Teaching Feminism: Summer Reading, Girls Vs. Boys

Submitted by Mastodon on Thu, 2012-07-12 18:45

Article here. Excerpt:

'Many teachers and parents believe that we should select books that boys will be interested in because girls will read them no matter what. While I do believe this is true, it is dangerous to keep pushing male-oriented books on our young female students. Girls are already so overwhelmed with all of the classics written by (and for) dead, white men. They encounter important heros in literature such as Guy Montag, Holden Caulfield, and Jay Gatsby to name a few. They also encounter their helpless and often short-lived female counterparts who generally serve to inspire or otherwise drive the male hero of the story with no true agency themselves. While these books are important for students to read, if we don’t counter the images of women we show young female students in literature, we risk sending the message that women aren’t good for much besides inspiring men.'

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Comments

I get the distinct impression that "the classics" as they are called are far from being assigned reading these days in colleges and high schools.

Most airlines' emergency instruction cards and procedures were probably written by now-dead white men. Guess that those things are not that important, either, given the fact that, well, they were written by dead white men. E=mc2 was written (well, discovered) by a... dead white man... guess that isn't a very important thing for that reason, too, huh? Same goes for such things as, well, calculus, without which we wouldn't have... well, modern society, which includes vast large-scale plumbing and electrical distribution systems. All those nasty dead white males came up with all those silly, dull mathematical formulas, may as well just forget about them. And all those books written by dead white men about modern anatomy and physiology and chemistry and biology that has allowed for those silly, "male-dominated" fields (well, at least for now, anyway) like... medicine. All very silly, since it's all so white male and all. Silly, silly. Yes, anything written by a dead white male can be safely ignored. Wouldn't want to pollute the minds of so many delicate young girls with such things. They're likely to feel inferior when confronted with literature by someone like, well, William Shakespeare, another nasty old dead white male, or anything that was written by a dead white male, like, I dunno, "Gray's Anatomy", it might be too intimidating a thing for them. Or philosophically, can't have women spending too much time with Plato's Dialogues, that would be a waste of time since he was a... white male... and in any case, what could a young woman possibly learn from such a thing as that?

Good freaking grief.

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Submitted by Matt on Fri, 2012-07-13 01:32

What bothers me is that they think boys can only be into a book if it's written by a white man. Harry Potter is a book series I'm sure many boys would love to read as school projects. It was written by a woman. But apparently we can't use that because "it is dangerous to keep pushing male-oriented books on our young female students. Girls are already so overwhelmed with all of the classics written by (and for) dead, white men.". These bigots have no imagination.

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Submitted by Kratch on Fri, 2012-07-13 04:36

When you've got the "Vagina Monologues"?

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Submitted by el cid on Fri, 2012-07-13 12:51

with what boys have to see in television these days and the ammount of ego boosting that goes on everywhere for girls they have the cahonies to say this? really?
pretty soon it wont be about the quality of the literature that counts just that it was written by a female feminist writer post 1960....(post patriarchy influence...)

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Submitted by Rog on Fri, 2012-07-13 16:46

Those feminists who fail to read Shakespeare because he's a dead white male are missing out on great feminist role models:

Goneril and Regan betrayed their father King Lear, the patriarch of the Lear family.

Lady MacBeth plotted with her husband to kill the king.

The Weird Sisters in MacBeth. Witches famous for chanting "Double, double, toil and trouble."

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Submitted by el cid on Sat, 2012-07-14 05:04