Men aren’t reading fiction and it’s hurting all of us

Could novels build the empathy we need to fix this spiral of selfishness?

It’s safe to say men are not doing alright. With my feminism tracing back to my early teenage years, I understand much of what ails us as women. But could I truly understand it if I wasn’t looking into the main cause of it — men? They seem to be in a perpetual state of anti-empathy and selfishness that is fed by internet incel holes. Like Alice, their realities morph through the looking glass of their screens. The loneliness epidemic, the fact that most of them are falling behind in school, not knowing how to act in a world that is (rightly) telling them to change what they were taught about what it means to be a man.

In the current political climate, it’s reactionary and understandable to dismiss these problems; men, and surprisingly young men, seem to consistently vote for the options that hurt women the most and fall into harmful far-right rhetorics. Why should we care about their issues? Because their problems directly impact the state of the world, and it’s counterproductive to ignore it. Coincidentally, research has also found that one of the main ways to learn empathy, clarify who we are, what we owe to others and comprehend complex social issues and situations is reading — specifically reading fiction. Statistics show, unsurprisingly, that men don’t read fiction, and it is clearly hurting the rest of us.

So welcome to my essay: the case for the importance of men reading fiction and how it could change their downward spiral of hatred.

There are a lot of reports about the reading gender gap. In summary, by most metrics, men read considerably less than women, even when statistically illiteracy affects women more than men. And this starts early on - a study with 15-year-olds found that 40% of girls spend at least 30 minutes a day reading long form content, only 25% of boys did the same. Men also read even less when it comes to female authors — who are at the moment dominating the publishing industry (either because more women read, therefore buy more books written by women or because more women grow up wanting to be authors since they read more, nobody is quite sure). Nilsen Book Research found that “of the 10 bestselling male authors, readership was roughly evenly divided by gender, with 55% male readers and 45% female readers. In contrast, only 19% of the 10 bestselling female authors’ readers were male, compared to 81% female.”

So why don’t men read fiction? Well, and try not to gasp, one of the main reasons is misogyny. If we look at the numbers, more women being published in fiction means men are less likely to pick up a novel. But mostly, it seems to be because young men feel the most pressure to conform to ‘masculine’ behaviours, according to Pew research, and reading fiction has a continued reputation, lagging from the nineteenth century, that it is a frivolous and feminine activity. Of course, at the time this reputation started, women were also not allowed to be as educated as men were, so anything they chose to do would often be seen as ‘lesser than’ for men’s minds. And we’ve continued on that trend, with things dominated by a female market consistently being put down as unintelligent consumerism (same old, whether it’s Twilight or Taylor Swift, you don’t see the same logic applied to James Bond or Drake). It all stems from the damaging belief that men are rational and deliberate while women are emotional and hysterical.

Why are we still dealing with the fall out of these stereotypes two centuries later? Perhaps due to generational cycles. Reading habits are formed in childhood and boys are likely to imitate the actions of their fathers, who are less likely to read. Research by Deloitte has also shown fathers of sons are less likely to read to them than fathers of girls. When I was growing up, my dad would sit me and my siblings down in our wide living room sofa with a notebook and a pen and read books out loud to us, encouraging us to make notes. In hindsight, this is probably when my personal love for reading began.

With the pressure to adhere to ‘masculine’ ideals, men are also increasingly under pressure to earn more in an economy with dwindling incomes. It’s hard for most gen-z or millennials to imagine living in a one-income household, and the stereotype of men being the main provider is still prevalent — if not outwardly, it’ll take many more generations to disinherit ideals stemmed from traditional roles (if we even manage that, see: tradwives). Men tend to feel a lot more guilt and shame when financially struggling, not only are they failing to provide, they’re failing to be. And reading fiction? Not part of the idea of a hustling male.

Every business guru telling men to get out there and create companies that will “make them millions” is selling either their own nonfiction book or telling them to read other nonfiction regurgitating the same ideas about business. There is a place for nonfiction business books (if you ask me, quite a small space made up of their first two chapters, arguably the only useful chapters in 99% of business nonfiction) — but that tends to be the only genre men read. As Jason Diamond pointed out for GQ earlier this year, “the idea that’s put out is that there is nothing a guy who wants to be a real man can get out of picking up a novel.”

There is a wide space in readership for nonfiction — educationally and historically —, but it teaches us different skills to fiction — interpersonally and internally—. Novels allow us to mentally step into the shoes of somebody else, to understand their character through experience, and in order to comprehend the story we must feel something towards the characters within it. Reading a novel like Enter Ghost by Isabella Hammad will seamlessly garner more empathy for the lived reality in the Gaza Strip than a history book with facts and figures (even if both are important). I may have never lived in 1950s Paris as a young bisexual man, but reading James Baldwin’s Giovanni’s Room helped me understand the motivations, aspirations and daily struggles of someone who might’ve been in that situation, exercising general empathy for people out of my immediate reach. Fictional narratives allow us to understand the complexity of human interactions, looking at them as if we were within them, yet not being marred by our own inherent selfishness.

