I've never considered the question, but you might have a point: Many of those novel covers look straight up girly.
Granted, as an English teacher I love reading novels, but I'll explore a classic novel with a plain cover over newer novels with that particular style. The question of marketing may as well be an assumption.
And as a stray thought, I read a lot of science fiction and science fantasy. That section at Barnes and Nobles looks alien compared to the featured sections when you walk in. You'd never ask those questions about Tor Books.
Part of the reason that reading is in crisis today is that literary gatekeepers continue to pretend like mere genre fiction hasn't ALWAYS been the most popular fiction that people enjoy. Almost all the bestselling books from the first half of the 20th Century were children's books, fantasies, or mysteries. Many are considered classics enough today that they've been kind of "upgraded" from mere genre to canon.
And, indeed, today, genres do very well. Some are obviously better written than others, but there's nothing inherently inferior about a literary fiction novel exploring the ennui of a upper-middle-class, 20-something Brooklynite vs. a space opera or a crime mystery. I personally find a lot of sci-fi lacking in characterization or plot. But I could say the same about many literary fiction efforts, which are just as plodding and unbelievable.
I have so many thoughts/opinions. I work as a bookseller in an independent bookstore and speak with many people each week. Hands down, trying to put a good fiction book into the hands of a male reader is the hardest thing to do. Even when I try to hand sell terrific male-centered books, they just don't take the bait too often - books like Nothing To See Here, Valley of Shadows, The Hail Mary Project, etc. I love when I can introduce a new fiction author to a male reader. You emphasised covers, but I think it begins with the YA section. By the time a young man turns 13, there is almost nothing being written for him. There are great wide ranging books and series for middle grade but so little for the boy teen reader. Then they just get out of habit. Easier to play a video game or watch You Tube. There are other factors too of course, but this is definately something I think about a lot.
I wonder how much of this is also related to AFAB vs AMAB societal expectations. My experience of the shift from guided to independent reading children’s books, outside of science fiction and fantasy, is that often they are written either for girls with “girl problems” like cliques or written for boys with “boy problems” like making the sports team, and the marketing for the two is also heavily divergent as well - boys won’t read the “girl fiction” bc it is obviously a girl book because it is a glaring shade of pink and what would their classmates think? And then girls are expected to have an empathetic reflective relational approach to things where the first question is if they themselves are the problem, and relational literature is both a guide to and reflection of this introspective approach. Meanwhile boys are taught to act / react and be doers, so reading seems a waste of time when they should be acting and building clout and not engage in self-indulgent reflective behaviors. It’s also more “cool” for girls to be good at school than boys, and reading is seen as a reflection of that. Then throw in different ages of adolescent onset.
I went to high school right around the turn of the Millennium and even at that time I was the only boy in two AP English courses. The gender ratio of advanced English then was something like 50:1.
One AP English teacher I had, though, was male. And he helped to make poetry seem interesting to an adolescent me. He even made John Donne seem relatable! I don't read or really enjoy poetry today, but I have positive associations to it, from that year. More importantly, he awoke my love of literature, generally, after many years of falling away from it.
After being forced to read pretty advanced stuff in 6th Grade like "Oliver Twist," I was pretty turned off of reading for pleasure for most of my teenage years. I read for class, yes, and could examine texts well enough to get good grades. But I didn't love it. So I think finding a way to take boys at that crucial middle-school transition point and encourage and allow them to read things they actually like is key. If that stuff isn't Charles Dickens (who I still viscerally dislike decades later), fine. The year before I forgot how to love reading, I had been devouring "Goosebumps" paperbacks like it was my job. Were they "good" books? Probably not, but I loved them! And every one I read deepened my reading ability and enjoyment.
I'm an avid reader of literary fiction today, something that apparently puts me in the minority among my gender again. So maybe we stop trying to give boys their vegetables, literature-wise, and start letting them read "Goosebumps?"
The exception here is science fiction, where covers are neutral (no gendered bodies, no currently coded female fonts or objects) or masculine (spaceman, male soldier, etc). Plus publishing there draws on the (often incorrect) sense that sf is for boys.
