Posted on 08/28/2006 4:44:24 AM PDT by Loyalist
“When women stop reading, the novel will be dead,” declared Ian McEwan in the Guardian last year. The British novelist reached this rather dire conclusion after venturing into a nearby park in an attempt to give away free novels. The result?
Only one “sensitive male soul” took up his offer, while every woman he approached was “eager and grateful” to do the same.
Unscientific as McEwan’s experiment may be, its thesis is borne out by a number of surveys conducted in Britain, the United States and Canada, where men account for a paltry 20 percent of the market for fiction. Unlike the gods of the literary establishment who remain predominantly male—both as writers and critics—their humble readers are overwhelmingly female.
In recent years, various pundits have used this so-called “fiction gap” as an opportunity to trot out their pet theories on what makes men and women tick. The most recent is New York Times columnist David Brooks, who jumped at the chance to peddle his special brand of gender essentialism. His June 11 column arbitrarily divided all books into neat boy/girl categories—”In the men’s sections of the bookstore, there are books describing masterly men conquering evil. In the women’s sections there are novels about … well, I guess feelings and stuff.” His sweeping assertion flies in the face of publishing industry research, which shows that if “chick-lit” were defined as what women read, the term would have to include most novels, including those considered macho territory. A 2000 survey found that women comprised a greater percentage of readers than men across all genres: Espionage/thriller (69 percent); General (88 percent); Mystery/Detective (86 percent); and even Science Fiction (52 percent).
Brooks’ real agenda, however, is not to deride women’s fiction, but to promote the latest conservative talking point: blaming politically correct liberals for a “feminized” school curriculum that turns young boys “into high school and college dropouts who hate reading.” According to Brooks, we have burdened little boys with “new-wave” novels about “introspectively morose young women,” when they would be better served by suitably masculine writers like Ernest Hemingway. “It could be, in short, that biological factors influence reading tastes, even after accounting for culture,” Brooks claims. “The problem is that even after the recent flurry of attention about why boys are falling behind, there is still intense social pressure not to talk about biological differences between boys and girls (ask Larry Summers).”
It takes a bizarre leap of logic to connect current school curricula to the reading habits of adult men. Moreover, there is no indication that men “hate reading”—women just read more fiction. Men out-read women by at least ten percentage points when it comes to nonfiction books—surely good news for the bestselling author of Bobos in Paradise.
To be fair, conservatives like Brooks are not the only talking-heads to resort to biological determinism in explaining the “fiction gap.” Psychologist Dorothy Rowe told the Observer that women like fiction because they have richer and more complex imaginations. “Women have always had to try to understand what other people are doing because women have always had to negotiate their way through the family,” she said. “They have always had to get their power by having a pretty good idea of what’s going on inside other people and using that knowledge to get them to do things.” Quite apart from the unintended implication that feminism is likely to fulfill McEwan’s worst fears—i.e., kill the novel—such arguments reproduce the worst kind of gender stereotypes: Women as sensitive, emotionally intelligent creatures; men as unreflective dolts.
Cognitive literary critic Lisa Zunshine, whose multidisciplinary field integrates the insights offered by cognitive science to better understand fiction, offers a more modest and nuanced hypothesis. Her book, Why We Read Fiction, argues that fiction as a literary form offers us pleasure because it engages our ability to mind-read, “a term used by cognitive psychologists, interchangeably with ‘Theory of Mind,’ to describe our ability to explain people’s behavior in terms of their thoughts, feelings, beliefs, and desires.” Fiction, therefore, “lets us try on different mental states.”
Women are more likely than men to enjoy reading fiction, period (as opposed to just reading about “feelings and stuff”), because “they generally want more input for their Theory-of-Mind adaptations,” says Zunshine. “They want to experience other ‘minds in action’—which is another way of defining ‘empathy’—much more than men do.”
Zunshine underscores the fact that such cognitive research is based on “average statistical scores,” and offers no guidance as to what individual men or women may read. Moreover, the biological difference between male and female Theory-of-Mind is small, and likely only accounts for a “somewhat greater” predilection for fiction among women.
