GBRK
10d ago
This is basically baiting angry comments on Reddit. You realize that using the word "DEI" will essentially label you as a chud and render the rest of your post irrelevant even if it was interesting beforehand?
I'm pretty sure most everyone in the thread pegged me as a chud based on the title alone so I'm not hugely concerned. (And to be perfectly honest I was perfectly happy to stir the shit. I much prefer 0-upvotes-109-comments to 120-upvotes-10-comments.)
GBRK
10d ago
To be perfectly honest I am actually extremely averse to most wish-fulfillment narratives on a personal level-- this is a case of me very much not practicing what I preach.
GBRK
10d ago
Weeds are always the first plants to colonize barren ground, and in their wake less hardy plants flourish. Thus as it is with gooners and media.
But no seriously, very few authors are going to invest years of work to stake their mangum opus in an unproven genre-- and even fewer agents, editors, and publishes will support them. The modern flood of romantasy wouldn't exist if it wasn't for the endless twilight and harry potter smut fics. Monsterfucking is a necessary step on the tech tree.
Well, it's not exactly appreciated here either. If I wanted to hear Claude's "unbiased" analysis, I would direct my browser to claude.ai instead of themotte.org.
I would like to point out that, to this point, no one has actually contradicted me on the fact that the applicable MSWL profiles were more oriented towards attracting books that are interesting to women than men. Maybe "appreciated" was too strong a point, but it definitely made my point for me.
Isn't this just a genderswapped version of the SJW complaints about representation from a decade ago?
Yes, and frankly the SJWs were basically right. Where they failed was that assuming every story could fit an unlimited amount of representation without pissing off previous fans.
Men can always write their own stories that suit their own proclivities if it means that much to them.
And they do, but without the infrastructure provided by publishing houses those stories remain at a poor state of editing and advertising that keeps them out of the hands of what might have been the next generation of readers and writers.
There's nothing intrinsically ennobling or salutary about the novel
why don't they deserve a turn at being catered to for a while?
In point of fact, reading purely textual material for fun is highly associated with the development of greater reasoning skills, more educational attainment, and as a consequence greater success later in life. When we already have structual inequalities in favor of female attainment among Gen Z and Gen Alpha, that means in effect encouraging an explicitly matriarchal and female-dominated society. Is that your position?
and a backlog of decades worth of Western and Japanese material that could fill multiple lifetimes
That exact statement would still be true if we instantly deleted every book written in the last two hundred years, but do you still think your reading habits would remain totally unchanged?
GBRK
10d ago
No this is a terrible idea and will make your son retarded or, worse, end with him poasting here. Thankfully, there is a simple solution: read old books. Start him on Hardy Boys and Biggles, get him to John Buchan and James Bond.
Every time I see this variety of argument, I think it's notable that people still point to fairly contemporary novels instead of, say, The Cantebury Tales and the Epic of Beowulf. Despite explicitly calling for reaching backwards in time, your recommendations are still influence by a massive recency bias. Without even realizing it, you argue for reading novels that had currency and applicability to the era of your life that you read them in, and yet are completely out of touch about how changes to culture, technology, and in general the state of the world make those novels more and more irrelevant to the experience of children growing up now.
GBRK
10d ago
I've noticed, meanwhile, that girls are more interested period novels and traditional styles of medicine and mythology (ref: astrology.) To be frank, I don't think we're going to get anywhere talking about which gender likes old stuff more. I can display numerical inequalities at every level of the publishing industry in favor of women, and have-- I think-- compelling a priori reasons to believe that inequality should cause a disparity in reading levels. I don't think the "likes old stuff" position has any argument that isn't fully generalizeable to, "then why don't publishers just release more new things that harken back to the old stuff?" Which in turn points back to the gender inequality issue.
GBRK
10d ago
Your argument is essentially that since you saw a panda in a zoo, pandas must not actually be endangered. "Boy books exist" does not disprove "there are fewer boy books." In particular, the paucity of male editors, agents, bookstore owners, and librarians mean that even the boy books that do get selected tend to be selected for acquisition or display get selected by people with a less discerning taste for what makes books interesting to boys. It's like the difference between the kind of comic book a grandma would buy for a little boy as opposed to the kind of comic book that little boy would buy for himself. Brainrot, poor attention spans, and tiktok thirst traps also afflict girls-- but the relatively higher quantity and quality of books available to them make them more likely to read anyway.
