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PaperclipPerfector  22d ago (text post)   23721 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of August 10, 2026

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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--

https://manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/adah-li/

  1. Broad Female-Skewing Appeal: 65%
  2. Equal / Gender-Neutral Appeal: 30%
  3. Male-Skewing Appeal: 5%

https://manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/alex-brown/

Primarily Female-Skewing 60% – 65%
Gender-Balanced / Equal Appeal 30% – 35%
Primarily Male-Skewing 5% – 10%

https://manuscriptwishlist.com/mswl-post/alex-grana/

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)
More Popular with Male Readers: 6% (1 out of 16 specific fiction requests)

(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.

Where is all the My Little Pony-inspired first-contact sci-fi?

https://www.fimfiction.net/story/211404/what-ive-become

was adapted to

https://www.amazon.com/What-Become-Humanity-Within-Book-ebook/dp/B07JK65325/ref=sr_1_1?qid=1681176034&refinements=p_27%3AKnight+Breeze&s=digital-text&sr=1-1

For whatever that is worth, didn't really love the original so didn't buy kindle adaptation.

lmaooo

thanks for the rec mate. It warms my heart to know a former ponyfic made probably on the order of ~$1000. I think it probably suffers from bird-people being insufficiently kawaii tho, the author should have gone for shortstack goblins or dogbolds or something.

A guy in my small group recommended Biblical Monsters, which is both short and quite surprising to me in its excellence, and is one of the better first-contact stories I've ever read.

"Biblical Monsters" is pretty good. Same author also wrote "The Writing on the Wall", which is an incredible bit of rational horror.

I think my favorite first contact ponyfic is Message in a Bottle, which is basically Greg Egan meets John Ringo (meets Lauren Faust).

This entire thread is reinforcing my already strongly-held impression that if you scratch a mottizen, a brony bleeds. I suppose that's almost par for the course in any space disproportionately inhabited by literate young men, but it doesn't stop it from being hilarious.

This entire thread is reinforcing my already strongly-held impression that if you scratch a mottizen, a brony bleeds.

Learning that there are so many bronies makes me question the time I spend here.

The show (and by that I specifically mean G4) ran for 10 years and was part of peak 4chan culture; I'm not sure what else you're expecting at this point.

Bronies, channers, anime enthusiasts... I feel like Sam the Eagle sometimes.

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?

They're being published as comics. Take a look at Webtoons some time and you'll see that this is the plot of nearly half of the series they publish.

I addressed this already.

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.

Also, try to remember that many popular manga were once Light Novels-- there is a latent demand for both written and visual forms of he same stories, often even from the exact same people.

(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 pulled the full MSWL editor list programmatically (dataset and python code) and fed it into Gemma4-25B using GBNF to coerce answers. (Caveat: spot checks looked good, but there's a very high unknown rate and almost all of them had clear genders or pronouns to human inspection, excluding a few general editor slots. So I'm probably using GBNF wrong, on top of the scraper being vibe-coded. I also didn't pull pictures.)

Out of 1065 entries, 104 were identified as male, 838 were identified as female, and 123 came back 'unknown'. I'm going to assume that the llm treated gender and sex as identical, so 8-22% man, 78-90% women, probably less than twenty multi-agent or company-wide agent profiles.

Gemma found 318 entries involving women's fiction or specifying a female protagonist. I'm less confident in that number serving as a good approximation.

Awesome, thank you for doing this! Request for clarification-- was the AI classifying only the difference in the agent genders, or also classifying the relative proportion of each profile focused on male-or-female-targeted works?

Gender was "Classify the gender of the person described below.\n\nText: {text}\n\nGender:", where the only valid responses were male (104), female (838) and unknown (123).

Genre was "Does this editor include a focus on Women's Fiction or a women/female protagonist?\n\nText: {text}\n\n Answer:".

It was smart to handle a test example (Alec Shane) where the agent specifically said he didn't want women's fiction, and I only caught one misclassification out of twenty spot tests (an "unknown" that did include wanting women protagonists), but I would still treat this as directionality, rather than ground truth, for either question.

Oh, I see-- you did things slightly differently from me, then. I was asking it to classify the relative proportions of each profile dedicated toward genres and concepts that were more likely to appeal to men or women, as a proxy for the relative preference of the agent/editor for each kind of book.

It's funny seeing this post bemoaning how litrpg/progression fantasy/xianxia/etc. have failed to get any physical traction aside from Dungeon Crawler Carl, and then the exact same day see this post from The Wandering Inn:

https://old.reddit.com/r/WanderingInn/comments/1vl5yys/blog_20_beware_of_chicken_and_billboards/

The physical release of the first few Wandering Inn volumes approaches rapidly, with enough juice behind it to even get billboard ads in major cities. And pirateaba uses the announcement to provide some advertising to Beware of Chicken, which is also getting a physical release (pictured alongside He Who Fights With Monsters, so I can only assume that too is now in major bookstores).

It seems like you've written this whole thing about a month too early for the male dominated, RoyalRoad explosion to hit bookstores now that DCC has laid a path for success.

Publishers just to have hope no one reads the godawful later volumes of BoC

It's an exciting step, and also exactly in line with my recommendations. BoC is slop, and I'm glad it's available for kids to read. Now lets see if the rest of the publishing world follows suit.

Chinese-language bookshop opened up near me right next to the regular bookstore. I thought the comparison was very interesting. The normal bookstore, which I generally like, is full of new modern semi-woke histories, romance novels, pop-sci, ghostwritten memoirs, etc. The Chinese bookstore was full of translated classics, Monte Cristo, Shakespeare, histories like Robert Caro and William Cronon, Samuel Huntington, Dostoevsky, etc. etc. I would say that the Chinese bookstore was much more "serious" and contained more books I feel like I'm "supposed" to read, more books that are going to sit on my shelf. The liberal bookstore is full of books that are going to go in the little free library up the street when I'm done with them.

Also, I confess, I have a sloppy love for trashy lowbrow Romance novels, I've been reading them for years, and there was a big turnover a few years ago in what's getting printed. There's a lot more gay stuff now. It got to the point where browsing the "Young Adult" section reliably turned up facially-normal books that were really about or contained gay romances. That seems to be all liberal women go for now, they only have a taste for stories about outcasts coming-to-terms with their true selves. This stuff used to be contained in its own ghetto but is now a major feeder pipeline for more serious stories. The pipeline took a few years to fully develop, but I think we're starting to see much more of this stuff in mainstream TV shows and movies now.

That seems to be all liberal women go for now, they only have a taste for stories about outcasts coming-to-terms with their true selves.

The TLPish take on this would be that the fantasy of being the oppressed outsider who finds his/her true self is actually a fantasy of being unique, and therefore appeals to people who secretly fear/know they are mass-produced. But it has to be done along culture-war lines, because a story of a genuine outsider (e.g. Faust, Stephen Dedalus, the von Trottas) would be unintelligible to a mass-produced person, it would be like asking them to interpret the roaring of a lion.

I've always liked books, but looking at the younger guys and boys I know, it's mostly video games. Men want to act, and the medium of video games is just infinitely more appealing to them by its basic nature. Contrariwise, girls are really into the fantasy of being (and being seen as) an educated, classy lady, and reading books is a mandatory accessory. Even those that are neither, which can lead to some hilariously non-self-aware selfies with books of questionable renown.

There is also a noticeable element of top-down woke/feminism/DEI in video games as well, but it's substantially tempered by the 90%+ male audience in many (sub-)genres, and usually they have to keep the core gameplay and basic story intact to make the game sell.

That said, there definitely is a strong feminist strain in contemporary writing. I'm currently reading various adventure stories to my kids, and it's quite noticeable how much of a switch happened from almost entirely male protagonists to an outright female bias. And this is excluding the already-female dominated genres like horse/unicorn/fairy etc. stories.

It's not entirely bad - my wife definitely remembers the time when she was forced to read stories with basically 100% male protagonists bc she simply enjoyed the adventure genre. But I do get the feeling that without the reciprocal process happening to the female genres, there probably is a bias of 80%+ or so female protagonists in contemporary kids' stories.

Men want to act, and the medium of video games is just infinitely more appealing to them by its basic nature. Contrariwise, girls are really into the fantasy of being (and being seen as) an educated, classy lady, and reading books is a mandatory accessory.

I don't see how that is different from when I was young and back then all the guys read in addition to playing video games, if anything, being into video games made it more not less likely to be a reader.

I loved video games, but my parents smartly put a limit on how much time I could spend playing them. By contrast, they put zero limit on the amount of time I could spend reading, regardless of subject matter or value (except romance novels: my mom considered those trash and off limits to me as a youth).

except romance novels: my mom considered those trash and off limits to me as a youth

lol, based mom. It's interesting how, again, these things have changed; At least from my impression, most women believe that male-targeted stories (action, basic genre fantasy, etc) predominantly appeal to the lower instincts, if not being complete trash, while they idealize their thinly-veiled romance slop novels as high literature. Not to defend stupid action and self-insert power fantasies, but I've found little difference in the sophistication of male vs female-targeted literature, they're just (un-)sophisticated in different ways.

It could be that you grew up in a much more literate culture than the current generation, whose parents are more phone-captured, whereas younger generations got hooked on/left with games much sooner, or just had a thinner reading culture in general and didn't pass the SF/F around their friend groups?

I've always liked books, but looking at the younger guys and boys I know, it's mostly video games. Men want to act, and the medium of video games is just infinitely more appealing to them by its basic nature. Contrariwise, girls are really into the fantasy of being (and being seen as) an educated, classy lady, and reading books is a mandatory accessory.

This looks like a perfect opportunity for some synergy across different demographic lines. If all the people who loudly claim some version of "literature industry is catering to men just fine, men are simply choosing other things" decided to partner with the people who claim "video game industry is catering to women just fine, women are simply choosing other things" and shout down all the people demanding that any particular industry be gender-equalized by hook or by crook, it might actually have some effect!

If all the people who loudly claim some version of "literature industry is catering to men just fine, men are simply choosing other things" decided to partner with the people who claim "video game industry is catering to women just fine, women are simply choosing other things"

Problem: Despite having the same form, these statements have different truth values. Both the literature industry and the video games industry are trying to cater to women.

Men want to act, and the medium of video games is just infinitely more appealing to them by its basic nature. Contrariwise, girls are really into the fantasy of being (and being seen as) an educated, classy lady, and reading books is a mandatory accessory. Even those that are neither, which can lead to some hilariously non-self-aware selfies with books of questionable renown.

It’s pretty amusing how women as human beings, men as human doings even affects choice of medium for leisure.

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. 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.

No this is a terrible idea and will make your son retarded or, worse, end with him poasting here. Thankfully, there is a simple solution: read old books. Start him on Hardy Boys and Biggles, get him to John Buchan and James Bond.

More generally, the good and the bad exist. Some art is objectively superior to other art, and it is good for you to prefer the better to the worse (even utilitarianoids had to admit the theory of the "competent judge"). The question is, though, given that the same industry problems exist for both - the feminization of publishing is strangling literature just as it is slop - how do we find, publish, and promote the good? What's wild to me is how young this problem is. If you'll forgive me some memory lane, when I was a whippersnapper squatting in a frathouse, it was simple: you'd go to The Quarterly Conversation, find a book Scott Esposito recommended there, and you'd have a 10/10 foreign author you'd never heard of before. Now Scott Esposito is a woman who posts about nothing but lowbrow current-thing trans stuff. Sam Kriss wrote a bit about this in All The Nerds Are Dead, but didn't quite draw the conclusion, because it would be difficult for him to take the responsibility required. What astonishes me is how durable and self-reinforcing the literary culture of the 2010s seemed to be at the time, and then how quickly it got taken to the Lubyanka basement and shot in the back of the head.

They should have access to fiction that takes place roughly in the current time, and reflects the era we are in. James Bond does not do that. At least litRPG characters are from our current world.

Why? I grew up largely on kids' books from the 50's, 60's, and 70's.

No this is a terrible idea and will make your son retarded or, worse, end with him poasting here. Thankfully, there is a simple solution: read old books. Start him on Hardy Boys and Biggles, get him to John Buchan and James Bond.

Every time I see this variety of argument, I think it's notable that people still point to fairly contemporary novels instead of, say, The Cantebury Tales and the Epic of Beowulf. Despite explicitly calling for reaching backwards in time, your recommendations are still influence by a massive recency bias. Without even realizing it, you argue for reading novels that had currency and applicability to the era of your life that you read them in, and yet are completely out of touch about how changes to culture, technology, and in general the state of the world make those novels more and more irrelevant to the experience of children growing up now.

That era of my life was the 2000s bro, I just grew up in a well-educated household in a backwards country (England). Facebook and I believe the iPhone existed before I picked up my first Bond novel. The reality is that the slop of the past is immeasurably better than the slop of the present, it's a fact, indisputable. The problem that you mean by recency bias is that as you get further into the past it takes a lot more friction to overcome the cultural and linguistic difference, such that it's worth it to read Chaucer (because it's a great work, not comparable to the kids'/adolescents' books I suggest), but not worth it to read medieval mystery plays unless that's for your PhD. 20th-Century works are still perfectly accessible for young people. Relevant? I guess "relevant to the kids today" is always the phrase, but, if you compare mid-century books to what you're going to find on display in your local library, put there by the nice spherical woman with her degree in Library Science, I think I know which one will suit a young man better.

but, if you compare mid-century books to what you're going to find on display in your local library, put there by the nice spherical woman with her degree in Library Science, I think I know which one will suit a young man better.

