Guys like stuff happening, women don't. Well women like female drama happening. As Steve Sailer points out The Handmaid's Tale isn't really dystopian SF, it's Harem Porn.
I think that there is something to this. Some books focus on social or emotional conflict, while others involve physical conflict, or dealing with an external enemy. Think Jane Austen versus Tom Clancy. One of the interesting things about Harry Potter, which successfully recruited both boys and girls as readers, is that Rowling balanced both forms of conflict. We had a fair amount about social dynamics, love stories, etc, but also the overarching structure is a struggle against an external enemy.
In great books it can be "both / and" rather than "either / or". For example, n the Aubry / Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian there is action on the high seas during the Napoleonic Wars, but many critics have said that the interpersonal relationships are reminiscent of Jane Austen.
The Handmaid’s Tale may be harem porn, and it may even be well-written by a very talented author, but its premise is pure nonsense.
After a mysterious set of circumstances only a precious few women are able to bear children. So what is the reaction of the men who run the country? Do they fight to the death for these precious few women? Do they place them upon pedestals of diamonds and gold, as they’ve done throughout history? No. Of course not. They arrest and punish and torture and kill them.
Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. But then I’m a man. And the fact that the streaming series based on this book became such an iconic feminist event, speaks volumes about fiction, and the lack of success for male writers – not to mention the power of feminist politics.
And on another note – about women accounting for 80% of fiction sales – that’s pretty much the standard. Women are purported to buy 80% of pretty much all consumer goods. That’s why all commercial media are so heavily skewed towards women: Advertisers want to reach them. And that doesn’t leave a whole lot of platforms for male consumers or creators who write from a male perspective.
Yep, I've always been disturbed when people rave about The Handmaid's Tale (especially when it was bought to life via streaming). I couldn't get excited about rape porn. I couldn't understand why people didn't recognize the straight line association with real life, eg. 'gestational carriers'.
I remember when 50 Shades was published and young women called it mommy porn - something boringly conventional. There is certainly a lot of very dark fantasies going on.
Yep, that's another one, although not as repellant as Handmaid's.
Apart from being badly written, 50 shades was porn dressed up as a deep romance. Mind boggling that millions of women read the books, and saw the films, and swooned.
Male here. Big fiction reader. I stopped trying to find modern American lit writers with a masculine voice a few years ago and have been reading Hemingway, Dumas, Houllebecq (modern but French)... Fantasy has some great Authors who still write for the boys like Patrick Rothfuss and Scott Lynch, but fantasy overall is female coded and woke. If I ever get published I'll add my voice to the world, but I've never been a super manly male-- I read fiction for God's sake.
Thanks for your perspective. I hope you do add your voice. In the essay, I could probably do a better job emphasizing my intent is authentic voices that happen to be male, not necessarily manly man for the sake of it.
That's a great nuance--"authentic voices that happen to be male,"-- and I think my retreat to Hemingway and the Flashman series (testosterone!) has been somewhat motivated by all the feminization of culture in general.
Is it cool for those of us dudes who write fiction with masculine themes and characters to pimp our shit here? ;-)
---
Some more history:
Fiction started shifting away from male readers in the late 1980s, as female humanities graduates began taking over publishing houses (for a variety of reasons, not all of them political). In genre, especially, before that point there was a pretty healthy balance of male and female editors, acquisitions staff, etc.
As women became more responsible for acquisitions, and especially women from the Ivy Leagues (genre fic of all sorts was historically written by people with blue collar, business, miltary, or engineering backgrounds, even if the authors also had humanities and academic backgrounds), the sorts of fiction acquired began to narrow, skew heavily in feminist and female-centric directions, and men began dropping away from readership in favor of video games and other such entertainments.
An excellent example can be seen in crime fiction, where women have always been a vital force:
Before the finish of the changeover, hard boiled detectives and soldier-of-fortune fiction (such as the Destroyer series, which went on for hundreds of volumes over the course of decades) were serious parts of the genre. Since the changeover, only the breakout male authors with a very distinctly upper-class sensibility (Harlan Coben, Greg Isles) or those who were already publishing industry insiders (Lee Child) have come up. The rest of the top male spots are held by veterans (Michael Connelly) or those male authors who are essentially house names for ghostwriters to make their bones (posthumous Robert Ludlum, James Patterson post ~2005, posthumous Tom Clancy).
Along the way, science fiction, several subgenres of mystery, several subgenres of fantasy, westerns, and adventure fiction have all basically disappeared--or had done, until the indie revolution. Now some of the top voices out there are men writing the stories they wish someone could've written for them to read.
Now the trick is to win more of the readership back from video games and web surfing.
True, science fiction sells far less than fantasy, and fantasy genres like sword and sorcery have fallen out of favor, but I think an overlooked story here is the culture war within SFF ("sad and/or rabid puppies") that blew up the Hugo Awards for a few years in the 2010s. What shook out of that is a SFWA/WorldCon crowd that is very 3rd or 4th wave feminist, while the "bros" took their ball and went elsewhere, designating the Dragon Awards as their new home. From where I sit, it seems like the SFWA/WorldCon folks have the most pull in Big 5 SFF imprints as far as acquisitions are concerned. The weird thing though is that WorldCon only has about 3,000 votes in the largest Hugo Award categories (and similar attendance), while DragonCon has something like 90,000 attendees (not sure how many vote on the awards).
When I try to discuss this with female author friends, they often point to Brandon Sanderson, John Scalzi, and other well-established dude authors in SFF as evidence that men dominate the genres. But I am not seeing it in the acquisition pipeline.
Scalzi's sales numbers are abysmal. Sanderson's more than half indie now.
The collapse was underway LONG before the 2010s. The whole sad/rabid/etc. puppies thing was a case of farmers fighting over a burning barn long after the horses had fled.