As a former lit prof, I often bypass covers because I know something of the texts, author, genre... but today's US cultural politics has caused me to pay more attention to marketing.
Sooo interesting. I confess to sometimes judging books at least partially by their covers... for instance the British Library Classic Crime series have me hooked by those mid-century travel poster covers, I will also pick up covers that have 'art' covers like the old virago modern classics. Anything photographic makes me suspicious, and a good graphic is always attractive. BUT this is for when I'm browsing... When I'm buying intentionally then the cover will be immaterial, I'll be buying from author familiarity, recommendation, reviews. So I think my purpose in entering a bookshop or online store matters very much when it comes to cover judging.
I'm "serious" woman writer who has written a historical, literary novel about a real woman, and I'd say I have about a 50-50 shot at getting a book cover that would appeal to both men and women. You've gotta be really good to get that kind of cover, though. You're just as likely to get a cover that skews more feminine, and unfortunately, you really have no control at all over this decision. Your agent (if they have enough pull) and your publisher will decide which way your book will be marketed at the time of sale, from the get go. I've held onto my unpublished novel for years because I cannot bring myself to send it out and get a cover that doesn't communicate what I intended. I know I should think: hey, if a male reader doesn't want to read my book about a woman because the cover makes him uncomfortable, that's his problem, and it's his loss. But I haven't worked up enough courage to be that blasé. I'm working on it, though.
This is a similar dilemma faced for decades by my dad as a reporter: readers never understand that the journalist doesn't get to select their own headline and also that the text that's printed in the published article is often HEAVILY edited by the editor, and often to the detriment of what the writer was trying to convey. Sometimes that editing even completely distorts the article beyond the bounds of truth. He was constantly trying to file a story through with the moral of the story being something like "Gay people are normal people just trying to make it" while his 1970s era editor would be out with the knife until the headline was "Gay People: Perverse and Un-American!"
It seems even worse with filmmaking, where the enterprise is inherently collaborative and there are so many veto-points within the process, going all the way up to the studio and producers who have a lot of artistic distance from the work.
I totally agree. Many covers alienate not just male readers but readers. The books you site as examples would not, of course, appeal to most men but they don't appeal to me either. And I would add, titles may have the same effect.
On the one hand, I think some men need to drop their egos and masculinity and do things even if someone says it's not manly. On the other hand, I think that we need more role models and it wouldn't hurt to intentionally guide men into reading things that they think might make them uncomfortable. As you rightly point out, reading can help develop empathy, which may be why it isn't emphasized for men. When I ran an after-school program, I would give books to students that I thought might interest them with a variety of characters/themes. Nine times out of ten the students would read them because of the direct recommendation. And these are students who spend most of their time on Tik Tok/video games when not doing schoolwork on their computers. I wonder if we need more male public school teachers to create those connections, or just more intentionality around encouraging students to read for fun.
Forgot to note this thought. Tech bros are worse off personally, and more dangerous politically for their lack of reading. The joke "I read the book 'Never Create The Torment Nexus' and it inspired me to create our new product The Torment Nexus" is far too often true, but in ways only slightly more subtle that our summary-brained tech leaders don't understand.
A problem that I hope somebody much more learned that I could address or at least explain is how often men don't seem to get it with satires, whether in book form or on the screen. How many people watched "Fight Club" and came away with the idea that Tyler Durden's character is cool and fun? And were the young men who decorated their dorm rooms with that "Scarface" poster projecting their awareness that the main character was a tragic one whose grizzly end is both awful and self-imposed? Doubtful! So, when even well-educated and intelligent tech bros read a science fiction dystopia that is clearly designed to warn them away from that potential future, why are they COMPLETELY MISSING THE POINT!?
Is it perhaps because we don't just read too little, but also haven't learned to examine a text critically? This is something we must learn, too. And it equally applies to movies, TV shows, music, comic books, etc. Because then you can watch "Breaking Bad" and realize, "Hey, wait a minute... why am I applauding this guy for murdering people to further his own ego and getting annoyed by his wife, who is actually being completely sensible here? Could it be that this work is designed to get me to implicate my own will to power and moral blindness...?"