GBRK
10d ago
As written, your response implies that you disagree with the position that "old books aren't necessarily unreadable"-- meaning, you think old books are unreadable. Responding against what you actually mean to say-- that "old books are interesting"-- I would counter, "nuh uh." Well not actually, but c'mon-- are you totally incapable of seeing how a person might enjoy recency and currency in the media they consume, and thereby prefer to look for classes of media where they can find it?
GBRK
10d ago
It's an exciting step, and also exactly in line with my recommendations. BoC is slop, and I'm glad it's available for kids to read. Now lets see if the rest of the publishing world follows suit.
GBRK
10d ago
Awesome, thank you for doing this! Request for clarification-- was the AI classifying only the difference in the agent genders, or also classifying the relative proportion of each profile focused on male-or-female-targeted works?
GBRK
10d ago
I addressed this already.
There is no shortage of yaoi manga, villainess webtoons, and cozy games to draw the attention of women, and yet all of those same tropes also make their way into traditionally published novels.
Also, try to remember that many popular manga were once Light Novels-- there is a latent demand for both written and visual forms of he same stories, often even from the exact same people.
So during its heyday, Friendship is Magic was a large enough fandom to have entire subfandoms centered around particularly popular fics. Two notable examples were Friendship Is Optimal and The Conversion Bureau. Without getting too into the weeds of it, both of these works feature pony civilization making contact with human civilization and expanding to dominate and convert humans into ponies, but both subfandoms came from extremely different ideological ground. FiO descends from the rationalist movement and features a mostly-aligned superintelligence that wants to persuade you into consensually mind-uploading, which focused its subfandom on the nature of consciousness, transhumanism, and psychology. TCB, on the other hand, was rooted very much in misanthropy, and while it did entertain interesting questions about cultural contact and transhumanism, it in the end became an entrenched conflict between the trans-misanthropic alliance on one side and fans of works like The Salvation War and Gate JSDF on the other. Each alliance competed to write their own takes on the conversion bureau theme where variously either the ponies were totally right to forcibly convert humans or the humans were totally right to lash out with overwhelming prejudice and nuclear weapons. (Fairly often you'd also see something in between two, focused on comparing the relative merits of liberty and security without necessarily coming down fully on one side.) Despite the differences between those two subfandoms, however, there was naturally substantial and contentious overlap. Chatoyance in particular was an extremely prolific writer in the trans-misanthropic side for both fandoms, and as a result gained the ire of the pro-human side. Thus, their hatedom.
By the by, the pro-human faction of the TCB subfandom was also inextricably linked with the inchoate HFY movement on sites of spacebattles and sufficientvelocity, to the point where you can draw a direct line from My Little Pony to Natowave drone edits. Also, in the meantime, more neutrally-aligned figures were writing an incredible amount of high-quality first contact fiction where humans and ponies worked together to solve some sort of problem in a way that very much prefigures the success of Project Hail Mary.
GBRK
10d ago
The operative words in your post are
if you know where to look
That is a very high barrier to entry, and one I think you are inches away from recognizing given your later comments about marvel doctors and fifa lawyers. Men have to take an active and concerted effort to find fiction written for them, much less high quality fiction. Goodreads has an abysmally shit book recommendation system and its top-lists are all voted on overwhelmingly by women. Fanfiction sites are full up on sludge written by middle schoolers and without deep knowledge of which fandoms to read and what tags to look for you will find yourself running into works that may initially seem compelling but invariably devolve into fluff/romance/angst slop. Royal road is... royal road.
In the meantime, women have booktok influencers and glistening werewolf abs on every supermarket shelf. Overabundance leads to interest leads to consumption leads to overabundance, in a virtuous cycle.
GBRK
10d ago
I'm extremely suspicious of claims to "timelesness" as applied to works written within living memory. You're a generation, perhaps two, away from these authors... they speak in the register of your parents and grandparents, and tell stories that would have seemed perfectly current to them. That's not timelessness, that's a nostalgic affection held for the subjects of sepia photographs. Maybe there's something at the core of their stories that will survive the ages, but to the modern youth the language they used and the values in their works are already at as far of a remove as Victory Hugo and Mary Shelley would have been to you. Entertaining, perhaps, for their distance from the present-- but otherwise largely inapplicable to their current concerns.
