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PaperclipPerfector  1yr ago (text post)   33534 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 24, 2023

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The decline of the Literary Bloke: "In featuring just four men, Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists confirms what we already knew: the literary male has become terminally uncool."

Just some scattered thoughts.

The Great Literary Man is no longer the role model he once was. The seemingly eternal trajectory outlined by Woolf has been broken. The statistics are drearily familiar. Fewer men read literary novels and fewer men write them. Men are increasingly absent from prize shortlists and publishers’ fiction catalogues. Today’s release of Granta’s 20 best young British novelists – a once-a-decade snapshot of literary talent – bottles the trend. Four of the 20 on the list are men. That’s the lowest in the list’s 40-year history. In its first year, 1983, the Granta list featured only six women.

It has to be pointed out that any such "great upcoming young novelists" list must be comprised of mostly women, out of necessity. Otherwise the organizers of the list would be painted as sexist and privileged and out of touch and it would probably jeopardize their careers. You don't even need to reach for the more subtle types of criticisms that revisionists make of the traditional canon: "yeah, I know like you feel you were just judging works solely on literary merit, and you just so happened to collect a list of 100 deserving authors where 99 of them are men, but actually you were being driven by subconscious patriarchal bias and you need to escape from your historically ossified perspective and so on and so forth". What's going on now in the publishing industry is far more overt: "it's time to hand the reins over to women, period". In such a cultural context, how could a list of the "20 best young British novelists" be taken as unbiased evidence of anything?

The irrelevance of male literary fiction has something to do with “cool”. A few years ago Megan Nolan noted – with as much accuracy as Woolf on these men in Mrs Dalloway – that it might be “inherently less cool” to be a male novelist these days. Male writers, she continued, were missing a “cool, sexy, gunslinger” movement to look up to. All correct.

It's true that literary fiction is not as cool as it once was, although this in itself is not a great moral catastrophe. It's part of the natural cycle of things. The "cool" things now are happening in TV, film, video games, and comic books. When was the last time a literary fiction author of either gender captured the imaginations of millions of people the way Hajime Isayama did? The literary novel is not eternal (many will argue that historically speaking, it's a relatively recent invention) and it is not inherently superior to other narrative art forms.

The decline of male literary fiction is not down to a feminist conspiracy in publishing houses

Correct, it's not a conspiracy, but only because there is nothing conspiratorial about it. If you were to ask any big (or small!) publishing house if they gave priority to voices from traditionally marginalized groups, they would say yes. If you were to then ask them if women are a traditionally marginalized group, they would say yes.

...

It's not a conspiracy if they just tell you what they're doing!

The most understanding account of male literary ambition was written by a woman.

There's been a meme for some time that goes something like, "men don't understand women, but women understand men - maybe even better than men do themselves", which I find to be quite obnoxious. If there is any "misunderstanding", then it surely goes both ways. There are plenty of things in the male experience that have no natural analogue in the female experience, same as the reverse.

Why should any man care? If the hobby can't 'maintain' men, for whatever reason, then you won't get men. It's of no greater consequence to the average 'bloke' that there aren't any men on some literary prize list than it is of consequence to them that 'Crochet Weekly' didn't feature many men yet again.

I mean, isn't it equally sad that the modding scene for Battlefield 1942 is dead? So much amazing work, some many hours of entertainment. Amazing feats of skill, long lasting friendships, memories of people who worked and played tirelessly for nothing other than love for their craft.

Men tend to just do great things wherever they are. Any creative exercise done by men has the potential to appeal to other men which snowballs itself further and further until the entire thing meets its end and the next thing takes its place. This is a process that has, for all my life, perpetuated itself without any need or input from women or some arbiter of what is good and what is bad. In fact I've only ever seen it hampered by the presence of women or these sorts of arbiters.

To paraphrase a young African American scholar: 'All a nigga knows is all a nigga loves'. There seems to be this unexamined notion that womens hobbies matter. Or that they should matter. Or that what happens around them matters. Which seems fueled entirely by womens sense of self importance. When the reality is that none of it matters any more than some random dead modding scene or that one flash animation on Newgrounds that no one will ever watch again.

Why should any man care?

What if you're a man and you want to read a book, and publisher shenanigans mean that books for you won't get published?

Then you can care all you want. Just like there are a few guys who still care enough to update an 19 year old mod for a 21 year old game that is played by less than a few hundred people.

"Not many books are published for men" does not mean "not many men want to buy books".

The 19 year old mod is both hard to get and not something many people want. The publishing industry situation is basically a principal/agent problem where the things that get published don't follow the market.

I didn't say that was the case.

If you started marketing Battlefield 1942 I'm sure plenty of people would start playing it again. That doesn't answer the question of why that should be done or be considered important. Why should a bunch of women care about publishing books for 'blokes'? These women seem perfectly happy reveling in the current situation.

If you started marketing Battlefield 1942 I'm sure plenty of people would start playing it again.

Battlefield 1942 was marketed back when it was new and at some point people stopped buying it despite the marketing. So I don't think this is true.

They stopped buying it, not playing it. That happened with the release of new games, primarily Battlefield 2.

But that's all very much besides the point, which pertained to why, if you had the ability to funnel attention to something, it should be done. Sure, your hobby feels important to you. But that's what everyone feels towards their hobby.

Someone hasn't seen The Sims 4 modding, it's run by women for women (and trains too of course)

???

What part are you incredulous about? The fact that the majority of modders there are women, or that a significant fraction are trans?

That it has any relevance to what I wrote.

Uh.. You just made a big statement about how modding is a male phenomena, while I am in complete agreement that it's majority male overall, the Sims is a big franchise that has an overwhelmingly female modding base.

It's a knock against your grand theory, which isn't to say that you're wrong overall, just overstating the point.

You just made a big statement about how modding is a male phenomena

No I didn't.

That a significant number of Sims players are trains, of course.

(I’ll show myself out)

Just in case you're out of the loop, people often use "trains" as a way to refer to trans people in contexts where they dont want to draw the Eye of Sauron for saying anything negative about them. More on Reddit, given how the jannies act.

I was definitely out of the loop. Thanks for the heads up.

That would be the exception that proves the rule I'd say.

Same way I'd be pretty confident in guessing that warhammer fanfiction is primarily written by and for men.

You've managed to trigger one of my pet peeves with that phrase haha

Exceptions don't prove the rule, quite literally the opposite, at least in the sense that 99.99% of people use it. Think about it, how does evidence against a hypothesis strengthen it?

I looked up the origins of the phrase, and it's been hopelessly mutated, originally it was used along the lines of:

Imagine you visit a hospital and see a sign saying "visitations allowed between 4-6pm". In that case, this 'exception' proves that there's a rule that visitations aren't allowed outside this window.

Nobody uses it in that sense anymore, and it should be taken behind a shed and shot.

"There are dozens of us! Dozens!"

Pedants of the world unite! We have nothing to lose except our chains, which we can then use on others haha

You know, I actually looked up the meaning of the phrase because I was also sure it was gibberish, saw that it was gibberish and decided to use it anyway.

It seems that I'm actually just an evil man.

May your pillows always be slightly warm and moist no matter how many times you turn them 🙏

I'm inclined to agree with the author. Literary fiction is incredibly uncool. I don't know who any of the people he mentions are. I guess I've heard of John Green and The Fault in Our Stars but only in the sense that I knew it existed and that I wasn't interested in it. I might've heard snide comments at its expense. The only thing I know about Infinite Jest is that one of my friends left it around ostentatiously and we mostly thought he was being a pseud, trying to show off. I noticed his bookmark wasn't advancing very far, week by week.

If men cannot dominate the literary landscape, cannot walk into lists like Granta’s, deservingly or not, they will look for other landscapes to colonise.

If men don't want to occupy this landscape, who cares? Literary fiction is not valuable real estate. Let's colonize some other landscapes!

I'll stick with my lowbrow translated Chinese novels, writing from Royalroad and Spacebattles Forums or various webnovels. The prose and editing isn't great but there is some kind of conflict, there are interesting mechanical ideas that people use to achieve their goals. It's almost universally written by men and they usually have no filter preventing them from writing whatever they want, Chinese censorship aside.

I'll add the caveat that forcibly homogenizing things like sci-fi or fantasy to make them more and more palatable to women is bad (or goes against my interests at least). But this article is talking about literary fiction specifically.

they usually have no filter preventing them from writing whatever they want, Chinese censorship aside.

On SB?

No, the translated Chinese novels. On second thought, there is a fair bit of censorship on SB too, but then you just pick another forum like AO3 or whatever.

Well for SB apparently now Questionable Questing is no longer merely a pit of degeneracy.

What do you mean?

The rare few times QQ comes up on SB it's just mentioned as the place where people write NSFW stuff.

It has a SFW section, and some authors put their SFW stories in the NSFW since it's more popular (which leads to frustration among readers). E.g. Beware of Chicken and Virtuous Sons are also posted on QQ, as does Ack.

With This Ring has moved solely to Questionable Questing, after a serious of hilarious events at Sufficient Velocity, and is SFW. (cw: giant archive.)

Disclaimer: I haven't read much fiction in the last two decades, and what I've read was similar to a stereotypical older Lesswrongian's sci-fi/fantasy diet and nuggets of classics, so my opinion is probably best discarded. Read @Dean's review of shitty new Star Wars movies instead, then.

Anyway, while institutional and ideological factors necessarily play a role, I would not rush to mock the premise that women are better writers. Of course, this depends on what we mean by a good writer. (For convenience I'll ignore market definitions and issues, such as female readers preferring stories by women). What does a good writer write best about? Stuff he – or, as it happens, she – cares about. It's not a given that this coincides with better practical understanding; but as for the resolution and clarity of verbal lens, it probably does.

In my experience, women, including writers, are vastly more interested in people, and men in events and things (the people-thing distinction is trivially true). In the limit they converge on detailed worldbuilding (whether «realistic» or thoroughly fictional) that provides a harmonious stage for the development of complex personalities, but the dissimilarity remains. Men write about things, ideas, events that the protagonist wrestles with, grows through, or sometimes is crushed by (classifications of archetypal narratives are very telling here), or in the worst case blasts through like a flying brick, shrugging off damage. Women who aren't complete hacks undeserving of our time write about… well, about stuff the protagonist feels as any this happens, in detail, to the point of forgetting that other pieces of the world should continue to move and live. Some of the best women wrote about a great man, adoring him as if from some distance, wrinkles and all. Say, Le Guin wrote Shevek. What is the deepest woman written by a man?*

Still, while some of my all-time favorite stories are written by women, others are written by men about women, for very understandable reasons. It's quite funny how the latter, in the modern genre fiction at least, are essentially weird men (consider all of Neal Stephenson's jailbait; bona-fide feminist protags are far worse, naturally). Yet men-as-depicted-by-women are still recognizably male and deeper than men's men – if sometimes unrealistically sensitive and vulnerable, even absolute brutes (indeed, especially brutes). Frankly, that may not even be much of a distortion: women work to see that side of their partner, the side that is usually not shown in male fiction – or in public.

Male fiction, put simply, is somewhat crude and churlish on the psychological side. Again, I'm not saying it's wrong in the sense of providing poor actionable descriptions. But it's not elaborate, not fancy and eloquent when it goes into the internal workings of the mind.