It's been going on for decades now. Boys are ill treated in schools, penalized for their natural rambunctiousness, marked lower for the same work and generally put off education and the school system. They are no longer attending college much either; the gender gap there is now 40:60 - larger than the gap was when Title IX was passed.
It affects their reading too as they associate literature with their mistreatment in school. It is only natural.
We won't be changing this trend without seriously reforming schools and education.
I've yet to see compelling evidence for this. Women have always been more interested in fiction while men were more interested in non-fiction. That part is biological.
I think what's changed is that parents don't push their kids to succeed in academics the way they used to and girls are far more intrinsically motivated towards academics than boys. Asian boys are doing just fine, their parents still push them.
@Nels, while not specifically about fiction vs non-fiction I think you might appreciate the book Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves. He's a Brookings Institution scholar who spent his career analyzing data on gender equality and started noticing a ton of indicators where boys and men were lagging girls and women, that very few decision-makers seemed to care about.
I've thought about this a lot. I have several theories.
I feel there just aren't that many guy oriented books in public schools. Most books students read lean towards the effeminate. If I put it as a percentage probably 10% were solely male oriented when I grew up. That may be a generous percentage.
Also if a school reads a modern book, it almost 100% is never a "guy book." You're never going to read Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, The Bourne Series, etc. These are often labeled, "too scary" and so men are forced to compromise for the sake of women and read Harry Potter or some young adult teen book.
There will always be some school out there that will prove what I just wrote wrong but for the vast majority of schools, guys will never even be introduced to "guy books." This makes it very unsurprising that guys don't read manly fiction considering most men have barely been introduced to it in school.
I hate to say it but I personally even have a hard time reading "guy books." Most are formulaic and there are the same common tropes throughout all of them: the cop that disobeys all the rules, is an alcoholic, sleeps around, and is divorced. Not exactly role models that you would want to emulate.
Also many stories do not have any twists in them. I feel like I am reading about a cop just doing his job. Are the circumstance epic? Sure but I feel no excitement because everything is laid out beforehand and the hero systematically solves the problem. Once again, these are generalities and there are tons of exceptions.
Thanks for this post. Sorry for the huge rant. I have thought about this a lot since my dad is an insane fiction reader and although I like books, I've never been drawn to most popular guy genre books. In theory I should love the genre because I love action movies and my favorite books of all time are "guy books." I just find most to be unfulfilling.
Maybe the content of public school libraries has changed, but I didn't have any difficulties finding "guy books" when I was growing up. Redwall, Eragon, Artemis Fowl, Percy Jackson... All written by guys, and mostly aimed towards the same. Imaginative worlds, themes of adventure and self-growth, plenty of action, and a minimal focus on romance and relationships.
I wonder if the dearth of men's fiction is a definitional problem, in part. I don't think I've ever read a book about a gritty alcoholic cop that sleeps around, but most of what I read still feels like it primarily appeals to guys. "Men's fiction" isn't necessarily fiction about explicitly manly stuff. It's fiction which explores topics which men tend to enjoy. Which is pretty broad!
Great observations. I'm an avid reader, but only started reading fiction again within the last couple years after a decade or so of reading pretty much only nonfiction. I spent (and still do spend) a lot of my time reading fiction that is unambiguously marketed towards women, especially of the WW2 historical fiction variety, but what got me back into reading literary fiction was deciding to try audiobooks on my long commute a couple years ago. I found it difficult to keep my attention on the story, so I picked a book I'd read many years prior so I wouldn't be lost in the plot of my attention wanted: The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III. After that, Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth. I wanted more historical fiction and found Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds.
Anyway, Dubus and Follett are some of my favorite male authors, with Dubus being very masculine in both subject matter and style. I just love everything he writes. I am actually very interested in the stories men tell, or want to tell, because they are foreign to me and I appreciate the window into that unfamiliar world. I very much hope more men speak up about this and do their best to get their works out into the world.
Thanks Lirpa. I love WWII novels as well, including those involving women. Kristin Hannah is a favorite. You'd enjoy "Nightingale" if you haven't read it. I'll check out "House of Sand and Fog" — wasn't familiar.
"Nightingale" is one of my absolute favorites by Hannah. I never wanted it to end. I think she is at her best with historical fiction. I recently read her latest, "The Women," about Vietnam nurses and their experiences. It was excellent.
Another good reason for people to get a library card... many libraries have access to almost everything as an audiobook that you can borrow and download.
Hell yes. I was deciding between writing this essay and a love letter to my local libary, which I rediscovered in the last two years after years of reading 1 out of 8 books I bought on Amazon. lol
That phase is what actually got me to start using the library constantly. I got tired of using up all my Audible credits or buying them, so I downloaded Libby and never looked back. It's how I found The Four Winds, in their recommended section.
Thanks Lirpa. I love WWII novels as well, including those involving women. Kristin Hannah is a favorite. You'd enjoy "Nightingale" if you haven't read it. I'll check out "House of Sand and Fog" — wasn't familiar.
Things have very much been moving in the same direction in film.
While there are still a lot of old white guys at the top, and places like The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are still primarily composed of men, the most reliable figures I've seen indicate that women now make up the majority of documentary filmmakers.
It's also very clear that most of the nonprofits that hand out film grants and film festivals that premiere and exhibit new films, providing them with the chance to connect with broader audiences and distribution channels, now favor women over men, sometimes very blatantly.
When you combine this with the new "anti-racist" approach that gatekeepers have embraced with regard to selection, less established white men are now at a severe disadvantage.
Of course being systemically disadvantaged in film is much worse than being systemically disadvantaged in literature, because it's exceedingly difficult to make a film without at least some money.
This is one topic we actually agree on. Though you focused on fiction books, the same can be said for movies, tv, comics, games, etc... However, I believe that the lack of good entertainment fiction may help to increase the reading of good fiction. One may be more inclined to read a book when there is nothing good on the screen.