As for the Vorkosigan Saga and the Dresden files-- I've checked both out, and they were okay, but they also had this unnameable and unpleasant millenial quality. As when my older nerd friends have variously tried to get me into star wars, monty python, doctor who, etcetera... I could understand what once made those works appealing, and yet found myself feeling mostly cold in their aftermath. I can't even blame anything reasonable like dialog, or pacing, or plot structure, for my aversion... I think it's something much more granular in the storytelling, that sits below my conscious awareness and yet blares like a some sort of chronometric siren for unwanted time-travel.
GBRK
10d ago
Do you actually disagree with any of the following statements?
- There are more female acquisition editors and agents than males
- Agents/editors would prefer to select books that flatter their interests and beliefs
- ...and as a result, agents/editors are more likely to select book that appeal to female interests.
GBRK
10d ago
The essence of my post is that we're not publishing enough books that are interesting to men. The essence of your first reply was that we already had published plenty of interesting books. The essence of my first reply was that those might have been interesting to you, but that you're atypical and that therefore your reply fails to contradict my thesis. I understood the essence of your second reply as being to claim that old books aren't necessarily unreadable, and replied that "not unreadable" != "interesting". If that was noncentral, and the essence of your reply was actually something along the lines of, "there's no point making books more interesting when that doesn't necessarily make them more useful", then I encourage you to go back and read my article without skimming because I use most of it to explain why the present state of the publishing industry disadvantages books that provide any sort of value to men, and therefore why, if you care about "good books", it is necessary to first convince publishers that men like to read by reading and paying for any books, so that they see the need to select and cultivate good books. If that was noncentral, and your central point was that you men probably won't start reading good books just because they're reading bad books, then I would claim that my central point is that they definitely won't start reading good books if they're not reading any books... and as per my earlier points, that in a tautological but also very true sense men won't start reading books if there are no books they're interested in reading.
(if the central point of your 2nd-to-last reply was something totally different than my three proposals, feel free to clarify that now.)
GBRK
10d ago
/r/Romance_for_men is already chomping at the bit for your submission. Give them the car junkie smut they're fiending for!
GBRK
10d ago
Maybe we're just in different social groups, but I haven't noticed much of a difference between the age of the media my male and female friends enjoy, and in particular I have not noticed that my friends devote most or even much of their attention to media that existed prior to their own birth. (We're mostly 20-30 somethings.)
Maybe things are a little skewed by men being less bothered by the dissonant cultural values held and propagated by old works of media... but if this was the driving factor, should we expect the deficit of new male-oriented works to played out across all forms of media? I don't notice any lack of male-oriented music, youtube videos, games (inclusive of video and board), or even TV shows. In particular, the recent male interest in fashion and looksmaxxing seems to be reversing the trend of men being willing to wear much older fashions of clothes.
GBRK
10d ago
"Not difficult" isn't sufficient. We need fun books to get boys and men to love reading-- and literary fiction is often written in direct subversion of what it takes for a story to be "fun." Reading about depressed writers getting cuckolded by their mistresses might be interesting if you've read a thousand stories about Buffguy McStrongJaw beating up the Unquestionable Evil Species of Alient Bug Invaders, but first you do have to read those thousand stories.
--Also, this went unaddressed in my earlier post, but twenty thousand years of human literary history doesn't matter one whit when someone feels the need for currency, or in particular a story told using the language and aesthetic of their lived experience. Yes, every theme is ultimately universal. Yes, we haven't come up with anything truly novel since Grug came up with the idea of telling his kids that if talked back to him the terrible LionSnakeFalcon would drop out of the sky and murderize them into little bits. But boy is it a lot less cognitive effort to read a story about a farmboy fighting a dragon instead of a caveman fighting a LionSnakeFalcon, and that leaves a lot of extra cognitive effort to spare for contemplating the deep truths common between both stories.
GBRK
10d ago
I'm not actually blaming Woke, for the record-- that's why I put that whole spiel about this NOT being a conspiracy. But I am convinced this is very much a supply issue, not a demand issue-- I stopped pirating music when spotify got easy and good enough to be a better deal... (well in point of fact I stopped when grooveshark got DMCA'd, but didn't feel the need to find an alternative given that spotify was just *there)-- and I'll stop pirating books when...
Okay, maybe you have a tiny point. TBH the cause is probably at least somewhat bidirectional. But while I acknowledge that I'm getting into bravery debate here... I feel like the impact of the pressures on men are dramatically underestimated compared to the impact of the pressures by men, when it comes to the publishing industry. (And maybe also in general but that is a way larger discussion that I have the time to have right now) As a baseline estimate, since we see much more comparable reading rates for younger vs older children...
