We can discuss this more over beers, but I agree with you totally and I think there is undeniably a bias against novels by straight men in publishing. Everyone will deny this, and point to the men who published big novels in… 2008. Alex Perez was publicly shamed for expressing similar ideas. And book influencer loves to brag about “reading books by women” as a form of activism but folks, MOST novels are by women! It triggers my inner rebel who wants to start bragging about how many novels I read by men.
Yes, I'm planning on writing a bit about that piece by DFW in the future! It's funny how DFW came to be regarded by some as the Updike figure he hated.
Powerful article; everything you mentioned in the article is why I had to just not give a #%;$ what I felt someone would think the first time I stood at an Open Mic or started digging and writing the poetry I write. After a 12 year career in EMS and too many suicides of family and friends and coworkers; I had to spill the vulnerability. But I certainly don’t fit that model poet/writer like you note in your article. I would probably get similar rejections if I attempted a novel with the roughness that has been experienced.
Hello Leigh, I love your comments thank you for sticking up for us straight male writers. I have the added scarlet letter of being middle aged and released my 1st novel in April. It’s about the go-to sports psychologist, but he’s got a gambling addiction that gets him in trouble with a gangster and he’s blackmailed to revealing his patients state of mind. One of my female readers commented, “It was a great view into the male psyche.” I didn’t think of that when I was writing. But the reader is very much in my protagonist’s head since the only POV is my protagonist’s (third-person close). So we see what he sees feels what he feels. I also wrote a set of short stories on love from the man’s point of view and men who love their wives. There is very little on how we as men perceive and experience love. TV bifurcates us as lovable buffoons or cheating jerks. What about the honorable, intelligent, and loving man who has boundaries and integrity and does what is right for his family? Let’s see more of those men in literature and media, please.
“Hegemony - preponderant influence or authority over others : DOMINATION”
Yes, EMS does give this sense in some aspects. Specifically, psychiatric calls. Always felt like the wrong way. Especially knowing how these protocols impacted Matt Samet; Former Editor of Climbing Magazine. Always felt that EMS was the wrong healthcare branch to manage psychiatric patients in crisis. There’s still no alternative that I’m aware of? In a prehospital emergency environment. Though I believe there’s attempts at changes.
I wasn't saying that EMSI is a hegemony, I was observing that one of the reasons we're in the state we're in vis a vis male vulnerability in fiction is the hegemony of white, college-educated, progressive women over the publishing industry.
Yes. And, as someone with absolutely no experience in your field, I think that hegemony might not be a bad thing. In medicine there's probably something to the idea of having consistent standards and ways of doing things. Would you rather have medical schools and state medical boards exert hegemonic power, or empower every individual doctor to come up with their own individual diagnoses and treatment methods?
In the same way that most of us would rather live in a society where, say, road safety laws and police and highway patrols have the power to control the way we drive rather than leaving it up to each driver to chose whether to drive on the right or left or whether to stop or go at a red light.
In the context of publishing, however, the problem is people using that control to exclude or marginalize certain perspectives.
Doctors do actually get that ability once they conclude their schooling. But your note does apply to the specific field I was involved with. Some doctors become Medical Directors for any number of Emergency Medical Services that is applied in the prehospital setting. From the Urban aspect to wilderness rescue medicine and wildland fire applications.
Recently before switching to working Costco I was working Waste Connections for a year; realized they had no tourniquet to stop a bleed.
I looked up the tourniquet protocol for Clark County and refreshed my mind on the county I worked which was Clackamas County which typically follows Multnomah County. The takeaway was Clark County protocol doesn’t allow a medical provider to remove a tourniquet even if it’s an inadequate belt applied prior to crew arrival. While Multnomah and Clackamas Protocol allows the inadequate tourniquet to be removed and apply a proper one along with adding an additional one 2-3 inches above the previously applied tourniquet if bleeding was not successfully controlled.
The reason I looked; EMS Staffing and response times are down here in the PNW stateside for a number of reasons. Being able to stop a bleed as a bystander is more important than reversing an overdose yet more bystanders have narcan now than a tourniquet.
I’m sure this comment will be decried for displaying the same female attitude as that being caricatured in the piece itself, but the argument here seems to be that if we want male vulnerability, we have to accept male misogyny. Men would rather be silent (and comfort themselves with the cape of silenced victimhood) than change. Many readers may well find misogyny unpalatable (though there is also a growing and increasingly mainstream market for misogyny, if not yet in literary fiction), and to cast that as some kind of snobbery or prudishness is wilfully reductive. It should be unremarkable that hatred and dehumanisation are unpalatable. Has the writer tried to put himself in the shoes of the women who make up the vast majority of editors, agents and readers, and imagine how it would feel to trawl through pages of that kind of hatred? Would he expect members of any other group to do so without turning a hair?
It’s too easy to cast anything that might be labelled “woke” as shallow and insincere. There are good reasons many readers have turned away from certain kinds of voices. It’s not just peevishness. It may hurt some writers’ feelings/ they may experience it as rejection, but sometimes rejection is a good opportunity for self-reflection.
For what it’s worth, I run a writing group (mainly amateur) with a roughly fifty-fifty gender balance. About half the men who submit do submit sci-fi, but about half submit what would probably count as sadboy. Elements of both have been misogynistic (and when that’s been the case, it’s been critiqued as frankly bad writing: flat, stereotypical characterisation, motivations that lack credibility, gratuitousness), but far from all of it has been. If the writer does think that if we want male vulnerability, we have to accept male misogyny, he’s telling on himself. Not all men hate women. But perhaps many of those railing against their rejection by the female dominated publishing industry do.
Thanks a lot for your comment, Elsie, for real. I think you bring up some very valid points here and by no means am I advocating for more misogyny on the page. Writers that I admire, like Junot Diaz, do not in fact glamorize that. I come away from his books thinking these are sad, lonely men looking for validation, and looking in the wrong places. Not, man, this guy is so cool, I want to live his life. It’s that excavation that I’m personally interested in.
