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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.
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?
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.
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!
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.
Disclaimer: I haven't read much fiction in the last two decades, and what I've read was similar to a stereotypical older Lesswrongian's sci-fi/fantasy diet and nuggets of classics, so my opinion is probably best discarded. Read @Dean's review of shitty new Star Wars movies instead, then.
Anyway, while institutional and ideological factors necessarily play a role, I would not rush to mock the premise that women are better writers. Of course, this depends on what we mean by a good writer. (For convenience I'll ignore market definitions and issues, such as female readers preferring stories by women). What does a good writer write best about? Stuff he – or, as it happens, she – cares about. It's not a given that this coincides with better practical understanding; but as for the resolution and clarity of verbal lens, it probably does.
In my experience, women, including writers, are vastly more interested in people, and men in events and things (the people-thing distinction is trivially true). In the limit they converge on detailed worldbuilding (whether «realistic» or thoroughly fictional) that provides a harmonious stage for the development of complex personalities, but the dissimilarity remains. Men write about things, ideas, events that the protagonist wrestles with, grows through, or sometimes is crushed by (classifications of archetypal narratives are very telling here), or in the worst case blasts through like a flying brick, shrugging off damage. Women who aren't complete hacks undeserving of our time write about… well, about stuff the protagonist feels as any this happens, in detail, to the point of forgetting that other pieces of the world should continue to move and live. Some of the best women wrote about a great man, adoring him as if from some distance, wrinkles and all. Say, Le Guin wrote Shevek. What is the deepest woman written by a man?*
Still, while some of my all-time favorite stories are written by women, others are written by men about women, for very understandable reasons. It's quite funny how the latter, in the modern genre fiction at least, are essentially weird men (consider all of Neal Stephenson's jailbait; bona-fide feminist protags are far worse, naturally). Yet men-as-depicted-by-women are still recognizably male and deeper than men's men – if sometimes unrealistically sensitive and vulnerable, even absolute brutes (indeed, especially brutes). Frankly, that may not even be much of a distortion: women work to see that side of their partner, the side that is usually not shown in male fiction – or in public.
Male fiction, put simply, is somewhat crude and churlish on the psychological side. Again, I'm not saying it's wrong in the sense of providing poor actionable descriptions. But it's not elaborate, not fancy and eloquent when it goes into the internal workings of the mind.
As a concluding note: it's not just that male consumers play games. Male creators also play games, and write them too. There are arenas for worldbuilding and self-expression that are more fit for male interests than composing traditional novels.
And, of course, then there's the real world, where we men are meant to carve novels of our lives into the bedrock with consequences of our acts.
* I am well aware that some Chekhov, Kuprin or Conrad could do more than that in an offhand sketch, but it feels wrong to bring them into this discussion. Old world giants are more than men.
I've not read much written by women in my life, but on the occasions I have I have to say that I've always found the way they write men to be jarring. There have even been times when I've read something without knowing anything about the author, come away thinking that something was off (everyone seems kind of gay? - my inner thought process at the time), lo and behold it's written by a woman every time. This was really the experience that lead me to believe that women as a group have a somewhat over-inflated view of their own understanding of the inner workings of men. I do think this street runs both ways, with the men that bother to try and understand women that is.
Do you remember any examples of writing like this?
Can't remember off the top of my head, it was ages ago.
Even at the time I don't think I could put my finger on what precisely was off about it, just that the characters inner thoughts seemed glaringly effeminate.
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I'm not so sure, I've never felt very "seen"(as the kids call it now) when reading how women tend to write men. There's investment in some kind of feelings and thoughts in the book but even that reflects a feminine view of the world. Like the opposite side of the coin of when men write women as if they were men who happened to have female bodies. I'm not so convinced that a woman putting more thought and investment into a male character they're inventing is going to produce a more realistically male character.
Is it just the type of thoughts and feelings on display that makes it feel foreign? Or is it the fact that it focuses on thoughts and feelings at all?
In a reversal of popular folk wisdom, Nietzsche identified emotion with masculinity and rationality with femininity. Which he was quite correct about.