Reading rates are lower for boys at every age. Over a third of girls (36%) aged eight to 11 said they read daily, compared with about a quarter (26.3%) of boys of the same age. By the age of 14 to 16, this had fallen to 17.6% of girls and just 9.8% of boys.
1.4x vs 1.8x
I would guess that at least half of those boys are "lost" because of an insufficient supply of books. If the proportion at age 14-16 was 1.6x, we would see ~11% of boys reading. That doesn't sound like much, but that's 10% more male readers! And we should expect that this effect is actually cumulative given decreased rates of reading with age. Given the relationship between reading ability, educational attainment, and professional success, this difference in reading ability likely has massive downstream effects on the total number of men making it through to elite positions. Correcting that deficit is the opposite of a "waste of time." We could have-- at minimum, at an estimate-- a minimum of 10% more male doctors, lawyers, and engineers just by making sure more male-oriented books are published and promoted. Even ignoring the negative effects of the disparity between male and female achievement, the absolute effects of so many missing elites is likely to be significant and negative.
(Unless you believe AI will solve everything, but that's a fully general argument for not caring about anything.)
The He-Man Woman-Haters Club or NO MA'AM aren't going to somehow seize the reigns of the Twilight IP and start "subverting" it by having Bella eventually chucked onto the street in the reboot for being a washed up ratchet whore
I mean if I had a nickel for every time I found a genderswapped rewrite of the twilight series designed to cater more towards men I would have three nickles, of which one was given to me by Stephanie Meyer herself. (The other two nickels come from a smut fic on QQ and a male-oriented-romance fic on SB, both abandoned but otherwise very solid.)
...I always knew Stephanie Meyer was a basedlord. I just wish she put more energy towards though-provoking sci-fi than lowbrow romance-- The Host was actually kind of goated.
GBRK
10d ago
This is not a very good sampling method because the profiles are sorted by first name, and women are overrepresented among people whose first name starts with A.
Okay, but also two of the woman I cited had the first name "Alex" which is normally a ~95%+ male name. Bayesian statistics would tell you this is NOT an expected result.
Personally, I'm probably going to keep doing most of my reading online
Ditto, undisputably, but I am legitimately concerned about the future of nerdy young men who might have otherwise gotten into reading and now are more likely to find less productive hobbies instead.
(I'm not concerned about the future of young men in general since they're just competition, but I do feel for the nerdy ones.)
GBRK
10d ago
Publishing as far as I can tell has zero moat or at best a very small one. What does big publishing control that would make only their books get read?
Negotiating for shelf space with nationwide bookstores is definitely not "zero moat", and neither is the actual industry of getting a massive amount of books printed at economic scale.
Maybe something else changed and men just don’t read books anymore?
What changed was the proportion of men involved in finding and publishing books, and the proportion, thereby, of men's book that were publishing. SEE:
But as far as I can tell you can just publish books and sell them on Amazon
For a broke kid, buying books off amazon has a much higher barrier to entry than picking a shiny cover out of a lineup at their school library. Especially since if they're on a computer and don't have a pre-existing love of reading, it's very likely that they'll just do something other than reading instead of doggedly sorting through the monsterfucking romantasy slop on the amazon bestseller lists.
(I'm pretty sure I addressed all this in my post?)
...also, don't discount the value and difficult of professional editing and cover-design. Publishers certainly don't. Traditionally published novels have a far greater up-front investment designed to make them marketable and readable, and that pays on at the back and as it encourages people to start and keep reading.
So then you don’t have a best books lists. I feel like you could create that easily. Spitballing maybe it would be good to have someone famous sponsor a best new children’s book lists. Like Mr. Beast?
Unironically a good idea, I was thinking of self-publishing my book anyway and it might be worth it to find and sponsor a few niche youtubers to promote it. Thank you!
GBRK
10d ago
I do believe the first post was auto-removed because it was gone literally as soon as I posted it. The second post stayed up for like two minutes-- long enough to attract an unknown amount of downvotes and 46 angry comments. A mod replied to my query to tell me it was autoremoved for reports of AI and incivility. On reflection, it seems like there is a conspiracy-- but it comes from the users of the subreddit, rather than its leaders, who themselves take no more interest in the matter than pontius pilot washing his hands of Jesus' execution.
(Yes, I do have an ego. Why do you ask?)
Given the ever-dropping number of young and old readers, I would say that this isn't the argument you think it is. "Everyone I know who saw the supergirl movie is woke!" "Everyone I know who likes books is fine with reading old ones?"
Well, who are you catering too?
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