Last summer, Jackie wrote about the Scholastic set of books titled How to Survive Anything. If you check out the indexes to the two books, you see major sexism going on, don’t you?
After she shared this, the post went wild, and Scholastic issued a statement that they’d produce no more copies of those books. Because, you know, sexism makes people angry.
So imagine how exciting it was to see Karen post this image on Twitter this morning:
The book on the left is called The Pocket Guide to Boy Stuff and the book on the right is called The Pocket Guide to Girl Stuff. The image comes from the blog “Eyes See The World Spinning Around,” which posted about this to no comments (though there was a Reddit discussion over the post).
This is unacceptable, yes?
While these are meant to be gift books — and the reviews suggest they’re over the top ridiculous on many levels — accepting this sort of every day sexism and continued belief in certain gender roles allows it to continue in bigger ways. What else is there really to say?
This is just sad. I remember as a kid (my, how grown-up we are at twenty, Kaye), my sister and I would always go for the Boy's Book for anything first because we knew there would be more stuff involved. We were never pleased by the usual crushes and friendship break-ups and fashion ideal other books seemed to be shoving down our throats.
I just looked at the covers of the books and they almost made me gag. Very outdated and stereotyped. It is sad in this day and age, that we haven't grown past this.
The first item in the girls' book is boys? Ugh.
I don't even know what to say. So girls are supposed to strive to improve their handwriting, presumably so they can look pretty whilst they do their boyfriends homework, and boys are supposed to learn to blow stuff up? WTH?
To tell you the truth, when I was growing up I would have been all over the Girls version. And we all know that there are plenty of girls today who would feel the same way! That being said, now that I'm a mom, handing books like these to my kiddos and showing them that "this is what girls like" and "this is what boys like" makes my skin crawl. But does that mean that books like these shouldn't exist? No way – plenty of kids will still get into them. We just need to do a good job of including variety and balance in their reading diets!