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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33064 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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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.

I read @pusher_robot as making a stronger claim.

[If] 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.

This is a lot more harsh than affirmative-action marketing for girls’ books. I’d say it’s more extreme than the Gillette campaign. At least in that case they didn’t stop manufacturing men’s razors.

It doesn’t pass the Turing test for me. I have no doubt that some executive has openly favored girls’ books over boys’ or neutral ones. But I’d expect it to be justified as girl-positive instead of boy-negative. Not “intentionally excluding,” but low priority. Benign neglect. Condemning small children as toxic is cartoonishly bad optics.

Speaking of cartoons, Captain Underpants is still a perennial Scholastic bestseller. I consider that the canary in the coal mine.

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.

It's funny reading this thread and other arguments about this topic on social media, where apparently it can't possibly be the case that young men have been told to get the fuck away from books and are doing as they're told, nobody would ever put their finger on the scale it can only possibly be the golden free market acting completely independently of any social pressure!

And then looking at video games 'where all the young men have gone because video games are male and books are female' and every big developer is jamming DEI shit into everything as hard and fast as they can because the media incessantly accuses them of excluding women. Even call of duty puts a woman in its steam title card thing to attract women, but if boys and men aren't reading books then they must have just suddenly started hating reading for no reason! Oh well, they can play video games instead... For now.

I don't think it's as actively-malicious as you imply, though. I think a lot of it is just pandering, combined with defensive doubling-down when called out on it.

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.

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