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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33056 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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The decline of the Literary Bloke: "In featuring just four men, Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists confirms what we already knew: the literary male has become terminally uncool."

Just some scattered thoughts.

The Great Literary Man is no longer the role model he once was. The seemingly eternal trajectory outlined by Woolf has been broken. The statistics are drearily familiar. Fewer men read literary novels and fewer men write them. Men are increasingly absent from prize shortlists and publishers’ fiction catalogues. Today’s release of Granta’s 20 best young British novelists – a once-a-decade snapshot of literary talent – bottles the trend. Four of the 20 on the list are men. That’s the lowest in the list’s 40-year history. In its first year, 1983, the Granta list featured only six women.

It has to be pointed out that any such "great upcoming young novelists" list must be comprised of mostly women, out of necessity. Otherwise the organizers of the list would be painted as sexist and privileged and out of touch and it would probably jeopardize their careers. You don't even need to reach for the more subtle types of criticisms that revisionists make of the traditional canon: "yeah, I know like you feel you were just judging works solely on literary merit, and you just so happened to collect a list of 100 deserving authors where 99 of them are men, but actually you were being driven by subconscious patriarchal bias and you need to escape from your historically ossified perspective and so on and so forth". What's going on now in the publishing industry is far more overt: "it's time to hand the reins over to women, period". In such a cultural context, how could a list of the "20 best young British novelists" be taken as unbiased evidence of anything?

The irrelevance of male literary fiction has something to do with “cool”. A few years ago Megan Nolan noted – with as much accuracy as Woolf on these men in Mrs Dalloway – that it might be “inherently less cool” to be a male novelist these days. Male writers, she continued, were missing a “cool, sexy, gunslinger” movement to look up to. All correct.

It's true that literary fiction is not as cool as it once was, although this in itself is not a great moral catastrophe. It's part of the natural cycle of things. The "cool" things now are happening in TV, film, video games, and comic books. When was the last time a literary fiction author of either gender captured the imaginations of millions of people the way Hajime Isayama did? The literary novel is not eternal (many will argue that historically speaking, it's a relatively recent invention) and it is not inherently superior to other narrative art forms.

The decline of male literary fiction is not down to a feminist conspiracy in publishing houses

Correct, it's not a conspiracy, but only because there is nothing conspiratorial about it. If you were to ask any big (or small!) publishing house if they gave priority to voices from traditionally marginalized groups, they would say yes. If you were to then ask them if women are a traditionally marginalized group, they would say yes.

...

It's not a conspiracy if they just tell you what they're doing!

The most understanding account of male literary ambition was written by a woman.

There's been a meme for some time that goes something like, "men don't understand women, but women understand men - maybe even better than men do themselves", which I find to be quite obnoxious. If there is any "misunderstanding", then it surely goes both ways. There are plenty of things in the male experience that have no natural analogue in the female experience, same as the reverse.

For whatever reason, women seem more interested in fiction novels and men seem more interested in video games. There's some amount of crossover of course, but they're exceptions that prove the general rule. It only makes sense that women would dominate the field considering they're far more interested in it.

Of course there's the societal issues when reading of any sort, including vapid fiction novels, is held on a ridiculous pedestal whereas video games are seen as a vice and a waste of time. In reality, there's little difference between the usefulness of a teenage girl reading the latest YA novel and a teenage boy playing Call of Duty.

In reality, there's little difference between the usefulness of a teenage girl reading the latest YA novel and a teenage boy playing Call of Duty.

Useful in what way? Between the two activities, I would prefer a child read instead of play video games.

Neither of them directly impart any skills, and both should be seen as primarily leisure activities. As a side effect though, reading can improve vocabulary and spelling, while video games can improve certain types of problem solving. The effects aren't massive in either direction and a lot depends on what type of content is being enjoyed. For whatever reason, society has deemed that reading is a fantastic use of time that's worthy for its own sake, whereas video games are seen as a vice like gambling or cigarettes, though not quite as destructive.

Well, we have high literature, no high video games, as it were. Give it time, maybe in 50 years, there will be a list of "classical video games" or whatever.

Well, we have high literature, no high video games

Have you played a broad swathe of video games that you're confident in dismissing the entire genre as having no equivalents to "high literature"?

You sound like Roger Ebert, except replacing films with literature. He eventually backtracked what he said.

I don't mean it that way. I mean that we don't have a canon. There's no "Classic Western video games" list that isn't just for nerds.

Basically, when one of those socially conservative magazines puts out an article that says "Here are some video games you can sit down and play with your children that capture Western civilization/culture".

I don't think we're really disagreeing, as I never disputed that society (exemplified by a magazine in this case) sees video games as inherently "lesser" than literature. I'd disagree with the truth of their assertion, but I wouldn't disagree that they'd make such an assertion at all.

It wouldn't be particularly hard to make a list like that if one put in the effort, though. A game exemplifying the scientific/engineering mindset of the West could be something like Minecraft, or Factorio for something more niche that takes it to the extreme. For a game exemplifying Western individualism and aspiration, Skyrim (or something along those lines) would do the trick.

"Here are some video games you can sit down and play with your children that capture Western civilization/culture".

I think I probably could compile such a list after a day of thinking about it. No, it probably won't be games that agree aesthetically with socons (stuff like Doom, Deus Ex, and Command & Conquer), but I think it'd fit the bill.

Depends what they're reading and what they're playing, I'd rather have a child playing Vintage Story, an RTS or something similar over quite a lot of the crap that gets put to paper. Growing up I read a lot of books and played quite a few games, I enjoyed both and looking back I don't really see one being more valuable than the other. In a practical sense I probably got more out of playing Age of Empires than I did from reading Redwall for example.