On the other hand, the best fiction in my opinion was written before I was born. The Lord of the Rings is a great example of good fiction in writing (if overly loquacious) and an excellent example of the modern decay in fiction movies. As the LOTR movies turned into the Hobbit, they showed an accelerating evidence of the metastasis of female coded characters and woke ideologies. The Amazon series culminated in an unwatchable disaster.
For two out of my three YA science fiction novels (published by major publishers), I was asked to change the main character from a boy to a girl, because it’s mostly girls and women who read YA. And yet a librarian friend of mine often told me she had trouble finding YA novels that her male students wanted to read. It’s a strange circle. (I didn’t end up changing my characters, btw.)
My first (YA science fiction) novel was also labeled by a professional reviewer as “heteronormative to the extreme,” which has always stumped me.
As someone who spent the last few years in queer circles, I can interpret: "There aren't enough queer characters."
If you write a YA book without queer or trans characters (who must be represented in a positive light), some people will judge it as heteronormative* - even though statistical probability is on your side.
*"Heteronormativity" is the idea that heterosexuality is a norm being forced on people who don't want it. It's popular in queer circles to assert that most people are inherently bisexual or homosexual (or better yet "pansexual") and society brainwashes them into heterosexuality. I think population statistics demonstrate that in fact a solid majority of people are solely attracted to the opposite sex and totally happy that way.
My librarian friend reports the same thing for children’s books. There are a handful of book companies that specialize in supplying libraries. Apparently it’s a struggle to find books for boys that aren’t some flavor of “Have you thought about being gay?”. It’s little wonder fewer boys are interested in reading by the time they hit the YA market.
Thanks for the mention! Though I'd disagree that any group should be encouraged to read or write in order to become better people. That'd be a weird and condescending standard if we applied it to any other group (e.g. "Asian Americans should be encouraged to read/write more in order to learn more empathy"). Writing is a fundamental skill and art form and our culture is better if more people do it and that culture would be greatly impoverished if half its people just disengaged from writing and reading.
Also, reading books becomes much easier and enjoyable if they're geared towards your group. If boys and men aren't reading, a major factor is likely because there aren't enough books that speak to them in a genuine way. The way some people wring their hands about why there aren't more male readers without also advocating for more books to entice such readers (and I'm not talking about hypothetical books they think these readers ought to be reading) is tiresome.
Telling people to read or write "to become better people" is an uncharitable interpretation of what I am saying in this piece. Yes, I am encouraging fiction though I don't think it's condescending, as a man myself, to talk about this — at least that's not the intent.
Oh yeah, I didn’t mean that that was all you’re saying. I was just addressing the empathy thing more generally since you mentioned it and it’s often brought up by others too.
Interesting article, not something I had ever considered. As a Gen Z, I'd like to offer my perspective on fiction and where I've ended up.
Growing up I read a lot of fiction, I was such a voracious reader that my parents had to take away my book light as otherwise, I would stay up all night reading instead of sleeping. The books I remember reading were:
* Percy Jackson Series
* Warrior Cats
* Ranger's Apprentice
* The Familiars
* Guardians of Gahoole
* Poppy
My parents also introduced me to a ton of comics they grew up reading
* Tintin
* Asterix and Obelix
* Calvin and Hobbes
But after I got my first smartphone in 7th grade the amount of book reading I did dropped off a cliff. It largely got replaced by YouTube, Reddit, and iFunny (🤮). We also got an XBOX so a lot of my free time was consumed by video games.
I only got back into reading later in High School at the encouragement of my parents, but most of it was nonfiction news sources, like The Economist and WSJ. Today most of my reading comes from nonfiction sources like The Economist, The Atlantic, Substack, and various nonfiction books. However, at some point during HS, I was introduced to Manga. Since then almost all of my fiction reading has been Manga + Manwha. I have not struggled to find male representation in this medium and I don't mean in the fanservice way. Some of these stories delve into the ideas of finding your place in the world and growing as a person (Holyland and Vinland Saga). Some of these are coming to terms with your past mistakes and rectifying what you've done (A Silent Voice). And some of these are just plain old good action (Attack on Titan, The Fable, Kagurabachi).
I wonder if this is because the medium is better for action stories which can have a male tilt. On the other hand, maybe I'm just drawn to these because they are similar to the comics I read while growing up. Yet I'm not going to lie, a good chunk of Manga and Manhwa can be pretty shallow. While I haven't read many adult fiction books, my experience from the ones that I have indicates that fiction books can explore much deeper topics, as they aren't restricted by a visual component like comics are. Hence, sometimes I worry that while Manga and Manhwa scratch the fiction itch, they don't push me to the next level of questioning and thinking that many of the nonfiction books I read do. (Caveat: I recently read the book Lessons In Chemistry as part of a book club and that shattered my illusion that fiction books are supposed to be more profound. It was quite a lot more shallow than many of the Manga and Manhwa I've read.)
It would be interesting to see if reading for men has been replaced by other forms of media, like video games, YouTube, and short-form entertainment.
I feel like this is partly due to the coding of genre. Plenty of men still read fantasy and sci-fi; it was highbrow literary culture’s own decision to label those as “not serious fiction”.
Also, RE your beach example, context matters! As a red-blooded American man, I only half-jokingly consider it my God-given right to drink beer and relive my childhood at the damn beach. But that shouldn’t erase the fact that I spend nearly every other waking hour most weeks reading audiobooks, especially while I do my marathon training or powerlifting.
I would conclude that it’s perfectly acceptable to encourage men to embrace reading in contexts they feel comfortable in as men, and to share what makes us comfortable (as I myself just did here ^). We don’t have to embrace inceldom nor toxic masculinity to simply chart our own course as a gender, nor to keep that course inclusive of all kinds of men.
Agree, genres are still gender-coded, some predominantly male like Fantasy, Sci Fi, Horror, Thrillers. Still, most popular and literary fiction skews female.
