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Notes -
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.
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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