I also am not suggesting that all women read the same way or have the same tastes. In fact, I have heard from many women, both those inside of and outside of the publishing industry (just fans of reading literature) who agree that they haven’t either read what they feel is a real exploration into the male psyche, or have witnessed it be passed over by editors in publishing houses because it’s not right for the moment and lament that.
I’m not looking for writing that is misogynistic for the sake of being so. But what I am saying is that a lot of the complicated, nuanced feelings men have around sex and relationships doesn’t always come out in a socially acceptable way. If this sort of writing were gaining a wider acceptance and being worked on by editors and agents, and even injected with some needed female perspective to add nuance and depth, that is one thing. But right now I have heard that it is simply overlooked and passed over. And then, at the same token, you read a wonderful, celebrated (and rightly so, because I loved it) book like All Fours and seeing all kinds of exploration into desire and sex that is acceptable because it is in a form that is more pleasing on the ears. It just feels, as a guy, that our version can’t even clear the bar of entry if it doesn’t look right is my point.
I get what you mean, but I don’t think people here are asking for explicitly misogynistic literature, it’s a debate over whether depiction equals endorsement. Fight Club always comes up in this- the book is a satire featuring violence and misogyny while also being relatable to disaffected men and for me personally helped me reflect on my grosser instincts and teenage angst. Just because it’s relatable and some might misinterpret it does that mean the book is condoning the actions within it? In the current publishing environment, for many the answer is yes.
You also mention “There are good reasons many readers have turned away from certain kinds of voices.” Well that is fair but it also might be why men are reading less every year, since they aren’t really being marketed too by the publishing industry anymore. Saying things like “Men would rather be silent than change” is not how men experience the situation, and it’s a good example of the type of perspective that fundamentally won’t appeal to men even if you believe it is correct.
I think it’s less about accepting misogyny (which no one should really do) than about men being bombarded by claims of misogyny for sharing their feelings, which may or may not be respectful toward women but might be perceived as misogynistic or labeled in order to silence unpopular views. If we’re not willing to listen to people’s views, even if they’re not cultured, then we have no right to demand vulnerability from them, any more than they have a right to expect us to accept true misogyny.
"...the women who make up the vast majority of editors, agents and readers..." I think you've hit upon part of the problem, perhaps unintentionally. Consider also that when we talk about any population other than straight men in any other field, we acknowledge that having gatekeeper roles (editors, agents) filled disproportionately by one group obviously leads to "other" groups (ie.g. straight men) being "underrepresented" (for lack of a better word) among readers of literary fiction. One example of the double standard: The Times recently expressed their disappointment with the publishing industry for not living up to its pledge to diversify. Just over 70% of the industry is white, which also roughly mirrors the U.S. population. So the industry is not overly white compared to the broader population, yet it is still "too white" for the Times' liking. And yet they don't seem to care at all about the underrepresentation of straight men in the industry. Straight white men still wield disproportional power in most realms, so I can see why there's no rush to balance the scales here, but if we claim to care about the future of the industry and or reading, then I think it matters.
I think a big part of the homogenization of literary culture, and the relatively absence of this kind of straight boy lit, is that the MFA writers has monopolized the small and independent press world. That MFA aesthetic rules from top to bottom. When I started out long ago, the little magazines were not filled with MFA writers. There were many writers with day jobs. There were a lot of Bukowski-influenced writers (men and women). But I don't recall the last time I saw a truly rowdy piece of fiction or poetry in a literary magazine.
I think the issue is that too often we think of diversity only in terms of race/ethnicity, whereas thinking in terms of class is also just as important.
It exists elsewhere. New York is no longer the cultural center that it once was. Higher education is the enemy of creativity. There is so much good stuff, but it is being written in other languages and being shared in other places.
In many ways it is like movies and video games. Over the last 10-15 years movies have become quite terrible, but video games have really shined. The old model of video games playing off of movies has reversed, and for good reason, as there is far more creativity in video games.
One area, in English, where creativity still exists is in fantasy and science fiction. Game of Thrones and Wheel of Time have become popular because of their television equivalents, but there are so many great books in that area. The terrible "woke" version of the Three Body Problem is a perfect example of existing media making a racist re-write of a great book and turning into shit, then crying homophobia when people are upset at how they white-washed and ruined a beautiful story.
The existing publishing and media elite are more racist than they have ever been, but they imagine themselves to be angels in the form of aging white ladies. Nothing embarrasses me more than racist white "activists" who descend on the world telling everyone else how to live and what is "right." They are sick.
The best thing to do is ignore them, and try to boycott anything they touch. Rich white ladies are plague on the world, whether they have MFA's or MBA's. The world would be a better place without them, but anything we build, they come running, demanding that they receive their "fair share" of structures they either despise or do not understand. The only thing we can do is keep innovating so we keep ahead of their corrupting influence.
What are you talking about video games today are garbage like garbage d i if you're thinking games that were once good maybe games from 2010 since 1990 that was the Golden age of gaming now we're in the dark age where you have to deal with companies preaching at you and microtransactions of the ass
You are not wrong, although I would extend that end point out at least another half decade. Metro 2033, Crysis 3, Bioshock Infinite, they all are good stuff. I am not sure when They are Billions came out, but I enjoyed it. I liked Watch Dogs and Watch Dogs 2 as well. Then again, even Diable 4 had a lot going for it, but I would agree that we have past the glory years of StarCraft 2, Portal, and the general excitement of the next title, and building a rig good enough to play it. Although, the males-only, exclusionary culture of that era of gaming was not cool. My wife always had to pretend she was male to avoid senseless harassment.
And I would gold star the last four words of your comment. It would be a gift to humanity to go back in time and kill the individual who invented microtransactions.
