Is "The Dangerous Book for Boys" Dangerous for Girls? [UPDATED AGAIN]

This book about reminding boys how to be boys has been much discussed lately at Instapundit, Althouse (where they're discussing the discussion), on Rush Limbaugh (where you'd need to be a card-carrying $59.95-a-year dittohead to access The Emasculating of America), etc. etc. etc.

Don't get me wrong -- I'm all for it.  All for boys being boys in the ancient and honorable way.  I think this book is a great thing.  It's #4 on Amazon right now, and a good thing too.

I'm just worried about its shadow companion volume: "The Harmless, Helpless, Demure Book for Girls."

People who acknowledge boys' need for rough-and-tumble, acted-out fantasy adventure, invention, skill, and physical risk have an alarming tendency to want to set up an opposite for girls -- necessary, it's implied, to help boys define what it is to be a boy -- that involves playing house, doll tea sets, frilly clothes, and a lot of domestic and social sitting around.   

Now, a lot of girls may well be into a lot of that, some of the time.  However, the ones I've known have also, without exception, been into running around like maniacs, riding bikes, climbing trees, getting dirty, sledding, hanging upside down from the jungle gym . . . even the odd acted-out fantasy adventure.  Unless, that is, they were taught that they mustn't. 

Like in the Fifties.  All the prohibitions that broke my tomboy friend "Missy's" heart (why'd they give her that nickname, anyway?).  And no, she wasn't masculinized by hormonal anomalies in the womb, nor is she gay.  She just wanted to play football.  Today she's an accomplished artist who works on a large scale, and the mother of a grown son.  (I'd love to link to her website, but I'm not sure she wants these childhood secrets out there.) (UPDATE:  She says OK!  Jo Ann Rothschild is a powerful abstract artist, and she has an excellent website -- very much worth a look, including a time-lapse view of the (re)making of a painting.)

When we were about 5, we used to play Roy Rogers and Dale Evans.  She was Roy Rogers, I was Dale Evans.  (She recently sent me a "Happy Trails to You" birthday card.)  A few years later, though, I wanted to be Robin Hood for Hallowe'en.  Maid Marian's life was way too boring, just sitting around in a skirt braiding her hair and waiting for Robin to get back from the woods.  I wanted to be in the woods.

Here's a comment I posted today on Sippican Cottage that pretty much says it:

The one thing that scares me about the "Dangerous Book for Boys" movement (much discussed on Instapundit, Althouse, etc.) is that they're going to put girls back in the opposite box with the dolls and the tea parties. They're always confusing activity with aggression.  Watch puppies or kittens:  they all play wildly.  The males just play-fight more.  Just because it may be easier for girls to sit still doesn't mean they want to, or should.

According to Amazon.com, the book has a "small but wise" chapter for girls.  Since I don't have the book and it isn't searchable, I don't know whether this chapter meets my objections.  It very well may.  I hope so.

UPDATE:  Someone's already coming out this fall with The Daring Book for Girls, and in the Amazon discussion forum there's already an absurd feminist objection to the different title. Anything but a straight-up duplicate is declared demeaning:

Why is the girls version titled The 'Daring' Book for Girls rather than 'Dangerous' like the boys? Is it because the authors are trying to instill an assumption about gender roles here.

The answer is-yes. [...]

Because if the book is supposed to be an equal copy of the boys edition it should be labeled the same, except with girls in the title rather than boy. [...]
No one has the right to title a book to demean the gender who buys it. 'Why,' would a girl ask, 'is the boys dangerous, and mine only danger?'
Would you rather be an active verb like dangerous, or only the possibility of action like danger. [sic]

'I'm a dangerous person.' (this is an active, possessive description)
'There could be danger,' or 'I'm in danger.' (passive, insinuating a possible outcome, but not stating it.)
Notice how this is gender indocrinative.

"Gender indocrinative"!  (Maybe she was trying to say something about hormones -- endocrinative?)  I always have trouble believing that these people really exist; I think they're really sock puppets for The Onion.  Oh well, I see that this one, govagabndgrl from Pueblo, Colorado, is either dyslexic or so blinded by rage that she can't read:  she has read "daring" as "danger," a near anagram.  Dangir.  Dangirl.  Go, Vagabond Girl, who just added to her wish list One of the Guys:  Women as Aggressors and Torturers!

