Abdo Publishing has a line of children’s science books, including one titled “Bugs”, which a seven year old girl, Parker Dains, read with enthusiasm. And then she discovered that the series was called “the Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys“. So she wrote to the publisher, as uppity young ladies are wont to do.
So she wrote to Abdo, telling the publisher that “I really enjoyed the section on Glow in the Dark bugs and the quizzes at the end”, but that “when I saw the back cover title, it said ‘Biggest Baddest Books for Boys’ and it made me very unhappy. It made me very sad because there’s no such thing as a boy book. You should change from ‘Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys’ into ‘Biggest, Baddest Books for Boys and Girls’ because some girls would like to be entomologists too.”
It’s unbelievable what the publisher did next.
According to the local paper, the publisher responded and told her she had made “a very good point”. “After all, girls can like ‘boy’ things too,” wrote Abdo, adding that it had “decided to take your advice”.
Dains has since received an early delivery of the series, which is now called simply Biggest, Baddest Books. “You can see that we dropped the ‘For Boys’ from the series name and we all agree here at Abdo that it was a very smart idea on your part. No other school, library or kid will be able to buy these books for another couple of months, so you are the first to read them,” it wrote.
Holy crap. Somebody did the right thing for a change. I am blown away.
I’m waiting for the usual suspects to show up to tell us how the company was hounded and forced to bow under the heel of an evil 7 yo feminist looking for things to be offended about.
Also, YAY for Abdo. If I were in the States I’d look out for their books for the kids.
That’s some welcome news! Good for Abdo and what a nice deed by Parker.
Too bad my happiness was undercut a little by reading that first comment.
Some girls would like to be entomologists too…. especially after they have read about the Portia labiata spider (aka eight-legged cat) that was used as a template for the alien organism in “Echopraxia” http://www.ba-bamail.com/Content_5428/5_Animals_That_are_Smarter_than_They_Look!.aspx
Also, see Peter Watts´”Echopraxia” – page 220 http://books.google.se/books?id=fOluAwAAQBAJ&pg=PA220&lpg=PA220&dq=portia,+eight-legged+cat&source=bl&ots=_PLz6EmBv2&sig=yfJhf4DoW6fcJvg4QrkVRuEjujQ&hl=sv&sa=X&ei=QmqAVKW6HoONywO514KIAg&ved=0CDwQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=portia%2C%20eight-legged%20cat&f=false
I’m disappointed. That company should have doubled down! Their rights are being oppressed! We can’t let those LIEbrals take over our book learning! Feminists have gone too far!
/sarcasm
Followed a link from the Grauniad page. There’s a couple of petitions—one for toys, one for books—on the Let Toys Be Toys website.
So very close. I’m glad they did the right thing, and maybe it’s a nitpick, but with scare quotes becoming so commonplace, and when writing to a child, that line’s a bit off. Maybe it assumes that the reader will realize the quotes mean that they’re aren’t really boy things, but I’d rather they just left it out entirely, or went with something along the lines of what the seven year old girl said: ” there’s no such thing as a boy book.” It’s like they mostly got the message, and they did the right thing, which is big: changing your entire line of books and dropping something that, sadly, was probably pretty good marketing in order to be inclusive is fantastic, but they also still haven’t quite made it up to this little girl’s level of understanding. Or maybe there’s more in the full text of their letter to her that ameliorates that sentence entirely and I’m just being overly judgmental.
@gussnar Cut the publisher some slack. The 7yr in question is *obviously* smart enough to understand scare quotes.
Now if we could just convince the toy industry (and the retailers, and the advertisers, and the charities) to stop segregating. All it does is teach boys to feel disdain for girls and contempt for feminine-coded things.
@Marshall handheld Flax
I agree with @gussnarp, I immediately stumbled over that part and thought they still made it sound like the default target audience was still boys, and they now merely acknowledge that there can be exceptions. Not happy.