Yes, this is kind of my point. Meanwhile, young women have a endless quantity of "feminist retellings" that not only manage to give them a solid chunk of the timeless core of the old books, but also infuse them with all the new junk-candy ideologies.

The problem that you mean by recency bias is that as you get further into the past it takes a lot more friction to overcome the cultural and linguistic difference, such that it's worth it to read Chaucer

Maybe someone should write a Gen Z translation.

When April drops and winter gets ratioed,

And every dead group chat is resurrected, bro,

When rain has power-washed the city clean

And suddenly the grass is giving green,

When Zephyrus logs on with soft-launch air

And flowers start posting thirst traps everywhere...

How about a modern James Bond who defeats crime syndicates that are using LLM's to hack people's crypto in order to use the money to fund bioweapons, while having to navigate modern norms regarding sex?

This is literally just Kingsmen, though.

Yeah though the sequels kinda failed to capture the same energy and now it appears to be a dead franchise?

The sequels did capture that energy, that's part of why it's a dead franchise. (Also happened with Bond; Craig, but also Dalton.)

"Navigating modern norms regarding sex" is the modern "leave room for Jesus" and the media spawned with that as the underpinning is generally poor.

Did you play that IO Interactive James Bond games that came out a couple months ago?

Because it is essentially James Bond vs LLMs.

To be fair to @GBRK, while I grew up in the same place reading the same stuff and I agree it still holds up (reread Swallows and Amazons last night, still good), the 2000s were already 20+ years ago. We’re old, man. And I agree with him that it would be nice to have good new books to go along with the good classic books.

Buchan's most famous novel is over a hundred years old, which is right about halfway into the period where novels exist in their "modern" readable form. Literature obviously existed prior to then, but it's really only about the beginning of the 19th-century that stories start getting presented in the form we now basically expect as a baseline.

Modern readers will struggle to relate to the characters of Chaucer or Shakespeare or whoever, but I think that's mainly a problem of the form of those works being foreign. But starting with about Austen, that problem mostly goes away, leaving you with about two centuries of readable old books to pull from.

And because the number of titles increases ~monotonically year-over-year, the time-weighted average "old book" is probably from about the mid-20th-century. (And really, I'd guess including all the pre-19th-century books only drags the average back to about the early-20th-century.)

Biggles

Out of curiosity, have you ever watched the old Rowan Atkinson series The Thin Blue Line, from around the same time period he was doing Blackadder?

No, but absolutely sounds worth a watch. Clip for reference. Definitely old-world sensibilities in the books; I recall giggling as a kid over the phrase "Biggles sat forward in his armchair and violently ejaculated".

Including Sherlock Holmes in there has aged possibly better than any other comedy line out there.

Doyle was fond of that word, too, and I still snigger at the thought of Watson being unable to contain himself while conversing with Holmes.

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.

Well, it's not exactly appreciated here either. If I wanted to hear Claude's "unbiased" analysis, I would direct my browser to claude.ai instead of themotte.org.

Anyway.

Isn't this just a genderswapped version of the SJW complaints about representation from a decade ago? And all the same retorts apply. Why can't people of all genders enjoy stories about plucky young women with magical powers drawing the obsessive affections of foreboding but ultimately caring men? What's stopping you? Don't we value literature precisely for its capacity to let us explore subjectivities and settings that are not our own? Men can always write their own stories that suit their own proclivities if it means that much to them.

The novel form is historically bound; it had a beginning in time and space, and it will likely have an end in time and space as well. There's nothing intrinsically ennobling or salutary about the novel as opposed to say, the film, the video game, or the comic book (all of which involve copious volumes of text, some of which is even "read" via the eyes, if you're into that sort of thing).

I'm kinda with the feminists on this one: why don't they deserve a turn at being catered to for a while? You still have anime/manga, and a backlog of decades worth of Western and Japanese material that could fill multiple lifetimes, so I think the whole thing is rather a moot point anyway (except for the writers who are getting shafted by the current political winds in the publishing industry, in which case, you do have my genuine sympathy).

There's nothing intrinsically ennobling or salutary about the novel as opposed to say, the film, the video game, or the comic book

I think that's the crux of the issue: does literature offer anything uniquely important? If it doesn't, then yeah, who cares. But if it does, then someone is getting screwed: maybe it's men who have fewer stories by and about people similar to themselves, maybe it's women for being denied the opportunity to explore subjectivities not their own. But there's something rotten in Denmark.

And there is something special about the written word. There's a reason LLMs have it as their primary modality: it's conceptually dense, thick with context, and easy to produce and consume. Reason made manifest: in the beginning was the word.

In principle, it seems like Substacks and Tweets could work for that. And I could imagine e.g. Joan Didion producing a Substack. But the way they are presented and consumed precludes longer form text. You won't find something equivalent to Blood Meridian or Moby Dick published online or, for that matter, in a manga or video game format.

You won't find something equivalent to Blood Meridian or Moby Dick published online

Most of Dickens' body of work was written as practically the equivalent of webserials for the Victorian era, as well as Anna Karenina and Brothers Karamazov. Even in the modern age I'd argue that lots of what's published online is better than what comes out of traditional publishing, and it's mostly status considerations as to why people denigrate works published online rather than anything to do with the format itself.

the way they are presented and consumed precludes longer form text. You won't find something equivalent to Blood Meridian or Moby Dick published online

I dunno, publishing novels as serials used to be fairly common, to my understanding.

I'm currently re-reading the Sienkiewicz Trilogy again in preparation for a trip to poland, and yes indeed, those novels were originally serialized in a newspaper.

Well, it's not exactly appreciated here either. If I wanted to hear Claude's "unbiased" analysis, I would direct my browser to claude.ai instead of themotte.org.

I would like to point out that, to this point, no one has actually contradicted me on the fact that the applicable MSWL profiles were more oriented towards attracting books that are interesting to women than men. Maybe "appreciated" was too strong a point, but it definitely made my point for me.

Isn't this just a genderswapped version of the SJW complaints about representation from a decade ago?

Yes, and frankly the SJWs were basically right. Where they failed was that assuming every story could fit an unlimited amount of representation without pissing off previous fans.

Men can always write their own stories that suit their own proclivities if it means that much to them.

And they do, but without the infrastructure provided by publishing houses those stories remain at a poor state of editing and advertising that keeps them out of the hands of what might have been the next generation of readers and writers.

There's nothing intrinsically ennobling or salutary about the novel

why don't they deserve a turn at being catered to for a while?

In point of fact, reading purely textual material for fun is highly associated with the development of greater reasoning skills, more educational attainment, and as a consequence greater success later in life. When we already have structual inequalities in favor of female attainment among Gen Z and Gen Alpha, that means in effect encouraging an explicitly matriarchal and female-dominated society. Is that your position?

and a backlog of decades worth of Western and Japanese material that could fill multiple lifetimes

That exact statement would still be true if we instantly deleted every book written in the last two hundred years, but do you still think your reading habits would remain totally unchanged?

I'm kinda with the feminists on this one: why don't they deserve a turn at being catered to for a while?

Feminists don't want to be "catered to", they want to be the only segment whose preferences are considered. That's what the logic of "catering to" entails: book publishing is a zero-sum game so anything that isn't for me is against me.

We used to have quite a robust literature that both men and women enjoyed reading before this logic about representation took hold. The feminist-SJW logic that women were oppressed by the lack of feminist-SJW literature was always ahistorical and self-interested. It was ridiculous logic in its own time. So now we've created a scarce resource out of what used to be a free market. Fair play if the boys see "GIRLS RULE BOYS DROOL" lit and want their turn.

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.

Interestingly enough I am a fan of LitRPG and progression fantasy and this space is absolutely horrible. It is riddled with various feminist tropes that make it unreadable for me and I think large part of male population. In general this slop genre is riddled with something I call "nagging female companion", that literally abuses the nerdy incel male hero to oblivion while at the same time serves as some kind of supposed "prize" and "source of tension". The hero needs to power up in order to deserve romantic interest from such a bitch and he swoons over her for no reason, while she does not bring any value to him except of nagging, disrespect and drama. She is there just as a foil and to keep the hero back. The author Phil Tucker is king of this genre, such as with his Dawn of The Void series where the hero is literal homeless alcoholic who shares System Apocalypse with literal female crackhead to whom he trauma bonds. I did not manage to read too far into it, but the start is literal toxic abuse that would be grounds for immediate decapitation if it was not female "companion" but some male villain.

Paradoxically one way to avoid this is by having a female protagonist, you have rare Ellen Rippley style character like in Azarinth Healer, where by virtue of being female she does not give a shit about some nagging disrespecting sidechick. Other escape is autistic power fantasy of male protagonist who does not give a shit such as in Primal Hunter or Defiance of the Fall and the like - who are basically Conan The Barbiarian style pulp fiction male fantasy characters with extra steps. However these are surprisingly rare. It is impossible to find genre where you have just bunch of male friends doing the progression and apocalypse, while women are actually supportive of them and do not create some stupid drama or are just background noise. Even military litrpg authors cannot help themselves and they do have to introduce some version of hated purple haired Admiral Holdo wannabe or some sarcastic and sassy katana wielding female Captain Marvel type of character.

And that is just feminist tropes. Other tropes are sarcastic nihilist know-it-all moron who moralizes over world where he was Isekaied - ideally telling them how slavery or religion is bad, throwing some bad and dated cultural puns plus literal Atheism+ with dense dose of progressive spices - one example is Jason from He Who Fights with Monsters. Other than that there is the anime incel tropes of some gamer moron who is dumb, stupid and mentally and socially inept but somehow became The Chosen One by sheer luck. But the most time it is all three, a moralizing Atheism+ moronic dumb incel being the Chosen one, who has some nagging combative female sidechick or at least some system who is there to create drama and tension and with whom he trauma bonds, and who throws bad dated puns and Young Adult/Marvel style of grating supposedly comedic relief that has no place in the setting. The landscape is very dry to be sure.

It is riddled with various feminist tropes that make it unreadable for me and I think large part of male population. In general this slop genre is riddled with something I call "nagging female companion", that literally abuses the nerdy incel male hero to oblivion while at the same time serves as some kind of supposed "prize" and "source of tension". The hero needs to power up in order to deserve romantic interest from such a bitch and he swoons over her for no reason, while she does not bring any value to him except of nagging, disrespect and drama. She is there just as a foil and to keep the hero back.

Sounds like the issue isn’t that the “nagging female companion” trope is too unrealistic, it’s that it’s too realistic of a depiction of many marriages—thus taking the escapism out of it and/or hitting too close to home.

Young Adult/Marvel style of grating supposedly comedic relief

I take it you aren’t a fan of girlpower quips like this one from X-Men?

“By the way, the women are always saving the men around here. You might want to think about changing the name to X-Women.”

Sounds like the issue isn’t that the “nagging female companion” trope is too unrealistic, it’s that it’s too realistic of a depiction of many marriages—thus taking the escapism out of it and/or hitting too close to home.

Sure, I guess many of these are just projections of author, including using heroes as mouthpieces for their ideology. There are so many ruined projects. For instance there was Steel Foundations - a 16th century knight from Holy Roman Empire is Isekaied into medieval fantasy world with levels and skills. What an amazing premise. Only the protagonist is not a 16th century knight, but basically your cookie-cutter nerd from San Francisco. He hates religion and he was a secret atheist, he actually hates authorities and he is secretly liberal, he takes shit from girlbosses around him and he is all for women equity. While he is is an atheist who mocks religion he at the same time loves to meditate and treats eastern mystics who know how to brew tea with great reverence and respect. His backstory is there just to make him wear plate armor and Langschwert, otherwise he is just a projection of author.

The same goes for many other things where the social structure is nonsensical. Imagine Walking Dead but dialed to eleven. Yes there is apocalypse, but there is still the same stupid drama as if we are in an episode of Friends with zombies. Rick also dedicates half if not more of his time to just keep bunch of morons in check. He is fighting zombies as much as his stupid wife and other whining morons from his group who complain about lack of toilet paper. It is basically a middle management bad office drama story, cheating wives, stupid kids doing stupid shit but just with zombies. In fact zombies are something like bad weather or environmental hazard, it could as well be a series about bunch of morons being transported to Alaska and slowly dying to diseases by eating berries or going to hug bears just to prove that Rick is incorrect. In fact it is completely good parallel with katana wielding badass diverse character who eventually becomes heroes romantic interest and 50 something abused wife Carrol, who becomes the best tactical genius, sniper and survivalist who single handedly dismantles fortified base of cannibal cultist as some Black Ops genius. But at least they are cooperative and supportive of Rick and his stupid wife died - I would consider it as a rare quality gem in litrpg if Rick had levels. In reality they would also be his wife in one.

He is fighting zombies as much as his stupid wife and other whining morons from his group who complain about lack of toilet paper. It is basically a middle management bad office drama story, cheating wives, stupid kids doing stupid shit but just with zombies. In fact zombies are something like bad weather or environmental hazard, it could as well be a series about bunch of morons being transported to Alaska

My understanding is that's most zombie stories. They're not about the zombies, they're about the people, and the zombies are -- as you say -- easily replaceable by any stressful environmental hazard. They're window dressing for the set.

Sure, the thing is that it is generic modern environmental hazard. Instead of zombies and hostile cannibals it could be local criminals and gals from HR. The structure is completely off and it should be apparent to anybody who reads let's say some war memoires of soldiers or other people in extreme circumstances and how people actually behave.

Rick also dedicates half if not more of his time to just keep bunch of morons in check. He is fighting zombies as much as his stupid wife and other whining morons from his group who complain about lack of toilet paper.

