The Female of the Species

About The Female of the Species

The Female of the Species is a young adult novel by Mindy McGinnis, published in 2016 by Katherine Tegen Books. An Edgar Award–winning author, McGinnis writes here about rape culture — the social systems, assumptions, and silences that enable sexual violence against women — through three alternating perspectives.

The first voice is Alex Craft, who three years ago watched her older sister Anna be murdered, and watched her sister's killer walk free. Alex's response was private and specific: she tracked the man down and killed him. She does not feel bad about it. She has carried this secret since, living in her small town as someone who knows what she is capable of and does not trust herself around other people — not because she is dangerous to everyone, but because she understands with cold clarity the violence that the people around her pretend does not exist.

The second voice is Jack, a popular athlete who was present on the night that Anna's body was found and has felt guilty about his role ever since. The third is Peekay, a preacher's daughter with a defiant streak who meets Alex while volunteering at an animal shelter and becomes her first real friend.

Rape Culture as Subject Matter

The novel does not treat rape culture as background texture. It makes it the explicit subject of the narrative. McGinnis shows how the mechanisms work: the way that women's reports are disbelieved, the way perpetrators are protected by their social status and athletic value, the way violence against women is treated as something that just happens rather than something that is done. Alex's particular clarity about all of this — her willingness to see it clearly and name it — is what makes her dangerous to a social order that depends on that violence remaining unnamed.

The novel's critical and library reception was extraordinary. It was named to the YALSA Top 10 Best YA Fiction list, selected by the Junior Library Guild, reviewed in glowing terms by School Library Journal and others. It was taught in high school classrooms across the country. The argument for it as a school library book was not simply literary; it was practical. Young readers — particularly young women — deserve access to fiction that names what they are living with.

Why The Female of the Species Has Been Banned

The Female of the Species has been banned or challenged in 29 school districts across 6 states: Florida, Iowa, Missouri, Tennessee, Texas, and Wisconsin. The challenges cite violence, sexual content, and language. The scale of the banning record — 29 districts — reflects both the book's prominence and the intensity with which its subject matter is resisted.

A novel about rape culture is going to make people who benefit from the silence around rape culture uncomfortable. That discomfort is not a reason to remove the book from schools. It is an argument for keeping it there. The students who most need access to fiction that names what Alex Craft names — who need to know that someone is writing clearly about what they are experiencing — are the ones most harmed by its removal.