So males supposedly don't read novels anymore? Maybe the ones to blame are those controlling what gets published

 

While the left-wing British publication The Guardian usually stays the course when it when it comes to politics, it unfortunately frequently indulges in oppressive gender politics, at least from the point of view of anyone who is aware of little things like hypocrisy, self-indulgence and self-obsession. I mean, people who "write" are in general among the most full of shit people there are, especially those with a “personal agenda.” If you are a male, would you prefer to read a detective or adventure novel, or some feminist fiction where male characters are defecated on, and the female characters don’t take any responsibility for their own actions?

At least J.K. Rowling understood that if you are a female author and you want to attract male readers, you have to “compromise” with a world in which males also have to survive in, and not alienate them. Female authors who complain that they are not taken “seriously” enough should realize that it is one thing to have a personal “perspective,” but if you are not “objective” then you shouldn’t expect the male consumer to take you seriously. Fiction written by men simply tell a story, and possible with a “message” that is intertwined with the narrative—not something that front and center is banged on one’s head to gaslight them. Nobody is “perfect”—and that includes women and minorities.

Female authors understood this up until the 1970s, when feminist ideology, “victimization” and self-service became the popular mode of “serious” expression. I recall when Alice Walker won the Pulitzer Prize for The Color Purple; it was made into a movie by Steven Spielberg and picked-up a record-tying 11 Oscar nominations—and won exactly zero awards. 

Why was that? Did it have something to do with making a “political statement” before admitting that the film and the book it was based on was misandrist and promoted racism against black men? Or just too “alienating”? Or really wasn't that "great"? Walker was for a time married to a white man, and her daughter admitted that they were not on the best of terms because she didn’t “hate” black men as much as her mother did.

But back to The Guardian, which had posted a story by a feminist opinionator (who was recently found guilty of defaming a male New Orleans journalist) named Moira Donegan who decried the Johnny Depp U.S. trial as an “orgy of misogyny.” I discovered an older post “of interest” that was apparently tied to some more recent Guardian story, entitled “Kamila Shamsie: let’s have a year of publishing only women—a provocation,” originally published in 2015, but “modified” in 2018. Shamsie opined that

It is clear that there is a gender bias in publishing houses and the world of books. Well, enough. Why not try something radical? Make 2018 the Year of Publishing Women, in which no new titles should be by men.

We don’t really need to examine Shamsie’s subsequent self-serving musings, because they have little to do with the reality—that books by female authors were even then more heavily promoted than books by male authors, and alienating male readers. Hell, that is what we read between the lines in this story by Johanna Thomas-Corr, who wrote the following in The Guardian from 2019:

Women are fiction’s life support system – buying 80% of all novels. But as a major new book argues, their love of an emotional truth has been used to trivialize the genre.

Again, “emotional truth” for women typically means self-serving, sob-sister polemics; maybe that is an over-generalization, but when someone uses a term like “emotional truth,” that’s what it is, and it used to both gaslight people (mainly males) and as personal psychological "therapy." The post goes on:

Damian Barr, author and founder of the Literary Salon in London, thinks that reading can still be a “rebellious and dangerous activity” for women. “There are men who still find it threatening and dangerous when a woman picks up a book,” he says. When he interviewed Nicola Sturgeon the first minister of Scotland, for his salon, he was appalled at the abuse she had received for talking about novels. “People would say that reading fiction is not important, she should be running the country. Why is reading less valuable to a leader than, say, playing golf?”

I mean honestly, who cares if anyone reads a book except book publishers? I suppose that if a woman is reading a book from a known radical feminist author, or if a government minister seems more interested in reading trash novels than fixing the problems of her constituency, then you might expect one or two people to question where their priorities are.  But this all sounds phony to me, since the person making the claim, Damian Barr, is only telling us what Nicola Sturgeon told him, and her claims of “abuse” may only be just the “emotional truth” that she reads in those books.

It goes on:

The idea that fiction is a female domain is taken for granted by most people involved in books. According to Nielsen Book Research women out-buy men in all categories of novel except fantasy, science fiction and horror. And when men do read fiction, they don’t tend to read fiction by women, while Taylor claims that women read and admire male novelists, rarely making value judgments.