As a concluding note: it's not just that male consumers play games. Male creators also play games, and write them too. There are arenas for worldbuilding and self-expression that are more fit for male interests than composing traditional novels.

And, of course, then there's the real world, where we men are meant to carve novels of our lives into the bedrock with consequences of our acts.

* I am well aware that some Chekhov, Kuprin or Conrad could do more than that in an offhand sketch, but it feels wrong to bring them into this discussion. Old world giants are more than men.

Yet men-as-depicted-by-women are still recognizably male and deeper than men's men – if sometimes unrealistically sensitive and vulnerable, even absolute brutes

I've not read much written by women in my life, but on the occasions I have I have to say that I've always found the way they write men to be jarring. There have even been times when I've read something without knowing anything about the author, come away thinking that something was off (everyone seems kind of gay? - my inner thought process at the time), lo and behold it's written by a woman every time. This was really the experience that lead me to believe that women as a group have a somewhat over-inflated view of their own understanding of the inner workings of men. I do think this street runs both ways, with the men that bother to try and understand women that is.

everyone seems kinda gay?

Do you remember any examples of writing like this?

Can't remember off the top of my head, it was ages ago.

Even at the time I don't think I could put my finger on what precisely was off about it, just that the characters inner thoughts seemed glaringly effeminate.

I'm not so sure, I've never felt very "seen"(as the kids call it now) when reading how women tend to write men. There's investment in some kind of feelings and thoughts in the book but even that reflects a feminine view of the world. Like the opposite side of the coin of when men write women as if they were men who happened to have female bodies. I'm not so convinced that a woman putting more thought and investment into a male character they're inventing is going to produce a more realistically male character.

There’s investment in some kind of feelings and thoughts in the book but even that reflects a feminine view of the world.

Is it just the type of thoughts and feelings on display that makes it feel foreign? Or is it the fact that it focuses on thoughts and feelings at all?

In a reversal of popular folk wisdom, Nietzsche identified emotion with masculinity and rationality with femininity. Which he was quite correct about.

Crying at a Hallmark movie is not emotion - or, it is emotion of a particularly diluted and domesticated type. Quitting your stable well-paying job for a one in a million chance at becoming a rockstar or a Twitch streamer or whatever, getting into a fight with a random guy at a bar because he looked at you funny, pursuing one woman to the point of self-ruin long after she made it abundantly clear that she’s not interested - this is emotion. And men are far more likely to engage in these sorts of activities than women are.

No, I'm aware I have emotions, I just think the inside view is significantly different from the outside view and women by necessity are not privy to the inside view for basically the same reason I find it difficult to describe to you or anyone the difference. To smash another culture war topic into this in a possibly doomed attempt to illuminate with heat look at the subtler difference between trans women and natal women or trans men and natal men - these are people to whom it's incredibly important to closely imitate the opposite sex and yet it seems very clear, at least to me, that it's an inauthentic reading. I find the men women write tend to be performing masculinity rather than simply being masculine(this is not to be confused with just overdoing the masculinity). I'm importantly not making the claim that men write women much better, I think the sexes are doomed to never really understanding the internal life of each other. I can usually quickly tell and author's sex by how they write men and I have heard and believe women have the complimentary ability.

I just think the inside view is significantly different from the outside view and women by necessity are not privy to the inside view for basically the same reason I find it difficult to describe to you or anyone the difference.

I suppose I would say that I don't think anyone is privy to my inside view, man or woman, and therefore it's not a reasonable criteria to use when judging an author... there may be certain properties I share in common with a male author or male fictional character on account of our shared maleness, some view of sexuality or relationships maybe, but taken in isolation, these things tend to be essentially incidental properties, on the same level as saying that we both share five fingers and five toes. It's not the sort of thing that makes me feel a deep spiritual kinship with someone.

In general my basic way of processing experience, the basic tactile feeling of my thoughts and sensations, the matrix of connections they form with each other (or don't form), is so remote from that of any other person I know of, fictional or not, that I am perpetually "apart" from others, perpetually "on the outside", and therefore I feel barely any more kinship with men as a group than I do with women as a group. Therefore let the author write of feminine men, and masculine women, and unrealistic realistic protagonists, and realistic unrealistic villains, it matters not to me because I will not be "seen" by any of them. All of them are equally arbitrary choices in the ceaseless procession of forms. Who am I to judge a character as "realistic" anyway? Who am I to say that man or woman must be such and such, to say that a male portrayed as having a "feminine" state of mind could not exist? In the most extreme case the author will invent a new type of psyche which has never existed before; but this is simply one of the principal tasks of the artist, to invent or discover new configurations of the soul which have hitherto gone unrecognized.

Can you really say that you're not the same way? Do you not simply fall prey to illusion when you look at another man and go "ah, he gets me" on the basis of one comment or action, or even a whole lifetime of comments or actions? Do you not both contain infinite depths that remain unrecognized and misrecognized? Give yourself some credit.

I feel this less with good male authors. Of course no one 100% able to grok someone else but there are pretty noticeable inferential gaps between the sexes, things others totally lack a frame of reference for and can't hope to understand. I can guess at, even guess well at what period cramps feels like or growing up with male attention you aren't prepared for feels like but I'm never going to truly on a gut level understand it and all the second third and fourth order effects that has on a person's psychology and it shows. The arrogance required to believe women or men can understand the general condition of the other sex is just preposterous to me. What you can gleam from behavior and inference is just not enough.

In the situation of literary outliers it doesn't matter if most men are insensitive, because the highly sensitive and talented male outlier can succeed and many have as psychological, emotional, sensitive writers (while other male authors have gone the way you describe as idea-focused etc.)

I think it's more of a question of there being space in the culture and market to draw those people into successful writers who understand their own gifts, have something to communicate clearly, and see rewards from it. I think that what culture that would support that has deeply degraded, to the point where the output of men and women authors are suffering.

Firstly I think sensitive men have become deeply confused by the culture/political war. Male gaze is bad, Fellini's male psychodrama is offensive etc. Sensitive men are so steeped in shame they are afraid of creating sensitive works with honesty.

Secondly, the sensitive male is outcompeted by the sensitive female. When women writers didn't exist, there is much less competition in the niche. It's like when men played the female roles in theatre, when women aren't competing it releases pressure on male gender expression.

Thirdly, the literary culture is less interested in reading the "sensitive man". What people see today as the "sensitive man" is basically an invented personality that has rough edges sanded off. Real sensitivity from men is distasteful in certain ways, so people only feel comfortable engaging with it when it at least was made in the 1970s when you can excuse that kind of thing.

I would not rush to mock the premise that women are better writers.

I can't agree. I don't think there's anything in principle that would prevent a woman from writing a truly superior work, but as a matter of fact, all of my favorite works from both "low" culture and "high" culture are overwhelmingly written by men.

If we just selected a woman and a man off the street entirely at random, then maybe you could convince me that there's a slightly better than 50/50 chance that the woman will be a better writer? But I'm not really concerned with the average case. I prefer to spend my time among the "old world giants", as you call them, and their contemporary spiritual successors.

In my experience, women, including writers, are vastly more interested in people, and men in events and things

A lot of people in this thread have been echoing the same sentiment and something bothers me about it.

The entire history of literature, the entire history of philosophy (not just the rarefied heights of logic and metaphysics, but all of the parts of philosophy that bring us down to earth too, ethics, politics, the investigation of the human soul), the entire history of what could be called Western humanistic thought, was forged almost entirely by men. Every artistic movement, every advance in the representation of the human psyche be it in word or image, every political ideology to command how people should organize themselves, all of the most probing examinations of the state of the human soul in its various historical epochs... virtually all men. Clearly there has never been a shortage of men who were deeply interested in people. Would Freud's work exist if Freud wasn't interested in people? Would Nietzsche's work exist if Nietzsche wasn't interested in people?

This very forum too. We, mostly men, gather here to discuss people doing people things. The motivations of people, the destiny of people, the norms that bind people.

Granted, we may be able to draw a distinction between being interested in people-as-things vs people-as-people. Maybe wanting to understand the general principles and patterns that govern people, wanting to use individual people as a means of accessing the universal, is a people-as-things approach, while gossiping about how your friend Sally wants a divorce from her husband Dave is a people-as-people approach. But then you would have to declare that essentially the entire history of literature and philosophy is not indicative of any particular interest in people per se, on the part of the authors. That seems very odd.

Male fiction, put simply, is somewhat crude and churlish on the psychological side. Again, I'm not saying it's wrong in the sense of providing poor actionable descriptions. But it's not elaborate, not fancy and eloquent when it goes into the internal workings of the mind.

Joyce's Ulysses is crude and churlish? Ulysses is not elaborate or fancy or eloquent when it goes into the internal workings of the mind?

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I noticed that further up in the thread you also said you experienced more anxiety than the male average as well. Both of these traits are outside the male average, in a more feminine direction. I wouldn’t be surprised if there was a slight correlation among traits like this.

How many Joyces contend for an average Hugo?

Every second-tier female fanfic writer is invested in her characters' feelings and thoughts and dedicates a big part of the work to spelling that out.

Men, like I said, have other avenues to express their core interests.

Male fiction, put simply, is somewhat crude and churlish on the psychological side. Again, I'm not saying it's wrong in the sense of providing poor actionable descriptions. But it's not elaborate, not fancy and eloquent when it goes into the internal workings of the mind.

Without reaching back to your old world giants - Kurt Vonnegut, Graham Greene, Gabriel García Márquez, Richard Wright, Anthony Powell, William Faulkner, John LeCarre, Cormac McCarthy, Jonathan Franzen, Ian McEwan - just to name a few off the top of my head. I deliberately chose more or less "literary" authors to avoid wrangling over genres. Note that I'm not endorsing all of these writers or saying they're everyone's cup of tea or that their writing is flawless (and some of them definitely have the "men writing women" problem you allude to), but the list of male writers capable of writing very masculine novels that are still psychologically elaborate and eloquent is longer than you suggest.

I'm not sure if that's really challenging my claim about priorities. Men can reason about psychology, sure. But McCarthy, for example, is famous for a number of enigmatic masculine characters, whose psychology, however nontrivial, is revealed overwhelmingly though action; it's a cinematic «show, don't tell» ethos. Vonnegut's ones came across as alexithymic and somewhat emotionally stunted to me (Slaughterhouse, Cat's Cradle).

Perhaps we could evaluate this just by looking at the proportion of self-referential monologue in text.

«Old World giants» was a bit tongue-in-cheek, I meant chronology and pre-digital culture more than geography, it just occurred to me that my immediate associations are Eurasians, which was not the case with genre fiction I referred to.

It seems somewhat accepted around here that a lot of career path differences are based on "men like to work with things, women like to work with people". Video games are way better at representing interactions between "things" than novels are, both "things" as physical objects to shoot and explode and strategic management of mechanistic systems. I don't think games are actually that good at representing complex social interaction between individuals, because of the cost of producing the visuals and dialogue for each branching path they really can't get that complex. It makes sense to me that survival games might replace male interest in survival novels like "Robinson Crusoe" or "My Side of the Mountain" but dating sims aren't really going to replace women's interest in complex interpersonal relationships portrayed in novels. This is of course describing the centers of different bell curves and not to suggest that there are no women interested in strategy games and no men who like Jane Austen novels.