I think a lot of the stuff about no game results rated but I will say this I think a lot of the woke stuff we see in games today was just a cover to protect them from criticism these game companies because they make game and abuse their employees like Activision anytime a sex scandal came out of activation of a few or workers being mistreated they made a new character gay really makes you think or they push wellness in the US but remove it from China in the Middle East take the skate Spider-Man missions from the recent Spider-Man 2 I think they do this not because they care about weakness they do it to shield themselves from criticism about how abusive their workplaces are for workers and some of the lead sexual harassment in there I think this won't stop is just a cover for them to protect their own asses
I’m not an expert, but it feels like classic overcorrection in an industry that long prioritized straight male narratives. I think correction was necessary, but sustained OVERcorrection may develop biases that are justified by how things used to be.
The problem is that, as the pro-diversity crowd points out, straight male viewpoints were considered "the default" in literature (and media).
As we all know by now, this was a privilege in the sense that writing from a female or minority perspective inherently defined one's writing by those terms. The straight man had the "privilege" of enjoying stories on their own terms with protagonists whose straightness, maleness, whiteness, whatever, weren't the focus of the character.
But the hidden flip side of that is: straight boys never actually got to see these "representative" stories as actually *representative* of themselves. How could they? Their perspective was the default, and by being the default, it was never presented as special the way female or minority voices were. Of all the literature we decry for being too straight and too male, how much of it was actually written in the service of making straight male readers seen and validated for their straightness and maleness?
Just because a story has a straight male protagonist and it lacks menstruation doesn't mean it was written for straight men. And as straight men are finding out, it's a fantastic double bind when people tell you that representation matters, but that you were overrepresented in the industry by a straight male perspective that you never really recognized as being particularly, unapologetically, affirmingly straight or male in any way.
And as Andrew points out, there are myriad structural barriers in the modern publishing industry to get an unapologetically affirming straight male work these days. (Just as, of course, there were such barriers for non-straight, non-male, non-white works in the past.)
Not that that stops some of the male writers I've seen on Substack, though.
I'm 68. I used to read 200 books per year. I can pinpoint my aversion to SWM authors. Lee Child's first Jack Reacher book. VP's Secret Service details led by a woman - Yay! Rare all those years ago. In first few pages, woman is confronted in advance of a threat to VP. Does she take charge, gather all possible intel, work aggressively to protect VP? Nope. Her nerves get jangled, she panics, calls Jack Reacher. I threw book in trash, wrote author an email, and couldn't get my anger over such BLATANT SEXISM to subside. That's when I learned what the words "toxic masculinity" meant.
Do I now absolutely disregard books by WM authors? ABSOLUTELY. Exceptions are made - Erik Larsen is one.
That sounds tight from my prospective. I'm WF, 68, read 200 books a year. I actively avoid reading about books by WM. Soooo over SWM trying to set the rules for the rest of us. I've been stunned by the delightful talent, entire new worlds of reading excellence by authors, men & women of color. Year after year, I discover books that shake up my brain (in the best way), take me to far away places, who take big chances with spectacular new ideas, & a variety of cultures. The lack of misogyny, cruelty to others, lack of violence, is Soooo REFRESHING!!!
The industry has been taken over by white ladies and reflects their preferences. They are miming the men who built these institutions, but the interesting work has moved on to greener pastures.
Men not apologizing for being men, white people not apologizing for being white, relatively privileged westerners not apologizing for being westerners- three demographics who are strongly disliked by the literary establishment at this time. (And the entire progressive establishment but that's another story).
You can't argue, beg or try and coerce the establishment out of these biases. You can only work diligently with your head down and try and ignore the despicable trends and not let it affect your writing. There is no doubt that it will come around because most people are sick of the paradigm that divides people into victim or victimizer and almost solely based on some demographic they fall into. Not only are the complexities of real life ignored, this worldview is ignorant, shallow, self-serving and really really boring.
I'm bored of the black and white "hero vs. villains" approach dominant in most media today. If we want more true depictions into healthy masculine experience, we need to evolve together. The only way to do that is to create it one honest story at a time.
I was once read an agent's literary wishlist and it said something like, "I have no interest in stories about sraight, white men achieving self-actualization."
I appreciate that this is slightly different than the point you're making, but they're part and parcel. On the one hand, it is absolutely important to have diversity and equality in the authors/voices/stories/characters in our literature. And to do that, the male voice (especially straight, white) needed to quiet down for a minute.
However, is like to think that a better metaphor is not just "redirecting the spotlight," but more of a "zooming out," so as to include all voices, for which I think there is indeed enough space.
Also, and yes I'm biased, I'd like to think there are young authors who are able to write with vulnerability and honesty, who can do so without relying on their hegemonic standing to do so, and who can write stories that don't marginalize, romanticize, or punch down.
At the very least, this is what I'm trying to do in my fiction.
For what it’s worth, while querying my novel, I’ve gotten a fair amount of the “stories centered on straight men just aren’t playing right now” as both rejections and warnings, which I understand and feels discouraging, but nothing warranting a woe-is-me. It’s still a story I feel personally connected to and could only have been written by me, so it’s worth the work to continue trying to publish it.
I really enjoyed reading this. Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is how many intersectional feminist discourses (not all, but many) went down a dead end in the 2010s by vilifying all forms of masculinity and masculine expression as intrinsically oppressive. The result, I think, has been an inability for many feminist spaces to understand trans masculinity (if you depict men as the ENEMY, what does it mean when someone who you previously saw as a woman, one of the GOOD ONES, decides to defect to the WRONG SIDE?)…and a denial of the experiences of men of color, which you touch on here.