Not only that, Rick raises his wife’s affair baby as his own. She didn’t wait very long after thinking he was dead to monkeybranch, letting his best friend rail her and knock her up. Epic handshake potential between Rick and Billy “my wife’s son” Butcher.

I guess the fitting parallel would be clueless Evangelical beta chumps, gamer nerds or red-piller right-wing MAGA chuds writing romantasy novels aimed at women, featuring content they think women should be reading.

Women: "I hate these maga chud romance novels. Where's the rape??"

I suggest /r/Romance_For_Men

I took a look at the top submissions, and I am now thoroughly horrified. What they keep asking for is literally Morning Glory Milking Farm, but in reverse. "Vince is a typical, down-on-his-luck millennial: mid-twenties, over-educated and drowning in debt, on the verge of moving into his parents' basement." And then he gets a job at Cambric Creek Morning Glory Milking Farm, where a muscle mommy minotauress gives him gently dominating handjobs.

Is this really what the romantic ideal for modern men looks like? Not Rose Sayer or Willie Scott or Princess Leia or Evelyn Carnahan or, um, Princess Fiona?

Funny you should mention Evelyn Carnahan. I was browsing the top posts in the sub when I came across "What is 'Romance for Men?' Go Watch 'The Mummy Returns'". And my immediate reaction to that title was "this is obviously bullshit, but I'm going to take a look just to see the argument". So I started reading and... turns out, it wasn't bullshit. By the time I was finished, the guy had convinced me; The Mummy Returns is an /r/Romance_For_Men GOAT.

Weeds are always the first plants to colonize barren ground, and in their wake less hardy plants flourish. Thus as it is with gooners and media.

But no seriously, very few authors are going to invest years of work to stake their mangum opus in an unproven genre-- and even fewer agents, editors, and publishes will support them. The modern flood of romantasy wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the endless twilight and harry potter smut fics. Monsterfucking is a necessary step on the tech tree.

I could understand gooners looking for harems, or, like the sibling comment said, Gor. But monster mommies?

An obsessive, devoted woman who's too neurodivergent to love another man isn't all that crazy of a love interest. Plus, "tall, hairy, curvy" are neither individually nor jointly particularly crazy as fetishes. Obviously there's an element of exaggeration in there too-- a book has to tell you "EIGHT FOOT WOMAN WITH BICEPS LIKE BOULDERS" to inspire a feeling that even approaches what you would experience in real life if a girl a little taller than you gave you a bear hug.

The dignity of Man is often exaggerated.

Well it is reddit, so of course it's going to be safe horny since everything else is highly illegal.

If you want Gor you're going to have to pay the actually-banned-book tax and find publishing houses run by schizo foreigners and ephemeral livejournal archives.

No wonder people just stick to Japanese media, where virile urges are just a normal thing.

Who said anything about Gor? I'm talking about a competent, but rough around the edges protagonist winning the heart of a refined damsel that initially finds him uncouth and vulgar, while he finds her cold and snooty. Not teaching her the freedom of submission.

It's rounded down to the same thing by the current western zeitgeist.

I fully agree with your point. But I think there's one additional aspect that's present in webfics that isn't found elsewhere, which the social aspect of webfic.

There's a lot of comments saying that there's more material written than you could read in a dozen lifetimes. Good material at that, and that's true. But the issue is that we are social creatures. I can read the original Journey to the West from which a lot of the modern day Xianxia tropes originate from, but if I want to discuss this work with others I'll have more luck if I learn Chinese or get into academia. Meanwhile I can go on WebToons right now and find some manhwa to read and then read the comments and see other people's perspectives, and discuss it with them. This is something that already exists with fiction that's marketed towards women. They see it on TikTok, they read it, discuss it, and then move on.

Overall, a large part of what people spend their time on is in some sense meant to be fill a social need. TikTok, Twitch, Youtube, Twitter/X, Reddit, Bluesky. People want to not just do things, but do them with others. You can discuss Worm right now very easily by going on Reddit or various Discord servers. And obviously you also have the comments on each new chapter on RoyalRoad.

And since chapters release weekly or biweekly on RoyalRoad, it's easy to make a habit of reading for a bit every few days. This is really what webfics are so good at. You cannot read Worm in one sitting, and instead it has to be something you do over time. In turn this creates a habit where you read more often. This is especially the case with ongoing stories where you'd come and check them once or twice a week. A lot of the things people do in their day to day lives are simply habits. If instead of scrolling TikTok, you check the stories you're following on RoyalRoad and read a chapter or two, that's already far more reading than you would've done normally, and that's also far easier to do than taking a book and reading a chapter or two from it instead.

Reading is a muscle that everyone on this site has already trained far beyond the average person, and it would be good for society if this became more common. And webfic is good specifically because it's easy to read, and there's a lot of it.

But also while a lot of webfic is slop, there is also a lot of really really good works. I believe that ultimately the great works of our time will most likely be webfics. Which is another reason to start reading them.

I fully agree with your point. But I think there's one additional aspect that's present in webfics that isn't found elsewhere, which the social aspect of webfic.

The social aspects of serial releases are the main advantage offsetting the difficulties finding something actually good (Sturgeon's law says "Ninety percent of everything is crap" - for web fiction it's more like 95%, although the cream of the crop is still up there).

If the release is chapter by chapter, you get to discover each step of the story together with everyone. Everything can be discussed, analyzed, theorized together, unlike a normal book you read in one sitting and are only able to share your thought on the final conclusion, not the intermediate steps.

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?

At risk of stating the completely obvious, I'll say that men normally respond to visual titillation. Women, on the other hand, do not. That explains much of this phenomenon.

Light novels and web novels with this premise do gangbusters in Japan and internationally. Men respond to written titillation just fine.

Or at least, enough of them do to support a massive industry.

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?

May I recommend Yudkowsky and lintamande's Planecrash for over a million words of mostly-accurate maths, crank decision theory, explosions, and BDSM isekai geek harem fantasy, including about three quarters of a million words of damn good writing.

To be perfectly honest I am actually extremely averse to most wish-fulfillment narratives on a personal level-- this is a case of me very much not practicing what I preach.

Your link is broken because you forgot to include the "https://" part.

Also, here's some custom CSS (usable in a browser extension like Stylus) that makes reading the infuriating "glowfic" format tolerable.

Fixed.

I wonder if, to some extent, this is another side effect of the breakdown in monoculture?

When I was a young lad, reading was easy. I could go to any big box bookstore, pull some pulp fantasy or sci fi off the shelf, and chances are it would suit my tastes. But those were also a relatively small set of books, published by traditional publishers with lots of gatekeeping and editing. If you liked it, there was also probably a lively fandom for it.

Now, there's so many forms of entertainment coming out that it's hard to even know where to start. I'm sure I could go to Amazon and find an ebook that might interest me, probably even one published this year. But it would also be hidden behind thousands of other books, which I'd have a hard time wading through to find the one I like. That book would then have essentially no fandom, and anyone I mentioned it to in real life would have no idea what I was talking about. It makes reading a very lonely and somewhat pointless hobby if there's no one to discuss it with. Easier to just read one of the old classics instead.

Me, my brothers, my brazilian cousins (who live in brazil) and my brazilian cousins (who live in abu dhabi) all independently discovered litrpg webtoons, fanfiction, and webfiction xianxia. The monoculture still absolutely exists, it just cuts along personality rather than geography.

Was the monoculture anything more than a brief blip in history?

I guess anything post-printing press, or post-radio could be a possible start date for a monoculture, but even in those eras, you had tons of little subcultures popping up around magazines or people photocopying/hand-copying and circulating stories via letter among a particular circle, or a club or organization for a niche interest.

If we look back and see monoculture, I think it is just because it is much easier to study the artifacts that monoculture left behind. But then you look into something like chapbooks, or read the letters of prominent pulp fiction writers, and it becomes pretty apparent that there were niche interests through the entire height of the monoculture.

I do agree having things to talk about with other people is a real problem. We have such an embarrassment of riches, that it can be easy to fall out of sync with the people around you, unless you make a deliberate effort to engage with the same content they do.

Schekley is timeless, so is Zelazny, as is Heinlein. The golden age of american Sci Fi is the same as the golden age of american animation. If you are only confined to it - it should actually be enough for a lifetime (I never tire of merrie melodies and the others).

Almost any hugo and nebula shortlist before the great awokening is worth checking out. You want romance for men - Vorkosigan Saga is there waiting for you. Thrillers are also published and we have Dresden files. You have many space operas.

I'm extremely suspicious of claims to "timelesness" as applied to works written within living memory. You're a generation, perhaps two, away from these authors... they speak in the register of your parents and grandparents, and tell stories that would have seemed perfectly current to them. That's not timelessness, that's a nostalgic affection held for the subjects of sepia photographs. Maybe there's something at the core of their stories that will survive the ages, but to the modern youth the language they used and the values in their works are already at as far of a remove as Victory Hugo and Mary Shelley would have been to you. Entertaining, perhaps, for their distance from the present-- but otherwise largely inapplicable to their current concerns.

As for the Vorkosigan Saga and the Dresden files-- I've checked both out, and they were okay, but they also had this unnameable and unpleasant millenial quality. As when my older nerd friends have variously tried to get me into star wars, monty python, doctor who, etcetera... I could understand what once made those works appealing, and yet found myself feeling mostly cold in their aftermath. I can't even blame anything reasonable like dialog, or pacing, or plot structure, for my aversion... I think it's something much more granular in the storytelling, that sits below my conscious awareness and yet blares like a some sort of chronometric siren for unwanted time-travel.

the language they used and the values in their works are already at as far of a remove as Victory Hugo and Mary Shelley would have been to you. Entertaining, perhaps, for their distance from the present-- but otherwise largely inapplicable to their current concerns.

That argument doesn't really make much sense to me, considering that Hugo and Shelley are considered classics of literature that many people (young or otherwise) enjoy to this day.

That argument doesn't really make much sense to me, considering that Hugo and Shelley are considered classics of literature that many people (young or otherwise) enjoy to this day.

Given the ever-dropping number of young and old readers, I would say that this isn't the argument you think it is. "Everyone I know who saw the supergirl movie is woke!" "Everyone I know who likes books is fine with reading old ones?"

Well, who are you catering too?

I do not see how this reply is relevant to what I said. Your argument that I responded to (paraphrased) was "those books are old, comparable to [other old books], therefore kids are going to be disinterested". But books being old has never precluded interest in them before, even from kids. Therefore, books from the 20th century being old doesn't seem likely to preclude interest in them now.

But books being old has never precluded interest in them before, even from kids.

This is factually wrong and you know it. You can defend the bailey that people will not lose literally all interest in a novel simply because it is old, but cannot defend the motte that a novel's age has literally no relationship to the amount of interest people have in it. Yes, kids aren't going to be totally disinterested in old books-- but in proportion to the age and irrelevance of the novels they find on shelves, they will less interested.

He has a much stronger factual basis than you realize. You see it a lot more in music where older things are more popular than current things. Also very true with movie stars where it feels like we haven’t had a new movie star in 20 years. There are areas in the arts where we basically decided to freeze in time.

Personally I feel like most of the books I’ve read in my life are older. But in general the current popular book are aimed at the mass market which would exclude most people here. For the top 5-10% intellects you likely do need to read the great novels.

He has a much stronger factual basis than you realize. You see it a lot more in music where older things are more popular than current things. Also very true with movie stars where it feels like we haven’t had a new movie star in 20 years. There are areas in the arts where we basically decided to freeze in time.

I think our respective preferences for media and novelty are just going to make it impossible for us to see eye-to-eye here. I mostly watch new movies, and while I almost never delete new songs from my spotify consistently 90% of the stuff I add was released in the past 5-10 years. (It helps that I have an affinity for screechy electronica created by trans autist furries born post-2005.) I can't categorically deny that men have a preference for older media, and I can't categorically deny that that has zero impact on buying patterns and therefore the propensity of publishers to target men... but the fact that you are asserting this via personal anecdotes instead of providing me proof via data makes me suspect that this effect, if it exists, is small and hard to measure... and consequently strongly dominated by the effect I have proposed, which I can back with independently-replicated statistical results. (Someone else in this thread wrote a script to filter profiles and feed them to their ai for judgement and binning on gender.)

@hydroacetalene this is also a response to your comment here https://www.themotte.org/post/3884/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/470522?context=8#context

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This is factually wrong and you know it.

I know no such thing. I think you are way off base, though I wouldn't go so far as to say it is a fact you are incorrect as I don't have hard evidence. But neither have you provided a basis in fact for your claim, so I guess we are just going to have to agree to disagree here.

Before we agree to disagree... can we actually agree on what we're disagreeing on? Do you deny any of the following statements:

  • Most books sell most of their copies closer to their debut than 6 months, 1, 5, 10, 20 years out
  • -> This rule applies even to megahits
  • Even books that remain durably popular tend to become less popular over time

?

These are the statements that I derive my assertions about popularity being at least linked to (though not wholly determined by) currency.

Now I am suspecting a conspiracy.

It's reddit, necessarily full of redditors... I bet that /r/books is run by the same type that you're implicitly criticizing. What are the chances that at least one moderator objects to the whole premise of what you're talking about and decided to remove it? May as well go on /pol/ and argue that the Holocaust happened. Wrong forum buddy! Only /pol/ moderators wouldn't actually remove a thread over something like that.

It also reminds me of what Arctotherium was saying in one point of his long essay about social media censorship: https://substack.com/home/post/p-209852382

I recommend the whole thing, relevant to the creation of this forum!

