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I've ranted about the problems with having a female-dominated publishing pipeline before... and I'll fucking do it again! I know I'm preaching to the choir here but I'd already written this all up for a submission to the /r/books subreddit so I figured I'd repost it here. (And the /r/books people made me take out all the links and remove the part where I used AI for a relatively unbiased analysis of manuscript wish list profiles so I wanted to repost this version to a place that would appreciate it.)
Anyway--
Why Boys Don't Read Anymore
I can't go into a supermarket novel aisle without seeing three full shelves of romantasy novels about plucky young women with magical powers drawing the obsessive affections of foreboding but ultimately caring men. So where are the novels about clueless but good-hearted losers reincarnating into rpg worlds with a special skill that makes them irresistable to a harem of ninja babes?
...okay, I see how that complaint can sound ridiculous, but I am honestly and totally serious. It feels like publishing companies are making absolutely no effort to find and print books young men might actually like, and very naturally boys end up drifting away from reading toward hobbies where they might actually be catered toward. Let me substantiate that by talking about my experiences a little...
I've always been a voracious reader. As a kid I was already addicted to The Magic Tree House, Redwall, Eragon, Warrior Cats, Percy Jackson, Maximum Ride, Harry Potter, Uglies, and so on and so forth. Entering middle school I transitioned quite naturally into reading and writing fanfiction. I focused mostly on male-dominated fandoms like Naruto, Pokemon, and My Little Pony, but still had plenty of exposure to female-dominated fandoms like Twilight and Harry Potter. A few decades on, it feels like the tropes pioneered in the female-dominate fandoms have graduated to the bookstores and awards lists: I don't have to look far to see Dracomione-alike dark academia or shifter romances with heat cycles. But where are the rewritten naruto revenge fics? Where is all the My Little Pony-inspired first-contact sci-fi? Why do none of the monsterfucking novels involve sick tournament arcs? LitRPGs have become by FAR the dominant genre on Royaload... but their only printed representative is Dungeon Crawler Carl-- which specifically avoids or subverts many of the tropes common to the genre. In the meantime, the other branches of the Progression Fantasy tree have remained completely neglected. The Xianxia fad rose and fell without publishers even noticing. Rational/ist fiction like The Methods of Rationality, Friendship is Optimal, and UNSONG inspired an entire generation of AI researchers. You are entirely likely to have your values forcibly re-aligned toward friendship and ponies because of a genre you never had the chance to hear about.
This isn't about the gender of the protagonist, either! Worm is incredibly famous online in male-dominated fanfiction spaces. So is A Practical Guide to Evil. Both those novels feature female protagonists, and both of these novels have dedicated fanfiction communities that reveal a substantial latent demand for retreads of the themes, plots, and character archetypes they feature. And while I wish I could blame this whole issue on male flight to video games, manga, and webtoons, that entire argument would instantly fall apart-- There is no shortage of yaoi manga, villainess webtoons, and cozy games to draw the attention of women, and yet all of those same tropes also make their way into traditionally published novels.
And finally, this isn't about fiction versus non-fiction. Nonfiction is stereotypes as being more appealing to men, but that's not actually true. Women tend to read different genres of nonfiction than men-- women's lit and spirituality in place of, say, popular history... but Women still read more nonfiction in total than men.
No, this problem is rooted in the publishers-- and in particular the preferences of the people who become agents and acquisition editors. I've been trying to get published lately*, and in the process had a look through manuscript wishlist, which is where literary agents and editors post their wishlists for what kind of tropes, plots, and characters they want in. Having read so many profiles... the gender ratio of agents, and especially newer agents/agents open to debut authors is incredibly skewed toward women. And, exactly as that skew implies, the proportion of profiles even hypothetically open to male-targeted books is a faction of the proportion of profiles open to women-targeted books. Similarly, even comparing within the same profile, agents and editors spend a greater proportion of their time soliciting women-targeted books as opposed to male-targeted books. (Excluding requests that are gender neutral in nature.) As an experiment, I filtered for profiles that were interested in sci-fi (to make sure they were at least in principle interested in a male-dominated genre) and copy-pasted everything in their profile into gemini with the following prompt:
Looking at alphabetically the first profiles--
65%5%Primarily Female-Skewing 60% – 65%
Gender-Balanced / Equal Appeal 30% – 35%
Primarily Male-Skewing 5% – 10%
Equally Popular Across Genders: 56% (9 out of 16 specific fiction requests)
More Popular with Female Readers:
38% (6 out of 16 specific fiction requests)6% (1 out of 16 specific fiction requests)More Popular with Male Readers:
(Feel free to try and replicate my results with other AI or just read through the profiles yourself-- I'm sure the percentages won't agree exactly, but I think the ratios between female/male appeal will be similar.)