Critical reading is incredibly important. There might be something to be said for just broader reading in general. Many people have said it before that reading is an excellent way to build empathy, but if you only ever read books from an aggrieved male viewpoint, or about spies and murder (which are fun, don't get me wrong), then you are missing out on a lot of different perspectives and ways of seeing the world. Plus I find it much easier to critically analyze books now that I've read enough other information to draw from and contrast the author's perspective.
I think there's even a way to read books from an aggrieved male viewpoint and challenge the narrator or characters (and perhaps yourself) to reconsider their stance.
If the book is well-written, the author is likely trying to do this, either with the plot arc, character development, or a certain irony toward his male protagonist. But it may take a guided discussion to bring that out for the inexperienced or non-reflective reader.
The article in Dazed provoked a lot of discussion among my bookie friends. While we all know males who read fiction, there don't seem to be as many. It's a shame because they would learn a lot and probably be more empathetic. I'm affected by the covers when shopping in a store and avoid those like the group you showed. When I shop on-line I'm usually looking for a particular book and don't care about the cover. So I enjoy your newsletter for the recommendations of books I would probably skip over otherwise.
I think you’re onto something here. The swimming pool cover says “serious writer” to me, the other one says “grocery store paperback.” And as you know much better than I do, since you read far more, this discussion about how the books are marketed has nothing to do with whether women can write the serious stuff. I haven’t actually counted, but it seems like more than half of the best contemporary stuff I’ve read is by women. Outside of this particular discussion, women writers are killing it.
I’ve met very few men in my life who concerned about being productive. The busiest and most productive people I know are women. And they still find time to read fiction.
I think you're right. We're not talking about productivity so much as a performance of productivity, or a category of productivity that we might call "maximization" which is measured against the stuff that has to get done, begins to look very much like a waste of time. All that time spent trying to figure out how to "hack" your life could've been spent actually doing stuff.
Just thinking about how much men's reading of novels about women were central to the very existence of human rights. Richardson's Clarissa, Rousseau's Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloise, Sophie de Cottin's Claire d'Albe were all read as much by men as by women in the late 18th c. and well into the 19th (Claire d'Albe was the runaway bestseller of 1799 and continued to be massively popular up into the 1830s; there's a lovely edition by Margaret Cohen with an English translation in MLA books). Lynn Hunt makes this argument about the development of empathy and human rights in her book Inventing Human Rights (an overview is here: https://www.ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org/journal/inventing-human-rights-a-history-by-lynn-hunt) and for most of us who work on the novel in the 18th and 19th c. the creation of a male readership who cared about women was already a given. Where this argument becomes especially powerful is in its description (which is shared by work by Lynn Festa, for example) of how much that reading experience transformed the ability of men and women in Europe and the nascent United states to think about other human beings unlike themselves. If young men are not reading, when did they stop doing so? What did they read in the 1960s and 1970s before video games and social media? I'm guessing scholars would point to sci-fi (Asimov, Bradbury come to mind as books the non-athletes read when I was in junior high and high school) and Tolkien. But weren't they also reading The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton? And by high school, novels about war: Catch 22. And conspiracy (De Lillo). And what woman who went to university in the 1980s didn't have boyfriends who were obsessed with Gravity's Rainbow? All of which is to say this seems to be to need a bigger picture look at the evolution of male readership. The book covers aren't the whole story. But Hunt's argument might point to ways to think about the empathy gap in the MAGA crowd! Thanks for asking this great question.
Well, firstly, keep in mind that the men you describe here were always the tiny minority: "And what woman who went to university in the 1980s didn't have boyfriends who were obsessed with Gravity's Rainbow?" What percentage of Americans in the 1980s actually went to university at all, much less one where anyone was reading "Gravity's Rainbow?" Even today, four decades later, only 37% of Americans has a higher education degree. It was half that in the 1980s. In other words, a small minority--perhaps an infinitesimal number of women--had boyfriends who were obsessed with Gravity's Rainbow in the 1980s.