In reality, there's little difference between the usefulness of a teenage girl reading the latest YA novel and a teenage boy playing Call of Duty.

It's much harder to get addicted to books. If teenage girls were reading YA novels for 4 hours a day people would be a lot more worried.

Eh, as someone who was often grounded from TV and computer time as an elementary and middle-school boy, I did find reading to be a fairly-engrossing comfort in the absence of other pursuits. I'd even read during classtime, when able, though that's probably as much of an indictment of the public-school environment as it is a testament to the engrossing power of books.

I did the same, getting into trouble at school for reading books under the desk, reading books while taking a shit, reading books while walking.

Of course, I have ADHD, so I was probably under-stimulated and didn't have smartphones then.

There are definitely some bookworms out there who are addicted, but overall you're correct.

Teenage girls get addicted to social media instead.

If teenage girls were reading YA novels for 4 hours a day

Are they not? They absolutely were when I was in high school, including problems of girls reading Twilight and Harry Potter during class time.

Edit: I guess I can't say for certain the hrs/day, but it was very common to see girls reading the YA craze du jour during lunch, free periods, or basically any other time they could.

It's interesting that Harry Potter (maybe Hunger Games but definitely not to the same extent) was as far as I know the last book to really have mass, cross-gender appeal among the youth. I think the male-female split on Potter fans was, maybe not fifty fifty, but probably closer to such than any fantasy YA book since. Doubt we'll ever see another such phenomenon.

It’s hard, and probably not predictable, but…is there anything stopping it from happening again?

  1. No appetite. I really can’t see this being the case, but include it for completeness. The upside is just too huge.

  2. Business model. The existence of HP means that authors and publishers know a book can make it that big. I’d HP benefited from the shock of its success, a snowball effect, maybe that can’t replicate. Not sure about this.

  3. Cultural inoculation. The concept of a multimedia empire is more familiar. Maybe cynicism would keep another property from getting such clout. You see it with MCU exhaustion, which is sort of its own phenomenon. If this were going to make the difference, I think it would have reared its head before HP. Star Wars or something. Unlikely.

  4. Author inoculation. Maybe everyone writing children’s books, now, is familiar with HP or was even raised on it. Like fantasy authors desperately trying to avoid imitating Lord of the Rings. I don’t think this works for the same reasons as 1.

  5. Market crowding. Is it possible that the saturation of good books, and connection to reviews and recommendations, would prevent any one from getting such share? I could see it.

  6. We have [new book] at home. There are now parents who grew up on HP. What’s to stop them from just giving an old copy instead? It still holds up, though new readers will not benefit from the bizarre cultural fervor. I don’t think this alone preempts other novels, but it could contribute.

  7. That seat is taken. Sort of a combination of 5. and 6. If HP really filled an unmet demand in children’s publishing, then Rowling may have broken the dam. But why would that prevent new kids from joining their own trend? Is their energy all going to some other form of media?

All in all, I feel like it could happen again. It’d be a black swan, or whatever the positive equivalent is, but there are a lot of people trying to hit that jackpot. In the absence of a really strong structural factor, I would expect kids to latch on to something. Then again, I was a nerd who read waaaaaay more books growing up, so I might have the wrong baseline.

If true, I'd guess a combination of 1 and 2: boys are so toxic, the upside of providing something they would want to buy is more than offset by the social consequences of doing so. It is therefore safer to intentionally exclude them.

Not a chance.

No, seriously, where are you getting this idea? Have you seen evidence that publishers are thinking like this?

Because I’m having a hard time imagining anyone actually endorses that.

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Book publishers specifically, no, it's not something I follow. But this seems the be a trend with other products that have previously considered what boys and young men like: movies, comic books, and video games. Beer... They will happily alienate their male audience if they believe it will be a political liability.

Women control the majority of consumer spending. Punching down at boys and men is just good business.

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It happens, but not every single day and to the extent boys do on video games. Not sure where we'd get actual numbers on it beyond anecdotes and impressions though.

The big addiction teenage girls are drawn to on a daily basis is social media, which is at least as worrying as video games.

Fair, also additional factors of my high school trending nerdier than average and this being in the earlier days of both social media and smart phones.

Still, my experience was definitely that the teenaged girls were reading a lot more in their free time (both books and fanfiction) than the guys. Perhaps more importantly, the teenagers writing in their free time at my school were almost entirely girls.

I am tempted to bring up one of those unsubstantiated claims : "Men are producers (do-ers?), women are consumers (experiencers?)."

Games force you to act. Books can be passively consumed. Even within books, the ones that force a lot of intellectual friction onto people, seem to be more popular among men. Modern literary fiction often reads like wish-fulfillment and escapism, rather using fiction as a tool for putting the reader in the midst of difficult hypothetical choices.

I am not convinced that there is something here, but interesting coincidence either way.

I’m not sure that something being wish-fulfillment and escapism means that men won’t like it. Take practically the entire isekai/isegye genre in light novels and manga; I am under the impression that popadantsy had similar elements to it as well.

Heck, a lot of the classic 80's movies aimed at kids were about escapism and fantasy.

Fair. Isekai is as "wish-fulfillment and escapism" as "wish-fulfillment and escapism" gets.

I’m not sure that something being wish-fulfillment and escapism means that men won’t like it.

Of course not. Larry Correia launched his career with that. It just has to be, you know, MALE wish-fulfillment and escapism. Which might not be "literary" enough.

Only, I've noticed older men that used to read having stopped/significantly decreased their reading, and they haven't picked up video gaming, while their female counterparts read as much as ever.

I used to read a lot but I'm frankly interested in very little fiction these days, written by either men or women. Getting a recommendation these days (especially for fantasy) feels like when someone recommends an isekai. No, it isn't different this time either, it's garbage.

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