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PaperclipPerfector  3mo ago (text post)   3829 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for August 18, 2024

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I have often read on The Motte (and believe it to be true, myself) that fiction publishing and reading have become heavily female-coded and -dominated in the Anglosphere.

Are there places where this is not true?

Not a physical location, but I do a lot of my reading on Royal Road, whose demographics say readership is 70% male and 30% female, and I couldn't find the data but my guess is the authorship is something similar. It's also mostly LitRPGs and similar power progression fantasies, which is almost certainly the explanation for the discrepancy.

Thank goodness, at least men still have power progression fantasies to read, lol.

I'm just joking around, please don't take offense - I enjoy a good isekai myself. But a generation or two ago, there were still men writing novels that grappled directly with the modern world. I feel like something important is lost if they entirely retreat from doing that.

My husband and I are both readers. "Beach reads" drown out a lot of what's available, and are female dominated. My fiction (political thrillers, historical fiction, mysteries) span both male and female, and generally published from major publishing houses. Political thrillers and historical fiction leaning hard into military historical fiction are pretty male. Mysteries and historical fiction leaning into biographical is more female. My husband reads niche horror (e.g. Thomas Ligotti) and well-crafted small press publications (e.g. Centipede Press, Cemetery Dance, Subterranean Press), and he'd say they're pretty male. Maybe find some small presses?

Despite anti-LGBT propaganda, the most popular fiction author in Russia is Mòxiāng Tóngxiù, who reportedly is a slash fiction writer from the PRC.

So I don't think you can find a safe space even there.

Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (MXTX) is a Chinese author well-known for her danmei (the Chinese equivalent of the Yaoi Genre) novels, and is one of the most successful authors of the genre.

I'll pass. I didn't realize horny gay erotica by and for women had infiltrated China and Russia.

Infiltrated? At least in China the tropes and community are very much homegrown (with at most some memetic seed capital from Japan). That it would start leaking into Russia is only natural considering how the geopolitical proximity of the two is increasingly translating into cultural exchange.

Two things are happening at once here:

-Traditional publishing is pushing men out, likely for culture war reasons. Unsurprisingly this has resulted in a huge bloom of non-traditional publishing for masculine focused genres (ex: Patreon and Progression Fantasy). The readers are still there, just the big publishers are mostly not selling to them and are confused why they aren't buying.

-Reading in general is down, less so in women's genres. Women still buy romance books for instance.

So if you want to see more reading by men you can look at the male genres (again Progression Fantasy, LitRPG are BIG right now).

The rest of the west has less of the general anti-intellectualism and therefore more reading so you can look there.

Something I've noticed in my social group is that the majority of men who still read are reading non-fiction for life improvement or knowledge development. I bet this group is mostly unchanged from the past it's just the fiction guys have been chased out or fled.

Traditional publishing is definitely a very progressive industry, but if they could sell 5 million copies of rip-off Tom Clancy schlock to young men they’d absolutely hold their noses and do it; after all, almost all the big publishers have conservative non-fiction imprints for basic economic reasons.

One of the most startling aspects of the woke revolution is the way select companies have chosen to just leave money on the table and abandon profit. Disney has been the most obvious example of this but it's pretty common in nerd hobbies and you see a lot of it in the comic book and video game industries.

With respect to publishing you'll hear anecdotes of male authors with a good idea being told that they just "aren't looking for your kind of book" right now or whatever.

Authors in the PF/LIT RPG genres often have massively profitable Patreon's indicating that the market exists, but struggle to get published using traditional methods. It's stupid but it is the same mistake a lot of business entities are right now.

Somehow what is happening in video games and comics is even worse however.

That there are popular Patreons doesn’t mean publishers aren’t being smart. How many guys are out there writing this kind of stuff? Tens of thousands, and maybe a handful are making decent money. If you were a book publisher, do you really think you could pick out hits easily? Also, men who read them online wouldn’t necessarily buy a ‘traditional’ book even if their preferred genre was better represented in bookstores.

Tons of ink and YouTube hours have been spilled about the difficulty in getting male themed products out there, and the removal of male appeal from existing products, and the way Asia doesn't do this and a single Manga has more sales than the entire Western comics industry, and how companies are losing out on hundreds of millions of dollars in sales by doing this....etc. I think you'd have to make a case for why this would suddenly not apply to this niche the all these other things are having the same problem.

It's hard to find specific articles in the moment because this finding is against the narrative, but over the years I've seen tons of complaints from male authors (some of who have published with success) about this.

I did find a Huffington Post article from 2010 which may as well have been from 1872 in Culture War years commenting.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/why-men-dont-read-how-pub_b_549491

I cannot imagine how much worse it has gotten since then.

It’s actually a very simple explanation, which is that men play many more video games for many more hours than women do. Men spend roughly double the number of hours per week playing video games than women do. That extra leisure time goes somewhere. What changed since 1970? Video games. It’s really that simple.

The men who have entirely stopped reading and replaced it with video games are equally matched by the women who have stopped reading and replaced it with social media.

