And check this out!
http://reason.com/news/show/120879.html
By Cathy Young.
What's surprising is that Young is a well-known libertarian
conservative who, when it comes to gender wars, tends to talk mainly
in sup****t of men's rights. On the rare occasions when she criticizes
sup****ters of men's rights, they tend to be near-extremists like Dr.
Laura. (After all, how hard is it to condemn DL's line from her
"Proper Care & Feeding of Husbands" book "remember that without him,
you are only a sorry excuse for a person"?) See here for review, if
you like: http://www.reason.com/news/show/31881.html
Excerpts from the former article:
On blogs and Internet forums, readers complaining about the book's
exclusionary message have been dismissed as angry feminist whiners; a
standard rejoinder is that no one is stopping girls from reading it if
they want. Yet my friend Dana, a graduate student who holds no brief
for angry feminism or political correctness, shares the concerns about
the gender-specific focus of The Dangerous Book. "I would have loved
this book as a kid, and it really bugs me how people are saying 'this
is such a great book for boys, and it's so wonderful that it's aimed
at boys,'" she says. "Where is the book for girls who did stuff like
make their own chain mail as kids, or cracked rocks with sledgehammers
in the driveway both to see what was inside them and to see if you
could get sparks?" Dana is not convinced by the argument that girls
can read the book too, given that it is geared so explicitly to boys.
Indeed, the message to girls seems to be either "This stuff is not for
you" or "You can enjoy this cool stuff if you want to be like the
boys......."
Partly in response to queries about a companion volume for girls,
HarperCollins is now bringing The Daring Book for Girls, scheduled for
publication in November. There's nothing wrong with having separate
books aimed at girls and boys, each with a somewhat different focus.
The trouble with The Dangerous Book for Boys is not that it seeks to
restore the old-fa****oned charms of adventurous boyhood but that it's
being treated as a restoration of old-fa****oned wisdom about boys and
girls. The "free to be you and me" message of 1970s feminism was often
na=EFve in its assumption that all differences between the ***es were
the result of social conditioning. But it also had a liberating
message of celebrating individuality. And it would be a shame to throw
out that baby with the bathwater, at a time when girls and boys have
more options open to them than ever.
(end)
Lenona.
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