The more updated version of this anecdote would be the (supposed) existence of the "David Foster Wallace Bro" in the late 2000s and early 2010s. As a university student, I was such a "DFW Bro" at that time and I knew exactly one other man who had read anything by DFW. But "the discourse" around his most notable novel, "Infinite Jest," began to convince me that "everyone" was reading it and then, eventually, that "everyone" found men who liked to "problematic."
But, again, almost nobody was reading this novel, much less forming opinions about others based on their enjoyment of it! It sold only 44,000 copies its first year in hardcover and eventually sold just over a million worldwide. If it were a music album, movie, or TV show, it would have been considered a "flop." So why did we and do we talk as if it really mattered?
In the 1950s, back when novels still had more pop-cultural heft among both genders, mass readerships were still less big than you think: a bestselling novel would sell copies numbering in the mere tens of thousands. The only real "blockbuster" novels from the first half of the 20th Century selling over 100 million copies were two children's fantasies: "The Little Prince" and "The Hobbit" and an Agatha Cristie mystery, "And Then There Were None." Almost all the second-tier early 20th Century bestsellers in the tens of millions were also children's or Young Adult books, including, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" (85 million copies sold), "The Catcher in the Rye" (65 million), and "Anne of Green Gables" and "Black Beauty" (50 million each).
This was a time when the most successful movies, TV, and even radio programs were pulling numbers vastly larger: In a single day in a single theater in Atlanta in 1939, 300,000 people showed up to see "Gone with the Wind" premier! It was estimated that "Gone with the Wind" was seen in the theater by more than half the American population. Tens of millions of people had tuned in the year before to listen to the infamous radio production of H.G. Well's "War of the Worlds," an order of magnitude more people than had ever read it.
So maybe we can start by accepting that reading fiction has always been a bit of a niche activity, for both men and women. And that what we're seeing is that the small niche of people who used to read more books now are more likely to watch and listen to other stuff, as well.
I’m a male who reads a whole lot of fiction, and I think you’re on to something with at least the covers you’ve shown. I would have passed by all three of the books you called out if I knew nothing about them, based on the covers.
It's pretty simple honestly. 71.3% (according to the Lee & Low publishing baseline diversity survey) of people who work in the literary industry are women (and mostly cis white women, who make up 72.5%). This includes agents, publishers, editors, and publicists. The majority (about 60-65% depending on the years cited) of people who graduate from higher education arts programs are women. This number skews even higher when you look at specifically Creative Writing programs, which are predominantly white and female. Also, tellingly, 58% of these people live in Northeast USA.
These are the people who write books. These are also the people who read them. And, finally, these are the people who publish them.
The EXTREME educational and geographic clustering in the American publishing industry is a huge problem for the media landscape, since people tend to reproduce stories that they themselves relate to.
And that excludes everyone else.
Even as I'm part of the stereotypically liberal, educated, upper-middle-class East Coaster segment that American novel-writers increasingly focus on, I'm just so tired of reading more stories about a Millennial Brooklyn transplant trying to figure out their life! Even the immigrant stories are about somebody with a graduate degree living in London or New York and experiencing ennui.
American fiction didn't used to be so limited in scope. Once upon a time a working class boy like my dad could pick up books that would appeal to his worldview, but also offer up broader vistas to inspire him. I don't think that kid picks up novels today. And if he did, he'd not see much of himself in them.
What do you guys think? Only looking for comments from the men who aren't reading novels? But it's certainly true. I recently recommended The Covenant of Water to one of the smartest nicest guys I know and he just immediately said "oh, I don't read fiction." I gather he thinks it's a waste of time. Pity.
I've never considered the question, but you might have a point: Many of those novel covers look straight up girly.
Granted, as an English teacher I love reading novels, but I'll explore a classic novel with a plain cover over newer novels with that particular style. The question of marketing may as well be an assumption.
