Dr. Frankenstein, meet your monster. This is what feminism has become, because we indulged it when we should have quashed it. (And ironically, this is an improvement. I was expecting to see titles like "Why Boys Suck" and "How Women Must Help Men to Be Better." It is better to be ignored than to be constantly demonized and browbeaten.)

Feminism is not, never was, and never will be about equality. It's about feminists cherry-picking male privilege without the risks or responsibility that men shoulder.

Feminists wanted the right to vote, but did not want to be drafted or required to register for the selective service. (Meaning women have a voice in when men will be forced to die for their country.)

Feminists demand equal representation for women in STEM fields, but not in the industries of trash removal, oil rigging, coal mining, law enforcement, or any other dangerous or dirty jobs.

Struggles to find literature?

Huck Finn, Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, Tom Sawyer, anything by Dickens, The Spiderwick Chronicles, the Hardy Boys, the Dark is Rising, Wizards of Earthsea, the Narnia Books feature both male and female protagonists, several of Roald Dahl's books, Kipling...

For younger kids, animals in picture books are by default male, The Snowy Day has a boy protagonist... I'm struggling to think of books about human kids, but male protagonists are very common... Maurice Sendak's books,

If you're struggling to find cool male protagonists in children's books you are not looking very hard.

Nicole, your list kind of proves the point, though -- most of what you listed was written prior to 1970. The youth-fiction industry today is nearly exclusively female, and stories about male protagonists are considered inherently sexist.

You beat me to it, NicoleK.

I think the problem is that Americans, at least, tend to put down any style of entertainment that's more than a year old. (Same goes for clothes.) Madonna was a success in part because she kept reinventing herself.

From the 1941 Billy Wilder movie "Ball of Fire":

"She sulks if she has to wear last year's ermine."

Also, see what I said in 2015:
__________________________________________

Could it be that one big problem is that classic pre-20th century novels by or about men, such as the ones you listed (Treasure Island, Captains Courageous, or Ivanhoe), are considered by many modern kids and teens to be too haaarrrrd (waaaah!) or at least too slow-moving to be worth reading, when they're so used to electronic entertainment and reading books with tons of action-filled pictures long after they're old enough to learn to enjoy books without them - say, age 9? Ironically, btw, it wasn't long ago that the comics page (which is considered a more-or-less good barometer of what's happening in American society) featured Jeremy (in "Zits") having to read Ivanhoe for school and not being at all happy about it until he suspects there might be sex scenes in it.

More on that (I just found it after typing the above - it's about the first "Zits" novel):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/comic-riffs/post/the-first-zits-novel-creators-aim-to-draw-reluctant-young-readers-into-the-power-of-artful-story/2013/08/02/9b0f3068-fba0-11e2-a369-d1954abcb7e3_blog.html

...Jerry Scott (co-creator of "Zits") doesn’t simply feel sorry for challenged grade-school readers. Years ago, swirling in a tsunami of prose, he was that reluctant young reader.

“As a freshman in high school, in Arizona, I was the new kid, and it was scary,” Scott recalls in vivid detail. “In my first English class, I got a paperback of ‘Ivanhoe.’ ”

Scott utters the title of the Walter Scott novel as if conveying the name of a particularly nasty disease, with painful symptoms best left to the imagination.

“Reading it was really hard — it was the worst frigging book,” Scott tells Comic Riffs. “There were no pictures in it at all. I had the hardest time. I don’t think I’m alone in this vast sea of alienation that a lot of kids feel...”

And, from The Literary Omnivore:

"...I first encountered Ivanhoe in, of all things, Zits, the comic strip. The teenager of the family, Jeremy, was forced to read it for class, and his father decided to read it along with him–with hilarious results, as both father and son couldn’t stand it. Ivanhoe, then, has always been an impenetrable classic to me ever since I was a wee lass. However, as my reading has expanded and I’ve gotten older, bits and pieces about Sir Walter Scott and his writing have filtered through to me and put several dents in my old conception. Needing a lengthy read for a bit of travel, I decided to dive in headfirst and take a library copy of Ivanhoe with me.

"Yes, its reputation for downright debilitating prose is well-earned, but there’s an amazing story once you acclimate..."

