I am on the elist of many major national literary / performing arts organizations. I receive their announcements regularly. Two of these organizations emailed me just recently to introduce their 2024-2025 fellows, which provide full funding or partial funding for new work. Neither of these organizations included any white men, nor did they include white women for that matter, as the recipients of these fellowships. Every year for the past several years it's been the same thing.
We want everyone to be reading more. We want more points of view represented. We want our minds and our world to open up to ideas. That’s what art should do. I’m not sure the problem is that agents and editors are more likely to be women; I’m a woman and some of my favorite writers are men and many of the best books I’ve read over the past twenty years have been written by men. I think the legacy publishing world is justifiably scared of the shaky economics of the profession and so they hew to a very narrow ideological spectrum to be safe. Agents need to make money so they take on what they think will sell. I think saying women only like work by other women is probably off base and doesn’t give us credit. But I do hope we figure out and take seriously the question of why men aren’t reading (if there really has been a change in that percentage. Did men used to read more novels than women? How long ago?) and we need to worry about the decline in numbers of all readers. And I’m so happy with Substack and for the opportunity it creates for all writers.
Thanks for reading and for the astute comment. I don't think I was that binary: I'm not saying women agents ONLY want to rep women writers, I'm saying there's a publishing culture now, in my view, which rewards women, overall and in general, much more than men. And when you do find contemporary authors, it generally seems sort of "de-fanged," drained of all the blood, guts and toughness which all men experience and feel in real life. We don't see ourselves in literature anymore, to the extent that literature even exists at this point. Women, by contrast, see themselves all over literary novels. Maybe that's just the way it goes. But even if that's true and I think some adjustments and new opportunities for men could help. We have seen some of this, of course, but not enough.
There's a correlation. Not all women will read only women authors, but people tend to like things they can relate to, so a more heavily female publishing staff will get more women authors. Since people tend to be herd animals, small discrepancies will increase over time.
Good point and I think it boils down to a publishing industry where all readers are ultimately underserved when one particular viewpoint is vastly over represented
The adage about the three kinds of lies (lies, damned lies, and statistics) might be hovering somewhere above to this topic.
For example, a roughly 6:4 female:male ratio in agents might be about as balanced as one could reasonably expect given the particulars of that type of job.
Furthermore, the Zippia site doesn’t say a word that I could find about what kind of “study” this ratio was derived from, how the study was conducted, sample sizes, etc. It just says “According to the data,” but we don’t see the “data,” just simple statistics, which look a little AI-ish in their presentation. Pretty sure they didn’t use what we call, you know, statisticians, who always cite or describe surveys. Always.
The NPR article makes it clear about how men absolutely dominate the film business. What’s a greater influence on the young male? Movies? Or, er, novels?
And the NBER study by the guy mentioned in the NPR article says “The study does not find any evidence that publishing of increased numbers of female-authored books crowds out publishing of books by male authors.”
The 2015 survey behind the 78% of publisher staff that’s female doesn’t fully break down what kinds of jobs they’re doing. KFC’s workforce is probably mostly female too, but that doesn’t necessarily mean women are making decisions about the fried chicken business.
And in the NEA survey, if we look at all books, then 40% of all men in 2022 were reading them, vs. 56% of all women. But what’s interesting to me is that how close the percentages were across all age groups. In fact, one could almost argue that the older you are, the less likely you are (slightly) to read a book, or a novel, which seems counterintuitive — aren’t we always lamenting how “young people” don’t read? (Also interesting: how less than 10% of all adults read poetry. Surely that’s the reason for the decline of empire.)
Michael, your piece reads like a good-faith effort at tackling this most tedious of topics, but I don’t believe the second part is supported very well by what you cite in the first part. These surveys, such as they are, were not designed to answer the kinds of questions you’re asking.
Are male authors getting a fair shake? I don’t know. In any case, that’s not even in my list of top 100 concerns.
Sure, this argument can be used for any data set. What's clear though, regardless of exact specifics in every nuanced angle, is that, in general, more women read novels, more women are getting novels published, more novels discuss women's subjects and ideas, most agents are women, etc.
The problem is that the market is already flooded with stories of men - stories that dominate TV and the movies. And these are stories of big visual events and big visual actions that are also privileged in video and film, which strongly appeal to men. That’s were all the male writing is. Who can then be surprised that women look elsewhere for story and come to dominate the literary market where those stories can gain a stronger foothold?
If you're going to talk about the story pie, you need to talk about all of it. Otherwise, all these articles miss the forest for the trees.
That said, film, TV, and literary stories can all be improved. Vastly. Very funny and insightful novels could be written that dramatize and or/rotate around these imbalances. You could get a much deeper exploration of the issues involved that way too, both conceptually and emotionally, far moreso than any essay can achieve. Even a short story on this topic, if well done, could easily far surpass the impact of a few stats, opinions, and conclusions. This is how to force deeper thinking, psychologizing, and impact on the complex and profound elements of this topic.
