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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.
That there are popular Patreons doesn’t mean publishers aren’t being smart. How many guys are out there writing this kind of stuff? Tens of thousands, and maybe a handful are making decent money. If you were a book publisher, do you really think you could pick out hits easily? Also, men who read them online wouldn’t necessarily buy a ‘traditional’ book even if their preferred genre was better represented in bookstores.
Tons of ink and YouTube hours have been spilled about the difficulty in getting male themed products out there, and the removal of male appeal from existing products, and the way Asia doesn't do this and a single Manga has more sales than the entire Western comics industry, and how companies are losing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in sales by doing this....etc. I think you'd have to make a case for why this would suddenly not apply to this niche the all these other things are having the same problem.
It's hard to find specific articles in the moment because this finding is against the narrative, but over the years I've seen tons of complaints from male authors (some of who have published with success) about this.
I did find a Huffington Post article from 2010 which may as well have been from 1872 in Culture War years commenting.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-men-dont-read-how-pub_b_549491
I cannot imagine how much worse it has gotten since then.
It’s actually a very simple explanation, which is that men play many more video games for many more hours than women do. Men spend roughly double the number of hours per week playing video games than women do. That extra leisure time goes somewhere. What changed since 1970? Video games. It’s really that simple.
The men who have entirely stopped reading and replaced it with video games are equally matched by the women who have stopped reading and replaced it with social media.
The men who would be traditionally reading a lot still read a ton it's just been replaced with non-fiction and stuff like this. Reading forum posts and /r/HobbyDrama or whatever is reading, it's just not fiction. And again, there are still large communities of men clamoring for fiction that appeals to them just a lot of them are looking at Royal Road or other stuff outside of traditional publishing.
Demand exists, supply is constrained. And again we see this in other markets impacted by wokeness.
Overall reading is down but as suggested in my link by someone who knows more about this than either of us, that doesn't need to be gendered.
HobbyDrama, 4chan, this place, celebrity gossip, AskReddit, WSB and most of TikTok are all nonfiction, so men and women are well-represented as readers there.
What’s the male equivalent to the fiction that women read? Well, porn in some cases, I guess. But in most it’s the fiction in video games, it’s Stalker, it’s Assassin’s Creed, it’s Dead Space, it’s The Last of Us, it’s Baldur’s Gate, it’s Red Dead Redemption (obviously all these have women players, but the the majority of playtime by hours is men).
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