I mean, I’m not remotely competitive in powerlifting… but the core of the sport is to lift as much as you can. It’s actually a good complement for running, because it helps me keep my metabolism up on non-running days.
Also, FWIW, I try not to stay impressed with myself, although it inevitably creeps in.
To me, it’s an acknowledgment of mortality. Death sucks, and most of our philosophizing and religiosity surrounding it is just cope. Everyone is different, and to each their own, but for me, on that last day, the only thing that will make it suck less for me is the knowledge that I worked my ass off in my middle age. I didn’t sit there in my comfy office job and get fat on McDonald’s; I did things that very few humans care to do (short of dumb striver shit like climbing Everest), and I did them because they were hard and they kept me strong.
The endorphins don’t hurt either. True endorphin highs are rarer than dumb CNN articles make them out to be, but when you have one… fuck, man, that shit is good. You feel like a million bucks without having to actually earn them.
@Jeff - No, if you look at the newest publications from major imprints in science fiction and fantasy, most of the debut authors are female, nonbinary, and or queer. There are still some male authors who debuted in the past that have a large following.
They’ve always been both better at and more interested in accommodating and exploring “outsider” perspectives. People who obsess over “best of” lists and “right ways” of doing things yell and scream about change happening in the spaces they thought of as “theirs”, but they’re just making noise. The percentages have changed, but nothing’s really gone away. If you go to an actual bookstore and look at what’s on the shelves, it’s all still there. The main difference is that stuff like Kushiel’s Dart or Left Hand of Darkness aren’t as exceptional as they once were.
There was an enormous controversy a few years ago about this process in action at the Hugo Awards. The ‘pro-male’ faction, we can call it, was broadly popular but hated by the press, etc as expected, and was tarred with the brush of GamerGate and the alt-right, and so on.
As far as I can tell they won? The Hugos changed their voting rules in a fairly complex manner apparently to prevent organized minorities from dominating, whatever their political stripe. The ‘Sad Puppies’ have not run campaigns since.
But the Hugos had been going downhill for years before that, and their credibility seems never to have recovered. Now, unfortunately, it seems that it’s gotten worse, and the Hugos are owned by the Chinese Communist Party.
I’m a pretty avid consumer of SF and fantasy, and I can’t remember any notable winners at all this century. I just learned that the 4th Harry Potter won back in 2001. The fact that James S.A. Corey never won even one for any of their flawless Expanse series (nine novels long!) is just completely discrediting. The Expanse is so good I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to the last book, and probably never will.
I commented in a subthread above about this. It's an exaggeration to say that the CCP owns the Hugos. The Hugos are administered by the WorldCon volunteers who are a different mix of people each year, depending on location. So I would rephrase your statement to say "In 2023, when WorldCon was in Chengdu, the team adinistering the Hugo Awards bent over backwards to accommodate what they thought the CCP wanted, eliminating several contestants on dubious grounds."
The 2024 Hugos were run in a transparent fashion and seemed to reflect the votes of the fans who were members of WorldCon this year. The winners were dominated by women and LGBT people, as has been the case in most recent years.
I must say, I'm part of the defecit. I overwhelmingly read nonfiction, and seldom read recent releases when I do read fiction.
Personally, I think it has a lot to do with videogames. Both men and women play videogames, but serious, devoted players are overwhelmingly male. And this skew increases in extremity the more serious the commitment the game* enables. There would be a defecit even if there wasn't also a fever to actively drive away further male audience.
* Or metagame, as to take one of many examples, there's many female Pokémon players,** but far fewer Nuzlockers.
** Still probably more boys, but by game standards, the right end of the bell curve.
I think this is exactly the issue. Men are gaming instead of reading. The few who do read fiction are just reading genre fiction.
I’m an older white Gen X male who reads literary fiction. I never - never - come across another guy who does IRL.
I think a young male adult relative of mine is typical. He was brought up in a reading household, was read to from infancy, did the Harry Potter books. He now reads the occasional sci fi book but mostly he games. We have good natured arguments over the merits of books vs games as storytelling formats.
Yes, the modern literary fiction publishing industry is largely ignoring men. But here’s the thing: I respond to that by reading a lot of pre 21st century fiction. Most men aren’t reading any of it and I’m pretty pessimistic that they ever will, regardless of what the publishing industry does.
I feel ya. Personally, I love videogames. But in terms of both character and narrative, the best games are still well below the best books, plays, movies, and TV shows. Go have a look at pretty much any list of "best videogame stories", and to this day you will find picks that are so bad* as to be the equivalent of putting Flowers in the Attic and The Sword of Shannara on a list of the greatest novels of the 20th Century.
* e.g., any Final Fantasy or Metal Gear game. Yes, even the good ones.
This is something many pop culture YouTubers have picked up on as established male leaning franchises (Star Wars, Marvel...) have tried to broaden their gender appeal, to limited results. They argue that something appealing to men will have a natural spillover to women, but something targeting women just naturally turns off guys.
Publishing wise, many guys have switched to self-publishing, and also have a Substack presence. Hopefully they'll be through here to offer their specific insights once your article percolates outwards to various feeds.
Guys like stuff happening, women don't. Well women like female drama happening. As Steve Sailer points out The Handmaid's Tale isn't really dystopian SF, it's Harem Porn.
I think that there is something to this. Some books focus on social or emotional conflict, while others involve physical conflict, or dealing with an external enemy. Think Jane Austen versus Tom Clancy. One of the interesting things about Harry Potter, which successfully recruited both boys and girls as readers, is that Rowling balanced both forms of conflict. We had a fair amount about social dynamics, love stories, etc, but also the overarching structure is a struggle against an external enemy.
True. Guys tend to be drawn to plot-driven stories.
In great books it can be "both / and" rather than "either / or". For example, n the Aubry / Maturin series by Patrick O'Brian there is action on the high seas during the Napoleonic Wars, but many critics have said that the interpersonal relationships are reminiscent of Jane Austen.