OK, so let’s start at the top again: terms like “brotherhood” and “mankind” had “universal” connotations before they became passé; terms like “sisterhood” and “womankind” have deliberately discriminatory connotations. That is the simple explanation if the above statement is correct. I remember serious female writers like Carson McCullers or Harper Lee were making “statements” about the societies they lived in, in which no one was really “innocent” or “guilty,” but whose actions were framed by their motivations and environment—not their “emotions.” 

That is what is demanded from a “serious” male author, for whom the “value judgment” of their work involves the quality of the writing; on the other hand, I don't think most female authors these days actually write to be "inclusive," not thinking of male readers save to kick them in teeth if they dare to read their books. And now that the people who control the publishing  industry have accomplished their "mission," there is no need to publish novels that appeal to either male readers or those who just like books that speak to the world as most of us know it because those people "don't read books anymore."

In a 2021 Guardian post, Thomas-Corr returns to tell us how much the publishing industry has twisted the industry to service female authors and female readers:

How women conquered the world of fiction. From Sally Rooney to Raven Leilani, female novelists have captured the literary zeitgeist, with more buzz, prizes and bestsellers than men. But is this cultural shift something to celebrate or rectify? All five of them are women. But you could be forgiven for not noticing it, so commonplace are female-dominated lists in 2021. Over the past 12 months, almost all of the buzz in fiction has been around young women.

So is the media coverage. Over the past five years, the Observer’s annual debut novelist feature has showcased 44 writers, 33 of whom were female. You will find similar ratios on prize shortlists. Men were missing among the recent names of nominees for the Costa first novel award. Here, too, the shortlisted authors over the past five years have been 75% female. This year’s Rathbones prize featured only one man on a shortlist of eight. The Dylan Thomas prize shortlist found room for one man (as well as a non-binary author), and so too did the Author’s Club best first novel award, which prompted the chair of judges, Lucy Popescu, to remark: “It’s lovely to see women dominating the shortlist.”

Was this a “reaction” to views such as Shamsie’s—or was she simply whining about herself and not reflective of the reality? I mean, things don’t just “change” overnight. If women write for women, and publishers increasingly only publish female authors, then why should this "domination" be a surprise? Then Thomas-Corr goes on to point out that not everyone thinks this is “great”:

But not everyone in publishing sees it in such benign terms. “Why is that ‘lovely to see’?” a male publisher emailed me shortly after the list was announced. “Can you imagine the opposite, a shortlist of five men and one woman, about which the chair says, ‘It’s lovely to see men dominating the shortlist’?”

This has changed, and while it is almost universally accepted with publishing that the current era of female dominance is positive – not to mention overdue and necessary, considering the previous 6,000 or so years of male cultural hegemony – there are, increasingly, dissenting voices among publishers, agents and writers. They feel that men – and especially young men – are being shut out of an industry that is blind to its own prejudices.

Women who were complaining about alleged “discrimination” in the publishing industry against them—or to be more “honest”—literary awards—are acting hardly less discriminatory:

Many women may instinctively take a dim view of men saying they need better representation. There were similar worries voiced when girls started to do better in their GCSEs than boys; there are whenever women are able to compete on equal terms to men. And certainly, when you raise this issue with anyone in publishing, you tend to receive an eye-roll – perhaps followed by a “Hang on! Wasn’t last year’s Booker prize-winner a man?” Those who don’t believe there is a problem will pounce on Douglas Stuart, author of Shuggie Bain as evidence of male supremacy. But they will often struggle to name younger men making their way on to awards lists or bestseller charts.

Many people point out that in U.S. colleges and universities, most of the people making the decisions about who is accepted into them are female, and this may “explain” why most schools have 60 percent or higher female student admissions, and math SAT scores are less “valued” than the “evidence-based reading and writing” scores. This kind of discrimination is also evident in the publishing business, where it was pointed out the probable reason that book publishing house Vintage promotes almost wholly female authors:

…all the editors in that (promotion) division are female. (Of 19 editors commissioning fiction at Vintage, only four are men.) And this isn’t just one team in one company, he argues – it’s a gender balance replicated across the industry. (A diversity survey released in February by the UK Publishers Association, had 64% of the publishing workforce as female with women making up 78% of editorial, 83% of marketing and 92% of publicity.)