@Saad:
Unfortunately, it’s not just the first one. Let’s hope those sourpusses get drowned out.
So I’m going to go just slightly off topic because I’ve been thinking about Legos lately. Truth be told, as long as stores are still segregating toys by boy and girl sections, and as long as many American parents still only want to buy girl toys for their girls and boy toys for their boys, and as long as some kids prefer them, I’ve no problem with the Lego Friends line. The company wants to expand their market to include more girls, and they did it the way marketing people are wont to do these things. But I do have a problem with that being their only effort to reach out to girls, and I think what they ought to do will A. Only help sales, not hurt them. B. Let girls have Legos that reflect them positively without limiting them, and C. Accurately reflect the world to boys, girls, and their parents, helping them all to see the world a little differently.
I have two kids of Lego age. I have fond memories of Legos. I have enough income to afford to buy some Legos (but not the Millenium Falcon). So naturally, there are thousands of Lego pieces all over my house. More than a hundred are minifigs. About ten are women or girls. In many sets there are no female minifigs at all. In others, there’s a token woman. Then there’s Wonder Woman, Princess Amidala, the characters who happen to be women but are mainly just part of the licensing. And with the airplane sets the women are the flight attendants, not the pilots.
So what do I think Lego should do? I think they should make half of all their future minifigs women. Construction set? Half the construction workers are women. Airplane set? Make one of the pilots a woman and one of the flight attendants a man. Police set? Not just a token woman, half women. Half the crooks, half the cops, half the bystanders. How hard is that?
I wouldn’t cut the publisher much, if any, slack.
The one thing I discovered when running tuition for schoolkids aged all the way from 5 to 18 is that you can’t make any distinctions of this kind. When it comes to keeping-kids-quiet-while-waiting and not disturbing the kids currently busy with their tuition I found a few sure-fire books and poster topics would keep just about anyone happy, Bugs, flags, maps, and solar system/space stuff kept younger and older, girls and boys alike fascinated. I actually resorted to using some of the waiting area materials as adjuncts to tuition materials, though the large Flags of the World poster one of my kids had brought back from visiting the UN wasn’t very movable.
And the advice from our trainer to give stickers to everyone regardless of age for appropriate completion of tasks was spot on. (The idea being that kids who aren’t doing well in middle school are _not_ beyond that sort of thing, because they missed out on that kind of appropriate reinforcement when they were little and needed it most. He was absolutely right.) Once again, predicting who likes what is futile. I once had a student nagging me to see if I had any more of some particular stickers left in my bottom drawer stash. Most upset when I confirmed that they were all gone. He was an absolutely ordinary 15 year old, devastated. He was “collecting” them. The stickers were based on “Noddy and friends” or some similar kids’ book (a once-off special I’d managed to get cheaply when they were discontinued).
Let kids like what they like, when they like it. I know parents and others expect boys to like sharks and snakes and spiders and slimy things and girls not to. A child is not a statistical average so that’s no help for individuals. As it happens, I’m not convinced that there’s a lot of difference in the liking. There is a bit of a difference in the topics they like to write about.
From the [New post] email:
Why you clickbaiting monster, you!
Anyways, I heart this story. I mean, not only is it a generally great thing to do to aim for gender neutrality in things like this, but it also just makes sense from a business perspective. I mean, seriously, putting “for boys” on the end of the title adds nothing to the content and basically excludes half of your possible market. That’s just silly marketing. Besides, if a “for x” was needed, we had a decent solution for that in the 90’s – I had a few joke books in my late single digit years; “Smart Alec’s [adjective] jokes for kids.” That worked fine as far as I could tell.
@6 gussnarp
I thought the same thing when reading that. I would have settled for them just adding the obvious following point:
“After all, girls can like ‘boy’ things too, and vice versa”.
It’s always much harder for people to acknowledge that second part of the equation…
Best news I’ve read all week.
