to suck it up, I guess) or b. who huffily insist that pushing for more diverse books is insulting because only reading about people who are "like you" means you don't stretch yourself (reading about white people is automatically stretching yourself even if they're basically your clone) are now falling all over themselves to say that of course we can't ask boys to read about girls and never should have suggested it. Boys never have to stretch themselves and never have to suck it up, I guess.
Is this what they mean when they talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations?
https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/2018/09/why-girls-are-better-reading-boys/571429/
But the commentary I've seen elsewhere positively infuriates me.
I'm all for stocking schools and libraries with a wider range of books to appeal to a greater variety of tastes. We should definitely increase funding with an eye towards this goal.
But it absolutely kills me to see the same people who either a. earnestly explain that we can't have gender parity in films because men and boys won't watch movies about girls and women and then the filmmakers wouldn't make any money (women have to suck it up, I guess) or b. who huffily insist that pushing for more diverse books is insulting because only reading about people who are "like you" means you don't stretch yourself (reading about white people is automatically stretching yourself even if they're basically your clone) are now falling all over themselves to say that of course we can't ask boys to read about girls and never should have suggested it. Boys never have to stretch themselves and never have to suck it up, I guess.
Is this what they mean when they talk about the soft bigotry of low expectations?