But in a culture infused with polarizing messages about gender, such small differences can be magnified into vast disparities. If the act of reading novels today seems more “girly”—because of female-dominated book clubs or a publishing industry increasingly geared toward its most loyal customers, i.e., women—then men are less likely to do so. That’s partly why Jonathan Franzen worried about being endorsed by Oprah. Franzen told NPR, “I had some hope of actually reaching a male audience [for The Corrections] and I’ve heard more than one [male] reader in signing lines now at bookstores say ‘If I hadn’t heard you, I would have been put off by the fact that it is an Oprah pick. I figure those books are for women. I would never touch it.’ “
Desperate efforts to “macho” up the novel include Penguin’s “Good Booking” campaign, which sent out—who else?—beautiful models to award prizes of £1,000 each month to any British man under 25 caught in flagrante with one of its testosterone-friendly titles. The advertising tag line? “What women really want is a man with a Penguin.”
Apart from sex with beautiful models, men are also socialized to seek out activities that confer status—which, these days, sadly doesn’t include reading novels. According to novelist Walter Kirn, “If novelists have become culturally invisible—at least to today’s men—it’s partly because the life of a novelist offers few rewards to the traditional male ego. It’s not about power, glory and money,” unlike the adulation our culture reserves for rap stars, athletes and movie actors.
Don’t look now, but we may be headed back to the 19th century, when the novel was considered a low-status, frivolous, pastime of ladies of leisure, unfit for real men. As Margaret Atwood pointed out in a 1998 speech, “To trace the trajectory of the novel is to follow the struggle of the novelist—even, perhaps especially, the male novelist—to be taken seriously—that is, to raise the perception of his chosen form from that of a piece of silly frou-frou to the higher, more male realm of capital-A Art.” This project kicked into high gear in the 20th century—so much so that by 1935 Ernest Hemingway could blithely declare, “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn.”—and reached its peak during the chest-thumping Beat movement.
But were men more likely to read novels when Jack Kerouac ruled the literary world? The answer is unclear, primarily because industry research in this area has been erratic until recent decades. So, it’s hard to establish a definitive link between the size of male readership and the status accorded fiction in society—at least over the past 100 years. Nor do we know if these trends hold true in other, non-English speaking cultures.
What is clear is that the novel seems to be reverting to its origins as a feminine hobby, and hence is in danger of being toppled off its high artistic perch. Explaining his newspaper’s decision to radically cut down on fiction reviews, New York Times editor Bill Keller told a Poynter columnist, “The most compelling ideas tend to be in the non-fiction world.” Others, like Toronto Star book columnist Phillip Marchand, are happy to quote their 19th century forbears like poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge—”Where the reading of novels prevails as a habit, it occasions in time the entire destruction of the powers of the mind.”—to conclude, “And if non-fiction can provide examples of fresh and precise use of language, and enlargement of our powers of sympathy and imagination, there’s no reason to insist, in the case of male readers, that it make way for fiction.”
It’s a good thing, then, that the great male novelists can still rely on us girls to finance their literary careers.
The last figure about science fiction surprised me until I realized that the fantasy genre--about as male-repellent as any neon pink covered chick-lit drivel--is now lumped in with it by booksellers.
Classic SF and current SF based on classic themes still remain man's domain.
Maybe it's because the men are out working, making money so that their women can go buy books to read...
Just give the boys some Raymond Chandler. They'll be all right.
Real men rent it at the video store, especially if it has allot of scenes of things blowing up, etc.
BTW: Does anyone know when the new Clancy novel is due out? It was originally expected in late May.
I went to the bookstore to get a book for some summer reading and all I could find was crap like the "Sisterhood of the traveling pants" and "Goodnight Nobody".
Bookstores are too commericals. A woman I know even told me she thought such "chick lit" books were crap and she prefered the classics.
Maybe it wasn't to your wife's taste, but I'm among the women who enjoy all of "Flashy's" adventures! :)
Male reader of novels here. The only thing that restricts my novel reading is working (of course) and females who want me to talk, talk, talk about my day. ;-)
biblio-ping....
Reading that was once fun for classes that were actually interesting became a chore, once one factored-in all the "required" authors of color, gender, sexual preference, and economic or victim status. Practically the only people enjoying it were the chicks.