There is high comedy in all this, that's for sure, right along with dripping contempt, and potentially all sorts of serious issues, depending on how well it's done, aesthetically and otherwise. This may be the most effective way to approach the issue, as you see it, or as it might be seen, in the literary world: approach it head-on, fictionalize the issue from the point of view of everyone. Ironically, many times over, such a story or novel would need to transcend any identity politics fixation to do it well.
Yeah, I think I agree. Our moment for so many reasons is ripe for satire. Andrew Boryga did this with his new novel Victim, and it was done brilliantly in the film (based off the novel), American Fiction.
Boryga's novel Victim and Everett's novel Erasure are stories about fraud, frauds, and exploitation with Black and Puerto Rican male protagonists acting in essentially corrupt societal and institutional realms.
Well, who are the heavy-hitting bone-chilling white male counterparts in this? JD Vance and the whole fraudulent and exploitative right-wing "populist" circus and cesspool - in media, entertainment, politics, etc.
Any ambitious novelist who wants to explore straight white male masculinity, identity, and any related themes would be crazy not to start there, in any part of that, of any size - and probably continue forever without end.
There's more than one great American novel in that lethal cesspool. It's no slight thing. It goes far beyond identity but has very deep roots in that as well. All the tough white male novelists out there should be taking on that shit headfirst. Or any novelist at all for that matter.
It will be biting and it won't be pretty, but it could also be poignant and self-deprecating - that is, full of subversive wit and self insight and personal and social understanding.
I mean, it wouldn't be easy to do - not with those murderous clowns. You would need some strong alternate side characters or a wholly different protagonist to look in on the vicious disease that has metastasized throughout the entire establishment and society, let alone throughout all the infernal JD Gatsby's out there.
It could be done better than F. Scott Fitzgerald ever did it, and surely it should be.
Such novels recognize that "Criticism, like charity, starts at home," per Wole Soyinka.
If you're not willing to dive deep into criticism, forget writing about any identity that exists in society at all. Same goes for any social or political issue.
Maybe do everyone a huge and daring favor and totally unwrap white male identity from the imperial flag, for once and for always. And then if the establishment doesn't have the guts or integrity to publish it, you'll need to go another way.
I personally enjoy reading men's writing and have discovered many new male writers (fiction and nonfiction) on Substack. This site is providing us with more access to writers from around the world. I love that about it.
I do think that genre fiction has more male writers being published (and there's definitely far more readers of genre fiction than there are of literary fiction).
Hmmm. Maybe? I think my original version of my essay (this one was edited down) included the stats on that; I think women still dominate even in genre but I could be wrong. I'll check.
I have some vague memory that men are reported to predominate reading westerns and science fiction.
There's a whole other story looking at science fiction/fantasy. Though probably not relevant to your broader issues. There's a sense that the more "fantasy" a work is, the more female its readership, and the more "hard SF" a work is, the more male. Though even if that is statistically correct, it's probably only economically relevant to a small degree.
Sci-fi and fantasy have leaned heavily female for new authors, though you still have the late-20th and 2000s titans like Brandon Sanderson floating around.
This kind of reminds me of the quota system in Indian universities. There is a huge movement to include minorities, so there are seats left specifically for them. But at who’s expense? If there are two candidates for a seat, and we both judge them only by criteria of intelligence, but one of them is poor and the other one is privileged who gets to have that seat? Does the intelligent student who might be rich get rejected because political correctness tells us that the minority student should be given for his priority? The minority student should be given attention. Yes , but not priority. I completely agree with you. As a female, I feel terribly sorry for what men have to go through these days. To justify themselves, to protect themselves against their own actions, so that they are not misconstrued as something else. It must be so stressful to be a man in today’s world.
Hi. Thanks for reading the piece. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, it's complicated for sure. I don't think there's any one right answer. I certainly don't claim that men are victims. But I do see an imbalance, and I think there's an opportunity for adjustment in the literary world.
I have given up on monetization here. The only people that can do that effectively are the ones that came over to Substack from some other platform bringing their followers with them.
I don’t have any followers like that and I would rather people see my content than not.
I think the whole Substack system just flawed, I think we all have subscription fatigue. Personally, I don’t want to pay five dollars a month or anything a month anymore for anything else.
I would like to see the stats on how many people actually earn a living on Substack. Given that conventional authors uniformly report that it's really difficult to earn a living publishing, and that a handful of Substack writers have mentioned that they do (or could) earn a living at it, the economics may have shifted substantially.
Women write more because we are sidelined from many other places and we are able to write in the small spaces we have in between taking care of everyone.
