A seemingly constant debate both online and in the “real world” is which books are for boys and which books are for girls.  This debate often hinges on the issue that seems to be- most boys won’t read books by or about girls.  A famous example of this is J.K. Rowling whose actual name is Jo(anne) Rowling, no middle name.  Many sources, including her wikipedia page, say that she or her publisher changed her name so that boys would not be turned off that a woman wrote the Harry Potter series.  Of course, by the time Harry took the world by storm, everyone was reading it, regardless of the gender of the author.

However, many female authors have similar issues or at least discuss gender fairly regularly.  Maureen Johnson (a YA author with all female main characters) has had several discussions on her twitter accountabout #genderinYA.  She has been asked, “Why do you only write books for girls?”  To which she responded, “I write books for EVERYONE.”  She has also discussed the phenomenon in great length in twitter posts, asking why books about girls should only be for girls while books about boys are for everyone.  Someone responded by bring up the Madonna song “What it Feels Like for a Girl”- discussing the song’s claim that girls can be like boys because it is acceptable to be a boy while the reverse is not true because girls are perceived as worth less than boys. 

Justine Larbalestier wrote an excellent blog post about this subject: http://justinelarbalestier.com/blog/2009/06/12/theyre-just-girl-books-who-cares/    She discusses how books by female authors get lumped together as “women’s fiction” and even people working toward a solution have trouble treating books by women as simply books.

And amidst all this controversy, you get posts that talk about the recent surge in YA female characters as a bad thing: http://hannahmosk.blogspot.com/2010/07/boy-problem.html  In her blog post, Hannah Moskowitz discusses how boys don’t read YA fiction.  She talks about how boys are turned off by YA fiction because they are stereotyped into various roles and then the characters are sanitized to eliminate strong, real males.   She discusses how this was done to empower girls.  She says, “Boys in YA are rubber walls for our 3D female characters to bounce off of.  They’re props for girls to throw around to show that they’re the stronger sex.   And I get that we need to empower girls, people.  I get it. But how many books about girls do we need before we can consider that a job well done?”

Tamora Pierce (who helped a nerdy little librarian-to-be find some inner strength with her amazing female characters) wrote a direct response: http://tammypierce.livejournal.com/40594.html.  She disputes many of the facts on the previous blog, but what really sticks with me is this quote:

“But make no mistake about it: there are still more books for guys out there than there are for girls. It’s fine that people write guy heroes. But please don’t knock those of us who know that being a girl, and a woman, is a lifelong fight, on the shelves and off. This debate comes up every ten years or so in publishing circles, and that it’s important not to work on the guys at the expense of the girls. Both need heroes, and both need books.”

And I think that’s a great moral for all of us.  Both boys and girls need to be empowered, and while it would be great if every person felt comfortable reading a book about other genders, everyone still needs a hero that’s like them.  A hero that can show that it is OK, even desirable, to be whatever they are.  It shouldn’t be Girls vs. Boys (not to mention people that don’t fit into standard categories); it should be simply YA.  How to get there?  Well, that’s a blog post for another day.