I think these results are pretty clear: the people in charge of finding publishers new books are mostly women, and as a reasonable consequence mostly interested in women-targeted content. I'm not proposing that there's any secret conspiracy to suppress men's voices... but conspiracy isn't necessary to prevent men's voices from, in effect, being suppressed. The modern crop of editors and agents simply largely lacks the lived experience required accurately identify literature boys and men find interesting, and similarly lacks a philosophical commitment to identifying and elevating a new generation of agents and editors who will.
So what can we do?
The publishing world won't fix itself. A lack of male-oriented books means a lack of male readers means a lack of sales means a lack of male-oriented books. Similarly, a lack of male reader means a lack of male writers and editors means a lack of male-oriented books means a lack of male readers. And at least speaking personally, I'm against DEI in general and for men in particular. But where does that leave us?
With slop.
No, seriously. If you feel like you're a guy, and you don't read enough, stop forcing yourself to read highbrow literature or books like you feel you should read, and track down some lowbrow junkfood. I suggest /r/Romance_For_Men , /r/HFY , /r/ProgressionFantasy , or anything on the royalroad front page. If you're a parent of one or more boys, point them toward the pig food dispenser. And I need to clarify that I am not being hyperbolic here. Just like babies have to eat mashed-up food before they can chew through steaks, young men need a regular diet of sophomoric fantasies before they're ready for Asimov or Murakami. Yes, there's a certain risk that the Heinlens and Ayn Rands of the world will feed them masculinist fantasies incompatible with the feminist-egalitarian view of the world you might prefer to instill... but hey, at least that's better than whatever the TikTok algorithm would have done to them.
And then...
Pay for the slop. Talk about the slop. Write your own slop, just for fun. We live in the internet age-- a problem created by gatekeepers can be solved by realizing that mass mediate makes even the tallest walls a short fence that you can simply hop over, and encourage others to do the same. Online-first publishers like Aethon are already in the process of bringing out the proverbial literary wrecking ball-- all they need is some momentum.
*necessary coda-- I haven't managed to get published because my book simply isn't good enough. I know what my problems are and they're largely orthogonal to this rant.
edit: my post just got removed from /r/books again! And this time I removed all references/use of llms and links, which is what the moderator told me got me removed last time. Now I am suspecting a conspiracy.
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.
Your argument is essentially that since you saw a panda in a zoo, pandas must not actually be endangered. "Boy books exist" does not disprove "there are fewer boy books." In particular, the paucity of male editors, agents, bookstore owners, and librarians mean that even the boy books that do get selected tend to be selected for acquisition or display get selected by people with a less discerning taste for what makes books interesting to boys. It's like the difference between the kind of comic book a grandma would buy for a little boy as opposed to the kind of comic book that little boy would buy for himself. Brainrot, poor attention spans, and tiktok thirst traps also afflict girls-- but the relatively higher quantity and quality of books available to them make them more likely to read anyway.
Whoah, that's sounding awfully like an argument for... representation? I'll admit, finding a full-throated defense of 50:50 gender quotas and #ownvoices on the was not on my Motte bingo card for the day. Nice that this place can still surprise me.
It unironically and unabashedly is (though unfortunately I don't think your downvoters recognized that.) Being represented in works of media is an important factor in making groups of people interested in said media, especially when the people in those groups do have some deep identification with the group identity. Wokism misunderstands representation as meaning that every group (excluding straight white cis and/or males) should be represented in every work, and that's a critical error. Similarly, there's also a lot of ignorance about what's actually being represented, and how important different kinds of representation are to different groups, but the idea isn't totally wrong at its core.
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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