I think FanFic writing rates make a strong case that this is pretty organic. If you look at the video game modding community and it's 80% male and then you look at video game developers and they're 80% male do we need some big hiring practices conspiracy to explain it? There aren't institutional barriers to putting your Skyrim mod up on the Nexus or Steam Workshop or putting your fiction on AO3 or fanfiction.net. This survey of AO3 Users says they're 80% female, this study of fanfiction.net says people who joined in 2010 were 76% female. Goodreads has a 76% female userbase, though that's book reviews not fanfiction.

This NBER paper has a graph of share of books authored by women. It bounced around 10% for the 19th century and then begins a steady linear increase starting in the 1970's breaking 50% around 2020.

Are there many media forms where if the consumers and amateur practitioners are primarily one gender the producers remain the other gender? It seems like once most readers are women, then probably most writers will be women, and eventually, most editors and publishers will be as well and this generational overturn is to be expected. These spaces are woke because they're women-dominated not women dominated because they're woke.

There's been a meme for some time that goes something like, "men don't understand women, but women understand men - maybe even better than men do themselves", which I find to be quite obnoxious. If there is any "misunderstanding", then it surely goes both ways.

I'd put slightly better odds on women understanding men than vice versa. This is some weak back-of-the-envelope evo-psych but generally, I'd expect there to be stronger selection pressure for women to be able to predict and manipulate male behavior then vice versa, since they are physically weaker, calorically dependent, and extremely vulnerable during pregnancy. If early men wants something from early woman (say monogamy) violent coercion is an option, whereas early woman can't really coerce her partner unless she can get the whole group to do that for her.

It makes sense to me that survival games might replace male interest in survival novels like "Robinson Crusoe" or "My Side of the Mountain" but dating sims aren't really going to replace women's interest in complex interpersonal relationships portrayed in novels.

I dunno, I think the audience for VNs and dating sims is probably pretty evenly-split gender-wise; it is just reading paired with some visuals, and no limit as to subject matter.

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Most VNs are essentially just books though. VN fans typically talk about “reading” VNs rather than “playing” them.

True, that's the feeling I got from fanfiction.net or AO3, but there are fanfiction spaces that seem to have more men.

I can think of Spacebattles, Sufficient Velocity, fiction.live or Questionable Questing from the top of my mind. The last two especially, given the type of gratuitous smut you will find there.

I am not able to find the forum thread that did the poll, but you will feel the difference when reading works in these spaces vs AO3. Especially the way feelings are handled in the writing.

Of course, it is also possible that SB or SV just have better women writers and hence you don't experience the same uncanny valley feeling you get from reading a lot of AO3 authors writing men.

Do women on The Motte have any tells they use to predict whether a writer under a pseudonym is a man? Say by how they write women?

Anecdotal Data says that SB and SF are less female dominated than most amature fiction dumping zones, majority men rather than 50/50 or 80/20.

That said, the proportion of non dog-shit (not an obvious power fantasy/weird sex thing AND has some fucking grammar) stories with she/her on the profile seems to be quite a bit higher than the gender ratio should produce.

this survey of AO3 Users says they're 80% female

Thanks for bringing this up. I had wanted to mention AO3 in the OP and ask if anyone had stats on its users. There is a lot of erotica on AO3 that's clearly written by men (as opposed to erotica that's clearly written by women), but I guess this is dwarfed by the amount of female-authored content on the site.

I do take this as a strong indicator of organic interest (or lack thereof). But it still feels wrong to flatly say "men just aren't into reading". The history of literature is dominated almost entirely by men. This was true even up until the mid 20th century - look at the writers who were active during the interwar period, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Pound, all men, with Woolf being a notable exception. Perhaps the absence of women can be explained by patriarchal oppression, but how do you explain the presence of men; clearly there were a lot of men who were interested in reading and writing.

Maybe it really is as simple as, men have more options today and they like those other options better.

I'd expect there to be stronger selection pressure for women to be able to predict and manipulate male behavior then vice versa

This isn't a bad argument. But a lot of female "manipulation" of men doesn't extend very far past "I am a healthy woman who meets the minimum standard of sexual attractiveness, and I am implying that you may be able to exchange resources for sexual access. You get me?" I don't think it necessarily entails a deep understanding of the unique parts of the male psyche, male isolation, male ambition. Or even just male sexuality - the very thing that they'd have the most selection pressure to understand. A lot of women just really seem to not understand male sexual desire - they don't understand how anyone could want sex that fucking much, to the point that it drives men to do the sorts of insane and often illegal things that men do in pursuit of sex. There's no natural analogue for it in women's experience.

I do take this as a strong indicator of organic interest (or lack thereof). But it still feels wrong to flatly say "men just aren't into reading". The history of literature is dominated almost entirely by men. This was true even up until the mid 20th century - look at the writers who were active during the interwar period, Joyce, Faulkner, Hemingway, Pound, all men, with Woolf being a notable exception. Perhaps the absence of women can be explained by patriarchal oppression, but how do you explain the presence of men; clearly there were a lot of men who were interested in reading and writing.

I think men seek entertainment more than women. Women are happier to sit in a circle and just chat. Men want activities to do. Up to the mid-twentieth century, literature was one of the few sources of entertainment, so men read and wrote it. But now we've got a lot of competitors like movies and video games. And men are very visual creatures, movies and video games devastatingly outcompete books for men's attention.

But I do think there's room for more men in literature. At this point we as a society should be actively encouraging male reading and celebrating male authors the way we currently do female, because males are at the disadvantage now. There was a time women were oppressed and as a society we subsidized them in certain fields to make up for that and bring them to parity, now it's the opposite.

There is a lot of erotica on AO3 that's clearly written by men (as opposed to erotica that's clearly written by women)

Really? Like there's some I guess. But the amount of homosexual male shipping that goes on there... it's like a phallic Straits of Malacca, a lilac Panama Canal, an LGBT Suez. Most men really are not interested in homosexual relationships, most men don't tag things with 'angst'.

I did an experiment a while ago, looking for the most popular HP fics on AO3 and the most popular fics on FFN. Nearly all of the AO3 ones were about relationships (often gay), most of the FFN ones were about events.

Gay male fiction may be written by gay men as well as women?

Gay male fiction may be written by gay men as well as women?

It's easy to tell. They are very different. Gay erotic fiction written by gay men for gay men resembles straight porn; 20% setup, 80% graphic sex. Gay erotic fiction written by women for women resembles straight romance novels; 99 pages of melodrama for 1 page of fucking. There are other tells (e.g. the female obsession with dark and broody bad boys).

Gay male fiction tends to look more like Dominated by Doug than the weepy softboy melodrama on AO3.

Sure but is that what's going on here? Are gay men known for how much they write about gay relationships in Harry Potter or Kpop? Or is it women?

Incidentally, these works tend to be catered towards the female gaze, and gay men often find M/M fanfiction alien or offputting.

Similarly with bara and yaoi in Japan, though this is by no means a physical law. BL is famously written by women for women.

Depends on what tags you search.

If you search M/M then yeah that’s obviously mostly by and for women. But if you search F/F or femdom there’s plenty that’s for the male gaze.

At least in 2013, F/F was mostly written and read by women, and its not even close.

https://archiveofourown.org/works/17018478/chapters/40009467

It's probably shifted since since in 2013 AO3 really was the niche site catering a lot to m/m porn whereas FFN had the broader appeal. Is there more recent equivalent data?

I don’t have any hard data (though I feel sure it exists and will see if I can dig it up later) but going off of anecdotal experience I would be utterly shocked if the demographics of f/f fic writers and readers was less than 80% female and even that would be low-balling.

The only type of fanfic where I expect male writers are probably significantly represented is out and out zero-plot smut and even that is probably more like 65/35 female/male than 50/50.

You can take this exercise even further. Read back to the prior comment in this thread.

It seems somewhat accepted around here that a lot of career path differences are based on "men like to work with things, women like to work with people". Video games are way better at representing interactions between "things" than novels are, both "things" as physical objects to shoot and explode and strategic management of mechanistic systems. I don't think games are actually that good at representing complex social interaction between individuals, because of the cost of producing the visuals and dialogue for each branching path they really can't get that complex. It makes sense to me that survival games might replace male interest in survival novels like "Robinson Crusoe" or "My Side of the Mountain" but dating sims aren't really going to replace women's interest in complex interpersonal relationships portrayed in novels. This is of course describing the centers of different bell curves and not to suggest that there are no women interested in strategy games and no men who like Jane Austen novels.

Now picture a subgenre of speculative fiction filled with obsessive worldbuilding, detailed demographics and alien physiology and gender roles of the type you might find in the chunkiest of doorstopper fantasy or science fiction novels. But rather, an alternative universe that can be added to any existing property or even stand on its own merit, with as many variations on the precise details of that world as there are authors. And the entire purpose of this worldbuilding is to codify interactions between people, sort them into groups, and then have them engage in insane amounts of fetish-laden sex.

It has to be written mainly by and for men, surely?

Nope. It's omegaverse.

This is the popularity of ships in HP:

Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter (59398)

Sirius Black/Remus Lupin (38850)

Hermione Granger/Draco Malfoy (23983)

James Potter/Lily Evans Potter (22265)

Hermione Granger/Ron Weasley (18572)

Harry Potter/Ginny Weasley (15385)

Harry Potter/Severus Snape (15320)

Regulus Black/James Potter (7394)

Hermione Granger/Severus Snape (7273)

Hermione Granger/Harry Potter (6807)

The majority is gay and I'd bet that most of the rest are very female. Men don't really conceive of Hermione/Draco relationships as being natural or plausible, let alone Hermione/Snape. Harry getting a harem of hot Slytherin girls is more plausible. Overall:

M/M (181841)

F/M (146346)

Other fandoms are considerably gayer. My Hero Academia for instance:

M/M (141877)

F/M (64209)

Marvel:

M/M (264404)

F/M (182454

Real Person fiction:

M/M (345459)

Gen (100487)

Kpop is even more homosexual than that, as you might expect. Even Minecraft somehow has 30,000 M/M stories and 7,000 F/M stories. I shudder to think of what's going on in there. I conclude that AO3 is a female dominated site, obsessed with male homosexuals.

Even Minecraft somehow has 30,000 M/M stories and 7,000 F/M stories. I shudder to think of what's going on in there.

I think a lot of those are also real person fiction, focusing on popular Minecraft streamers (such as Dream and the people he played with).

Yeah, this is a fandom universal and has been for ages.

The most popular ship in the Star Wars fandom is Kylo Ren/Rey which is probably not surprising, everybody loves a broody bad boy. But by far second most popular is to ship Kylo Ren and Domhall Gleeson’s minor supporting villain Hux. It is many times more popular than say, Finn/Rey or Poe/Rey (that is, the female lead of the sequel trilogy and the male leads) with some 11,000 fics vs 2,000 or so for each of the latter two.

Another piece of fandom lore relates to Supernatural. The show was clearly meant to be a “guys’ show.” If you’re unfamiliar, it follows two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, who drive around the country killing monsters/ghosts/demons and sleeping with beautiful women. However the fandom it cultivated turned out to be overwhelmingly female. And for a while anyways, they overwhelmingly shipped the two brothers (‘Wincest’). The writers tried valiantly time and time again to introduce female love interests for the brothers only for each to suffer the vicious wrath of the fandom (sometimes up to harassing the actresses that played them) and be shortly written out one after the other.