Ok ok, I’ll stop being a spoil sport, it is good news… :)
Not only did they do the right thing, but they did it without drama, sturm & drang, delays or anything else that normally accompanies these requests. I’m willing to forgive the “‘boy’ things” bit given that they obviously got the message (and whether they meant it to or not, bonus points for going straight to the trans-friendly option of eliminating gender terms at all on the covers; they didn’t just go with her suggestion, they improved upon it).
There is a comic book series by a grad student at the AMNH, Carly Tribull, that my daughter loves unreservedly. It isn’t expensive and can be purchased here. For more about Carly, read here.
I should have mentioned that the series is about entomology, which is what Carly studies.
I was also a bit primed by PZ’s linkbaity above the fold bit. Here’s what it looked like to me before I scrolled down:
I was not prepared for anything good when I scrolled down.
Good on the publisher. Bad that this is still even a thing.
@21 EK — oh it’s still a thing alright. Just last night I was on Amazon looking at science and chess gifts for a 5-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl, and I found it jaw-dropping how many of the science kits and chess instruction books say “for boys”. Naturally I chose those that didn’t, even if it was for the boy, so I suspect (or hope) nowadays that they do themselves a marketing disservice for continuing to assume that science and chess only appeal to boys. I did recently give my girlfriend’s teenage son a book titled “How To Beat Your Dad At Chess”, mainly because it’s good, and he should be able to beat his Dad soon (it’ll take a while longer than that before he beats me, heh heh) — but naturally my girlfriend didn’t care for the title one bit, and immediately took to online chess lessons so that she could continue whipping his ass. Her point is well taken, and perhaps she should contact the publisher….why can’t it be “How To Beat Your Parents At Chess”?
This was enough to draw tears from me today. :) Because I, secretly, am an entomologist, too. Or almost. I would be, if I’d finish my education for once. Because BUGS ARE AWESOME!
FREEZE PEACH…err…FREE SPRINTING!!!!1But seriously, good on Abdo. My six-year old daughter LOVES bugs, the weirder the better.
Giliell @1:
Or that she didn’t really write the letter. Instead, it was written by an ebil feminazi relative posing as Parker.
I can’t believe the comments at the Guardian by pompous know-nothings who have proclaimed it must have been the girl’s parents who wrote to the publisher. I saw Parker interviewed on a TV news segment and she is a little firecracker! There is no doubt she has both the language skills and the moxie to do this wonderful thing.
A pox on those commenters!
Looks like the paper missed the point too by saying “a very good point”. “After all, girls can like ‘boy’ things too,” Who says these are ‘boy’ things?
Today, I’m willing to take “good” and not insist on perfect. Good on the publisher, not only for making the change, but for rewarding the courage of a 7-year old girl and encouraging her interest.
My wife loves bugs! I’ve seen her elbow schoolkids out of the way to hold a Madagascar hissing roach. If she’d had more encouragement when she was younger, she probably would have been an entomologist off in the wilds of Borneo.
Good for Abdo and Ms Dains !
On the wording nitpick, I would have phrased it something like “… which have historically, without thinking, and in ignorance of reality, thought to be just for boys. We sincerely apologize for having continued that mythology, and thank you for pointing out how silly we have been.” (I suppose that might require a bit of tweaking so as to not be too challenging for a 7 yo?)
As long as we’re talking about encouraging basic human dignity for everyone, I don’t think I’m going to use Zillow anymore:
http://laist.com/2014/12/02/lawsuit_accuses_zillow_of_frat_boy.php
My guess is they did it, not because it was right, but because it was profitable. I’ll bet they didn’t make the decision until the accountants and the PR men had played around with the spreadsheets for a while.
@22: Yes, I knew that :-/. I’m bemoaning that fact. I grew up in the era of books like “Electronics for Boys” (don’t recall what the girls’ equivalent was — wasn’t paying attention). And then I married a girl who does electronics. When we were expecting our first child, and were thinking through how to raise it, and of course were determined that it wouldn’t make any difference which sex it turned out to be.