The men who would be traditionally reading a lot still read a ton it's just been replaced with non-fiction and stuff like this. Reading forum posts and /r/HobbyDrama or whatever is reading, it's just not fiction. And again, there are still large communities of men clamoring for fiction that appeals to them just a lot of them are looking at Royal Road or other stuff outside of traditional publishing.

Demand exists, supply is constrained. And again we see this in other markets impacted by wokeness.

Overall reading is down but as suggested in my link by someone who knows more about this than either of us, that doesn't need to be gendered.

HobbyDrama, 4chan, this place, celebrity gossip, AskReddit, WSB and most of TikTok are all nonfiction, so men and women are well-represented as readers there.

What’s the male equivalent to the fiction that women read? Well, porn in some cases, I guess. But in most it’s the fiction in video games, it’s Stalker, it’s Assassin’s Creed, it’s Dead Space, it’s The Last of Us, it’s Baldur’s Gate, it’s Red Dead Redemption (obviously all these have women players, but the the majority of playtime by hours is men).

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I know that this is a trite comparison, but even so... I think that viewing wokeness though the lens of religion helps to illuminate why this happens. Imagine you're in 17th century Europe and someone comes to you wanting to print a book that alleges that Jesus was a rapist or something equally blasphemous. Even if you thought you could make a ton of money off that book, you would probably turn the author down due to the immense social blowback you would receive.

Publishers (and video game companies, etc) today are in a similar situation. Even if an individual is sympathetic to your pitch, even if they could make hella money, they are going to be reluctant to publish something which is blasphemous to the religion they have to work with.

it's just the fiction guys have been chased out or fled

My social circle is staying out of the culture war and the guys are heavy fiction readers. I'd say they pretty much all are unaware about the more recent developments in the publishing world. It just doesn't affect them. Because if you like to read about sword fights or space ships, there are already more high quality books to read than you can fit into a lifetime.

Same thing if you are more literary-minded and like to read fiction about Russian nobility, or German interwar drama. In that genre, you could also argue that nothing worth reading has been written for the last 30 years anyway.

If you are talking about the backlog than sure, but the vast majority of the books I've read in the last 5 years have been self published/online and while a few legacy authors are still around there isn't an abundance of new appealing stuff.

I'll admit that having a friends group that is interested probably helps, none of my IRL contacts really read fiction so I have to go off of reddit etc fro recs and /r/fantasy for example is pretty fucking woke.

I don't think I've seen a book recommended on /r/printsf that was written in the last 5-10 that wasn't by Adrian Tchaikovsky.

Yeah, that was my point. Normal male fiction readers really don't care that much, because the backlog of good fiction is absolutely massive anyway.

Really sucks for young authors today, of course.

...and for people who read way too much and who have worked through most of the backlog.

Nope not me.

Me neither, unironically. Got a little bored of swords and space ships and started with Russian literary fiction. Just Dostoevsky, Tolstoi and Chekhov seem to be a life-long project...

Yeah I read those guys in High School and College because it seemed like The Thing To Do and so on but these days I just switched to lowbrow book-crack since I have to read so much non-fiction for work.

Ideally later in my career I'll switch back.

Last week, a lady at work asked me to read The Brothers Karamazov with her. Perhaps we could get some Motte book club action going.

The self published book ecosystem seems to have a different culture. I vaguely recall reading an article a while ago to the effect that regular masculine military science fiction published as eBooks to Amazon can be much more profitable than going through the legacy publishers and that the Bantams of the world should "cry harder".

The self published book ecosystem seems to have a different culture.

Much more difficult to find the good stories in a sea of self-published trash. However, when you find a gem, it's excellent.

You've got me there, and that is certainly true. What I meant by "places" though was more like Latvia, or Uruguay or something.

I think what I'm really wondering about, is whether the extreme feminization of fiction and fiction publishing is a uniquely Anglospheric phenomenon, or a Western one, or a necessary consequence of the leftward shift of Western culture in general, or something else; and whether there are any holdouts anywhere.

Women are more narrative/relationship/character oriented, so fiction is going to militate towards female overrepresentation in a way media in general may not regardless of local attitudes. So like, Afghanistan as in actually Afghanistan might be your best bet.

And Uruguay speaks rioplatonese Spanish, which is not what I would associate with ‘less feminism’ anyways.

Women are more narrative/relationship/character oriented, so fiction is going to militate towards female overrepresentation in a way media in general may not regardless of local attitudes.

Female overrepresentation in fiction is a recent development, though. Look, for example, at the list of bestselling novels in the U.S. in the 1970s. There are several years in which all of the top 10 were men. If this state of affairs could hold at one time, I would expect that at least 50/50 parity is possible.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Publishers_Weekly_list_of_bestselling_novels_in_the_United_States_in_the_1970s

And Uruguay speaks rioplatonese Spanish, which is not what I would associate with ‘less feminism’ anyways.

Uruguay was just an example of a physical place. I'm not explicitly interested in Uruguay.

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