He made the point that censorship deprives the right of high-quality content (which necessarily takes lots of time and stability to develop). Because accounts are ephemeral and getting banned all the time, it makes more sense to go for sensationalist, simplistic memes rather than serious scholarship. You'd feel a fool if you spent 3 years writing a 1000 page magisterial tome of right-wing history/philosophy and then nobody would publish it because the right gives them the ick, wouldn't you? Or if Vauban books or mystery grove or whoever does, the big bucks probably aren't going to roll in (most of the financial value in writing books is that rare but massive hit)! Better to make a png infographic or a soy wojak that can circulate more easily than huge books which need publishers, printers, distribution...

Or better to make blog posts or essays on substack.

Well it's the same with fiction I think. So we end up with fewer really high quality male-focused stories and more of the lower-tier 'Adding Big Elf Tits to the Harem' kind of thing.

Hopefully new publishers make ground here.

shifter romances with heat cycles

I honestly thought you were talking about an automotive romance, involving an analysis of the thermodynamic (Carnot) cycle. Carry on.

/r/Romance_for_men is already chomping at the bit for your submission. Give them the car junkie smut they're fiending for!

With a sudden spark, I could feel the pressure building, rising inside me

My girthy (⌀ 47 mm) member extended, thrusting against the cold steel of the crankshaft

I exhausted my hot load into the waiting pipes, ready for more

It felt like an eternity, but it was less than the blink of an eye (6.8 ms). It's hard being a two-stroke man in a four-stroke world.

Ok, but I think a big part of it that we see over and over again is that men are just more willing to enjoy last year's release while women want something new and trendy.

I'm not talking about old school high culture, here. Men listen to classic rock. Men read 70's and 80's sci fi, or Tom Clancy novels from before 9/11. Men watch older movies. Women seem to want new releases in all sorts of popular culture stuff. Over time, that makes the entertainment industry skew more and more towards chasing a female audience, because men will decide it's dumb and go watch the original star wars trilogy and listen to the rolling stones much faster.

I dunnno, in my feeds, it's women supporting interest in historical dance and costume, historical handicrafts, classic novels, classic poetry, etc., while around me young men chase the latest games and influencer fads, get sucked in by gambling apps, and don't seem to listen to music at all.

Are you sure it's not just that you are personally an aging guy with retro tastes, getting annoyed by dunk-retweets of trendy young women on social media and generalizing from that?

Yeah, I may have a somewhat skewed perception, but a lot of the women around me have distinctly old-fashioned tastes. My 15 year-old niece is rampaging through all the 19th century classics. I have multiple friends whose interests in sewing and crochet root their tastes in art and culture centuries past. Obviously this doesn't apply to all the women I know, but there's certainly a cohort of them for whom the past is alive.

Did men always look backwards in this way, or is it a consequence of men not enjoying a crop of media not really aimed at them or their tastes?

As an example, I assume men are not reading Pride and Prejudice at higher rates than women, even though that is an older work, because it is an ur-romance book that tends to appeal more to women than to men. And when the Dracula Daily trend started (which sent out Bram Stoker's Dracula in bite-sized chunks via email, so everyone could "read along" to it), my impression was that most of the readers were women. I suppose you could make the case that Dracula Daily was just a new and trendy thing, even if the trend was a 100+ year old work of literature, but that seems to at least show that the trends women jump on don't have to be new things at all. (See also, recent works like "The Other Bennet Sister", which build on classic chick literature.)

Counterpoint; Is this because they enjoy old things or just that everything new nowadays sucks?

It's one of the refrains I've seen in the video game arenas I frequent; 'Why would I be giving money to people who hate me when I can just keep playing older games?'

If I can crack open a twenty two year old game(holy shit) and get what I feel is a better Star Wars experience than anything that's come out since then, is it because I like old things or that everything nowadays that is bad?

Even worse, while it seems to be very easy to run across good video games nowadays in the indie market, given how much exposure they get, finding good books that are very male-coded is quite difficult. I can think of atleast two recent authors off the top of my head that are very male coded(KD Robertson and E William Brown) and while not exactly high-brow, they're still fun, good reads.

Maybe we're just in different social groups, but I haven't noticed much of a difference between the age of the media my male and female friends enjoy, and in particular I have not noticed that my friends devote most or even much of their attention to media that existed prior to their own birth. (We're mostly 20-30 somethings.)

Maybe things are a little skewed by men being less bothered by the dissonant cultural values held and propagated by old works of media... but if this was the driving factor, should we expect the deficit of new male-oriented works to played out across all forms of media? I don't notice any lack of male-oriented music, youtube videos, games (inclusive of video and board), or even TV shows. In particular, the recent male interest in fashion and looksmaxxing seems to be reversing the trend of men being willing to wear much older fashions of clothes.

I’ve noticed a vast difference in interest in classic rock and 80’s music- women who’re into that stuff are mostly that age.

Men seem to like not-new movies at much higher rates. Men also seem pretty happy reading mostly not-new releases. Note that I'm not talking classic novels here- men just generally seem to read novels that sold well when released in the late twentieth century or early 2000’s.

I've noticed, meanwhile, that girls are more interested period novels and traditional styles of medicine and mythology (ref: astrology.) To be frank, I don't think we're going to get anywhere talking about which gender likes old stuff more. I can display numerical inequalities at every level of the publishing industry in favor of women, and have-- I think-- compelling a priori reasons to believe that inequality should cause a disparity in reading levels. I don't think the "likes old stuff" position has any argument that isn't fully generalizeable to, "then why don't publishers just release more new things that harken back to the old stuff?" Which in turn points back to the gender inequality issue.

Do you really not see the difference between mid-late 20th century pop culture on the one hand and the SCA and classical literature on the other?

I would see the difference-- if it was actually something visible in my own life that I could independently verify. Without denying your own experience, it seems to me that there's always some other anecdote either of us can pull out to make this argument moot.

I mean, turn on the classic rock station in the morning- it’s definitely going to be a show aimed at men. Go to original Star Wars trilogy showings and compare the audience to a recent release. Tom Clancy and Larry Correia are still selling very well.

And thats leaving out the core male popular entertainment interest, which is sports.

I enjoyed Battletech slop for the longest time. Then at some point the embezzlers at Catalyst Game Labs decided the only way to keep not paying authors was to lean into turning Battletech in a gay brand, and the rest has been history. Now the IP I've been a 30 year fan of is fake and gay at it's root source material.

Piranha Games doing a bang up job on the video games not withstanding.

The most depressing part about being a fan of anything male coded, is that for reasons that are beyond my ken, activist feel the constant need to invade the space and smash your toys right in front of you. The He-Man Woman-Haters Club or NO MA'AM aren't going to somehow seize the reigns of the Twilight IP and start "subverting" it by having Bella eventually chucked onto the street in the reboot for being a washed up ratchet whore, and dying of an overdose in the gutter. Only to be replaced by some boring new submissive eyecandy that raises the male main characters children while they go off on adventures to space.

And yet that is precisely what has happened with virtually every male coded IP, ever? I'm drawing a blank, truthfully.

I would love to support slop I can trust. I would love to have an IP I could point my little boy to, that I know won't break his heart around book 4 (or 40 RIP Battletech), when the crazies took it over and humiliated and murdered his favorite character.

Alas. They'll even pillage the estates of dead authors, just to keep the humiliation ritual going. Poor, poor Tolkien.

Battletech was my first introduction to table-top wargaming. I remember playing with it as a kid, with the battlemech setup sheets that, uh, were just a little bit litigatious.

Years later, when I finally get a bee in my bonnet and start looking into painting miniatures, I decide to cut my teeth by purchasing a box of Mechwarriors and start looking into see what's been happening with the IP lately...

...only to find that it's decided to go a similar route as Warhammer 40K and go woke and gay.

For fuck's sake. By this point having anything you love become widespread and popular is a curse rather than a blessing.

The He-Man Woman-Haters Club or NO MA'AM aren't going to somehow seize the reigns of the Twilight IP and start "subverting" it by having Bella eventually chucked onto the street in the reboot for being a washed up ratchet whore

I mean if I had a nickel for every time I found a genderswapped rewrite of the twilight series designed to cater more towards men I would have three nickles, of which one was given to me by Stephanie Meyer herself. (The other two nickels come from a smut fic on QQ and a male-oriented-romance fic on SB, both abandoned but otherwise very solid.)

...I always knew Stephanie Meyer was a basedlord. I just wish she put more energy towards though-provoking sci-fi than lowbrow romance-- The Host was actually kind of goated.

of which one was given to me by Stephanie Meyer herself.

She also said once that she had a nightmare in which Edward revealed that the "vegetarianism" was just a false front to lure humans in, and he actually eats humans like every other vampire.

I sort of wish we'd gotten that book.

Yet another banger sci-fi/horror idea from one of the GOATs, that we will unfortunately never see because she understands her target demographic.

Yeah, The Host was massively underrated.

I am beginning to think that retrospectively de-canonizing the Star Wars EU was actually one of the best things Disney ever did for that universe. Because it's now non-canon, they don't have the incentive to go back and inject this sort of nonsense into it all.

If anything, I almost wish they had de-canonized it earlier. I already pretend everything published after the Unifying Force in 2003 was just a bad dream (Shadows of Mindor excluded. Stover can never not be good). Jacen eventually takes over as Grandmaster and leads the Jedi into a new golden age, I don't care what Troy Denning has to say.

This rant comes up quite often, in literary spaces, on social media, and on reddit. On reddit, unsurprisingly, it is generally not received well (probably why your post was removed). The usual feminist response is "Boo hoo, fiction catered to men forever, now it's our turn" and/or "Boo hoo, we had to grow up reading about boys, why can't boys read about girls?"

Both of those arguments are of course very disingenuous, but you shouldn't really expect much better on reddit.

(I personally have given up trying to shop my Heinlein-inspired YA teens-in-space novel around.)

That said, I do think "Nothing to read for boys" is overstated. Even "Nothing published recently for boys" is not entirely true. But it's hard, man. You pretty much have to go looking for small, niche publishers or indies... and if your tastes don't happen to run towards Christian homeschoolers or right-wing nutjobs, the selection is even sparser.

Looking at alphabetically the first profiles

This is not a very good sampling method because the profiles are sorted by first name, and women are overrepresented among people whose first name starts with A.

A more random sample does seem to agree that this website primarily lists female literary agents interested in books written by women that appeal to women, though. A lot of agents have "I'd like the next..." sections listing almost exclusively female names.

This seems like a case similar to college degrees where women are disproportionately attracted to some aesthetically prestigious thing (going to an Ivy League; reading/writing books printed on paper by traditional publishers) even as the actual value starts to move out from under it. Personally, I'm probably going to keep doing most of my reading online, in places where the great writers I like hang out, like Substack and the My Little Pony fanfiction community.

This is not a very good sampling method because the profiles are sorted by first name, and women are overrepresented among people whose first name starts with A.

Okay, but also two of the woman I cited had the first name "Alex" which is normally a ~95%+ male name. Bayesian statistics would tell you this is NOT an expected result.

Personally, I'm probably going to keep doing most of my reading online

Ditto, undisputably, but I am legitimately concerned about the future of nerdy young men who might have otherwise gotten into reading and now are more likely to find less productive hobbies instead.

(I'm not concerned about the future of young men in general since they're just competition, but I do feel for the nerdy ones.)

"Alex" which is normally a ~95%+ male name

This statistic is correct for people who have "Alex" written on their birth certificate, but "Alexandra" is actually a more common given name that women often shorten to Alex. ("Alexander" is an even more common male given name, but not 20 times more popular, and female names like Alexis have even beaten it some years.)

Do you actually disagree with any of the following statements?

  1. There are more female acquisition editors and agents than males
  2. Agents/editors would prefer to select books that flatter their interests and beliefs
  3. ...and as a result, agents/editors are more likely to select book that appeal to female interests.

Also consequences for defecting to the right are way greater than being lefter than average for your media universe. Like in recent discussions of University hiring where the example of political pressure will inevitably be 'one professor got depersoned for seeming somewhat anti-abortion and another professor lost they/their job for refusing to publish for 4 years, joining ISIS and making every lecture about Gaza'

To be clear, I agree with all of those, I'm just being a pedant about name statistics.

I agree with Opt-out here. It's easy to point fingers at woke or DEI, but I think the cause is really just prosaic capitalism. Acknowledging I'm in a filter bubble, plenty of men in my orbit read; they just don't do it in a way that makes money for traditional industry.

They read Substacks, or they read Royalroad/web serials/fanfiction, or they "read" manga/indie narrative video games/visual novels, or they pirate all of their literature and the classics from Libgen and Anna's Archive. It's much easier than it's ever been to self-publish or release your work online without going via Big Publisher.

The difference is simply that female writers are disproportionately interested in the prestige of going via traditional Big Publisher, and female readers actually spend money with publishers and bookstores, driven by BookTok or whatever, and hence those industries move increasingly towards catering to the female userbases that actually make them money.

Trying to make men read in the same way that women like to read seems to me much like trying to make sports gambling appealing to women; perhaps in the interest of the industries trying to increase their profits, but honestly a waste of time for society at a whole to try and fit a square peg into a round hole.

I agree with Opt-out here. It's easy to point fingers at woke or DEI, but I think the cause is really just prosaic capitalism.

No, it's not. We saw this during Floyd; woke is perfectly willing to leave money on the table (by canceling things catering to their enemies -- e.g. [I]Cops[/I] or [I]Roseanne[/I]) if they can prevent anyone else from picking it up. Capitalism or consumer preferences or whatever are then used as an excuse for this

As a response to @Ioper and @Primaprimaprima as well:

If you define woke and DEI as "women having increased economic power relative to men" in such a way that it applies globally across East Asia and the global south then ok sure, but I don't think that's a particularly useful definition.

