Favorite Sons and Unicorns

6 min readJun 20, 2020

June 19, 2020, 11:17 pm
Filed under: art, art institutions, Art Scenes, feminism, Non-Profit, Racism, theatre, writing | Tags: Children’s Books, favorite sons, feminized spaces, folk tales, Italian mothers, Theater for Youth, Theatre for Youth, Young Adult Books

This is another one of these “written before” posts. The world is moving so fast, it is hard to keep up! It’s not quite of this moment. But it’s probably still worth talking about.

Over the last few years, I have leaned into making work for young people — both as a theatre maker and as a writer. I dove head first into Theatre for Youth and then, later, into middle-grade fiction. I went to conferences for both and found that they shared something I didn’t expect. They were both fields that were largely run by women. Women were the decision makers and the middle (wo)men. Women dominated — which was very nice to see. There aren’t a lot of fields where that is true.

But work for young people is, like education, a kind of feminized subset of the greater whole. The rest of theatre and the rest of literature are dominated by men. It’s a very interesting phenomenon. Even more interesting to me is how this domination does not extend to the artists. There are the odd exceptions but the artists that these women choose to grace their stages or their publishing houses are mostly men. If there’s a commission to be handed out, I can almost guarantee that it will be handed to a man, and in all probability, he will be a white man. At the several theatre for youth conferences I attended, I saw many all male performances and not one single all female show. The ratios were staggering. I saw male writers hailed as geniuses and male directors applauded for their mastery. I did not see one single woman so honored. I saw artistic director panels without one single woman. Similarly, at the children’s book writer’s conference, men in artistic positions of outnumbered women two to one, while the membership of the organization had women outnumbering men by 10 to 1.

In both places, I saw men being coddled and catered to. I saw them lionized and adored. I did not see the same for women. Ever.

There’s a quality that reminds me of the stereotypical Italian mother from fiction. This bella mama adores her sons. She’ll do anything for them. She pinches their cheeks and calls them heroes. She treats them like kings. In women’s spaces, like work for children, men who go there become the favorite sons.

It makes me think of a phenomenon that Deborah Frances White talks about on her podcast, The Guilty Feminist. The podcast is a distinctly womany feminist space and whenever a man shows up, he tends to be very interesting to the audience. Deborah Frances White has lately been inclined to talk about how much credit male feminists get for just showing up. “The bar is so low,” she’ll say. And it is. All a male feminist had to do to get a whole bunch of credit is show up at a feminist event and he’s a hero. She compares it to the applause men will get for caring for their own children.

“Look at him holding his own baby,” people say. “What an amazing man.”

I think this happens in other feminized spaces to varying degrees. Men get handed goodies just because they showed up in a place men don’t always go. They get all the privileges associated with maleness and then get an extra layer of laudatory attention for being unusual. But the fact is, men in these spaces are NOT unusual. They are the norm. They are the norm over and over again. The favorite sons are chosen over and over again. They seem like unicorns to the women who are choosing them but it’s a 98% unicorn world so unicorns just aren’t that special in it. And the horses are left kind of wandering around the paddock going “I thought horses belonged here. There are so many in charge.”

Does it have to be this way? Of course it does not. I know at least one presenter who brings in women’s work much more often than her colleagues do. She’ll do the occasional unicorn show but she makes special room for horses. While her colleagues are pinching the cheeks of the latest It Boy unicorn, she is giving space to a group of horses to try a new idea. The bar is high for women feminist heroes and to my mind, she meets it.

I’m not saying we should never do another unicorn show. Unicorns are great. But I would like for their bar to be a little bit higher and I would like for the bar for horses to be a lot lower because at this point, only the occasional magic horse can get over it. And usually, it’s because someone’s favorite son is riding on her back.

And don’t think I haven’t noticed that most of the favorite sons are white. The majority of the women in charge are white and they choose their boy geniuses to be as like them as they can. On a rare occasion there is a son of color but he is usually treated as a kind of pet project. The white boys are geniuses; the boys of color have “so much potential” that needs to be cultivated and shaped and pruned. In these spaces, men of color can be called inspiring but they’re rarely called brilliant. In some rare moments in these spaces, you’ll find a woman of color but she somehow has to lean into a culturally specific lane. A Black woman can make some inroads with Anansi tales; Agents can sell her show for Black History Month. A book about Chinese lanterns can be sold around Chinese New Year lessons in school, so that means there might be space for a Chinese woman. I mean, I love Anansi tales and Chinese lanterns as much as the next person — probably more than the next person — but what if our artists of color could just make cool stuff that they felt like making? Like we could have a South Asian company make a show about trains. Or an Iraqi writer could just publish a cute story about a frog. Or maybe, as a temporary remedy, white artists should only be allowed to make culturally specific work for a while. Like, no more cute frog stories for us white folks. It’s just Betsy Ross myths, muskets and tea cozies in our repertory now. See how we like it. (We wouldn’t like it.)

In any case, I’m no longer attempting to make any inroads in these spaces. I gave them my best shot but I didn’t see a path toward success. I was no one’s favorite daughter there and there is no such thing, really. The favorite daughter of folktales is the one who does all the chores and sacrifices herself for the good of her loved ones, not one who strides out into the world to make her fortune. I’m keen on striding out into the world to make my fortune the way the boys do in those stories. And one day I hope to encounter someone who can actually champion me the way the boys get championed by their arts mothers and arts fathers. And I hope all the bella mamas, of all the feminized spaces, find a way to make favorites of more than just the white boys one day.