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Hard agree on this. I recently learned that the President of South Korea has no children, but several dogs. And he is a conservative who actually wants to increase the birth rate. Lol.
Based on no data whatsoever, I will propose that if a woman ever gets a dog before having kids, the chance of kids goes down by a lot. I have friends who have dogs that they treat like children, and I have to admit it bothers me a lot.
Arguably literature mattered a lot from like 1800–1970 give or take. Supposedly, people would mob the docks to get the latest Charles Dickens serial. Harriet Beecher Stowe practically caused the Civil War by writing "Uncle Tom's Cabin". Even as recently as the 1960s, writers like Norman Mailer were actually well-known and widely read.
Today, of course, the entire industry should just be drowned in a bathtub. It is so ideologically captured as to be worthless. I don't care if I ever read another book of "literature" written after the year 1980.
I think you have an overly narrow view of what the "industry" is. The publishing industry, certainly is staffed mainly by 30 and 40 something white women trying to appeal to the same. But the superset-- the literature industry-- is much larger, still relevant, and wholly unkillable. We think of "literature" as being "classical books about people being depressed in russian" and "modern books about suburban moms leaving their husbands" because that's what we learned about in school and that's what makes it onto the talk shows. And so because nobody reads those books and actually changes what they believe, we think literature is a dead, academic pursuit. But in reality, I think it's stuff like dark romantasy smut and isekai webnovels that are having the greatest net effect on philosophical and moral development. (Which is a terrifying thought, but I digress.) You can find any number of people talking about how, for example, Mushoku Tensei changed their lives.
/u/coffee_enjoyer this is also relevant to your comment.
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Some books are fun. The key is ignoring people who say you have to spend all your time reading neurotic navel-gazing about the Female Experience if you want to be a good person. If something is annoying or boring... You just drop it.
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