Dads got their annual time in the spotlight over this past week as we geared up for and then celebrated Father’s Day. Here at HUP we’ve been glad to see a book we published last year get a nice bit of attention in the Father’s Day media blitz. It’s called Fatherhood: Evolution and Human Paternal Behavior, and it was co-written by Peter B. Gray and Kermyt G. Anderson. Just in the past week the BabyCenter blog cited the book; it featured in a Vancouver Sun op-ed; and there was a particularly thorough post about the book on MSNBC.com’s Cosmic Log, where Alan Boyle looked at how anthropologists suggest that current social trends might be reshaping fatherhood in the mold of the “good old days of hunter-gatherer fathering,” an era when researchers like Gray and Anderson assert that fathers were more active in their children’s development than in much of modern history.
All of this attention on modern fathers, and this welcome coverage of Gray and Anderson’s rich evolutionary perspective, makes a recent article on a persistent societal barrier between motherhood and fatherhood even more interesting. The piece appeared on Jezebel last week and is titled “Could A Mom Have Written Go The F--k To Sleep? And Would It Have Been A Bestseller?” (Well, actually, Jezebel doesn’t bother with the coy hyphens, and, in what follows, neither will we. Be warned.)
For those who’ve somehow missed it, Go the Fuck to Sleep is a parenting and publishing sensation.
It’s a picture book, written by the novelist Adam Mansbach and illustrated by Roberto Cortés, that
gives us a father at his wit’s end come bedtime. The book began as a lark, picked up steam online, went to number one on Amazon, had a first printing of 300,000 copies, has been performed by Samuel L. Jackson and Werner Herzog, and has already been optioned for film. That kid who wouldn’t go to sleep is suddenly making an awful lot of money for daddy.
What Amy Sohn asks in her Jezebel piece is whether a mother could have gotten away with a book like this—and been met with a reception that would pay for her kid’s college just based on preorders. From her piece:
As much as I want to believe that “Funny is funny” and it would have been a runaway success regardless, I can't help but think that things might have gone down differently.
A mom who even thinks the word “fuck” around her kid? A mom who can’t get her child to sleep or is unwilling to co-sleep to do it? A mom who isn’t more lovable than caustic, always and forever? I can't help but think the Internet masses on parenting sites like this would have a field day with it, raking me over the coals for the same sentiment that is so funny when expressed by a dad.
— If you hate being a mom so much, why did you have a child in the first place?
— Clearly your daughter can’t rest because you work.
— You have an anger management problem and you're giving your kid ADHD.
— You need Zoloft.
— I pray that you bring no more children into the world because it will spare another individual the years of therapy he will need to get over the trauma of having been raised by such a selfish and insensitive person.
And, of course: That book is so lame, I could have written it.