Why Aren’t Men Reading? Why Are People Reading Less?
Perhaps these are the wrong questions….
Quite some time ago, this tweet from Publisher’s Weekly was making the rounds in writers’ circles. It led to this article over at Dazed Digital, which had the provocative title, “Why don’t straight men read novels?”
The subtitle was the equally provoking:
“Men often read non-fiction books in the name of self-improvement – but many are reluctant to pick up works of fiction.”
We here at Upstream responded accordingly in the Twitter/X thread, but this lament that Dazed Digital published and which Publisher’s Weekly broadcast is hardly new. Various outlets have decried the decline of reading or the loss of a “book loving culture” over the last decade or more.
Although plenty of these cries revolve around a general loss of interest in reading among children (as they simultaneously state that reading to children unfairly advantages them), more focus on the male demographic’s apparent lack of interest in fiction. When they do so it is always presented in an unflattering way by suggesting that men only read “gore.”
Since any number of the books reviewed here at Upstream are written by men and just as many of our readership are men, we know this broad declamation misses the point entirely. Men and women read different types of fiction and non-fiction, whether the women in charge like it or not.
As Ms. Hogarth says in her tweet, linked above:
“What I object to is women (right now controlling the tradpub bubble) saying that men don't read, when the truth is men are reading, just not in a way visible to women in tradpub. That's just offensive to me from a [sic] "observing reality accurately" standpoint. It's not "men aren't reading," it's "men aren't reading the books we have statistics for, that we're mostly writing to our own tastes anyway."”
Various surveys back up Ms. Hogarth’s assertion as she is not the only author to notice that men prefer certain genres to those that women typically read (though she is not one of those to sneer at this sex-linked trait). Other writers have made their own surveys to determine who likes which genre more, and some groups have surveyed their own followers to discover how many are men and how many are women. Many do not like these results and state that women are marginalized by so-called “girly covers,” neglecting in the process the fact that authors in traditional publishing have no control over what type of cover their publisher gives them (an advantage many independent authors do possess).
Furthermore, of course, this whining ignores the fact that men and women simply prefer different genres. There is no way in which to force one sex to enjoy the genre that they find boring. Not without causing the great harm that occurs thereby, at least.
It is worth noting that not all of the surveys linked above even agree on which genres are the preference of which sex. In some surveys, the sexes are almost even in their engagement with one particular genre, whereas others have one sex ahead of the other in preferring a type of tale. This may be due to sample size, as many of these people are surveying their own readers. Statista’s website may have a slightly more realistic view, but one must still account for the fact that the respondents may have misunderstood their questions based on how they were phrased, or they didn’t tell the truth because they distrusted the people calling them by phone to ask about their reading habits.
Furthermore, one of the items that these articles on men “not reading” overlook is that boys are reading less as well, mostly because they cannot find books they like to read. It has been widely reported that children in schools cannot read or cannot read well, even those attending college. The reasons for this range from the present and ongoing poly-anti scholastic resistance to proven methods of teaching, to declaring some children “mentally deficient and unteachable,” to outright malpractice on the part of curriculum writers and teachers. The dire straits of the three Rs are well known. Not only is this loss preventable among students, the greater issue is that this loss means fewer people, particularly young people, are reading for pleasure.
But as noted in the Scholastic survey cited in Psychology Today, what is being produced for children and particularly boys to read by traditional publishers really isn’t encouraging them to continue the practice.
Most news outlets and researchers like to blame smartphones, but when you can get porn in school or on your phone, what is the big difference? At least on your smartphone, the porn you see is what you choose to view, not what the school decided to feed you today.
People wonder and worry about why children are reading less but they seem unwilling to dig into the real reasons why they are reading less. While parents are willing to fight to get discouraging books out of schools, they are generally deprived of any good idea on where to turn to find better content that their children will want to read.
It’s not a lack of empathy on boys’ and men’s part that makes them unwilling to read – it is the publishers’ and many writers’ refusal to produce material for the male half of the human race to read.
