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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?
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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.)
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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.
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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.
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