Powered by fascination and bafflement, I have been following the coordinates of male flight. “Male flight” is a sociological term used to describe the phenomenon of men leaving an industry en masse as more women enter it, primarily caused by the destruction of misogynistic barriers that once excluded women. In some cases, men leave these industries because the female majority renders the work “worthless.”
I’m particularly interested in how male flight plays out in literature. How else would I have so much fun with the figurative language in this piece? Literature is increasingly framed as a worthless pastime, something to disparage while also expressing outrage at the domination of women in the field. What men often describe as danger of a female-majority industry is really the danger of being penalized for misogyny. These dynamics are tied to broader patriarchal structures that men inform: to weaken society’s intellect, enjoyment, and health at the expense of women. Of course, men are also in society so this affects them too. As men have allowed reading to lose cultural esteem, fewer men are encouraged to write. The prison they intended for women has trapped them too.
Readers
Society has been decrying women reading for centuries. Up until the mid 20th century, literature was seen as too trying for women’s minds. Their focus was meant to be on simpler things such as… motherhood? Which would be much easier if women had access to literature. In fact, it was the access to literature and education that gave women the insight to see that they are more than the boxes that the patriarchy pushes them in. Literature showed women they could want more from their world; in life and in love. It is no coincidence that romance, the genre that centres women and their pleasure, is the genre men decry the most. There is power in reading, attempts are made to try and strip that power from women. Whether it has sexual content or not, literature enjoyed by women is scorned as being ‘porn.’
It’s interesting how men see the danger in pornography only when women are deriving pleasure from it. It also highlights their wilful ignorance because romance literature doesn’t exploit men in even closely the same way as the pornography industry exploits women. Lack of consent, the violence around sex, the view of sex being something that is done to women rather than with women. While romance literature is not completely free from these views, the factor of harm is not the same. A survey last year found that more than ⅔ of women enjoy reading in Britain compared to just over ½ of men. When women gained power from literature, men distanced themselves from it and demonized it.
It’s not just romantic fiction that men disdain, it’s fiction in its entirety. Fiction’s basis on the imaginary is deemed as a waste of time and emotional (read: feminine). Men that do read are more likely to read non-fiction because fact is worth more to them than fiction.
But, in my opinion, time fostering the imagination is time well spent. That’s how we first learn to read and it’s no less valuable in our adulthood. Fiction teaches empathy, takes us to different places and times, and allows us to exist as another person. The characters and stories of my favourite novels may not be real but the way they have heightened my understanding of myself is. Everyone who loves Jane Austen wants to identify with Elizabeth Bennet, but it was a wonderful revelation to realize how much I identify with Emma Woodhouse. Gendering fiction and non-fiction is not the sign of a well-read adult; neither is the idea that empathy is a feminine trait and not a human trait.
Who is reading who also matters. Men are less likely to engage with books written by women, whereas women tend to read books by both men and women equally. The oppressed cannot help but engage in their oppressor’s art, but men have to be coerced into reading books by women. This means men actively choose to limit their worldview, reinforcing archaic ideas of authority and superiority over women. This is what having power looks like, and men once wielded it to bar women from reading and writing, and they wield it again now to deem it frivolous and pointless.
Authors
Men claim that reading non-fiction exclusively sharpens their logic, yet they fail to see the obvious result: a limited reading diet produces very few writers. Even so, it would be an injustice to say that is why women currently dominate modern. Authors like Ottessa Moshfegh, Rebecca F. Kuang, Sally Rooney, Bolu Babalola, Raven Leilani and many more women have a monopoly on bestsellers lists. These women have captured readers and critics because of their talent, craft, and no doubt buoyed by the abundant reading they do themselves.
I had the pleasure of meeting R.F. Kuang last August for a talk she did in Manchester and she signed my copy of Yellowface; a biting satire on the publishing industry. Sally Rooney’s Normal People has been stacked neatly on my bookshelf for 3 years but it was Intermezzo that finally got me into Rooney’s writing; free of quotation marks and full of sincerity. The increase of these narratives by women are a cause for celebration, and yet get polluted by the claims that this is somehow indicative of ‘reverse’ discrimination towards men in literature.
Women in literature on this scale is a relatively new phenomenon. Though the world’s first novel is credited to a woman, The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu, it has taken centuries to reach this majority. Centuries to break down the barriers put in place for women to be literate and educated. Writing, let alone being paid for it, did not fit into the confines of women that the patriarchy put on them. Women had to use male pseudonyms to publish their work (George Elliot) or worse, their writing was put into the world by their thieving husbands (Zelda Sayre). As feminist movements in the 60s and 70s grew in power and progress, so did women in literature. We’re very familiar with this story now; it was followed by the exodus of men in literature and devaluing of fiction.
Little to nothing was done when women were barred from writing due to misogyny, but the absence of men from literature due to their sexist bias is a huge emergency. Conduit Books, founded last year, is an independent publishing house that prioritizes fiction by men. The female majority in literature exists in spite of the historic barriers against literary women, not because men are suddenly neglected. What is revolutionary about attempting to replicate the centuries head start that men had in literature? This double standard immediately underlines that the panic about the lack of men is not about men at all, it’s about women being in the spotlight. A tantrum emboldened by a decided lack of reading. Good luck to Conduit Books.
Representation
This conversation is, unsurprisingly, incredibly white, straight and cisgendered. Positioning men as excluded from publishing because they’re men overlooks how intersectionality plays into this. Men of colour, LGBTQ+ men, disabled men, and others encounter tangible barriers due to bias, but they’re not the ones centred in this conversation. It’s not a compelling argument for the cause when the poster boy is the mediocre white man.
Men also argue that their place in literature is fading because can’t write about the ‘male experience’ anymore. But if that experience boils down to emotional repression and the routine enforcement of patriarchy onto women, it’s not exactly a loss worth mourning. However, depiction doesn’t equal endorsement, and tales about masculinity are often accused of endorsing the behaviour they’re criticizing. If these stories are being lost, it’s not because of women’s domination in literature, it is executives at publishing houses being unable to take a risk. We’ve seen this cowardice in film and television too; original art being sacrificed because too much focus is being placed on what a pre-existing audience may think and not the new people who would stand first in line to read these stories.
Depiction doesn’t equal condemnation either. As the saying goes, “when you’re accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” It’s reasonable for publishers to be more mindful of how misogyny appears in literature, though this tends to affect authors’ reputations more than the stories themselves. This is all in theory, male writers who profit off their misogyny are rarely punished. The idea that men are being systematically pushed out doesn’t hold up.
A more likely explanation is a decline in engagement. Men are opting out of reading through gradual disinterest, likely guided by their internalized—or for some, externalized—disdain for women, and unsurprisingly that doesn’t require a syllabus. Through flight, men have careened themselves into a world of scorn to one of humanity’s oldest art forms. A world devoid of light. I cannot imagine finding myself on that route, especially not on purpose. Women in literature, both authors and readers, will continue to rise. The panic about men’s absence in literature is a poorly disguised mission to crash women to earth. It’s an ambition as hollow as Icarus flying with his wings to the ground, the dust flying into his eyes, blinding him from a wider horizon.
