The Disappearance of Literary Men Should Worry Everyone By David J. Morris A Fisking

Cross-posted from the Conservative Historian

Photo by Florian Klauer on Unsplash

Every once in awhile I read something so incredibly strange that I can’t ignore it. What follows is a fisking of a New York Times editorial written by David J Morris. It can be found here. His words will be in bold. My responses will be in italics.

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Over the past two decades, literary fiction has become a largely female pursuit. Novels are increasingly written by women and read by women. In 2004, about half the authors on the New York Times fiction best-seller list were women and about half men; this year, the list looks to be more than three-quarters women. According to multiple reports, women readers now account for about 80 percent of fiction sales.

And yet women still claim to be marginalized in publishing. The fact is that if roughly three quarters of the writers in the industry are female, then women aren’t being discriminated against or marginalized. It’s that simple. The article I linked a few sentences ago would claim otherwise but, at the end of the day, they’re wrong. I also wonder who it is who would be marginalizing woman since the staffs at publishing houses are overwhelmingly female.

I find it weird that Morris fails to mention this. I’d have to believe that forcing men out of jobs at publishing houses decreases the ability of men to get published. I have a sneaking suspicion that men were forced out for precisely this reason, but I have no evidence to back that, so we’ll just leave it there for now.

I see the same pattern in the creative-writing program where I’ve taught for eight years. About 60 percent of our applications come from women, and some cohorts in our program are entirely female. When I was a graduate student in a similar program about 20 years ago, the cohorts were split fairly evenly by gender. As Eamon Dolan, a vice president and executive editor at Simon & Schuster, told me recently, “the young male novelist is a rare species.”

Of course he is. I get the fact that American mythology is full of underdog stories, but let’s face it: It’s never been easy to succeed as a writer in the first place. J.K. Rowling submitted the Harry Potter series and was rejected twelve times before being accepted. That’s a literary property that has spawned seven books, eight movies, at least two theme parks and only God knows how much in merchandising. I’ve bought some of it myself. Publishing is a world that many people will discourage a young person from getting into in the first place. But for those of us whose gender has been forced out of publishing slots, it’s even worse. Why bother submitting when houses won’t publish you? Why take a class in creative writing if you can’t use the knowledge gained to support yourself?

Male underrepresentation is an uncomfortable topic in a literary world otherwise highly attuned to such imbalances.

And it should not be. If discrimination is wrong, it’s wrong regardless of who the object of the discrimination effects.

In 2022 the novelist Joyce Carol Oates wrote on Twitter 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.”

I want to be shocked and offended here but this is par for the course in the modern US. Whether it’s K. Tempest Bradford calling for people to not read white male authors or companies in the Standard and Poors 100 limiting their hiring of white candidates. .This is clearly not just a publishing problem, but it is part of a disturbing trend in part of a disturbing trend in American culture.

Per Resourceful Finance Pro:

Nearly 17% of HR professionals say they’re being told by company executives not to hire white men and women. Maybe the actual percentage is significantly higher. Or perhaps the majority of smaller and private companies are following merit-based hiring practices unlike the biggest, publicly traded companies that clearly aren’t

The public response to Ms. Oates’s comment was swift and cutting — not entirely without reason, as the book world does remain overwhelmingly white. But the lack of concern about the fate of male writers was striking.

“Striking?” Really? What’s striking here? I just referred to this trend above. It’s nothing new. Men are being pushed out and this is just one more example of what is going on. Women won the gender war, folks. Now they’re pushing to end not must male dominance, but male existence pretty much everywhere.

To be clear, I welcome the end of male dominance in literature.

I would too, if it had ever truly exited.

Men ruled the roost for far too long, too often at the expense of great women writers who ought to have been read instead.

Tell Emily Bronte, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Jane Austen, Emily Dickinson, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Louisa May Alcott all of whom were published during the Nineteenth Century. And that leaves off Mary Shelley, who not only got published during the eighteen hundreds, but whose novel Frankenstein is the foundational text for all of science fiction. Nothing says “marginalization” like being a best seller or having an entire genre of books, movies, TV shows and games come from your creation,

I also don’t think that men deserve to be better represented in literary fiction; they don’t suffer from the same kind of prejudice that women have long endured.

You, Mr. Morris have detailed precisely the type of discrimination against men that you are declaring in this sentence to have never happened. This is a flat out lie and, what’s more, you know it. You just destroyed the credibility of your entire article.

Furthermore, young men should be reading Sally Rooney and Elena Ferrante. Male readers don’t need to be paired with male writers.

I’ve never read Sally Rooney or Elena Ferrante. I don’t even know who they are, but I’m guessing they don’t write Science Fiction or Fantasy, because that’s what I read when I’m not reading history or politics. That much having been said, his point about male readers not needing to be paired with male authors is a good one. I have a book review blog with a nearly ten year history (the anniversary is next month) where I review authors ranging from independent/small press authors like Cedar Sanderson, L. Jagi Lamplighter Wright and Monalisa Foster all the way up to Suzanne Collins. If someone tells you that this post is about denying women opportunities, they’re lying.

The difference between myself and the current publishing establishment is that I don’t see a problem with pairing a reader of either gender with a man. And that’s why I also review authors like Larry Correia, James L Young, and David Weber. The men deserve their chance to.

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But if you care about the health of our society — especially in the age of Donald Trump and the distorted conceptions of masculinity he helps to foster — the decline and fall of literary men should worry you.

If Mr. Morris cared about the health of our society he would have had the guts to call discrimination by its name instead of equivocating. He is right, though. Charles Dickens and Mark Twain deserved their chances and so do todays young men.

In recent decades, young men have regressed educationally, emotionally and culturally.

