Balancing the books

Publishing's problem with men

Brace for a blunt statement:

The publishing industry and its surrounding media have spent years telling men to fuck off.

And now we have a problem.

Book people (like most people) are now very worried about men. Specifically, they are worried that men have been discouraged from engaging with literature. Men are reading less, they’re writing less and - if international politics is anything to go by - the result is that they’re thinking less.

Not everyone¹ is convinced that there is good statistical evidence to confirm these fears. But there are plenty of worrying signs about male engagement in the book world.

For instance, in an article on the Vanishing Male Writer by Jacob Savage published last month in Compact Magazine suggests:

“It’s easy enough to trace the decline of young white men in American letters—just browse The New York Times’s“Notable Fiction” list. In 2012 the Times included seven white American men under the age of 43 (the cut-off for a millennial today); in 2013 there were six, in 2014 there were six.

And then the doors shut.

By 2021, there was not one white male millennial on the “Notable Fiction” list.”

Savage mainly focusses on “white” men - but a few months before him, an English professor from the University of Nevada called David Morris also wrote an article in The New York Times lamenting the “disappearance” of all “literary men.” He too presented some worrying figures:

“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.”

That’s in the US. Over here in the UK you could also add in the fact that – as Tim Lott explains here – within the publishing industry, women make up 78 per cent of editorial, 83 per cent of marketing and 92 per cent of publicity roles.

Lott’s theory, in fact, is that this is why men aren’t reading:

“More girls than boys read fiction, and far more women than men (who overwhelmingly prefer non-fiction). One wonders why this is. Is there perhaps a ‘female’ slant to the books published?”

Jacob Savage’s article in Compact Mag also expresses a related worry about men feeling alienation when they walk into bookshops and don’t see enough books by blokes.

Really, I’m not sure about that. It doesn’t sound entirely implausible. But I still want to kick back. Because men can perfectly easily read books with a “‘female’ slant”. Chances are they will enjoy them and benefit from them. Many of those new books on display in the shops are superb. Some of them are even better than that. It’s not publishing’s fault if some men have gonads where they should have brains and somehow feel that reading Sally Rooney or Chimamanda Adichie is going to hurt them.

And if your imagination and empathy are so limited that you can only see yourself writing a book if you read one by someone exactly like your male self? Well, maybe you don’t have the skills to be a novelist. Or a human.

This should not worry you.

But that doesn’t mean there isn’t a problem. Doesn’t mean that it doesn’t matter.

David Morris puts it well:

“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.”

It certainly worries me.

There are all kinds of big scale educational, cultural and economic factors that explain why this trouble with men has arisen - as well as the kinds of things that Jacob Savage, David Morris and Tim Lott are worrying about. There is no one diagnosis and there is no one solution.

But! I do think that the issue of telling men to go away has not yet been fully addressed. I do think that fixing it might make a difference. And I do think that here at least, some of us can take responsibility.

Here come the caveats

Okay. I started off with a very blunt statement. I believe it’s true. But I do now have to surround it with clouds of caveats and caution.

For instance, I wouldn’t entirely blame you if you think that men should actually just fuck off. The last few thousand years of patriarchy haven’t been a resounding success, after all. Maybe it’s time we tried a different system?

Men have also stomped all over publishing since the days of guys like Johannes Gutenberg, William Caxton and Wynkyn de Worde.² So I’d also forgive you for thinking that it’s a bit much for book men to have spent the last millennium behaving outrageously towards women - and then to drag away their toys in a huff because finally a few small attempts have been made to address that ridiculous imbalance.

I have no doubt that there has been a pressing need for men to make room for the other 51% of the population, as Virago famously put it when they first set up in 1973. Their brilliant publications, alongside all the classic female novels they rescued from obscurity, more than made their case - and continue to do so.

There are other good reasons why publishers might sometimes insist on all female lists.

In fact, I want to stress that in writing this article, I don’t want to impugn the intentions of publishers, or of people in the book world. We’ve reached a point where the mood music has become unfortunate - but some of that has been caused by earnest attempts to hit the right note.

I’ve been partly responsible for such attempts myself.

For some time at Galley Beggar we were burdened by a disproportionate number of men sending us submissions. We worried that we were missing out on interesting writing from women who were getting subsumed under the sheer weight of other submissions - and had also possibly been somehow been discouraged from sending us material. So, we opened up a female only submission window.

We received some wonderful books that we might not otherwise have seen. We emboldened people who wouldn’t have sent us material otherwise (and I know because they told us so). It worked. It was a good thing. I don’t regret doing it. I would do it again.