I think it’s a bit simpler. Women, particularly white women are the biggest readers of books, at least for fiction. And even if we assumed that the numbers of potential writers shake out fairly even (which given the demographics of readers doesn’t make sense) it does make a lot of sense that publishers would choose authors who are like the main reading demographic in hopes of getting more books sold. Women probably don’t like the same sorts of books men do, and they likely prefer women writers or at least feminine sounding writers.

(https://www.marketingcharts.com/demographics-and-audiences/men-demographics-and-audiences-70503)

Is Septimus Smith supposed to be…“cool”? I can see “tragic” or “romanticized,” but not “cool.” Woolf sketched a society in tension with its Romantic ideals, childhood follies given pride of place. She may show compassion for this Literary Bloke—but compassion is not the same as approval.

If men cannot dominate the literary landscape, cannot walk into lists like Granta’s, deservingly or not, they will look for other landscapes to colonise.

The starving author was never guaranteed cultural cachet; by the standards given here, he was always making an irrational choice. Lloyd is bemoaning an era which never really existed. He can’t back up his vibes with statistics because he’s looking at an enormous selection effect. “Remember when men used to be cool, alpha males, who smoked unfiltered cigs and dominated bestseller lists?” I’m sure some of them were. Septimus Smith represents the rest.

It has to be pointed out that any such "great upcoming young novelists" list must be comprised of mostly women, out of necessity. Otherwise the organizers of the list would be painted as sexist and privileged and out of touch and it would probably jeopardize their careers.

So who is one of these young novelists who is a man that isn't being recognized?

An accusation of "We genuinely just searched for that which is great and good that fit the market and it happened to be comprised mostly of X" cuts both ways, y'know?

It's true that literary fiction is not as cool as it once was, although this in itself is not a great moral catastrophe. It's part of the natural cycle of things. The "cool" things now are happening in TV, film, video games, and comic books.

So you acknowledge that the whole medium is not as cool to men, but then you insist that if upcoming authors' lists are dominated by women, it can't be because they're the ones who comprise most of the market?

The only way to make your argument is to say that, in general, the great men authors of the past were recognized independent of the markets they were a part of. Which you can certainly argue, but I want to see evidence of that claim if you're going to make it.

Correct, it's not a conspiracy, but only because there is nothing conspiratorial about it. If you were to ask any big (or small!) publishing house if they gave priority to voices from traditionally marginalized groups, they would say yes. If you were to then ask them if women are a traditionally marginalized group, they would say yes.

How do you square this with your own admission that literary fiction isn't superior to other, newer forms of media?

If a man today enjoys reading manga, watching YouTube and Netflix, plays video games, etc. but doesn't read a book, why is this a consequence of publishing houses promoting women and minorities instead of just a conclusion of where his interests naturally lay? The engagement from playing Ace Combat is probably higher to many than reading a Hemmingway novel.

An accusation of "We genuinely just searched for that which is great and good that fit the market and it happened to be comprised mostly of X" cuts both ways, y'know?

Is this something decision makers are actually claiming, though? I'm not all that familiar with the literature publishing industry, but if it's at all like other fictional media industries like movies, TV shows, and video games, almost everyone would be openly and intentionally discriminating their hires based on various identity markers, including sex and gender, rather than genuinely just searching for that which is great and good that fits the market.

It has to be proven on a case-by-case basis is my point. If someone wants to argue that the industry is signaling its progressive credentials, I'm going to ask why it's not possible that a politically neutral search couldn't replicate the same result for other reasons.

So who is one of these young novelists who is a man that isn't being recognized?

I think there are a lot of men writing power fantasy novels targeted at men, which aren't great literature, but are still very enjoyable entertainment that deserve to be promoted more. Stuff like Dungeon Crawler Carl and Cradle, which are really popular in certain circles on reddit, but which aren't mainstream at all. I think entertainment targeted at men deserves a bit more spreading power. Schools don't need sections for "feminist protagonists targeted at young women" anymore, they need sections for "Awesome protagonists targeted at young men".

For what it’s worth, those works specifically have gotten more mainstream. My dad picked up Cradle completely independently. It’s not like he was trawling progression fantasy subs.

But! Granta is a lit-crit magazine, picking “literary” authors for readers who want “literary” fiction. Lloyd’s article is also specifically talking about “Literary Blokes” pouring their hearts and souls into thinky, sophisticated novels. They have no intention of signal-boosting anything remotely popcorn fantasy. The existence of male-dominated genres doesn’t say much about the particular authors in which Granta is interested.

Entertainment for men is already widespread, you can get into, among others things, manga, anime, video games, and more.

The question at hand is whether there are young men novelists who are not being valued by the industry. To which I say, either the market matters or it doesn't. It's fine to say that selling more books isn't a metric of "upcoming" or whatever, but evidence has to be provided if you go that route. Who are these people that we're not seeing on lists of the people who write physical books (or would have, in another age)?

I chose a wrong word then. Entertainment targeted at men is doing fine, books targeted at men are not. If you want a specific name, Will Wight. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Will_Wight He deserves some more awards from some sort of organization that gives awards to people who write entertaining books. I think there are a lot of men out there who'd devour his books, but do not hear about him.

So who is one of these young novelists who is a man that isn't being recognized?

Have you not heard of sad puppies drama?

Switch the genders and tell me your argument would be OK.

Does my account have blue hair on it or something? What's with the assumption that I wouldn't be just as critical of women being given awards they weren't entitled to?

If I were in charge of those lists, I'd probably go along with efforts to widen the pool of authors across race and sex. But I wouldn't fuck with the listings themselves.

Does my account have blue hair on it or something?

I'm sorry if I came off kind of flippant, that wasn't my intention. (now that I've opened myself to emojis, I'm kind of lost without them, lol).

Opening up the field is great! Giving money/books to communities that don't have access is awesome.

Denying someone a spot on a list because they are the incorrect demographic is wrong.

I think the disagreement is over if/how much this line is crossed.

Which puppies do you think deserved an award? And how many of them ended up on the slate thanks to their own author? Vox Day flogging his own works isn’t a badge of quality.

And yes, flipping the argument is fine. I don’t particularly care if this magazine awards 16/20 or 6/20 or 4/20 awards to women.

I don’t particularly care if this magazine awards 16/20 or 6/20 or 4/20 awards to women.

That's great but not the point. If 4/20 of the awards went to women, there would accusations of sexism, articles written, etc.

All I'm saying is apply the same critical lens. If that makes you uncomfortable, maybe it wasn't a great idea to being with.

No, it doesn’t make me uncomfortable. I’m not going to write (or cheer for) such articles, and neither is @drmanhattan16, as far as I can tell.

The proportion of slots on this list doesn’t match the demographics of Britain. Is this because (1) the proportion of lit-fic authors doesn’t match? Because (2) the distribution of skill doesn’t match? Or because (3) the list-makers are sexist?

Drmanhattan and I think it’s likely 1. Lloyd kind of equivocates between 1 and 3. @Primaprimaprima argues for straight 3, if I’m reading him right.

Flipping the genders doesn’t change the valence because I don’t believe 3 is well-supported.

All I'm saying is apply the same critical lens. If that makes you uncomfortable, maybe it wasn't a great idea to being with.

No, it doesn’t make me uncomfortable

Great, what about the point:

All I'm saying is apply the same critical lens

For over a decade now, this critical theory lens has been applied to a lot of things... Usually resulting is accusations of 'isms. What's good for the goose is good for the gander.

The fact that you don't care does not change the point. You caring doesn't matter to anyone but you.

I guess I don’t understand what you’re asking. I thought “applying the lens” meant “flip the genders, and see if you feel different.” I did, and I don’t.

What more do you want me to say?

Post is about sexism. You make the hip sexism argument that wouldn't fly (culturally) the other way.

There isn't much to say if you just ignore this.

So who is one of these young novelists who is a man that isn't being recognized?

I can think of a few, but they wouldn't want to be recognized anyways and are content anonymously shitposting on twitter.

For whatever reason, women seem more interested in fiction novels and men seem more interested in video games. There's some amount of crossover of course, but they're exceptions that prove the general rule. It only makes sense that women would dominate the field considering they're far more interested in it.

Of course there's the societal issues when reading of any sort, including vapid fiction novels, is held on a ridiculous pedestal whereas video games are seen as a vice and a waste of time. In reality, there's little difference between the usefulness of a teenage girl reading the latest YA novel and a teenage boy playing Call of Duty.

In reality, there's little difference between the usefulness of a teenage girl reading the latest YA novel and a teenage boy playing Call of Duty.

Useful in what way? Between the two activities, I would prefer a child read instead of play video games.

Neither of them directly impart any skills, and both should be seen as primarily leisure activities. As a side effect though, reading can improve vocabulary and spelling, while video games can improve certain types of problem solving. The effects aren't massive in either direction and a lot depends on what type of content is being enjoyed. For whatever reason, society has deemed that reading is a fantastic use of time that's worthy for its own sake, whereas video games are seen as a vice like gambling or cigarettes, though not quite as destructive.

Well, we have high literature, no high video games, as it were. Give it time, maybe in 50 years, there will be a list of "classical video games" or whatever.

Well, we have high literature, no high video games

Have you played a broad swathe of video games that you're confident in dismissing the entire genre as having no equivalents to "high literature"?

You sound like Roger Ebert, except replacing films with literature. He eventually backtracked what he said.

I don't mean it that way. I mean that we don't have a canon. There's no "Classic Western video games" list that isn't just for nerds.

Basically, when one of those socially conservative magazines puts out an article that says "Here are some video games you can sit down and play with your children that capture Western civilization/culture".

I don't think we're really disagreeing, as I never disputed that society (exemplified by a magazine in this case) sees video games as inherently "lesser" than literature. I'd disagree with the truth of their assertion, but I wouldn't disagree that they'd make such an assertion at all.

It wouldn't be particularly hard to make a list like that if one put in the effort, though. A game exemplifying the scientific/engineering mindset of the West could be something like Minecraft, or Factorio for something more niche that takes it to the extreme. For a game exemplifying Western individualism and aspiration, Skyrim (or something along those lines) would do the trick.

"Here are some video games you can sit down and play with your children that capture Western civilization/culture".

I think I probably could compile such a list after a day of thinking about it. No, it probably won't be games that agree aesthetically with socons (stuff like Doom, Deus Ex, and Command & Conquer), but I think it'd fit the bill.

Depends what they're reading and what they're playing, I'd rather have a child playing Vintage Story, an RTS or something similar over quite a lot of the crap that gets put to paper. Growing up I read a lot of books and played quite a few games, I enjoyed both and looking back I don't really see one being more valuable than the other. In a practical sense I probably got more out of playing Age of Empires than I did from reading Redwall for example.

In reality, there's little difference between the usefulness of a teenage girl reading the latest YA novel and a teenage boy playing Call of Duty.

It's much harder to get addicted to books. If teenage girls were reading YA novels for 4 hours a day people would be a lot more worried.

Eh, as someone who was often grounded from TV and computer time as an elementary and middle-school boy, I did find reading to be a fairly-engrossing comfort in the absence of other pursuits. I'd even read during classtime, when able, though that's probably as much of an indictment of the public-school environment as it is a testament to the engrossing power of books.

