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Notes -
I have often read on The Motte (and believe it to be true, myself) that fiction publishing and reading have become heavily female-coded and -dominated in the Anglosphere.
Are there places where this is not true?
Two things are happening at once here:
-Traditional publishing is pushing men out, likely for culture war reasons. Unsurprisingly this has resulted in a huge bloom of non-traditional publishing for masculine focused genres (ex: Patreon and Progression Fantasy). The readers are still there, just the big publishers are mostly not selling to them and are confused why they aren't buying.
-Reading in general is down, less so in women's genres. Women still buy romance books for instance.
So if you want to see more reading by men you can look at the male genres (again Progression Fantasy, LitRPG are BIG right now).
The rest of the west has less of the general anti-intellectualism and therefore more reading so you can look there.
Something I've noticed in my social group is that the majority of men who still read are reading non-fiction for life improvement or knowledge development. I bet this group is mostly unchanged from the past it's just the fiction guys have been chased out or fled.
Traditional publishing is definitely a very progressive industry, but if they could sell 5 million copies of rip-off Tom Clancy schlock to young men they’d absolutely hold their noses and do it; after all, almost all the big publishers have conservative non-fiction imprints for basic economic reasons.
One of the most startling aspects of the woke revolution is the way select companies have chosen to just leave money on the table and abandon profit. Disney has been the most obvious example of this but it's pretty common in nerd hobbies and you see a lot of it in the comic book and video game industries.
With respect to publishing you'll hear anecdotes of male authors with a good idea being told that they just "aren't looking for your kind of book" right now or whatever.
Authors in the PF/LIT RPG genres often have massively profitable Patreon's indicating that the market exists, but struggle to get published using traditional methods. It's stupid but it is the same mistake a lot of business entities are right now.
Somehow what is happening in video games and comics is even worse however.
I know that this is a trite comparison, but even so... I think that viewing wokeness though the lens of religion helps to illuminate why this happens. Imagine you're in 17th century Europe and someone comes to you wanting to print a book that alleges that Jesus was a rapist or something equally blasphemous. Even if you thought you could make a ton of money off that book, you would probably turn the author down due to the immense social blowback you would receive.
Publishers (and video game companies, etc) today are in a similar situation. Even if an individual is sympathetic to your pitch, even if they could make hella money, they are going to be reluctant to publish something which is blasphemous to the religion they have to work with.
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