How do you feel about the various Substack literary magazines? I find them all quite exciting! You seem to be exceptionally successful as a contributor to Republic of Letters
Very interesting and vivid story you've written here. It's interesting that what feels like a distortion in the publishing industry (ascendancy of women, a pseudo-censorship of male writers) led to what is considered to be a "seminal coming of age text" in the Riot Grrrl scene (I'm just looking your work up in Wikipedia).
It's a not uncommon story in art where bizarre political or financial pressures that seem like they would pervert a work of art end up making it more compelling (earliest example I can think of is Virgil making the Aeneid as a work of state propaganda)
I'm not a fan of the publishing industry as it is, and I think many people will quibble with you over the degree of "over-feminization" of the industry, but most will have to concede that the direction of your thesis is correct.
You're right that the solution is to move on to new media domains -- indie publishing, and, yes, novel platforms like Substack
Thanks for writing this essay. You've gained my follow, sir!
Interesting. I went through college in 1972 - 76. The women hadn't yet taken over. When they did, it was a complete takeover. I was writing in the 1980s, published in 1995. My agent actually had a 'house' say they would take another look at my novel if I re-wrote it from a female perspective. There was such a thing as 'remove and replace' at the time but I refused.
I think the game is still rigged against straight white male writers. Yeah. a few get through, but only if they emasculate their male characters and stay well within the DEI lane.
Self-publishing is the only recourse. But, the woke gatekeepers have a strangle hold on the literary awards and prizes. Self-published work is absolutely not considered. That has to change if there is ever to be an open playing field.
Yeah, so am I. And my agent found a publisher finally. That book, Calling Crow, was my first and a one-off. I never thought of a series. But after it was published, my agent Richard Curtis and my editor at Putnam/Berkley, asked me to write two more. I sent them the outlines for two more books (Flight of the Crow and Calling Crow Nation) and they sent me a contract. I wrote the two over a period of two years while working a regular job and having a wife and two children. Things have changed big time. I've written about it and don't want to belabor it. Hope you have success with your writing endeavors!
Male writers are effectively banned, you say? On the NYTimes bestseller list (print + e-books combined) male authors hold 3 of the top 4 slots. The rest of the list is pretty fairly divided by gender.
As authors who have been disallowed from publishing can now enter that world—black, lgbtq+, Asian, Hispanic, women—the authors who previously claimed all that space will of course feel their relative territory shrink. But it’s a larger pie now too. We can all fit.
You have a good point -- I don't see male writers as being fully excluded from publishing (there are even *gasp* straight white male writers still being published these days).
My point of disagreement is with the idea that the pie is larger these days. It really does feel like the pie has shrunk, and more and more writers from lots of formally marginalized groups are crowding onto a room with fewer and fewer chairs.
We're all thrust into competition with each other. White male writers are going to feel the loss the deepest because they're experiencing the biggest relative decline. I can sympathize with the frustrations there, to an extent.
My own view is that mathematically, someone is going to feel like they aren't getting their fair shake in publishing (or media more broadly). With the decline in readership -- maybe that's everyone
This line gets repeated a lot but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It's at best half-true, and as Joan Didion said about feminism back in the 70s, "Half-truths, repeated long enough, come to authenticate themselves."
Gay writers, closeted or otherwise, have always been over-represented. Proust, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Burroughs. And women have long been more published than men, their books just don't tend to last. George Eliot wrote under a male name to differentiate herself from the masses of mediocre female writers. I buy discrimination based on race somewhat more, but even that gets complicated.
A lot of feminists use social justice as a pretext to pursue their own ends. You are allowed to pursue your own ends & assert yourself, but don't call it justice. It's getting very tiresome.
Heh. It was a bit of a shock, finding out that the author is male!
The Future is Female! With caveats. For sure, Fiction is Female, writers and readers both. Works for me (mostly). Some of the mooshier romantasy stuff is Not for me.
Banned from publishing? Tell that to Justin Key (The Hospital at the End of the World), Usman Malik, Henry Lien, Adrian Tchaikovsky, John Wiswell, Travis Baldree... the list goes on.
I would like to believe that the current publishing orientation to women writers is based on the book buying market as opposed to gatekeeping gender bias. Do we know factually that men are not buying fiction? There was a new small press exclusively for male writers that recently opened and had to suspend submissions because they were overwhelmed.
Great piece, I love the specific details from your personal experience. There's a piece of this that's maybe implicit in your point about the phenomenon building over time, but I'd like to bring it out: By my own time at this point in life (early 90s), the hot writers were Tartt and Janowicz, AND Easton Ellis and McInerney and early DFW, right? The future was *increasingly* female -- and by this point the future was also increasingly "of-color" and gay and disabled -- but not *exclusively* those things, not yet, that was still to come.
Yes. Truth. We men ARE discriminated against in big publishing and have been for about a decade now. Longer, even. But so are women, Black and Hispanic and Asian writers with the 'wrong' ideology. Thanks for the piece. Honest.
Who is going to start the Substack small press that is so needed to shift the gears here?
How do you feel about the various Substack literary magazines? I find them all quite exciting! You seem to be exceptionally successful as a contributor to Republic of Letters
I want to start my own. But they are costly to build and run. They are very tough to sustain without institutional or private funding.
but why? You're already substack famous!
Very interesting and vivid story you've written here. It's interesting that what feels like a distortion in the publishing industry (ascendancy of women, a pseudo-censorship of male writers) led to what is considered to be a "seminal coming of age text" in the Riot Grrrl scene (I'm just looking your work up in Wikipedia).