I think that’s going a bit far.
The Handmaid’s Tale may be harem porn, and it may even be well-written by a very talented author, but its premise is pure nonsense.
After a mysterious set of circumstances only a precious few women are able to bear children. So what is the reaction of the men who run the country? Do they fight to the death for these precious few women? Do they place them upon pedestals of diamonds and gold, as they’ve done throughout history? No. Of course not. They arrest and punish and torture and kill them.
Doesn’t make a whole lot of sense to me. But then I’m a man. And the fact that the streaming series based on this book became such an iconic feminist event, speaks volumes about fiction, and the lack of success for male writers – not to mention the power of feminist politics.
And on another note – about women accounting for 80% of fiction sales – that’s pretty much the standard. Women are purported to buy 80% of pretty much all consumer goods. That’s why all commercial media are so heavily skewed towards women: Advertisers want to reach them. And that doesn’t leave a whole lot of platforms for male consumers or creators who write from a male perspective.
Yep, I've always been disturbed when people rave about The Handmaid's Tale (especially when it was bought to life via streaming). I couldn't get excited about rape porn. I couldn't understand why people didn't recognize the straight line association with real life, eg. 'gestational carriers'.
I remember when 50 Shades was published and young women called it mommy porn - something boringly conventional. There is certainly a lot of very dark fantasies going on.
Yep, that's another one, although not as repellant as Handmaid's.
Apart from being badly written, 50 shades was porn dressed up as a deep romance. Mind boggling that millions of women read the books, and saw the films, and swooned.
Male here. Big fiction reader. I stopped trying to find modern American lit writers with a masculine voice a few years ago and have been reading Hemingway, Dumas, Houllebecq (modern but French)... Fantasy has some great Authors who still write for the boys like Patrick Rothfuss and Scott Lynch, but fantasy overall is female coded and woke. If I ever get published I'll add my voice to the world, but I've never been a super manly male-- I read fiction for God's sake.
Thanks for your perspective. I hope you do add your voice. In the essay, I could probably do a better job emphasizing my intent is authentic voices that happen to be male, not necessarily manly man for the sake of it.
That's a great nuance--"authentic voices that happen to be male,"-- and I think my retreat to Hemingway and the Flashman series (testosterone!) has been somewhat motivated by all the feminization of culture in general.
Allow me to introduce myself. i am the worst boyfriend ever
Hear hear!
Is it cool for those of us dudes who write fiction with masculine themes and characters to pimp our shit here? ;-)
---
Some more history:
Fiction started shifting away from male readers in the late 1980s, as female humanities graduates began taking over publishing houses (for a variety of reasons, not all of them political). In genre, especially, before that point there was a pretty healthy balance of male and female editors, acquisitions staff, etc.
As women became more responsible for acquisitions, and especially women from the Ivy Leagues (genre fic of all sorts was historically written by people with blue collar, business, miltary, or engineering backgrounds, even if the authors also had humanities and academic backgrounds), the sorts of fiction acquired began to narrow, skew heavily in feminist and female-centric directions, and men began dropping away from readership in favor of video games and other such entertainments.
An excellent example can be seen in crime fiction, where women have always been a vital force:
Before the finish of the changeover, hard boiled detectives and soldier-of-fortune fiction (such as the Destroyer series, which went on for hundreds of volumes over the course of decades) were serious parts of the genre. Since the changeover, only the breakout male authors with a very distinctly upper-class sensibility (Harlan Coben, Greg Isles) or those who were already publishing industry insiders (Lee Child) have come up. The rest of the top male spots are held by veterans (Michael Connelly) or those male authors who are essentially house names for ghostwriters to make their bones (posthumous Robert Ludlum, James Patterson post ~2005, posthumous Tom Clancy).
Along the way, science fiction, several subgenres of mystery, several subgenres of fantasy, westerns, and adventure fiction have all basically disappeared--or had done, until the indie revolution. Now some of the top voices out there are men writing the stories they wish someone could've written for them to read.
Now the trick is to win more of the readership back from video games and web surfing.
True, science fiction sells far less than fantasy, and fantasy genres like sword and sorcery have fallen out of favor, but I think an overlooked story here is the culture war within SFF ("sad and/or rabid puppies") that blew up the Hugo Awards for a few years in the 2010s. What shook out of that is a SFWA/WorldCon crowd that is very 3rd or 4th wave feminist, while the "bros" took their ball and went elsewhere, designating the Dragon Awards as their new home. From where I sit, it seems like the SFWA/WorldCon folks have the most pull in Big 5 SFF imprints as far as acquisitions are concerned. The weird thing though is that WorldCon only has about 3,000 votes in the largest Hugo Award categories (and similar attendance), while DragonCon has something like 90,000 attendees (not sure how many vote on the awards).
When I try to discuss this with female author friends, they often point to Brandon Sanderson, John Scalzi, and other well-established dude authors in SFF as evidence that men dominate the genres. But I am not seeing it in the acquisition pipeline.
Scalzi's sales numbers are abysmal. Sanderson's more than half indie now.
The collapse was underway LONG before the 2010s. The whole sad/rabid/etc. puppies thing was a case of farmers fighting over a burning barn long after the horses had fled.
It's been going on for decades now. Boys are ill treated in schools, penalized for their natural rambunctiousness, marked lower for the same work and generally put off education and the school system. They are no longer attending college much either; the gender gap there is now 40:60 - larger than the gap was when Title IX was passed.
It affects their reading too as they associate literature with their mistreatment in school. It is only natural.
We won't be changing this trend without seriously reforming schools and education.
I've yet to see compelling evidence for this. Women have always been more interested in fiction while men were more interested in non-fiction. That part is biological.