But there are complications here. There are some aspects of this decision that do make me nervous. Our intention was to let everyone know that they were welcome to send us material. But I do know that closing off a specific demographic is a crude way of doing that.

And because similar things have been happening throughout the industry, for quite a few years, there has been a cumulative effect. It hasn’t all been good news - and we’re seeing some of the down sides now.

Pieces of work

What’s more, we seem to have reached a point where it doesn’t always feel like we’re trying to ensure there’s room for everyone. Sometimes it feels like we’re leaving some passengers waiting on the platform - and giving them the two fingered salute as the train pulls away.

One other thing about our Galley Beggar submissions window. Frankly, also, we wanted a break from a certain type of male submitter. We had a disproportionate number of men pissing us off. Hassling us. Demanding to know why we weren’t interested in their book. Demanding to know why we had published anyone else instead. Demanding answers to their multiple and increasingly rude emails and messages.

And when I say ‘disproportionate’ here, what I actually mean is that 100% of the people hassling us were men. No women did it.

Those guys were a pain - and in a notably masculine way. But now the important thing to note is that, in the greater scheme of things, there weren’t many of them. We’ve maybe encountered a dozen or so such pests in more than twelve years of publishing. Thousands of other men have also been in touch. And we’ve loved hearing from those guys.

I know: “not all men” - but still. It’s true. Most of the men who submitted to us have been polite and perfectly understanding when we said no. Many of them submitted very fine books. And it’s also been our honour to publish some wonderful male writers over the years.

The tl;dr here is that there are - and I hope that this doesn’t blow your mind - many different kinds of men out there.

Which brings me to my point: a large part of the publishing industry has started to give the impression that it lumps all men together. That it also scorns the good guys, just because they are, well, guys.

Over the years I’ve attended a lot of publishing talks with other editors, writers and industry luminaries, talking to aspiring authors about the path to publication. I’ve heard more than one person in a position of power sneer at the idea of taking in books from “stale pale males.” I’ve heard audiences laugh and approve of that ugly phrase. I’ve heard more than one agent say that they won’t even read books by men. Heard more than one writer rejoice to be putting them in the metaphorical bin.

I’m not sure I didn’t join in all that hilarity myself.

I do get that some of it was quite funny. Some of it maybe even felt constructive at the time.

But nowadays I have reservations about “punching up.” I worry that it might just be better if we tried not to hit anyone at all. I also know there are people we really do have to fight - and that wafting around at identitarian stereotypes is a distraction.

`Focus the fight onto this kind of goon.

There is something else to note about those publishing talks. More than one of the people who were so keen to pronounce on who should be heard expressed their disdain in public school accents. More than one was dressed in designer clothes. More than one wore the perfume of old money.

In his article Tim Lott also makes the point that “the industry remains overwhelmingly white and middle-class.” I’d even be tempted to go so far as to suggest it’s full of posh people. Most of them perfectly nice. But still. I’m Northern and went to a state school and, in publishing industry terms, that makes me an outsider. I don’t write that to score points. The truth is that I’ve been fortunate in all kinds of ways. I’m still pretty damn middle class. And I’m also in the building. My point is that if someone like me feels this kind of alienation: well then.

And if I was feeling that kind of class resentment while I was sitting there on the stage, how did everyone else feel? How must it feel to be a working class 21-year-old man with aspirations to enter the industry, if the first thing you are told is that you’re aren’t welcome? How would I have felt about becoming a writer if I had been repeatedly told that my voice was invalid? How would I feel as a reader?

Some men will always be fine. But (ahem) not all of them. Not everyone has inherited confidence and contacts. Some might even need encouragement.

“Ample, poignant breasts”

So far, so anecdotal. I’ve tried to convey some of the things I’ve felt as a result of working inside the book industry. I now want to open things out slightly³.

Plug “male writers” into your search engine of choice and you’ll quickly come across articles declaring “I don’t read books by straight, white men anymore”; “I personally don’t want to read books by men because I don’t trust them to do the female character justice”; “I don’t read books written by men… It is a little bit about not supporting white men.”⁴

That’s the hard edge. And maybe the extreme. But there have been plenty of other ways of dismissing male writers as a group.

There was, to give just one illustrative instance, a widespread discussion that started on Twitter about ten years ago relating to the apparent inability of male writers to talk about women without obsessing about their cleavage. Alison Flood wrote a very funny article about it, citing Paul Auster’s hilarious line about “ample, poignant breasts⁵” , alongside similar booby-breasting from George RR Martin and John Updike.