I would love to have a corporate job but the job market wants nothing to do with women my age. I write FT for low pay and no benefits for exactly this reason: It’s under my control and I don’t need some ageist HR person to grant me an opportunity.
This is a case of women trying to find a way to make it — NOT a matter of men being pushed out.
Next, write one about women hogging up all the oh-so-desirable jobs in daycare centers.
(Your novel was not rejected because you’re a man. Your novel was rejected because MOST novels are rejected. I self-publish for this reason.)
You studied journalism and worked at a corporate job as a writer. You also recently bragged about making more money on Substack than at any corporate job you had. Just because journalism is dying isn’t agism.
I mean, this is the reason I sold all the books I had on how to write novels to my local 'entertainment exchange'. Hopefully they'll do someone some good, and I bought a copy of The Killing Joke.
But, burying a dream carries a certain grim clarity in the aftermath. (I know...why so serious?) So I'll do my best.
I think a lot more men got driven off by visual media like video games, movies, video games, manga, video games, anime, and video games. Men are just more visual, most famously in the gender split in erotica between romance novels (often quite pornographic!) and visual pornography. So you get a sort of feedback loop where there are no new books for men to read, so men don't read, so you can't make money selling to them, so new books get made for them... Of course if it were a left-coded group like Black people not reading there would be a big rush to make books that appealed to them.
I think there's also a relationship between genre and literary fiction people on either side don't like to admit--a lot of people come to literary through genre (or even comic books) as their tastes evolve as they grow older, and that pipeline is now shut for men as fantasy and scifi are now looking for women among newer authors (the present legacy authors like Brandon Sanderson notwithstanding). Still, you have new genres like litRPG that often have little respectability, but there are so many people writing I'm sure some of it's going to develop literary value eventually.
Also, the left's identity turn has something to do with this. The Old Left would have been scouring the world for working-class authors, probably half of whom would be male. We haven't really seen the Great Uber Driver Novel or the Great Amazon Warehouse Staff Novel, though such people are as human as any MFA grad and might well have more interesting stories to tell. (Think about how many people an Uber driver talks to.)
I have my doubts Substack is going to really replace the publishing industry. But, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had. As we've seen in cases like Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl, eventually there's too much money left on the table for everyone to resist.
How much any of this has to do with Trump's victory I'm not sure--an awful lot of presidential election boils down to 'inflation + unemployment'. There's a larger problem in that men's and women's interests diverge and are in many ways opposed, and you can't really explore the male experience without letting them say things that are offensive to women, and in particular feminists. Men think about having sex with more women than will agree to have sex with them, fear rejection, and fear false accusations of wrongdoing. And feminism is a big part of the left, and their support base and party rank and file is heavily female. So to some extent, any attempt to honestly explore the male experience has to be outside of control by the left. It doesn't have to be antiwoke, but it can't be woke.
Thanks for the essay. As for men reading less, I can share an anecdote. I used to frequent a local bookstore and really loved their recommendations for science fiction and fantasy. But, over time, the recommendations started to change. The most noticeable year was 2015, which, I found out in retrospect, was the year of the Sad Puppies incident. My first hand experience was, “man, all of these recommendations are really bad.” I didn’t find out until later about the push to get specific demographics of writers published. After that, year after year, I found fewer and fewer new books that were worth reading. They all covered themes I didn’t strongly relate to about characters I didn’t really like or identify with. When I brought it up at the bookstore, I got a lecture about reading outside of my comfort zone. These days, I tend to read older books. I am currently reading Middlemarch and have a number of other classics on the list. I’ve also learned to use Chat-GPT and other tools to figure out whether a series I see recommended has themes I don’t like (the presence of a strong political or social justice message is often deliberately obfuscated in reviews). My stance is often represented as “white men can’t stand to read about diverse experiences,” which is both inaccurate and typical of the “there is no problem / if there is a problem it’s yours” kind of thinking.
Well, there you go. Now you understand what most women have dealt with their entire life... having to read stories that don't touch on the issues of importance to them. Can you imagine all those hundreds of books we (women) had to plow through in college and maybe 2 were written by women. UGH. And I would have to agree with whoever gave the lecture about reading outside your comfort zone. We all need that lecture. Not understanding all the variations of people in this world is why our country is a dumpster fire right now. Getting out of one's cul-de-sac of comfort and riding up into the hills = good.
Here’s a kind of sideways thought: the lack of pay for intro positions may not only favor rich kids, but especially rich *daughters*.
More widely, it seems like women are able to take chancier or shorter term positions, and this plays against them in general pay-scale considerations. But it’s then far easier to try this career, which has low compensation and high risk (of burnout, “not making it”, etc.). Then add the culture and self-selecting taste, and that may be at list a bit of *why* it happened.
