Forsooth it is time to wander once again into the vapid waspish stupidity of an elitist feminist mind. I happened to run across this article in my internet travels. Pay attention. we’re going to rip it the fuck apart.
The byline at the top of this piece reads MA Sieghart, not Mary Ann. Why? Because I really want men to read it too. Female authors through the centuries, from the Brontë sisters to George Eliot to JK Rowling, have felt obliged to disguise their gender to persuade boys and men to read their books. But now? Is it really still necessary? The sad answer is yes.
See…she’s starting this whole piece with *GASP* an assumption. Remember one thing Sister Betty Lou Better Than You….you’ve just made an assumption. Which just makes you look like the braying ass you are.
For my book The Authority Gap, which looks at why women are still taken less seriously than men, I commissioned Nielsen Book Research to find out exactly who was reading what. I wanted to know whether female authors were not just deemed less authoritative than men, but whether they were being read by men in the first place. And the results confirmed my suspicion that men were disproportionately unlikely even to open a book by a woman.
Ahhh a paid poll then basically. YEah we all know around here, how yours truly feels about *snort of disdain* POLLS. Also what I think can be done with them
For the top 10 bestselling female authors (who include Jane Austen and Margaret Atwood, as well as Danielle Steel and Jojo Moyes), only 19% of their readers are men and 81%, women. But for the top 10 bestselling male authors (who include Charles Dickens and JRR Tolkien, as well as Lee Child and Stephen King), the split is much more even: 55% men and 45% women.
Lets see…Danielle Steel, romances. Jojo Moyes…trashy romances. Whether you agree with the trashy part or not they write bodice rippers. Jane Austen, oh LOOK! ROMANCE. Margaret Attwood. In my own humble opinion, she just writes crap, but your mileage may vary. So based on just those 4 female choices, men who generally don’t like romance anyway; hate, don’t like or won’t read women authors. Now lets look at the 4 men mentioned.
Charles Dickens…who gave us The Christmas Carol. JRR Tolkien who gave us what is without a doubt one of the greatest fantasy epics of all goddamn time. Lee Child..he writes thrillers. Stephen King. Another two bit hack with delusions of adequacy who writes popular horror. You’re trying to compare Apples to….lettuce and peanuts! Jesus Fucking H Christ Ass Fucking an Alligators Corpse, lady! Come down out of your ivory fucking tower, unpack what you undoubtedly call a mind, from the poison laced wool it’s packed in and try and think critically and honestly. I truly doubt you’re capable of it you myopic harpy but…*shrug*
In other words, women are prepared to read books by men, but many fewer men are prepared to read books by women. And the female author in the top 10 who had the biggest male readership – the thriller writer LJ Ross – uses her initials, so it’s possible the guys thought she was one of them. What does this tell us about how reluctant men are to accord equal authority – intellectual, artistic, cultural – to women and men?
Considering how stupidly slanted this research poll was…it tells us the blazingly obvious. Men and Women like different things. *gasp* Imagine that! You pallid gelatinous mass masquerading as a thinking human being.
Margaret Atwood, a writer who should be on the bookshelves of anyone who cares about literary fiction, has a readership that is only 21% male. Male fellow Booker prize winners Julian Barnes and Yann Martel have nearly twice as many (39% and 40%). It’s not as if women are less good at writing literary fiction. All five of the top five bestselling literary novels in 2017 were by women, and nine of the top 10. And it’s not as if men don’t enjoy reading books by women when they do open them; in fact, they marginally prefer them. The average rating men give to books by women on Goodreads is 3.9 out of 5; for books by men, it’s 3.8.
Ahh “for those who care about literary fiction” Actually? Most of what you call literary fiction is repetitive, uninspiring and boring as hell. Why dost thou think, thou mannequin faced baboon, that the classics hast fallen out of favor; some justified, some not; in required reading lists? Quite a bit of my required reading throughout my education career bored me to fucking tears! Others I found fascinating and fell in love with. Chaucer and the works of The Bard to name two that held my interest. I love Shakespeare enough that one of my friends many moons ago didst gift me with a massive leatherbound edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare.
Turning to nonfiction, which is read by slightly more men than women, the pattern is similar, though not quite so striking. Men still read male authors much more than female ones, but the discrepancy isn’t so large because women tend to do the same in favour of female authors. But there is still quite a difference. Women are 65% more likely to read a nonfiction book by the opposite sex than men are. All this suggests that men, consciously or unconsciously, don’t accord female authors as much authority as male ones. Or they make the lazy assumption that women’s books aren’t for them without trying them out to see whether this is true.
Actually one of my favorite historic non fiction authors is a woman. Adrienne Mayor. There’s another one that writes of Quantum Physics and makes it somewhat understandable. Although I will freely admit the field of Quantum Physics and the mathematics involved turn my brain to mush trying to understand for the most part.
Why does this matter? For a start, it narrows men’s experiences of the world. “I’ve known this for a very long time, that men just aren’t interested in reading our literature,” the Booker prize-winning novelist Bernardine Evaristo told me in an interview for The Authority Gap. “Our literature is one of the ways in which we explore narrative, we explore our ideas, we develop our intellect, our imagination. If we’re writing women’s stories, we’re talking about the experiences of women. We also talk about male experiences from a female perspective. And so if they’re not interested in that, I think that it’s very damning and it’s extremely worrying.”
