I wasn't going to post this article

[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?

Comments

[zesty_pinto]

This article for some reason makes me think of the boomer/millenial divide where I am seriously convinced the former hates the latter because they're better educated in general, and how it also seems to apply to the sexes. It might be the Kavanaugh hearing doing this.

I should point out that (I can't find the article, I really want to but I don't think I can) that mentioned how Americans in general prefer films where they can shut their brains off and leave the theaters happy, so what would make a good number of them happier than a film that fulfills most of their own social biases? I'm sure most actors and actresses in general would prefer this didn't happen too since it's easy to get typecast (the industry itself though seems to have a thing about pushing typecasting anyway even for the people who work behind the scenes).

[conuly]

I've always chalked up the divide to a. Boomers can't stand not being the center of attention the way they've been their whole lives, the way that seems "normal" to them and b. their generation was marked by a much bruited "generation gap" between them and their elders.