Friday, July 19, 2019

Boycott Alert

I have been traveling, and I owe you a "chat" on the writing workshop I attended, and I returned to work, and it was a deluge of delugy-ish tasks to complete. So. We will catch up, I promise. Except I've been checking my stats on amazon (pointless endeavor, I know, and why I do this is a form of perverse masochism not worth exploring at this juncture), and what keeps popping up on my amazon page, but plugs for Gilbert's City of Girls.

Nope. Not going there. For a lot of reasons, but the title itself disqualifies it. To cover myself, I did look at a synopsis and it is not about children. No, the book is about a young woman in New York in the 1940s. What I wrote in 2017 still holds true:

My latest pet peeve is this persistent insulting trend of books that are about women that have "girls" or "girl" in the title. I am now boycotting all such books. I don't care HOW good they are. This stealth sexist bullshit by reducing adult women into the role of a powerless "girl" has to stop somewhere, and it's going to stop at my pocketbook. I walked through one of the last remaining Barnes and Nobles in my area and I counted--I AM NOT JOKING--eight books with the word "girl" in the title, And I wasn't even looking. I was just strolling along trying to find a Father's Day present for my husband. Did I see ONE book with the word "boy" in the title. I did not.

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