I think what's changed is that parents don't push their kids to succeed in academics the way they used to and girls are far more intrinsically motivated towards academics than boys. Asian boys are doing just fine, their parents still push them.
@Nels, while not specifically about fiction vs non-fiction I think you might appreciate the book Of Boys and Men by Richard Reeves. He's a Brookings Institution scholar who spent his career analyzing data on gender equality and started noticing a ton of indicators where boys and men were lagging girls and women, that very few decision-makers seemed to care about.
I've thought about this a lot. I have several theories.
I feel there just aren't that many guy oriented books in public schools. Most books students read lean towards the effeminate. If I put it as a percentage probably 10% were solely male oriented when I grew up. That may be a generous percentage.
Also if a school reads a modern book, it almost 100% is never a "guy book." You're never going to read Tom Clancy, Michael Crichton, The Bourne Series, etc. These are often labeled, "too scary" and so men are forced to compromise for the sake of women and read Harry Potter or some young adult teen book.
There will always be some school out there that will prove what I just wrote wrong but for the vast majority of schools, guys will never even be introduced to "guy books." This makes it very unsurprising that guys don't read manly fiction considering most men have barely been introduced to it in school.
I hate to say it but I personally even have a hard time reading "guy books." Most are formulaic and there are the same common tropes throughout all of them: the cop that disobeys all the rules, is an alcoholic, sleeps around, and is divorced. Not exactly role models that you would want to emulate.
Also many stories do not have any twists in them. I feel like I am reading about a cop just doing his job. Are the circumstance epic? Sure but I feel no excitement because everything is laid out beforehand and the hero systematically solves the problem. Once again, these are generalities and there are tons of exceptions.
Thanks for this post. Sorry for the huge rant. I have thought about this a lot since my dad is an insane fiction reader and although I like books, I've never been drawn to most popular guy genre books. In theory I should love the genre because I love action movies and my favorite books of all time are "guy books." I just find most to be unfulfilling.
Maybe the content of public school libraries has changed, but I didn't have any difficulties finding "guy books" when I was growing up. Redwall, Eragon, Artemis Fowl, Percy Jackson... All written by guys, and mostly aimed towards the same. Imaginative worlds, themes of adventure and self-growth, plenty of action, and a minimal focus on romance and relationships.
I wonder if the dearth of men's fiction is a definitional problem, in part. I don't think I've ever read a book about a gritty alcoholic cop that sleeps around, but most of what I read still feels like it primarily appeals to guys. "Men's fiction" isn't necessarily fiction about explicitly manly stuff. It's fiction which explores topics which men tend to enjoy. Which is pretty broad!
Great observations. I'm an avid reader, but only started reading fiction again within the last couple years after a decade or so of reading pretty much only nonfiction. I spent (and still do spend) a lot of my time reading fiction that is unambiguously marketed towards women, especially of the WW2 historical fiction variety, but what got me back into reading literary fiction was deciding to try audiobooks on my long commute a couple years ago. I found it difficult to keep my attention on the story, so I picked a book I'd read many years prior so I wouldn't be lost in the plot of my attention wanted: The House of Sand and Fog by Andre Dubus III. After that, Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth. I wanted more historical fiction and found Kristin Hannah's The Four Winds.
Anyway, Dubus and Follett are some of my favorite male authors, with Dubus being very masculine in both subject matter and style. I just love everything he writes. I am actually very interested in the stories men tell, or want to tell, because they are foreign to me and I appreciate the window into that unfamiliar world. I very much hope more men speak up about this and do their best to get their works out into the world.
Thanks Lirpa. I love WWII novels as well, including those involving women. Kristin Hannah is a favorite. You'd enjoy "Nightingale" if you haven't read it. I'll check out "House of Sand and Fog" — wasn't familiar.
"Nightingale" is one of my absolute favorites by Hannah. I never wanted it to end. I think she is at her best with historical fiction. I recently read her latest, "The Women," about Vietnam nurses and their experiences. It was excellent.
Another good reason for people to get a library card... many libraries have access to almost everything as an audiobook that you can borrow and download.
Hell yes. I was deciding between writing this essay and a love letter to my local libary, which I rediscovered in the last two years after years of reading 1 out of 8 books I bought on Amazon. lol
That phase is what actually got me to start using the library constantly. I got tired of using up all my Audible credits or buying them, so I downloaded Libby and never looked back. It's how I found The Four Winds, in their recommended section.
Libby is the best.
Thanks Lirpa. I love WWII novels as well, including those involving women. Kristin Hannah is a favorite. You'd enjoy "Nightingale" if you haven't read it. I'll check out "House of Sand and Fog" — wasn't familiar.
Things have very much been moving in the same direction in film.
While there are still a lot of old white guys at the top, and places like The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences are still primarily composed of men, the most reliable figures I've seen indicate that women now make up the majority of documentary filmmakers.
It's also very clear that most of the nonprofits that hand out film grants and film festivals that premiere and exhibit new films, providing them with the chance to connect with broader audiences and distribution channels, now favor women over men, sometimes very blatantly.
When you combine this with the new "anti-racist" approach that gatekeepers have embraced with regard to selection, less established white men are now at a severe disadvantage.
Of course being systemically disadvantaged in film is much worse than being systemically disadvantaged in literature, because it's exceedingly difficult to make a film without at least some money.
https://substack.com/@cinematimshel/p-146088542
Interesting points, thanks for the context about film. I'll check out your piece.
This is one topic we actually agree on. Though you focused on fiction books, the same can be said for movies, tv, comics, games, etc... However, I believe that the lack of good entertainment fiction may help to increase the reading of good fiction. One may be more inclined to read a book when there is nothing good on the screen.
On the other hand, the best fiction in my opinion was written before I was born. The Lord of the Rings is a great example of good fiction in writing (if overly loquacious) and an excellent example of the modern decay in fiction movies. As the LOTR movies turned into the Hobbit, they showed an accelerating evidence of the metastasis of female coded characters and woke ideologies. The Amazon series culminated in an unwatchable disaster.
