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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.
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.
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.
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.
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