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Notes -
Read “Earth” by John Boyne (author of The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas) this weekend. Short novel, second in a series of interconnected “Elements” stories. (Water previously published, Fire and Air to come).
SPOILERS BELOW
Quick and easy read, 165 pages that zip along. Narrator is a young professional footballer in the UK who has been implicated in a high profile rape trial. (He’s charged with accessory to rape, his mate, a more high profile teammate, with rape.) The narrator is gay and came to football via an unconventional route, having previously worked as a rentboy for wealthy, sordid and powerful figures.
It has 1000s of reviews on Amazon and Goodreads at an average of 4.3, plus a lot of positive attention in mainstream media (at least in UK/Ireland, not sure about US etc), so you’d think it’s worth a couple of hours, right?
Yes. But not for the reasons you might think.
Almost all the characters are male (central and peripheral):
With the possible exception of the priest (a Stereotypical Man of Great Spiritual Understanding) and the barrister (a 2D legal eagle) all male characters are uniformly loathsome, lying, controlling, screening, misogynistic, raping pricks.
Those Amazon and Goodreads reviews are FULL of 5-star reviews from women. The media/newspaper reviews all seem to be left-leaning, virtue-signalling, vapid and vacuous.
Lots of reviewers called it “disturbing”. I think so too, but for very different reasons than they do.
It’s worth reading, and also disturbing, to see up close just how anti-man mainstream publishing has become.
I believe it’s one of the most dangerous books I’ve ever read, because it underscores something I’ve been observing in publishing.
Complex reality, including the inner world psychodrama of human beings, used to be the thing intelligent fiction did brilliantly. It is possible to learn as much about humanity from reading a handful of books by Austen, Dostoevsky, Dickens and Hemingway as you’d get from a hundred lifetimes. Now, mainstream fiction is another front in the war against reality. Instead of learning about humanity you will more often fill yourself with disinformation, much of it from self-flagellating male authors keen to impress feminists and men who deny their own balls.
This book could easily have been called “All Men Really Are Bastards”.
This is purely anecdotal, but from my experience with yaoi/gay porn, female artists/writers are much more likely to include guro or psychological torture in their works than male ones. Even when they draw both yaoi and straight porn, they will only include it in yaoi. And this has been the case probably the last 20 years, and a lot of these artists are Japanese as well so it's not something contained to the West.
So as a whole this doesn't really seem very surprising. Rather than this becoming an indication of anti-male publishing, it's an indication that what used to be fanfiction people read in private, rose to the mainstream. The publishers are delivering female targeted fiction, for their female majority fanbases. If you want an actual example, you just need to look at Fifty Shades of Grey. The movie is rated 4.2/10, but you can find thousands of stories like it on Ao3.
I don't think that this is really a bad thing. In general mainstream has become something that panders to all demographics which I don't find very interesting, so the development of new works that are targeted specifically to either men or women doesn't seem like a bad thing. Like in Japan, it's been like that for ages, where you have shoujo that is targeted towards girls, and primarily watched by girls. And you have plenty of harem power fantasies as well as regular shounen that are targeted towards boys and watched by boys. Although shounen has acquired a bigger female audience recently.
I know nothing about any of that, other than the observation that the internet (where I’m assuming lots of what you talk about lives or are least has deep roots in) is opening up thousands or millions of new niches to cater for and profit from new interest groups.
But honestly, I don’t think it’s relevant at all to this point. This is about mainstream publishing and society/culture. Which has become extremely anti-male/anti-masculine in the past ~10 years.
I’m talking UK/Irish literary fiction, which is not internet native. It’s offline establishment native. It holds a powerful influence over the conversations being had by normie people who don’t spend any time on Reddit or X (and who might not be able to find Reddit or X if you asked them to).
As a sideways related example, Entourage was a hit mainstream US show, centering on four male characters and their interests, ambitions struggles, screened between 2004-11. When you watch it now and realise that there’s an almost 0% chance of anything like it being approved now, never mind be given prime time slots for years, you realise how far the mind virus has gone in the decision making corridors of power across all mainstream publishing and media.
I agree with the BahRamYou that there's no malevolent conspiracy. Women simply spend more money on media they consume. So publishers cater to them.
The ones I talked about with shounen/shoujo is offline. It has physical sales. Same thing in China. Where despite the CCP's stance against homosexuality some of the most popular novels and tv shows are danmei, which are stories with gay romance, but without the sex and kissing. Whose fanbase is primarily female.
If you want stories that are made for and by men, there's plenty of webnovels you can read on Royalroad or self published on Amazon, or fanfics on Spacebattles or other sites.
And actually there are still shows made primarily for men. Reacher, Jack Ryan, Terminal List. Adaptations of novels that probably do still have a primarily male readership.
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I agree, but I don't think there's any malevolent conspiracy at work here. It's just that TV, and especially books, are more of a female market. So the publishers naturally make stuff aimed at women, which attracts more of a female audience and also creates a pipeline where the only new writers getting trained are the sort of people who can write that stuff. And over time it just becomes more and more extreme. The guys go elsewhere to things like sports, video games, anime, and internet blogs.
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I think the male exploitation/male victim and male perpetrator definitely has a female audience that is captivated by it. I think it's idealizing a sexuality and preference with an absence of pregnancy scares, where all activity exploitative or otherwise doesn't change a persons mental status, with characters not bogged down by the 'All Women are Wonderful' and allowed to villainous.
Several years ago I rented the film 'My private Idaho' from the library (awful even, with young Keanu Reeves and River Phoenix mixes Shakespeare prose and street urchins to ill effect) where the dvd jacket had a interview with the writer JT LeRoy (I believe pre-unmasking of the author) who gives fraudulent story about her watching the film while working as a male prostitute in the Castro district (what a bizarre cultural relic).
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