Why Don’t Men Read Anymore?
There is an article on The Standard’s website: “Men Don’t Read Anymore – What Happened?” that I think deserves our attention. It was written by Martin Robinson and dated 12 September 2024.
Today, the MailOnline website says: “Martin Robinson joined MailOnline in 2012 as a senior news reporter and became chief reporter in 2016. He has also worked at Westminster. Martin previously wrote for the Daily Telegraph, The Sun, The Daily Mirror and the Evening Standard, primarily covering London politics, crime and the London 2012 Olympics after starting his career in regional newspapers. He lives in London with his wife and three children. In his spare time he coaches youth football and follows his beloved Ipswich Town.” Apparently, he is also a freelancer.
Martin Robinson
He says,” Why don’t men read? Oh, I know dear male Standard readers do, those urbane, literary, poised and secretly perverted doyens of good taste. But those other men, they are not reading fiction. Oh sure, they read Sir Alex Ferguson’s book, Lewis Hamilton’s book, books about cage fighters and career criminals, but nice books that win literary prizes? Nope. The book buying public in the UK, US and Canada is 80 per cent women.
Is this why no-one wants my woe? Why my breathtaking work of utterly miserable fiction has been rejected by every literary agent in London, including a few I didn’t even send it to. Despite pouring my little spiteful heart and ugly soul into 350 pages of unrelenting male despair, everyone is chipping in with how much they hate it, how little it would sell, how much of my life I wasted on it. And those are just the gentle let-downs.
I could get all thicko anti-woke conspiracist about it — “I clearly wasn’t successful because I’m a man!” — but instead I’ll go thicko anti-male conspiracist: other men have let me down!
No-one wants to read my crushingly depressing glimpse into the masculine mind because no one is interested in what men think. Least of all men!
This sense of men lacking the sophistication to understand the nuances of existence has been at the centre of the analysis about why the modern man’s preferred reading choice is the captions on Rio Ferdinand’s podcast videos.
LitHub quoted an Irish novelist saying women are better novelists than men because they have a better grasp of human complexity, and the piece explored men’s reluctance to buy books written by, or about, women as indicative of a stunted view of literature.
Dazed put it down to the patriarchal late capitalist system, quoting one professor who said: “Our culture makes a fetish of practical outcomes, and perhaps because the outcomes of fiction-reading don’t patently lead to higher wages, it seems less worthy.”
All of which provides excellent food for thought when your thought revolves around: why is the book industry spaffing millions on Matt Haig’s global book promotion, while I can’t even get a non-automated reply?
Didn’t men used to be more engaged in the internal struggles of existence? I’m not going to reel off a load of male writers highly attuned to mysteries and complexities, but y’know, Shelley was hardly Andrew Tate was he?
Things have changed. Men have changed. Or the perception of men has changed. One which seems to be increasingly reductive. It becomes a self-fulfilling doom loop where men are considered by the literary world to be half-dog, half-machine, while men themselves take the excuse to act like robo-hounds because it’s easier and there are apps demanding their attention instead. They’re right, men are not buying women’s books, but they’re not buying men’s books either. They’re just not reading, OK?
And so you see. The abject failure of my rotten novel is not my fault, it’s the world’s…”
I don’t think we should be at all concerned, because you and I read plenty of fiction!