An interesting point ... It's notorious that men prioritize making money more than women do (and are judged more based on their income). In our culture, a young woman who holds a prestigious type of employment at low pay is not disadvantaged in looking for a spouse, whereas a man is.
Right. Men are judged more on income in terms of attractiveness (it's roughly equivalent to beauty for women--not the only factor but the predominant one), so they tend to avoid 'glamour industries' like publishing, fashion, and so on that have high prestige but low income.
It certainly seems to be a reasonable demand. Indeed, it should be straightforward for a woman to look at a list of "books a lot of men read", write one in a similar vein, and men would read it. If the male readers are actually filtering on the apparent gender of the author, that can be fixed by a pseudonym. (Hmmm, the tale of James Tiptree is relevant here.)
But this points to the question of whether the themes that men like (particularly in literary fiction) are different from the themes women like, and whether male/female authors tend to be biased in their themes along these lines. Though given this column, I would hardly be surprised if literary agents and editors are biased in what themes they prefer to publish and that may interact with what themes different demographics like to read.
I'm a white, male, middle-class Canadian writer who was recently hired by an NYC friend I've known 30 years to edit his newly completed first novel. We're both in our 60s. His book blew my effing mind. It's unpretentiously eloquent, highly accessible, current, sexy, original, funny as hell and written entirely from a white, upper middle-class male's perspective. Not to say it's sexist, racist, classist, etc. -- in fact, the logline is: Protagonist loses everything that makes him middle class and so, forced to eat, takes a low-paying job that delivers him unexpected redemption through the humbling nature of the work.
My friend is well aware that no publisher will likely want to touch his book, no matter how great it is, and he fortunately doesn't need the money it could potentially generate. He wrote it because he had to scratch a creative itch.
I'm no critic or lit prof, but think he's a living American treasure and deserves to be internationally celebrated thus. But this will likely never happen.
To me, the publishing world's notion, that straight white men have had their run and and it's time for everyone else, gets it only a little bit right. While I agree it's time everyone got a fair go, I'm certain there's still a big and profitable market for books like my friend's, and also that it's not just women who like to read.
The "male who reads novels" demographic didn't die of natural causes 15-20 years ago; it was intentionally starved of new reading material by the narrow-minded gate-keepers you mention who were following the lead of leftist university profs who themselves have failed at the jobs they were hired for -- namely offering a "universal" (as in "university") education to young people seeking it so they can be taken seriously in the world they head out to engage after graduating.
The whole idea is so anti-Darwinian and self-defeating that it can't survive without taking down the culture with it -- which is arguably happening and much enhanced by the right's backlash last US election.
I'm old enough to remember when we celebrated writers simply, and rightfully, and only because they wrote well. Now we're told we must celebrate writers who deserve to be celebrated, based on a narrow and gate-kept definition of "deserve", even when their books are not well-written. Even if those books don't sell, more like them keep on coming because the self-hating elitist weirdos in academia and NYC letters deem it so.
At some point, you'd imagine publishers waking up to their own suicidal tendencies. But are they? Will they?
My younger sister, a comedy writing teacher at a community college who's been witnessing ultra-wokeness ruining everything for everyone on campus (including those it's meant to elevate), is now reading my pal's book and loving it. We both feel it's a book for anyone who struggles with unfairness, bad luck, dark turns, paying bills, raising kids, managing a marriage, holding onto one's dignity, keeping a sense of humour when life turns to excrement... including the millions of young and old men who'd love to sit down with a page-turny, relatable, satisfying story they could devour over a weekend, but are having trouble finding them lately.
I agree with you: Substack is a godsend. I believe it could, and maybe should, wipe out the trad publishing industry for the Darwinian reasons so studiously ignored by that industry for so long.
Thank you for writing this, and weathering the inevitable blowback that boringly follows these things. All too often, if you so much as notice the transparent success of the identity revolution that the progressive left has ushered in / imposed, you get attacked and eye-rolled by the people who a) celebrated the revolution in the first place and b) benefited. The winners are unable to accept that they won because it threatens their underdog status which they can never concede to the losers since it's the source of their power. And no one wants to admit that the game might now be rigged in their favor.
Or the men taking all those jobs in hazmat cleanup, heavy equipment mechanics, roofing, concrete work...
It's great you are doing what many others complain about. This platform has the capacity to be a great leveler, especially for those of us on the backside of life.
I am on the elist of many major national literary / performing arts organizations. I receive their announcements regularly. Two of these organizations emailed me just recently to introduce their 2024-2025 fellows, which provide full funding or partial funding for new work. Neither of these organizations included any white men, nor did they include white women for that matter, as the recipients of these fellowships. Every year for the past several years it's been the same thing.
Has anyone else noticed this?
Yep. Read this. Even just the opening page.
Read your essay? I did. I don’t have any arguments with it. I think you are observing the impact of the past 10-15 years on the literary arts.
