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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33052 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.

It seems somewhat accepted around here that a lot of career path differences are based on "men like to work with things, women like to work with people". Video games are way better at representing interactions between "things" than novels are, both "things" as physical objects to shoot and explode and strategic management of mechanistic systems. I don't think games are actually that good at representing complex social interaction between individuals, because of the cost of producing the visuals and dialogue for each branching path they really can't get that complex. It makes sense to me that survival games might replace male interest in survival novels like "Robinson Crusoe" or "My Side of the Mountain" but dating sims aren't really going to replace women's interest in complex interpersonal relationships portrayed in novels. This is of course describing the centers of different bell curves and not to suggest that there are no women interested in strategy games and no men who like Jane Austen novels.

I think FanFic writing rates make a strong case that this is pretty organic. If you look at the video game modding community and it's 80% male and then you look at video game developers and they're 80% male do we need some big hiring practices conspiracy to explain it? There aren't institutional barriers to putting your Skyrim mod up on the Nexus or Steam Workshop or putting your fiction on AO3 or fanfiction.net. This survey of AO3 Users says they're 80% female, this study of fanfiction.net says people who joined in 2010 were 76% female. Goodreads has a 76% female userbase, though that's book reviews not fanfiction.

This NBER paper has a graph of share of books authored by women. It bounced around 10% for the 19th century and then begins a steady linear increase starting in the 1970's breaking 50% around 2020.

Are there many media forms where if the consumers and amateur practitioners are primarily one gender the producers remain the other gender? It seems like once most readers are women, then probably most writers will be women, and eventually, most editors and publishers will be as well and this generational overturn is to be expected. These spaces are woke because they're women-dominated not women dominated because they're woke.

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.

I'd put slightly better odds on women understanding men than vice versa. This is some weak back-of-the-envelope evo-psych but generally, I'd expect there to be stronger selection pressure for women to be able to predict and manipulate male behavior then vice versa, since they are physically weaker, calorically dependent, and extremely vulnerable during pregnancy. If early men wants something from early woman (say monogamy) violent coercion is an option, whereas early woman can't really coerce her partner unless she can get the whole group to do that for her.

It makes sense to me that survival games might replace male interest in survival novels like "Robinson Crusoe" or "My Side of the Mountain" but dating sims aren't really going to replace women's interest in complex interpersonal relationships portrayed in novels.

I dunno, I think the audience for VNs and dating sims is probably pretty evenly-split gender-wise; it is just reading paired with some visuals, and no limit as to subject matter.

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Most VNs are essentially just books though. VN fans typically talk about “reading” VNs rather than “playing” them.

True, that's the feeling I got from fanfiction.net or AO3, but there are fanfiction spaces that seem to have more men.

I can think of Spacebattles, Sufficient Velocity, fiction.live or Questionable Questing from the top of my mind. The last two especially, given the type of gratuitous smut you will find there.

I am not able to find the forum thread that did the poll, but you will feel the difference when reading works in these spaces vs AO3. Especially the way feelings are handled in the writing.

Of course, it is also possible that SB or SV just have better women writers and hence you don't experience the same uncanny valley feeling you get from reading a lot of AO3 authors writing men.

Do women on The Motte have any tells they use to predict whether a writer under a pseudonym is a man? Say by how they write women?

Anecdotal Data says that SB and SF are less female dominated than most amature fiction dumping zones, majority men rather than 50/50 or 80/20.

That said, the proportion of non dog-shit (not an obvious power fantasy/weird sex thing AND has some fucking grammar) stories with she/her on the profile seems to be quite a bit higher than the gender ratio should produce.

this survey of AO3 Users says they're 80% female

Thanks for bringing this up. I had wanted to mention AO3 in the OP and ask if anyone had stats on its users. There is a lot of erotica on AO3 that's clearly written by men (as opposed to erotica that's clearly written by women), but I guess this is dwarfed by the amount of female-authored content on the site.

I do take this as a strong indicator of organic interest (or lack thereof). But it still feels wrong to flatly say "men just aren't into reading". The history of literature is dominated almost entirely by men. This was true even up until the mid 20th century - look at the writers who were active during the interwar period, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Pound, all men, with Woolf being a notable exception. Perhaps the absence of women can be explained by patriarchal oppression, but how do you explain the presence of men; clearly there were a lot of men who were interested in reading and writing.

