A friend and her 10-year-old daughter were telling me recently they’d begun to watch The Baby-Sitters Club, the short-lived Netflix adaptation of Ann M Martin’s books. Eager to show I had something to contribute to the conversation, I told them I’d read the first 52 books in Baby-Sitters Little Sister series this year. After a brief interlude, in which we established for the 10-year-old’s benefit that this was a spin-off which centred on BSC president Kristy Thomas’s seven-year-old stepsister Karen Brewer, the 10-year-old looked at me suspiciously and said: “Yeah, there’s something pretty wrong with that.”
Many people would instinctively agree with her. Here I am, a man in my 40s who has for no discernible reason delved deep into a literature that was supposed to be the preserve of girls. I don’t have a daughter. My two-year-old son hasn’t yet expressed any interest in Karen Brewer and her antics. I’m not reading them for a satirical book club or for a piss-take podcast, as do Jack Shepherd and Tanner Greenring for their amusing exchanges on Strange Bedfellows. Other than them, I don’t know any other man who has read these books.
Let me explain. For decades now I’ve outsourced my reading choices to an Excel spreadsheet and its random number function. Last year it suggested I read the first Baby-Sitters Club book, Kristy’s Great Idea (1986). I found myself unexpectedly enjoying this story about children’s friendship and modern family structure, even if the characters and themes are all very white and well-to-do in a 20th-century sort of way. I promptly added the Little Sister spinoffs to that part of the spreadsheet that gives me a short book – which usually ends up being a kids’ book – to read each night. This year so far, it’s had me read the first 52 of them. It’s as if I’m filling in a gap in my own childhood.
Gender identities have become rather more fluid since I was 10 years old in 1991 (the year that saw Scholastic publish books 14 through 23 in the Little Sister series) and the 10-year-olds of today are more likely to be raised on significantly more inclusive and accepting values than we were. But prescriptive views on which type of books are “for boys” and which are “for girls” nevertheless persist.
Despite all the de-gendering work over the last half-century, there remains a prevailing taboo which prevents boys (and men) from taking too much interest in whatever kinds of culture girls (and women) are interested in. It doesn’t apply in the reverse – for instance, to women who become interested in space and superheroes and dinosaurs.
For me and my male friends in the 1980s and early 1990s, the social taboo which prevented us from reading fiction marketed at girls was infinitely more powerful than anything censorship achieved. My literary diet consisted of a lot of Three Investigators and Famous Five, superhero comics and genre fiction. The Point Horror series seemed acceptable, despite its female protagonists and popularity with girls, because they were sinister mysteries. If I ever occasionally wondered what on earth was in books like The Baby-Sitters Club, I never once mustered the courage to even pick one up, let alone open it.
It took me another 35 years to do so.
What have I learned through reading them? That the plots in Karen Brewer’s adventures – and indeed much of “girl lit” – were (and still are) driven by commonplace rupture and repair among friends and family. There’s nothing highbrow here. But boys simply weren’t (and I suspect still often aren’t) exposed to emotionally intelligent character interactions in the books marketed to us. Now I’m wondering how much I might have saved on the therapy I’ve undertaken as an adult if I’d simply learned more about my emotional life as a child.
This gendering of literature extends into what we read as adults, of course. “Chick lit” is routinely disparaged, often by men, though that’s really just an expression of the same taboo that prevents men from reading stories in which men are supporting characters at most. Thanks to my spreadsheet and its dictated selections, I’ve learned that I’m a big fan of Maeve Binchy and Liane Moriarty.
In our collective quest for a reformed masculinity, at a time when kids are being force-fed misogyny and other kinds of hate by the social media giants, each of us has a responsibility. As well as being a good partner, I also want to encourage and foster my son’s emotional development. He may never want to read about Karen Brewer’s adventures in Stoneybrook, Connecticut. But hopefully, having eventually overcome the taboo that precluded me from reading about them as a child, I can help him as he develops his own identity – one that hopefully features a rich emotional life and respectful relationships. And maybe even some girl-lit.
Russell Marks is a criminal defence lawyer and the author of Black Lives, White Law: Locked Up and Locked Out in Australia (La Trobe University Press, 2022)