Thanks, glad you liked it. That's a good point about how male voices still predominate in older books and classics.
For two out of my three YA science fiction novels (published by major publishers), I was asked to change the main character from a boy to a girl, because it’s mostly girls and women who read YA. And yet a librarian friend of mine often told me she had trouble finding YA novels that her male students wanted to read. It’s a strange circle. (I didn’t end up changing my characters, btw.)
My first (YA science fiction) novel was also labeled by a professional reviewer as “heteronormative to the extreme,” which has always stumped me.
Thanks for sharing your experiences — that's so interesting. What does "heteronormative to the extreme" even mean, lol.
As someone who spent the last few years in queer circles, I can interpret: "There aren't enough queer characters."
If you write a YA book without queer or trans characters (who must be represented in a positive light), some people will judge it as heteronormative* - even though statistical probability is on your side.
*"Heteronormativity" is the idea that heterosexuality is a norm being forced on people who don't want it. It's popular in queer circles to assert that most people are inherently bisexual or homosexual (or better yet "pansexual") and society brainwashes them into heterosexuality. I think population statistics demonstrate that in fact a solid majority of people are solely attracted to the opposite sex and totally happy that way.
My librarian friend reports the same thing for children’s books. There are a handful of book companies that specialize in supplying libraries. Apparently it’s a struggle to find books for boys that aren’t some flavor of “Have you thought about being gay?”. It’s little wonder fewer boys are interested in reading by the time they hit the YA market.
Thanks for the mention! Though I'd disagree that any group should be encouraged to read or write in order to become better people. That'd be a weird and condescending standard if we applied it to any other group (e.g. "Asian Americans should be encouraged to read/write more in order to learn more empathy"). Writing is a fundamental skill and art form and our culture is better if more people do it and that culture would be greatly impoverished if half its people just disengaged from writing and reading.
Also, reading books becomes much easier and enjoyable if they're geared towards your group. If boys and men aren't reading, a major factor is likely because there aren't enough books that speak to them in a genuine way. The way some people wring their hands about why there aren't more male readers without also advocating for more books to entice such readers (and I'm not talking about hypothetical books they think these readers ought to be reading) is tiresome.
Telling people to read or write "to become better people" is an uncharitable interpretation of what I am saying in this piece. Yes, I am encouraging fiction though I don't think it's condescending, as a man myself, to talk about this — at least that's not the intent.
Oh yeah, I didn’t mean that that was all you’re saying. I was just addressing the empathy thing more generally since you mentioned it and it’s often brought up by others too.
Interesting article, not something I had ever considered. As a Gen Z, I'd like to offer my perspective on fiction and where I've ended up.
Growing up I read a lot of fiction, I was such a voracious reader that my parents had to take away my book light as otherwise, I would stay up all night reading instead of sleeping. The books I remember reading were:
* Percy Jackson Series
* Warrior Cats
* Ranger's Apprentice
* The Familiars
* Guardians of Gahoole
* Poppy
My parents also introduced me to a ton of comics they grew up reading
* Tintin
* Asterix and Obelix
* Calvin and Hobbes
But after I got my first smartphone in 7th grade the amount of book reading I did dropped off a cliff. It largely got replaced by YouTube, Reddit, and iFunny (🤮). We also got an XBOX so a lot of my free time was consumed by video games.
I only got back into reading later in High School at the encouragement of my parents, but most of it was nonfiction news sources, like The Economist and WSJ. Today most of my reading comes from nonfiction sources like The Economist, The Atlantic, Substack, and various nonfiction books. However, at some point during HS, I was introduced to Manga. Since then almost all of my fiction reading has been Manga + Manwha. I have not struggled to find male representation in this medium and I don't mean in the fanservice way. Some of these stories delve into the ideas of finding your place in the world and growing as a person (Holyland and Vinland Saga). Some of these are coming to terms with your past mistakes and rectifying what you've done (A Silent Voice). And some of these are just plain old good action (Attack on Titan, The Fable, Kagurabachi).
I wonder if this is because the medium is better for action stories which can have a male tilt. On the other hand, maybe I'm just drawn to these because they are similar to the comics I read while growing up. Yet I'm not going to lie, a good chunk of Manga and Manhwa can be pretty shallow. While I haven't read many adult fiction books, my experience from the ones that I have indicates that fiction books can explore much deeper topics, as they aren't restricted by a visual component like comics are. Hence, sometimes I worry that while Manga and Manhwa scratch the fiction itch, they don't push me to the next level of questioning and thinking that many of the nonfiction books I read do. (Caveat: I recently read the book Lessons In Chemistry as part of a book club and that shattered my illusion that fiction books are supposed to be more profound. It was quite a lot more shallow than many of the Manga and Manhwa I've read.)
It would be interesting to see if reading for men has been replaced by other forms of media, like video games, YouTube, and short-form entertainment.
Thanks for your perspective. Your last point about competition from other media is key. Others have made that point too.
Hi I write fiction.
I feel like this is partly due to the coding of genre. Plenty of men still read fantasy and sci-fi; it was highbrow literary culture’s own decision to label those as “not serious fiction”.
Also, RE your beach example, context matters! As a red-blooded American man, I only half-jokingly consider it my God-given right to drink beer and relive my childhood at the damn beach. But that shouldn’t erase the fact that I spend nearly every other waking hour most weeks reading audiobooks, especially while I do my marathon training or powerlifting.
I would conclude that it’s perfectly acceptable to encourage men to embrace reading in contexts they feel comfortable in as men, and to share what makes us comfortable (as I myself just did here ^). We don’t have to embrace inceldom nor toxic masculinity to simply chart our own course as a gender, nor to keep that course inclusive of all kinds of men.