This is really a shot in the dark here (I'm just a garden-variety cis woman, lol) but I think that for men of color to come to a useful and positive relationship with their identity, they need to embrace their racialized AND their gendered experiences. Quite a few men of color end up racially emasculated or racially othered as predators…and that is such a painful, psychologically intense experience that fiction has the capacity to depict and explore in a moving way! It is tragic to not have those fictional explorations, and I can't help but feel that it limits our cultural capacity to navigate these questions.
The first man who can write a book about men (of any color) being othered as a predator that manages to penetrate mainstream sympathy will be doing both men and women an immense service.
I've mentioned before my forthcoming novel was flat-out rejected by one editor (and perhaps tacitly by others) because they said they haven't had "success" with overtly masculine narratives.
I'm very interested to see how my book is received by the marketplace. My dream is for it to be extremely polarizing. I'll take big feelings over no feelings any day!
> The epidemic of male suicide speaks volumes of a culture that frames masculinity as unyielding and immune to vulnerability.
Or perhaps many men, whose stoicism in the face of suffering has now been re-branded as “toxic” and “closed-off” and used as a bludgeon to beat them when they refuse to react to adversity with hysteria, see suicide as the only option left to them to exit their no-win situation with their dignity intact.
Yeah I do like your point about these articles, that when they talk about representation there's a narrow confine on acceptable representation. To avoid drawing from ones own lived experience has become almost instinctual.
Relatedly I think that the disdain for the unremarkable or so-called mainstream has really warped writing. It's hard for writers to work within the confines of mainstream society without telling against it.
I’ve often come to the conclusion that the request for male vulnerability isn’t a genuine one, but a request for a version of vulnerability that shows that the man has resolved and healed from
whatever he suffered from, and shows contrition for his formerly problematic nature.
To show genuine emotional vulnerability and the inherent messiness that comes with it, often gets a man labelled as a threat, red flag or a problem - and ostracized for it.
Expressing anger or frustration gets reframed as hatred - and then the usual labels come out.
This was an interesting read. Thanks for bringing attention to this gap in modern publishing patterns. Hopefully in ten years we’ll have found a better balance.
"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?"
Late to this conversation, but after a recent trip to Montana (where I was born and raised), I think the answer is yes. But whether that "yes" comes from a book-buying or literary fiction-reading community is another question. That is, I am aware--in places like Montana where a conventional masculinity is welcomed--that there are many women who are curious about men's interior lives and who like men for being themselves. Some of these are working-class women, not all of them are college graduates, and not all of them are readers. But one wonders if the problem is less the lack of interest among a book-buying public and more the self-fulfilling prophecy that literary gatekeepers enable. There is no such bias in film or TV dramas, for instance, which are not struggling to find viewers.
I remember the sick feeling I often got while querying, when I'd sometimes pull up a literary agency and see 5, 10, 20 agents who were all bourgie white women, ages 30-50. Presumably they were thought to be reliable stand-ins for the majority of book buyers, but I wondered which came first, the majority of women buying books or the agencies devoted to amplifying that kind of content? I'm wary of generalizing, but I do know some women in that demographic, and there is a certain type of reader whose appetite for literary fiction doesn't extend much beyond Jennifer Egan, but who also reads smutty romances. In both cases, there is a certain framing of men as figures of power and influence, which either renders them patriarchal antagonists or sexy doms, a la Christian Grey. Perhaps this is a proven formula for selling books, but it's pretty boring and it's one of the main reasons that I do not watch the new releases at the library or bookstore terribly closely. The same is true of the agencies with a more diverse array of faces, each of which is looking for exactly the kind of client that you'd expect. Even though I did not begin pitching my novel with the assumption that I'd find an agent who looked just like me or who had a similar story (working class background, first-gen college student and academic), at a certain point I realized that is just how the game is now played.
It is hard to imagine Tobias Wolff's "This Boy's Life" catching an agent's eye today. But I remember mining that book for craft secrets, thinking that learning how to cast a similar spell was the ticket to literary success. That magic is also the magic of enchanting strangers who wouldn't expect to have anything in common with me. I still think it's one of the only things that makes writing worthwhile.
Thanks so much for the great comment, Joshua. I agree with you, particularly here:
"But one wonders if the problem is less the lack of interest among a book-buying public and more the self-fulfilling prophecy that literary gatekeepers enable. There is no such bias in film or TV dramas, for instance, which are not struggling to find viewers."
I have no doubt there is an audience for this work, and bringing up TV and film is a great example.
Have not read This Boy's Life before, but adding it to my list at the library immediately.
I’m actually writing a novel that deals with these themes in depth. Reading this puts a battery in my back and makes me believe I’m not wasting my time telling this story.
We can discuss this more over beers, but I agree with you totally and I think there is undeniably a bias against novels by straight men in publishing. Everyone will deny this, and point to the men who published big novels in… 2008. Alex Perez was publicly shamed for expressing similar ideas. And book influencer loves to brag about “reading books by women” as a form of activism but folks, MOST novels are by women! It triggers my inner rebel who wants to start bragging about how many novels I read by men.
I look forward to that convo, Leigh! And yes, you're right, my man Alex has been saying this for a while now and the reaction is like oh, you monster!
That brash young alive whippersnapper David Foster Wallace, taking up all the shelf space
Yeah!! Right?!
Honestly, DFW contributed to this problem with the whole dismissal of John Updike as a phallocrat, no?
Yes, I'm planning on writing a bit about that piece by DFW in the future! It's funny how DFW came to be regarded by some as the Updike figure he hated.
Could especially see that “penis with a thesaurus” diss boomeranging back at DFW.
Absolutely true.
If I recall, he quit increasing in age years ago. If someone is submitting manuscripts in that man's name, I have an inkling that they are fraudulent.
Powerful article; everything you mentioned in the article is why I had to just not give a #%;$ what I felt someone would think the first time I stood at an Open Mic or started digging and writing the poetry I write. After a 12 year career in EMS and too many suicides of family and friends and coworkers; I had to spill the vulnerability. But I certainly don’t fit that model poet/writer like you note in your article. I would probably get similar rejections if I attempted a novel with the roughness that has been experienced.