I did the same, getting into trouble at school for reading books under the desk, reading books while taking a shit, reading books while walking.

Of course, I have ADHD, so I was probably under-stimulated and didn't have smartphones then.

There are definitely some bookworms out there who are addicted, but overall you're correct.

Teenage girls get addicted to social media instead.

If teenage girls were reading YA novels for 4 hours a day

Are they not? They absolutely were when I was in high school, including problems of girls reading Twilight and Harry Potter during class time.

Edit: I guess I can't say for certain the hrs/day, but it was very common to see girls reading the YA craze du jour during lunch, free periods, or basically any other time they could.

It's interesting that Harry Potter (maybe Hunger Games but definitely not to the same extent) was as far as I know the last book to really have mass, cross-gender appeal among the youth. I think the male-female split on Potter fans was, maybe not fifty fifty, but probably closer to such than any fantasy YA book since. Doubt we'll ever see another such phenomenon.

It’s hard, and probably not predictable, but…is there anything stopping it from happening again?

  1. No appetite. I really can’t see this being the case, but include it for completeness. The upside is just too huge.

  2. Business model. The existence of HP means that authors and publishers know a book can make it that big. I’d HP benefited from the shock of its success, a snowball effect, maybe that can’t replicate. Not sure about this.

  3. Cultural inoculation. The concept of a multimedia empire is more familiar. Maybe cynicism would keep another property from getting such clout. You see it with MCU exhaustion, which is sort of its own phenomenon. If this were going to make the difference, I think it would have reared its head before HP. Star Wars or something. Unlikely.

  4. Author inoculation. Maybe everyone writing children’s books, now, is familiar with HP or was even raised on it. Like fantasy authors desperately trying to avoid imitating Lord of the Rings. I don’t think this works for the same reasons as 1.

  5. Market crowding. Is it possible that the saturation of good books, and connection to reviews and recommendations, would prevent any one from getting such share? I could see it.

  6. We have [new book] at home. There are now parents who grew up on HP. What’s to stop them from just giving an old copy instead? It still holds up, though new readers will not benefit from the bizarre cultural fervor. I don’t think this alone preempts other novels, but it could contribute.

  7. That seat is taken. Sort of a combination of 5. and 6. If HP really filled an unmet demand in children’s publishing, then Rowling may have broken the dam. But why would that prevent new kids from joining their own trend? Is their energy all going to some other form of media?

All in all, I feel like it could happen again. It’d be a black swan, or whatever the positive equivalent is, but there are a lot of people trying to hit that jackpot. In the absence of a really strong structural factor, I would expect kids to latch on to something. Then again, I was a nerd who read waaaaaay more books growing up, so I might have the wrong baseline.

If true, I'd guess a combination of 1 and 2: boys are so toxic, the upside of providing something they would want to buy is more than offset by the social consequences of doing so. It is therefore safer to intentionally exclude them.

Not a chance.

No, seriously, where are you getting this idea? Have you seen evidence that publishers are thinking like this?

Because I’m having a hard time imagining anyone actually endorses that.

More comments

Book publishers specifically, no, it's not something I follow. But this seems the be a trend with other products that have previously considered what boys and young men like: movies, comic books, and video games. Beer... They will happily alienate their male audience if they believe it will be a political liability.

Women control the majority of consumer spending. Punching down at boys and men is just good business.

More comments

It happens, but not every single day and to the extent boys do on video games. Not sure where we'd get actual numbers on it beyond anecdotes and impressions though.

The big addiction teenage girls are drawn to on a daily basis is social media, which is at least as worrying as video games.

Fair, also additional factors of my high school trending nerdier than average and this being in the earlier days of both social media and smart phones.

Still, my experience was definitely that the teenaged girls were reading a lot more in their free time (both books and fanfiction) than the guys. Perhaps more importantly, the teenagers writing in their free time at my school were almost entirely girls.

I am tempted to bring up one of those unsubstantiated claims : "Men are producers (do-ers?), women are consumers (experiencers?)."

Games force you to act. Books can be passively consumed. Even within books, the ones that force a lot of intellectual friction onto people, seem to be more popular among men. Modern literary fiction often reads like wish-fulfillment and escapism, rather using fiction as a tool for putting the reader in the midst of difficult hypothetical choices.

I am not convinced that there is something here, but interesting coincidence either way.

I’m not sure that something being wish-fulfillment and escapism means that men won’t like it. Take practically the entire isekai/isegye genre in light novels and manga; I am under the impression that popadantsy had similar elements to it as well.

Heck, a lot of the classic 80's movies aimed at kids were about escapism and fantasy.

Fair. Isekai is as "wish-fulfillment and escapism" as "wish-fulfillment and escapism" gets.

I’m not sure that something being wish-fulfillment and escapism means that men won’t like it.

Of course not. Larry Correia launched his career with that. It just has to be, you know, MALE wish-fulfillment and escapism. Which might not be "literary" enough.

Only, I've noticed older men that used to read having stopped/significantly decreased their reading, and they haven't picked up video gaming, while their female counterparts read as much as ever.

I used to read a lot but I'm frankly interested in very little fiction these days, written by either men or women. Getting a recommendation these days (especially for fantasy) feels like when someone recommends an isekai. No, it isn't different this time either, it's garbage.

Although wokism has certainly a significant impact on the nature and demographics of modern fiction, it is not the only problem. Another problem, it seems to me, is that more and more modern writers have limited life experience outside of the realm of intellectuality. There have always been highly intellectual writers, of course, but fiction has also greatly benefitted from being pollinated by the works of adventurers and all sorts of other weird rugged characters. I think that there is a similar problem in Hollywood. Many modern movies seem like they are made by people who have lived their whole lives inside the LA celebrity scene.

Literary fiction is very poorly defined anyway. Do works like The Iliad, The Divine Comedy, and Paradise Lost, which depict supernatural events, count as literary fiction? Is Moby Dick literary fiction, or is it an adventure novel? How about White Fang? Is Wuthering Heights literary fiction or is it a weird tale / horror novel? Is Huckleberry Finn literary fiction or is it a young adult novel? Sometimes what should technically probably be called genre fiction becomes so famous and revered over time that even people who care about the supposed genre fiction / literary fiction divide call it literary fiction. Is the notion of literary fiction anything other than a snobby term meant to evoke status differences?

I agree with the point regarding "limited life experience outside of the realm of intellectuality." Let me expand on it.

I've written about this before (too lazy atm to link to it), however, colleges are over-specializing to the detriment of their students. Many (most?) of the pre-WW2 male literary giants had little-to-no college education. They wrote about their experiences and honed the craft of writing via journalistic or similar assignments. Hemingway's terse prose owes a lot to his career as a newspaperman.

Post-war literary, high-brow writers (Updike, Roth, Mailer, etc.) may have had more formal and complete college education, often as English majors. Again, however, they usually wrote for school papers, or maybe tried to submit to a popular magazine. (This is an interesting subplot in an early season of Mad Men).

I'd say starting from the time of the so-called "Literary Brat Pack" (Brett Easton Ellis and his ilk), you have a whole class of "writers" who go to very prestigious sounding colleges in the Northeast take creative writing (not English) classes, and basically brute force a publication maybe through an undergrad literary magazine. Then, with the help of a professor, they immediately get into an MFA program (U. Iowa helps the most!) where they can write - and just maybe publish - for years on end. If that novel doesn't hit, they can get a job as a professor and one of the fancier mid Western liberal arts colleges and get some long form piece published in an online only magazine once a year.

The point is that, much like even the hard sciences, the over-institutionalization of writing has made it brittle. You have "writers" who are writing exclusively for a tiny subset of other writers with the right pedigrees. When you know everyone by name in your market, all of a sudden social/political orthodoxy Trumps actual talent and ability and also constrains real artistic risk taking. Hence, you get so many self-indulgent think piece novels about how hard some rich kid's life is. There's literally one called All The Sad Young Literary Men by the brother of Masha Gessen. He went to Harvard and then got an MFA from Syracuse and now teachers at Columbia's Journalist school. You can't make this shit up.

Moby-Dick is 100% literary fiction. Melville wrote it after years of mainlining New England literature and Biblical culture. At the time of writing he was contributing to literary magazines and complaining to Nathaniel Hawthorne:

What I feel most moved to write, that is banned,—it will not pay. Yet, altogether, write the other way I cannot.

I think this…intentionality…is what separates literary fiction from the rest. Melville is openly writing to convey something he feels deeply and passionately. This is not a substitute for craft, but a complement, as he pays great attention to the spiraling structure and the atmosphere. More importantly, though, it’s part of a conversation with the literary community of the time. He is making use of a common cultural context to compress even more into an already dense book.

The end result is a book that benefits from study in a way that mass-market fiction generally does not. There are countless classics which are better as romances, as adventures, as entertainment. Literary fiction has to ask of the reader something a little different.

There is plenty of so-called genre fiction that is written to convey things that the authors feel deeply and passionately, so it seems to me that maybe the author's passion is not enough to distinguish literary fiction? By the standard of passion, for example, a lot of sci-fi should be considered literary fiction, yet many aficionados of literary fiction would probably object to that.

The literary fiction vs genre fiction distinction isn’t that useful. I mean, I know it when I see it, but I don’t get all uptight about keeping genre fiction segregated from “pure” literary works. Works of surpassing quality can certainly include elements of “genre” fiction too, e.g. fantasy or sci-fi settings.

If there is a distinction that I would choose to maintain, it would be the distinction between works of art vs mere products.

I don't think modern genre conventions really make much sense to apply prior to the mid-twentieth century or so. Calling the Iliad literary fiction would be ridiculous, but it would also be ridiculous to call it fantasy, or military fiction, or thriller, even though it could fairly be said to share elements of all of those genres.

Young Adult in particular is barely a decade old as a real publishing category. Even Harry Potter doesn't really fit into the formula conventions of modern YA (despite the fact that the YA genre was in large part a product of HP).

I have always understood literary fiction as fiction where the beauty and skill of the prose and the thematic exploration are meant to be as big of or bigger draws as plot or characters. You can have literary fiction where not much happens plot-wise, but not really in genre fiction. Lines are blurry of course. And yeah a lot of it is probably just snobbery.

Young Adult in particular is barely a decade old as a real publishing category.

LOL. This is some real Year Zero stuff. Wikipedia notes many earlier examples, and notes that YA was big in the 1970s and 1980s, which I can personally attest to.

Even Harry Potter doesn't really fit into the formula conventions of modern YA (despite the fact that the YA genre was in large part a product of HP).

That is because the early Harry Potter books were not YA; they were a category younger.

"Literary fiction" as a category probably goes back to the late 19th century.

Inferential distance strikes again.

As some of the other comments here get at, there's at least a significant difference in YA-before-it-was-really-called-YA (your Nancy Drews, Hardy Boys, Outsiders, and so on; books aimed at tweens and teens that deal with heavier issues but don't contain content we'd judge unsuitable for a mind barely ready to know what sex is) and the 2010's style of YA that blossomed in the wake of Harry Potter and The Hunger Games (Divergent and so forth; books aimed more at literal young adults, who want the mature content and some of the pretension of the hard stuff); the former sort of book might typically be about groups of teenage friends getting into adventures and hijinks and learning some important lessons, the latter sort of book might typically be more about a Special Teenager being sorted into a faction, except they're so special they're above the concept of factions, and they're going to bring down the oppressive system and find themselves and all that feel-good jazz.

