Why do men not like fiction books as much?

[Dave Hartwick]

Originally Posted by Kimstu

It's already generally acknowledged here that men tend to prefer different themes in all kinds of fictional formats than women do. But the themes men prefer in non-text formats are still overwhelmingly fictional rather than non-fictional.

Are you overlooking sports?

[Lamia]

Exapno Mapcase, you've been awfully quick to dismiss Lynn Bodoni's posts, but I haven't seen you provide any evidence -- or even anecdotes -- to support your claim that children's fiction is equally likely to feature girl heroes as boy heroes (bolding mine below):

Originally Posted by Exapno Mapcase

Girls will read books with boy heroes; boys won't read books with girl heroes: that gives girls twice as many books to read.

I am skeptical as to whether the bolded portion is true now, and am pretty certain it was not in the past. But you don't have to take my word for it. A 2011 study of 20th century children's books found that "Males are represented more frequently than females in titles and as central characters. [...] By no measure are females present more frequently than males."

Original article: J. McCabe, E. Fairchild, L. Grauerholz, B. A. Pescosolido, D. Tope. Gender in Twentieth-Century Children's Books: Patterns of Disparity in Titles and Central Characters. Gender & Society, 2011; 25 (2): 197-226. Available as a PDF at http://www.fsu.edu/~soc/people/mccab..._April2011.pdf

News item on this study from Science Daily: http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases...0503151607.htm

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by Dave Hartwick

Are you overlooking sports?

? Not following you here: professional sports are a type of staged entertainment with an improvisational format. That is, the venue, costumes, participants, and genre conventions (i.e., the rules of the game) are all pre-determined, although the details of the performance and the final denouement (i.e., who wins) are not.

That's in no way meant as a criticism, mind you. I like watching team sports and I've spent years playing them myself. But at the professional level, they are strictly a staged-entertainment industry.

Sporting events aren't any more "factual" or "genuine" than a rock concert or reality talent show, although they're considerably less scripted. They certainly don't count as "nonfictional" in the same way that, say, a documentary about the Kashmir conflict is "nonfictional" compared to a Bollywood musical. Or, say, a scientific book about reconstructing evolutionary development from the fossil record is "nonfictional" compared to Jurassic Park.

[Hello Again]

Originally Posted by Fiveyearlurker

As a male and a reader, who stopped reading for about ten years after high school, I can say that high school turned me off reading for quite some time. There was a tendency toward books and authors (The Scarlet Letter and Jane Austen come to mind immediately. I think Jane Austen is responsible for eight of those ten years.) that I simply could not find any interest whatsoever in.

Not sure if it was because all of my high school English teachers were women, and understandably, assigned books that they viewed highly, but might have had more appeal to women than men.

Eh, I think English teachers are just as likely to assign "Great Expectations" which is all about boys and their dumb problems (see also, "Catcher in the Rye," see also "The Lord of the Flies", see also "Ethan Fromme", see also "The Great Gatsby", see also "Huckleberry Finn") but that doesn't put women off reading, statistically speaking. In fact, of the 10 most assigned books in high school, only one, "the Scarlet Letter" has a solely female protagonist, and at most three have any major female characters. (re: "To Kill a Mockingbird," the first time I read it, I didn't even realize Scout was a girl, until I was 90% finished. That she is female is not relevant to the story.)

If what you claim is true -- men read one boring book featuring women, and give up reading; women read many boring books about men but keep on reading -- would you say women have some ability not to overextrapolate that men lack? (ETA: I wrote that in semijest but I have read that when boys in school fail, they blame extrinsic factors, ie, the material... "reading is stupid" while girls blame intrinsic factors, ie, themselves, "I didn't pay enough attention").

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by Hello Again

If what you claim is true -- men read one boring book featuring women, and give up reading; women read many boring books about men but keep on reading -- would you say women have some ability not to overextrapolate that men lack?

I can't answer for Fiveyearlurker, but I would definitely favor a different hypothesis to explain that phenomenon. Namely, I think it's probably at least mostly due to a built-in gender-biased assumption in society that is "male-normative", so to speak.

IOW, we take it for granted that the experiences and actions of male characters are representative of society as a whole. But the experiences and actions of female characters are perceived as more gender-specific.

It's the same reason, IMO, that girl readers identify with boy protagonists more readily than boy readers identify with girl ones. There's a universal assumption that "boy" somehow stands for the default or general case, while "girl" is an exception or a special case. Naturally, male protagonists are going to be easier for readers as a whole to identify with.

[Exapno Mapcase]

Originally Posted by Lamia

Exapno Mapcase, you've been awfully quick to dismiss Lynn Bodoni's posts, but I haven't seen you provide any evidence -- or even anecdotes -- to support your claim that children's fiction is equally likely to feature girl heroes as boy heroes (bolding mine below):

Seriously? You're referring to a statement I labeled a "giant glib generalization" and taking me to task because you found a study that says it's 57/31 instead of 50/50?

And what in the world do that have to do with the point that everybody in the industry agrees with: that girls will read about boy heroes and boys won't read about girl heroes. As a general trend. Not as a specific about any one person or one genre or one time or one age. Do you understand anything about what you are arguing? Did you stop to think for a second that this trend would naturally lead to more boy heroes than girl heroes for sheer commercial purposes and so this confirms my generality rather than refutes it?