EMS is emergency medical services?
YES!!!
Hello Leigh, I love your comments thank you for sticking up for us straight male writers. I have the added scarlet letter of being middle aged and released my 1st novel in April. It’s about the go-to sports psychologist, but he’s got a gambling addiction that gets him in trouble with a gangster and he’s blackmailed to revealing his patients state of mind. One of my female readers commented, “It was a great view into the male psyche.” I didn’t think of that when I was writing. But the reader is very much in my protagonist’s head since the only POV is my protagonist’s (third-person close). So we see what he sees feels what he feels. I also wrote a set of short stories on love from the man’s point of view and men who love their wives. There is very little on how we as men perceive and experience love. TV bifurcates us as lovable buffoons or cheating jerks. What about the honorable, intelligent, and loving man who has boundaries and integrity and does what is right for his family? Let’s see more of those men in literature and media, please.
Hegemony.
“Hegemony - preponderant influence or authority over others : DOMINATION”
Yes, EMS does give this sense in some aspects. Specifically, psychiatric calls. Always felt like the wrong way. Especially knowing how these protocols impacted Matt Samet; Former Editor of Climbing Magazine. Always felt that EMS was the wrong healthcare branch to manage psychiatric patients in crisis. There’s still no alternative that I’m aware of? In a prehospital emergency environment. Though I believe there’s attempts at changes.
Sorry for the confusion.
I wasn't saying that EMSI is a hegemony, I was observing that one of the reasons we're in the state we're in vis a vis male vulnerability in fiction is the hegemony of white, college-educated, progressive women over the publishing industry.
Ah. Ok, well it got me thinking on a decent tangent.
Yes. And, as someone with absolutely no experience in your field, I think that hegemony might not be a bad thing. In medicine there's probably something to the idea of having consistent standards and ways of doing things. Would you rather have medical schools and state medical boards exert hegemonic power, or empower every individual doctor to come up with their own individual diagnoses and treatment methods?
In the same way that most of us would rather live in a society where, say, road safety laws and police and highway patrols have the power to control the way we drive rather than leaving it up to each driver to chose whether to drive on the right or left or whether to stop or go at a red light.
In the context of publishing, however, the problem is people using that control to exclude or marginalize certain perspectives.
Doctors do actually get that ability once they conclude their schooling. But your note does apply to the specific field I was involved with. Some doctors become Medical Directors for any number of Emergency Medical Services that is applied in the prehospital setting. From the Urban aspect to wilderness rescue medicine and wildland fire applications.
Recently before switching to working Costco I was working Waste Connections for a year; realized they had no tourniquet to stop a bleed.
I looked up the tourniquet protocol for Clark County and refreshed my mind on the county I worked which was Clackamas County which typically follows Multnomah County. The takeaway was Clark County protocol doesn’t allow a medical provider to remove a tourniquet even if it’s an inadequate belt applied prior to crew arrival. While Multnomah and Clackamas Protocol allows the inadequate tourniquet to be removed and apply a proper one along with adding an additional one 2-3 inches above the previously applied tourniquet if bleeding was not successfully controlled.
The reason I looked; EMS Staffing and response times are down here in the PNW stateside for a number of reasons. Being able to stop a bleed as a bystander is more important than reversing an overdose yet more bystanders have narcan now than a tourniquet.
I’m sure this comment will be decried for displaying the same female attitude as that being caricatured in the piece itself, but the argument here seems to be that if we want male vulnerability, we have to accept male misogyny. Men would rather be silent (and comfort themselves with the cape of silenced victimhood) than change. Many readers may well find misogyny unpalatable (though there is also a growing and increasingly mainstream market for misogyny, if not yet in literary fiction), and to cast that as some kind of snobbery or prudishness is wilfully reductive. It should be unremarkable that hatred and dehumanisation are unpalatable. Has the writer tried to put himself in the shoes of the women who make up the vast majority of editors, agents and readers, and imagine how it would feel to trawl through pages of that kind of hatred? Would he expect members of any other group to do so without turning a hair?
It’s too easy to cast anything that might be labelled “woke” as shallow and insincere. There are good reasons many readers have turned away from certain kinds of voices. It’s not just peevishness. It may hurt some writers’ feelings/ they may experience it as rejection, but sometimes rejection is a good opportunity for self-reflection.
For what it’s worth, I run a writing group (mainly amateur) with a roughly fifty-fifty gender balance. About half the men who submit do submit sci-fi, but about half submit what would probably count as sadboy. Elements of both have been misogynistic (and when that’s been the case, it’s been critiqued as frankly bad writing: flat, stereotypical characterisation, motivations that lack credibility, gratuitousness), but far from all of it has been. If the writer does think that if we want male vulnerability, we have to accept male misogyny, he’s telling on himself. Not all men hate women. But perhaps many of those railing against their rejection by the female dominated publishing industry do.
Thanks a lot for your comment, Elsie, for real. I think you bring up some very valid points here and by no means am I advocating for more misogyny on the page. Writers that I admire, like Junot Diaz, do not in fact glamorize that. I come away from his books thinking these are sad, lonely men looking for validation, and looking in the wrong places. Not, man, this guy is so cool, I want to live his life. It’s that excavation that I’m personally interested in.
I also am not suggesting that all women read the same way or have the same tastes. In fact, I have heard from many women, both those inside of and outside of the publishing industry (just fans of reading literature) who agree that they haven’t either read what they feel is a real exploration into the male psyche, or have witnessed it be passed over by editors in publishing houses because it’s not right for the moment and lament that.