Crying at a Hallmark movie is not emotion - or, it is emotion of a particularly diluted and domesticated type. Quitting your stable well-paying job for a one in a million chance at becoming a rockstar or a Twitch streamer or whatever, getting into a fight with a random guy at a bar because he looked at you funny, pursuing one woman to the point of self-ruin long after she made it abundantly clear that she’s not interested - this is emotion. And men are far more likely to engage in these sorts of activities than women are.
No, I'm aware I have emotions, I just think the inside view is significantly different from the outside view and women by necessity are not privy to the inside view for basically the same reason I find it difficult to describe to you or anyone the difference. To smash another culture war topic into this in a possibly doomed attempt to illuminate with heat look at the subtler difference between trans women and natal women or trans men and natal men - these are people to whom it's incredibly important to closely imitate the opposite sex and yet it seems very clear, at least to me, that it's an inauthentic reading. I find the men women write tend to be performing masculinity rather than simply being masculine(this is not to be confused with just overdoing the masculinity). I'm importantly not making the claim that men write women much better, I think the sexes are doomed to never really understanding the internal life of each other. I can usually quickly tell and author's sex by how they write men and I have heard and believe women have the complimentary ability.
I suppose I would say that I don't think anyone is privy to my inside view, man or woman, and therefore it's not a reasonable criteria to use when judging an author... there may be certain properties I share in common with a male author or male fictional character on account of our shared maleness, some view of sexuality or relationships maybe, but taken in isolation, these things tend to be essentially incidental properties, on the same level as saying that we both share five fingers and five toes. It's not the sort of thing that makes me feel a deep spiritual kinship with someone.
In general my basic way of processing experience, the basic tactile feeling of my thoughts and sensations, the matrix of connections they form with each other (or don't form), is so remote from that of any other person I know of, fictional or not, that I am perpetually "apart" from others, perpetually "on the outside", and therefore I feel barely any more kinship with men as a group than I do with women as a group. Therefore let the author write of feminine men, and masculine women, and unrealistic realistic protagonists, and realistic unrealistic villains, it matters not to me because I will not be "seen" by any of them. All of them are equally arbitrary choices in the ceaseless procession of forms. Who am I to judge a character as "realistic" anyway? Who am I to say that man or woman must be such and such, to say that a male portrayed as having a "feminine" state of mind could not exist? In the most extreme case the author will invent a new type of psyche which has never existed before; but this is simply one of the principal tasks of the artist, to invent or discover new configurations of the soul which have hitherto gone unrecognized.
Can you really say that you're not the same way? Do you not simply fall prey to illusion when you look at another man and go "ah, he gets me" on the basis of one comment or action, or even a whole lifetime of comments or actions? Do you not both contain infinite depths that remain unrecognized and misrecognized? Give yourself some credit.
I feel this less with good male authors. Of course no one 100% able to grok someone else but there are pretty noticeable inferential gaps between the sexes, things others totally lack a frame of reference for and can't hope to understand. I can guess at, even guess well at what period cramps feels like or growing up with male attention you aren't prepared for feels like but I'm never going to truly on a gut level understand it and all the second third and fourth order effects that has on a person's psychology and it shows. The arrogance required to believe women or men can understand the general condition of the other sex is just preposterous to me. What you can gleam from behavior and inference is just not enough.
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In the situation of literary outliers it doesn't matter if most men are insensitive, because the highly sensitive and talented male outlier can succeed and many have as psychological, emotional, sensitive writers (while other male authors have gone the way you describe as idea-focused etc.)
I think it's more of a question of there being space in the culture and market to draw those people into successful writers who understand their own gifts, have something to communicate clearly, and see rewards from it. I think that what culture that would support that has deeply degraded, to the point where the output of men and women authors are suffering.
Firstly I think sensitive men have become deeply confused by the culture/political war. Male gaze is bad, Fellini's male psychodrama is offensive etc. Sensitive men are so steeped in shame they are afraid of creating sensitive works with honesty.