Define “regressed.” I would argue that getting a trade school certificate that leads to a job pays more than the guy with the creative writing degree and job at Starbucks makes is actually PROgressing. Men appear less in culture because of precisely the type of discrimination Morris spent a large chunk of his article describing before he denied it. I’ll leave “emotional regression” alone. What does that even mean? Is he referring to the fact that men are less likely to marry screaming harpies who admit that they use sex to enslave mens’ minds? (WE HAVE WHAT YOU NEED AND WE’RE NOT GOING TO GIVE IT TO YOU IF YOU DON’T DO AS WE TELL YOU TO!) Yeah, I’ll leave that one alone.

Among women matriculating at four-year public colleges, about half will graduate four years later; for men the rate is under 40 percent.

I finished my degree the second time I went to school. I have to wonder about the effect of telling men they’re unlikely to get a job because of their gender and that they’re a bunch of misogynist rapists because of their gender and how it influences their decisions to stay in college or leave.

This disparity surely translates to a drop-off in the number of novels young men read, as they descend deeper into video games and pornography.

Pornography is poison that destroys relationships. There’s no denying that. Given the differences in why people read (entertainment) versus why they watch porn (sexual gratification) I’m on the fence as to what the effects of pornography are on reading. I’m not saying he’s wrong. I’m just not convinced that he’s right. I would need an actual argument to be made here as opposed to the assumption he just posted. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong here, either.

Video games may be the bigger problem here, and I want to be cautious. I myself am a gamer. I have the aforementioned book review blog, but I also know that I’ve spent entire days playing World of Warcraft. Part of my fascination is the lore of the game, which is deep and varied. The writers for WoW put together stories that are every bit as entertaining as everything I’ve read and that is what makes their game worth playing.

Young men who still exhibit curiosity about the world too often seek intellectual stimulation through figures of the “manosphere” such as Andrew Tate and Joe Rogan.

He’s not wrong. It’s just that he’s wrong. By that I mean that a lot of guys do listen to Joe Rogan and Andrew Tate. He’s not wrong about that. He is wrong in his assumption that this is a bad thing. It is not the job of men to parrot a female point of view. If you have a problem with something that Tate, Rogan, or anyone else says make an argument against it.

The marginalization of young men seems to have been a significant factor in this year’s presidential election. No voters were more committed to Mr. Trump than young white men — and he also did well with Hispanic men and continued to make gains with Black men. I think of 2024 as the “Fight Club” election, in which disaffected guys vented their frustrations and anxieties through a brawler who will one day reveal himself to be not their hero, but rather a figment of their imagination.

Whether Trump will be the savior of American men remains to be seen and I’m not all that optimistic. The fact remains that the page on the Official Website of the Democrat Party has a page entitled “Who We Serve.” If you pay attention while perusing the page, you’ll notice that they never once mention men. (I wrote about this particular subject here.) If the Democrats don’t serve men, then why should men vote for them? By the same token, why should men support a publishing industry that is pushing them out?

These young men need better stories — and they need to see themselves as belonging to the world of storytelling.

Many of them get that from gaming, but I guess I already covered that. Morris is correct about young men needing better stories though. I wrote about that here. And we do need more men writing. The first step to that would be eliminating the discrimination. The second step would be to stop with Wokist men are trash storylines and publishing stories that aren’t intended to make half of the potential audience hate themselves. No one is going to spend their time and money on books that hate on them.

Novels do many things. They entertain, inspire, puzzle, hypnotize. But reading fiction is also an excellent way to improve one’s emotional I.Q.

Morris is right here. Of course, it’s up to the publishing industry to provide men with something worth reading and not our jobs to read to become more empathetic.

Novels help us form our identities and understand our lives. Like many other bookish Gen X-ers, I can’t conceive of my formative years without the Douglas Coupland novel that gave our generation its name.

That’s an interesting statement. I am a Gen-Xer and I never knew where the name of my generation came from. Anybody know what novel this is and whether it’s worth reading? Not whether or not a college professor would say it’s worth reading, but whether it’s ACTUALLY worth reading?

This is why we need a more inclusive literary culture, one that will bring young men in from the cold.

Bingo.

I am not saying that we should declare progress for women writers complete and now focus only on men.

I am. Men are being discriminated against and marginalized as evidenced by Morris’s own argument, even if he didn’t have the guts to flat out state what was going on.

The question for me is: What will become of literature — and indeed, of society — if men are no longer involved in reading and writing?

Nothing good, that’s for sure.

The fortunes of men and women are intertwined. This is why, for example, I make sure that my male students read “The Handmaid’s Tale.” It’s not just their edification that matters; women also benefit from the existence of better men.

And men would benefit from better women as well, starting with the women who are at fault for discriminating against men in publishing. This works both ways.

Here I am reminded of something that the feminist scholar bell hooks once wrote: “There remains a small strain of feminist thinkers who feel strongly that they have given all they want to give to men; they are concerned solely with improving the collective welfare of women. Yet life has shown me that any time a single male dares to transgress patriarchal boundaries” — something I am convinced that literature enables men to do — “the lives of women, men and children are fundamentally changed for the better.”

I’m not saying he’s wrong. I’m just saying that pointing out “patriarchal boundaries” while failing to call out the modern big publishing industry for its matriarchal and misandrist bent is deeply misguided if I’m being charitable.

Morris is a squish, but at least he’s willing to head in the right direction even if he seems to be afraid of the conclusions his facts should lead him to. One day he and others like him will look up and realize that they spoke up and nothing changed. That is because they are too scared to call discrimination discrimination or to call misandry misandry. It takes guts to change the world. Call things what they are or get out of the way and let those of us with the courage of our convictions do it for you.