The sexes like what they like from the start, and there is nothing wrong with that, no matter what some will claim. The problems we are confronting run deeper than even lack of time to read: men are reading less because most of what traditional publishing is producing for them to read is either geared toward women or is intended to degrade men. It is also intended to degrade boys, as any perusal of presently-on-offer YA novels or middle grade novels will show a shopper, if they check the blurbs. Most of the books focus on female leads, relegating men or boys to supporting roles where they are abused, corrected, or could just as easily be replaced by a girl, while giving all the glory to the female characters – particularly if the female characters enter into combat.
The general dereliction of duty in teaching children how to read means that not only does the task become a chore for most of them, but to get past that barrier or learn to love reading in spite of it, children are left with either actual porn to read or stories that show those children a twisted vision of the world around them. If adults won’t read it, why should anyone expect children or teens to bother?
This is the part of independent authorship no one knows about or recognizes, including conservative outlets like the Daily Wire. Matt Walsh can make movies like What is a Woman? and Am I Racist? that may aid in revealing the hypocrisy of absurd, academic-induced trends that have hopefully reached its zenith, but these films do not replace the trash that present-day audiences must wade through.
Chris Rufo and others lament conservatives’ “inability” to create, but what have he and other conservatives actually created to counter the rot we have to surf through on a daily basis? Am I Racist? is doing well, but it is not going to beat entertainment like Deadpool and Wolverine, or The Boy and the Heron, or any other good movie that manages to squeak past the liberal censors of Hollywood’s nightmare factory.
The Daily Wire and other like-minded conservative outlets’ issue is that, rather than creating, they take the Left’s tactic of “propagandize everything” and run it counter to them. That is fighting back, yes, but it is not a creative endeavor. It may be effective in the short term, as much of politics may be, and it might have some historical value in the future for educational purposes. But it is not creating stories for the screen.
It is not what we at Upstream Reviews are trying to do, either with our own books or those books we review and promote. What true creatives on the right do is write stories following the universal, time-honored understanding of the craft of writing that the Left has done its best to erase. Like teachers bringing phonics back to the classroom, we are less concerned with making countersigns to the bad and poorly produced stories of the Left and more interested in showing that what the past has taught us works, while the destructive actions and nature of the Left do not.
Matt Walsh is a good satirist and a good documentary maker. He is, however, not a good storyteller. If he worked a little at studying the techniques of storycraft, which the left has done its best to bury over the past sixty plus years, then he would probably improve his future creative enterprises. But as long as he adheres to the flawed pattern which he received from the Left, who cut out the connections that make the whole story work so those reading the pattern would fail, he is going to continue to disappoint as a storyteller even if he rises as an expert satirist.
The same is true for Rufo and those who claim “the right cannot create,” as well as those who claim “men don’t read because they have no empathy” or other associated drivel. What standards are each camp using to make these claims? The right cannot create? According to what criteria do you judge this to be true? We know the Left has absolutely mangled standards where they have not destroyed them. That being the case, why would you use their metrics for anything? Isn’t the entire point of What Is a Woman? and Am I Racist? to produce evidence of just how badly the Left has wrecked the objective measurements Western civilization utilizes? If that is not the point of these films, then what IS the point?
So “men don’t read.” What? According to whose standards do they “lack empathy”? What metrics are you using to measure that statement by? “Men don’t read” bodice rippers? Harlequin romance? They lack empathy for women who read these types of genres? Are you sure the female characters in these genres have a healthy sense of empathy? There are women who doubt that the female characters in these works have any good sense at all, let alone empathy.
Do men lack empathy for the latest political autobiography churned out and stacked up on the box store floor? How does one measure men’s lack of interest in reading or their “lack of empathy”? What standards are being used? Does it just mean that “Men don’t read what I want them to read”? Or “Men don’t read what I like to read”? Or perhaps “Men won’t read my latest bodice ripper”? Do men “lack empathy” because they don’t want to read Jane Austen’s books? If one is a female author and men are not in her target audience, why would they WANT to read the book? A female author is trying to sell her book(s) to other women….