Secondly, the sensitive male is outcompeted by the sensitive female. When women writers didn't exist, there is much less competition in the niche. It's like when men played the female roles in theatre, when women aren't competing it releases pressure on male gender expression.
Thirdly, the literary culture is less interested in reading the "sensitive man". What people see today as the "sensitive man" is basically an invented personality that has rough edges sanded off. Real sensitivity from men is distasteful in certain ways, so people only feel comfortable engaging with it when it at least was made in the 1970s when you can excuse that kind of thing.
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I can't agree. I don't think there's anything in principle that would prevent a woman from writing a truly superior work, but as a matter of fact, all of my favorite works from both "low" culture and "high" culture are overwhelmingly written by men.
If we just selected a woman and a man off the street entirely at random, then maybe you could convince me that there's a slightly better than 50/50 chance that the woman will be a better writer? But I'm not really concerned with the average case. I prefer to spend my time among the "old world giants", as you call them, and their contemporary spiritual successors.
A lot of people in this thread have been echoing the same sentiment and something bothers me about it.
The entire history of literature, the entire history of philosophy (not just the rarefied heights of logic and metaphysics, but all of the parts of philosophy that bring us down to earth too, ethics, politics, the investigation of the human soul), the entire history of what could be called Western humanistic thought, was forged almost entirely by men. Every artistic movement, every advance in the representation of the human psyche be it in word or image, every political ideology to command how people should organize themselves, all of the most probing examinations of the state of the human soul in its various historical epochs... virtually all men. Clearly there has never been a shortage of men who were deeply interested in people. Would Freud's work exist if Freud wasn't interested in people? Would Nietzsche's work exist if Nietzsche wasn't interested in people?
This very forum too. We, mostly men, gather here to discuss people doing people things. The motivations of people, the destiny of people, the norms that bind people.
Granted, we may be able to draw a distinction between being interested in people-as-things vs people-as-people. Maybe wanting to understand the general principles and patterns that govern people, wanting to use individual people as a means of accessing the universal, is a people-as-things approach, while gossiping about how your friend Sally wants a divorce from her husband Dave is a people-as-people approach. But then you would have to declare that essentially the entire history of literature and philosophy is not indicative of any particular interest in people per se, on the part of the authors. That seems very odd.
Joyce's Ulysses is crude and churlish? Ulysses is not elaborate or fancy or eloquent when it goes into the internal workings of the mind?
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I noticed that further up in the thread you also said you experienced more anxiety than the male average as well. Both of these traits are outside the male average, in a more feminine direction. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a slight correlation among traits like this.
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How many Joyces contend for an average Hugo?
Every second-tier female fanfic writer is invested in her characters' feelings and thoughts and dedicates a big part of the work to spelling that out.
Men, like I said, have other avenues to express their core interests.
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Without reaching back to your old world giants - Kurt Vonnegut, Graham Greene, Gabriel García Márquez, Richard Wright, Anthony Powell, William Faulkner, John LeCarre, Cormac McCarthy, Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan - just to name a few off the top of my head. I deliberately chose more or less "literary" authors to avoid wrangling over genres. Note that I'm not endorsing all of these writers or saying they're everyone's cup of tea or that their writing is flawless (and some of them definitely have the "men writing women" problem you allude to), but the list of male writers capable of writing very masculine novels that are still psychologically elaborate and eloquent is longer than you suggest.
I'm not sure if that's really challenging my claim about priorities. Men can reason about psychology, sure. But McCarthy, for example, is famous for a number of enigmatic masculine characters, whose psychology, however nontrivial, is revealed overwhelmingly though action; it's a cinematic «show, don't tell» ethos. Vonnegut's ones came across as alexithymic and somewhat emotionally stunted to me (Slaughterhouse, Cat's Cradle).
Perhaps we could evaluate this just by looking at the proportion of self-referential monologue in text.
«Old World giants» was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I meant chronology and pre-digital culture more than geography, it just occurred to me that my immediate associations are Eurasians, which was not the case with genre fiction I referred to.
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