(end of excerpts)

Not to mention that since boys are pushed (by peers and the media) to wallow in video games and high-tech interests all the time, why wouldn't they feel at least a little embarrassed and reluctant to read "masculine" 19th-century novels from an assigned reading list, since there's nothing high tech about them by modern standards?
________________________________________

I mean, honestly. What happened to the days when kids were at least slightly EMBARRASSED to be caught reading books with pictures in them after age 10?

And regarding the STEM fields, maybe that's mainly because feminists know that women PREFER jobs that aren't dangerous and that pay well. Men may or may not prefer safe jobs, since plenty of them take pride in working at dangerous jobs. However, whenever men complain about the "glass floor," I can't help but think "excuse me, women have always worked at dangerous jobs. It's just that when it came to women, those jobs tended to pay minimum wage - if anything at all. (Factory workers and farmers' wives, for example.) How many men are clamoring for a fair share of THOSE jobs?"

Not to mention that when women try to get jobs that pay well AND are dangerous, they tend to get treated pretty badly by angry men. You don't have to believe every detail of the movie "North Country" (about the true story of women miners in Minnesota, one of whom was a single mother of two children). You can read Anthony Bourdain's "Kitchen Confidential" instead. There was no reason for HIM to lie - and he had every admiration for those women who fought back. (Not that he was exactly helpful to them, from what I could tell.)

And regarding CURRENT novels for children and teens: All one has to do (mostly) is look for those books that are highly rated by the critics and that have won major awards. Especially those by men - but not always.

Btw, check out Katha Pollitt's long, award-winning essay, "Why We Read: Canon to the Right of Me" (Pollitt is an English professor, among many other things):

http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2014/01/why-we-read-canon-to-the-right-of-me-by-katha-pollitt.html

(The essay isn't about helping any particular kids. It's about the foolishness of squabbling over which "few dozen books" are appropriate for mandatory reading lists in school, since kids can't be expected to remember anything they're FORCED to read, once exams are over, if they've never learned to like reading in the first place.)

Last paragraphs:

"...But is there any list of a few dozen books that can have such a magical effect, for good or for ill? Of course not. It's like arguing that a perfectly nutritional breakfast cereal is enough food for the whole day. And so the canon debate is really an argument about what books to cram down the resistant throats of a resentful captive populace of students; and the trick is never to mention the fact that, in such circumstances, one book is as good, or as bad, as another. Because, as the debaters know from their own experience as readers, books are not pills that produce health when ingested in measured doses. Books do not shape character in any simple way -- if, indeed, they do so at all -- or the most literate would be the most virtuous instead of just the ordinary run of humanity with larger vocabularies. Books cannot mold a common national purpose when, in fact, people are honestly divided about what kind of country they want -- and are divided, moreover, for very good and practical reasons, as they always have been.

"For these burly and strenuous purposes, books are all but useless. The way books affect us is an altogether more subtle, delicate, wayward and individual, not to say private, affair. And that reading is being made to bear such an inappropriate and simplistic burden speaks to the poverty both of culture and of frank political discussion in our time.

"On his deathbed, Dr. Johnson -- once canonical, now more admired than read -- is supposed to have said to a friend who was energetically rearranging his bedclothes, 'Thank you, this will do all that a pillow can do'. One might say that the canon debaters are all asking of their handful of chosen books that it do a great deal more than any handful of books can do."

And, earlier on:

"...Now, I have to say that I dislike the radicals' vision intensely. How foolish to argue that Chekhov has nothing to say to a black woman -- or, for that matter, to me -- merely because he is Russian, long dead, a man. The notion that one reads to increase one's self-esteem sounds to me like more snake oil. Literature is not an aerobics class or a session at the therapist's. But then I think of myself as a child, leafing through anthologies of poetry for the names of women. I never would have admitted that I needed a role model, even if that awful term had existed back in the prehistory of which I speak, but why was I so excited to find a female name, even when, as was often the case, it was attached to a poem of no interest to me whatsoever?..."

"It's just that when it came to women, those jobs tended to pay minimum wage - if anything at all. (Factory workers and farmers' wives, for example.)"

Congratulations; you're a de-humanized materialist. You have no ability to engage in human relationships without being compensated. This is the end goal of leftism: to destroy any ability to care for anybody and to be an atomized individual.

