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Well, hey, cool! Kudos on your self-awareness, it's an interesting set of views.
I'm curious how a right-leaning identitarian/ equity-and-inclusion focus squares itself with some of the standard critiques from the right, though. For example, you say:
But we should be clear that this isn't something left-identitarians believe for its own sake. Rather, it follows inevitably when you first accept the premise that it's right and natural for a person to reject otherwise-valuable activities (reading a book, taking a job, going to college) because of their subjective feelings of exclusion or lack-of-belonging when they feel unrepresented among too many non-identity-affiliates. An institution achieves perfect representation along one axis, then someone pipes up and says they feel the work doesn't speak to their group's concerns, so you put some of that group in, and before you know it, you have "every group represented in every work."
But as I understand it, you also endorse that premise? You're arguing it's understandable when boys don't read, and that this is not their fault, but rather is the fault of too much female-ness/ not enough vapid-big-titty-schoolgirls in books- so it's the job of publishers to remove this female-ness, and NOT the job of intelligent boys to find other axes besides gender/sexual desire along which to connect with literature. This is in keeping with the standard identitarian view that fiction is a mirror, not a window- that is, we read books to flatter our feelings and affirm our existing worldviews, not to better understand other people or learn about different spheres of human experience.
But also, you actually seem to be endorsing a far stronger version of this premise than most left-identitarians in publishing would. They might agree that fiction-as-mirror means that readers deserve a relatable own-identity-aligned character or two in most works to keep them engaged, plus some books in the catalog with own-identity-aligned protagonists, plus preference for the authors who write identity-group-X to also be from identity-group-X ("own voices"). But when I listed many books in the Scholastic catalog that satisfied these exact criteria for your identity group, being male-authored, deliberately tuned to male-only thematic interests, and featuring not just male protagonists but also mostly-to-all-male secondary characters, you argued that this is still not enough for equity and inclusion, because although men wrote this for men, about male interests, and many Scholastic execs are also men, there were presumably women in the pipeline somewhere ("chosen by grandma"), which makes it understandable that boys wouldn't want to read those books and shouldn't be expected to.
You can see how that would get pretty extreme if impartially applied across identity groups, right? Your "grandma" claim says that for your group to engage, there should be be no critical mass of non-co-idents anywhere in the mainstream publishing pipeline, primarily because non-co-idents don't really understand your identity group's experience, secondarily because they might block content that your identity group enjoys because it comfortingly runs down other identity groups as inherently stupid, inferior and exploitation-worthy.
Your preferred identity axis is biological sex, but that's based on your own feelings: someone else might feel more attuned to ethnicity, immigrant status, gender-nonconformity, class, disability, religion, etc. Arguing from your very high standards for equity and inclusion, how would you operationalize this in fairness across all those identity categories, for which people feel the same deep feelings of interest/disinterest and acceptance/rejection that you feel around your male sex? Again, you've argued not just that there should be some representation of your identity in authors/ characters/ protagonists, but that fiction is disqualified by any involvement of your enemy identity group(s), and indeed must feature substantial content demeaning them in order to catch your interest. That's a pretty tall order if you're applying it evenly across groups.
In broader terms, though, I'm also curious: if we're going with the identitarian "fiction= mirror" and the main purpose of reading really is to stroke our ego, bathe us in wish-fulfillment fantasies of power, accomplishment and sexual desirability, demean our enemies and validate our worldviews, all in the easy familiar language of our Present Moment - then what do you see as the prosocial value in reading? You seem to think it's a loss to society if some group chooses not to read, but also it sounds like you want books to leave us just as they found us, except maybe a bit more self-centered. So why do you care?
So I think you're overapplying your own understanding of why leftists want representation because I was referring less to all the academic concepts of why representation is good/useful and more to what I understood to be the most defensible version of the argument. That being, narrowly, that people re more likely to enjoy and therefore engage with works of media where they can see aspects of themselves represented.
(this is my bad for not being more specific, sorry.)
And to be clear, I'm also not applying this concept of representation normatively. I'm not saying that representation is good or bad, I'm neither claiming nor disclaiming a moral right to reject a book series based on its lack of big-titty schoolgirls. I am making a descriptive assessment that there is a lack of representation for males (1) within newly-released novels and (2) relative to the amount of space allocated for male-targeted books on store shelves. I furthermore diagnose the cause of that lack of representation as being due to the lack of representation of males (3) within the publishing industry. I do make a normative assessment about whether male literacy/novel-reading is a good thing, and to the degree that I believe it is a good thing I propose measures to remedy a lack of it by addressing (1) and (3). But you should understand those recommendations as instrumental measures, not moral imperatives. So with reference to your question:
To the degree that we can benefit as a society by encouraging literacy in specific identity categories, we should recommend interventions to promote literacy... based on the relative cost of the intervention compared against the expected benefit. I think the interventions I propose to start making up the gap between male and female literacy should be fairly cheap and affect a large proportion of the population. I think, on the other hand, forcing every single movie to include mixed-race professional sheep wool stylists would have a cost out of proportion to its benefits.
And with reference to--
This is a clear strawman of my position. I think reading can, does, and should stroke egoes and fantasies... not an an terminal goal, but as an instrumental step towards getting them to read better books that help them grow as people. (And also as a way to displace even more unhealthy, ego-stroking forms of media consumption.) Refer to my original post:
Also, elsewhere I make the argument that reading anything increases reading comprehension skills, which are linked to educational and professional attainment and therefore something we want to positively promote... even if the means to do so have unsavory light novel titles about horny sisters and taking gigarevenge for small slights.
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