Even in my day having been one of Betsy Bird‘s Hot Men of Children’s Literature (BB: are those archived anywhere?) I was more than a little skeeved out by Meaghan O’Connell’s “The Children’s-Book Guy: An Ideal Crush Object,” published yesterday in New York Magazine but reading like something written by Carrie Bradshaw in 1999:

“If you think about it, the young male children’s-book author (or illustrator) is in many ways the perfect crush: artistic but in a productive, financially solvent way; imaginative, filled with empathy and quiet wisdom — like a dad, but not. Like a dad, but single. Children’s-book guy will wake up just before you, stepping over your rescue dog to start the Chemex and make you both pancakes (childlike wonder).”

Why is what was amusing then annoying now? (I know, ’twas ever thus and the number one reason I’ll never get a tattoo.) Part of it is tone: O’Connell aspires to an ironic distance from her own lubriciousness but who is she kidding? Another part is the gratuitous swipe she takes at female children’s-book creators: “These women are generally in their mid-50s, with great glasses, admirably draped Eileen Fisher duds, and expensive sandals.”  (She adds, “I want to be them” but, again, who believes that?)

But the sentiments O’Connell expresses are hardly unheard within our own realms of gold; indeed, she quotes a number of fellow droolers from among our ranks. There’s an odd kind of sexism at work in our work. I tried to talk about this when Daniel Handler put his foot in his mouth last year and perhaps it is foolhardy to try again, but here is another example. Some time ago I was casting about for children’s book people who do something else that is interesting (see these questions for Tom Barron and Deb Taylor) and wrote to about a dozen publishing friends–all women–for suggestions from among their stables. Every single name that came back was of a young, white, man. Where were the women?

They are of course everywhere, from writers and illustrators to agents and publishers to reviewers and librarians and teachers to readers. When it comes to books for young people, females are in the majorities of all those groups. Not to take anything away from Dr. Johnson (or Cynthia Ozick), but perhaps their minority renders men the dancing dogs of children’s literature, where “one marvels not at how well it is done, but that it is done at all.”

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