Maybe it really is as simple as, men have more options today and they like those other options better.

I'd expect there to be stronger selection pressure for women to be able to predict and manipulate male behavior then vice versa

This isn't a bad argument. But a lot of female "manipulation" of men doesn't extend very far past "I am a healthy woman who meets the minimum standard of sexual attractiveness, and I am implying that you may be able to exchange resources for sexual access. You get me?" I don't think it necessarily entails a deep understanding of the unique parts of the male psyche, male isolation, male ambition. Or even just male sexuality - the very thing that they'd have the most selection pressure to understand. A lot of women just really seem to not understand male sexual desire - they don't understand how anyone could want sex that fucking much, to the point that it drives men to do the sorts of insane and often illegal things that men do in pursuit of sex. There's no natural analogue for it in women's experience.

I do take this as a strong indicator of organic interest (or lack thereof). But it still feels wrong to flatly say "men just aren't into reading". The history of literature is dominated almost entirely by men. This was true even up until the mid 20th century - look at the writers who were active during the interwar period, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Pound, all men, with Woolf being a notable exception. Perhaps the absence of women can be explained by patriarchal oppression, but how do you explain the presence of men; clearly there were a lot of men who were interested in reading and writing.

I think men seek entertainment more than women. Women are happier to sit in a circle and just chat. Men want activities to do. Up to the mid-twentieth century, literature was one of the few sources of entertainment, so men read and wrote it. But now we've got a lot of competitors like movies and video games. And men are very visual creatures, movies and video games devastatingly outcompete books for men's attention.

But I do think there's room for more men in literature. At this point we as a society should be actively encouraging male reading and celebrating male authors the way we currently do female, because males are at the disadvantage now. There was a time women were oppressed and as a society we subsidized them in certain fields to make up for that and bring them to parity, now it's the opposite.

There is a lot of erotica on AO3 that's clearly written by men (as opposed to erotica that's clearly written by women)

Really? Like there's some I guess. But the amount of homosexual male shipping that goes on there... it's like a phallic Straits of Malacca, a lilac Panama Canal, an LGBT Suez. Most men really are not interested in homosexual relationships, most men don't tag things with 'angst'.

I did an experiment a while ago, looking for the most popular HP fics on AO3 and the most popular fics on FFN. Nearly all of the AO3 ones were about relationships (often gay), most of the FFN ones were about events.

Gay male fiction may be written by gay men as well as women?

Gay male fiction may be written by gay men as well as women?

It's easy to tell. They are very different. Gay erotic fiction written by gay men for gay men resembles straight porn; 20% setup, 80% graphic sex. Gay erotic fiction written by women for women resembles straight romance novels; 99 pages of melodrama for 1 page of fucking. There are other tells (e.g. the female obsession with dark and broody bad boys).

Gay male fiction tends to look more like Dominated by Doug than the weepy softboy melodrama on AO3.

Sure but is that what's going on here? Are gay men known for how much they write about gay relationships in Harry Potter or Kpop? Or is it women?

Incidentally, these works tend to be catered towards the female gaze, and gay men often find M/M fanfiction alien or offputting.

Similarly with bara and yaoi in Japan, though this is by no means a physical law. BL is famously written by women for women.

Depends on what tags you search.

If you search M/M then yeah that’s obviously mostly by and for women. But if you search F/F or femdom there’s plenty that’s for the male gaze.

At least in 2013, F/F was mostly written and read by women, and its not even close.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/17018478/chapters/40009467

It's probably shifted since since in 2013 AO3 really was the niche site catering a lot to m/m porn whereas FFN had the broader appeal. Is there more recent equivalent data?

I don’t have any hard data (though I feel sure it exists and will see if I can dig it up later) but going off of anecdotal experience I would be utterly shocked if the demographics of f/f fic writers and readers was less than 80% female and even that would be low-balling.

The only type of fanfic where I expect male writers are probably significantly represented is out and out zero-plot smut and even that is probably more like 65/35 female/male than 50/50.