“why does this matter?” Here’s a fucking hint. It doesn’t. It just means that men don’t want to read a particular type of story. They don’t want to be PREACHED at by feminist elitists. They don’t wanna read bodice rippers, when lets be honest, we can simply watch porn. If you find the fact that we men don’t think the same way you women do, express ourselves the same way, and are not interested int he same things “very damning and worrying”? Then here’s a hint buttercup. The problem isn’t men, like myself. The PROBLEM, stares back at you from the mirror every fucking day.
If men don’t read books by and about women, they will fail to understand our psyches and our lived experience. They will continue to see the world through an almost entirely male lens, with the male experience as the default. And this narrow focus will affect our relationships with them, as colleagues, as friends and as partners. But it also impoverishes female writers, whose work is seen as niche rather than mainstream if it is consumed mainly by other women. They will earn less respect, less status and less money.
A lot of men will fail to understand anyway. Women tend to be…complicated. Men are more simple. As the great relationship expert John Grey once opined..”Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus” You’re problem is you believe everyone should think and act as you do. Sorry sweetheart, specialization is for insects and cookie cutters and I won’t be put in anyone’s definition box. I am who I am, a free thinking human being. If you can’t handle that? Well then, to be blunt? Go fuck a cactus and leave me be.
The novelist Kamila Shamsie has sat on a number of prize judging panels and has witnessed exactly this asymmetry. “The women judges are putting forward books by both men and women,” she told me. “And the male judges are largely putting forward books by other men.”
Ah another person I’ve never heard of. How unsurprising. However…there’s a lot of people I haven’t heard of, simply because it is physically, mentally and emotionally; not to mention logically; IMPOSSIBLE to know every goddamn person on the planet.
Dolly Alderton is a highly successful writer, whose memoir Everything I Know about Love won the 2018 National Book Award for best autobiography. Yet in Britain, at least, it had almost no interest from men. Every newspaper and magazine journalist sent to interview her was a woman and it was, as she told me, “marketed and perceived and received as something incredibly niche by dint of my gender. Yet a female experience is not a niche experience; it’s a universal common interest.”
I don’t read memoirs and what she has written was probably something not even the vast majority of WOMEN gave a damn about. England is not homogenous, far from it. There are people from all backgrounds, nationalities. So saying because the vast majority of men didn’t read it there, because all the interviewers were female makes it niche because of gender? Is intellectually dishonest. Sadly something I’ve come to expect from a wide swathe of humanity. I wonder if she ever thought about the fact that maybe the reason some of those mostly female interviewers were female was because they wanted to put her at ease? Ever think of that? No? Didn’t think so.
Yet, when she went on a publicity tour to Denmark, it was quite different. She told the male journalist who had been sent to interview her that he was the first ever. “He couldn’t believe how weird that was. He was in his 20s and said he and his friends read memoirs or fiction by women just as much as those by men.” Things can be different. And it’s a very easy problem for men to fix. All they have to do is actively seek out books by female authors.
Different demographic than England. Denmark is very small and homogenous, demographics wise. I’d have expected the result to be somewhat different there. Hip Hip Hooray…clear the Danish people are more enlightened for sending a male interviewer. *snort* Did I mention how intellectually dishonest her thought process is? Also myopic and illogical?
If men are sceptical that women will write about subjects that interest them, they could try Pat Barker on the first world war or Hilary Mantel on the machinations of Henry VIII’s court. Once they become used to it, they may even find that these turn into human stories rather than niche female ones – and that they enjoy them.
It’s SKEPTICAL…minor nit. apparently the editor of this ‘article’ missed one. It happens, but I digress. Sigh, look, most men don’t give a shit WHO writes the story so long as it’s a good one. If it trades story for preaching a certain screed? Then yeah, it’s gonna end up in the “What the fuck was I doing reading this feckless crap?” bin. Women can be the same way. As I said, we have different interests. It’s called life. DEAL with it, and stop thinking everything is a plot against women, and misogyny. Worst kind of intellectual dishonest there is, right there.
Men can gain a huge amount from broadening their minds and their tastes. Just because a book is written by a woman or is about women doesn’t mean it has nothing to offer them. It opens their eyes to what it’s like to live as a woman in the world, the first step to learning empathy. And it may help to burst the bubble many men have been inadvertently living in, allowing new thoughts and insights to germinate. Isn’t that what the arts are for?
For all our faults, we men tend to be more broad minded, better read and more logical in our thought processes than most women. More than a lot of women, and some men, ever give us credit for. Most women, trend more toward the illogical, the emotional. It’s just genetics and nature. I’m not saying there aren’t women who aren’t logical, I’m not saying that at all. As a matter of fact those women who are logical tend to get dumped on as brainless bimbos by the other side of the political or cultural divide that they are opposite of. Told that the only reason men listen to them is because they are good looking. Told that the men don’t really care about what they think, that the men only wanna get them in the sack. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. More myopic and intellectual dishonestly. In the case of this train of thought I can only tell the women, telling the successful intelligent women opposite them, that these things are so? Stop being bitter, spiteful, vicious little twats. You sound like 2yrs olds. It got old a long goddamn time ago. As in along about the time I turned 16 give or take. Sooner probably. So, long goddamn time.
Did I mention I hate vapid elitist twats, no matter which gender, male or female, that they are?
Here’s a link to the original article
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2021/jul/09/why-do-so-few-men-read-books-by-women
carry on!
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