According to Neil Gaiman, yes, they do.



I became aware of this whole thing because Chuck Wendig's book Blackbirds is being described by some as a "boy's book with a girl protagonist" - and I'm not sure I agree.

If Neil Gaiman wants to assign a gender to every story he writes, that's his business, I guess.

It wouldn't even occur to me to think of a book as a "boy's book" or a "girl's book." It seems to me that more is lost than is gained by making an arbitrary classification such as the one you mentioned.

I believe in the boy's book girl's book divide. Just like there are chick flicks and dude movies. And even dick flicks, the male acceptable version of chick flicks. They are target to an audience of one gender verus the other

I agree with you, generally. I never thought of books as "boy's books" or "girl's books." I asked Mal about it, though, and he said that he thinks of boy books as focused on the events happening (as in Lord of the Rings), whereas girl books focus on the relationships between characters (as often happens in zombie novels). It gave me something to ponder, at least.

He is a grate writer and all that but... THATS STUPID, what are we all 7 now?

There are author genders, and protagonist genders. But books are written to an audience, and although the audience mix might be skewed, where do you say that the book has a gender? When the mix is theoretically past a certain point?

That's kind of what I'm thinking, really. With regards to chick flicks and dude movies, I've known a lot of both gender who enjoy both. Heck, Mal likes chick flicks more than I do. He also likes "dude movies" more than I do, though.

I'm not entirely sure he means "a book for girls" or "a book for boys" more that a story has a gender in the same way it has a "personality". I can see where he's coming from there.

Maybe it's just a weird synesthesia but I'd happily point at novels I've read and say "male" or "female" and not, for the slightest moment, be saying which folks should or shouldn't read them but that there's a distinctive and gendered personality to the story that's separate of any notion of the gender of people who'd like to read them, of the author or of the characters (although there's definitely a link in the latter).

It does sound like that's what gaiman was going on about, but I'm not sure I see it. Can you give an example of a male and female book?

Well, here's a black male book, at least

I think we're getting hung up on the word 'gender' as a shorthand for 'this only appeals to a gender, and if you don't like things in your gender/do like things in the other gender, you're a WEIRDO and should be SHUNNED'. Which isn't what he's saying. Based on the post, it sounds more like he's talking about a second level of genre, as it were. This system, rather than just categorizing by having elves and dwarves, or bodice ripping, or people with robot eyes, he writes his stories with a focus - whatever that focus may be, relationships or events or whatever - that he terms 'male' or 'female'. The focus seems to be on telling a tale of the main character and its depths, but there's probably societal elements and expectations that go along with those categories as well.

Not to say he could have figured out some other words for this form of categorization, but this isn't a Political Correctness issue, just something to think about while you're writing a story.