And as a stray thought, I read a lot of science fiction and science fantasy. That section at Barnes and Nobles looks alien compared to the featured sections when you walk in. You'd never ask those questions about Tor Books.
Agreed. But there's still a good chunk of litr'rary types who sneer at sf.
Part of the reason that reading is in crisis today is that literary gatekeepers continue to pretend like mere genre fiction hasn't ALWAYS been the most popular fiction that people enjoy. Almost all the bestselling books from the first half of the 20th Century were children's books, fantasies, or mysteries. Many are considered classics enough today that they've been kind of "upgraded" from mere genre to canon.
And, indeed, today, genres do very well. Some are obviously better written than others, but there's nothing inherently inferior about a literary fiction novel exploring the ennui of a upper-middle-class, 20-something Brooklynite vs. a space opera or a crime mystery. I personally find a lot of sci-fi lacking in characterization or plot. But I could say the same about many literary fiction efforts, which are just as plodding and unbelievable.
I have so many thoughts/opinions. I work as a bookseller in an independent bookstore and speak with many people each week. Hands down, trying to put a good fiction book into the hands of a male reader is the hardest thing to do. Even when I try to hand sell terrific male-centered books, they just don't take the bait too often - books like Nothing To See Here, Valley of Shadows, The Hail Mary Project, etc. I love when I can introduce a new fiction author to a male reader. You emphasised covers, but I think it begins with the YA section. By the time a young man turns 13, there is almost nothing being written for him. There are great wide ranging books and series for middle grade but so little for the boy teen reader. Then they just get out of habit. Easier to play a video game or watch You Tube. There are other factors too of course, but this is definately something I think about a lot.
I wonder how much of this is also related to AFAB vs AMAB societal expectations. My experience of the shift from guided to independent reading children’s books, outside of science fiction and fantasy, is that often they are written either for girls with “girl problems” like cliques or written for boys with “boy problems” like making the sports team, and the marketing for the two is also heavily divergent as well - boys won’t read the “girl fiction” bc it is obviously a girl book because it is a glaring shade of pink and what would their classmates think? And then girls are expected to have an empathetic reflective relational approach to things where the first question is if they themselves are the problem, and relational literature is both a guide to and reflection of this introspective approach. Meanwhile boys are taught to act / react and be doers, so reading seems a waste of time when they should be acting and building clout and not engage in self-indulgent reflective behaviors. It’s also more “cool” for girls to be good at school than boys, and reading is seen as a reflection of that. Then throw in different ages of adolescent onset.
I went to high school right around the turn of the Millennium and even at that time I was the only boy in two AP English courses. The gender ratio of advanced English then was something like 50:1.
One AP English teacher I had, though, was male. And he helped to make poetry seem interesting to an adolescent me. He even made John Donne seem relatable! I don't read or really enjoy poetry today, but I have positive associations to it, from that year. More importantly, he awoke my love of literature, generally, after many years of falling away from it.
After being forced to read pretty advanced stuff in 6th Grade like "Oliver Twist," I was pretty turned off of reading for pleasure for most of my teenage years. I read for class, yes, and could examine texts well enough to get good grades. But I didn't love it. So I think finding a way to take boys at that crucial middle-school transition point and encourage and allow them to read things they actually like is key. If that stuff isn't Charles Dickens (who I still viscerally dislike decades later), fine. The year before I forgot how to love reading, I had been devouring "Goosebumps" paperbacks like it was my job. Were they "good" books? Probably not, but I loved them! And every one I read deepened my reading ability and enjoyment.
I'm an avid reader of literary fiction today, something that apparently puts me in the minority among my gender again. So maybe we stop trying to give boys their vegetables, literature-wise, and start letting them read "Goosebumps?"
Male teen reader: science fiction classics. Former male teen reader here. Cheers.
The covers definitely aim at a female audience.
The exception here is science fiction, where covers are neutral (no gendered bodies, no currently coded female fonts or objects) or masculine (spaceman, male soldier, etc). Plus publishing there draws on the (often incorrect) sense that sf is for boys.
