I've ranted about the problems with having a female-dominated publishing pipeline before... and I'll fucking do it again! I know I'm preaching to the choir here but I'd already written this all up for a submission to the /r/books subreddit so I figured I'd repost it here. (And the /r/books people made me take out all the links and remove the part where I used AI for a relatively unbiased analysis of manuscript wish list profiles so I wanted to repost this version to a place that would appreciate it.)
Anyway--
Why Boys Don't Read Anymore
I can't go into a supermarket novel aisle without seeing three full shelves of romantasy novels about plucky young women with magical powers drawing the obsessive affections of foreboding but ultimately caring men. So where are the novels about clueless but good-hearted losers reincarnating into rpg worlds with a special skill that makes them irresistable to a harem of ninja babes?
...okay, I see how that complaint can sound ridiculous, but I am honestly and totally serious. It feels like publishing companies are making absolutely no effort to find and print books young men might actually like, and very naturally boys end up drifting away from reading toward hobbies where they might actually be catered toward. Let me substantiate that by talking about my experiences a little...
I've always been a voracious reader. As a kid I was already addicted to The Magic Tree House, Redwall, Eragon, Warrior Cats, Percy Jackson, Maximum Ride, Harry Potter, Uglies, and so on and so forth. Entering middle school I transitioned quite naturally into reading and writing fanfiction. I focused mostly on male-dominated fandoms like Naruto, Pokemon, and My Little Pony, but still had plenty of exposure to female-dominated fandoms like Twilight and Harry Potter. A few decades on, it feels like the tropes pioneered in the female-dominate fandoms have graduated to the bookstores and awards lists: I don't have to look far to see Dracomione-alike dark academia or shifter romances with heat cycles. But where are the rewritten naruto revenge fics? Where is all the My Little Pony-inspired first-contact sci-fi? Why do none of the monsterfucking novels involve sick tournament arcs? LitRPGs have become by FAR the dominant genre on Royaload... but their only printed representative is Dungeon Crawler Carl-- which specifically avoids or subverts many of the tropes common to the genre. In the meantime, the other branches of the Progression Fantasy tree have remained completely neglected. The Xianxia fad rose and fell without publishers even noticing. Rational/ist fiction like The Methods of Rationality, Friendship is Optimal, and UNSONG inspired an entire generation of AI researchers. You are entirely likely to have your values forcibly re-aligned toward friendship and ponies because of a genre you never had the chance to hear about.
This isn't about the gender of the protagonist, either! Worm is incredibly famous online in male-dominated fanfiction spaces. So is A Practical Guide to Evil. Both those novels feature female protagonists, and both of these novels have dedicated fanfiction communities that reveal a substantial latent demand for retreads of the themes, plots, and character archetypes they feature. And while I wish I could blame this whole issue on male flight to video games, manga, and webtoons, that entire argument would instantly fall apart-- There is no shortage of yaoi manga, villainess webtoons, and cozy games to draw the attention of women, and yet all of those same tropes also make their way into traditionally published novels.
And finally, this isn't about fiction versus non-fiction. Nonfiction is stereotypes as being more appealing to men, but that's not actually true. Women tend to read different genres of nonfiction than men-- women's lit and spirituality in place of, say, popular history... but Women still read more nonfiction in total than men.
No, this problem is rooted in the publishers-- and in particular the preferences of the people who become agents and acquisition editors. I've been trying to get published lately*, and in the process had a look through manuscript wishlist, which is where literary agents and editors post their wishlists for what kind of tropes, plots, and characters they want in. Having read so many profiles... the gender ratio of agents, and especially newer agents/agents open to debut authors is incredibly skewed toward women. And, exactly as that skew implies, the proportion of profiles even hypothetically open to male-targeted books is a faction of the proportion of profiles open to women-targeted books. Similarly, even comparing within the same profile, agents and editors spend a greater proportion of their time soliciting women-targeted books as opposed to male-targeted books. (Excluding requests that are gender neutral in nature.) As an experiment, I filtered for profiles that were interested in sci-fi (to make sure they were at least in principle interested in a male-dominated genre) and copy-pasted everything in their profile into gemini with the following prompt:
evaluate this manuscript wishlist profile to determine what proportion of it seeks to acquire novels that are likely to be more popular with a given gender [specify each proportion], or likely to be equally popular. [specify proportion]
Looking at alphabetically the first profiles--
- Broad Female-Skewing Appeal:
65% - Equal / Gender-Neutral Appeal: 30%
- Male-Skewing Appeal:
5%
Primarily Female-Skewing 60% – 65%
Gender-Balanced / Equal Appeal 30% – 35%
Primarily Male-Skewing 5% – 10%
Equally Popular Across Genders: 56% (9 out of 16 specific fiction requests)
More Popular with Female Readers: 38% (6 out of 16 specific fiction requests)6% (1 out of 16 specific fiction requests)
More Popular with Male Readers:
(Feel free to try and replicate my results with other AI or just read through the profiles yourself-- I'm sure the percentages won't agree exactly, but I think the ratios between female/male appeal will be similar.)
I think these results are pretty clear: the people in charge of finding publishers new books are mostly women, and as a reasonable consequence mostly interested in women-targeted content. I'm not proposing that there's any secret conspiracy to suppress men's voices... but conspiracy isn't necessary to prevent men's voices from, in effect, being suppressed. The modern crop of editors and agents simply largely lacks the lived experience required accurately identify literature boys and men find interesting, and similarly lacks a philosophical commitment to identifying and elevating a new generation of agents and editors who will.
So what can we do?