I’m not looking for writing that is misogynistic for the sake of being so. But what I am saying is that a lot of the complicated, nuanced feelings men have around sex and relationships doesn’t always come out in a socially acceptable way. If this sort of writing were gaining a wider acceptance and being worked on by editors and agents, and even injected with some needed female perspective to add nuance and depth, that is one thing. But right now I have heard that it is simply overlooked and passed over. And then, at the same token, you read a wonderful, celebrated (and rightly so, because I loved it) book like All Fours and seeing all kinds of exploration into desire and sex that is acceptable because it is in a form that is more pleasing on the ears. It just feels, as a guy, that our version can’t even clear the bar of entry if it doesn’t look right is my point.
Thanks again for your comment.
You took it easy on that comment, which so perfectly makes all of your points I half wonder if you didn't write it yourself (not really).
I get what you mean, but I don’t think people here are asking for explicitly misogynistic literature, it’s a debate over whether depiction equals endorsement. Fight Club always comes up in this- the book is a satire featuring violence and misogyny while also being relatable to disaffected men and for me personally helped me reflect on my grosser instincts and teenage angst. Just because it’s relatable and some might misinterpret it does that mean the book is condoning the actions within it? In the current publishing environment, for many the answer is yes.
You also mention “There are good reasons many readers have turned away from certain kinds of voices.” Well that is fair but it also might be why men are reading less every year, since they aren’t really being marketed too by the publishing industry anymore. Saying things like “Men would rather be silent than change” is not how men experience the situation, and it’s a good example of the type of perspective that fundamentally won’t appeal to men even if you believe it is correct.
I think it’s less about accepting misogyny (which no one should really do) than about men being bombarded by claims of misogyny for sharing their feelings, which may or may not be respectful toward women but might be perceived as misogynistic or labeled in order to silence unpopular views. If we’re not willing to listen to people’s views, even if they’re not cultured, then we have no right to demand vulnerability from them, any more than they have a right to expect us to accept true misogyny.
"...the women who make up the vast majority of editors, agents and readers..." I think you've hit upon part of the problem, perhaps unintentionally. Consider also that when we talk about any population other than straight men in any other field, we acknowledge that having gatekeeper roles (editors, agents) filled disproportionately by one group obviously leads to "other" groups (ie.g. straight men) being "underrepresented" (for lack of a better word) among readers of literary fiction. One example of the double standard: The Times recently expressed their disappointment with the publishing industry for not living up to its pledge to diversify. Just over 70% of the industry is white, which also roughly mirrors the U.S. population. So the industry is not overly white compared to the broader population, yet it is still "too white" for the Times' liking. And yet they don't seem to care at all about the underrepresentation of straight men in the industry. Straight white men still wield disproportional power in most realms, so I can see why there's no rush to balance the scales here, but if we claim to care about the future of the industry and or reading, then I think it matters.
I think a big part of the homogenization of literary culture, and the relatively absence of this kind of straight boy lit, is that the MFA writers has monopolized the small and independent press world. That MFA aesthetic rules from top to bottom. When I started out long ago, the little magazines were not filled with MFA writers. There were many writers with day jobs. There were a lot of Bukowski-influenced writers (men and women). But I don't recall the last time I saw a truly rowdy piece of fiction or poetry in a literary magazine.
I just thought of a rowdy, emotional, highly masculine, introspective, intellectual work of art about a straight American male...Calvin and Hobbes.
I've seen the same thing in the prestige journals. Academics/teachers publishing, then some MFA students. No civilians, and I mean none.
Yup
But I love Calvin & Hobbes with all my heart and soul, and I have everything that man has ever put on page. I may even be obsessed.
The greatest comic strip of all time.
Interesting perspective as always, Sherman!
Curious though, do you not think writers have day jobs today? I do! I guess you mean that many of them are in academia?
Day jobs as English/Creative Writing professors, probably.
It’s sad that the more diverse contemporary literature becomes, the less diverse it becomes?
I think the issue is that too often we think of diversity only in terms of race/ethnicity, whereas thinking in terms of class is also just as important.
Amen to that.
It exists elsewhere. New York is no longer the cultural center that it once was. Higher education is the enemy of creativity. There is so much good stuff, but it is being written in other languages and being shared in other places.
In many ways it is like movies and video games. Over the last 10-15 years movies have become quite terrible, but video games have really shined. The old model of video games playing off of movies has reversed, and for good reason, as there is far more creativity in video games.
One area, in English, where creativity still exists is in fantasy and science fiction. Game of Thrones and Wheel of Time have become popular because of their television equivalents, but there are so many great books in that area. The terrible "woke" version of the Three Body Problem is a perfect example of existing media making a racist re-write of a great book and turning into shit, then crying homophobia when people are upset at how they white-washed and ruined a beautiful story.
The existing publishing and media elite are more racist than they have ever been, but they imagine themselves to be angels in the form of aging white ladies. Nothing embarrasses me more than racist white "activists" who descend on the world telling everyone else how to live and what is "right." They are sick.
The best thing to do is ignore them, and try to boycott anything they touch. Rich white ladies are plague on the world, whether they have MFA's or MBA's. The world would be a better place without them, but anything we build, they come running, demanding that they receive their "fair share" of structures they either despise or do not understand. The only thing we can do is keep innovating so we keep ahead of their corrupting influence.
What are you talking about video games today are garbage like garbage d i if you're thinking games that were once good maybe games from 2010 since 1990 that was the Golden age of gaming now we're in the dark age where you have to deal with companies preaching at you and microtransactions of the ass
You are not wrong, although I would extend that end point out at least another half decade. Metro 2033, Crysis 3, Bioshock Infinite, they all are good stuff. I am not sure when They are Billions came out, but I enjoyed it. I liked Watch Dogs and Watch Dogs 2 as well. Then again, even Diable 4 had a lot going for it, but I would agree that we have past the glory years of StarCraft 2, Portal, and the general excitement of the next title, and building a rig good enough to play it. Although, the males-only, exclusionary culture of that era of gaming was not cool. My wife always had to pretend she was male to avoid senseless harassment.