Agree, genres are still gender-coded, some predominantly male like Fantasy, Sci Fi, Horror, Thrillers. Still, most popular and literary fiction skews female.
Marathoning *and* powerlifting? Impressive. I can't think of two more diametrically opposed physical activities. Maybe high jumping and bodybuilding?
I mean, I’m not remotely competitive in powerlifting… but the core of the sport is to lift as much as you can. It’s actually a good complement for running, because it helps me keep my metabolism up on non-running days.
Also, FWIW, I try not to stay impressed with myself, although it inevitably creeps in.
To me, it’s an acknowledgment of mortality. Death sucks, and most of our philosophizing and religiosity surrounding it is just cope. Everyone is different, and to each their own, but for me, on that last day, the only thing that will make it suck less for me is the knowledge that I worked my ass off in my middle age. I didn’t sit there in my comfy office job and get fat on McDonald’s; I did things that very few humans care to do (short of dumb striver shit like climbing Everest), and I did them because they were hard and they kept me strong.
The endorphins don’t hurt either. True endorphin highs are rarer than dumb CNN articles make them out to be, but when you have one… fuck, man, that shit is good. You feel like a million bucks without having to actually earn them.
This would be a good essay topic
I could be convinced to do a guest appearance!
“The Zen Of Death, Fitness, Hedonism, And Stoicism”
I wonder if there is a difference between “literary fiction” and some types of genre fiction like science fiction, fantasy and thrillers.
Yes — Sci fi, Fantasy, Horror, and Thrillers are still majority male, I believe.
@Jeff - No, if you look at the newest publications from major imprints in science fiction and fantasy, most of the debut authors are female, nonbinary, and or queer. There are still some male authors who debuted in the past that have a large following.
interesting, didn't realize that
They’ve always been both better at and more interested in accommodating and exploring “outsider” perspectives. People who obsess over “best of” lists and “right ways” of doing things yell and scream about change happening in the spaces they thought of as “theirs”, but they’re just making noise. The percentages have changed, but nothing’s really gone away. If you go to an actual bookstore and look at what’s on the shelves, it’s all still there. The main difference is that stuff like Kushiel’s Dart or Left Hand of Darkness aren’t as exceptional as they once were.
That's a great question. I'm curious about this as well.
There was an enormous controversy a few years ago about this process in action at the Hugo Awards. The ‘pro-male’ faction, we can call it, was broadly popular but hated by the press, etc as expected, and was tarred with the brush of GamerGate and the alt-right, and so on.
As far as I can tell they won? The Hugos changed their voting rules in a fairly complex manner apparently to prevent organized minorities from dominating, whatever their political stripe. The ‘Sad Puppies’ have not run campaigns since.
But the Hugos had been going downhill for years before that, and their credibility seems never to have recovered. Now, unfortunately, it seems that it’s gotten worse, and the Hugos are owned by the Chinese Communist Party.
I’m a pretty avid consumer of SF and fantasy, and I can’t remember any notable winners at all this century. I just learned that the 4th Harry Potter won back in 2001. The fact that James S.A. Corey never won even one for any of their flawless Expanse series (nine novels long!) is just completely discrediting. The Expanse is so good I haven’t been able to bring myself to listen to the last book, and probably never will.
I commented in a subthread above about this. It's an exaggeration to say that the CCP owns the Hugos. The Hugos are administered by the WorldCon volunteers who are a different mix of people each year, depending on location. So I would rephrase your statement to say "In 2023, when WorldCon was in Chengdu, the team adinistering the Hugo Awards bent over backwards to accommodate what they thought the CCP wanted, eliminating several contestants on dubious grounds."
The 2024 Hugos were run in a transparent fashion and seemed to reflect the votes of the fans who were members of WorldCon this year. The winners were dominated by women and LGBT people, as has been the case in most recent years.
I must say, I'm part of the defecit. I overwhelmingly read nonfiction, and seldom read recent releases when I do read fiction.
Personally, I think it has a lot to do with videogames. Both men and women play videogames, but serious, devoted players are overwhelmingly male. And this skew increases in extremity the more serious the commitment the game* enables. There would be a defecit even if there wasn't also a fever to actively drive away further male audience.
* Or metagame, as to take one of many examples, there's many female Pokémon players,** but far fewer Nuzlockers.
** Still probably more boys, but by game standards, the right end of the bell curve.
Yeah, with so many distractions, it's hard to sustain the attention to read a full book.
I think this is exactly the issue. Men are gaming instead of reading. The few who do read fiction are just reading genre fiction.
I’m an older white Gen X male who reads literary fiction. I never - never - come across another guy who does IRL.
I think a young male adult relative of mine is typical. He was brought up in a reading household, was read to from infancy, did the Harry Potter books. He now reads the occasional sci fi book but mostly he games. We have good natured arguments over the merits of books vs games as storytelling formats.
Yes, the modern literary fiction publishing industry is largely ignoring men. But here’s the thing: I respond to that by reading a lot of pre 21st century fiction. Most men aren’t reading any of it and I’m pretty pessimistic that they ever will, regardless of what the publishing industry does.
I feel ya. Personally, I love videogames. But in terms of both character and narrative, the best games are still well below the best books, plays, movies, and TV shows. Go have a look at pretty much any list of "best videogame stories", and to this day you will find picks that are so bad* as to be the equivalent of putting Flowers in the Attic and The Sword of Shannara on a list of the greatest novels of the 20th Century.
* e.g., any Final Fantasy or Metal Gear game. Yes, even the good ones.
This is something many pop culture YouTubers have picked up on as established male leaning franchises (Star Wars, Marvel...) have tried to broaden their gender appeal, to limited results. They argue that something appealing to men will have a natural spillover to women, but something targeting women just naturally turns off guys.
Publishing wise, many guys have switched to self-publishing, and also have a Substack presence. Hopefully they'll be through here to offer their specific insights once your article percolates outwards to various feeds.