Said kid just turned 30. And I am alternately astonished and pissed off that the world hasn’t caught up to what seemed obvious to me 30 years ago.
Mildlymagnificent @ 12
“Let kids like what they like, when they like it. ”
This made me smile because my 15 year old grandson still loves Disney and Sesame Street.
He would never admit it to his peers, but when his 2 year old sister is watching Mickey Mouse Club or the Sesame Street version of Peter and the Wolf he’s right there cuddling on the couch with her to watch the show.
His high school band will be playing at Disney World during spring break and he is beyond excited about it.
Eamon Knight @ 32
Agreed! My hubby the engineer bought electronics kits for our kids, and it was the oldest daughter who loved them. She happily joined him on any science project while her siblings ran off to do other things.
She’s 37 now, and holds degrees in engineering, computational neuroscience and neurobiology.
She’s been working for the NSF on a project to interest more women and minorities in STEM, and was just hired by a company that contracts with the government to work on a project that will contribute to the president’s brain initiative.
I’m a strong believer in encouraging kids to seek employment in what they are passionate about. One never knows where that passion may lead.
Grumpyoldfart,
Who said an action cannot be both right and profitable?
I find it some what astonishing that it is the conservative pro-free market capitalist that is so resistive to change. All of the social changes that are advocated have as one of their outcomes an expansion of their market. For the life of me I do not see why they persist in this reluctance to change. In this case it took a kid to write a letter to the publisher with a simple request of making a small change to point out the obvious benefit of increased marketing potential at no cost to them. change = more profits.
uncle frogy
Of COURSE one of the comments at the linked article is making the claim that the parents probably are the one who wrote the letter, or advised her to write the letter. I really hope that person is not a parent. It astonishes me how often adults underestimate the intelligence of children. I’m not even a parent, and I understand how incredibly observant and bright kids can be, often even more observant than adults, because children have far less to filter out. I bet the person who left this comment also believes children should be seen, and not heard, or some variation on that, because clearly a child’s insight is not wanted (to this sort of person). Phooey, I say. Phooey.
I tips me hat to the outspoken sproglet.
I am rather emotional today due to….well…because life. This made me cry happy tears. A little bit of good news goes a long way some days. This kinda touches home for me as well – I was a “tomboy” growing up – I was fascinated with critters of all kinds from the day I could crawl. I can’t tell you how many times I startled my poor mom by bringing home any manner of fauna – from wild birds (yes…I could catch wild birds with my hands) to grasshoppers, giant toads, lizards, and even a baby rattlesnake. While I grew into a woman who enjoys makeup, fine handbags, good perfume, and spa treatments (ha…all back when I wasn’t dangerously poor as I am now) I still maintained my love of critters. In my late 20’s I had quite a menagerie of insects and reptiles – a large colony of Madagascar hissing cockroaches, walking stick bugs, a tarantula, monitor lizards (my favorite), smaller boas and pythons (never kept anything large enough to harm a rabbit, small dog, or FSM forbid – a child). Due to cost and time I had to give that all up years ago – but people are always shocked when they find out my love of nature. I never did it for shock value, but for my own fascination with these beautiful creatures – yet when my hobby would finally be divulged I was often met with revulsion and disgust….just once I would have loved for someone to be interested and ask questions. Anyway….while this girl would have rather been a herpetologist kudos to Parker and more kudos to the publisher – this really did reach through to me and it was much needed. Thank you for sharing.
A nice little serving of joy and hope in a week otherwise filled with despair. Thanks for bringing it to my attention. :)
The 30-year-old mentioned by Eamon in #32 had a toy plastic tea set that was part of the toy kitchen ensemble that he and his brother enjoyed playing with. When I recently brought the tea set out for some young kids to play with, one of the parents said, “Oh good, girls’ toys! I only brought boys’ toys.” My first response was to say that I didn’t think cooking play was inherently gendered, and then to followup by pointing out that, in fact, this particular tea set was co-owned by 2 boys.
