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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'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
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.)
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:
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
Things work in tendencies and on the margins. I thought that would be common sense for anyone here. If literature is marginally more entertaining to young males than they are now, then the boys for whom not-books was one epsilon more entertaining than books will shift over, this causing a higher proportion of boys to read. This is baseline for how ALL population-wide phenomena of personal choices works.
The fact that there are boys right now who read for fun and balance reading and video games for fun is about as strong proof as possible that there are boys on these margins. Resorting to some argument from personal incredulity of some version of "X can't POSSIBLY be made to tear kids away from Y due to A, B, C" when we currently see current versions of X doing just that - just to a lesser extent than would be equal - is a way of conceding the argument entirely.
You make no point here, though. The point is that when you see a metal object with a flat head and a pointy end in a box that says "nails" on it, then you can most likely accurately call it a nail. The ideology in question has overtly taken over literature and other fictional media with the explicit intention of appealing more to females and less to males. Maybe they're so incompetent that all their efforts have no effect, but certainly just turning off their explicit pushing-away-males strategy is something one ought to consider when thinking about how to attract males.
More generally, if someone is failing to accomplish something, then the possibility of burning down whatever ideology got them there has to be considered a reasonable possibility. That this isn't one of the first thoughts to occur indicates a lack of desire to accomplish this. Which is also fine, but it's important to be clear that it's entirely due to a lack of desire, not due to a lack of ability (the ability might be lacking, but anyone who claims that we have meaningful evidence that it is is someone who hasn't been paying attention the last 20 years).
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