Well, you clearly have excellent taste! I think she might have found Flashy a bit too predictable. She's also not quite the history fan I am.
"Flashman at the Charge" was LOL-in-public funny!
Sir Harry's view of, and uses for, women is another good reason to delve into this series. Bill Clinton, call your office!
In my opinion, as a book seller and a book reader, the current lack of interest among men in the fiction genre is based soley on the very poor quality of fiction being produced. I mean, really, how many books about a struggling writer searching for his muse can one tolerate?
How many travails of middle-aged, divorced, alcoholic college professors can possibly be interesting?
Stephen King, Tom Clancy and Bernard Cornwell have demonstrated that if you actually have a story to tell men will buy it.
Gee, an industry dominated by gay males and leftist females. I couldn't guess why male readers are leaving.
> It’s a good thing, then, that the great male novelists can still rely on us girls to finance their literary careers.
What a load of feminist-apologist CRAP. As if girls invented how to read. So what is this, a contest? Which sex has read most, read wisest, understood and comprehended best?
Bring it on.
Who's got time for fiction? Men read, they just don't read fiction.
Mickey Splllaine (sp) or Rex Stout?
I wouldn't say that, since I read a lot of fiction including Terry Pratchett, Robert Heinlein, Orson Scott Card, Mickey Spillane, J.R.R. Tolkien, H.P. Lovecraft, Jamie Gorelick's portion of the 9/11 Commission Report...
I'm a single woman who works, yet I manage to read a lot. I read non-fiction, and I read novels. Good novels. I think "good" is the operative word here. So much of what is out there today is trash. Give me Austen, Fielding, Trollope, Wharton, etc., any day of the week.
Boys will read if you give them good books to read. When my brother was little, he loved the Hornblower books. But, since there weren't any women in the Royal Navy in the early 19th century, they're not politically correct. Tough noogies. They're still great reads, even for girls. My nephew loves the Captain Underpants books. They offend his mother, but they get him to read, and that's what counts.
In 1972, I really became interested in footbal and the Redskins in particular. I started reading everything I could about those two subjects. Before then, I would go to the library and pick up collections of short stories - Great Mysteries of 1956, 1957, and so on. I read a lot of short stories that I had either seen as a movie before I read the story or afterward. In the mid-70's, I started reading Joseph Wambaugh and spy thrillers such as Jack Higgins and Colin Forbes. In recent years, I have read more political books than novels. I use to like Stephen King and Tom Clancy, but no longer. My favorite author of all time is James Jones and currently I enjoy Dean Koontz.
I have two grandsons and I look at what they are forced to read in school and required summer reading. Most of it are books that "educators" think would "stimulate" the mind. I would not last long as a teacher because I would just as soon have kids read a graphic novel than Hemmingway. I remember in 7th grade English, we were required to read Wurthering Heights. What sheer, utter boredom for a twelve year old boy!
Patrick O'Brian, A very fine novelist. I also read Thomas Hardy, but, I prefer a good murder mystery.
From my observations (non-scientific) is that men are reading non-fiction for the most part. History, Poli-Sci, Science, or Economics.
I totally agree about the Sci-Fi/Fatasy. But, don't forget books like Xanth....I don't think of those as Chick-lit.
Tolkien is now considered straight literature.
Haven't read much since the betamax was invented. It's better to see & hear explosions.
Clancy and Grisham are exceptions.
I average 160 books a year, of which 60-70% are nonfiction, 30-40% fiction. For nonfiction I like history (esp US civil war), biography, social history, mythology/folklore/theology, and for fiction, I prefer classics (I hardly ever read fiction published after 1899), high fantasy, and 'worldbuilder' or soft SF. (Yeah, I keep tabs on what kinds of books I read, too).
I want to write a book someday...
I usually buy a new book whenever I have to travel by air, as it supplies readily accessible entertainment that can be stopped and started at will, and I don't have to pull it out of my carry-on for separate x-raying. I usually end up going to several different book stores to find something worth reading. There is just too much crap on the shelves.
Fantasy isn't male repellant. What is so repugnant about LotR? I read plenty of it, as well as Science Fiction.
