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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33460 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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Not a chance.

No, seriously, where are you getting this idea? Have you seen evidence that publishers are thinking like this?

Because I’m having a hard time imagining anyone actually endorses that.

I read @pusher_robot as making a stronger claim.

[If] boys are so toxic, the upside of providing something they would want to buy is more than offset by the social consequences of doing so. It is therefore safer to intentionally exclude them.

This is a lot more harsh than affirmative-action marketing for girls’ books. I’d say it’s more extreme than the Gillette campaign. At least in that case they didn’t stop manufacturing men’s razors.

It doesn’t pass the Turing test for me. I have no doubt that some executive has openly favored girls’ books over boys’ or neutral ones. But I’d expect it to be justified as girl-positive instead of boy-negative. Not “intentionally excluding,” but low priority. Benign neglect. Condemning small children as toxic is cartoonishly bad optics.

Speaking of cartoons, Captain Underpants is still a perennial Scholastic bestseller. I consider that the canary in the coal mine.

Book publishers specifically, no, it's not something I follow. But this seems the be a trend with other products that have previously considered what boys and young men like: movies, comic books, and video games. Beer... They will happily alienate their male audience if they believe it will be a political liability.

Women control the majority of consumer spending. Punching down at boys and men is just good business.

It's funny reading this thread and other arguments about this topic on social media, where apparently it can't possibly be the case that young men have been told to get the fuck away from books and are doing as they're told, nobody would ever put their finger on the scale it can only possibly be the golden free market acting completely independently of any social pressure!

And then looking at video games 'where all the young men have gone because video games are male and books are female' and every big developer is jamming DEI shit into everything as hard and fast as they can because the media incessantly accuses them of excluding women. Even call of duty puts a woman in its steam title card thing to attract women, but if boys and men aren't reading books then they must have just suddenly started hating reading for no reason! Oh well, they can play video games instead... For now.

I don't think it's as actively-malicious as you imply, though. I think a lot of it is just pandering, combined with defensive doubling-down when called out on it.

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