The decline of traditional publishing in favor of online entertainment is pretty clearly globalized; the phenomenon of men retreating to online and non-traditional reading (e.g the narou / qidian scenes, basically web serials for Japan/China) and of course video games and the myriad of digital pleasures, while only women continue to read traditionally published books, is a fully globalized phenomenon, not just contained to Anglo societies.

It seems fairly clear to me that this is a phenomenon driven by women gaining more economic power relative to men across the entire world, and revealed preferences given the general availability of internet and smartphones. If you want to call this woke or DEI then sure I guess, but I don't think saying that China or Pakistan is woke is a particularly useful definition.

I think you can call Floyd's death the trigger but not the cause, because TV programming has been willing to purge things that red tribe likes at least since the 1970s.

And that's still ideology, not "capitalism".

Yes, but if it's been documented as happening since the 1970s even on Wikipedia, ideology over raw capitalism has been a thing for quite some time.

The march through the institutions has been going on a LONG time, yes.

It's easy to point fingers at woke or DEI, but I think the cause is really just prosaic capitalism.

Capitalism and DEI are inseparable. Culture and politics and economics are unified as one.

If women have greater purchasing power due to a confluence of social factors (getting railroaded into higher paying and more prestigious positions due to DEI initiatives, having more disposable income due to delaying childbirth, etc), then the invisible and perfectly just hand of the free market will just so happen to start catering to women's preferences more.

I don't want to hear about capitalism in a system that actively hunts you for not having enough preferred minorities

It's been an incredible win convincing people that left-wing social engineering, both successful and deeply unsuccessful, is just "capitalism"*

* When it unequivocally fails I believe it's called "late stage capitalism", to distinguish.

I think we're partially making the same point. Regardless of how you want to frame it, we don't live in a pure free market, so defending X or Y or Z by saying "that's just the free market doing its thing" is frequently disingenuous.

I would extend it however and claim that there's no such thing as a "pure free market" even in principle. Even if we can imagine a complete absence of government interference, private individuals could still collude and engage in social engineering; to the extent that they don't, it's because there are cultural prohibitions against doing so. And if we were to make such social engineering formally illegal, then that would simply be government interference in the market. You're always going to have some sort of culture, and it's going to influence your economics; you can't escape to a pure realm of abstract rational agents untainted by culture and politics.

I would believe it was it not for the fact that it is still happening even in male dominant subgenres like sci-fi and to some extent fantasy. Although there is significant part of female readers there (around 40%), the domination is almost complete and you can hardly find something for men and boys. There are some holdouts like Warhammer 40k that still hold 80%+ of male readership, but at this point the clock is ticking.

The point being that male readers are there, but they are not catered to. That is why they move over to other stuff. The situation is similar to what happened to superhero genre or comics, which also have majority male readership but that is increasingly catering to female readers. So men and boys react by going over to anime such as Berserk or Chainsaw man and not whatever gay/feminist slop is produced now in mainstream DC and Marvel comics.

The same goes for literature for boys. There is no replacement for old Cowboy pulp fiction or various adventure books or genre like The Three Investigators, where male/boy heroes only interaction with women is to get sandwich from them. Modern young adult writing is at best Harry Potter clone, where there has to be some know-it-all nagger like Hermione Granger or some female professor hero. The old style of literature of 100% male space is completely gone from modern publishing and especially Young Adult publishing, which became utter gay/feminist slop with mandatory diversity quotas for characters like in Hollywood.

To be fair to Rowling, Hermione being an obnoxious girlboss is mostly a product of the films. Book Hermione is written as book smart, but also as incapable of dealing with high pressure situations, dogmatic and uncreative in solving problems, and a clueless activist who prioritizes her own sense of moral outrage over the people she's ostensibly trying to help. She's constantly getting up-staged by her slacker male friends in every arena outside of pure academics (and even there, Harry mogs her in Defense Against the Dark Arts, clearly the most important and practical subject, and the only one he really cares about doing well in).

And remember, the hero of the story is an aristocratic white man jock who solves all his problems with violence and blind rebellion against authority, who faces his own death with manly courage and ends the story by marrying his best friend's hot younger sister and raising a big family.

Between that and a cast of secondary villains that includes a catty and deceitful female journalist (Rita Skeeter), the ultimate toxically feminine HR lady (Umbridge), and really the wizarding world's entire bureaucratic state (capitalist free enterprise, as exemplified by the Weasley twins, receives an almost exclusively glowing treatment, by contrast), Harry Potter is actually pretty based.

a cast of secondary villains that includes a catty and deceitful female journalist (Rita Skeeter)

This is just the British hatred of the tabloids (who've given people across the spectrum reason to loathe them). It's not really a partisan or based opinion.

Don't forget that the whole school is open-carry and it's mostly the bad guys are in favor of "Common Sense Wand Control".

I wrote about it at length before, but it's interesting that Rowling wrote a fictional universe that made sense to her, a liberated late-boomer/early gen X feminist, and it ended up enshrining values that are diametrically opposed to her stated world view.

It's as if writing a universe from scratch requires thinking about the values in it from first principles, and that this can lead you to very different conclusions than those you would get if you just stuck to the values that were imprinted on you by your environment.

It's very British and difficult to understand outside of that context. JK Rowling, like many of her generation, "knew her place", and wanted to look up to her social betters - that is, to have "betters" actually worth looking up to. So, the high drama is replacing the unworthy aristocrats with worthy ones, the long-lost prince returning to high society and mogging the bureaucrats. Ron and Hermione are the good servants of the prince, the stolid man (it's not a coincidence that Ron is red-headed and has a big family, that's saying he's the wizard equivalent of a Celtic Catholic) and the brainy woman, who represents the fantasy of a nerdy girl wishing she had a worthy man to serve, with the Platonic nature of the friendship making the service more pure. It goes back to to the middle ages - think about Robin Hood's relationship to the Good King Richard and the Bad Usurper John.

I wrote about it at length before, but it's interesting that Rowling wrote a fictional universe that made sense to her, a liberated late-boomer/early gen X feminist, and it ended up enshrining values that are diametrically opposed to her stated world view.

Or her stated worldview just isn't as radical as younger wokes, which is one of the reasons she got herself into a lot of trouble.

She just didn't write in the hyper-doctrinaire way people do today. This is a woke more correct situation since they pointed out that JKR is the moderate white: for things like equality but not for revolution. Hermione is shown to be silly, but the end result of that entire SPEW episode is that house-elves being paid instead of indentured servants becomes a policy supported and instituted by Dumbledore, who is also pro-magical creature rights, just not an obnoxious child about it.

IIRC, that wasn't the result of the SPEW episode; Dumbledore had already been paying Dobby (and presumably would have been willing to pay the rest if they'd actually wanted to be paid) before Hermione even learned about Hogwarts having house-elves.

Sure, Hermione is not such a girboss in books - although that is arguably a little bit more grating to be honest at least in the beginning. However she shows quite a lot of growth, by the end of the series she is a monster who can cast every spell silently, she can best deatheaters in duels under high-pressure situation, she is genius in potions and transfigurations that she uses constantly to great effect etc. Harry on the other hand remains stagnant, from spellcraft he is one-trick pony using expeliarmus and patronus. Other than that he just utilizes pure gimmicks such as hic connection to Voldemort and psychic visions or pulling Gryffindor sword literally out of the hat just because. He is the series version of McGuffin, he is imbued asset managed and operated by Hermione according to Dumbledore's strategy. It is Hermione who does the heavy lifting such as actually researching on how to destroy horcruxes or painstaking training in spellcasting.

She's Basil Exposition, there to conduct the background research and dripfeed the reader useful information that's too tedious for the protagonist to bother with. She provides Harry with some of his cool gadgets. Harry is the one putting his body on the line. Harry is the one who has to systematically lose his parent figures in the process of growing into the leader his people need him to be. Harry is the one who figures out the last pieces of puzzles at the last second when it really counts, and then actually defeats the bad guy.

Yes, Hermione is a valuable asset and a character who grows throughout the course of the story. She is a technically more proficient magic practitioner than Harry is, and uses this to save him on numerous occasions. She is more organized and more responsible, as girls tend to be at that age.

But Harry isn't just some buffoon protected by main character energy. Set his special chosen one status aside for a second. He may not be a star student, but the books are pretty explicit that this is because he prioritizes the battle against Voldemort over academics. Yes, sometimes he's just slacking off with Ron instead of studying, but more often than not, he struggles because he spends his nights snooping around the castle and is constantly battling extra work and detention as a result of this (and vindictive teachers actively out to harass him). In the areas he is able/willing to apply himself, he consistently outshines Hermione. Harry is also much more well-rounded than Hermione (in the model of the classic English gentleman. Being a broadly successful dilletant is good; being a single-minded striver is gauche). He's exceptionally brave, loyal, and strong-willed in the face of institutional opposition. What he lacks in technical acumen, he more than makes up for in grit, determination, and leadership.

Hermione is a very capable (though flawed) character, but she's not heroic in the same way Harry is.

She's Basil Exposition, there to conduct the background research and dripfeed the reader useful information that's too tedious for the protagonist to bother with. She provides Harry with some of his cool gadgets. Harry is the one putting his body on the line. Harry is the one who has to systematically lose his parent figures in the process of growing into the leader his people need him to be. Harry is the one who figures out the last pieces of puzzles at the last second when it really counts, and then actually defeats the bad guy.

This is just matter of perspective. In practice, it is Harry who is Basil Exposition for Hermione, especially given the gimmicky nature of how he receives his knowledge. If the story was written from Hermione's perspective, it would be much more interesting. She is out there in the library researching Nicolas Flamel, creating plans and plots only for Harry to casually drop stuff like randomly waking up screaming, speaking to snakes, and seeing visions of Voldemort torturing people - only to obsess about quidditch the next day as if nothing happens, leaving all the work to main protagonist Hermione.

The story would shift toward Hermione managing this Harry moron, who refuses to communicate (e.g. when he refused to talk to Hermione about seeing Grim in Prisoner of Azkaban), who endlessly whines about how bad he has it and, who has some inferiority complex trying to hard to be a hero only to be rescued like damsel in distress by Hermione. You would get your standard YA story where the main protagonist manages his team of moronic sidekicks who more than villains are there to foil his plans. Just think about all the time when Harry talking to Hermione would solve the plot in couple of days instead of whole year.

But Harry isn't just some buffoon protected by main character energy. Set his special chosen one status aside for a second. He may not be a star student, but the books are pretty explicit that this is because he prioritizes the battle against Voldemort over academics.

No, he does not prioritize that. Like I said before, he wallows in his trauma and refuses to communicate. He constantly switches priorities to stupid stuff like quidditch instead of the issue at hand or even communicating with the group. Other than Hermione, it is his chosen plot armor is his main quality.

Harry is also much more well-rounded than Hermione (in the model of the classic English gentleman. Being a broadly successful dilletant is good; being a single-minded striver is gauche).

He never is more well rounded. He is myopic, lack any planning or true talent except of dumb luck. And it even gets worse as Hermione shores up her academic/theoretic leanings by raw experience. If anything, managing Harry in earlier yeas is her training wheels - much as in some story the main hero takes care of his younger sibling or ailing mother.

Also Hermione is much better leader and even possesses better character. Just compare these two scenes: Harry is tortured in Goblet of Fire and he decides to stand and face Voldemort by pure grit and defiance. He casts his stupid expeliarmus - there is nothing else in his bag of tricks - and the nature of predcicament makes it so that he resists Voldemorts curse by pure cosmic coincidence. Second scene: Harry is threatened by crucio torture in Umbridge office. Harrys instinct is stubborn denial. However Hermione keeps her cool, pretends to fold, invents complex story about Dumbledore's secret weapon in the forest thus leading Umbridge into a trap. This was the umpteenth time where Hermione bailed out that moron from deadly situation so that the Voldemort could actually be defeated.

Hermione is as brave as Harry, but she goes about it more intelligently. She is proactive, strategic, she can rely on backup plans. In terms of leadership she is communicative, competent, mature, she has high moral integrity and by the end of the book she is very versatile monster of a witch, true enlightened gentlewoman. Harry is isolated self pitying whiner, inept, prone to distractions like quidditch. His redeeming qualities are his stubbornness - the other side of the coin of introversion and refusal to communicate. He is for sure brave, even stupidly so and his main redeeming qualities are plot armor in form of being the chosen one.

If I wanted to select who would be my colleague or coworker or even friend or role model after the whole ordeal, I would take Hermione over Harry every time.

Have you read Leaders of Men? I think it gestures at some of what you're eliding as "gimmicks".

fellas, is it gay when a woman speaks in a piece of fiction

Ok, I mean, I get the desire for gritty warband-society fiction, but having zero women is not a natural or optimal state of most societies. The Harry Potter example is strange - I have never seen a single complaint that it has too many female characters for the male readership's taste, until now, I suppose. And superhero comics? Really? You mean those superhero comics that famously don't have women acting with agency on par with men, ever?

Ok, I mean, I get the desire for gritty warband-society fiction, but having zero women is not a natural or optimal state of most societies.

It's not just society warband gridmark fiction. It is any fiction, take Three Investigators that was famous genre during my time as young adult in 80ies and 90ies. The same with old Western books by Karl May such as Old Surehand or Czech version of it in form of books by Jaroslav Foglar, huge proponent of Boy Scouts and who created incredible world where boys had their own culture and hidden wars in Prague.

he Harry Potter example is strange - I have never seen a single complaint that it has too many female characters for the male readership's taste, until now, I suppose.

