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Wednesday, February 8, 2012. New Comics TODAY!

 

Gender and Reading Habits Part One: Let's Hear it for the Boys

By Kristy Valenti

Tuesday March 25, 2008 10:00:00 am

*Disclaimer: The hard data sources I've been able to find will be included in the text or in the footnotes of this piece: unfortunately, a lot of what I'm going to be writing about here is more observational and anecdotal. Also, I'm going to make generalized statements about gender: for example, I'm going to be mostly talking about boys and superhero comics in this column. I'll be addressing other kinds of comics and other kinds of genders in the next column. As such, what I'm saying won't apply to everyone's individual experiences: they're just trends that some professionals who work with books and graphic novels and I have observed. Some other grains of salt you may want to take with this piece is that everyone I talked personally to about this lives in Seattle and a.) Seattle is the second-most childless city in America and b.) is filled with book-lovers. [1]

If one visits ERIC, the Education Resources Information Center, on the Internet, he or she will find scores of articles on why, in the U.S., boys lag behind girls in reading. Many of these articles suggest using graphic novels as a lure for boys, [2] but it is Christine Welldon's popular "Addressing the Gender Gap in Boys' Reading,"[3] that's of particular relevance. Welldon invented a club aimed at the older elementary school grades to help close the gap between girls' and boys' reading habits. She awarded symbolic colored belts, as in martial arts, to express levels of advancement, held discussion groups, did exercises to hone the students' research skills, threw pizza parties and handpicked popular kids to help recruit others. In the PA announcements to promote "The Cool Guys Reading Club", Welldon wrote that only boys could attend; literally, no girls allowed. The club was successful in getting boys excited about reading. Her advice to educators wishing to start a "Cool Guys Reading Club" of their own focuses on moving the books away from the main collection and giving boys visual feedback on their reading accomplishments.

It's hard not to see parallels to certain comic shops, isn't it?

There have been times where I've received the message in subtle and not-so-subtle ways that, because I'm a woman, superhero comics (Hi, Dirk!) are not made for me. As such, I'm starting to understand something of the "boys club" bunker mentality that some mainstream comics readers exhibit after a discussion with local teen librarian Jennifer Bisson (her opinions, she was careful to say, were her own, and didn't reflect that of her employer). Apparently, not only do boys have a more difficult time early on learning to read, of those who do read for pleasure, many stop when they reach the preteen years (she expressed this as the age in which boys catch up in social skills with girls: I've heard this expressed by others as the age in which boys get interested in girls). She theorized that the reason that boys stop reading is because, early on, reading is feminized: not only are educators at the elementary level primarily women, but librarians, as a rule, are too. (And, as I'll discuss in the second part of this article, moms tend to buy books and reading materials for everyone in the family.) This is a conclusion that many others, in their articles collected on ERIC, came to as well.

Bisson said at that point, boys who do read either become more interested in nonfiction or are "into fantasy/sci-fi, which is some of the only stuff published that is geared towards guys." She also explained that this is just at the age in which YA fiction fails them: it's pretty much aimed at girls. (One can see the same kind of chicken-and-egg market forces here as with mainstream comics until very recently: boys don't read YA books, so YA books aren't created for them; girls don't read comics, so comics aren't created for them.) Bisson and the other teen librarians do the best they can to find teen books with male protagonists: they have to actively search for covers with pictures of boys on them to face out. (Last night I was talking to my male friend who works at a big-chain bookstore. I was sketching out my ideas for this article, and immediately, without me telling him what Bisson said, he came to the same conclusion. "There aren't books for boys in the teen section," he said. "They're all for girls. A few years ago, James Patterson did a spy series for teen boys. It was reclassified as for adults, because that's a larger market." He also named a recent fantasy series with a teen male protagonist that didn't do well.)[4]






Ironically, of course, even the superhero comics, who hold the promise of "boys only" by being typified as adolescent male power fantasies, actually sort of neglects the group in question as well — let's just call it 12-17-year-old boys, because that's the junior-high- to high-school-aged group that Bisson and my friend seem to be talking about here. According to Valerie D'Orazio at Occasional Superheronie:

I recently acquired some demographic information from a publicly-traded comic book company. This information is not at all top-secret but available to those who know where to look for it. The portrait that it painted of the average mainstream comic book reader is as follows: Male, 20-25, video-game player, disposable income, "techie," single. What is the breakdown of male versus female readership? More than 90% of the readers of mainstream superhero comics are male. [The bolding is hers.]

(Some good points were raised in the comments responding to D'Orazio's post about the methodology of the source of this information, but but Johanna Draper Carlson's numbers, although older, corroborate this.)

Of course, this is all fairly reductive, and doesn't account for a lot of things, like girls and women who like superhero comics (Hi, When Fangirls Attack!), nonfiction and indy comics and manga, boys who are eager readers across genres, gender cross-identification, breeds of comics publishers such as First Second that have begun to put out graphic novels that could appeal quite nicely to both 11-17-year-old boys and girls, etc. But they are some talking points, and putting comics reading in the larger context of how people read can shed some light on the subject.

On a personal level, I know that I've maturely reacted to the superhero-comics-are-not-for-girls (Hi, Kevin Smith's Black Cat miniseries!) meme with, "I don't NEED your stinky superhero comics. Look over here, I have girl-friendly indy comics and girl-friendly foreign comics and girl-friendly webcomics and girl-friendly manga and …" It's not too hard to imagine a similar reaction from the other point of view, magnified by an entire book industry.

Next time: Gender and Reading Habits Part Two: Let's Hear it for the Girls

1. According to "Seattle in Focus: A Profile from Census 2000": Residents of Seattle are young, mobile, and mostly childless. By a wide margin, people in their late 20s and early 30s make up Seattle's largest age groups. Because of this age tilt, fewer than 20 percent of city households contain children, and Seattle households are smaller than those in any other large U.S. city." Also, according to Julie Bicks' New York Times article, Seattle is book town: http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/09/business/09book.html?_r=1&oref=slogin
2. Author Jon Scieszka has also started a website to help encourage boys to read: http://www.guysread.com/
3. Christine Welldon. "Addressing the Gender Gap in Boys' Reading," Teacher Librarian. Seattle: Apr 2005. Vol. 32, Iss. 4, p. 44-45 (2 pp.)
4. He was also careful to clarify that this was what he observed at his own store, located in Seattle.

Previous article: Matt Kindt, part two
Next article: Gender and Reading Habits, part two

Kristy Valenti currently works for The Comics Journal and Fantagraphics Books, Inc.

Uncharted Territory is © Kristy Valenti, 2010

 

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