We want everyone to be reading more. We want more points of view represented. We want our minds and our world to open up to ideas. That’s what art should do. I’m not sure the problem is that agents and editors are more likely to be women; I’m a woman and some of my favorite writers are men and many of the best books I’ve read over the past twenty years have been written by men. I think the legacy publishing world is justifiably scared of the shaky economics of the profession and so they hew to a very narrow ideological spectrum to be safe. Agents need to make money so they take on what they think will sell. I think saying women only like work by other women is probably off base and doesn’t give us credit. But I do hope we figure out and take seriously the question of why men aren’t reading (if there really has been a change in that percentage. Did men used to read more novels than women? How long ago?) and we need to worry about the decline in numbers of all readers. And I’m so happy with Substack and for the opportunity it creates for all writers.
Thanks for reading and for the astute comment. I don't think I was that binary: I'm not saying women agents ONLY want to rep women writers, I'm saying there's a publishing culture now, in my view, which rewards women, overall and in general, much more than men. And when you do find contemporary authors, it generally seems sort of "de-fanged," drained of all the blood, guts and toughness which all men experience and feel in real life. We don't see ourselves in literature anymore, to the extent that literature even exists at this point. Women, by contrast, see themselves all over literary novels. Maybe that's just the way it goes. But even if that's true and I think some adjustments and new opportunities for men could help. We have seen some of this, of course, but not enough.
There's a correlation. Not all women will read only women authors, but people tend to like things they can relate to, so a more heavily female publishing staff will get more women authors. Since people tend to be herd animals, small discrepancies will increase over time.
Good point and I think it boils down to a publishing industry where all readers are ultimately underserved when one particular viewpoint is vastly over represented
The adage about the three kinds of lies (lies, damned lies, and statistics) might be hovering somewhere above to this topic.
For example, a roughly 6:4 female:male ratio in agents might be about as balanced as one could reasonably expect given the particulars of that type of job.
Furthermore, the Zippia site doesn’t say a word that I could find about what kind of “study” this ratio was derived from, how the study was conducted, sample sizes, etc. It just says “According to the data,” but we don’t see the “data,” just simple statistics, which look a little AI-ish in their presentation. Pretty sure they didn’t use what we call, you know, statisticians, who always cite or describe surveys. Always.
The NPR article makes it clear about how men absolutely dominate the film business. What’s a greater influence on the young male? Movies? Or, er, novels?
And the NBER study by the guy mentioned in the NPR article says “The study does not find any evidence that publishing of increased numbers of female-authored books crowds out publishing of books by male authors.”
The 2015 survey behind the 78% of publisher staff that’s female doesn’t fully break down what kinds of jobs they’re doing. KFC’s workforce is probably mostly female too, but that doesn’t necessarily mean women are making decisions about the fried chicken business.
And in the NEA survey, if we look at all books, then 40% of all men in 2022 were reading them, vs. 56% of all women. But what’s interesting to me is that how close the percentages were across all age groups. In fact, one could almost argue that the older you are, the less likely you are (slightly) to read a book, or a novel, which seems counterintuitive — aren’t we always lamenting how “young people” don’t read? (Also interesting: how less than 10% of all adults read poetry. Surely that’s the reason for the decline of empire.)
Michael, your piece reads like a good-faith effort at tackling this most tedious of topics, but I don’t believe the second part is supported very well by what you cite in the first part. These surveys, such as they are, were not designed to answer the kinds of questions you’re asking.
Are male authors getting a fair shake? I don’t know. In any case, that’s not even in my list of top 100 concerns.
Sure, this argument can be used for any data set. What's clear though, regardless of exact specifics in every nuanced angle, is that, in general, more women read novels, more women are getting novels published, more novels discuss women's subjects and ideas, most agents are women, etc.
Thank you for taking the time to break down the specious argument of this post.
The problem is that the market is already flooded with stories of men - stories that dominate TV and the movies. And these are stories of big visual events and big visual actions that are also privileged in video and film, which strongly appeal to men. That’s were all the male writing is. Who can then be surprised that women look elsewhere for story and come to dominate the literary market where those stories can gain a stronger foothold?
If you're going to talk about the story pie, you need to talk about all of it. Otherwise, all these articles miss the forest for the trees.
That said, film, TV, and literary stories can all be improved. Vastly. Very funny and insightful novels could be written that dramatize and or/rotate around these imbalances. You could get a much deeper exploration of the issues involved that way too, both conceptually and emotionally, far moreso than any essay can achieve. Even a short story on this topic, if well done, could easily far surpass the impact of a few stats, opinions, and conclusions. This is how to force deeper thinking, psychologizing, and impact on the complex and profound elements of this topic.
