But a bunch of articles I've been reading all seem to lead me in a similar direction. First of all there's one from the New York Times this weekend. The Children's Television Workshop is doing something for the 37th season of Sesame Street that they haven't been able to do -- introduce a lead female muppet who sticks. The new candidate is called Abby Cadabby -- she's meant to be a kind of girly-girl muppet. It is interesting to me that in the entire run of Sesame Street, none of the female muppets ever achieved iconic status. Don't get me started on Elmo, now. I was the first Sesame Street generation, and thoughts of Elmo and of the fact that adults can now see Mr. Snuffleupagus just make me feel dead and cold inside.
LIZ NEALON, executive vice president and creative director of Sesame Workshop, the nonprofit organization behind “Sesame Street,” wasn’t sure exactly what she wanted in a new Muppet for the show’s 37th season, which starts on Aug. 14. But she did have one major goal: She wanted the creative team, at long last, to come up with a female Muppet star. The show did already have a number of female characters, including Zoe, a rambunctious, orange, furry friend of Elmo’s, and Rosita, an emerald-blue, bilingual Muppet with a sweet, friendly soul.
“We have our wacky, and we have our gentle,” Ms. Nealon said in a recent interview. “But we wanted a lead female character. If you think about ‘The Mary Tyler Moore Show,’ some girls relate to Rhoda, who’s our Zoe, and some girls really relate to Mary, who’s a girly girl. And we didn’t have that girl. We made a definite decision to sit down with the writers to figure out what this character might be.”
For anyone who spends time trying to wrestle characters to ground, it's nice to see that the Sesame Street folks have their own meticulous process to go through. Article is here.
That article was still in my head as I went back through the Globe and Mail yesterday and looked over Kate Taylor's piece on the male-female fiction divide.
“Women read more, they read more novels, they read earlier and they read later. Sixty-five to 70 per cent of the [Canadian] book market is women,” observes Brad Martin, president of Random House of Canada, adding that the American and European markets are probably similar. “How many men do you know who are in a book group?”I find this article interesting because of my own experience, and also the implication Taylor comes to later in the piece.
No surprise, then, that when the federal Department of Canadian Heritage surveyed Canadian reading habits last year, it found a distinct gender gap. Women accounted for 60 per cent of the daily readers and 70 per cent of the heavy readers who had read 50 or more books in the last 12 months. Women also outnumbered men two to one as regular readers of both classic and contemporary novels.
The divide is not new: The department's previous survey, in 1991, had found similar results, while academics can trace the characterization of novel reading as a genteel — or frivolous — female pursuit as far back as the 18th and 19th centuries. However, the gender gap is both particularly pronounced and much debated these days, partly because publishers have exploited it so successfully with their marketing strategies, and partly because teachers and parents are so concerned that boys lag behind girls in their literacy skills.
Once upon a time, I had a fairly constant reading regimen: I'd read one work of fiction, followed by a work of non-fiction. I'd sometimes stagger them so I was reading both at once. But the busier my career got, the more fiction became kind of a siren call. If I'm into a novel, it's too easy for me to just disappear and do nothing else. I've had to burn the midnight oil a couple of times for no other reason than I spent seven hours reading when I should have been working. When you don't have someone standing over your shoulder in the office, you can do that kind of thing. So, gradually, I tapered off my fiction reading. I can read non-fiction for a few pages at a time, not voraciously, like fiction. So except for rare treats or special occasions, fiction to me is like videogames; love'em, but seriously, I can't afford to lose that much time to them. Which, I recognize, is somewhat sad.
Where Taylor gets in her article is that because the fiction gap is so pronounced, marketing to it has become pronounced, and that's making the problem worse. Women read fiction, so fiction that's catered to women drives the market. This does change the kind of stuff that gets talked about and written -- because besides habits, reactions are so very much different. I think I wrote before that when the whole James Frey/Oprah thing blew up, it was the women I knew who read the book who felt betrayed. The men shrugged it off.
The same thing that Taylor talks about in fiction is also happening in TV, of course. The female audience is becoming more pronounced as the male audience shrinks. And consequently, except for things like the zombie-driven Fat Guy w. Skinny Wife comedy shows, it's getting harder and harder to actually get male characters who act like male characters on the air.
Having watched it a few times now, I think the best thing that Lucky Louie has going for it is that it actually deals head on with how men and women think differently, and doesn't take a stand on one side being right and the other wrong.
We're both crazy -- Men and Women. That's funny. And hilarious. And true from the moment we hit the playground.
But it strikes me as so weird that they've never been able to sell a female muppet on Sesame Street.
