You shouldn’t judge a book by its cover, unless it’s pink and sparkly. Then it’s marketed at girls, and we can’t have that. They should be reading Chilton’s car-repair manuals. But not the one whose cover indicates it’s aimed at boys, because that’s just as bad. This, apparently, is the new policy of the book-review editor of the British newspaper the Independent:
The problem? Such books are gendered, a prerogative term applied to things that don’t realize children are nebulous blobs of brain goo who are warped by a heteronormative society to adopt “girl” or “boy” traits. Left alone and shielded from the psychic emanations of the Great Penis in the Sky, girls would play with dump trucks and boys would put on tiaras and totter around in heels. Well. I can only speak from firsthand experience, but my daughter was not given Barbies or princess books or anything like that, mostly because I find them inane at best, and a whitewashing of the realities of the feudal system at worst. Yet she wanted them.
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