It's a not uncommon story in art where bizarre political or financial pressures that seem like they would pervert a work of art end up making it more compelling (earliest example I can think of is Virgil making the Aeneid as a work of state propaganda)
I'm not a fan of the publishing industry as it is, and I think many people will quibble with you over the degree of "over-feminization" of the industry, but most will have to concede that the direction of your thesis is correct.
You're right that the solution is to move on to new media domains -- indie publishing, and, yes, novel platforms like Substack
Thanks for writing this essay. You've gained my follow, sir!
You say the future is female, I say the future is fibromyalgia. Maybe we're both right.
"The future is a lovely thing to contemplate, but in the final analysis, it is where we go to die."
-- John Maynard Keynes (1883-1946)
I don't know if it's true that male writers can't get published. I suspect they can and do.
I think the problem is that fiction today is too refined.
That's probably the result of the rise of the MFA Industrial Complex in the postwar period.
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/are-women-preventing-men-from-publishing
Interesting. I went through college in 1972 - 76. The women hadn't yet taken over. When they did, it was a complete takeover. I was writing in the 1980s, published in 1995. My agent actually had a 'house' say they would take another look at my novel if I re-wrote it from a female perspective. There was such a thing as 'remove and replace' at the time but I refused.
I think the game is still rigged against straight white male writers. Yeah. a few get through, but only if they emasculate their male characters and stay well within the DEI lane.
Self-publishing is the only recourse. But, the woke gatekeepers have a strangle hold on the literary awards and prizes. Self-published work is absolutely not considered. That has to change if there is ever to be an open playing field.
Glad you refused
Yeah, so am I. And my agent found a publisher finally. That book, Calling Crow, was my first and a one-off. I never thought of a series. But after it was published, my agent Richard Curtis and my editor at Putnam/Berkley, asked me to write two more. I sent them the outlines for two more books (Flight of the Crow and Calling Crow Nation) and they sent me a contract. I wrote the two over a period of two years while working a regular job and having a wife and two children. Things have changed big time. I've written about it and don't want to belabor it. Hope you have success with your writing endeavors!
Male writers are effectively banned, you say? On the NYTimes bestseller list (print + e-books combined) male authors hold 3 of the top 4 slots. The rest of the list is pretty fairly divided by gender.
As authors who have been disallowed from publishing can now enter that world—black, lgbtq+, Asian, Hispanic, women—the authors who previously claimed all that space will of course feel their relative territory shrink. But it’s a larger pie now too. We can all fit.
You have a good point -- I don't see male writers as being fully excluded from publishing (there are even *gasp* straight white male writers still being published these days).
My point of disagreement is with the idea that the pie is larger these days. It really does feel like the pie has shrunk, and more and more writers from lots of formally marginalized groups are crowding onto a room with fewer and fewer chairs.
We're all thrust into competition with each other. White male writers are going to feel the loss the deepest because they're experiencing the biggest relative decline. I can sympathize with the frustrations there, to an extent.
My own view is that mathematically, someone is going to feel like they aren't getting their fair shake in publishing (or media more broadly). With the decline in readership -- maybe that's everyone
This line gets repeated a lot but it doesn't stand up to scrutiny. It's at best half-true, and as Joan Didion said about feminism back in the 70s, "Half-truths, repeated long enough, come to authenticate themselves."
Gay writers, closeted or otherwise, have always been over-represented. Proust, Henry James, D. H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Willa Cather, Burroughs. And women have long been more published than men, their books just don't tend to last. George Eliot wrote under a male name to differentiate herself from the masses of mediocre female writers. I buy discrimination based on race somewhat more, but even that gets complicated.
A lot of feminists use social justice as a pretext to pursue their own ends. You are allowed to pursue your own ends & assert yourself, but don't call it justice. It's getting very tiresome.
Watch my eyes roll all the way off the back of my head.
Amen 🙏
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/are-women-preventing-men-from-publishing
Heh. It was a bit of a shock, finding out that the author is male!
The Future is Female! With caveats. For sure, Fiction is Female, writers and readers both. Works for me (mostly). Some of the mooshier romantasy stuff is Not for me.
Banned from publishing? Tell that to Justin Key (The Hospital at the End of the World), Usman Malik, Henry Lien, Adrian Tchaikovsky, John Wiswell, Travis Baldree... the list goes on.
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/are-women-preventing-men-from-publishing
I would like to believe that the current publishing orientation to women writers is based on the book buying market as opposed to gatekeeping gender bias. Do we know factually that men are not buying fiction? There was a new small press exclusively for male writers that recently opened and had to suspend submissions because they were overwhelmed.
https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/are-women-preventing-men-from-publishing
Great piece, I love the specific details from your personal experience. There's a piece of this that's maybe implicit in your point about the phenomenon building over time, but I'd like to bring it out: By my own time at this point in life (early 90s), the hot writers were Tartt and Janowicz, AND Easton Ellis and McInerney and early DFW, right? The future was *increasingly* female -- and by this point the future was also increasingly "of-color" and gay and disabled -- but not *exclusively* those things, not yet, that was still to come.
We're here!
Thought provoking piece. Also, p.s. "bahahaha" clasps fingers together like Dr. Evil in Austin Powers.
Yes. Truth. We men ARE discriminated against in big publishing and have been for about a decade now. Longer, even. But so are women, Black and Hispanic and Asian writers with the 'wrong' ideology. Thanks for the piece. Honest.