Really? You never read any analysis of how Hermione Granger is the true hero? I took it for granted that Harry Potter is just a lucky, brave but ultimately passive and reactive "chosen one for no reason" moron. The only thing that he really owns is his quidditch success, that is why he was such a good target for Eliezers fanfiction remake. Ron is comedic relief with loyalty as his best attribute. Hermione Granger is the ultimate hero of the story, she is the brain of the whole operation, she is proactive one who prepares for everything, who is there to get the group out of trouble and often is the only one capable to execute due to her diligence and knowledge of spells. She is basically managing the other two morons. Additionally such a group is hardly something normative, I cannot imagine any such group dynamics developing anywhere during my childhood.

And superhero comics? Really? You mean those superhero comics that famously don't have women acting with agency on par with men, ever?

These were nowhere near as popular especially compared to S-tier heroes like Spiderman, Superman or Batman, in fact most of the female led comics were on brink of cancelation in 1970s and 1980s with one exception of Wonder Woman. But I will give it to you as the same thing is happening with anime Tsundere phenomenon, so I guess nerds universally are attracted to sassy combative female characters who are there as a prize to be won if hero simps enough and takes the abuse.

Why is this only happening in the west though? And why only the last 20 years or so?

I'm more inclined to believe that something is rotten specifically in western publishing.

I'm not actually blaming Woke, for the record-- that's why I put that whole spiel about this NOT being a conspiracy. But I am convinced this is very much a supply issue, not a demand issue-- I stopped pirating music when spotify got easy and good enough to be a better deal... (well in point of fact I stopped when grooveshark got DMCA'd, but didn't feel the need to find an alternative given that spotify was just *there)-- and I'll stop pirating books when...

Okay, maybe you have a tiny point. TBH the cause is probably at least somewhat bidirectional. But while I acknowledge that I'm getting into bravery debate here... I feel like the impact of the pressures on men are dramatically underestimated compared to the impact of the pressures by men, when it comes to the publishing industry. (And maybe also in general but that is a way larger discussion that I have the time to have right now) As a baseline estimate, since we see much more comparable reading rates for younger vs older children...

ref-- https://www.theguardian.com/education/2026/feb/22/teenage-boys-reading-books-research?CMP=share_btn_url

Reading rates are lower for boys at every age. Over a third of girls (36%) aged eight to 11 said they read daily, compared with about a quarter (26.3%) of boys of the same age. By the age of 14 to 16, this had fallen to 17.6% of girls and just 9.8% of boys.

1.4x vs 1.8x

I would guess that at least half of those boys are "lost" because of an insufficient supply of books. If the proportion at age 14-16 was 1.6x, we would see ~11% of boys reading. That doesn't sound like much, but that's 10% more male readers! And we should expect that this effect is actually cumulative given decreased rates of reading with age. Given the relationship between reading ability, educational attainment, and professional success, this difference in reading ability likely has massive downstream effects on the total number of men making it through to elite positions. Correcting that deficit is the opposite of a "waste of time." We could have-- at minimum, at an estimate-- a minimum of 10% more male doctors, lawyers, and engineers just by making sure more male-oriented books are published and promoted. Even ignoring the negative effects of the disparity between male and female achievement, the absolute effects of so many missing elites is likely to be significant and negative.

(Unless you believe AI will solve everything, but that's a fully general argument for not caring about anything.)

I would guess that at least half of those boys are "lost" because of an insufficient supply of books.

Sorry, but for middle-grade and young-adult boys, this supply-side argument just isn't empirically true.

Scholastic is a behemoth juvenile-lit publisher who sends their direct-marketing book fliers home with schoolkids and hosts annual book fairs at elementary and middle schools all over the USA. Here is their catalog for ages 13+. Skim it and you'll see whole rafts of titles obviously trying to catch the interest of teen boys:

  • Walter Dean Myers War Stories Value Pack
  • More Walter Dean Myers sports and outdoor adventure stories
  • Gary Paulsen (also an outdoor boys' adventure writer), The Voyage of the Frog
  • So, so many Five Nights at Freddy's interactive fiction titles
  • Harry Potter Hogwarts Library (male-protagonist, male antagonist, 60%+ male characters special talents wish fulfillment)
  • Gaming Favorites Value Pack
  • Jordan Sonnenbeck boy's middle-grade comedy memoirs
  • Lamar Giles boys'... something, seems to be sci-fi/urban realism?
  • assorted other basketball fiction, war and battle fiction, etc., etc.

Maybe it's not your personal ideal Naruto/ MLP/ skills-progression/ harem-porn cocktail, but at this level there's no shortage of publishing executives asking what boys like (fighting, adventure, videogames, skills, gore, comedy) and desperately trying to give it to them. Meanwhile, based on what I see around me, the tween boys are off binging MrBeast brainrot and disturbing TikTok AI porn, have minimal attention spans, and will not be enticed to pick up a book by any number of explosions on the cover.

Your argument is essentially that since you saw a panda in a zoo, pandas must not actually be endangered. "Boy books exist" does not disprove "there are fewer boy books." In particular, the paucity of male editors, agents, bookstore owners, and librarians mean that even the boy books that do get selected tend to be selected for acquisition or display get selected by people with a less discerning taste for what makes books interesting to boys. It's like the difference between the kind of comic book a grandma would buy for a little boy as opposed to the kind of comic book that little boy would buy for himself. Brainrot, poor attention spans, and tiktok thirst traps also afflict girls-- but the relatively higher quantity and quality of books available to them make them more likely to read anyway.

Whoah, that's sounding awfully like an argument for... representation? I'll admit, finding a full-throated defense of 50:50 gender quotas and #ownvoices on the was not on my Motte bingo card for the day. Nice that this place can still surprise me.

Whoah, that's sounding awfully like an argument for... representation?

It unironically and unabashedly is (though unfortunately I don't think your downvoters recognized that.) Being represented in works of media is an important factor in making groups of people interested in said media, especially when the people in those groups do have some deep identification with the group identity. Wokism misunderstands representation as meaning that every group (excluding straight white cis and/or males) should be represented in every work, and that's a critical error. Similarly, there's also a lot of ignorance about what's actually being represented, and how important different kinds of representation are to different groups, but the idea isn't totally wrong at its core.

Well, hey, cool! Kudos on your self-awareness, it's an interesting set of views.

I'm curious how a right-leaning identitarian/ equity-and-inclusion focus squares itself with some of the standard critiques from the right, though. For example, you say:

Wokism misunderstands representation as meaning that every group (excluding straight white cis and/or males) should be represented in every work, and that's a critical error.

But we should be clear that this isn't something left-identitarians believe for its own sake. Rather, it follows inevitably when you first accept the premise that it's right and natural for a person to reject otherwise-valuable activities (reading a book, taking a job, going to college) because of their subjective feelings of exclusion or lack-of-belonging when they feel unrepresented among too many non-identity-affiliates. An institution achieves perfect representation along one axis, then someone pipes up and says they feel the work doesn't speak to their group's concerns, so you put some of that group in, and before you know it, you have "every group represented in every work."

But as I understand it, you also endorse that premise? You're arguing it's understandable when boys don't read, and that this is not their fault, but rather is the fault of too much female-ness/ not enough vapid-big-titty-schoolgirls in books- so it's the job of publishers to remove this female-ness, and NOT the job of intelligent boys to find other axes besides gender/sexual desire along which to connect with literature. This is in keeping with the standard identitarian view that fiction is a mirror, not a window- that is, we read books to flatter our feelings and affirm our existing worldviews, not to better understand other people or learn about different spheres of human experience.

But also, you actually seem to be endorsing a far stronger version of this premise than most left-identitarians in publishing would. They might agree that fiction-as-mirror means that readers deserve a relatable own-identity-aligned character or two in most works to keep them engaged, plus some books in the catalog with own-identity-aligned protagonists, plus preference for the authors who write identity-group-X to also be from identity-group-X ("own voices"). But when I listed many books in the Scholastic catalog that satisfied these exact criteria for your identity group, being male-authored, deliberately tuned to male-only thematic interests, and featuring not just male protagonists but also mostly-to-all-male secondary characters, you argued that this is still not enough for equity and inclusion, because although men wrote this for men, about male interests, and many Scholastic execs are also men, there were presumably women in the pipeline somewhere ("chosen by grandma"), which makes it understandable that boys wouldn't want to read those books and shouldn't be expected to.

You can see how that would get pretty extreme if impartially applied across identity groups, right? Your "grandma" claim says that for your group to engage, there should be be no critical mass of non-co-idents anywhere in the mainstream publishing pipeline, primarily because non-co-idents don't really understand your identity group's experience, secondarily because they might block content that your identity group enjoys because it comfortingly runs down other identity groups as inherently stupid, inferior and exploitation-worthy.

Your preferred identity axis is biological sex, but that's based on your own feelings: someone else might feel more attuned to ethnicity, immigrant status, gender-nonconformity, class, disability, religion, etc. Arguing from your very high standards for equity and inclusion, how would you operationalize this in fairness across all those identity categories, for which people feel the same deep feelings of interest/disinterest and acceptance/rejection that you feel around your male sex? Again, you've argued not just that there should be some representation of your identity in authors/ characters/ protagonists, but that fiction is disqualified by any involvement of your enemy identity group(s), and indeed must feature substantial content demeaning them in order to catch your interest. That's a pretty tall order if you're applying it evenly across groups.

In broader terms, though, I'm also curious: if we're going with the identitarian "fiction= mirror" and the main purpose of reading really is to stroke our ego, bathe us in wish-fulfillment fantasies of power, accomplishment and sexual desirability, demean our enemies and validate our worldviews, all in the easy familiar language of our Present Moment - then what do you see as the prosocial value in reading? You seem to think it's a loss to society if some group chooses not to read, but also it sounds like you want books to leave us just as they found us, except maybe a bit more self-centered. So why do you care?

So I think you're overapplying your own understanding of why leftists want representation because I was referring less to all the academic concepts of why representation is good/useful and more to what I understood to be the most defensible version of the argument. That being, narrowly, that people re more likely to enjoy and therefore engage with works of media where they can see aspects of themselves represented.

(this is my bad for not being more specific, sorry.)

And to be clear, I'm also not applying this concept of representation normatively. I'm not saying that representation is good or bad, I'm neither claiming nor disclaiming a moral right to reject a book series based on its lack of big-titty schoolgirls. I am making a descriptive assessment that there is a lack of representation for males (1) within newly-released novels and (2) relative to the amount of space allocated for male-targeted books on store shelves. I furthermore diagnose the cause of that lack of representation as being due to the lack of representation of males (3) within the publishing industry. I do make a normative assessment about whether male literacy/novel-reading is a good thing, and to the degree that I believe it is a good thing I propose measures to remedy a lack of it by addressing (1) and (3). But you should understand those recommendations as instrumental measures, not moral imperatives. So with reference to your question:

Arguing from your very high standards for equity and inclusion, how would you operationalize this in fairness across all those identity categories

To the degree that we can benefit as a society by encouraging literacy in specific identity categories, we should recommend interventions to promote literacy... based on the relative cost of the intervention compared against the expected benefit. I think the interventions I propose to start making up the gap between male and female literacy should be fairly cheap and affect a large proportion of the population. I think, on the other hand, forcing every single movie to include mixed-race professional sheep wool stylists would have a cost out of proportion to its benefits.

And with reference to--

if we're going with the identitarian "fiction= mirror" and the main purpose of reading really is to stroke our ego,...etc

This is a clear strawman of my position. I think reading can, does, and should stroke egoes and fantasies... not an an terminal goal, but as an instrumental step towards getting them to read better books that help them grow as people. (And also as a way to displace even more unhealthy, ego-stroking forms of media consumption.) Refer to my original post:

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.

Also, elsewhere I make the argument that reading anything increases reading comprehension skills, which are linked to educational and professional attainment and therefore something we want to positively promote... even if the means to do so have unsavory light novel titles about horny sisters and taking gigarevenge for small slights.

And before someone argues "sure, but all those boys' books are stupid, formulaic and terrible," well, the girls' books very much are, too.

Meanwhile, I miss when people of either sex read books for some reason other than pure embarrassing wish-fulfillment, jack-off material, or TV fandom. And when every book didn't need to have pictures.

And before someone argues "sure, but all those boys' books are stupid, formulaic and terrible," well, the girls' books very much are, too.

The girls' books seem stupid, formulaic, and terrible in a way that appeals to girls' interests, in a way that boys' books aren't. That's the interesting question here, why book publishers, despite their monetary incentives, seem immensely terrible at appealing to boys in a way that they aren't when it comes to appealing to girls. Why is it that they're publishing the kinds of stuff directed at boys that they are now and declaring that they've tried and just lack the ability to force boys to read, instead of analyzing whatever underlying assumptions and ideologies that are directing them towards making bad decisions when it comes to publishing books that are stupid, formulaic, and terrible in a way that appeals to boys, like they're successfully doing for girls now?

Girls' reading has dropped off dramatically, too; boys just had a shorter distance to fall. I know "F@#$g girlbosses" are the preferred explanation for many ills hereabouts, but for anyone who's hung out with elementary schoolers recently, it's so obviously the screens in this case that I don't think Ockham's razor supports any more elaborate explanation.

Citation needed, so here's a 2025 study that captures some of the key gender differences: in kids 0-8, 59% of girls read or were read to daily vs. 50% of boys, but for both populations the figure is falling steadily over time.

By contrast, parental reports of screen use showed boys spent 25% more daily time on screens than girls. They spent 50% more time gaming (especially console gaming), as well as substantially more time watching online videos.