WHO is supposed to compensate you for being the farmer's wife? WHO?

This is that emotional labor BS - if you love somebody, "society" doesn't owe you a pay check for listening to them. If you have a familial bond, the government doesn't owe you a subsidy for being a human being.

You make it sound as if being a farmer's wife doesn't involve anything more than cooking huge meals for farm workers.

I thought I made it clear that they often DID do dangerous farm work. If there wasn't any money left over for her, once the bills had been paid, maybe there wasn't any left for him either. Which is likely why hardly any men CHOOSE to be farmers anymore. As I was saying...

I could have said just "farmers" not "farmers' wives," but single women seldom CHOSE to become farmers before marrying - and if they had a choice of more than one man to marry, they likely wouldn't choose the more backbreaking lifestyle, as a rule. Again, that's "IF they had a choice."

From "Libertarians on the Prairie," (2016) by Christine Woodside (this is about Rose Wilder Lane):

"No one can tell me anything about the reasons young people leave farms," Rose wrote in 1925..."I know them all - the drudgery of farm tasks; the slavery to cows and pigs and hens; the helplessness under whims of weather that can destroy in a day the payment for a year's toil; the restlessness of ambition, with its sense of missing, on a farm, all the adventures and rewards that one dimly feels are elsewhere."

Btw, women, traditionally, have been the ones expected to work at volunteer jobs. So (in the past, at least) whenever middle-class women, in large numbers, started refusing to be volunteers on the grounds that they needed to work for money and they didn't want to exhaust themselves for more than 40 hours a week, they got accused of being selfish. As if the saying "women's work is never done" was something that shouldn't change. (How many people are truly PROUD of having no leisure time - aside from those whose work regularly gets praised in the newspapers?)

In 1997, Miss Manners answered a letter from a parent who complained that her son had been happily planning to do summer volunteer work, but got turned off - somewhat reasonably - by certain requirements.

http://www.spokesman.com/stories/1997/jun/27/expose-children-to-new-ideas-attitudes/

First half of MM's response:

"Like you, Miss Manners remembers when voluntary service was something for which people volunteered, rather than were sentenced to do.

"But a lot has happened since then, notably the attitude that it is foolish to work for free. It is not only modern greed that created this, but a long-term general dismissal of the value of volunteer work because it was done by unsalaried women.

"Surely the function of a mandatory educational system is to expose the young to ideas, fields, attitudes and information they might not otherwise encounter, or might even take pains to avoid. No doubt many of them do as little as possible for the service requirement and resolve never to return - but isn’t that true of much else they are supposed to be learning?..."

Oh, and can you believe THIS happened as recently as 1987?

https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/ct-xpm-1987-12-20-8704040364-story.html

Dear Miss Manners- "I would like your opinion on how to show appreciation for services rendered by the very helpful staff-two secretaries, a head maintenance man and two or three maintenance men under him-at the fairly large complex in which I rent an apartment.

"The custom of the few people I know is to give something at holiday time. They give $10 each to the men and cookies to the women. I wonder how many cookies the women can eat. And why the sex difference? One person said he gave money to the men and gift certificates to the women."

Gentle Reader: "Money for men and cookies for women? And where are the smelling salts for poor Miss Manners, who has just fallen over in a heap?

"She would have thought that the practice of treating workers according to their gender would have been stamped out by now. But your horrifying example illustrates how deeply ingrained is the misunderstanding on which this is based.

"It may even be that the 'gift certificates' one person gave the women were equal in value to the cash he gave the men. That still wouldn`t make it right.

"The distinction is based on the idea that it is not quite nice to give women money. And why is that? Because people have long held the myth, in the face of overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that women properly belong only in the social realm (where there is plenty of work, but without wages), while men divide their lives between that and the workaday world (where money is the chief measure of achievement). The fact that poor women worked for whatever money they could get since the world began did not interfere with this idea, but Miss Manners thought that the influx into the market of women from all levels might have.

"In the social world, money is a crass present. It means you have no idea what your friend would enjoy. In the business world, it is inappropriate to try to guess how an employee would enjoy having the money spent.

"Miss Manners urges you to give cash bonuses to all of these valued workers."