The above admittedly probably doesn't make a ton of sense if you were never on Tumblr in the 2010's.

What you're missing is that YA as a category is newer than Nancy Drew and Hardy Boys, and so on, but much older than 2010. Publishing did not skip from 1967 to 2010, or even 1997. YA, like everything else, has become woke/tumblrized, but there's plenty of older stuff closer to your second category than your first. The Tripods trilogy comes immediately to mind.

Yeah, ( @The_Nybbler ) this is what I was trying to get at. Probably half at least of the books listed by wikipedia as early YA (including The Bell Jar and of all things) would never be published as YA nowadays if they were published at all. I doubt even The Outsiders would make it. Pony Boy is 14 (strike one) and a boy (strike two) for starters.

Modern YA has become more of a genre than an age category, not in the least because a substantial chunk of its readers are in fact grown women and not teenagers. For a book to be classed and published as YA it is not enough for it to be about teenagers, it has to hit certain themes like you've mentioned, the fight against an oppressive and cruel 'adult' society (whether it be a dystopian sci-fi tyranny or just bull-headed teachers and parents), the narrative must be very introspective and feelings-y, the lead must be between 16 and 18 (15 and 19 are possible but really pushing it) and with very few exceptions female, there must be a love story B-plot, and it doesn't have to be written in first-person present but that's strongly recommended. There's also just a certain sine qua non 'feel' to YA prose that is hard to pin down but that I know when I see. It's not quite that it's usually linguistically simpler though that is part of it. There is a certain immediacy and immaturity (not necessarily in a bad way, though it can be, but just a sense that 'this is a kid talking') that is usually not found in adult novels. But I have read so-marketed adult novels that have made me think 'this feels like YA' and so-marketed YA novels that make me think 'this feels like an adult novel.'

That stuff is what YA as a "genre" and a publishing category has meant since the early 2010s or so. Gary Paulsen's Hatchet may be a young adult novel but it is not a Young Adult™ novel.

I doubt even The Outsiders would make it. Pony Boy is 14 (strike one) and a boy (strike two) for starters.

S. E. Hinton is a woman, so that ups the chance of it being published.

People wrote books about young people in the 70s, but that's not the same as YA as a publishing category with genre conventions almost as strict as those of say, romance, which is a much more recent thing.

Indeed, stumbling upon a YA novel in a publishing category can be jarring. I was reading through Battletech fiction and you might think that pulpy action novels based on a game would already be considered YA. And yes, if you define YA as books read by young adults, you would be right. But that’s not what YA is.

I came across a Battletech novel that was specifically designated as YA fiction. The strange tropes it introduced into the 100+ novel body of work that is Battletech were jarring and uncomfortable. Other Battletech novels involved kids, even kids at academies dealing with cliques and bullying. So how different could an explicitly YA novel be?

It’s hard to describe. All those other kids in Battletech were more “Hero’s Journey” stories, whereas a YA novel is more of a metaphor for puberty. YA fiction, even for boys, is predominantly written by women. This Battletech novel was no exception. So it was a metaphor for puberty with a female perspective.

Which novel was this?

The Nellus Academy Incident I don't recommend it.

Dude the GPTese accent is so strong on this one that it barely makes sense.

YA was an established category in the 1970s and 1980s. There were sections in libraries dedicated to it, by name. There was fiction recognizable as what we now call YA well before that, of course (the coming-of-age novel is particularly recognizable, but also teen adventure like Robinson Crusoe or the Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew serieses, and the Heinlein juveniles)

YA was not, and is not, a genre.

I do buy what the other posters have said about literature demand being female dominated although maybe less so than game is male dominated. I think it could be interesting to compare the reaction of this gender domination knowledge in the two media types. Is there an equivalent to criticism of tropes such as the damsel in distress pointed at tropes found in romance novels? Or is it jsut considered kind of a silly thing to even critique? Why or why not?

I’ve brought up this point before, but what relation do those lists of ‘best new writers’ and awards and the like have to, well, sales?

My priors are distinctly that sales are dominated by 1) porn adjacent novellas and 2) James Patterson-esque high-volume authors with a dozen-odd ghost writers, with institutional sales in a distant third.

Obviously if the fashion in lit fic is to have books with emotions instead of plot, women will dominate the list of ‘best new writers’ compiled by lit fic reviewers. But it’s unclear to me that they can compete outside of that niche.

While I concur that sales are going to be decoupled from literary criticism, the list in question is from a lit-crit magazine. Lloyd is complaining that there’s no money in lit-fic, and only women can get reputation from it, so men wandered off.

emotion instead of plot

What do you mean by that? I don’t think of lit-fic as stereotypically emotional so much as…thematic. Technical. Willing to eschew a normal plot, but in service of conversations with other lit-fic, not “emotions.”

if the fashion in lit fic is to have books with emotions instead of plot

Notes from the Underground? Ulysses? In Search of Lost Time?

Plenty of classic literature is high on emotions and low on plot. There's no reason to assume that it's a naturally feminine domain. If anything, the most complex and probing investigations of human emotional life have been written by men.

Your priors are right insofar as fiction sales are dominated by romance (maybe unfair to class it all as porn-adjacent--there's a lot of romance without graphic sex scenes. It's certainly a very formulaic, paint-by-numbers genre tho even by the standards of genre fiction). Second-biggest I believe is mystery/thriller, though female authors predominate there too these days.

Here's the NYT bestsellers list.

I’m begging no one from my school sees this 😘😘 // #readingsmvt #bookslvt #LinkBudsNeverOff #smut #book #booktok #foru #foryou #foryoupage #page #waterstones #wattpad #crystal #spice #itendswithus #getmefamous

Is… is this what TikTok is?

TikTok's a pretty wide platform. It's like taking a post from /r/anime_irl and saying "Is this what reddit is like?". But I think there's definitely a large swath of tiktok like that

I thought tiktok was less literate... Shouldn't these short-form videos be attracting the lowest common denominator?

"Look, they're having sex in my book. Tee-hee I'm such a bad girl"

Seems very much to be a small but common denominator.

How is this a thing?

The pleasure of transgression?

Why wouldn't it be a thing?

Women purchase a lot more fiction than men, a trend that goes back at least to the early 90s and precedes the dominance of female authors in the market. The share of female authors in general ticked sharply upwards starting in the 70s but only cracked 50% in the last couple of years. Why this is I'm not sure. When I was in high school a couple of years ago all the girls read for fun but few boys did. Men tend to read non-fiction a lot more than fiction but even there I think women read a bit more.

Women also fantasize to fiction.

I know 1 guy who actively prefers reading + fantasizing over porn. I know a ton of women who never saw the appeal of porn, and purely go off scenarios in their own head.

It's an entire industry the size all porn on the internet, that is contained purely within fiction novels for women.

I know 1 guy who actively prefers reading + fantasizing over porn.

I've always been puzzled by the notion that pornography is something to masturbate to seemingly as its own end and (by extension) the people who claim to do this. While I understand that PornHub's analytics is censored, I'm willing to believe that its logs for time spent per visit are accurate, which is (experimentally) about the time it takes for the anecdotally-average man to find something then jack it to orgasm.

(I wonder how long the average AO3/Wattpad visit is?)

It's an entire industry the size all porn on the internet, that is contained purely within fiction novels for women.

Comiket (and assuming it's representative of the (both ero and not) manga industry, the industry itself) is also majority female, and Japan is sufficiently outside the woke orbit that this is probably a natural equilibrium. For reference, this festival is a celebration of fan work, but quite a bit more commercial than any other Western country would tolerate (their rights-holders either can't or won't take action against it, as they also know full well that that's where its future talent comes from; you don't get 50 Shades of Gray if Twilight fanfiction is sufficiently criminal).

I would argue that hentai (mostly manga, though some anime can count as well) and VNs are a much better balance between the visual and the emotional; being hyper-real makes it possible to engineer specific facial expressions and scenes in a way you can't do as well with real actors (the ones who can are Hollywood A-listers and a bit too expensive for even the well-heeled porn studios... well, other than Stallone anyway).

You can hit both needs at once provided you're competent enough at drawing and take at least some time to establish characterization, or at least that's how I've observed it to work for me. It's not like you can't just "borrow" characters from another franchise and get all that characterization for free if you don't want to do it yourself, which is partially the reason why slashfic is so successful- and because it's drawn, you not only get something to see, but it's superstimulus at the same time since you can make sure your characters look good (they don't even have to be human) and properly expressive from every angle, and the stuff you have them do doesn't even need to be anatomically possible.

I'm not going to argue that H-manga is the pinnacle of storytelling by any means (though there are a few that most certainly are; Katawa Shoujo is probably the best example but there are many others) but what little there usually is still beats "lemon-stealing whores".

I've always been puzzled by the notion that pornography is something to masturbate to seemingly as its own end and (by extension) the people who claim to do this.

I'm confused by what you mean here, can you elaborate?

I'm not going to argue that H-manga is the pinnacle of storytelling by any means

It's not, but works like Subahibi are really interesting. More interesting than a lot of what gets published today.

I'm confused by what you mean here, can you elaborate?

This is "I masturbate while watching porn". Even though I'm told this is generally how most men use pornography, I find this incredibly strange.

More interesting than a lot of what gets published today.

Yeah, I agree; I think the VN as "novel, but a bunch of other stuff happens too outside of the specific text" really goes a long way to improving on raw text. It also happens to be something that AI image generation (and a suitably uncensored LLM) is already capable of, which likely hasn't gone unnoticed by some of the more niche startups and hopefully they get big before they get targeted by the usual suspects.

deleted

Like this.

Maybe TMI, but now you know (of) at least one other guy, being me. I have always found erotica more exciting than pornography (it used to genuinely annoy me as a teenager how hard it was to find porn with actual plot). That makes sense though because I've always considered myself to have a more feminine kind of mind in a lot of ways. I used to write a ton of fanfiction in HS, and as mentioned above a supermajority of fanfic writers are female. I was in a few fandoms where just about every single other fan I interacted with was a girl.

That's really interesting. I am not sure if that supports my anecdotes or balances it out ahaha. Either way, useful nuance.

I bet it makes for more creative love making. Porn is creatively bankrupt.

There is literary fiction whose readership is heavily tilted toward men. Think Pynchon, DFW, etc. Heavy, pretentious, ponderous tomes whose reading indicates some kind of status achievement. I think with less certainty that some literary journals (namely n+1) are also more heavily subscribed to by men.

Those have fallen out of fashion, though, to the point where it's a meme that having Infinite Jest on your bookshelf is a literary red flag for potential dates.

Women buy more fiction: "We must cater to women, they are our natural market"

Men buy more fiction: "We must cater to women, they are an untapped/underserved market"

And your reference for women purchasing a lot more fiction than men?

While little publicized and hard to document, it is a widely held belief in the book business that more women buy books than men -- perhaps as much as 70 or 80 percent of fiction.

So, at least in 1997, they didn't even know. It was just a "widely held belief" that couldn't be documented.

