Notebook: (2) Some Men Reading

Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin, Portrait of Auguste Gabriel Godefroy (1741). São Paulo Museum of Art

Read Part One of this post here!

The cluster of ideas emerging from Yahdon Israel and Jerid Woods’s work—a critical and also forward-looking understanding of masculinity, an energetic and proactive effort to engage people with reading—seemed a striking contrast with the contemporaneous, mostly white discourse on “men reading,” which was more focused on who is entitled to an audience, rather than how one earns it. An early entrant in the genre was Johanna Thomas-Corr, writing in The New Statesman in 2022 and sounding the recurrent note, post #MeToo, that “if men can’t publish gloves-off accounts of their sexual urges—as today’s female authors are encouraged to—then male readers will feel disenfranchised and disengaged by fiction,” and Joyce Carol Oates notoriously tweeting that July that “a friend who is a literary agent told me that he cannot even get editors to read first novels by young white male writers, no matter how good.” 2024 saw a relatively lightly researched article in Esquire called “Where Is All the Sad Boy Literature,” which got its own smattering of responses, including one from novelist Andrew Boryga that identified a dissonance in experience between working-class male writers in particular and all the affluent, educated white women in publishing (see also Lee Cole in LitHub). In November 2024 there was a National Endowment for the Arts study revealing growing discrepancies between men and women’s reading and a consonant spot poll in The Washington Post. Then in December of 2024 came the first of a run of assertive New York Times opinion pieces, this one by creative writing teacher David Morris, which opened, “Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit,” and declared “if you care about the health of our society … the decline and fall of literary men should worry you.” The visibility of ascendant repudiators of reading like Andrew Tate and Samuel Bankman-Fried appeared to underline his point.

The next month Constance Grady gave the whole subject a bracingly empirical rebuke in Vox, citing statistics showing little meaningful change in male vs. female reading, in particular noting that an oft-brandished statistic, that men currently constitute only 20 percent of the market for fiction, has no traceable source. But three months later the subject was back, with a widely circulated article in