"They offend his mother, but they get him to read, and that's what counts"
It offends HIS MOTHER but you don't care what drivel you place in that child's mind.
That is the reason that the progressive schools are succeeding in dumbing down America. They don't care about HIS MOTHER either.
One of my personal favories>
The Flashman series is great fun...but what about other, similar 'guy stuff', beginning with the Hornblower books, or in more recent years, Cornwell's Richard Sharpe series, or Patrick O'Brien's superb Aubry/Maturin ("Master and Commander, etc.) series?
Any other recommendations?
From this male's perspective, a lot of it has to do with the quality of books coming out these days.
I vowed this year to read a modern novel. I plowed my way through "The House of Sand and Fog." The theme of the book seems to be "everyone is a victim. Nobody can be expected to show any moral responsibility. Let's feel sorry for the victims."
I then found an old dusted copy of Bernard Malamud's "The Assistant" on my bookshelf. Now that is a fine novel. The novel has interesting characters, a good plot, and has fine things to say about the struggle to lead a moral life. It was also written in the late fifties.
Because the cultural relativism of the sixties killed the idea (at least in the literary world) that people should struggle to be moral, fiction has suffered. Once we lose the idea that people have a responsibility to do the right thing even if it isn't easy, the only thing left to write about is victimhood. The result is "oh, poor me!" literature like "The Color Purple" and "The Handmaid's Tale" and "The House of Sand and Fog" and a thousand others. Unfortunately, a lot of people (mostly women) think of themselves as victims, so the victim novel has considerable popularity.
I started listing back in 1977. My 'year' went from September 1 through August 31. Why? Because I arrived in Naples, Italy on August 31, 1977 and decided to use that date as my mark. 160 books a year - extremely impressive! There are some authors I've read that can take up an entire page on a list - Stephen King and Dean Koontz. I prefer American fiction to English.
I am with you concerning reading on a plane trip. Usually, a couple weeks before I go on a flight, I will find a few books - usually three - to take with me. One for the flight there, one to read while there, and the third to read on the flight back.
ROTFL. You're either a great humorist or incredibly stupid. You pick.
I'm both, depending on what time of day you have in mind. :)
I've seen and known women who read sci fi voraciously. However, I'm really stretching the definition of 'woman' here.
As a man, I used to read a lot, but got tired of reading garbage.
Well, I'm the wrong one to talk to. I'll grant you Heinlein is fun, but that's basically kid's stuff. Tolkein to me is completely worthless. That whole genre to me is completely worthless. The Gorelick thing is funny, though! When I was a train commuter, I wore out my library card. It was the best way to use the time. But I just about never read fiction. I think I did in fact read "Farmers in the Sky" by Heinlein, and I also read one of Tom Wolfe's novels. But 90+% of my reading was non-fiction. Primarily history, which you could argue is part fact, part fiction. I like biographies and history books. Frontier history, US history. Wagon trains, injuns, that sorta thing. Not only is it suspenseful and exciting and riveting, it has the added bonus of actually being educational and factual.
I'm pretty picky about whose mind I want to "experience" anymore. I'm sticking with George Eliot, Edith Wharton, and Jane Austen, and a little Herman Wouk. Maybe an Ayn Rand bout again. It's got to be worthy.
I don't read too much fiction these days - there's too much going on in the real world that occuppies my attention. But there are still certain authors who's books I always read - Stephen Coonts and James Lee Burke for example.
How about the novels of Lee Child and Brian Haig?
"Reading that was once fun for classes that were actually interesting became a chore, once one factored-in all the "required" authors of color, gender, sexual preference, and economic or victim status."
When I took "World Literature" in college, I had a woman professor. I believe most every book or story we read was written by women. It was a chore to get through. So many paragraphs full of nothing more than whiny chick-thoughts.
I would greatly appreciate it if you did not make such pronouncements when you don't know the full story.
I love Austen, but Eliot is, IMO, somewhat ponderous. Have you ever read Trollope? Wonderful stuff!
Hell, even reading the classics became a chore, with all the blather about race/gender issues, and the all-encompassing and insipid discussion of "the Other."
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