Last weekend Katy
Guest, literary editor of the
UK’s Independent on Sunday, touted an online campaign
called Let Books Be Books, which petitions publishers to put an end to
children’s books marketed specifically
to either boys or girls. She then announced proudly that henceforth her publication will refuse even to review such
books:
So I promise now that the newspaper
and this website will not be reviewing any book which is explicitly aimed at
just girls, or just boys. Nor will The Independent’s books section.
And nor will the children’s books blog at Independent.co.uk. Any Girls’
Book of Boring Princesses that crosses my desk will go straight into the
recycling pile along with every Great Big Book of Snot for Boys.
Another blow struck for censorship in the name of
politically correct social engineering.
Of course, this isn’t technically censorship or book-banning,
although I’m confident people like Guest would absolutely favor that if they
had the power. She has the right to set any review policy she wishes (even if
it leaves her readers less informed), and publishers can continue to publish
what they wish. Nonetheless it sends a clear message – or more precisely, a
clear threat: progressive reviewers will ensure that ideas that don’t conform
to the “correct” gender politics are ignored.
This sort of politics is nothing new in the world of book
reviewing. The New York Times Book Review,
arguably the most influential in the world, routinely ignores books by many conservative
authors, for example, even ones that make the NYT’s own bestseller list. That paper just doesn’t make a bold
admission about it like Katy Guest did.
She singled out for condemnation Michael O’Mara, owner of
Buster Books, for continuing to publish gender-specific books. He
responded by saying that such books sell very well:
It’s a fact of life how a very
large percentage of people shop when buying for kids, do it by sex. We know for
a fact that when they are shopping on Amazon, they quite often type in “books
for boys” and “books for girls.” All boys don’t like one thing and all girls
the other, but the fact is lots of boys like the same things and lots of girls
like the same things. We can’t ignore the fact that they are definitely
different.
Guest isn’t ignoring that difference – she’s steamrolling
right over it. A firm believer that gender differences are socialized, Guest
says that in her own ‘70s childhood brothers and sisters shared the same books and
toys, and “there was no obvious disintegration of society as a result.”
But there clearly has
been an obvious disintegration of society. The feminist campaign for equal
rights was one thing, but anyone who thinks that this decades-long progressive obsession
with erasing the very concept of gender has led to anything but confusion,
anger, and bitterness on both sides of the gender line is living a willful
delusion.
Guest anticipated my argument: “There are those,” she wrote,
“who will say that insisting on gender-neutral books and toys for children is a
bizarre experiment in social engineering by radical lefties and paranoid ‘feminazis’
who won’t allow boys to be boys, and girls to be girls.” Her sarcastic
exaggeration doesn’t change the fact that it absolutely is social engineering. There’s nothing wrong with gender-neutral
books per se; the social engineering
lies in promoting them while burying the ideas and speech that stand in the way
of her utopian vision.
And yet even as she takes
umbrage at “the limiting effects” of gender-specific books, she hypocritically
asserts that “books, above all things, should be available to any child who is
interested in them.” Yes, they should be – including the ones she is determined
to help stamp out, because some children and parents want those. The
marketplace should reflect that choice, not just what Guest and her ilk in
publishing and the media deem socially acceptable. Let books be books, indeed.
(This article originally appeared here on Acculturated, 3/21/14)