And I would gold star the last four words of your comment. It would be a gift to humanity to go back in time and kill the individual who invented microtransactions.
I think a lot of the stuff about no game results rated but I will say this I think a lot of the woke stuff we see in games today was just a cover to protect them from criticism these game companies because they make game and abuse their employees like Activision anytime a sex scandal came out of activation of a few or workers being mistreated they made a new character gay really makes you think or they push wellness in the US but remove it from China in the Middle East take the skate Spider-Man missions from the recent Spider-Man 2 I think they do this not because they care about weakness they do it to shield themselves from criticism about how abusive their workplaces are for workers and some of the lead sexual harassment in there I think this won't stop is just a cover for them to protect their own asses
Re your last two paragraphs: WOW. Tell me you hate women witho, uh, never mind.
Your hatred of women SCREAMS OFF YOUR POST. I feel sorry for any of your family, co-workers, friends..
although your obsession with in hating makes me think NO ONE could stand to be around you.
I’m not an expert, but it feels like classic overcorrection in an industry that long prioritized straight male narratives. I think correction was necessary, but sustained OVERcorrection may develop biases that are justified by how things used to be.
The problem is that, as the pro-diversity crowd points out, straight male viewpoints were considered "the default" in literature (and media).
As we all know by now, this was a privilege in the sense that writing from a female or minority perspective inherently defined one's writing by those terms. The straight man had the "privilege" of enjoying stories on their own terms with protagonists whose straightness, maleness, whiteness, whatever, weren't the focus of the character.
But the hidden flip side of that is: straight boys never actually got to see these "representative" stories as actually *representative* of themselves. How could they? Their perspective was the default, and by being the default, it was never presented as special the way female or minority voices were. Of all the literature we decry for being too straight and too male, how much of it was actually written in the service of making straight male readers seen and validated for their straightness and maleness?
Just because a story has a straight male protagonist and it lacks menstruation doesn't mean it was written for straight men. And as straight men are finding out, it's a fantastic double bind when people tell you that representation matters, but that you were overrepresented in the industry by a straight male perspective that you never really recognized as being particularly, unapologetically, affirmingly straight or male in any way.
And as Andrew points out, there are myriad structural barriers in the modern publishing industry to get an unapologetically affirming straight male work these days. (Just as, of course, there were such barriers for non-straight, non-male, non-white works in the past.)
Not that that stops some of the male writers I've seen on Substack, though.
I'm 68. I used to read 200 books per year. I can pinpoint my aversion to SWM authors. Lee Child's first Jack Reacher book. VP's Secret Service details led by a woman - Yay! Rare all those years ago. In first few pages, woman is confronted in advance of a threat to VP. Does she take charge, gather all possible intel, work aggressively to protect VP? Nope. Her nerves get jangled, she panics, calls Jack Reacher. I threw book in trash, wrote author an email, and couldn't get my anger over such BLATANT SEXISM to subside. That's when I learned what the words "toxic masculinity" meant.
Do I now absolutely disregard books by WM authors? ABSOLUTELY. Exceptions are made - Erik Larsen is one.
That sounds tight from my prospective. I'm WF, 68, read 200 books a year. I actively avoid reading about books by WM. Soooo over SWM trying to set the rules for the rest of us. I've been stunned by the delightful talent, entire new worlds of reading excellence by authors, men & women of color. Year after year, I discover books that shake up my brain (in the best way), take me to far away places, who take big chances with spectacular new ideas, & a variety of cultures. The lack of misogyny, cruelty to others, lack of violence, is Soooo REFRESHING!!!
The industry has been taken over by white ladies and reflects their preferences. They are miming the men who built these institutions, but the interesting work has moved on to greener pastures.
Ugh. Really?
You're a data analyst, where's the data to back up your claim?
Men not apologizing for being men, white people not apologizing for being white, relatively privileged westerners not apologizing for being westerners- three demographics who are strongly disliked by the literary establishment at this time. (And the entire progressive establishment but that's another story).
You can't argue, beg or try and coerce the establishment out of these biases. You can only work diligently with your head down and try and ignore the despicable trends and not let it affect your writing. There is no doubt that it will come around because most people are sick of the paradigm that divides people into victim or victimizer and almost solely based on some demographic they fall into. Not only are the complexities of real life ignored, this worldview is ignorant, shallow, self-serving and really really boring.
100%
I'm bored of the black and white "hero vs. villains" approach dominant in most media today. If we want more true depictions into healthy masculine experience, we need to evolve together. The only way to do that is to create it one honest story at a time.
Yes. You might like: https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/literary-agent-rejections
I was once read an agent's literary wishlist and it said something like, "I have no interest in stories about sraight, white men achieving self-actualization."
I appreciate that this is slightly different than the point you're making, but they're part and parcel. On the one hand, it is absolutely important to have diversity and equality in the authors/voices/stories/characters in our literature. And to do that, the male voice (especially straight, white) needed to quiet down for a minute.
However, is like to think that a better metaphor is not just "redirecting the spotlight," but more of a "zooming out," so as to include all voices, for which I think there is indeed enough space.
Also, and yes I'm biased, I'd like to think there are young authors who are able to write with vulnerability and honesty, who can do so without relying on their hegemonic standing to do so, and who can write stories that don't marginalize, romanticize, or punch down.
At the very least, this is what I'm trying to do in my fiction.
For what it’s worth, while querying my novel, I’ve gotten a fair amount of the “stories centered on straight men just aren’t playing right now” as both rejections and warnings, which I understand and feels discouraging, but nothing warranting a woe-is-me. It’s still a story I feel personally connected to and could only have been written by me, so it’s worth the work to continue trying to publish it.
