Why Johnny Doesn’t Read, An Exercise
Let’s run a little experiment together, shall we? Open Google, and enter, ‘Why Men Don’t Read,” into the search bar. The first few articles should be worth a laugh.
I was hesitant to write this article, mainly because in no way do I want to be perceived as diminishing the talents of many, many brilliant women in publishing,
It’s an article about men, and he still felt the need to talk about women. Of course he did. These days, you can’t say anything nice about men without covering your six by complementing women. Compliments are a zero-sum game. The modern religion of secularism has its forms and protocols that must be adhered to lest you be cast out as an unclean heretic, after all.
nor do I believe that there is a true ‘gender bias’. A bias insinuates some sort of malice, a purposeful exclusion of a segment of society for selfish or ignorant reasons.
1911, Courtesy, http://www.pulpmags.org/ |
Give him credit, this was written in 2011. The mask has slipped since then, and the publishing industry, in line with the rest of the coastal cultural pioneers, continually signals its desire to see masculinity replaced by a tepid uni-sexual market that presents a monocultural diversity. The order of the day is making men more feminine and women more masculine for reasons too deep to go into here.
Publish more books for men and boys. Trust editors who try to buy these books, and work on the marketing campaigns to hit those audiences. The readers are there, waiting, eager just under the surface. And I promise, if publishing makes an effort to tap it, they’ll come out in droves.
But he doesn’t understand those women any more than they understand him. His advice is sound. It is logical and it makes good business sense. Those two arguments work on logical men engaged in productive business, but the emotive women engaged in business for fulfillment rather than profit won’t listen.
There is more men’s adventure fiction being written than ever before, and all the publishing apathy in the world can’t stop the onrushing tide. It’s early days yet. The word hasn’t fully gone out, the structures aren’t fully developed, and the filtering of the good from the drek has a way to go, but men’s adventure writing will soon make a huge comeback.