As a former lit prof, I often bypass covers because I know something of the texts, author, genre... but today's US cultural politics has caused me to pay more attention to marketing.
Sooo interesting. I confess to sometimes judging books at least partially by their covers... for instance the British Library Classic Crime series have me hooked by those mid-century travel poster covers, I will also pick up covers that have 'art' covers like the old virago modern classics. Anything photographic makes me suspicious, and a good graphic is always attractive. BUT this is for when I'm browsing... When I'm buying intentionally then the cover will be immaterial, I'll be buying from author familiarity, recommendation, reviews. So I think my purpose in entering a bookshop or online store matters very much when it comes to cover judging.
I'm "serious" woman writer who has written a historical, literary novel about a real woman, and I'd say I have about a 50-50 shot at getting a book cover that would appeal to both men and women. You've gotta be really good to get that kind of cover, though. You're just as likely to get a cover that skews more feminine, and unfortunately, you really have no control at all over this decision. Your agent (if they have enough pull) and your publisher will decide which way your book will be marketed at the time of sale, from the get go. I've held onto my unpublished novel for years because I cannot bring myself to send it out and get a cover that doesn't communicate what I intended. I know I should think: hey, if a male reader doesn't want to read my book about a woman because the cover makes him uncomfortable, that's his problem, and it's his loss. But I haven't worked up enough courage to be that blasé. I'm working on it, though.
This is a similar dilemma faced for decades by my dad as a reporter: readers never understand that the journalist doesn't get to select their own headline and also that the text that's printed in the published article is often HEAVILY edited by the editor, and often to the detriment of what the writer was trying to convey. Sometimes that editing even completely distorts the article beyond the bounds of truth. He was constantly trying to file a story through with the moral of the story being something like "Gay people are normal people just trying to make it" while his 1970s era editor would be out with the knife until the headline was "Gay People: Perverse and Un-American!"
It seems even worse with filmmaking, where the enterprise is inherently collaborative and there are so many veto-points within the process, going all the way up to the studio and producers who have a lot of artistic distance from the work.
I totally agree. Many covers alienate not just male readers but readers. The books you site as examples would not, of course, appeal to most men but they don't appeal to me either. And I would add, titles may have the same effect.
On the one hand, I think some men need to drop their egos and masculinity and do things even if someone says it's not manly. On the other hand, I think that we need more role models and it wouldn't hurt to intentionally guide men into reading things that they think might make them uncomfortable. As you rightly point out, reading can help develop empathy, which may be why it isn't emphasized for men. When I ran an after-school program, I would give books to students that I thought might interest them with a variety of characters/themes. Nine times out of ten the students would read them because of the direct recommendation. And these are students who spend most of their time on Tik Tok/video games when not doing schoolwork on their computers. I wonder if we need more male public school teachers to create those connections, or just more intentionality around encouraging students to read for fun.
Forgot to note this thought. Tech bros are worse off personally, and more dangerous politically for their lack of reading. The joke "I read the book 'Never Create The Torment Nexus' and it inspired me to create our new product The Torment Nexus" is far too often true, but in ways only slightly more subtle that our summary-brained tech leaders don't understand.
A problem that I hope somebody much more learned that I could address or at least explain is how often men don't seem to get it with satires, whether in book form or on the screen. How many people watched "Fight Club" and came away with the idea that Tyler Durden's character is cool and fun? And were the young men who decorated their dorm rooms with that "Scarface" poster projecting their awareness that the main character was a tragic one whose grizzly end is both awful and self-imposed? Doubtful! So, when even well-educated and intelligent tech bros read a science fiction dystopia that is clearly designed to warn them away from that potential future, why are they COMPLETELY MISSING THE POINT!?
Is it perhaps because we don't just read too little, but also haven't learned to examine a text critically? This is something we must learn, too. And it equally applies to movies, TV shows, music, comic books, etc. Because then you can watch "Breaking Bad" and realize, "Hey, wait a minute... why am I applauding this guy for murdering people to further his own ego and getting annoyed by his wife, who is actually being completely sensible here? Could it be that this work is designed to get me to implicate my own will to power and moral blindness...?"
