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Notes -
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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