Women will Save Reading:
So novelist Ian McEwan and his son decided to throw a bunch of books on a cart and peddle it through London giving away books. For free. In five minutes, he managed to give away 30 novels, nearly all to women. The men who approached his cart did so with suspicion. Only one bit and took a book. Mr. McEwan concluded in this article that “when women stop reading, the novel will be dead.”
Okay, I can think of a few possible reasons for this disparity.
1) Are men naturally more suspicious of strangers giving stuff away than women?
2) Do men not like to carry stuff around with them when rushing from one place to the next?
3) Is Ian McEwan a scary looking fellow?
4) Are men simply not interested in books?
I’m only going to address #4 by saying, dudes, wtf? I’ve been hearing in more than a few places that men don’t read. Organizations like Guys Read are in place to combat this problem in childhood and throw out the following reasons why the problem exists:
•Biologically, boys are slower to develop than girls and often struggle with reading and writing skills early on.
•The action-oriented, competitive learning style of many boys works against them learning to read and write
•Many books boys are asked to read don’t appeal to them. They aren’t motivated to want to read.
•As a society, we teach boys to suppress feelings. Boys aren’t practiced and often don’t feel comfortable exploring the emotions and feelings found in fiction.
•Boys don’t have enough positive male role models for literacy. Because the majority of adults involved in kids’ reading are women, boys might not see reading as a masculine activity.
I can see how a few of these play out. A lot of men I talk to don’t read fiction because they equate reading with learning and they don’t “learn anything” by reading fiction. They don’t apply the same standard to television, movies or music which strikes me as a big PR problem for books. Second, reading, being an intimate, vulnerable activity, the human tendacny seems to be to read what confirms rather than challenges one’s sense of identity. Which may explain, in only the most general way, why reading is a much more gendered activity than say, music listening. Few women I know read military fiction. Many women I know listen to Snoop Dogg and his “bitches and hoes” flow.
Third, men seem to assoicate reading with work, with labor instead of a relaxation activity. Which I simply don’t get.
What are your thoughts (via Arts Journal)?
Reader interactions
4 Replies to “Women will Save Reading:”
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You posed the question, “Is Ian McEwan a scary looking fellow?” Really, the fact that he’s a man at all is probably some reason for the disparity. Send a woman around with a cart of free anything, and I would anticipate that she’d be approached my more than a few men. I’m not talking supermodels giving out free samples. I would guess even an average looking woman would be deemed more approachable by men in general. Just my two cents.
You posed the question, “Is Ian McEwan a scary looking fellow?” Really, the fact that he’s a man at all is probably some reason for the disparity. Send a woman around with a cart of free anything, and I would anticipate that she’d be approached my more than a few men. I’m not talking supermodels giving out free samples. I would guess even an average looking woman would be deemed more approachable by men in general. Just my two cents.
Great post. While it’s not the most scientific of experiments (shouldn’t he have sent out Zadie Smith with a book pile to see the corresponding results?), it does point, I think, to one of your posits re: boys’n’books — fiction is often the realm of exploring, examining, analyzing and re-experiencing emotions… which seems to be a much more “feminine” interest and pursuit. As opposed to problem-solving (the traditionally masculine approach), which may account for men’s higher comfort zone with how-to, political, historical etc. non-fiction fare (i.e. in male-oriented genre fiction, one of the draws for Clancy and his ilk is the amount of “technical” detail, which can con the male reader into thinking “I’m learning something about [guns, nuclear policy, economy], so I guess I can put up with these pesky emotional bits”…
Great post. While it’s not the most scientific of experiments (shouldn’t he have sent out Zadie Smith with a book pile to see the corresponding results?), it does point, I think, to one of your posits re: boys’n’books — fiction is often the realm of exploring, examining, analyzing and re-experiencing emotions… which seems to be a much more “feminine” interest and pursuit. As opposed to problem-solving (the traditionally masculine approach), which may account for men’s higher comfort zone with how-to, political, historical etc. non-fiction fare (i.e. in male-oriented genre fiction, one of the draws for Clancy and his ilk is the amount of “technical” detail, which can con the male reader into thinking “I’m learning something about [guns, nuclear policy, economy], so I guess I can put up with these pesky emotional bits”…