When I wrote last month about the soothing properties of adult coloring books, I apparently missed something. As is the case with many other innocuous, popular products that for some reason needed to become gendered—pop, Kleenex, soap—there is a separate category of coloring books just for men.
Luckily, the BuzzFeed writer Grace Spelman tweeted about them, and I am no longer under the mistaken impression that whatever coloring book I might enjoy would be equally suitable for a man:
hooooooooly shit pic.twitter.com/zEQNFsJK0l
— Jingle Spels (@GraceSpelman) December 1, 2015
Amazon has a sizable sampling of these for sale, including some that are fairly NSFW. There’s the redundantly-titled Adult Coloring Book For Men: Realistic Coloring Book of Sexy Women and Hot Girls for Men. There’s also one that promises to take the colorer “on a man’s journey”—which, from what I can glean, is creating, courting, and proposing to your dream woman, followed by lots and lots of sex, complete with genitals to fill in with your favorite flesh-toned crayon. There does not seem to be an equivalent of this coloring book for women (though there is the Mom Coloring Book, and one where you can color in the paintings of great women artists, which, frankly, looks awesome.)
We’ve also got The Manly Man’s Coloring Book, which includes cars, kegs, and an image of a flask with two axes and fire on it. And The Amazing Colouring Book for MEN (A Really RELAXING Colouring Book), featuring patterns of typically masculine-coded things like tools and sports equipment, as well as … means of transportation? And cameras? Which I never thought of as particularly gendered, unless I was trying to memorize which French nouns use “le” and which use “la.”