Critical reading is incredibly important. There might be something to be said for just broader reading in general. Many people have said it before that reading is an excellent way to build empathy, but if you only ever read books from an aggrieved male viewpoint, or about spies and murder (which are fun, don't get me wrong), then you are missing out on a lot of different perspectives and ways of seeing the world. Plus I find it much easier to critically analyze books now that I've read enough other information to draw from and contrast the author's perspective.
I think there's even a way to read books from an aggrieved male viewpoint and challenge the narrator or characters (and perhaps yourself) to reconsider their stance.
If the book is well-written, the author is likely trying to do this, either with the plot arc, character development, or a certain irony toward his male protagonist. But it may take a guided discussion to bring that out for the inexperienced or non-reflective reader.
The article in Dazed provoked a lot of discussion among my bookie friends. While we all know males who read fiction, there don't seem to be as many. It's a shame because they would learn a lot and probably be more empathetic. I'm affected by the covers when shopping in a store and avoid those like the group you showed. When I shop on-line I'm usually looking for a particular book and don't care about the cover. So I enjoy your newsletter for the recommendations of books I would probably skip over otherwise.
I think you’re onto something here. The swimming pool cover says “serious writer” to me, the other one says “grocery store paperback.” And as you know much better than I do, since you read far more, this discussion about how the books are marketed has nothing to do with whether women can write the serious stuff. I haven’t actually counted, but it seems like more than half of the best contemporary stuff I’ve read is by women. Outside of this particular discussion, women writers are killing it.
I’ve met very few men in my life who concerned about being productive. The busiest and most productive people I know are women. And they still find time to read fiction.
I think you're right. We're not talking about productivity so much as a performance of productivity, or a category of productivity that we might call "maximization" which is measured against the stuff that has to get done, begins to look very much like a waste of time. All that time spent trying to figure out how to "hack" your life could've been spent actually doing stuff.
Just thinking about how much men's reading of novels about women were central to the very existence of human rights. Richardson's Clarissa, Rousseau's Julie ou la Nouvelle Heloise, Sophie de Cottin's Claire d'Albe were all read as much by men as by women in the late 18th c. and well into the 19th (Claire d'Albe was the runaway bestseller of 1799 and continued to be massively popular up into the 1830s; there's a lovely edition by Margaret Cohen with an English translation in MLA books). Lynn Hunt makes this argument about the development of empathy and human rights in her book Inventing Human Rights (an overview is here: https://www.ethicsandinternationalaffairs.org/journal/inventing-human-rights-a-history-by-lynn-hunt) and for most of us who work on the novel in the 18th and 19th c. the creation of a male readership who cared about women was already a given. Where this argument becomes especially powerful is in its description (which is shared by work by Lynn Festa, for example) of how much that reading experience transformed the ability of men and women in Europe and the nascent United states to think about other human beings unlike themselves. If young men are not reading, when did they stop doing so? What did they read in the 1960s and 1970s before video games and social media? I'm guessing scholars would point to sci-fi (Asimov, Bradbury come to mind as books the non-athletes read when I was in junior high and high school) and Tolkien. But weren't they also reading The Outsiders by S.E. Hinton? And by high school, novels about war: Catch 22. And conspiracy (De Lillo). And what woman who went to university in the 1980s didn't have boyfriends who were obsessed with Gravity's Rainbow? All of which is to say this seems to be to need a bigger picture look at the evolution of male readership. The book covers aren't the whole story. But Hunt's argument might point to ways to think about the empathy gap in the MAGA crowd! Thanks for asking this great question.
Well, firstly, keep in mind that the men you describe here were always the tiny minority: "And what woman who went to university in the 1980s didn't have boyfriends who were obsessed with Gravity's Rainbow?" What percentage of Americans in the 1980s actually went to university at all, much less one where anyone was reading "Gravity's Rainbow?" Even today, four decades later, only 37% of Americans has a higher education degree. It was half that in the 1980s. In other words, a small minority--perhaps an infinitesimal number of women--had boyfriends who were obsessed with Gravity's Rainbow in the 1980s.