The always excellent Alison Flood was careful to say that this was a trait of “some” male authors. (Just as some female authors struggle to write about men.) But like so much else on the internet, this theme quickly became most stale and less subtle. The egregious guff about mammaries was conflated into all writing by all men.

“Male writers do really seem to struggle to write women,” said a later article in The Guardian. “It isn’t that these male authors are unable to empathise, it is that they haven’t bothered, or needed to… Women authors do not seem to have the same problem.”

And on it went.

For years.

I don’t want to endorse sentences about variously jiggling parts of young female characters who aren’t allowed to say very much. I don’t want to pretend there aren’t sometimes issues with the male gaze⁶.

But I do want to suggest that men don’t exclusively write lazy misogynistic tripe. I do want to suggest that if you dismiss them all as hapless pervs, they might start to feel unwelcome.

To look at it another way: Shakespeare also had a male gaze. Should we also stigmatise him? Should we dissuade readers from reading his poetry?

Of course not. And maybe, you’re thinking, I’m now guilty of a reductio ad absurdum?

Maybe?

Yes. I looked it up on Ecosia. And, inevitably, Shakespeare has been found to be similarly problematic. Of course he has! A pox on him and his “white, able-bodied, heterosexual, cisgender male narratives”.

But even without that specific kind of insanity, my worry, as I say, is more about mood music. The more general vibe that male writers and readers aren’t wanted. Spend any amount of time reading about books in old media and on social media and you will find more restrictions on the things that men shouldn’t be allowed to write - from female characters to male violence, up to and including novels themselves.

It doesn’t strike me as a recipe for encouraging men to do that wonderful thing that writers do - and to think empathetically.

Some hope

I’m getting towards the end of this piece but I haven’t got to the end of the caveats. Here are two more:

1. I know some of my thoughts are vague and indefinite. I’m talking about atmosphere and feeling. I worry that in my individual arguments I may have overstated the case. But I also worry that, overall, I haven’t conveyed the message strongly enough. The truth is that I was mainly driven to write this article out of a sense that has grown on me over a number of years. I suspect that plenty of other people will recognise that feeling - but I can’t really prove it. (It might just be me. In which case, I’m an idiot. Sorry. Sign up and tell me in the comments!)

2. I don’t want to do too much special pleading for men or claim victimhood. We don’t need special treatment. But I also don’t see the harm in trying to make everyone - everyone! - feel welcome in the big tent of literature. Or the harm in trying to suggest to men that there are other and better ways of expressing yourself than threatening to march armies into Greenland.

One other thing. Now I’ve written this article, I suspect about 2 billion books by brilliant new authors will come along to prove me wrong. A certain type of writer has become unfashionable. But going out of style is often helpful to artistic creation. Even now, there will be writers beavering away in the darkness, and readers eager to receive their work. Good things will happen. Especially if we manage to change the tune enough to actually encourage men and boys to write and read.

1. Constance Grady raises some interesting questions about our doomsaying in this article on Vox.

2. Yes, I included De Worde because this bit of nominative determinism delights me every time.

3. Not too far. As I’ve already mentioned, there’s a huge ongoing debate about “toxic” masculinity, identity politics, and the education of young boys. All that is obviously relevant to this article - but I don’t have the space or the knowledge to add anything particularly useful. Except in so far as publishing not only reflects back the wider world, but also influences and changes it.

4. Another caveat! While people on the internet are quite likely to boast about not reading men, other statistics suggest that it’s actually often men who are unwilling to read women. This isn’t a good thing either.

5. Don’t let this put you off Paul Auster. Plenty of his writing is wonderful.

6. As an aside, have you read the originating article about the concept of the “male gaze”? It was in an essay by Laura Mulvey written in the 1970s, mainly about cinema. It contained some brilliant and persuasive analysis. The phrase clearly stuck because it’s so resonant. And there’s no point denying that some men objectify women on the screen and in literature. But! That essay is also plenty weird. Sample quote: “But in psychoanalytic terms, the female figure poses a deeper problem. She also connotes something that the look continually circles around but disavows: her lack of penis, implying a threat of castration and hence unpleasure. Ultimately, the meaning of woman is sexual difference, the absence of the penis as visually ascertainable, the maternal evidence on which is based the castration complex essential for the organisation of entrance to the symbolic order and the law of the father. Thus the woman as icon, displayed for the gaze and enJoyment of men, the active controllers of the look, always threatens to evoke the anxiety it originally signified. Woah! Fill your boots here.