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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'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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