“Whenever I send out a novel to editors, the list [of names] is nearly all female,” a male agent says. Like the publisher – who fears being seen as “some kind of men’s rights activist” – he will only speak on condition of anonymity. The subject is such a hornet’s nest that almost every man in the books industry who I approached refused to speak on the record for fear of the backlash.

Again, feminist activists say one thing, when the truth is quite another:

Hannah Westland, publisher of the literary imprint Serpent’s Tail, says she’s not always confident that there’s a market for fiction written by young men. “If a really good novel by a male writer lands on my desk, I do genuinely say to myself, this will be more difficult to publish.” She believes that the “paths to success” are narrower because there are fewer prizes open to men, fewer magazines that will cover male authors, and fewer media figures willing to champion them – in the way that, for example, Dolly Alderton and Pandora Sykes have championed female authors on their podcasts.

It gets worse, because then there is the issue of what female writers actually write about that men are comfortable reading and not alienated by it:

Sharmaine Lovegrove is the founder of Dialogue Books…argues that publishing has become a monoculture, dominated by “white, middle-class, cis-gendered, heteronormative women” who feel that they are themselves victims. “Because it’s all about dismantling the patriarchy, men don’t get a look-in.”

New male fiction writers, in fact, are expected to “answer” for a “past that isn’t ours” according to Northern Irish author Darran Anderson. No, you have to write novels like one of “a 20-something woman in a controlling relationship with a man, (which) has been praised for its honest and visceral portrait of female desire.” 

And yet it is noted that male authors are “cautious” about writing about “sex" because they fear “backlash.” Some have claimed that this is evidence of “malformed, self-centered boy” authors, but this is pure hypocrisy given today’s MeToo and cancel culture society. Male writers can’t be honest about gender relations without offending a female who decides if they have a right to have their work published.

Then we hear from an agent who is one of the “deciders”: Karolina Sutton, who is “surprised that men are feeling excluded from fiction. She stresses that it has taken women centuries to find their voice and be confident within publishing: “Why wasn’t there uproar in the media when women were excluded?' she asks.” 

Well, like all the mendaciously self-serving, she apparently was asleep when that “media uproar” was occurring. There are “plenty” of young male writers, she says, but they are not writing from the “dominant” perspective or “with the self-assurance that Roth and Amis had in the 80s or 90s.” I wonder why; maybe the ones who do are the ones Westland admits have a hard time getting published.

But Sutton admits that for male debut novelists, the bar is now much higher than it is for female writers because “the expectations of male debut novelists are greater than they used to be: ‘For a young man to get a quarter of a million pound advance, the bar is really high. They have to deliver something really spectacular. It’s easier for women to get higher advances.’” And it isn’t any different in the U.S. Every time I see some promotional material, almost all the book titles are written by women. 

If I read anything these days, it is historical works, current politics and society, or if fiction the “classics”; I still enjoy reading Voltaire’s Candide, Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones, the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe and Ambrose Bierce, stuff like that. More “recent” novels like the Pulitzer Prize-winning A Confederacy of Dunces, which I discovered while sitting in a dentist office or some place, thumbed through it and thought to myself, this is really good. The "irony" is that Dunces sat for a decade looking for a publisher after the author committed suicide; in today's publishing environment, it likely would never have seen the light of day.

Very different from these novels are those written by women with characters either “strong” or “victims”—I mean make up your minds what you are, and of course the evil characters are always men. That kind of "narrative" doesn't do a thing for me, it doesn't help me understand the world I live in, and that is why I don’t read any new “serious” fiction, because your "choice" these days is that--or that.

In the end, literary works that stand the test of time do so because have a universal quality, and don't purposely alienate a particular demographic; unfortunately, today’s “serious literary” works only speak to a very limited audience of the self-obsessed whose lack of objectivity will likely be seen in a hundred years as no more relevant than being in the “anti-romance” genre. Perhaps Thomas-Corr was realizing that promoting the insular world of what a female clique thinks "sells" today is actually killing serious literature.