In fact, that same reference makes the case that, if there is such an effect, it's push rather than pull -- publishers are refusing works which appeal to men:

Last fall Matt Bialer, a book agent at William Morris, sent publishers the latest manuscript by Ed Gorman, the author of 17 works of fiction, primarily suspense novels that have had steady, if not spectacular sales. But Mr. Gorman's newest, ''The Poker Club,'' which is about four card-playing professional men who accidentally kill an intruder and see their lives unravel, was turned down flat by nearly a dozen houses.

''People said it was a good story but it was too male-oriented,'' Mr. Bialer said. ''They said it needed a stronger female protagonist.''

Every set of hard numbers I've ever seen suggest the same thing. I chose that article from the 90s to show that it's an old trend.

See numbers here for 2015, on pages 71 - 72.

Also dovetails with my personal experience so I don't really have trouble believing it. If it was a matter of being pushed out by a market that caters to women, there's plenty of older stuff men could read, but while I know girls that like to read older stuff I can't remember the last time I met a guy who reads Hemingway or Bierce for fun. Men IME have different hobbies.

Do publishers really cater to men? Or do they have imprints that minimally cater to men in ways that people who aren’t men think won’t give men harmful notions? For example, I have some French comic adaptations of Conan stories that are amazing. They’re full of action, adventure and excitement. The original short stories are also included, as if daring the reader to find fault with their adaptation. I have heard that modern domestic comic productions of Conan are less intense by comparison.

The preceding text was fed through my sensitivity reader.

If you say "I have some..." and "I have heard that..." and the text was written by ChatGPT, you are lying unless you personally actually have some or have heard.

For clarity. I type how I normally type. Then I copy and paste it into ChatGPT and ask it "Can you rephrase this to be less offensive". Sometimes it defaults to "They author believes..." and I have to ask it again, specifying to rephrase it in the first person. Most of the changes are subtle IMHO. I really have those Conan comics, I have really read them, I have really heard domestic Conan comics are weak sauce compared to them.

The preceding text was fed through my sensitivity reader.

This is obnoxious. Stop it.

Stop doing it, or stop saying I'm doing it?

Sigh. Both?

We have already modded people for using ChatGPT to write posts without announcing they were doing this. It's disingenuous and not speaking clearly.

OTOH, this schtick where you pretend that golly-wolly you just don't know how to write words that won't randomly "trigger" people anymore is also disingenuous and obnoxious.

(If you think I'm being harsh, you should read the reports. Nobody is impressed by this routine, dude.)

Realistically, if your "sensitivity reader" is good enough not to be obvious, I am not going to play "spot the AI," so sure, go ahead and have ChatGPT rewrite your posts for you and treat it like a proofreading pass, minus the passive-aggressive "sensitivity reader" bitching.

That said, come off it.

(If you think I'm being harsh, you should read the reports. Nobody is impressed by this routine, dude.)

I'm unconcerned with impressing anyone. Have any reports been for language, being uncharitable or combative? No? Then I consider it a resounding success.

More comments

stop saying you're doing it. that's much more off-putting than idiosyncrasies of speech.

[EDIT] - I think the mods have dinged people before for having GPT write their posts for them and not announcing it. On the other hand, it seems to me that if you're going to pass every post through it, just declare that you're doing this from now on, and then everyone will know it without having to be told.

To what extent could the difference be carried by erotica? It is widely believed that men prefer visual titillation and women prefer narrative. New media that proliferated since the '90s has much more of an advantage over books in the former than the latter domain, so it would stand to reason that more men who were at least partially in it for the porn jumped ship to the internet. I still remember being annoyed that the semi-trashy criminal fiction I read as a teenager always had to include an ill-fitting gratuitous graphic sex scene, so the proposition that it matters for large swathes of the audience seems not too far-fetched.

(...or perhaps the "men are more visual" thing extends to entertainment beyond the explicitly pornographic. Do men also prefer videos of {violence, heroism, drama} over written stories about them more than women do?)

...or perhaps the "men are more visual" thing extends to entertainment beyond the explicitly pornographic. Do men also prefer videos of {violence, heroism, drama} over written stories about them more than women do?

I have difficulty getting into the mind of the modal male here. For porn I typically prefer words over images. Words simply allow you to explore a broader and more nuanced range of concepts.

Ultimately both words and images have their place though (for both sexual and non-sexual topics) and I wouldn't say that one is "superior" to the other in a global sense.

Yeah, but not like words on a page. Its different if it's actual audio.

I have a feeling they were into the former far more than the latter..

And that's leaving aside the lack of availability of video pornography during Playboy's heyday.

Women seem to use Tumblr a lot, which had a lot of porn back in the day.

Interestingly, the surge in female sexlessness corresponds exactly to the 2018 Tumblr porn ban. This has to be a coincidence right? There’s no way it’s as simple as “femcels stopped having sex as soon as they stopped being turned on by hardcore porn on their social media feed,” is it?

There’s no way it’s as simple as “femcels stopped having sex as soon as they stopped being turned on by hardcore porn on their social media feed,” is it?

Simple sanity check: does the number of femcels match the number of regular unique tumblr users?

Also: doesn't it correspond more to COVID?

Probably part of it. Romance has always been the biggest seller in mass-market fiction by far, something like 50% of all units sold yearly are romance. I think the trend holds across most genres though.

Of course, and as with any endeavor of this nature, all that has happened is that the true talent has been pushed underground. And it will either find another way to reach us or be redirected elsewhere as the carcass of what was once great walks itself proudly into the garbage bin of history.

The people around these parts are all to familiar with this exact process happening to Science-Fiction, and to many other institutions by now. Oh what a Hugo used to mean!

This piece is written as triumph, but it is the epitaph of the institution that penned it. The great wordsmiths of our age won't get published in places so racist and sexist that they refuse to entertain greatness. And this is somehow to be celebrated. This is progress. It certainly is. Nay, this is reactionary. Why

Some will say, with great wisdom, that "get woke go broke" is wish fulfillment, that the tides of ideology can remain staunchly ignorant of market forces and continue to produce drekk with aplomb thanks to a steady supply of magic money.

And they are right in the short term of course, as we have seen. "Institutional buyers" can sustain these sinecures for a long time, for decades possibly.

Things will get worse, they may do so for the rest of our lives.

But eventually, inevitably, every nation runs out of ruin.

Ah, the true talent of…Vox Day?

I can’t tell what’s supposed to be “written in triumph,” either. The original article bemoans a lack of women in tech men in lit-fic. He alleges that being a starving artist has become cringe. The OP goes further and blames identity politics for keeping men out of published lists. Neither of these looks particularly triumphant.

I don't care for Vox Day, but where are this generation's Heinlein, Vance, Bujold or Spinrad? Because I refuse to believe the hot garbage that makes the Hugos now is it.

Where's the triumphalism

If you don't get a sneering tone from the original article, maybe you haven't read enough editorials about how the old dinosaurs of the past are no longer relevant and never really were that great anyways. Either that or I've read too many. It's a prolific genre.

Come to think of it, this article is so particularly insulting to /lit/ and it's denizens I should probably post it there and see what they make of it.

I found the OP article on /lit/ lol.

I wrote a comment and gave it to my sensitive reader. Here is it's feedback. I am "The auther" for clarity.

"The author believes that institutions have successfully brainwashed young people. The author first noticed this in video games, where games like Diablo II introduced a slot machine-like element that has now become the norm. Young gamers and game developers can hardly imagine games any other way. The author believes that this has destroyed the discerning game audience and the culture of sophisticated gaming.

The author also believes that younger generations have been trained to expect diversity in entertainment and recoil when it is not present. This has led to the removal of great cultural artifacts from curriculums or their presentation as offensive and wrong. The author believes that this has replaced our entire society.

The author believes that our nation ran out of ruin 10-20 years ago and was replaced by a new nation that is still establishing its new order. The author believes that anticipating this new nation to run out of ruin is premature and compares it to anticipating the Roman Empire running out of ruin the day after Caesar was assassinated. The author believes that by the time this new nation finally runs out of ruin, America of old may be just as much an antiquity as the Roman Republic was to the Roman Empire."

Diablo II

Went and googled this because "Diablo" makes me think "relatively recently" but I did not know Diablo II was older than WoW! I figured RNG loot mechanics have been in roleplaying games forever, not even that WoW created it. Or is there a qualitative difference between gambling money and gambling time?

For extra clarity, couldn't you just curate & edit the output of ChatGPT and replace "the author" with "I" and fix the resulting grammatical errors? If your goal is to translate your thoughts into the tone expected in this place, then using tools to help you sounds like a great idea! If your goal is to own the sensitive readers here, I think that counts as waging the culture war, right?

Went and googled this because "Diablo" makes me think "relatively recently" but I did not know Diablo II was older than WoW! I figured RNG loot mechanics have been in roleplaying games forever, not even that WoW created it. Or is there a qualitative difference between gambling money and gambling time?

I acknowledge that RNG loot has been a part of CRPGs for a long time. However, my issue with Diablo II is how it amplified the use of RNG loot. Before Diablo II, I cannot recall playing a single player CRPG and grinding for loot. After Diablo II, however, many RPGs tried to copy its success.

Different games tried different approaches. The Infinity Engine games were pressured to do real-time combat, which was compromised as “real-time with pause” to not alienate its core audience. These games were successful but not as successful as Diablo II.

Other action RPGs such as Nox, Titan Quest and Dungeon Siege were released. These games were successful in their own ways but not as successful as Diablo II. Titan Quest/Grim Dawn focused on skill trees while Dungeon Siege focused on building a massive party and evolving into a tactical combat system.

However, it turns out that what gamers really loved about Diablo II was the presentation of loot with light and sound effects and psychological addiction. This was implemented in many other games including mobile games, freemium games and AAA games with season passes, loot boxes and cosmetic drops.

The preceding text was fed through my sensitivity reader.

Before Diablo II, I cannot recall playing a single player CRPG and grinding for loot.

Seriously?

https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/RareRandomDrop

Let me clarify. I remember playing CRPGs with random loot before Diablo II. I do not remember grinding them for loot. Like as an integral part of the experience. One I would feel compelled to repeat long after I'd beaten the game.

Um... grinding for loot is the very definition of trying to get a rare random drop.

Right, and I'm saying, I never tried to get a rare random drop before Diablo II. I played Wizardry, Might & Magic, Bard's Tale, Pool of Radiance, Final Fantasy, etc, and I got what I got. When I was strong enough to beat a boss, I beat it and moved on. When I was strong enough to beat the game, I beat it and moved on. I grinded for XP primarily, and even then only to whatever bar was required to advance. I never grinded for loot. The loot just happened. In the best of those games, I didn't grind for XP either, I explored a game world because it was fun, and the XP sufficient to advance just happened. Shout out to Pool of Radiance for stopping random encounters in an area when you've had so many you've "cleared" it. I'm aware some players did grind RPGs for specific rare loot drops, even in older RPGs. It was not he predominant mode of play.

Diablo 2 was the first game that was primarily about grinding for loot. Other games had it. Diablo 2 was 95% primarily about it. To the point where beating the game was incidental to playing it. Other players would rush you straight through the end of the game simply so you could get to the meat of the game faster, which was grinding for loot. I had never, ever, seen that happen in any other game ever.

I wrote a comment and gave it to my sensitive reader.

