{"id":1333,"date":"2005-01-31T02:37:45","date_gmt":"2005-01-31T10:37:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/archives\/2005\/01\/31\/comic-books-and-gender-differences\/"},"modified":"2005-01-31T02:37:45","modified_gmt":"2005-01-31T10:37:45","slug":"comic-books-and-gender-differences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=1333","title":{"rendered":"Comic books and gender differences"},"content":{"rendered":"

(This is from a comment I posted on Dispatches from the Culture Wars<\/a>).<\/p>\n

I’m a cartoonist, so naturally I pay attention to comics. So I know from long experience, it’s hard to have a discussion of why the overwhelming majority of comic book readers are boys without someone suggesting that boys are biologically more visually-oriented. Since girls are language-oriented, it’s only natural that girls prefer reading prose, and boys like comic books more. It’s often suggested that folks who think that social factors are why so few girls read comic books are ignoring science in the name of feminist ideology.<\/p>\n

Stop here. Before you continue, ask yourself if the biological explanation for why (on average) boys and not girls read comics rings true to you.<\/p>\n

Because the truth is, I should have put the paragraph about comics in the past tense. Today, the majority of young comic book readers are girls – by far the best-selling comic books in the USA are manga <\/em>(translated Japanese comics), which are read mostly by girls.<\/p>\n

In retrospect, it seems obvious that whatever biological factors (if any) may make boys more natural comic book readers, they are utterly dwarfed by social factors. (In this case, what made the difference was a new publishing model for translated manga<\/em>).<\/p>\n

There was a time when many highly intelligent people of science thought that women were biologically unsuitable for higher education; that women were biologically less likely to make good lawyers (all that logical, rational thinking!); that women were inherently unsuitable for medicine (all that science!); etc.. Heck, there was a time when the idea of female schoolteachers was extremely controversial.<\/p>\n

What would we have thought if we were alive back then? Most of us would have agreed with the consensus (most people do, after all) that apart from a few outliers, most women were biologically unsuited for (fill in the blank).<\/p>\n

I recognize, of course, that there are biological differences between the sexes. Nonetheless, I don’t think it makes me a Luddite to suggest that, in physics departments as in comic books, lawyers and schoolteachers, it’s possible that the social factors dwarf the biological.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

(This is from a comment I posted on Dispatches from the Culture Wars). I’m a cartoonist, so naturally I pay attention to comics. So I know from long experience, it’s hard to have a discussion of why the overwhelming majority … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[17,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1333","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-cartooning-comics","category-feminism-sexism-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1333"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1333\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1333"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1333"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1333"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}