In the user forum for The Dangerous Book for Boys, meanwhile, male readers are complaining that this book gets criticized by feminists while books exclusively for girls are approved of. 

If there has to be a copycat book for girls, "daring" is fine with me; in fact, just about perfect.  But why does there have to be a copycat book at all?  Leave this phenomenon alone, let boys enjoy it and thrive on it, as long as pushing girls back to the other extreme is not part of the program.  I note that a number of people are cheerfully buying The Dangerous Book for Boys for their daughters, and why not?  Girls will pick out from it the stuff that interests them. 

I'm from the martial-arts world, where the difference between men and women is very clear, and what they share is also stripped bare.  Most men, even slight ones, are built for fighting in a way most women are not.  They're heavier-boned and -muscled, more explosively strong, have chests as smooth as shields.  And they're interested in fighting in a visceral, instinctual way women are not.   

A lot of women want to fight full-contact these days, like they want to box.  But it means something different to them than it means to guys. 

1. It means fighting for equality -- in the wrong arena, if you ask me, but what the hell.  They're not competing directly with men.
2. It means learning to be able to protect yourself if you have to, and not to be afraid.  (In that regard, getting hit was as important to me as learning to hit.  If you think getting hit is the end of the world, you're going to freeze with terror if someone attacks you.)
3. And it means demonstrating equality in spiritual virtues such as courage and perseverance, which are ultimately genderless, but which had become (pre-1970) so exclusively claimed by men and so entwined with men's physical challenges that women want to test and prove their spirit by the same standard.

But those are all secondary motivations, less rooted in biology.  (I'm not sure about #2.  Fierce self-defense might actually be an aspect of female biology that has been sexually selected and trained out of women by men, because it would make us less dependent and harder to control.)  Combat and risk -- physical, political, intellectual -- are primary for men, because their mission is to protect, to put themselves in the way of danger.  Allure and maternity are primary for women.  That still leaves an enormous amount of human forebrain territory -- including exploration and inquiry and challenge and creation -- that is of great interest to both.

UPDATE II:  In the Comments, Danny Miller made the interesting suggestion that I actually write "The Harmless, Helpless, Demure Book for Girls."  It seems as if James Thurber beat me to it:

Thurber and White (Is Sex Necessary? ""Claustrophobia, or What Every Young Wife Should Know'', 1929) [...] write :

"Freedom is as essential and as primary an urge with a man as the loss of it is with a woman. A man grows up with the desire to be free and unfettered. The boy of six wants to play outside the house all the time. He doesn't even want to come into the house for his meals. On the other hand, little girls like to be in the house as much as they can. When dusk falls, the little boys are restless and under the urge to be several blocks away, playing Go, Sheepy, Go, but the little girls want to be home putting their dolls to bed. Usually at least one of the dolls is ill and needs constant attention. Often it is necessary to force little girls to go outside and get some air and exercise, just as it is frequently necessary to use force to get little boys _into_ the house. And even when girls go outdoors, they have to be watched like a hawk or they will be playing house in the dog box or under the cellar door."

From a comment by rh hardin at Althouse.  And in another comment by the same:

The difference in what sustains the interests of men and women respectively [...] is more interesting, and has all sorts of effects.

Exactly the kind of creeping assumption I'm afraid of.  I'm not saying there is no difference.  I'm saying the assumptions about what the difference is, at the girl end, are insidious and noxious. And, on some semiconscious level, aimed at getting women back under control and stuffing us back inside an exclusive support-and-nurture function.

Comments

[Ruth Anne]

[T]he ones I've known have also, without exception, been into running around like maniacs, riding bikes, climbing trees, getting dirty, sledding, hanging upside down from the jungle gym . . . even the odd acted-out fantasy adventure.

And your streak continues without exception. I was the ultimate girly-girl [still am as a Mary Kay consultant] who loved those things, too. I was enamored of Olga Korbut and Nadia Comaneci and took up gymnastics. I was extremely proud of my ripped palms and my bruises on my hips [back when we could do belly beats on the unevens]. My Dad ran out of sons early on and became what I've heard called a Title 9 Dad--a great advocate for us girls at the school. Why did the gymnasts always have to practice after the wrestlers? He asked and got some equity for us. And his son and daughters qualified for state-level athletics competitions. [2 in track, me in gymnastics]. My dad, the original 98 pound weakling who was a great dadvocate. Let me not forget Mom, either...still a jock even in her 70s, who played against Grace Kelly's sister in field hockey at the all-girls' Catholic school league in Philly.

