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A lot of people who criticize women for reading Fifty Shades of Grey or Twilight or whatever don't even realize that men would be responsible for just as many silly or mockable bestsellers if men were reading as much fiction as women are.
If you look at what was being published decades ago, pulp fiction was very gender-coded. There were, and are, romances for women; for men, there were a ton of western novels and adventure novels and Mack Bolan and whatnot. That genre is much smaller than it used to be because guys stopped reading them. The audience got older and the new generation that would've replaced them just started playing video games and reading blogs and articles on the internet.
A NY Times article from way back in 1997 says,
And I think that's not outdated -- I think it's the beginning of a change that has continued up until the present.
This is just meant as observation, not as criticism. People should do whatever makes them happy with their leisure time. If a person is kind of marginal in terms of how strong they are as a reader, then pleasure reading -- no matter how "unsophisticated"! -- is certainly a useful thing. I like reading fiction and I do have a financial interest in other people liking it too but I'm not one of those people who'll yell about The Decline Of Civilization, especially when I know lots of people who don't read much fiction because of time and attention issues.
But I do think it's odd when people talk about these books driven by women readers as a huge problem with literary culture, while not talking about the men who aren't reading fiction at all.
If you look at what was being published decades ago, pulp fiction was very gender-coded. There were, and are, romances for women; for men, there were a ton of western novels and adventure novels and Mack Bolan and whatnot. That genre is much smaller than it used to be because guys stopped reading them. The audience got older and the new generation that would've replaced them just started playing video games and reading blogs and articles on the internet.
A NY Times article from way back in 1997 says,
''The techno-thriller has become a kind of emoto-thriller, if you will,'' Mr. Kirshbaum said. ''What we used to call the boy books don't work nearly as well as they once did, except for a brief spurt at Father's Day.''
And I think that's not outdated -- I think it's the beginning of a change that has continued up until the present.
This is just meant as observation, not as criticism. People should do whatever makes them happy with their leisure time. If a person is kind of marginal in terms of how strong they are as a reader, then pleasure reading -- no matter how "unsophisticated"! -- is certainly a useful thing. I like reading fiction and I do have a financial interest in other people liking it too but I'm not one of those people who'll yell about The Decline Of Civilization, especially when I know lots of people who don't read much fiction because of time and attention issues.
But I do think it's odd when people talk about these books driven by women readers as a huge problem with literary culture, while not talking about the men who aren't reading fiction at all.