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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33056 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.

Why should any man care? If the hobby can't 'maintain' men, for whatever reason, then you won't get men. It's of no greater consequence to the average 'bloke' that there aren't any men on some literary prize list than it is of consequence to them that 'Crochet Weekly' didn't feature many men yet again.

I mean, isn't it equally sad that the modding scene for Battlefield 1942 is dead? So much amazing work, some many hours of entertainment. Amazing feats of skill, long lasting friendships, memories of people who worked and played tirelessly for nothing other than love for their craft.

Men tend to just do great things wherever they are. Any creative exercise done by men has the potential to appeal to other men which snowballs itself further and further until the entire thing meets its end and the next thing takes its place. This is a process that has, for all my life, perpetuated itself without any need or input from women or some arbiter of what is good and what is bad. In fact I've only ever seen it hampered by the presence of women or these sorts of arbiters.

To paraphrase a young African American scholar: 'All a nigga knows is all a nigga loves'. There seems to be this unexamined notion that womens hobbies matter. Or that they should matter. Or that what happens around them matters. Which seems fueled entirely by womens sense of self importance. When the reality is that none of it matters any more than some random dead modding scene or that one flash animation on Newgrounds that no one will ever watch again.

Someone hasn't seen The Sims 4 modding, it's run by women for women (and trains too of course)

That would be the exception that proves the rule I'd say.

Same way I'd be pretty confident in guessing that warhammer fanfiction is primarily written by and for men.

You've managed to trigger one of my pet peeves with that phrase haha

Exceptions don't prove the rule, quite literally the opposite, at least in the sense that 99.99% of people use it. Think about it, how does evidence against a hypothesis strengthen it?

I looked up the origins of the phrase, and it's been hopelessly mutated, originally it was used along the lines of:

Imagine you visit a hospital and see a sign saying "visitations allowed between 4-6pm". In that case, this 'exception' proves that there's a rule that visitations aren't allowed outside this window.

Nobody uses it in that sense anymore, and it should be taken behind a shed and shot.

"There are dozens of us! Dozens!"

Pedants of the world unite! We have nothing to lose except our chains, which we can then use on others haha

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