There is high comedy in all this, that's for sure, right along with dripping contempt, and potentially all sorts of serious issues, depending on how well it's done, aesthetically and otherwise. This may be the most effective way to approach the issue, as you see it, or as it might be seen, in the literary world: approach it head-on, fictionalize the issue from the point of view of everyone. Ironically, many times over, such a story or novel would need to transcend any identity politics fixation to do it well.
Yeah, I think I agree. Our moment for so many reasons is ripe for satire. Andrew Boryga did this with his new novel Victim, and it was done brilliantly in the film (based off the novel), American Fiction.
Boryga's novel Victim and Everett's novel Erasure are stories about fraud, frauds, and exploitation with Black and Puerto Rican male protagonists acting in essentially corrupt societal and institutional realms.
Well, who are the heavy-hitting bone-chilling white male counterparts in this? JD Vance and the whole fraudulent and exploitative right-wing "populist" circus and cesspool - in media, entertainment, politics, etc.
Any ambitious novelist who wants to explore straight white male masculinity, identity, and any related themes would be crazy not to start there, in any part of that, of any size - and probably continue forever without end.
There's more than one great American novel in that lethal cesspool. It's no slight thing. It goes far beyond identity but has very deep roots in that as well. All the tough white male novelists out there should be taking on that shit headfirst. Or any novelist at all for that matter.
It will be biting and it won't be pretty, but it could also be poignant and self-deprecating - that is, full of subversive wit and self insight and personal and social understanding.
I mean, it wouldn't be easy to do - not with those murderous clowns. You would need some strong alternate side characters or a wholly different protagonist to look in on the vicious disease that has metastasized throughout the entire establishment and society, let alone throughout all the infernal JD Gatsby's out there.
It could be done better than F. Scott Fitzgerald ever did it, and surely it should be.
Such novels recognize that "Criticism, like charity, starts at home," per Wole Soyinka.
If you're not willing to dive deep into criticism, forget writing about any identity that exists in society at all. Same goes for any social or political issue.
Maybe do everyone a huge and daring favor and totally unwrap white male identity from the imperial flag, for once and for always. And then if the establishment doesn't have the guts or integrity to publish it, you'll need to go another way.
The data here is brilliant. It's hard to have conversations on the subject without including it. Thanks for this piece, Michael
Thanks, Anthony!
I personally enjoy reading men's writing and have discovered many new male writers (fiction and nonfiction) on Substack. This site is providing us with more access to writers from around the world. I love that about it.
I do think that genre fiction has more male writers being published (and there's definitely far more readers of genre fiction than there are of literary fiction).
Hmmm. Maybe? I think my original version of my essay (this one was edited down) included the stats on that; I think women still dominate even in genre but I could be wrong. I'll check.
I have some vague memory that men are reported to predominate reading westerns and science fiction.
There's a whole other story looking at science fiction/fantasy. Though probably not relevant to your broader issues. There's a sense that the more "fantasy" a work is, the more female its readership, and the more "hard SF" a work is, the more male. Though even if that is statistically correct, it's probably only economically relevant to a small degree.
Sci-fi and fantasy have leaned heavily female for new authors, though you still have the late-20th and 2000s titans like Brandon Sanderson floating around.
This kind of reminds me of the quota system in Indian universities. There is a huge movement to include minorities, so there are seats left specifically for them. But at who’s expense? If there are two candidates for a seat, and we both judge them only by criteria of intelligence, but one of them is poor and the other one is privileged who gets to have that seat? Does the intelligent student who might be rich get rejected because political correctness tells us that the minority student should be given for his priority? The minority student should be given attention. Yes , but not priority. I completely agree with you. As a female, I feel terribly sorry for what men have to go through these days. To justify themselves, to protect themselves against their own actions, so that they are not misconstrued as something else. It must be so stressful to be a man in today’s world.
Hi. Thanks for reading the piece. I'm glad you enjoyed it. Yeah, it's complicated for sure. I don't think there's any one right answer. I certainly don't claim that men are victims. But I do see an imbalance, and I think there's an opportunity for adjustment in the literary world.
Just abandon traditional publishing…
https://kennetheharrell.substack.com/p/the-age-of-publishing-gatekeepers
Touche. Feel ya.
I know too many stories of men told no I am like guys just walk away from that BS
I have given up on monetization here. The only people that can do that effectively are the ones that came over to Substack from some other platform bringing their followers with them.
I don’t have any followers like that and I would rather people see my content than not.
I think the whole Substack system just flawed, I think we all have subscription fatigue. Personally, I don’t want to pay five dollars a month or anything a month anymore for anything else.
I would like to see the stats on how many people actually earn a living on Substack. Given that conventional authors uniformly report that it's really difficult to earn a living publishing, and that a handful of Substack writers have mentioned that they do (or could) earn a living at it, the economics may have shifted substantially.
