Even for David Brooks, this is daft

Echidne of the Snakes posts a list of links to some of David Brooks’ old sexist columns and her responses. As a former bookstore clerk, the one which grabs my attention the most is the one that starts like this: “There are three gender-segregated sections in any airport: the restrooms, the security pat-down area and the bookstore. In the men’s sections of the bookstore, there are books describing masterly men conquering evil. In the women’s sections there are novels about … well, I guess feelings and stuff.”
What follows from this is, in Brooks’ eyes, a logical progression. Men and women read different things. This proves men and women think differently, as does all scientific research. This proves we shouldn’t be forcing them into the same classes and giving them the same assignments in English class. Boys need adventure books to teach them to be manly! Because they get “new-wave young adult problem novels, which all seem to be about introspectively morose young women whose parents are either suicidal drug addicts or fatally ill manic depressives” they’re falling behind in schools, whereas single-sex education would work much better.
The gender-based explanation for boys’ problems in schools is, in any case, bogus, but let’s look at the column’s opening about segregated bookstores. Quite simply, WTF? Sure, I would certainly count the romance section as “female” but history? Business? General fiction (which far from being segregated includes everything from technothrillers to character-centric romances)? My old bookstore had a “male” section but it was limited to Westerns and a few action thrillers (the Executioner series for instance).
I have no idea whether Brooks was just pulling whatever he could out of his butt to make a point or if he saw what he needed to see to fit his thesis. If you start from the assumption that men (and only men) read about “masterly men conquering evil,” then maybe this does make sense: Obviously thrillers, mysteries, history (lots of manly heroes conquering evil in real life) and SF/fantasy are all male genres.
Only this doesn’t make sense because it collapses in half a second’s thought or a modest amount of actual research. It’s not just that women do read in all those genres, it’s that a lot of books in a lot of genres deal with feelings. War novels deal with love amidst war. Horror novels deal with fear, and sometimes love. SF novels include lots of romance, as do mysteries. So I’m swinging back to “David Brooks spouting bullshit” as an explanation. Or maybe, since he sounds so completely baffled by books that have feelings in them, maybe he blocks them out in some weird kind of cognitive dissonance.
I do think he has a point about some of the oh-so-serious novels that turn up on reading lists. I’ve read persuasive arguments that one reason teens don’t read more is that schools steer them to dark, serious, angsty books when like most people they want to read something fun (the truism when I was in school was that teenagers naturally want to read Serious Literature that will help them Understand Life. At the time I assumed I was odd for not liking that stuff).
But what evidence does he offer that this has anything to do with gender? Schoolgirls like fun stuff too—Nancy Drew, Sweet Valley High, Animorphs, Harry Potter (to name a few that come to mind). The only reason for assuming the Serious Books reading lists have anything to do with boys’ needs being neglected in favor of girls is … okay, none.
Other than Brooks needs that to be true to make his point.