You can take this exercise even further. Read back to the prior comment in this thread.

It seems somewhat accepted around here that a lot of career path differences are based on "men like to work with things, women like to work with people". Video games are way better at representing interactions between "things" than novels are, both "things" as physical objects to shoot and explode and strategic management of mechanistic systems. I don't think games are actually that good at representing complex social interaction between individuals, because of the cost of producing the visuals and dialogue for each branching path they really can't get that complex. It makes sense to me that survival games might replace male interest in survival novels like "Robinson Crusoe" or "My Side of the Mountain" but dating sims aren't really going to replace women's interest in complex interpersonal relationships portrayed in novels. This is of course describing the centers of different bell curves and not to suggest that there are no women interested in strategy games and no men who like Jane Austen novels.

Now picture a subgenre of speculative fiction filled with obsessive worldbuilding, detailed demographics and alien physiology and gender roles of the type you might find in the chunkiest of doorstopper fantasy or science fiction novels. But rather, an alternative universe that can be added to any existing property or even stand on its own merit, with as many variations on the precise details of that world as there are authors. And the entire purpose of this worldbuilding is to codify interactions between people, sort them into groups, and then have them engage in insane amounts of fetish-laden sex.

It has to be written mainly by and for men, surely?

Nope. It's omegaverse.

This is the popularity of ships in HP:

Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter (59398)

Sirius Black/Remus Lupin (38850)

Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy (23983)

James Potter/Lily Evans Potter (22265)

Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley (18572)

Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley (15385)

Harry Potter/Severus Snape (15320)

Regulus Black/James Potter (7394)

Hermione Granger/Severus Snape (7273)

Hermione Granger/Harry Potter (6807)

The majority is gay and I'd bet that most of the rest are very female. Men don't really conceive of Hermione/Draco relationships as being natural or plausible, let alone Hermione/Snape. Harry getting a harem of hot Slytherin girls is more plausible. Overall:

M/M (181841)

F/M (146346)

Other fandoms are considerably gayer. My Hero Academia for instance:

M/M (141877)

F/M (64209)

Marvel:

M/M (264404)

F/M (182454

Real Person fiction:

M/M (345459)

Gen (100487)

Kpop is even more homosexual than that, as you might expect. Even Minecraft somehow has 30,000 M/M stories and 7,000 F/M stories. I shudder to think of what's going on in there. I conclude that AO3 is a female dominated site, obsessed with male homosexuals.

Even Minecraft somehow has 30,000 M/M stories and 7,000 F/M stories. I shudder to think of what's going on in there.

I think a lot of those are also real person fiction, focusing on popular Minecraft streamers (such as Dream and the people he played with).

Yeah, this is a fandom universal and has been for ages.

The most popular ship in the Star Wars fandom is Kylo Ren/Rey which is probably not surprising, everybody loves a broody bad boy. But by far second most popular is to ship Kylo Ren and Domhall Gleeson’s minor supporting villain Hux. It is many times more popular than say, Finn/Rey or Poe/Rey (that is, the female lead of the sequel trilogy and the male leads) with some 11,000 fics vs 2,000 or so for each of the latter two.

Another piece of fandom lore relates to Supernatural. The show was clearly meant to be a “guys’ show.” If you’re unfamiliar, it follows two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, who drive around the country killing monsters/ghosts/demons and sleeping with beautiful women. However the fandom it cultivated turned out to be overwhelmingly female. And for a while anyways, they overwhelmingly shipped the two brothers (‘Wincest’). The writers tried valiantly time and time again to introduce female love interests for the brothers only for each to suffer the vicious wrath of the fandom (sometimes up to harassing the actresses that played them) and be shortly written out one after the other.

I think it’s a bit simpler. Women, particularly white women are the biggest readers of books, at least for fiction. And even if we assumed that the numbers of potential writers shake out fairly even (which given the demographics of readers doesn’t make sense) it does make a lot of sense that publishers would choose authors who are like the main reading demographic in hopes of getting more books sold. Women probably don’t like the same sorts of books men do, and they likely prefer women writers or at least feminine sounding writers.

(https://www.marketingcharts.com/demographics-and-audiences/men-demographics-and-audiences-70503)

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