Women write more because we are sidelined from many other places and we are able to write in the small spaces we have in between taking care of everyone.
I would love to have a corporate job but the job market wants nothing to do with women my age. I write FT for low pay and no benefits for exactly this reason: It’s under my control and I don’t need some ageist HR person to grant me an opportunity.
This is a case of women trying to find a way to make it — NOT a matter of men being pushed out.
Next, write one about women hogging up all the oh-so-desirable jobs in daycare centers.
(Your novel was not rejected because you’re a man. Your novel was rejected because MOST novels are rejected. I self-publish for this reason.)
You studied journalism and worked at a corporate job as a writer. You also recently bragged about making more money on Substack than at any corporate job you had. Just because journalism is dying isn’t agism.
I mean, this is the reason I sold all the books I had on how to write novels to my local 'entertainment exchange'. Hopefully they'll do someone some good, and I bought a copy of The Killing Joke.
But, burying a dream carries a certain grim clarity in the aftermath. (I know...why so serious?) So I'll do my best.
I think a lot more men got driven off by visual media like video games, movies, video games, manga, video games, anime, and video games. Men are just more visual, most famously in the gender split in erotica between romance novels (often quite pornographic!) and visual pornography. So you get a sort of feedback loop where there are no new books for men to read, so men don't read, so you can't make money selling to them, so new books get made for them... Of course if it were a left-coded group like Black people not reading there would be a big rush to make books that appealed to them.
I think there's also a relationship between genre and literary fiction people on either side don't like to admit--a lot of people come to literary through genre (or even comic books) as their tastes evolve as they grow older, and that pipeline is now shut for men as fantasy and scifi are now looking for women among newer authors (the present legacy authors like Brandon Sanderson notwithstanding). Still, you have new genres like litRPG that often have little respectability, but there are so many people writing I'm sure some of it's going to develop literary value eventually.
Also, the left's identity turn has something to do with this. The Old Left would have been scouring the world for working-class authors, probably half of whom would be male. We haven't really seen the Great Uber Driver Novel or the Great Amazon Warehouse Staff Novel, though such people are as human as any MFA grad and might well have more interesting stories to tell. (Think about how many people an Uber driver talks to.)
I have my doubts Substack is going to really replace the publishing industry. But, you go to war with the army you have, not the army you wish you had. As we've seen in cases like Matt Dinniman's Dungeon Crawler Carl, eventually there's too much money left on the table for everyone to resist.
How much any of this has to do with Trump's victory I'm not sure--an awful lot of presidential election boils down to 'inflation + unemployment'. There's a larger problem in that men's and women's interests diverge and are in many ways opposed, and you can't really explore the male experience without letting them say things that are offensive to women, and in particular feminists. Men think about having sex with more women than will agree to have sex with them, fear rejection, and fear false accusations of wrongdoing. And feminism is a big part of the left, and their support base and party rank and file is heavily female. So to some extent, any attempt to honestly explore the male experience has to be outside of control by the left. It doesn't have to be antiwoke, but it can't be woke.
Thanks for the essay. As for men reading less, I can share an anecdote. I used to frequent a local bookstore and really loved their recommendations for science fiction and fantasy. But, over time, the recommendations started to change. The most noticeable year was 2015, which, I found out in retrospect, was the year of the Sad Puppies incident. My first hand experience was, “man, all of these recommendations are really bad.” I didn’t find out until later about the push to get specific demographics of writers published. After that, year after year, I found fewer and fewer new books that were worth reading. They all covered themes I didn’t strongly relate to about characters I didn’t really like or identify with. When I brought it up at the bookstore, I got a lecture about reading outside of my comfort zone. These days, I tend to read older books. I am currently reading Middlemarch and have a number of other classics on the list. I’ve also learned to use Chat-GPT and other tools to figure out whether a series I see recommended has themes I don’t like (the presence of a strong political or social justice message is often deliberately obfuscated in reviews). My stance is often represented as “white men can’t stand to read about diverse experiences,” which is both inaccurate and typical of the “there is no problem / if there is a problem it’s yours” kind of thinking.
Well, there you go. Now you understand what most women have dealt with their entire life... having to read stories that don't touch on the issues of importance to them. Can you imagine all those hundreds of books we (women) had to plow through in college and maybe 2 were written by women. UGH. And I would have to agree with whoever gave the lecture about reading outside your comfort zone. We all need that lecture. Not understanding all the variations of people in this world is why our country is a dumpster fire right now. Getting out of one's cul-de-sac of comfort and riding up into the hills = good.
Here’s a kind of sideways thought: the lack of pay for intro positions may not only favor rich kids, but especially rich *daughters*.
