Basically a repost pf things I said in the mega, but anecdotally I’m hearing that sales of fiction read by men are dropping precipitously, and English and literature classes in colleges are now dominated by women. It seems like young men are not being exposed to literature in the same way that they used to. Like, when I was in high school and college, you could be a “bro” kind of guy and read Chuck Palahniuk, or Hunter S. Thompson, or David Foster Wallace. For decades, authors like Hemmingway and Bukowski found receptive audiences in young men, not to mention all the crime fiction, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy that men have traditionally consumed. The “guy in your English class who loves David Foster Wallace” was a stereotype for a reason. I read in another thread that music is less culturally important to young men than it used to be. It seems like younger men just straight up see no value in reading literature or fiction, or exposing themselves or critically engaging with art and music, because the algorithms just railroad them into Alpha Gridset world.
Am I wrong about this? Am I being condescending and out of touch, or is this a real thing that’s happening, where the whole “male” culture is turning into grindset podcasts and streamers?
Edit: Okay, so the impression I’m getting is that everything is worse but also kind of the same as it ever was, which sounds right.
I actually wanted to like Hunger Games, at the least, as a basic but still entertaining worldbuilding attempt at class struggle metaphors and rigged game analogies that might connect with younger people, but then it became exhaustively shallow YA romance instead.
What do you mean? Love triangles are the pinnacle of storytelling.
That’s what a lot of my students believed in my classes and I didn’t want to criticize their treats in a way that’d make the rest of the year miserable for both parties.
You ever watch Terrible Writing Advice on YouTube? Recurring bits include love triangles, Man with No Name spoofs, evil empire that’s evil for reasons, chosen one prophecies, self-insert wish fulfillment, etc.
It’s unfortunate that that place could call itself Profitable Writing Advice and it’d be just about as correct.
Writing absolute slop, where it’s not just bad ideas but bad composition of bad ideas, can be very profitable if it panders enough.
Just look at Ready Player One.
Still can’t believe that book was not only a bestseller, but also got made into a movie. I get it, not everyone wants to trudge their way through obscure 18th. century literature or avant-garde meta commentary on English academia. But like…“The idea hit me like an anvil on the top of my head.” Really? 300 pages of that? Why would you do that to yourself?
My chuddiest relative, one that I’ve ranted about at length here before, holds Goodkind, Card and Heinlein all in very high regard… but Ready Player One is his very favorite book and he was shocked when I had such a strong negative opinion of it.
He has all the pretenses and attempted pomp and circumstance of a “smart” person, up to and including waving around big words and claiming to have “studied philosophy” and all that… but his favorite book ever is the one that says that being the epic bideo bame boy and knowing lots of Gen X white boy trivia made him the winningest winner.
Okay but Heinlein is kinda mid so that tracks lmao
At least your chud reads. My chuddiest chud relatives think reading is for dorks and I’m pretty sure one of them hasn’t picked up a book since high school (despite being almost 50).
My chud primarily got into reading because the Starship Troopers movie’s satire completely fucking missed him and he wanted to read the book where the epic space fascism came from.
He liked the book more.