A boy's world

Here's a strange conundrum. Addie is being raised by a mother and father who share equally in her care and feeding (and bathing and diaper changing and tantrum management, etc.). We have little fondness for gender stereotypes and tend to subvert them without even trying. Daddy loves opera. Mommy loves science fiction. So we feel very confident that we are not endorsing anything close to a patriarchal worldview. Nevertheless our daughter insists on calling all people "boys." There are no girls in Addie's world. There are only people whose actual names she knows and "boys."We have tried to inform her of the existence of the other gender, but she's not buying it. When she points to a girl on a bike and says "boy on bike," we say, "that's a girl on a bike." She humors us with a nod then reiterates that it's a "boy on bike," as if she were clued in to some secret we're too old to understand.I was happy to write this off as a funny pit stop on the way to a fullblown vocabulary, until I found myself reading her The Gruffalo by Julia Donaldson. It's a cute story about a clever mouse who repeatedly evades predators by claiming to be the friend of a fierce imaginary beast called a gruffalo. There's just one problem with this book. All of the creatures, including the gruffalo, are male. I have to ask Ms. Donaldson: if you can be as inventive as was necessary to create this imaginary world, could you not envision the possibility of a female owl? Couldn't at least one of the animals have been female?A quick survey of my daughter's bookshelf confirms that the animal kingdom, at least in the minds of children's book authors, is direly lacking females. How will these animals reproduce?I call this phenomenon "the myth of male neutrality." It implies that females are a "special case." A duck is male unless otherwise specified. A horse is male unless the story requires it to be female. But why? And what are the ramifications of such thinking? I'm sure Addie will figure out that girls exist, eventually. But I also suspect that she'll internalize the notion that, as a girl, she is a special case. We all internalize this notion. It's the result of the stubborn persistence of the myth of male neutrality. It's the reason why movie trailers are always voiced by men and why a female plumber is a female plumber, but a male plumber is just a plumber. These things take time to evolve. But I think it's fair to ask children's book authors to think twice when casting their books. Would it really have wrecked the story if that owl had been female?