Isn’t she?
If one is writing strictly for women and a small number of men, then the majority of male readers are not in the “niche” and, furthermore, they will not enter it. You can scream and rail at them all you like, even teach them to read poorly so that they never want to crack open a book again, but you will always fail to make them like what you enjoy writing and/or reading.
If, however, you want to appeal to a wider audience that includes a commensurate number of men and women, maybe you need to adjust your focus to attract greater male readership.
That is, at the end of the day, the real issue. A great many publishers are interested in abusing their readership like a narcissistic spouse, claiming they are being abandoned by readers. These publishers then claim they did nothing wrong. Except, these publishers have been actively driving readers away. The publisher’s misdeeds are either actively ignored, or hidden via “gaslighting,” as shown in the resistance against parents protesting pornographic books in schools and in those who use the juvenile claim that men “lack empathy.” Erin Boyd notes this fits a world run by a de facto matriarchy and, with the general failure seen from schools to publishing, it seems all too reasonable to guess that the “matriarchy” is on its way out the door.
What will come after? That depends on what happens once the current fashions have been flushed out of the culture. “Men don’t read,” “the right can’t create,” “children aren’t reading because they have smartphones” are all the current zeitgeist, but they are wearing their welcome out as quickly as a fever would with the human body. The problem with what the spirit of the age offers is not only that it promises much but delivers nothing, it does so that it may feed on your despair. As Chesterton noted, the “nameless sin” (despair) prefers to remain unnamed. That gives it more power than it would otherwise possess.
So do not abandon all hope, ye who enter here. Take a quick look through our backlog of book reviews and see what you can buy or recommend that might help reignite someone’s spark of passion for a good story. The Daily Wire has the means of promoting good works by conservatives but won’t notice us. They can’t notice us, because to acknowledge the books we review would collapse their business model. The Daily Wire exists by claiming there are no other right-of-center creators, so the audience is trapped with what they give them.
You noticed us. You’re reading this article and/or subscribed here. Share our site around. Let’s give the spirit of the age a good swift kick…
…and prove that men do read, phones are not the main issue, and conservatives CAN create. People just need the skills to read and write, as well as something worth reading and writing about. Go forth, and share! To paraphrase the song, let’s light a candle even though it’s harder than cursing the dark. Lighting a candle is more productive, and production hurts. It is how you know it is working.
So let’s get to work. Grab the gas can and some matches, and light up the dark.
It turns out that drag queen story hour doesn't teach young boys tolerance, it just traumatizes them and makes them associate literature with the queasy sensation of being ogled by a cross-dressing pedophile. Result: "boys don't read".
More seriously - though I'm only half joking - there is a close connection between the untruths that "men don't read" and that "the right can't create". The left does not have some lock on literary creativity - HP Lovecraft, Robert E Howard, CS Lewis, JRR Tolkien, Robert A Heinlein, Gene Wolfe, Larry Niven, and numerous other genre-defining titans would have been very amused to hear that "the right can't create".
What actually happens is that the left takes over production, distribution, and promotion channels, and then ensures that only their books are published, stocked, marketed, and given awards. There is no creativity whatsoever involved in this strategy. It is simply low animal cunning and venal social power games.
As with every other instance of the left murdering an institution and wearing it as a skinsuit, the result is the precipitous collapse of the ability of that institution to fulfill its social function, followed in short order by the collapse of its prestige as the general public starts tuning the corrupted institution out.
"Men don't read" the insipid sermons the big publishers are selling, and "the right doesn't create" anything the left will consider publishing. Meanwhile there is a quiet literary Renaissance happening in independent publishing, and men are reading it in droves.
Beautifully stated, Caroline. Authors must respect their Readers, not revile them. Too many publishers despise the EveryMan - the Man who works for Bread, longs for Family, yearns for Romance and fights for Good . Readers know when an Author hates them; Authors who despise men should not expect men to read their works.