Have you ever read a book to your children about a talking pencil or rocket ship and wondered, "Why didn't they make that character female?" If you have, you aren't alone.  A piece in the Washington Post worries about the lack of female animals and female inanimate objects in kids' books.

A 2011 Florida State University study found that just 7.5 percent of nearly 6,000 picture books published between 1900 and 2000 depict female animal protagonists[.]

Oh no!

... male animals were the central characters in more than 23 percent each year. 

So wait.  What's the problem?  That means most animals have no gender in these stories.

No more than 33 percent of children’s books in any given year featured an adult woman or female animal, but adult men and male animals appeared in 100 percent of the books. While there are a handful of exceptions, like Frances the badger, Olivia the pig and Lilly the mouse, they are the exceptions, not the rule. 

Do you think authors could correct this imbalance by creating more female mouse and pig characters?

The current bestsellers “The Day the Crayons Quit” and “The Day the Crayons Came Home” have been praised as parables of inclusion and celebrations of diversity. One bookseller I spoke with even described the rebelling crayons as a metaphor for the Occupy movement. Yet not a single crayon is identified with a female pronoun. Just about everything and everyone in the books — from five of the crayons to a paper clip to a sock to Pablo Picasso to the crayons’ owner, Duncan, to his father to his little brother — is male, or not assigned a gender. The exceptions are a female teacher and Duncan’s little sister, who uses the otherwise under-employed pink crayon.

Why is it always the pink crayon that gets the short end of the story?  Do you think all phallic objects in kids books should be given girl names?

 Recent bestseller lists are topped by books starring crayons, fish and a snowplow: all male or non-gendered. 

Imagine a story starring a snow plow named Natalie; wouldn't that make girls named Natalie happy everywhere?

... we should want to show our kids that girls can be anything — and anything can be a girl.

I think we're seeing that right now in a lot of girls' locker rooms and showers.

Obviously liberals have nothing better to do with their time than to worry about things like this.  It reminds me of the tremendous excitement when it was stated that the new BB-8 droid in Star Wars: The Force Awakens, was a girl. 

This article was written by Ed Straker, senior writer of NewsMachete.com, the conservative news site.