Do we really want more male vulnerability in fiction?

If we actually do, then we'll have to accept those voices on their terms.

Photo by Anna Hecker on Unsplash

Last week, journalist Katie Tobin published a piece in Esquire called “Where is all the sad boy literature,” which I read with great interest. Although I don’t really know what the hell “sad boy” literature is, and didn’t really get a better sense of that after reading the piece, I was very happy to see it published. 

Sure, it was kind of late, and didn’t go into the same depth as, say, this excellent Katie Roiphe piece from 2009, or this more recent piece from novelist and journalist

Ross Barkan

. But late is better than never. 

The main thrust of the piece is that while there are a number of young, celebrated female novelists writing compelling works about the interiority of the modern woman, that same sort of writing from the male perspective is either nonexistent or “wildly overlooked” in the current publishing landscape. Tobin goes even further to suggest that young male writers are most noticeably “glaringly absent from the contemporary canon of popular authors writing about sex and intimacy.” 

While we’ve had a lot of excellent literature from the perspective of queer men on this topic in recent years, there has been a stark lack of it from the perspective of straight men, which, Tobin suggests—and rightly so—is a problem: “The epidemic of male suicide speaks volumes of a culture that frames masculinity as unyielding and immune to vulnerability. Fiction can offer a useful lens into that headspace, as an avenue by which we understand the lived experiences of others.” Tobin also quotes an editor of a publishing house—Maloku, of Daunt Books—who insists there is in fact an “appetite” for these types of interior stories from younger, straight male writers, but “the question now is about finding those voices.”

While I’m happy the piece exists, I did read it and find that there was a glaringly obvious reason why we’re seeing less vulnerable, interior stories from the perspectives of straight men today, and particularly stories that delve into sexual and intimate relationships with women. 

As a straight male bookworm—which is a breed of person that I find is rarer and rarer to encounter in the wild these days—it makes sense to me why men like myself have tuned out literature and turned toward podcasts and self-improvement books, as Tobin notes. 

To me, it has less to do with men not having an interest in exploring themselves and their fellow man, or their relationships with women, on the page, but rather, men feeling like that exploration isn’t worth it because the result will often be ignored, panned, or rejected.

When it comes to male writer friends who share a lot of the same characteristics as me—male, straight, of color for the most part, and hailing from middle class or lower class backgrounds—I often hear that a big reason why they don’t try and get out into the world the sort of work Tobin is calling for is because they’re afraid, or in many cases I’m aware of, told straight up by agents and editors that the vulnerable, interior voices the Esquire piece suggests people are looking for actually sounds too grating on the ears. 

You see the thing is, that vulnerability, that rawness that people seemingly want, may very well sound too rough, cringy, uncultured, un-PC, un-woke, or whatever the hell you would like to call it. Those stories might include characters, for example, who use words like bitch to refer to women, or characters who think often about women’s bodies and sexualize them in their minds or in real life, or characters who are violent and mean, and cruel, as men can often be. They may include characters who use the wrong words of the day, and perhaps are oblivious to the new sets of words in the first place, or hostile to the idea of some random body of disconnected people having the power to determine a set of acceptable words and hold everyone accountable to them. 

In simple terms: The characters and the writing, particularly when it comes from the perspective of working class men, won’t always sound like what white, upper class women (the women who make up the large majority of editors, agents, and readers) will expect, or more importantly, want, men to sound like. 

And so, my question is, what are we going to do about that? 

It was interesting—and funny—to see the Esquire piece reference Charles Bukowski. That shit made me chuckle. Where are the modern Bukowski’s? Well, I remember a time, perhaps a year or so ago, when even admitting online that you admire Bukowski’s work or, say, Jack Kerouac, was akin to saying something offensive. “Eww, you like that misogynist?” People looked at you differently. They blocked you. I’ve seen the same reaction, incidentally, for bringing up the name or work of a more modern writer like Junot Diaz, who is the last writer that I’ve read that truly excels at excavating and laying bare all the ugliness of a certain kind of raw manhood on the page. (Thankfully, things are changing on this latter front.)

In the face of these sorts of reactions, and this sort of rejection from the literary world, it’s no wonder then that male writers will either change up and veer far away from touching interiority, intimacy, and masculinity by writing female characters or futuristic characters, or characters who have no sex, or just give up pursuing the idea of being a literary novelist in the first place. 

The truth is, it’s kind of an uphill battle to get that raw voice on the page. 

Part of the reason I’m so proud of my debut, Victim, is that aside from the satire about diversity and identity and where the culture is at today, I was able to depict an authentic picture of the transition from boyhood to manhood from the perspective of young strivers of color from the bottom who don’t always speak or act in “acceptable” ways. 

It felt radical to me to see that on the page in 2024, and it’s part of why I spent time in the novel detailing Javier’s friendship with Gio, the ways in which they’re taught by their communities and lack of father figures to view and think about women, and how it’s hard for them to just shake that shit off as they age and try to grow—in the way that some people just imagine guys should be able to do overnight, or otherwise suffer the consequences. 

The point wasn’t to glamorize their flaws and shortcomings. The idea is to show it on the page, warts and all, for the sake of compelling fiction, but also, to create the space for people to learn, to accept, to understand, and to empathize.

It means the world to me, for example, when other men and women–and mostly, it’s the women–pick up on those themes in my book and call them out as important, as helping them to understand the men in their life, or, in the case of men, better understand themselves a bit more. That is what the literature of the great male writers in the past—many of whom have been looked down upon until recently—did for me coming up, too. 

But while I’m happy my little contribution is out there in the world, and I think the fact that it made it out there says something about how the winds are changing, I also hear pretty damn frequently from straight male writers, and particularly those of color or from a poorer upbringing, trying to land an agent or a publishing deal who face rejection for writing their own versions. Often, too, that rejection is explicitly related to their male characters and the way in which they speak, or how “unrelatable” they are, particularly when it comes to relationships and dealings with women. 

So it makes me wonder: Is there really an appetite out there for this work? Or is there simply an appetite for male voices that look and sound acceptable enough? 

True vulnerability is off-putting. Sometimes it’s crass, politically incorrect, dark, and confusing. It’s been interesting, for example, to finally dip my toes into Sally Rooney’s oeuvre and discover that her wonderful writing has a lot of this, particularly in her scenes related to sex, relationships, breakups, and fetishes, which is the vast majority of her books, according to what I’ve read thus far. Rooney is so widely celebrated, and yet, I can’t help but wonder whether that acclaim and response would be the same if she were a male writer writing intimately about these things, and attempting to be as honest. 

Perhaps I’m wrong and that book just hasn’t been written yet or celebrated yet. I truly hope that’s the case. But I suspect a big reason why the work Tobin is calling for doesn’t exist as much as we’d like it to is because many in the literary fiction world are asking that men, and particularly straight men, become more vulnerable, but also, at the same time, express that vulnerability in a palatable way. 

They’re asking that we adhere to goal posts and rules that are constantly shifting beneath our feet, which is quite a dance to tell someone to pull off while also asking them to bleed their heart out, too. 

It’s no surprise, then, that some dudes feel it’s easier to check out entirely, and take their energy elsewhere. 

Peace, 

Andrew