As a middle-aged man, I would’ve saved loads on therapy if I’d read Baby-Sitters Club books as a kid. “The social taboo which prevented [boys] from reading fiction marketed at girls was infinitely more powerful than anything censorship achieved.”
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When I was a kid, my sister and I would go to the library once a week and load up on books. I'd invariably burn through mine in like 3 days and would start in on my sister's. (She did the same.) I ended up reading all sorts of "girls" books, including the first 10 or so Baby-Sitters Club books, all the Little House on the Prairie books, Caddie Woodlawn, Nancy Drew, Anne of Green Gables, Judy Blume, and I can't remember what else.
When I was a kid in the early 70’s I was reading through my friend’s Nancy Drew books and didn’t even think there was anything odd about it. I do remember getting some strange looks when I gave an extremely detailed oral book report on one of them in class once. Happy to say I haven’t needed therapy.
I felt something similar when I watched Steven Universe a few years back. It was just wall-to-wall emotional navigation of relationships that I never saw in cartoons and books targeted towards boys of my generation.
"Let me explain. For decades now I’ve outsourced my reading choices to an Excel spreadsheet and its random number function."
Ah, one of my people!
I thought the same and figured he had to have written about his particular permutation of this. Indeed, from a few years back: https://www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2021/december/1638277200/russell-marks/homemade-algorithm-chooses-every-book-i-read. Just in case it saves anyone else a search.
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