The publishing world won't fix itself. A lack of male-oriented books means a lack of male readers means a lack of sales means a lack of male-oriented books. Similarly, a lack of male reader means a lack of male writers and editors means a lack of male-oriented books means a lack of male readers. And at least speaking personally, I'm against DEI in general and for men in particular. But where does that leave us?
With slop.
No, seriously. If you feel like you're a guy, and you don't read enough, stop forcing yourself to read highbrow literature or books like you feel you should read, and track down some lowbrow junkfood. I suggest /r/Romance_For_Men , /r/HFY , /r/ProgressionFantasy , or anything on the royalroad front page. If you're a parent of one or more boys, point them toward the pig food dispenser. And I need to clarify that I am not being hyperbolic here. Just like babies have to eat mashed-up food before they can chew through steaks, young men need a regular diet of sophomoric fantasies before they're ready for Asimov or Murakami. Yes, there's a certain risk that the Heinlens and Ayn Rands of the world will feed them masculinist fantasies incompatible with the feminist-egalitarian view of the world you might prefer to instill... but hey, at least that's better than whatever the TikTok algorithm would have done to them.
And then...
Pay for the slop. Talk about the slop. Write your own slop, just for fun. We live in the internet age-- a problem created by gatekeepers can be solved by realizing that mass mediate makes even the tallest walls a short fence that you can simply hop over, and encourage others to do the same. Online-first publishers like Aethon are already in the process of bringing out the proverbial literary wrecking ball-- all they need is some momentum.
*necessary coda-- I haven't managed to get published because my book simply isn't good enough. I know what my problems are and they're largely orthogonal to this rant.
edit: my post just got removed from /r/books again! And this time I removed all references/use of llms and links, which is what the moderator told me got me removed last time. Now I am suspecting a conspiracy.
GBRK
13d ago
I would wager that, looking at the segment of the AI and EA intelligentsia that reads as a hobby, a significant fraction have read at least some of the rational/ist corpus. I base this off my own social group, where I keep discovering that my friends also discovered and read books like Worm, Metropolitan Man, and Friendship is Optimal at formative stages of their life. It might not be 20% of the AI world, or even 5%, but ideas are promiscuous-- if even one person in an organization has read Cordyceps or There Is No Antimemetics Division they're going to talk about the relevant ideas to their friends and coworkers, especially when those ideas are relevant to the tasks they have at hand.
It's like the article about the silicon valley serial entrepreneur addicted to pokemon smut fanfiction.
...actually I lied, it isn't. I just thought the article was hilarious and wanted to link it.
GBRK
13d ago
I'm sorry, but it's hilarious to me that Chatoyance ponyfic is getting posted to themotte, of all places. Not because I'm part of her substantial hatedom, but because rational fanfiction is without exaggeration one of the most intellectually influential literary movements of the 21st century, and notwithstanding that, it is substantially about ponies. And the mainstream literary establishment doesn't even realize that! Not even because they're constitutionally opposed to it, as they might be to right-wing or incel literature... But because it's compromised predominantly of middle aged women who would rather read about schizoid trans men than autistic trans women.
GBRK
15d ago
I take compounded semaglutide for weight loss and, anecdotally, it really does seem reduce cravings in general. (Which I was specifically hoping for when I got on them since I also struggle with being too horny.) In particular, I've noticed that while I still get horny, it's actually possible to distract myself and remain distracted, without the horny thoughts recurring later with even more power. I won't say the drug is 100% or even 40% effective, but I do feel like my ability to respectfully interact with attractive women has meaningfully improved.
I do have to bring up an interesting side effect though: as my libido has become more controllable it feels like I've become a lot pickier about how I evaluate women's faces. It used to feel like virtually every woman with a body I liked also had a face I liked, but now I notice facial asymmetries and defects in composition even on short girls with good hip/bust to waist ratios.
(Possible confounder: me just getting naturally less horny as I delve into the latter half of my twenties )
GBRK
26d ago
You say this isn't an example of ai writing but I noticed a few very significant tells of AI slop. I won't harp on the section formatting and random inclusion of a table because those aren't necessarily bad things, but a few of these paragraphs engage in possibly the single thing I hate most about AI writing: the tendency to tack on vacuous, unnecessary, self-congratulatory statements at the end of paragraphs. For example:
It's a good demonstration of how the sheriff/police division isn't just historical trivia; it determines, very concretely, who is politically on the hook when something goes wrong.
... If it's such a good demonstration, the reader should already have concluded that from reading it. Cut!
American law enforcement, in other words, is a braid of at least three lineages — feudal county sheriff, urban professional police, and Southern slave-patrol/frontier policing — not one clean line.
Again, this should be obvious from the rest of the paragraph. Cut!
I won't go so far as to directly accuse you of composing this essay wholly with AI, but it is definitely AI inflected in that it contains a lot of information that is likely true but not necessarily interesting for humans. A good essayist should prioritize. You spend about as long talking about the etymology of the word sheriff as you spend talking about the history and effectiveness of london's municipal police department, and as a consequence completely gloss over the historical sources actually relevant for demonstrating your central point.
As a maxim: develop taste. Keep ONLY the delicious bits and spit the rest out.
If you're happy with the amount of reading that you do then this advice isn't for you. I'm addressing specifically the kind of person that feels like they should read more, but can never seem to get around to it-- because, in my opinion, their problem is that they need to wrap bitter pills in provolone. Before reading the great books, it is necessary to read the good ones-- to create a habit of reading so that your mental muscles don't end up sore three paragraphs into a difficult book.
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