I’m with gussnarp at #6. Since when are bugs boy things? They are just things, not boy things or girl things. And cool things at that. If you haven’t read “For the Love of Insects”, it’s worth getting. My daughter loved bugs for years as a child and I bought that book and read it with her. She’s moved on to other interests as an occupation, but she still likes bugs.
Glad the publisher changed the wording on the back cover, but they should know that pursuits in the world are not divided by gender. Numbers are only biased one way or the other for mostly cultural reasons.
perfect.
Entomology is awesome.
This makes me happy.
Stories like this always remind me of my best friend’s 7-year-old daughter. She loves poisonous bugs and snakes and always has. Loves watching any nature show about poisonous bugs or snakes, especially cobras and scorpions. :)
What a bunch of godamn cretins you people are. Anything that is male-centric must be destroyed. Men are starting to fight back against and in the future will fight back in even greater numbers. Remember, we are bigger, stronger, faster and smarter than you(and that includes you male feminist pussbags) so we will win. Of course any woman with any understanding of physiology, biology, cultural history, and a trace of femininity will be thankful when we win.
@rondolf scott #46: Oooooh! You threaten us!
But I’m a male feminist pussbag, so I should be scared.. Ehm, no.
I can’t even take you seriously.
Scoff off, idiot.
I don’t want to feed the troll, but it is very interesting to me as to how #46 interpreted this post. Instead of thinking, “Yes, it’s a good thing when our little girls feel just as welcome to explore all of nature’s wonders as our little boys.” he took it as a calculated attack on his manhood. A little girl’s letter scared him to the extent that he had to spew out insults and threats. Again, interesting. And if it weren’t so scary it would be rather sad.
rondolf scott #46
By “you”, do you mean the 7-year-old person who is the topic of this thread?
@phere #48: Of course he interpreted it that way! Remember, he’s *smarter* and far more courageous than us! /s
This guy is not even thinking, you are crediting him with far more rationality than he shows.
Ohhh, cute. A new piece for the trollarium. Some girls would like to be trollologists!
Re. 46.
I am not sure about the smarter part.
A post about a seven-year old kid = attack on his manhood, because everything in the universe is about him.
In fact, the seven-year old kid might be smarter than that!
Ah, yes because in transparently fake troll logic, women studying entomology, constitutes destroying “anything that is male-centric”. We all know how arthropods come with a tiny label that says “may only be studied by people with a penis (preferably not on their head)”. I’ll be sure to send an e-mail to my old professor and let her know, that for the past several decades she has been commiting a crime by intruding on male territory.
PS: Try harder next time, that was really bad acting (which incidentally in your fake fantasy world i expect is a female-centric field, you usurper)
Well it only took 46 comments. *sigh*
@Rondolf Scott
I’m sorry, but how big you are has what to do with your ability to succeed at entomology?
PhD entomologist Bug Girl’s latest post certainly implies, not least through the picture, that one needs a bit of strength for the job.
Of course, despite Bug Girl’s spectacular picture, it turns out that stick insects weigh, at most, 65 grams.
What? Were you thinking that the median woman’s curl-strength was under 40 grams? Cough, cough.
Look, I’ll be generous and assume that you don’t know that 5 pounds (at earth surface gravity) represents a few more than 5 grams of mass.
Shall we go for speed? Right. Let’s see. Stick insect behavior, there’s got to be a source for that somewhere….
Ah, right. Here we go. Turns out that the measured insect speeds were between 0.08 and 0.66 meters per second. That means the super fast beetles got up to 2.376 kph or 1.476 mph. Of course, it was the stick insects related to the ones now getting all the sexy blog headlines that were down near 0.08 m/s or 15.75 feet per minute.
15.75 feet per minute. Sprinting. I don’t know about you, but when I look at the intra-species median speed variation from human males to human females I don’t really see the same order of magnitude as I see in the inter-species median speed from H. sapiens to P. heusii.