(end)

Btw, there was a paragraph missing from the 1997 column, right after where I snipped it. It should read:

"Reverse psychology is all very well, but Miss Manners doubts that removing the algebra requirement, for example, would inspire otherwise dilatory students with an interest in algebra. She therefore hopes that in spite of your son's disillusionment, you will stop short of condemning the effort of schools and religious organizations to teach through requiring one to donate services to the community."

Let me say, too, that since women have sons as often as they have daughters, they definitely need to speak up about male-bashing - or the ignoring of boys in school.

Not to mention that parents should SUPPORT schools that don't want clothes with ANY type of writing on them, whether the writing is obscene, bigoted, or is just commercial slogans. If boys can't wear shirts that say "underachiever and proud of it, man," girls can't be treated more leniently. (Same goes for the workplace. That is, if men can't talk about any controversial subject that isn't work-related, the women should be under the same rule.)

If you're struggling to find cool male protagonists in children's books you are not looking very hard.

No kidding. A look at the Newbery Award winners and finalists shows that there's plenty of quality children's literature written by men, with male protagonists.

The photo seems to be a display of books for girls, not the sum total of a bookstore's inventory. One might as well complain that "there are no books for adults" based on the picture.

This is ridiculous.

It is better to be ignored than to be constantly demonized and browbeaten.

Sorry; I refuse to be a victim or to be painted as a victim. If you're feeling "constantly demonized and browbeaten," you're welcome to wallow in it, but I'm happy to be a guy and don't feel penalized for my penis.

Crid, even lots of the stuff written in the past 20 years features male protagonists. The whole reason there's a display table of girls' books is because there are overall less books with female protagonists.

As I said, Percy Jackson, Harry Potter, Spiderwick... those are more recent books that have been made into major studio films.

And most of the picture books people give you as parents are the classics anyhow, which are very much in print. I got two hungry caterpillars and goodnight moons...

And as for kids shows, yeah there's Peppa but there's also Caillou.

Oh come on. As the mother of a 16 year old who reads at least two books a week (perhaps my proudest accomplishment, along with her extraordinary kindness), I just checked her shelves. They are filled with scores of current books with boys and young men as the protagonists. Girls and young women, too. When she was in elementary school, I had to search out ones that featured girls as the main actors solving crimes and having adventures - and not sitting around discussing clothes or boys or popularity. I'm glad there's now a lot of literature aimed at and featuring girls.women, a selection that didn't exist when I was her age. Some of it is silly, of course. But much of it is empowering and encouraging. I hope boys are also reading and learning from some of the books where they don't star. But any mom who claims she can't find books featuring boys as the masculine and positive protagonists is a mom who doesn't know how to do a simple google search or hasn't been in a bookstore...ever. It's flat-out false.

When i was growing up (before 1970) a Hugo award was a good indication that an author was worth reading. Now it is the opposite.

Um, Crid hasn't posted - yet.

And, to be charitable to Patsy, maybe what she really meant was that it was somewhat hard to keep her son from seeing the large number of books with dumb adult male characters - like Homer Simpson or Papa Bear from the Berenstain series. Clueless fictional PARENTS have been around since at least Mary Poppins (1930s), of course, but books where the majority of the men are practically useless didn't become common until decades(?) later. (The Berenstains started that trend, re dads, as early as 1967.)

If you like, check out William Leith's June 2009 article on such books. The reason I'm not posting the link is that it's from the Daily Mail, so, many would laugh at me if I did. (He cites books for preschoolers by the acclaimed writers Anthony Browne and Julia Donaldson.)

It may well be taboo these days, in children's literature, to have boring, dumb female characters without smart female characters in the same book - but we just need the same rule for male characters.

And, from gay composer Ned Rorem (he's now 95):

"Black Pride and Gay Pride are dangerous slogans, like White Pride or Straight Pride. Gay and Black are not achievements but accidents of birth. One must not be ashamed, but that's not the same thing as being proud. Pride should lie only in what one does with one's blackness or gayness."

My point in quoting Rorem, of course, is that if I had a daughter, I'd gently discourage her from having a similar "pride."

@Lenona,

The reason I'm not posting the link is that it's from the Daily Mail, so, many would laugh at me if I did.