I hear that a lot from friends of mine, too. But I think good work will always find it's intended audience. Keep it pushing
Yes. Me too. https://michaelmohr.substack.com/p/literary-agent-rejections
I really enjoyed reading this. Something I've been thinking about a lot lately is how many intersectional feminist discourses (not all, but many) went down a dead end in the 2010s by vilifying all forms of masculinity and masculine expression as intrinsically oppressive. The result, I think, has been an inability for many feminist spaces to understand trans masculinity (if you depict men as the ENEMY, what does it mean when someone who you previously saw as a woman, one of the GOOD ONES, decides to defect to the WRONG SIDE?)…and a denial of the experiences of men of color, which you touch on here.
This is really a shot in the dark here (I'm just a garden-variety cis woman, lol) but I think that for men of color to come to a useful and positive relationship with their identity, they need to embrace their racialized AND their gendered experiences. Quite a few men of color end up racially emasculated or racially othered as predators…and that is such a painful, psychologically intense experience that fiction has the capacity to depict and explore in a moving way! It is tragic to not have those fictional explorations, and I can't help but feel that it limits our cultural capacity to navigate these questions.
Absolutely agree. I've been labeled as a victmizer publicly and directly. Wrote about that pain in my autobiography.
It taught me a hard lesson - the wrong words at the right time can destroy your life.
The first man who can write a book about men (of any color) being othered as a predator that manages to penetrate mainstream sympathy will be doing both men and women an immense service.
I've mentioned before my forthcoming novel was flat-out rejected by one editor (and perhaps tacitly by others) because they said they haven't had "success" with overtly masculine narratives.
I'm very interested to see how my book is received by the marketplace. My dream is for it to be extremely polarizing. I'll take big feelings over no feelings any day!
I can't wait for it man. You know I'm a fan
> The epidemic of male suicide speaks volumes of a culture that frames masculinity as unyielding and immune to vulnerability.
Or perhaps many men, whose stoicism in the face of suffering has now been re-branded as “toxic” and “closed-off” and used as a bludgeon to beat them when they refuse to react to adversity with hysteria, see suicide as the only option left to them to exit their no-win situation with their dignity intact.
"Straight male bookworm" Brother!
I was reading Tony T's forthcoming REJECTION and remembered how people lost their minds over The Feminist....
I'm not aware of The Feminist. Is that a novel?
I believe it's referring to this short story. Won't spoil it but it is definitely relevant to the topic of this article:
https://www.nplusonemag.com/issue-35/fiction-drama/the-feminist/
Thank you! Will check it out
Yeah I do like your point about these articles, that when they talk about representation there's a narrow confine on acceptable representation. To avoid drawing from ones own lived experience has become almost instinctual.
Relatedly I think that the disdain for the unremarkable or so-called mainstream has really warped writing. It's hard for writers to work within the confines of mainstream society without telling against it.
I’ve often come to the conclusion that the request for male vulnerability isn’t a genuine one, but a request for a version of vulnerability that shows that the man has resolved and healed from
whatever he suffered from, and shows contrition for his formerly problematic nature.
To show genuine emotional vulnerability and the inherent messiness that comes with it, often gets a man labelled as a threat, red flag or a problem - and ostracized for it.
Expressing anger or frustration gets reframed as hatred - and then the usual labels come out.
This was an interesting read. Thanks for bringing attention to this gap in modern publishing patterns. Hopefully in ten years we’ll have found a better balance.
"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?"
Late to this conversation, but after a recent trip to Montana (where I was born and raised), I think the answer is yes. But whether that "yes" comes from a book-buying or literary fiction-reading community is another question. That is, I am aware--in places like Montana where a conventional masculinity is welcomed--that there are many women who are curious about men's interior lives and who like men for being themselves. Some of these are working-class women, not all of them are college graduates, and not all of them are readers. But one wonders if the problem is less the lack of interest among a book-buying public and more the self-fulfilling prophecy that literary gatekeepers enable. There is no such bias in film or TV dramas, for instance, which are not struggling to find viewers.
I remember the sick feeling I often got while querying, when I'd sometimes pull up a literary agency and see 5, 10, 20 agents who were all bourgie white women, ages 30-50. Presumably they were thought to be reliable stand-ins for the majority of book buyers, but I wondered which came first, the majority of women buying books or the agencies devoted to amplifying that kind of content? I'm wary of generalizing, but I do know some women in that demographic, and there is a certain type of reader whose appetite for literary fiction doesn't extend much beyond Jennifer Egan, but who also reads smutty romances. In both cases, there is a certain framing of men as figures of power and influence, which either renders them patriarchal antagonists or sexy doms, a la Christian Grey. Perhaps this is a proven formula for selling books, but it's pretty boring and it's one of the main reasons that I do not watch the new releases at the library or bookstore terribly closely. The same is true of the agencies with a more diverse array of faces, each of which is looking for exactly the kind of client that you'd expect. Even though I did not begin pitching my novel with the assumption that I'd find an agent who looked just like me or who had a similar story (working class background, first-gen college student and academic), at a certain point I realized that is just how the game is now played.
It is hard to imagine Tobias Wolff's "This Boy's Life" catching an agent's eye today. But I remember mining that book for craft secrets, thinking that learning how to cast a similar spell was the ticket to literary success. That magic is also the magic of enchanting strangers who wouldn't expect to have anything in common with me. I still think it's one of the only things that makes writing worthwhile.
Thanks so much for the great comment, Joshua. I agree with you, particularly here:
"But one wonders if the problem is less the lack of interest among a book-buying public and more the self-fulfilling prophecy that literary gatekeepers enable. There is no such bias in film or TV dramas, for instance, which are not struggling to find viewers."
I have no doubt there is an audience for this work, and bringing up TV and film is a great example.
Have not read This Boy's Life before, but adding it to my list at the library immediately.
Thanks
I’m actually writing a novel that deals with these themes in depth. Reading this puts a battery in my back and makes me believe I’m not wasting my time telling this story.
Love to hear that. God speed