Society: A Dangerous Book for Girls

MY HUSBAND DOUG and I were watching the marching band perform at our son’s high-school football game when I noticed something. There on the field amid the sequin-spangled flag twirlers was a slim black-clad figure, bouncing to the beat of “Beauty and the Beast” and proudly unfurling a rainbow swath of satin in time with the rest of the row. “Is that a boy?” I asked.

Doug peered at the bobbing, swirling dancer. “That,” he said, “is the bravest boy in the world.”

And, clearly, a boy who doesn’t own a copy of The Dangerous Book for Boys, the compendium of British boy know-how — School Library Journal called it “old-­fashioned and politically incorrect” — that last spring was published by ­HarperCollins in an Americanized version that’s been parked atop the New York Times best-seller list ever since. If he did, he’d be building tree houses and chipping flint arrowheads and (eck!) skinning rabbits, because those are boy things to do, and if boys don’t do them, if they instead play video games or twirl flags with girls, they’ll never grow up with the true “attributes of manliness,” as the book puts it.

Andrea Buchanan, who lives in Center City, and Miriam Peskowitz, of Mount Airy, are authors, friends, and the owners of MotherTalk, Inc., which organizes online “virtual book tours.” (“Moms can’t get to the bookstore,” Buchanan explains, “but they can get to the computer at 2 a.m.”) Hired by HarperCollins earlier this year to construct such a tour for Boys — with book reviews and author interviews on websites and blogs — the two read the book and had identical reactions: “This is so great! Where’s the one for girls?”

“We figured they already had one in the works,” Peskowitz confesses. But they couldn’t stop thinking about what a girls’ book might contain. So they wrote to the editor of Boys, proposing a distaff version. Instead of building tree houses, girls would build indoor forts of sofa cushions. Where boys played rugby, girls would play hopscotch. And where boys skinned rabbits, girls would … well, there really wasn’t anything analogous to that. Girls would learn Japanese t-shirt folding, though.

“Within three days,” says Peskowitz, “we were on a train to New York and meeting with a room full of publishing big shots. We gave them our proposal, and at the end of the meeting they said, ‘Start working!’”

And thus their just-published The Daring Book for Girls was born.

It seems fair enough, prima facie, that where there’s a book for boys, there should be one for girls. After all, there’s blue and pink. Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts. Football and cheerleading. One water fountain for the white kids, and one for the … oh, wait.

Perhaps the proper feminist reaction to Boys would have been to co-opt it, send forth an army of little girls chanting “Anything you can do, I can do better” as they laid tripwires and wrote secret messages in urine and, yes, skinned rabbits. But a book that says “We can, too!” isn’t a book. A book for girls, especially one that the publisher is producing more than half a million copies of, had to be different. Distinct. Girly. And so The Daring Book for Girls is … sparkly.