This picture -or the direct link to the article- helps whenever someone disses a counterpoint because it's from someone or a website they don't like:

https://pbs.twimg.com/media/DpUTD54UwAYjQtO.jpg

> Crid hasn't posted - yet.

It takes a lot of work, but once you get someone all spun up in here, they can do the work themselves, and you save oodles of time.

Kevin:

Sorry; I refuse to be a victim or to be painted as a victim. If you're feeling "constantly demonized and browbeaten," you're welcome to wallow in it, but I'm happy to be a guy and don't feel penalized for my penis.

Well, goody-goody gumdrops for you, numbnuts.

I wasn't talking about myself, since I had presented hypothetical children's books titles. I was suggesting that perhaps young children might be demonized and browbeaten by being constantly told how much they suck for being boys.

And you don't have the option on being demonized. Regardless of whether you wring your hands in anguish or pooh-pooh it, if someone demonizes you, you are demonized. Being demonized does not depend upon the victim's reaction to it.

In a world where Bernie Sanders' math is off by 1200%, yes, we need everyone we can get.

Bernie The Inflatatorian

No. College did not cost $600 a year in 1975.

No. College did not cost $600 a year in 1975.

Gog_Magog_Carpet_Reclaimers at April 29, 2019 4:28 PM

Transferred to the University of Wyoming spring semester of 1976. Full tuition and fees was $217.35. Add eighty bucks for brand new books, yea, roughly 600 bucks a year.

I could make that in one month working as a cocktail waitress in my uncle’s bar and restaurant.
Now room and board was extra, of course, but that is kinda of a fixed cost for being a human being in the USA. It wasn’t extravagant by any means.

Thanks Isab.

And my apologies to Bernie. Lookin' good Bernster, ya got my vote buddy!!

Pattycakes-- you would not BELIEVE some of the things people have said about teh gays in recent times. Let alone the blacks. I mean…

> This is what feminism has
> become, because we indulged
> it when we should have
> quashed it.

That's just ludicrous.

Lenona-- Keeping up with everything you say here would take five hours a week. And that would come out of the time needed to make fun of the guys who say goofy stuff.

But-

> when women try to get jobs
> that pay well AND are dangerous,
> they tend to get treated pretty
> badly by angry men.

So do men. It's competitive out there.

In many (often youthful) girly hearts, there's a feminine (not feminist) presumption that men in the workplace are welcoming each other to every venture with affection and automatic respect. It's not like that. Men have been cutting each other down in the workplace since their first meetings on the Savannah.

If there were anything, ANYTHING that might bring an advantage in that context —including a feminine temperament— men have have tried it.

If you think the men in a workplace are fonder of each other than of you, you aren't paying attention.

If you're struggling to find cool male protagonists in children's books you are not looking very hard.
-NicoleK

You're being dishonest. Yes obviously you can find male heroes portrayed in a positive light in literature. But the wider point, which you are pretending to miss, is that in modern media and culture there is an attack on males.

> in modern media and culture
> there is an attack on males.

Maybe, but it's the bes time in history to be a man. Especially in the United States.

Crid, just so you know, I was responding to NicoleK when she confused you with Cousin Dave.

And, somehow I doubt that smearing feces on someone's locker - or acts that are just as atrocious (see "North Country" or read the book it's based on) - happen nearly as often to individual men who are not part of a minority group and who didn't get the job because of unfair family connections or what have you.

Also, while I certainly take over some threads, more than half the time, I don't post. I don't have the time.

In the meantime, here's that Daily Mail article.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/femail/article-1190141/Why-sons-books-tell-men-useless.html

And, for an out-of-print book that's worth hunting down - for boys and girls alike - here's the beginning of the 1953 book "Double Trouble for Rupert." The author (a woman) was from Wisconsin; I suspect that's where the stories take place. (There's one chapter that hints at local speech accents.)

"Wakefield is a keen town and I, Rupert Piper, and the guys have a swell time, usually. The girls are a trial, and sometimes they scandalize us. But all in all, we wouldn't trade Wakefield for San Francisco, or New York.