[amba]

Ah, I love it.

[amba]

And don't let anybody knock field hockey for rough-and-tumble. I still remember clashing sticks and running in the October cold till my lungs hurt.

[realpc]

It was always more acceptable for girls to act like boys than for boys to act like girls, and I'm sur that's still true. I wanted to be a boy and was very physically active. I hated frilly dresses. I think that's natural for a lot of girls. On the other hand, not always. My sister always dressed up as a bride or princess on Halloween, and she loved playing with Barbie dolls.

Maybe there's an ultra-male morphic field and an ultra-female one, and most of us resonate to some extent with both.

But even though I resonated with the male field, it was only partial. I never had any interest in war or violence, and I was never interested in cars or machines. And later on I caught the girl disease of caring about how I looked to others.

Both sexes have a lot more freedom now to do what they like, rather than what their sex dictates. But sex roles are still very powerful. Even though women want to be equals, they want to be pretty and do NOT want to be mistaken for a man. They have twice as much to worry about. And men are supposed to learn compassion and empathy, as well as continue being strong and smart and protective.

So it's all just a lot more complicated and confusing now. There was a reason our species divided everything into male and female -- it was simpler.

[rick robotham dvm]

Just ordered one for Rhett, my daughter (23 yrs old)
who has just finished pre-med at USC. Figured it be interesting for anyone for many reasons.

[Peter Hoh]

Well, I think that both boys and girls need some rough and tumble, daring and dangerous stuff in their childhoods. Not all boys and not all girls have an appetite for that, and I don't think it should be forced on children no matter their gender, but those who thirst for it ought to be able to avail themselves of it.

[realpc]

Females in other species know how to fight, as far as I know. In "Chimpanzee Politics" the females do a lot of fighting, but not the ritualized fighting males do when competing for alpha status.

Female mammals are famous for using violence to protect their babies.

I'm sure human females evolved with the ability to fight, alhough males were always, or almost always, the official warriors.

According to "Our Kind" by Marvin Harris, as societies became larger and more complex, and needed ever more land for agriculture, they became more warlike. As war became more important, the status of males increased and women eventually became oppressed.

An obvious example is traditional Muslim society, where women have no power and contribute nothing except sex and offspring.

But in more primitive societies, women had some power and value. The ones I have read about, however, were all relatively peaceful internally and fighting was mostly verbal. Maybe that's because human weapons are so deadly internal fighing becomes taboo.

[Danny]

Fascinating. As far as anticipating the underlying message for girls that might be present in this movement, I think you should really write the book you called "The Harmless, Helpless, Demure Book for Girls." Imagine the opportunities for powerful commentary!

And just to show a bit of my own gender assumptions based on certain behaviors or language, I was shocked to discover that your commenter 'realpc' is a woman. During all the previous discussions on your blog, I assumed a male identity!

[realpc]

Because male is the default. Everyone assumes everyone is male, and I just let them.

My intellectual "self" is not female -- I am not a pacifist or a feminist -- so I don't really want my web identity to be female.

On the other hand, I am definitely an advocate for holistic philosophy, which is definitely non-mainstream. Men are drawn to the influential mainstream ideas, where you can get power and money.

So in that sense, being a dissenter from non-holistic science and medicine, I might be a typical female.

[Dan]

I grew up in the 1960s in a working class neighborhood. I couldn't tell you what the girls did -- boys stuck with boys and we never gave a single thought to what the girls were doing. We boys had a blast though.

It is obvious that "Dangerous Book for Boys" is selling so well due to baby boomer nostalgia for the "good old days, when boys were boys." But it strikes a chord with the kids too. I have two sons who are in the target market and they love it.

[Dan]

Actually, on reflection, I do remember what the girls were doing: skipping rope. They alwasy seemed to be skipping rope.

[amba]

Danny -- interesting idea, to actually write "The Harmless, Helpless, Demure ..."

[david]

I'm sure Gabe (and I) would love the book... ;)