There is a small amendment in the second edition of It isn’t Rude to be Nude. A tiny change that took a lot of thought and a few discussions with my publisher.
The change is on the willies page. Here is before:
Here is after:
The original sentence in brackets came about after I’d written the first draft of the text and finished the first drawings, and was showing the book to people close to me to see what they thought.
It was a male friend who suggested it. He looked at the page and said “but willies are a bit silly!”
I liked the suggestion, and I thought of my brothers and all the other boys (and some men) I have known having innocent and silly fun with their willies. And that was my intention - there is a lot of funny waggling and aimed peeing that can be done with the male appendage, and this is a book whose spirit is a bit silly and tongue-in-cheek.
Since publication the book has received loads of fantastic feedback, I’ve been on BBC Radio talking about it, it’s been covered by the national press and selected as an Observer/Guardian Children’s book of 2020, as well as a dePictus outstanding picturebook of autumn 2020.
But that line has caused a few quibbles, a few wobbly reviews, and one quite strongly worded email.
I have to say I was completely unprepared for criticism like this. Perhaps it was naive of me, but this was my first book, and I’d not thought about how I’d feel if I found a one star Amazon review, or opened an angry email. I could shrug off as ridiculous the instagram commentators who wrote (without reading the book for themselves) that it raised child safeguarding concerns, or that children should not be made to look at naked adults, but I found it less easy to dismiss the idea that boys could be damaged by this line.
A few other, and on the most part really positive online reviewers said that they wish I’d used all the ‘proper’ names for all body parts. Some felt that it was unfair on boys that I’d used willy for them, and vulva for girls - boys’ bits deserve equal respect! Others felt that it was unfair on girls - how come boys get a frivolous word, encouraging them not to take their private parts seriously?
I did a lot of thinking about it all, and talked it through with Tate, who support my decision. We thought about changing willy to penis, we thought about adding an author’s note about language. I (very briefly, and not seriously) considered changing the text on the page to “Testes are the bestest”, or “The penis is very serious”.
But in the end we decided just to take the line out.
I know what my intention was, but I’d realised that if just a very small percentage of boys were upset, or thought less about their bodies because of that line, then that is against the spirit of the book. It’s easy to apply our own adult context and life experience to what we write in books for children, but does every child have the same understanding that I do of the word ‘silly’? Will they see it as a light hearted joke, or will they take it to heart?
I didn’t want to risk this, so the line went.
Willy stayed, however. Because it rhymes with the word silly, and for other reasons, which you can read about in my post about language used in It isn’t Rude to be Nude, below.