Dude, I like your comments. Stop this nonsense.

I think it's preposterous to think of this regime as bearing the innovation, strength and potency of youth.

Nowhere it goes does it create, and everywhere it steals and vandalizes. Where is the progressive Augustus? Where are its novel institutions? Where is the peace created by its unquestionable bright future? The few rays of sunlight that exists in its grim vision are all coming from technocapital dissidents who would not mind its destruction at all and even they are undermined at every turn by it for fear of becoming a rival castle of managerial moralism.

You are right to analogize us with murdered Caesar. But "such another" hasn't yet come.

Look, I think the metaphors are getting a little mixed here.

We don’t see much in the way of novel institutions because our existing ones work. About as well as they ever did, anyway. No murder there.

Woke media is sort of fashionable at the moment. I don’t think this is the culmination of a Long (Ides of) March. Neither is the counter push for anti-woke products. Who’s supposed to be Caesar, again?

We disagree in premise. The current institutions do not work. They do not work on so many levels I want to ask you to pick any topic and explain to me how you can possibly read their behavior as serviceable. Even basic thing like public order are fubar. The economic system is broken to the point of hilarity, not to mention logistics and infrastructure.

Everything is fucked that is, except remaining in power, which is literally always the last thing to go.

Public order?

I can drive ten minutes down clean, well-lighted streets and get to a functioning police station or courthouse or other outpost of civil society. The worst I might see is a couple homeless. No drugs, no shootings, none of the apocalyptic tenor that shows up on this board. An armed robbery with no casualties is considered shocking, even exciting.

When I vote, I have every reason to believe my vote is fairly counted. Our polling places operate just fine. My vote may not make the difference, given that my neighbors would probably vote for a log with an R next to it, but that’s okay. That log is not a threat.

I can buy gas and groceries. Go to one of the innumerable big box stores flowing goods to the metroplex. Get a good lunch out with my family. Prices are inflated but manageable.

My job is quite secure—I have reasonable skills, and the regime always needs new weapons for its foreign commitments. We impose some level of order on half the planet. It may not always be this way, but for now, America is the best in the world.

That’s public order.

I guess you just don't live in a big city. Good for you D-FENS, but I question the relevance of your personal experience to the health of your regime when those lawless places in your country do exist.

I spent the last Saturday on the train through Dallas, actually. It was…fine. A couple “don’t make eye contact” moments. Certainly less comfortable than my glorified suburb. Do you live in one of these hellholes, or do you just hear about them on TV?

Their existence doesn’t outweigh all the functional, ordered parts of the country. Since you disagree—when was the last time they did?

More comments

I mean if you’re judging by the lifestyle of someone living a middle class life in the suburbs of a major metropolitan area, I mean sure. But there are major portions of almost every major American city that are lawless enough that “good people” no longer go there and if misfortune puts them near those areas, they flee as quickly as their modern automobile will allow them.

My city had more than 250 murders last year. Not even that bad. Chicago had more. There are places in America with such high crime rates that stores have their good — all of their goods locked up, and for good measure have metal bars over their windows. You can look on YouTube for the skid rows of various cities, entire streets filled with people hopelessly addicted to drugs. Or you can look up the Los Angeles feces map. A map to help people avoid steers covered in human feces. In most of the inner cores of the city, it’s common practice to leave a car door unlocked and signs on the windows telling thieves there’s nothing of value and to please not break the windows. That’s the urban rot.

Now if you go to rural areas, especially in the south, it’s often very poor. There are no big stores giving the fruits of civilization to rural Georgia. They don’t have good jobs, they don’t have much in material wealth. Most of the buildings are in poor repair. And most of the people still there live in poverty. Those with means fled when the last good jobs were taken with the factory that left decades ago. No new business has come in, and what remains are the people too poor to move and who don’t have the job skills to make it worthwhile.

You want working institutions? I don’t see them. Politics is mostly for show and at best ignores real problems in favor of theatrics. You mentioned the inflationary pressures on the economy. So what exactly has our government been doing while people struggle to afford healthcare and food and so on? Well, we had a nice conversation about January 6, we overturned Roe, and we’re desperately concerned with the contents of elementary school books. We can muster the energy to condemn various political heresies in public and private life. We can perhaps find time to elevate a trans woman to celebrity status. But we cannot fix any real problems. Roads don’t get fixed, crimes in many larger cities are ignored, kids get shot in schools, and for that matter our schools plain stink as compared to other countries.

I think this “sensitive reader” gimmick is dumb and ugly.

Sorry: it’s an inelegant solution to your problem. Applying Gaussian blur to text is aesthetically unappealing on the object level, which I realize is intentional. It’s also unpleasant on the meta level, representing a middle finger to the community ethos.

You don’t need GPT to write with some tact.

You don’t need GPT to write with some tact.

Perhaps you don’t have this issue, but I do. It’s something I’m working on to the best of my ability.

The preceding text was fed through my sensitivity reader.

Come on, you got modded for being combative, not for using a no-no word.

In fairness, it does seem like ChatGPT has tempered Coil's tone, but still.

While I could be mistaken and it could just be a trick played on me by my filter bubble, I believe this:

The author also believes that younger generations have been trained to expect diversity in entertainment and recoil when it is not present.

is an illusion cast on us to make it seem as if it is fait accompli, so we do not resist it. My impession is that young generations, save a loud activist minority, do not care about this and would rather consume entertainment that prioritise quality over "activism" when both are on offer, which is why it seems like an imperative for people pushing this illusion that all remnants of past quality entertainment must be "remade" and tainted with activism, as its mere presence next to its modern counterparts shade it entirely. This is where I believe we differ, they must destroy the past not because they've won, but because they fear its presence will break the spell they've put on us.

It is also weird to see how more than half of the top 50 followed tiktokkers do not have Wikipedia pages. What does it take to be notable these days. Dominik Lipa (who is not a Mexican guy, as I presumed) has 65 million people who follow her and does not get a Wikipedia page. Perhaps people can't tell her apart from Addison Rae or Charli D'Amilio, or perhaps all girls of that age look vaguely similar to me.

Perhaps Wikipedia is not young thing any more.

Perhaps people editing Wikipedia are old geezers, relics from primeval times when people went to www to read things, not listen to music and watch videos, people who do not know what Tiktok is and do not care.

Perhaps the wrong side won in the most important war you never heard about - Wikipedia deletionist against inclusionist struggle. Had things went the other way, Wikipedia would today have 66 million articles instead of 6.6 million and nine tenths of them would be about Star Wars, Harry Potter, Pokemon, Dungeons&Dragons and similar nerd crap.

How can you try to figure out if your filter bubble has played a trick on you? It sounds what you're describing (I think this too) is that institutions control the kinds of common knowledge that can be formed. This is independent of the fact that most young people prefer quality over activism.

Maybe I'm just trying to flatter my worldview by saying, "the institutions are oppressing me, but also they're wrong and stupid!!1!"

Now if you could get your sensitivity reader to write in the first person and vary its wording a bit... (though it seems like part of the point is defeated by this exercise: it's good that the result is more palatable to those that would disagree, but bad that you are not forced to break the spirit of your own misplaced confidence to post)

On the object level, I am not sure I agree that Roman timelines can be expected to generalise to the present day, since technological advantages and population density seem to otherwise have accelerated turnaround.

When there are more men writers it’s prima facie evidence of discrimination; when there are more women writers it’s because men suck.

This type of asymmetry is everywhere and it is always completely predictable how it will go from relative positions on the oppression hierarchy.

I've had similar thoughts when it comes to language. Is it sexist if a gendered language (like Spanish) treats the masculine as the default case, or e.g. that words like "mankind" is based on the masculine word? If it was the inverse, would people complain that the male had it's own superior "exceptional" category and the female was simply generic?

To avoid trying to draw conclusions from hypotheticals, do you have any examples of

people complain[ing] that the male had it's own superior "exceptional" category and the female was simply generic?

If so, it would show that hand-wringing over masculine-default terms is who/whom / motivated complaining / isolated demand for rigor.

I can provide here.

In French we've had multiple waves of performative linguistic alterations of gender in many contradictory directions.

In my youth it used to be appropriate to refer to women in positions of power by using the masculine (Madame le Ministre) because to use a special word would imply women in those positions were different or lesser in dignity.

These days it's appropriate to use the feminine (Madame la Ministre) because to not feminize titles would imply that women were not worthy of such titles.

The paradox here of course is that properly speaking French has no masculine, only neutral and feminine, and this state of affairs can and has been twisted in all possible directions for linguistic novelty, from creating all new feminized titles where neutral titles existed (Autrice) to adding dots in the middle of words to signify explicit inclusion in the political sense (Auteur.ice).

All this forever in the service of the cause of women of course.

Though I might also have an interesting counterfactual. Because a very long time ago the switch to the grammatical rule that says groups of mixed gender are considered masculine (that is to say neutral) instead of of the last gender mentioned was done on political grounds because men were deemed of a greater station. Or so I've been taught.

Of course all that I've been taught of linguistics tells me this prescriptivism is nonsense and of those proposed fads only persist those that actually simplify use. But who can say?

Is it the case that literary fiction is mostly pseudo-memoirs and filled with pity and sympathy stories? I checked once and this is what I found, but if someone familiar with the genre can inform me that would be cool. The issue could be that that we call this writing “literary”, when it’s really just emotional novels/novellas, ie what women have been consuming for one hundred years — gossip and wives’ tales that calls itself literature. Surely the weighty mark of “literature” has nothing to do with what the writer intends or what some capitalistic publishers desire, but how culture at large sees the work in the future.

I just… why would I ever want to consume the writing of someone who has merely been trained to write, who has spent their formative years regurgitating what their trait-conformist teachers have told them should be written, from textbook straight to to text? That’s incredibly boring and I will gain nothing. Imagine if Harper Lee and Hemingway grew up in suburbia and spent all their time gunning it at school to make it into the best graduate programs for writing. They would write nothing of value. Their writing comes from their experiences that began in formative years, their culture and inner culture. Graduate students in English are writing “literature” for reviewers and magazine writers who are also graduate students in English, none of which gunned it at developing a personality or any unique insight into living.

Largely, yes. The bright side, however, is that there is more than enough good stuff that you'll never have to fall back to the personal novellas.

I'd personally recommend jumping in the deep end: Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy. Remember it was published in the 1980s and probably penned throughout the 1970s. I wonder if any editor at a publishing house today would even read draft chapter nowadays.

I think another thing that makes it "literary" is adding allusions to stories in the Western canon and name-dropping famous thinkers. E.g. Iris Murdoch's The Sacred and Profane Love Machine does it right in the title. The big disappointment is that the references usually don't add anything or help make an argument, they just make things seem more profound.

Probably a good example of literary fiction that does actually make a sort of argument is Mann's Death in Venice, which is about an aging pedophile realizing that being educated doesn't actually make him or his desires cool.

It's quite noticeable at the library, in the new releases section. It often looks like it's 100% women and minorities in American general fiction. Still get the odd continental European or Asian male writer in there. I guess they're just serving what the market has become. And I imagine there isn't a lot of counter-pressure because if you're dissatisfied with that kind of narrative, you can always read the classics.

Lol "We discriminated against men and wrote a million think-pieces about how shit they all are, and now they publish fewer books with us, proving that women are better at writing!"

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