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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   2235 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 30, 2025

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Since publishing and readership overwhelmingly lean female

Why? Males stopped reading? I certainly didn't, and I know many people who are male nerds like me and who read. Is it the millennial/gen Z thing? Are males only doing tiktok or games now?

so I'm not super bothered by it.

I'm not bothered at all - my concern is not having time to read what I already want to read, not to find more reading based on somebody's opinion - I am just curious as to what is going on.

The last time I was in a physical bookstore(a few months ago) and browsed through the sci-fi/fantasy genre, the majority of new books seemed to be overwhelmingly written by women in a quirky, post-2000 semi-ironic genre-smacking type style that comes across as a 'serious parody/satire' more than anything.

So if you want to find anything written that will appeal to men, you either need to go old-school or down the indie-rabbit hole, not exactly an easy thing to slog through.

Conversely, if you're being uncharitable, when women brag about how much reading they do, they're bragging about stuff like this and booktok(IE, it's all porn).

Well, I didn't read the GR tops but I am pretty sure it's not porn - at least not the thing I'd call porn - at least in the SciFi and YA SciFi categories.

Most males in my circle overwhelmingly read fanfiction and/or mass-produced male-oriented original fiction that usually involves isekai, magic nobles and harems (basically wuxia but not Chinese). I suspect neither is a category that takes top places on Goodreads.

Millennial and gen Z men basically don’t read. In my undergrad (MIT), and my PhD, basically none of my male friends read at all. Podcasts have become the dominant medium instead.

Reading has declined across the board, but it seems to have hit men harder for some reason. I don’t have the full answer but I think Jared Henderson has a video about this, I’ll try and link tomorrow if I can find it.

Reading has declined across the board, but it seems to have hit men harder for some reason. I don’t have the full answer but I think Jared Henderson has a video about this

I don't think this was intentional (if it was, kudos), but "reading is dying out, here's a video about it" is very on-the-nose.

In my undergrad (MIT), and my PhD, basically none of my male friends read at all.

My bubble is split roughly 50/50: some don't read at all, the others are probably top 1% readers. But even those guys practically never read anything written in the last 20 years. The backlog of classics is just to long.

I resemble this remark. I read a ton, but I'm not reading stuff that's been written recently (with a few exceptions). There are a ton of classics to read, and also frankly I don't think most new releases are actually good.

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