Table 10 in that study gives useful insights into what would appeal to boys. It shows that boys and girls have similar YouTube viewing patterns, except for the categories of streaming videogame commentary and prank videos, both of which little boys spend far more daily time consuming. This is by parental report, so likely a large underestimate given how often kids (and boys especially!) sneak YouTube time on phones or school computers without their parents' knowledge.

Have you ever seen any of those brainrot prank videos that little boys gravitate toward, on channels like Brent Rivera's? I was subjected to some secondhand, recently, as I glanced over the shoulder of a ~9-year-old little boy who binge-watched for three straight hours on his ipad while his dad was emailing. (This was in travel circumstances where once kids might have turned to a book.) The videos are aggressively, mind-numbingly high-intensity, emotive and anti-thought. Jump cuts multiple times per second! Bright colors and Punch-and-Judy-level plots! Constant threat and edgy cruelty, telegraphed by actors who grimaced and mugged cartoonishly through their roles, with constant fantasy slapstick to confuse and perplex. Bonus vague undercurrents of disturbing sexuality (Brent apparently feels up his sister a bunch) to seamlessly transition the kids to phone porn when they hit 10 or 11.

I felt trippy and mentally fried after about 5 minutes of that stuff. I can't imagine what it would do to a young person's brain to spend hours per day at that level of passive stimulation during sensitive developmental windows from toddlerhood onward. Verbal ability also builds on itself, so kids who read just a bit less will fall farther behind in reading comprehension and stamina with each passing year.

If you honestly think it's those publishing Karens' fault that this boy didn't read, I'd be curious to hear exactly what print stories you think would compare favorably in attention-grabbing qualities to Brent Rivera or Five Nights at Freddy's. I suspect the Karens would love to know, as well.

If you honestly think it's those publishing Karens' fault that this boy didn't read, I'd be curious to hear exactly what print stories you think would compare favorably in attention-grabbing qualities to Brent Rivera or Five Nights at Freddy's. I suspect the Karens would love to know, as well.

Hard to say, but behavior by the "Karens" in other fictional media industries such as film, TV, and video games suggests that these Karens would prefer not to find out, even if it means paying a hefty financial penalty.

I'd say that a good start might be trying to appeal to boys by figuring out what appeals to them in literature by e.g. looking where there is a higher proportion of boys reading, such as, e.g. comic books (the actually successful ones from yesteryear) or visual novels or even light novels, and see what those have in common. I think one core part that would likely help is to make sure that the fiction specifically flouts ideals, concepts, principles, and such, of whatever name we're putting on the cluster of ideologies around feminism today. A lot of the male-successful VNs and LNs seem to have a significant wish-fulfillment portion, which, to young men, would certainly require things that would make the typical standard-issue liberal feminist at least cringe, if not faint; as such, a publisher aiming to appeal to young male readers ought to at least consider, if not prioritize, making literature that specifically offends their editors.

I also suspect that nerdy scifi or tech-oriented military thrillers like the stuff by Crichton and Clancy of yesteryear could find a decent male audience, though, like all literature, it's likely far less popular in 2026 than 1996. And it seems vanishingly unlikely that someone who's not a male autist or autist-adjacent could or would want to write a good book like that; as such, if the publishers made sure not to discriminate against males and possibly even sought out autists or autist-adjacents, with bonus points if their writings seemed to condone ideologies that would make their median editor ragequit and call for a boycott of the publisher, then that might also be a good step.

I think one core part that would likely help is to make sure that the fiction specifically flouts ideals, concepts, principles, and such, of whatever name we're putting on the cluster of ideologies around feminism today.

Yes, as I said, I'm aware that's the one-size-fits-all prescription hereabouts. Similarly, I bet the tankies think flouting capitalism would solve the reading crisis and the NIMBYs think stricter zoning couldn't hurt. To a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail.

But the claim that little Jaden with the slack jaw and glazed eyes would totally click away from his sixtieth Dhar Mann video and dive into thick books if only the mean editor ladies... what, put more vapid big-titty schoolgirls in there? I think you're going to need a proposed mechanism for that. The internet is already chockablock with vapid big-titty schoolgirls, many of whom you can apparently watch getting excitingly choked and butt-fucked while their big titties bounce around in crystal-clear high-def. What's the competing attraction of a paragraph of tepid prose description that forces you to exhaustingly imagine the titties yourself based on a lot of words whose meanings you don't know?

As you pointed out, there's lots of media out there that's already consumed enthusiastically by boys and men. Versus traditional prose novels, all of those other media genres are notable for dispensing much higher levels of stimulation while making much lighter demands on abstract thinking, verbal reasoning, long-term focus and complex emotional processing. If a group, left to itself, preferentially consumes media that's mostly pictures with few words, media that features fast-moving objects, physical conflicts, bright colors and flashing lights, media with cartoonish characters based on familiar TV/film/game IP and predictable wish-fulfillment plots, media with exaggerated visual depictions of receptive sexual targets, then that's what I'd call an extremely obvious revealed preference for not prose literary fiction. Which is fine, but again, what's your model for "just mix in a little cartoony comic-book fanservice porn and maybe they'll rush back to novels"? Why would they be likelier to take the medicine with a spoonful of sugar, when they can already just eat the sugar straight?

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I am convinced this is very much a supply issue, not a demand issue

IMO there's plenty of supply if you know where to look, frankly way more supply that any human could engage with in a thousand lifetimes, between the classics, modern web fiction, and non-traditional mediums (narrative indie games, graphic novels, visual novels etc). If the claim is more narrow that there's a supply issue within modern traditional publishing then I agree, but it seems like neither male producers nor male consumers as a whole are particularly interested in filling the gap, so it seems like a bit of a dead end. I'm not convinced that specifically lack of modern traditionally published books is why boys are reading less, when there's so much else available to read for those interested.

I would guess that at least half of those boys are "lost" because of an insufficient supply of books.

Those are some interesting stats, but I'm not convinced that less boys reading is causal to reduced male educational / professional success (although it does seem likely that there are other factors of modernity causal of both less reading and less success).

The era where every upper-middle class man received a traditional liberal arts education and was conversant in the classics is decades past; nowadays your doctor's favorite movie is the Avengers and your lawyer plays Fifa in the one hour free he has every week to unwind. The pressures behind competitive careers nowadays don't really align with developing literary taste; I've had much more interesting intellectual conversations with underemployed third-world internet anons compared to the vast majority of the magnet school strivers that I went to school with. I'm not convinced that more reading would lead to more men in elite positions at all.

The operative words in your post are

if you know where to look

That is a very high barrier to entry, and one I think you are inches away from recognizing given your later comments about marvel doctors and fifa lawyers. Men have to take an active and concerted effort to find fiction written for them, much less high quality fiction. Goodreads has an abysmally shit book recommendation system and its top-lists are all voted on overwhelmingly by women. Fanfiction sites are full up on sludge written by middle schoolers and without deep knowledge of which fandoms to read and what tags to look for you will find yourself running into works that may initially seem compelling but invariably devolve into fluff/romance/angst slop. Royal road is... royal road.

In the meantime, women have booktok influencers and glistening werewolf abs on every supermarket shelf. Overabundance leads to interest leads to consumption leads to overabundance, in a virtuous cycle.

That is a very high barrier to entry

Yeah that's fair enough, I agree that booktok / romantasy slop is now aggressively marketed to women in a way that reading is no longer marketed to men.

Still, I'm not really convinced this is a problem per se; on an individual level there's plenty of avenues for men to read and write literature if they so desire, and on a societal level would we really be better off if the romantasy equivalent (Dungeon Crawler Carl?) was getting marketed aggressively to men?

on an individual level there's plenty of avenues for men to read and write literature if they so desire,

For men who already have an established and voracious love of reading, maybe. For young boys, I think, not so much.

and on a societal level would we really be better off if the romantasy equivalent (Dungeon Crawler Carl?) was getting marketed aggressively to men?

When reading books is causative of reading proficiency is causative of educational and professional attainment, absolutely.

This feels like a theory that feels a just so theory that feels correct (DEI and women in publishing) that actually makes zero economic sense.

Publishing as far as I can tell has zero moat or at best a very small one. What does big publishing control that would make only their books get read?

Maybe something else changed and men just don’t read books anymore? The only thing I can think of that big publishing controls is the ranking lists of good books which school librarians then stock.

But as far as I can tell you can just publish books and sell them on Amazon. You need like a printer to make the books. Even assuming you want to do like 50k book runs and have some art how much does that actually costs like $500k. I do not see a barrier to entry into this business. But no one is entering. Writers can bartend and write their books in their spare time. Lots of people do that.

So then you don’t have a best books lists. I feel like you could create that easily. Spitballing maybe it would be good to have someone famous sponsor a best new children’s book lists. Like Mr. Beast?

The economics of book publishing makes me assume your theory is wrong.

Most books, and the most profitable ones, still go through traditional publishing. That directionally suggests that it does do some function. You could also argue that it selects for books that are high quality and will sell well and be profitable; but if it's purely selecting good books and skimming off the top, authors writing good books could skip publishers entirely and deny them their cut.

Publishing is somewhat like VC: most books will not make money when published. What pays the bills is runaway hits, which get you exponential returns. Once a book becomes "part of the conversation," it ends up self-marketing until something else displaces it. And if everyone else reads it, you have to read that new book from some Irish millennial woman whose entire plot is about a guy and a girl not knowing how to communicate or send a text message, all the fault of capitalism. Everything publishing does is driven to ride that dynamic.

And, because the readers who most flock to fads and a predictable style of book tend to be of a certain demographic, publishers select books targeting that group. Hence, no more James Ellroy.

Print-on-demand services have reduced the cost of actually publishing a book on paper to nearly zero. Even if you get professionals to design your cover and typeset your interior, you're looking at single-digit thousands of dollars on the high end. The problem is getting people to notice your book, which is the main thing a publisher gets you these days. There is a decent audience of people who read books by traditional publishers, or follow critics that a traditional publisher can get you in front of, etc.

But if you already have an audience, paper books are not an especially good thing to sell them. Most authors would get more money from a $7/month Patreon or Substack subscription then they'd get if you bought all their books. So you usually see authors either treating physical books as a relatively niche merch item (like the paperback version of Unsong), or trying to leverage an online audience to get noticed by the traditional publishing industry's audience (like Fifty Shades of Grey or There Is No Antimemetics Division), and neither of those strategies involves becoming a serious alternative to the traditional publishing industry.

Publishing as far as I can tell has zero moat or at best a very small one. What does big publishing control that would make only their books get read?

Negotiating for shelf space with nationwide bookstores is definitely not "zero moat", and neither is the actual industry of getting a massive amount of books printed at economic scale.

Maybe something else changed and men just don’t read books anymore?

What changed was the proportion of men involved in finding and publishing books, and the proportion, thereby, of men's book that were publishing. SEE:

1

2

3

But as far as I can tell you can just publish books and sell them on Amazon

For a broke kid, buying books off amazon has a much higher barrier to entry than picking a shiny cover out of a lineup at their school library. Especially since if they're on a computer and don't have a pre-existing love of reading, it's very likely that they'll just do something other than reading instead of doggedly sorting through the monsterfucking romantasy slop on the amazon bestseller lists.

(I'm pretty sure I addressed all this in my post?)

...also, don't discount the value and difficult of professional editing and cover-design. Publishers certainly don't. Traditionally published novels have a far greater up-front investment designed to make them marketable and readable, and that pays on at the back and as it encourages people to start and keep reading.

So then you don’t have a best books lists. I feel like you could create that easily. Spitballing maybe it would be good to have someone famous sponsor a best new children’s book lists. Like Mr. Beast?

Unironically a good idea, I was thinking of self-publishing my book anyway and it might be worth it to find and sponsor a few niche youtubers to promote it. Thank you!

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There is significant amount of routing around. Forget book runs, think ebooks and audiobooks and webnovels that have plenty to cater to men, but it's very much a "build your own publishing industry" situation.

I admit I mostly skimmed, however:

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.

Uh, why? There's twenty thousand years of human literature out there. Believe it or not, the ancestors even had literature that wasn't highbrow (Portnoy's Complaint? Robert Louis Stevenson?).

A better comparison would be pulp from the last century. Howard, Lovecraft, Ashton Smith.

But the issue is that those books aren't very contemporary. I've read Path of Dragons recently, it's complete slop, and I dropped it after 1.5 books, but during that I saw a ton of inspiration from video games like World of Warcraft, and other stories. And you know what, it's still fun to see those references to video games I've played and experienced, rather than just another 18th century world that's as disconnected from me as it could be. Meanwhile I've read a Clark Ashton Smith short story recently and the writing style was great, far better than you'd find on RoyalRoad, but also clearly set in a specific time period.

There is a reason why Urban Fantasy is so popular, people want to read what's familiar.

Fanfiction, and RR specifically is easier to read because you come in with certain expectations. For example when I start a Wormfanfic I know who all the characters are, and they or the world don't need to be introduced. The same goes for a lot of RoyalRoad stories that basically play off the same rough world building. System Apocalypse, Xianxia. They all reuse a lot of concepts. And in turn this allows the subversion of those existing concepts as well.

And as a comparison. I would also say that authors like Pynchon, are closer to modern webfic in terms of style than they are to those older stories. Which also speaks to how ahead his works are. Crying of Lot 49 feels more contemporary and could've been made in the last 20 years despite having been written in '66. It also shows just how influential Post-Modernism was, and that escaping it is impossible.

