A writer for The Guardian, M. A. Sieghart, has asked the perennial question, “Why do so few men read books by women?” Curiously, the people who always ask this question never follow up by asking how women authors might better appeal to men or how the publishing industry might get a better share of the underserved male-readership market. No, the assumption is always that men have something wrong with them and need to change. It’s not the books that are the problem, it’s you. The customer is in the wrong.
Why do so few men read books by women? | MA Sieghart https://t.co/Za5Y4gepDr
— Gwenda Bond 😈 (@Gwenda) August 1, 2021
Sieghart notes that the top-selling lady novelists have a disproportionately female readership, but though she treats this as a mystery with sinister implications, it’s not actually hard to understand what’s going on when she names who those top-selling authoresses are: Jane Austen, Margaret Atwood, Danielle Steel, and Jojo Moyes.
She proposes the answer that men don’t take women seriously. The actual answer, obvious to anyone outside Sieghart’s elitist cultural bubble, is that men aren’t interested in what those women write. Danielle Steel writes trashy romances. Jojo Moyes writes trashy romances. Jane Austen wrote non-trashy romances. Atwood writes a variety of things but is best known for a pearl-clutching feminist screed that confuses Baptists with the Taliban, though she also churns out an occasional apocalyptic science-fiction novel disturbingly obsessed with child pornography.
To put it briefly and bluntly, men don’t want to read that shit.