Any offence caused
Usborne publishing has apologised and announced it will revise a puberty guide for boys that states that one of the functions of breasts is “to make the girl look grown-up and attractive”.
Published in 2013, Growing Up for Boys by Alex Frith is described by Usborne as a “frank and friendly book offering boys advice on what to expect from puberty and how to stay happy and confident as they go through physical, psychological and emotional changes”. According to the publisher, it “covers a range of topics, including moods and feelings, what happens to girls, diet, exercise, body image, sex and relationships, self-confidence, alcohol and drugs”.
It is the section on breasts that has drawn criticism, after writer and blogger Simon Ragoonanan, who blogs about fatherhood at Man vs Pink, posted a page from the book on Facebook. “What are breasts for?” writes Frith in the extract. “Girls have breasts for two reasons. One is to make milk for babies. The other is to make the girl look grown-up and attractive. Virtually all breasts, no matter what size or shape they end up when a girl finishes puberty, can do both things.”
Reasons?
Sure, and by the same token, humans have ears for two reasons: to hear, and to hang glasses on. We have feet for two reasons: to walk, and to wear Jimmy Choo shoes. We have elbows for two reasons: to connect the two bits of arm, and to prod people on crowded buses. That’s science.
After a campaign led by parent group Let Books Be Books three years ago, Usborne announced that it would discontinue publishing gendered titles, such as its pink Girls’ Activity Book and blue Boys’ Activity Book.
I bet we can guess what those color-coded activities were like.
A spokesperson from Usborne Publishing told the Guardian: “Usborne apologises for any offence caused by this wording and will be revising the content for reprinting.”
Identical wording to that in the response from Tatton Park to the “future footballers wife” hat – “any offence” – which tidily avoids actually acknowledging what was wrong with the wording, and translates the objections into silly ruffled feelings as opposed to reasoned arguments against treating girls and women as stupid fluffy empty playthings for the real people, who are male.
“We apologize and are correcting inappropriate content” would be just fine as such boilerplate too, and would acknowledge it’s a problem with the content rather than how someone reacts. It’s not even hard. It doesn’t call upon them to DO anything different than they are, and when they’re changing the stuff anyway, it’s not like they’re committed to standing by it.
It would be better if they recalled and pulped any copies still in the distribution channel and at the same time acknowledged that the ‘reason’ was sexist, unscientific trash talk that should have been red-lined by the first editor to see the draft.
Yeah, that’s just it, isn’t it? There is absolutely no reason at all why Usborne Publishing couldn’t just apologise unreservedly, admit they’d fucked up and promised to do better in the future. No reason at all.
Except for the fact that there’s someone there rolling their eyes at the political correctness gone mad who pretends not to see why this is a problem.
It’s also kind of ironic that they carefully omitted a different, though much more likely (even if it’s only hypothesized), “second reason” for women to have breasts: not only are they useful for feeding babies, they also double as great reservoirs for fat storage. But I guess it’s better not to offend your primary audience by explaining the pragmatic reasons for the existence of those “fun bags” they like so much.
Anna:
Or even that breasts might not be an adaptation at all. For all we know they might be a non-adaptive consequence of something else.
I remember reading The Naked Ape when I was a kid in the 70s and thinking that a lot of that shit sounded fairly feeble even then. It certainly said a lot more about Desmond Morris than it did about women’s bodies. For one thing, it said that he didn’t understand evolution. Or science. Or reason. Or not being a dick.
I’m almost but not quite tempted to re-read it and see how quickly my organs burst like balloons from the influx of purest rage.
Many evolution discussions, even in popular books by scientists, seem overly full of “purpose”, in my view. Body parts do things, or are used by creatures to do things; they don’t exist and they didn’t develop “for the purpose of” doing those things. That kind of expression leads all too easily to claims that a particular action is “unnatural” or “not what X was designed to do”. But it’s frustratingly difficult to avoid imputing “purpose”.
I think I’ve seen discussions of that, including by science writers – about how hard it is to avoid that language without long explanations that risk turning off the readers.
Dawkins is among the many science writers who has written about the dangers of teleological language in these matters. He mostly wrote about this at the gene level: it’s useful to think about genes ‘wanting’ something, providing you don’t take the thought too far. You run the risk of people getting the wrong idea (hell, there have been plenty of rebuttals to the selfish gene concept based solely on the title of the book) but you can also paint a bigger and more vivid picture for those people who grasp the metaphor and learn how far they should take it.
But there’s another problem here too. People tend to assume that since life forms evolved, every part of them must be an adaptation to some environment or circumstance. As Sackbut says, a lot of people who should know better make this mistake. It’s the sort of thinking that leads to the just-so stories of evolutionary psychology, which I think is probably the sort of thing that frustrates Sackbut too.
It tends to lead to ‘reasoning’ such as “Women are worse than men at building stuff because they gathered instead of hunting during the pleistocene” or whatever. The proponents of these views haven’t shown that women *are* worse than men at building stuff, that they *did* do the gathering rather than the hunting, that there is a genetic component to this behaviour or that it is heritable in the right sort of way in the first place.
They just state it as true, based on the apparently sensible idea that everything that’s evolved is an adaptation to some particular past or current circumstance.
There is only one tiny flaw with this argument: it’s bollocks.