Uh, why? There's twenty thousand years of human literature out there. Believe it or not, the ancestors even had literature that wasn't highbrow (Portnoy's Complaint? Robert Louis Stevenson?).

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.

The point I'm trying to make is that there's plenty of good books that aren't difficult (surely that should be clear from the examples I gave). It's not clear to me that reading slop helps read good books any more than watching tiktoks helps you enjoy movies.

I imagine you read a lot, so I think your perspective is skewed by what counts as difficult. You are underestimating just how simple RoyalRoad is, and how that simplicity is very useful when you haven't been reading your whole life.

The first issue is that you're competing with TikTok, video games, and twitch streams. I can promise you that there is a gulf between Treasure Island and your average RoyalRoad story in terms of ease of reading.

And the second issue is that, or at least this is my perspective, is that it's fun to read books that are contemporary. I've read Count of Monte Cristo, and in it I clearly saw a lot of inspiration for what the modern WebFic world developed from. In many ways it's a proto webfic. And yet, I would say it's also much worse than modern web novels. Is it better than the average RR slop? Of course, is it as interesting to read as the above average RR stories? I don't think so.

Reading RoyalRoad stories is like eating popcorn. I'm a very fast reader, depending on the book, I can reach up to 400 WPM. I'm obviously an outlier, but the way I reached this is by just reading a lot of slop. Reading is a much a muscle as anything else, and you do develop it as long as you do it. Even if you read slop, you will get better at consuming slop more quickly.

I've started reading translated xianxia slop, then webfics like Worm, and now I've also read "highbrow" authors like Pynchon, and Burroughs. But I don't think I would've enjoyed them anywhere as much if I hadn't developed my ability to consume words on the lowbrow stories first.

The first issue is that you're competing with TikTok, video games, and twitch streams. I can promise you that there is a gulf between Treasure Island and your average RoyalRoad story in terms of ease of reading.

Sure, RLS might require the average moid to look up a few words. But basically anything in the past 100 years is easily digestible for a literate adult.

Even if you read slop, you will get better at consuming slop more quickly.

Uh, cool, I guess, but I don't know what the point of this is. It isn't necessary to read faster than average to read something that isn't slop.

The point is that it's not easily digestible enough when you're starting at a level where you don't read recreationally at all.

All over the internet you see how quickly people say "tl;dr" for any post that's over like three paragraphs. People don't read articles, only headlines. To take a lifting example, if you try to lift 100kg without any muscle training, you won't lift anything at all, or at least most you'll lift it for a few cms, drop it and become exhausted from that alone. And then you won't want to do it again for a while.

RoyalRoad stories are easy to consume, more appealing because they provides an escapist fantasy, and usually have contemporary themes and references. Once you get used to reading, once you can read a few chapters a week, and do that for a while you'll be able to start reading other things too.

You're seriously underestimating just how easy RoyalRoad is to read.

his sea-chest following behind him in a hand-barrow; a tall, strong, heavy, nut-brown man; his tarry pigtail falling over the shoulders of his soiled blue coat; his hands ragged and scarred, with black, broken nails; and the sabre cut across one cheek, a dirty, livid white.

This is an excerpt from Treasure Island. Commonly on RoyalRoad is that often character descriptions are rarely given, or if they are they're spare. Which speeds up visualization because you don't need to build the full image in your head. Now I'm good at visualization, and I can do it as fast as as I can read pretty much, but again, that's a skill that's built by doing. The prose is far more spare as well. The more I read this excerpt the more this is just way beyond average RoyalRoad.

How that personage haunted my dreams, I need scarcely tell you. On stormy nights, when the wind shook the four corners of the house, and the surf roared along the cove and up the cliffs, I would see him in a thousand forms, and with a thousand diabolical expressions. Now the leg would be cut off at the knee, now at the hip; now he was a monstrous kind of a creature who had never had but the one leg, and that in the middle of his body. To see him leap and run and pursue me over hedge and ditch was the worst of nightmares. And altogether I paid pretty dear for my monthly fourpenny piece, in the shape of these abominable fancies.

Meanwhile for comparison from Primal Hunter Ch 6:

The tree was more than strong enough to take the hits, having barely taken any damage. With its circumference easily being large enough for 7-8 grown men to stand holding hands around it, he saw no scenario where it would be falling over. So, to sum it all up… if he had been alone, he would have gotten solo experience and TP, and no one would have gotten seriously hurt, though the fight would have taken longer. On top of that, Jake had an inherent unwillingness to ignore his own instincts and intuition. As most people would, he assumed. While he in his work-life before the system was very calculating, always taking an analytical and data-based approach, he also relied on his guts a lot. The same for tests in university. He trusted his intuition to an almost unhealthy degree.

There is a drastic difference between the two. I would bet that if you give the average kid the latter he'll read more of it than Treasure Island.

That's why I do think more people should be given slop to read. Babies aren't given hard meat to chew through to eat, they're given food that's easy to digest. And that's what more people need to consume before they can take on something more.

I quite simply reject the premise. Simple syntax wasn't invented on royal road.

The Old Man and the Sea:

He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish. In the first forty days a boy had been with him. But after forty days without a fish the boy's parents had told him that the old man was now definitely and finally salao, which is the worst form of unlucky, and the boy had gone at their orders in another boat which caught three good fish the first week. It made the boy sad to see the old man come in each day with his skiff empty and he always went down to help him carry either the coiled lines or the gaff and harpoon and the sail that was furled around the mast. The sail was patched with flour sacks and, furled, it looked like the flag of permanent defeat.

Of Mice and Men

A FEW MILES south of Soledad, the Salinas River drops in close to the hillside bank and runs deep and green. The water is warm too, for it has slipped twinkling over the yellow sands in the sunlight before reaching the narrow pool. On one side of the river the golden foothill slopes curve up to the strong and rocky Gabilan mountains, but on the valley side the water is lined with trees - willows fresh and green with every spring, carrying in their lower leaf junctures the debris of the winter’s flooding; and sycamores with mottled, white, recumbent limbs and branches that arch over the pool. On the sandy bank under the trees the leaves lie deep and so crisp that a lizard makes a great skittering if he runs among them. Rabbits come out of the brush to sit on the sand in the evening, and the damp flats are covered with the night tracks of ’coons, and with the spread pads of dogs from the ranches, and with the split-wedge tracks of deer that come to drink in the dark.

The Metamorphosis:

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.

Slaughterhouse Five:

All this happened, more or less. The war parts, anyway, are pretty much true. One guy I knew really was shot in Dresden for taking a teapot that wasn’t his. Another guy I knew really did threaten to have his personal enemies killed by hired gunmen after the war.

The Lord of the Flies:

The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet of rock and began to pick his way toward the lagoon. Though he had taken off his school sweater and trailed it now from one hand, his grey shirt stuck to him and his hair was plastered to his forehead. All round him the long scar smashed into the jungle was a bath of heat. He was clambering heavily among the creepers and broken trunks when a bird, a vision of red and yellow, flashed upwards with a witch-like cry; and this cry was echoed by another.

I could, in fact, go on.

That's why I do think more people should be given slop to read.

Indeed, it's a wonder that anybody learned to read before royal road became a thing. In fact, the correlation between the existence of royal road and the apparent masculine reading crisis is surely just spurious, we just need to get more people to read slop and then they will surely stop reading slop.

It's not just a masculine reading crisis, reading is down for everyone, however it is worse for men.

Most people (both men and women) already basically read something that's a level about the RR slop which is romantasy and thrillers.

Every single book you mention could be put into a literary fiction which is read by a minority of the minority who reads in the first place. I've read a lot, but I haven't read a single book of on that list, and so I'm curious if you have read them, and not for a school assignment, but pleasure out of your own free time.

As it is reading is basically somewhat of a dead hobby. Like there's obviously communities where reading is valued like in the rationalist adjacent communities like the Motte. But for the majority, reading is just not popular. This is a pure hypothetical, but I would guess that audiobooks will become more popular than actually reading books, which is a damn shame.

My and @GBRK's point I think is that more people should try to read, even if it's slop, just because reading is something that should have more people doing. There's a ton of great literary works that will never be read by the majority of people because they just don't care to read in the first place, let alone read demanding works, where as at least more would've watched classical movies.

Like I would easily recommend Pynchon's Crying of Lot 49 to someone who doesn't read a lot, because it's not at all difficult to read and quite funny, and could serve as an introduction to a great author. But the fact is that most people will never read in the first place, but if they do, they would probably rather read some RR slop than that.

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"Not difficult" isn't sufficient. We need fun books to get boys and men to love reading-- and literary fiction is often written in direct subversion of what it takes for a story to be "fun." Reading about depressed writers getting cuckolded by their mistresses might be interesting if you've read a thousand stories about Buffguy McStrongJaw beating up the Unquestionable Evil Species of Alient Bug Invaders, but first you do have to read those thousand stories.

--Also, this went unaddressed in my earlier post, but twenty thousand years of human literary history doesn't matter one whit when someone feels the need for currency, or in particular a story told using the language and aesthetic of their lived experience. Yes, every theme is ultimately universal. Yes, we haven't come up with anything truly novel since Grug came up with the idea of telling his kids that if talked back to him the terrible LionSnakeFalcon would drop out of the sky and murderize them into little bits. But boy is it a lot less cognitive effort to read a story about a farmboy fighting a dragon instead of a caveman fighting a LionSnakeFalcon, and that leaves a lot of extra cognitive effort to spare for contemplating the deep truths common between both stories.

literary fiction is often written in direct subversion of what it takes for a story to be "fun." Reading about depressed writers getting cuckolded by their mistresses

You have an incredible talent for talking to someone without responding to them.

The essence of my post is that we're not publishing enough books that are interesting to men. The essence of your first reply was that we already had published plenty of interesting books. The essence of my first reply was that those might have been interesting to you, but that you're atypical and that therefore your reply fails to contradict my thesis. I understood the essence of your second reply as being to claim that old books aren't necessarily unreadable, and replied that "not unreadable" != "interesting". If that was noncentral, and the essence of your reply was actually something along the lines of, "there's no point making books more interesting when that doesn't necessarily make them more useful", then I encourage you to go back and read my article without skimming because I use most of it to explain why the present state of the publishing industry disadvantages books that provide any sort of value to men, and therefore why, if you care about "good books", it is necessary to first convince publishers that men like to read by reading and paying for any books, so that they see the need to select and cultivate good books. If that was noncentral, and your central point was that you men probably won't start reading good books just because they're reading bad books, then I would claim that my central point is that they definitely won't start reading good books if they're not reading any books... and as per my earlier points, that in a tautological but also very true sense men won't start reading books if there are no books they're interested in reading.

(if the central point of your 2nd-to-last reply was something totally different than my three proposals, feel free to clarify that now.)

I understood the essence of your second reply as being to claim that old books aren't necessarily unreadable

It clearly wasn't, which should have been obvious given the examples I gave of interesting books. It's quite simply wrong that there are no interesting books published before current year plus ten.

As written, your response implies that you disagree with the position that "old books aren't necessarily unreadable"-- meaning, you think old books are unreadable. Responding against what you actually mean to say-- that "old books are interesting"-- I would counter, "nuh uh." Well not actually, but c'mon-- are you totally incapable of seeing how a person might enjoy recency and currency in the media they consume, and thereby prefer to look for classes of media where they can find it?

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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.

It's not a conspiracy theory. Reddit moderators will remove posts simply because they don't like them. "AI slop" is just the newest excuse. Previously it was "bad faith", "trolling", or "we can't moderate posts this spicy". It isn't an invitation for you to remove the LLM-generated text or demonstrate your earnestness. They are telling you to shut up.

I do believe the first post was auto-removed because it was gone literally as soon as I posted it. The second post stayed up for like two minutes-- long enough to attract an unknown amount of downvotes and 46 angry comments. A mod replied to my query to tell me it was autoremoved for reports of AI and incivility. On reflection, it seems like there is a conspiracy-- but it comes from the users of the subreddit, rather than its leaders, who themselves take no more interest in the matter than pontius pilot washing his hands of Jesus' execution.

(Yes, I do have an ego. Why do you ask?)

And at least speaking personally, I'm against DEI in general and for men in particular. But where does that leave us?

This is basically baiting angry comments on Reddit. You realize that using the word "DEI" will essentially label you as a chud and render the rest of your post irrelevant even if it was interesting beforehand?

You can try to edit and remove that and probably this too.

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.

Like I fully agree with your main point, but the fact is that if you want to post on Reddit, you need to word it in a way that they will accept. I'm not surprised your post was removed personally. I don't go on /r/books, but I read /r/games, and the only places I see people mention DEI are at the bottom of the comments with 50 downvotes.

This is basically baiting angry comments on Reddit. You realize that using the word "DEI" will essentially label you as a chud and render the rest of your post irrelevant even if it was interesting beforehand?

I'm pretty sure most everyone in the thread pegged me as a chud based on the title alone so I'm not hugely concerned. (And to be perfectly honest I was perfectly happy to stir the shit. I much prefer 0-upvotes-109-comments to 120-upvotes-10-comments.)

You're not baiting discussion and downvotes, you're just baiting getting banned all together. Which is what has happened.

I think you have a good point, and a it could lead to good discussion, that's why it's a shame you try to include stuff like that.

I've long given up any hope of honest, good faith, thoughtful engagement on Reddit. That site is absolute cancer ruled by jannies who would rather dedicate their entire lives to removing wrongthink than get a job.

They are a public company now. That’s basically the one reason I think maybe they can change. The AI companies their content. More content means they make more money. Which to me would seem to be a strong incentive to try and boost Reddit outside of leftist circles.

They may even have a fiduciary duty to do that now.

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