Pink unicorns and pastel bling: Maureen Johnson calls out gendered covers
When author Maureen Johnson tweeted on
Tuesday, “I do wish I had a dime for every email I get that says,
‘Please put a non-girly cover on your book so I can read it. – signed, A
Guy’,” she issued a follow-up challenge. “Also: PROJECT! Redesign covers by Literary Dudes. Imagine they have been reclassified as by and for women.” The “coverflip” responses that emerged are worth a gander.
Johnson discussed the problem of stereotypically “girly” packaging on The Huffington Post:
…If you are a female author, you are much more likely to
get the package that suggests the book is of a lower perceived quality.
Because it’s ‘girly,’ which is somehow inherently different and easier
on the palate. A man and a woman can write books about the same subject
matter, at the same level of quality, and that woman is simple more
likely to get the soft-sell cover with the warm glow and the feeling of
smooth jazz blowing off of it.
Let’s pretend ‘girly’ packaging does appeal to the vast majority of women. In that case, all books would look like this. Jonathan Franzen‘s Freedom really would feature a little heart
on its cover. Despite those emails from wistful male readers in
Johnson’s inbox, women are the ones buying and reading books. Women are the market for books, or at least for fiction.
Years ago, Ian McEwan proclaimed in The Guardian, “Reading groups, readings, breakdowns of book sales all tell the same story: when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”
Why do men get the serious covers? Why do they escape the “girly”
treatment? Not just because society takes men more seriously or because
men won’t read books with fluffy covers—though that’s part of it.
Rather, women don’t give a fuck about “girly” covers. We don’t pick up a
book because pink unicorns frolic on the front. If we did, I promise
you: even Philip Roth novels would feature some pastel bling.
Abigail Grace Murdy is a former Melville House intern.
Needed: Gender-neutral covers, especially for boys
“If The Hunger Games
had featured Katniss on the cover instead of a gold medallion against a
black background, sales to boys would have been fractional.”
Shortly after
Jane Eyre was first published, a skeptical
male critic picked up a copy and started reading. “I found myself unable
to put it down. At midnight I was on the moors with Jane Eyre, and at
4:00 A.M. I married Mr. Rochester,” he
wrote.
You won’t hear boys today issuing statements like that, partly because
of the way books featuring female protagonists are packaged.
Novelist Alison Croggon participated in a panel on gender and YA literature at the Reading Matters conference last weekend, and yesterday she described her experience in The Guardian.
“A shelf of YA books might still suggest a world in which boys and
girls make their reading choices based upon their gender. Almost from
birth, readers are coralled into the pink and blue worlds of sparkle for girls and adventure for boys,” Croggon wrote. Obviously these stereotypes are problematic, but they’re especially problematic for boys.
Girls tend to read widely, glibly crossing the gender divide. They
can read “boy books” without encountering social stigma. Not so for
boys, who learn early on to feel ashamed of dipping into a “girl book.”
And what determines the girl-ness or boy-ness of a book? The cover—not
the content. As Elizabeth Bluemle lamented in Publisher’s Weekly,
If The Hunger Games had featured Katniss on the
cover instead of a gold medallion against a black background, sales to
boys would have been fractional. This is a frustrating truth. And it’s
our fault. We steer kids—no, we steer boys—away from stories they might respond to from a very early age.
“If you categorize books as for boys or for girls, the message is
that boys don’t need to be concerned about the female experience,” said
YA author Libba Bray at the Reading Matters panel. In a
climate of increased violence against women, boys should be encouraged
to reading books that will help them not avoid but instead empathize with their female peers.
YA author Shannon Hale described a typical book signing on her blog:
Most of my line is made up of young girls with their
mothers, teen girls alone, and mother friend groups. But there’s usually
at least one boy with a stack of my books. This boy is anywhere from
8-19, he’s carrying a worn stack of the Books of Bayern, and
he’s excited and unashamed to be a fan of those books. As I talk to him,
95% of the time I learn this fact: he is home-schooled.
If we want more boys in the book signing line—marrying Mr. Rochester, you might say—we need more gender-neutral covers.
Abigail Grace Murdy is a former Melville House intern.
Something’s…different.
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