Hrm. Smarter. Smarter. How smart do you have to be to lay out a bug and measure the damn thing with a ruler? After all, those sexy headlines over at Wired are all based on a European Journal of Taxonomy paper about how species should be redistributed among Phasmatodea’s genera based on measuring a whole bunch of body parts in millimeters. Is there something scary for you about rulers? Or just rulers marked in millimeters?
Really, it’s okay. Dedication, critical thinking, and measuring will get you pretty far in this field. Unless you’re worried about sample collection. I agree, the section on collection methodology does seem to give a leg up to the women who beat laundry with a stick by the side of a river, but honestly, most of the women you’ll compete with to enter a PhD entomology program won’t have much experience in that method of textile contaminant-elimination.
Really.
So thanks for your concern that women might not be able to chase down insects, or drag home our kills, but I’m pretty sure we’ll be fine.
And if all this is really coming from a place of sex-insecurity on your part, when Dr. Pearson said you had to, “…put the sheet on the ground and whack a bush with your stick. Many insects release their grip and play dead when disturbed, and so drop onto your sheet for easy retrieval…” trust me when I tell you that none of that, NONE of it was nearly-non-coded sex talk. Really.
“Whack a bush with your stick” is not remotely comparable to “cut your cake with my knife”. I believe your brother, Bon, is perhaps skewing your interpretation of the exact nature of entomology. Contrary to his lyrical oeuvre, not everything involves rock-n-roll, being a bad boy, and Big Balls.
Poor Rondolf, why are you so insecure in your masculinity? How come that a 7 yo girl wanting to read bug-books scares you so very out of your wits* that you need to threaten physical violence (how eslse should we interprete the “stronger” argument if not because you want to physically subdue anybody who disagrees with you?)?
*not that that was hard. Because really, even if men were smarter than women as a group, you would still be stuck in the spoon compartment where even the butter knives lokk down on you.
Also, what is it about bugs that makes them inherently masculine?
How fragile must one’s masculinity be, for it to feel threatened by the actions of a seven-year-old girl?
chigau, #49
Haha. Perfect.
Daz, #57
We can get a relative answer to that question:
Malala was 15 when shot by the Taliban. So about twice as fragile as that guy.
Ah yes, by shagging you, right? I always forget that in an MRA’s delusional mind the outcome of being an abussive piece of shit arsehole that causes physical and phycological damage, is getting to fuck whoever you like. I suposse if all you know about biology is what you’ve seen in a couple of baboon documentaries, and you are baboonish yourself, it’s possible to drive that ridiculous conclussion.
Any man with any understanding of physiology, biology, cultural history and a trace of masculinity (that word means different things to you and me) would never dream of making such an embarrasingly infantile display of willful, proud ignorance.
Go back to your cave, you pathetic little wanker, and stop making me ashamed of owning a penis.
Phycological damage is the worst…
Saad
Careful, don’t drop that ego! Sensitivity level: nitrogen triiodide.
azhael
There’s a publication for that…
azhael
Well, he’s conveniently defined “real men” and 2real women” along the lines of “people who agree with me”.
Therefor my opinion and yours don’t matter anyway.
I’ve got to wonder… if these big, scary non-feminist-pussbag guys are so strong and smart and awesome and going to win… why are they so afraid of progress that they need to drive by and posture at us?
@rondolf scott #46: *snigger* *snortle* FYI, that’s laughing at you, not with you.
Athywren; Kitty Wrangler #65:
But how are we supposed to spot their oh-so-obvious and self-evident superiority unless they point loudly at it?
Wait, women are NOT supposed to have any understanding of physiology, biology and natural history! Those are strictly *male* disciplines, WHY DO YOU WANT TO DESTROY EVERYTHING THAT’S GOOD you damn feminazi!!!
Oh wow, F.O. wins by K.O.
@63 rq
Hehehehe.
:D