More widely, it seems like women are able to take chancier or shorter term positions, and this plays against them in general pay-scale considerations. But it’s then far easier to try this career, which has low compensation and high risk (of burnout, “not making it”, etc.). Then add the culture and self-selecting taste, and that may be at list a bit of *why* it happened.
An interesting point ... It's notorious that men prioritize making money more than women do (and are judged more based on their income). In our culture, a young woman who holds a prestigious type of employment at low pay is not disadvantaged in looking for a spouse, whereas a man is.
Right. Men are judged more on income in terms of attractiveness (it's roughly equivalent to beauty for women--not the only factor but the predominant one), so they tend to avoid 'glamour industries' like publishing, fashion, and so on that have high prestige but low income.
Women have always read books by men and women. Can't men be expected to do the same?
It certainly seems to be a reasonable demand. Indeed, it should be straightforward for a woman to look at a list of "books a lot of men read", write one in a similar vein, and men would read it. If the male readers are actually filtering on the apparent gender of the author, that can be fixed by a pseudonym. (Hmmm, the tale of James Tiptree is relevant here.)
But this points to the question of whether the themes that men like (particularly in literary fiction) are different from the themes women like, and whether male/female authors tend to be biased in their themes along these lines. Though given this column, I would hardly be surprised if literary agents and editors are biased in what themes they prefer to publish and that may interact with what themes different demographics like to read.
I don't see any suggestion in the article that men can't read books by both men and women.
I'm a white, male, middle-class Canadian writer who was recently hired by an NYC friend I've known 30 years to edit his newly completed first novel. We're both in our 60s. His book blew my effing mind. It's unpretentiously eloquent, highly accessible, current, sexy, original, funny as hell and written entirely from a white, upper middle-class male's perspective. Not to say it's sexist, racist, classist, etc. -- in fact, the logline is: Protagonist loses everything that makes him middle class and so, forced to eat, takes a low-paying job that delivers him unexpected redemption through the humbling nature of the work.
My friend is well aware that no publisher will likely want to touch his book, no matter how great it is, and he fortunately doesn't need the money it could potentially generate. He wrote it because he had to scratch a creative itch.
I'm no critic or lit prof, but think he's a living American treasure and deserves to be internationally celebrated thus. But this will likely never happen.
To me, the publishing world's notion, that straight white men have had their run and and it's time for everyone else, gets it only a little bit right. While I agree it's time everyone got a fair go, I'm certain there's still a big and profitable market for books like my friend's, and also that it's not just women who like to read.
The "male who reads novels" demographic didn't die of natural causes 15-20 years ago; it was intentionally starved of new reading material by the narrow-minded gate-keepers you mention who were following the lead of leftist university profs who themselves have failed at the jobs they were hired for -- namely offering a "universal" (as in "university") education to young people seeking it so they can be taken seriously in the world they head out to engage after graduating.
The whole idea is so anti-Darwinian and self-defeating that it can't survive without taking down the culture with it -- which is arguably happening and much enhanced by the right's backlash last US election.
I'm old enough to remember when we celebrated writers simply, and rightfully, and only because they wrote well. Now we're told we must celebrate writers who deserve to be celebrated, based on a narrow and gate-kept definition of "deserve", even when their books are not well-written. Even if those books don't sell, more like them keep on coming because the self-hating elitist weirdos in academia and NYC letters deem it so.
At some point, you'd imagine publishers waking up to their own suicidal tendencies. But are they? Will they?
My younger sister, a comedy writing teacher at a community college who's been witnessing ultra-wokeness ruining everything for everyone on campus (including those it's meant to elevate), is now reading my pal's book and loving it. We both feel it's a book for anyone who struggles with unfairness, bad luck, dark turns, paying bills, raising kids, managing a marriage, holding onto one's dignity, keeping a sense of humour when life turns to excrement... including the millions of young and old men who'd love to sit down with a page-turny, relatable, satisfying story they could devour over a weekend, but are having trouble finding them lately.
I agree with you: Substack is a godsend. I believe it could, and maybe should, wipe out the trad publishing industry for the Darwinian reasons so studiously ignored by that industry for so long.
Thank you for writing this, and weathering the inevitable blowback that boringly follows these things. All too often, if you so much as notice the transparent success of the identity revolution that the progressive left has ushered in / imposed, you get attacked and eye-rolled by the people who a) celebrated the revolution in the first place and b) benefited. The winners are unable to accept that they won because it threatens their underdog status which they can never concede to the losers since it's the source of their power. And no one wants to admit that the game might now be rigged in their favor.
Or the men taking all those jobs in hazmat cleanup, heavy equipment mechanics, roofing, concrete work...
It's great you are doing what many others complain about. This platform has the capacity to be a great leveler, especially for those of us on the backside of life.
We've never seen the Great Hazmat Cleanup Worker's Novel. I'm sure *they* would have some great stories to tell!