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 Unfortunately it was been superseded by visual media as a form of popular expressions a century ago.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.
Yes, it's weird how we treat fiction as some kind of weird esoteric elitist thing when it's the artistic form with one of the lowest barriers to entry in terms of execution. MFA propaganda notwithstanding, there's no need to spend tons of money in an institutionalized setting to learn to write well.
As to whether reading or writing novels is male vs. female, I don't think anything's set in stone. It seems more like a battle to, metaphorically, paint the treehouse blue or pink. If you enforce a literary culture that caters to women's tastes and biases, then you'll chase men away. And of course, vice versa. Then you can claim that your gender has a natural claim to this artistic territory and snuff out any challenges before they can even rise up.
(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.
> 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 publishing industry is more female dominated at 80% female than the tech industry is male dominated at 75% male. Women are the gatekeepers to literary success. But I would say that it’s specifically women who have been steeped in certain discourse about the Patriarchy who are the gatekeepers to literary success.
Some of the best novels I’ve read recently just go right around these gates. Delicious Tacos is one writer who completely sidesteps these gates. Unsong by Scott Alexander is another.
Lots of the tenure track jobs for creative writing [https://joblist.mla.org/jobs/creative-writing/] say that they want a candidate who has a track record with women’s literature. That’s code for, female candidates preferred.
I think it’s worth listing the evidence that men are self exiling versus being exiled. It’s a testable hypothesis either way.
I think you're on to something about the culture crowding out male, I guess we'll call them social realist writers. Even novelists like Martin Amis, and who I often hear, Haruki Murakami (for all his faults) are attacked for "being unable to write female characters," which might be true, but isn't most critique of literary fiction just transcribed from genre critique? Or even television critique (a form that pulls more from genre than movies)? These novels are supposed to share an unvarnished, or even narcissistic voice of "interiority," that is not the norm in television, so probably includes offhand objectification of other people. I've been reading mostly female novelists lately, so my ease of access is a bit limited! The leading lights we have as men nowadays are endlessly mild personalities in endlessly self-conscious fiction, like Ben Lerner. (One exception I like is Joshua Cohen, especially in Book of Numbers.) Plus have we honestly evaluated whether "women can write male characters," particularly in the messy realistic fiction field?
I saw a movie the other day where a character admitted that he liked men more than women, which I found to be an honest truth, but which other members of the group took umbrage with. (It sounds sexist.) For some reason women are more immune to these genre lenses, even on a non-genre level. Even female culture of book draws an inherent double-standard: women are allowed to share their private thoughts in public, and men's must be laundered. I suspect partly men are forgetting how to separate the two spheres, and then how to write, or to think, or to know what to say anymore. There's mostly an unexpressed "dark matter" where they look and see themselves. But I guess that's to your point again about there needing to be more confidence from them to step up.
At a certain point, men have to stop caring so much what women (especially strangers in the cultural commentary ether) think because all groups have their biases and self-interests. What women say, and what men say, aren't sacrosanct texts. We're all just people expressing our selfish, in the most literal sense, points of view.
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.
Yes, it's weird how we treat fiction as some kind of weird esoteric elitist thing when it's the artistic form with one of the lowest barriers to entry in terms of execution. MFA propaganda notwithstanding, there's no need to spend tons of money in an institutionalized setting to learn to write well.
As to whether reading or writing novels is male vs. female, I don't think anything's set in stone. It seems more like a battle to, metaphorically, paint the treehouse blue or pink. If you enforce a literary culture that caters to women's tastes and biases, then you'll chase men away. And of course, vice versa. Then you can claim that your gender has a natural claim to this artistic territory and snuff out any challenges before they can even rise up.
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.
> 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 publishing industry is more female dominated at 80% female than the tech industry is male dominated at 75% male. Women are the gatekeepers to literary success. But I would say that it’s specifically women who have been steeped in certain discourse about the Patriarchy who are the gatekeepers to literary success.
Some of the best novels I’ve read recently just go right around these gates. Delicious Tacos is one writer who completely sidesteps these gates. Unsong by Scott Alexander is another.
Lots of the tenure track jobs for creative writing [https://joblist.mla.org/jobs/creative-writing/] say that they want a candidate who has a track record with women’s literature. That’s code for, female candidates preferred.
I think it’s worth listing the evidence that men are self exiling versus being exiled. It’s a testable hypothesis either way.
I think you're on to something about the culture crowding out male, I guess we'll call them social realist writers. Even novelists like Martin Amis, and who I often hear, Haruki Murakami (for all his faults) are attacked for "being unable to write female characters," which might be true, but isn't most critique of literary fiction just transcribed from genre critique? Or even television critique (a form that pulls more from genre than movies)? These novels are supposed to share an unvarnished, or even narcissistic voice of "interiority," that is not the norm in television, so probably includes offhand objectification of other people. I've been reading mostly female novelists lately, so my ease of access is a bit limited! The leading lights we have as men nowadays are endlessly mild personalities in endlessly self-conscious fiction, like Ben Lerner. (One exception I like is Joshua Cohen, especially in Book of Numbers.) Plus have we honestly evaluated whether "women can write male characters," particularly in the messy realistic fiction field?
I saw a movie the other day where a character admitted that he liked men more than women, which I found to be an honest truth, but which other members of the group took umbrage with. (It sounds sexist.) For some reason women are more immune to these genre lenses, even on a non-genre level. Even female culture of book draws an inherent double-standard: women are allowed to share their private thoughts in public, and men's must be laundered. I suspect partly men are forgetting how to separate the two spheres, and then how to write, or to think, or to know what to say anymore. There's mostly an unexpressed "dark matter" where they look and see themselves. But I guess that's to your point again about there needing to be more confidence from them to step up.
At a certain point, men have to stop caring so much what women (especially strangers in the cultural commentary ether) think because all groups have their biases and self-interests. What women say, and what men say, aren't sacrosanct texts. We're all just people expressing our selfish, in the most literal sense, points of view.