A writer for The Guardian, M. A. Sieghart, has asked the perennial question, “Why do so few men read books by women?” Curiously, the people who always ask this question never follow up by asking how women authors might better appeal to men or how the publishing industry might get a better share of the underserved male-readership market. No, the assumption is always that men have something wrong with them and need to change. It’s not the books that are the problem, it’s you. The customer is in the wrong.
Why do so few men read books by women? | MA Sieghart https://t.co/Za5Y4gepDr
— Gwenda Bond 😈 (@Gwenda) August 1, 2021
Sieghart notes that the top-selling lady novelists have a disproportionately female readership, but though she treats this as a mystery with sinister implications, it’s not actually hard to understand what’s going on when she names who those top-selling authoresses are: Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, Danielle Steel, and Jojo Moyes.
She proposes the answer that men don’t take women seriously. The actual answer, obvious to anyone outside Sieghart’s elitist cultural bubble, is that men aren’t interested in what those women write. Danielle Steel writes trashy romances. Jojo Moyes writes trashy romances. Jane Austen wrote non-trashy romances. Atwood writes a variety of things but is best known for a pearl-clutching feminist screed that confuses Baptists with the Taliban, though she also churns out an occasional apocalyptic science-fiction novel disturbingly obsessed with child pornography.
To put it briefly and bluntly, men don’t want to read that shit.
(Austen is not shit, of course, but her work is still undeniably feminine and aimed at a female readership.)
Monoculture
I work in the library field, and this same braindead question constantly gets asked in a slightly different way: Why can’t we get men and boys into the library? Why don’t they like to read?
The answer is that the library does not cater to them, but librarians do not realize this—cannot realize it—because librarians are lockstep idealogues. The American Library Association, like the teachers’ unions or The Guardian, has more the character of a cult than of a professional organization. The idea that boys and men represent a niche that needs marketed to, and not a group of villains who need browbeaten, is alien to them.
Today, I took a walk through our library’s “Recent Releases” collection. This is a set of books we order from a company that curates them based on the New York Times bestseller list and other mainstream indicators of what is allegedly hot in books right now. I did not take an exact head count, but the books on the shelves were 60% or more by women.
Sieghart comes close to self awareness when she confirms this. She writes, “All five of the top five bestselling literary novels in 2017 were by women, and nine of the top 10.”
Yes, of course they were. The people working at the publishing houses are overwhelmingly women. Slate reports that they are 78% women, almost all politically left-wing. The publishing industry is a monoculture, and the works it publishes reflect that monoculture.
The bestseller lists are designed to reinforce that monoculture: The New York Times bestseller list, the best-known indicator of what we’re all supposedly reading, is formulated by a method that remains a trade secret, which almost certainly means that its numbers, though not invented out of thin air, are massaged. Although not completely decoupled from actual sales, it is best understood as an editorial telling us what we’re supposed to read. See this reasonably thorough breakdown of the list’s controversies for details.
Bad Writing
Given the monoculture of the publishing industry, the big publishing houses will necessarily have blind spots, and one of those blind spots is probably the average guy, someone overlooked by approximately 78% of editors. One likely reason that men avoid women writers is because they anticipate that, if they open a book by a woman, it will read like this:
That is an actual page from a published book. It’s the first page of a comic called Mother of Madness, and it’s by someone named Emilia Clarke, who is apparently a celebrity.
We could use this as a textbook example of bad writing. First, it abuses the comic-book medium by dropping a wall of text into a single panel. Second, it delivers a character’s life story as a checklist. Third, it delivers a character’s life story on the first page before we have a reason to care. Fourth, it reads like a Twitter profile. Fifth, it’s full of desperately trendy how-do-you-do-kids bullshit. Sixth, it’s condescending as hell, so condescending that the artist even gave the character a smug expression to go with the monologue. Seventh, it’s overwhelming—and overwhelmingly shallow—in its brand of feminism.
No one involved with this project saw the problem, probably because of the monoculture I mentioned above. Unbearably smug, preachy feminism elicits cries of “Yassss Kween” from the very people who are supposed to keep this kind of unreadable garbage from seeing publication in the first place.
By the way, the Japanese manga Demon Slayer outsold the entire American comic-book industry last year. This is not a coincidence.
Different Topics
A quick glance at the shelves at my library also tells us that men and women are writing different things. The books by women are predominantly love stories, cozy mysteries, feminist reworkings of classical mythology, “literary” novels whose dustjackets suggest meandering plots and lots of hurt feelings, and dystopian sci-fi about teen girls who need to choose between two hot boys. The books by men are adventure novels (no less than four Clive Cusslers), political thrillers, and Star Wars tie-ins.
In other words, men and women write different things, so they naturally read different things.
Sieghart comes close to self awareness a second time when she comments that the lady novelist with the largest male readership is L. J. Ross. Ross is a writer of thrillers, so her male readership is understandable—but Sieghart attributes her large readership not to her genre but to her initials, which allegedly disguise her sex.
On the contrary, anyone who is an avid reader of Ross likely knows she is a woman but probably doesn’t care. Remember, the single biggest money-maker of all time in the world of fiction is J. K. Rowling. Is anyone unaware that Rowling is a woman? Did anyone care about her sex while devouring her novels? After Rowling’s success, it is ridiculous to claim that a woman cannot garner a male readership—it’s just that she must write for that readership if she wants it. If she does not want that readership, so be it; there’s no shame in writing for women, but there’s also no shame in avoiding books for women if that is not what one wants to read.
The Example of Manga
Japanese pop culture, which normies like Sieghart studiously ignore, teaches us this. Japan wisely divides its fiction by target demographic instead of by setting or subject matter. Women dominate in the world of manga and successfully write for boys and men as well as girls and women, but when boys or men are their intended audience, they write works designed to appeal to those audiences. Rumiko Takahashi, one of the single most prolific manga-ka, is a woman who produces works almost exclusively for a male readership. Women like CLAMP or Peach-Pit have successfully produced work for multiple demographics including boys and men.
The Example of Science Fiction
And of course there is crossover: A lot of men and boys read manga for girls, which is almost entirely by woman creators. It is also a fact, as Sieghart notes, that a lot of women here in the West read books aimed at men, such as thrillers and adventure stories, but there is considerably less crossover of men reading stories aimed at women. Sieghart’s prejudices and preconceptions render her incapable of understanding why that is, but once upon a time, women writers cultivated male readers here as well: In science ficiton, C. J. Cherryh, Ursula K. LeGuin, Anne McCaffrey, Andre Norton, and even James Tiptree Jr, a feminist who makes Margaret Atwood look sane and reasonable, all had avid male readers.
Sieghart would be quick to object that Cherryh’s initials and Norton’s first name are ambiguous, and of course Tiptree deliberately deceived with her nom de plume, but the overwhelming success of LeGuin and McCaffrey explodes this conjecture. Each of these writers was capable of telling a ripping yarn without descending into the kind of painfull hipness and smarmy lecturing that characterizes Mother of Madness as well as many of the woman-penned books on the shelves today. Most of these authoresses, maybe all, were rabid feminists, but they were able to work that into their books with more subtlety than most writers now are capable of, with the exception of Tiptree—but her work has other merits that outweigh its frequent fingerwagging and sometimes literal insanity.
Edit: If I’d known so many of you were going to show up, I would have considered my examples more carefully. Yeesh.
If you want a book that can appeal to both male and female readers, and which does not presume to lecture, I recommend Jake and the Dynamo.