The more updated version of this anecdote would be the (supposed) existence of the "David Foster Wallace Bro" in the late 2000s and early 2010s. As a university student, I was such a "DFW Bro" at that time and I knew exactly one other man who had read anything by DFW. But "the discourse" around his most notable novel, "Infinite Jest," began to convince me that "everyone" was reading it and then, eventually, that "everyone" found men who liked to "problematic."
But, again, almost nobody was reading this novel, much less forming opinions about others based on their enjoyment of it! It sold only 44,000 copies its first year in hardcover and eventually sold just over a million worldwide. If it were a music album, movie, or TV show, it would have been considered a "flop." So why did we and do we talk as if it really mattered?
In the 1950s, back when novels still had more pop-cultural heft among both genders, mass readerships were still less big than you think: a bestselling novel would sell copies numbering in the mere tens of thousands. The only real "blockbuster" novels from the first half of the 20th Century selling over 100 million copies were two children's fantasies: "The Little Prince" and "The Hobbit" and an Agatha Cristie mystery, "And Then There Were None." Almost all the second-tier early 20th Century bestsellers in the tens of millions were also children's or Young Adult books, including, "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" (85 million copies sold), "The Catcher in the Rye" (65 million), and "Anne of Green Gables" and "Black Beauty" (50 million each).
This was a time when the most successful movies, TV, and even radio programs were pulling numbers vastly larger: In a single day in a single theater in Atlanta in 1939, 300,000 people showed up to see "Gone with the Wind" premier! It was estimated that "Gone with the Wind" was seen in the theater by more than half the American population. Tens of millions of people had tuned in the year before to listen to the infamous radio production of H.G. Well's "War of the Worlds," an order of magnitude more people than had ever read it.
So maybe we can start by accepting that reading fiction has always been a bit of a niche activity, for both men and women. And that what we're seeing is that the small niche of people who used to read more books now are more likely to watch and listen to other stuff, as well.
“the central character becomes a cam-girl and that her father is an ex-professional wrestler” - TAKE MY MANLY MONEY
I’m a male who reads a whole lot of fiction, and I think you’re on to something with at least the covers you’ve shown. I would have passed by all three of the books you called out if I knew nothing about them, based on the covers.
It's pretty simple honestly. 71.3% (according to the Lee & Low publishing baseline diversity survey) of people who work in the literary industry are women (and mostly cis white women, who make up 72.5%). This includes agents, publishers, editors, and publicists. The majority (about 60-65% depending on the years cited) of people who graduate from higher education arts programs are women. This number skews even higher when you look at specifically Creative Writing programs, which are predominantly white and female. Also, tellingly, 58% of these people live in Northeast USA.
These are the people who write books. These are also the people who read them. And, finally, these are the people who publish them.
The EXTREME educational and geographic clustering in the American publishing industry is a huge problem for the media landscape, since people tend to reproduce stories that they themselves relate to.
And that excludes everyone else.
Even as I'm part of the stereotypically liberal, educated, upper-middle-class East Coaster segment that American novel-writers increasingly focus on, I'm just so tired of reading more stories about a Millennial Brooklyn transplant trying to figure out their life! Even the immigrant stories are about somebody with a graduate degree living in London or New York and experiencing ennui.
American fiction didn't used to be so limited in scope. Once upon a time a working class boy like my dad could pick up books that would appeal to his worldview, but also offer up broader vistas to inspire him. I don't think that kid picks up novels today. And if he did, he'd not see much of himself in them.
What do you guys think? Only looking for comments from the men who aren't reading novels? But it's certainly true. I recently recommended The Covenant of Water to one of the smartest nicest guys I know and he just immediately said "oh, I don't read fiction." I gather he thinks it's a waste of time. Pity.
I hope I live long enough to see the pendulum swing the other way.