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Juju Lee's avatar

Men still dominate non-Fiction. The great works of popular history, politics, economics are almost all written by men, from the People's History of the United States to Freakonomics to A Dawn of Everything. I think men are disinterested writting fiction because reading novels is considered a female past-time. In the 1990s Oprah and other book clubs had women regularly snapping up bestsellers, while men's interest veered towards video games and stayed on sports and cable television. Today fiction is an easily consumable product to help middle and upper middle class woman feel feelings.

It's a tragedy among tragedies. Written fiction is the most low cost form of creative expression, and anything can happen on the page (I mean, check out some of the stories listed on AO3 :). Fiction should be the craziest, most diverse, most democratic of artistic fields. Unfortunately it was been superseded by visual media as a form of popular expressions a century ago. Fiction books today are just a mid-range luxury items, in the same field of consumption as scented candles and decorative notebooks, designed for and marketed to non-poor girls and women seeking a pleasant pick-me-up - not a new perspective on life.

Obviously men should write fiction. Straight men should write fiction, gay men should write fiction, non-White men should DEFINITELY write fiction, poor and working class people DESPERATELY need to write fiction. So should iconoclasts, conspiracy theorists, wannabe reformers, failed social climbers, successful social climbers, rebel scholars, traditionalists, exasperated elders...everyone should go at it. We cannot allow such an incredible form of communication be reduced to breakfast cereal levels of conformity.

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Patrick R's avatar

Two memories:

(1) Getting in an argument with an old girlfriend—I suppose it must have been about ten years ago—about gender politics in the publishing industry. We spent most it talking past each other, as discussions like this usually play out. For my part I had recently tried (and failed) to get a novel published, and could point to my giant spreadsheet of all the literary agents I'd reached out to, and something on the order of 80% were female. I feel like educated millennial women who spent their university years and the time immediately afterwards steeped in discourse about The Patriarchy had (or have?) a hard time recalibrating their conception of the situation when facts on the ground change.

(The possibility that the field became feminized as a direct result of money, clout, and men fleeing from fiction publishing into newer and more lucrative fields of the culture industry is a separate discussion.)

(2) I admittedly haven't read much by Chuck Palahniuk, but there was a while in the mid-to-late 2010s where he was publicly expressing concern about how contemporary fiction no longer addresses men's concerns, or focuses on relationships (not necessarily sexual) between men. As perhaps you remember, lit Twitter gave him a round mocking for it. (The word "edgelord" came up a lot, as I recall.) I don't suppose any of the people who reflexively sneered at him have since looked at the inexorable trends in the demographics of people who buy and read fiction, and paused to wonder if he mightn't have had a point.

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