For fuck’s sake, lighten up.

The reinvention of the “boys’ own adventure” genre for the twenty-first century seems to have taken the media by storm. It has the hazy glow of nostalgia for a simpler world, a world where everyone knew their place in the white, male playground. Problem is, that world no longer exists, if it ever did, and in reinventing the ripping yarn genre (whose most enduring example is Biggles), some of the problems of the original have reappeared. Beneath the surface are racial tension and xenophobia, cultural traits that were institutionalized during the colonial era.

[...]

This is a scary and thrilling time to be male and I can’t help but think we are short-changing our sons. The new millennium has seen the unravelling of old, obsolete male values, and good riddance to them, too. Men have come to realize that we need new ways of being male if we are to negotiate the contemporary world of globalization. Why do we feel the need to inflict our own nostalgia and wishful thinking on our children? Such stories offer no advice on how to survive and thrive in our increasing complex and accelerating culture, while fostering an unhealthy fear of otherness.

I fail to see how “inflicting” boys’ own adventure novels on teenage boys is nostalgic and “wishful thinking.” Is Tom Kelly implying that parents who let their kids read Biggles novels, in all their xenophobic, chest-beating glory, are longing for a return to colonialism and racial segregation? In any case, I think he’s taking these novels a bit too seriously (not mention sounding as though he thinks books should be doing a large part of parents’ jobs). No kid is thinking about how to “negotiate the contemporary world of globalization”; that’s asking too much. Kids care about escapism, which is all the boys’ own adventure novels really are. Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island doesn’t teach kids about how to survive in the contemporary world—should they be banned from reading it? (I hope not—that was one of my favorite books as a kid.) And what about J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan? It’s not the most politically correct book, yet kids have been reading it for over a century without turning into little racists. The fact is, books do very little to teach kids certain attitudes; more often than not, they learn their attitudes from their parents.

Maybe we’re really short-changing our sons by not letting them be kids, by expecting them to understand and care about adult concepts like “globalization” and “accelerating culture.” The great thing about being a kid is that you don’t have to worry about the real world.