The Baby-sitters Club’s readership is generally thought of as a girls’ club. Whenever a man shows up on BSC message boards or livejournals, it’s something unusual. Posters are generally assumed to be female until proven otherwise.
Now, if some of us girls feel strange reading the BSC once we’re actually older than our childhood idols, well, I can only imagine what happens when sex/gender plays into it. If I feel weird reading the BSC being a relatively normal 21-year-old female college student who enjoys dancing to electroclash and shopping for clothes that only a Stacey would wear, I can only imagine how a 21-year-old male college student feels.
I know that my brother would occasionally read them in the bathroom, and that The BSC Companion is run by a man, and we occasionally get men on the livejournal. There are people who make their SOs read the books. I’m really curious about the experiences of a male who reads the BSC, and what reactions they get from people.
There is also the fact that these books are without a doubt written with a female audience in mind. Yes, there is a token male sitter, but, like Lyman Bruno, we pretty much all accept the fact if it weren’t for his relationship with Mary Anne, Logan probably wouldn’t be in the Club. The boys I know who baby-sit do just as well as the girls, but it is still kind of stigmatized, even nearly twenty years after Logan accepted Kristy’s offer to be a Associate Member.
I don’t really know where I’m going with all this, and in fact I don’t know if I have any male readers. But I am interested in their perspective on what they like about the BSC, and whatever problems they’ve had with their families, etc. because of their love for it.
