By Julian Ebacher
This is one of the most accepted pieces of anecdotal wisdom in the current literary culture.
Women say men don’t read. Publishers say men don’t read. Men who don’t read, say men don’t read. Men who do read, say men don’t read. And I am here to burnish their wisdom with some of my own —I’ll bravely come out and say that men don’t read.
There are a thousand sources to back this up, but the most compelling is the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, run by the U.S. Census Bureau, which in 2022 presented a nineteen-point gender gap, with 46.9 percent of women reading a work of fiction in the previous year, compared to only 27.7 percent of men.
The existence of this gender gap is undisputable, and indeed undisputed. What is disputed, on the other hand, is why.
The obvious answer is that the rise of the internet as a universal and universally accessible phenomenon would naturally destroy any chemical incentive to read in general.
As shown above, more than half of women do not read, and with the focus of men as a market. As an extreme, predictable example, 38 and 31 percent of non-college and college men 21 or younger engaged in heavy gambling, over five times as likely as women.
This is not meant as some QED, but to be frank, it’s difficult to name a vice in which women lead men. Smoking, drinking, cannabis, gambling; all of this is, of course, expected. But even factors that seem universal lean toward male self-destructive behavior — while internet addiction exists at similar rates across genders, it universally tends to be more severe among males.
The men themselves, by and large on the defensive, offer a somewhat cynical look at the whole matter — it’s the publishers’ faults. If one takes a look at the work published and publicized today, it’s no wonder that men don’t read. Of the New York Times bestsellers of 2024, far and away the most popular (and the only ones to top the list for over a week) were Yarros’s “Fourth Wing,” “Hannah’s The Women,” and Hoover’s “It Ends With Us.”
These are all highly marketed toward women, particularly young women, because this is the market that does read. The sheer mass of published works means this isn’t quite a vicious cycle, but it does mean that the face of contemporary literature is overwhelmingly coded toward women.
In fact, almost all contemporary literature not written for Gen X men is written toward women. It’s understandable why this happens (if there’s no market for young male readers, then there is no use in writing for the sake of that market). The nostalgic age of scifi stories and male-centric fantasy is over.
But is it? The rise of Amazon as a grassroots-forming institution has led self-published material to be practical, meaning that the publishing industry can more or less be bypassed. In fact, that’s how Colleen Hoover, herself, began her meteoric rise (for better or for worse).
The distinction, I would hope, is obvious.
Her success was due to having a devoted selection of readers who would be willing to read anything (anything) as long as it was in the genre they desired; it’s a built-in market for the self-published author.
A while back, Andy Weir was the success story of the self-published movement, managing to capture, initially, incredibly online young men of all things. He marketed and published online on science fiction forums, one of the first successful examples of online literary marketing.
This only works if the audience is receptive to the work itself, and even twenty years ago most people didn’t see it that way. It was the type of American young male to go onto a science fiction forum.
That’s all only about why they don’t read contemporary fiction, though. Anecdotally, it’s very difficult to get boys to read in school regardless of material, which sort of means that this becomes a cultural issue.
The publication market being restructured around women can’t be the reason because men don’t generally read the classics or even stereotypically “male” novels, like authors Dostoyevsky or Salinger.
What then in culture would emphasize the divide? Well, the right wing certainly has a thesis. The postliberals have begun to argue that schooling has become its modern incarnation, a primarily feminine institution, one that does not serve the boys as boys, but rather attempts to mold them into a feminine model.
The school system, in its drive towards conformity, “squashes” the “innate masculinity” of these boys. It presents a dampening effect on them. They are presumed to be naturally active, as opposed to the (also patriarchal) feminine ideal of engaging in quiet, studious behavior.
This is not a fringe belief, either — it is probably the most significant driver for neo-populist right wing pedagogy, and Wayne Martino and Michael Kehler write a wonderful journal article about it in Male Teachers and the ‘Boy Problem.’ Now, I’m sure the average reader of this sees why this is nonsense but it must not only be considered that this masculine behavior is similarly socialized, but that it is necessary regardless. Schools as institutions are more or less identical to the way they were a hundred years ago: if anything, they are less conformist–not just of alternate ideas in dress or, shall we say classroom demographics, but in their ability to allow students to engage in traditionally masculine activities. Reading John Dewey’s work, particularly “Experience and Education,” indicates just how much “student masculinity” was repressed long before the alleged feminisation of the school system.
The second thesis is that male students have a tendency to socialize peers into collective anti-intellectualism. I find this similarly wanting, for one reason alone. This is true in a sense (I don’t think direct anti-intellectualism is the right word, it’s very much incidental), but it’s also entirely avoidable.
What it comes down to is that the abstract zeitgeist places a massive positive social benefit on reading—it is praised by just about everyone willing to stake a claim on the subject at all.
The problem with it is that it is not focused on a personal level. Reading is shown time after time to be a generational activity: parents who read develop children who read, and so on and so forth.
A culture in which reading among adults dies alongside the rise of the internet naturally leads to reading falling out of fashion.
Any cultural positivity about reading is reduced to a spectre trying to whisper encouragement, and it might remain substanceless. The postliberals’ diagnosis is to some degree correct! The (albeit socialized) femininity is what makes women trend as less outgoing, which in turn allows more opportunities to develop an individualized love of reading, not enforced through the institution itself.
A boy, when given the chance to read for no reward but a highly delayed appreciation and a cultural pat on the back will obviously choose the instantaneous reward of fifteen minutes playing with friends.
That external positivity is dwindling. It’s because of that feminine socialization that a subset of girls continues to read — that is not the natural outcome. And that in turn leads to a market centered around those girls, and shuts men out more and more.
The worst part, I think, like all the great social issues, is that nobody is at fault.