“Narrative fiction models life, comments on life, and helps us to understand life in terms of how human intentions bear upon it.”
-Raymond A. Mar and Keith Oatley, The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience

In psychology, theory of mind is one’s ability to ascribe their own mental thoughts as different to others, understanding others’ beliefs, feelings, intentions and perspectives. Theory of mind is essential to navigate the world as a sane neurotic, because we can’t read minds, we assume what others want, think, believe and intend. Possessing a developed theory of mind allows us to predict what others might do as well as what we might do. Theoretically, this not only develops empathy, but helps us understand our own motivations as well as new information and what may be false or deceptive beliefs (because we learn how to read and communicate with people). That is, essentially, what fiction allows us to do:

"The historian [understood as the writer of nonfiction] speaks of what has happened, the poet [understood as the writer of fiction] of the kind of thing that can happen.”
-Aristotle, Poetics

While nonfiction is seen as more essential to understand history and general knowledge, fiction is actually better for understanding how we move in the world among others. And, perhaps more importantly, it reduces bias against those who are different to ourselves. Multiple levels of research have shown that one of the main functions of fiction is empathy building, which in turn reduces stereotypes and prejudices. Reading comprehension in fiction literally requires the reader to empathise with the characters, but it also allows them to move through that empathy at their own pace. Novels are effectively a safe space for people to explore and experiment with understanding towards other groups — the reader can step back and go back to their real world, allowing their mind to process or disconnect without consequence.

Having established all of this, it was unsurprising to find that a various studies examining new media literacy have found that men consume in a less critical way than women, which is also consistent with the fact that men are less likely to finish school and go on to university in a widening gap in education. Perhaps the most prominent real life example right now comes from the US elections, polling statistics found that the men voting for Donald Trump were more likely to not have been to university (61% of not college educated men voted for Trump). With less media literacy, you are more likely to consume online content with no critical thinking, making it easier to fall through the looking glass and into far right rhetorics fed by both trolls (see: the Amber Heard v Johnny Depp trial) and the likes of figures like Andrew Tate or Russell Brand. It’s not particularly surprising to me that men who statistically don’t pick up novels written by and about women would fail to see the perspective of women in the real world, feeding toxic ideals of masculine vs. feminine and undermining violence against women.

There is pushback about the argument of fiction being an agent of change. Firstly, the idea that novels are meant to be entertainment and therefore reading is not political. It’s a cognitive mistake to assume that while you’re reading fiction you’re not applying politicised thought. We all do, because we live under political systems and conversations all the time. Every form of entertainment, no matter how far from reality it might seem, is inherently woven through with political thought, whether it’s pop music, sports, films or books. From the obvious examples such as Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to the less obvious like Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings or Butler’s Xenogenesis trilogy.

Which brings us to the next point of pushback, fiction includes speculative and science fiction, how can those situations allow us to build empathy when they’re clearly not real? I would counter that speculative and science fiction is often more clearly political than contemporary or classic fiction. Speculative fiction writers know they have a wall up between political statement and reality, so they tend to be more forceful with their ideas — you cannot read something like Cline’s Ready Player One and honestly believe you’re not reading a political book. I mean, we’ll rest this case with Orwell’s 1984. And even when a book is not intentionally placing itself within a political discourse, simply enacting empathetic feelings for people in different contexts is political, whether the context is Earth or Mars. As mentioned before, part of the function of fiction is to create predictive social situations in which we can place ourselves, any book written by humans will be about human societies and how we exist within them.

“Works of imaginative literature are one means by which we make sense of our history and our current life and by which we make predictions and decisions regarding our future world.”
-Raymond A. Mar and Keith Oatley, The Function of Fiction is the Abstraction and Simulation of Social Experience

I’m not suggesting reading fiction will automatically make men leave behind all incel-led, selfish discourse. But I find it hard to look at the statistics of falling reading and media literacy rates in men and the rise in far-right, misogynistic ideas within communities of young men, and not relate them in any way. Encouraging and teaching men to read is a start, a step in the right direction that, if not fixing a deep-rooted problem, will at least make it less likely to perpetuate. Because it is true that men today are more lonely and continue to lack the necessary tools to express their sensitivities and worries, much of which, if fixed, would begin to topple a system that feeds on them being emotionally stunted.

So let’s encourage men to read more fiction. Drop a few hours of the business book to read about a different world and perspective. If you’re a mother or father, teach your boys to immerse themselves in novels — let them watch you read, sit them on the sofa and read to them. If you’re dating or are friends with men, talk to them about books until they can’t help but pick one up. Any amount of fiction reading is better than nothing at all. I’m deeply concerned about women and minorities trying to navigate a world in which numbers keep telling us people don’t care about others. That concern turned into worry for the state of the new generation of men in which we were pinning so many feminist hopes on. This is a small, but likely very effective way forward. So, please, read more fiction — for the sake of us all.