"Even Lincoln School has its good points, if you don't count too high. The sixth grade is the best grade, and our teacher, Miss Carlman, is keen. We spend a lot of time in school, and it's certainly no man's world there! We guys have one small corner in the schoolyard which belongs to us and to us alone, and that is the 'No Dames' corner. The girls can stand around and listen, but they cannot come in. This much respect they show us."
______________________________________

And, in the sequel, regarding Rupert's upcoming birthday party, his mother orders him to invite girls as well as boys.
_______________________________________

"Well," Clayte said, "it could be worse. What are having to eat?"

"Dear, dear ladies' food," I said. "We have to eat out of a dish, with a fork and spoon. We have to wipe our faces on our dainty napkins and say 'No, thank you,' if we are offered more."
__________________________________________

And, later on:

"The guys in the sixth grade were happy, our school was getting a new stove, until Smart Annabelle and Beautiful Sylvia dreamed up their dear-little-thank-you-note idea.

"All the girls were very happy, because it was worky. Work makes girls happy, and that's O.K. But they try to share their great happiness with others, and that is not O.K."
__________________________________________

However, from an Amazon review of another(?) book in the series:

"Reflecting back, I realize why I loved Rupert. He was a boy who made mistakes and admitted when he was wrong, but always found a way to make things right. Compared to now, this book is a poignant reminder of idyllic childhoods...the kind one wonders if they ever existed, but wishes they did.

"I read this book to my children, then ages 8 and 6, last summer. They were enchanted and hung on to every word. It's funny that some books have a universal charm that transcends time and space. Yes, the gender roles are dated, but considering the publishing date, I'd expect them to be. Look beyond that aspect to find the simplicity of friendship and loyalty. Enjoy the many funny moments which will touch and endear Rupert to new generations of children and even adults."
____________________________________________

Btw, the girls are often smarter than expected, but the women are a different story - at least once.

"And, somehow I doubt that smearing feces on someone's locker - or acts that are just as atrocious (see "North Country" or read the book it's based on) - happen nearly as often to individual men who are not part of a minority group and who didn't get the job because of unfair family connections or what have you."

Are unions involved, then I can see your point. US unions have a long history filled with fecal mater. That and murder. And yes a long long history of racism and sexism. But once you get out of union jobs then pretty much all of that goes away for both men and women, minorities and majorities.

I don't know, but I never heard of that, regarding unions.

Maybe Melinda Gates' new book will shed some light on the harassment issue in non-union workplaces. (Not that I've had a chance to flip through it, yet.)

"Maybe, but it's the bes time in history to be a man. Especially in the United States." ~Cridster

Citation needed.

All I can say Lenona is then you haven't been paying any attention. There is no question especially today that unions are bastions of racism, sexism, and most other vile forms of bigotry. Weaponized fecal matter too. If you are getting poop smeared on your locker 99% chance it was a union guy doing it.

A little bit on bias from the International Lord of Hate...

> more than half the
> time, I don't post

I wish you posted more. (Or thirty sisters with your perspective, like olden days.) But even at this rate, your responses are thoughtful and detailed, and it takes more time to answer them than is available.

> Citation needed.

Just for example, there are feckless ninny-men who complain about challenging times despite earning $165,000 a year.

Thanks, Crid.

Point those people out Crid, you lying sack. As for your unsubstantiated claim, the male suicide rate sure doesn't support it.

Tempting, right?

You appear to have a reasonable command of the english language Crid. Have you ever considered using it to communicate? Or has the Alzheimer gotten so bad you can only write in gibberish?

Pakliskinitoff vickelspintz; applerplackintory quinlohootz, guxainticlatvitor spizilgank your famously tiny sex unit.

Everybody knows.

And you are offended when people recognize you are a troll?

Not really, after the targeting is taken into account.

Listen, you came into my life describing my thoughts as inconsistent and self-contradictory. You refused to offer examples (despite literally thousands of comments here), and I was supposed to be cool with that. For some reason. And now I'm "a lying sack," with no cite. And a "troll."

Not even saying you're wrong about the troll part, but it doesn't much sting.

And there are some more lies. I've offered numerous examples. If you don't want to be called a troll then stop acting like one. It's as simple as that. Get over your butthurt Crid.

> If you don't want to
> be called a troll

Naw, it's cool. By you? No prob