One explanation for this continuing popularity is that the Hardy Boys are simple wish fulfillment. Their adventures allow readers to vicariously experience an escape from the mundane. At the same time, Frank and Joe live ordinary lives when not solving mysteries, allowing readers to identify with characters who seem realistic and whose parents and authority figures are unfailingly supportive and loving. The Hardy Boys also embody an ideal of masculinity: by their very name they "set the stage for a gentrified version of hardiness and constructed hardiness as an ideal for modern American males", part of the "cultural production of self-control and mastery as the revered ideal for the American man." More controversially, to Meredith Wood, the characters embody not just an ideal of masculinity, but an ideal of white masculinity. She tries to argue that "racist stereotypes are ... fundamental to the success of the "Hardy Boys" series." In support of this claim, Wood cites what she says is the replacement of one stereotype (evil Chinese) with another (evil Latin Americans) in the original and revised versions of "Footprints Under the Window". She further claims that this is the reason for the popularity of the Applewood Books reprints of the original, unrevised texts rather than the widely cited blandness of the rewrites.