Kimstu seems to get it. I definitely agree with her last post.

[Lamia]

Originally Posted by Exapno Mapcase

Seriously? You're referring to a statement I labeled a "giant glib generalization" and taking me to task because you found a study that says it's 57/31 instead of 50/50?

That's one more study than you've come up with, and you're the one who's been going on about how anecdotes don't count. Now that I have linked to a peer-reviewed study indicating that you were wrong about the specific statement that Lynn Bodoni was questioning, you're throwing a tantrum. So was this really about the weakness of Lynn's evidence, or do you just have a problem with people who dare to disagree with you?

And what in the world do that have to do with the point that everybody in the industry agrees with: that girls will read about boy heroes and boys won't read about girl heroes.

Nothing. Both my post and my cite were in response to your claim that girls' willingness to read books about boys gave them "twice as many books to read". That's why I put that part of the quote in bold and then specifically said I was referring to the bolded portion.

Do you understand anything about what you are arguing? Did you stop to think for a second that this trend would naturally lead to more boy heroes than girl heroes for sheer commercial purposes and so this confirms my generality rather than refutes it?

Do you understand what you're arguing? Because you're the one who indicated that children's books were equally divided between those about girls and those about boys, and dismissed Lynn's posts about how "there were damn few girl hero books" as nothing more than anecdotes based on her personal experience reading a specific genre that was targeted at a male audience. I'm not saying that Lynn's posts weren't based on personal anecdotes, they were, but that doesn't mean she was wrong about there being more children's books with boy heroes than girl heroes. You say now that this actually proves your broader point -- which is rather different than what you were saying at the beginning of this same post, but everyone's entitled to change their mind -- so I have no idea why you're still so angry about me and Lynn having the nerve to question one small part of your post. You could have just said "Whoops, sloppy wording on my part, I should have said 'more' rather than 'twice as many'!"

[Fiveyearlurker]

Originally Posted by Hello Again

If what you claim is true -- men read one boring book featuring women, and give up reading; women read many boring books about men but keep on reading -- would you say women have some ability not to overextrapolate that men lack? (ETA: I wrote that in semijest but I have read that when boys in school fail, they blame extrinsic factors, ie, the material... "reading is stupid" while girls blame intrinsic factors, ie, themselves, "I didn't pay enough attention").

Believe me, in retrospect, I blame myself. I think I extrapolated "Jane Austen writes terribly uninteresting books" (and she does!) into "Any book that my English teacher assigns will be terribly uninteresting".

I don't segregate "boy" books and "girl" books necessarily into the gender of the protogonist though. It might tend in that direction, but I wouldn't put To Kill a Mockingbird into a "girl" book category just because the narrator is a little girl.

But looking at the list of 10 most assigned books, I would put 5, 7 and 10 (maybe 3, but I didn't appreciate this until I was older) into the category of "books teenaged boys might enjoy". I get that Shakespeare is awesome, but it held zero appeal to me as a teenager; I thought it was impenetrable, and gave me the impression that reading a book was supposed to be some sort of struggle.

Maybe cultivating an enjoyment of reading is a starting point, and maybe girls are simply more willing to suffer through books they aren't enjoying.

[bup]

Originally Posted by Kimstu

So why should the one format of printed text be different from the other formats where men do like fiction more than non-fiction?

Because women are more verbal. Women can talk and concentrate on something else they're doing at the same time. To men, that's an interruption. They have to stop what they're doing to answer.

Reading takes effort for men. More than it does for women.

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by bup

Reading takes effort for men. More than it does for women.

While this is something that I can certainly believe, I'd love to see some verified experimental evidence for it. I'm not sure how one would even go about testing that hypothesis, given how different the reading experience is for different people. (Nor do I have a clue as to why it should be so.)


If it's true, though, it would certainly explain why men on average don't gobble up text-only leisure reading at the rate that women on average do.

[Lamia]

Originally Posted by Fiveyearlurker

I don't segregate "boy" books and "girl" books necessarily into the gender of the protogonist though. It might tend in that direction, but I wouldn't put To Kill a Mockingbird into a "girl" book category just because the narrator is a little girl.

I could believe that the gender of the protagonist isn't as big a deal to boys as many people assume. We had a recent thread where a number of male Dopers said they didn't have a problem identifying with female protagonists, and a couple of years ago I had a thread about video games where many male Dopers expressed willingness to, or even a preference for, playing as a female character.

I would expect that the gender of the protagonist makes a difference, but the personal traits of the character and what the story is about probably also matter to many boys. I would assume that more boys would be interested in The Hunger Games than Twilight even though both are by women authors and have teen girls as the protagonists, because the former has more action/adventure and the latter has more romance.

[Apollyon]

Originally Posted by Exapno Mapcase

Science fiction in the old days was, maybe, 10% of the total book market. Female readers of SF were perhaps 10% of that market. So your "collective experience" missed a mere 99% of readers and 98% of females.

I note you say "in the old days"; has the M/F readership of SF changed substantially over time? Is it closer now to the norm for fiction? Are there other fiction genres that are also heavily skewed in favour of male readers? (Other than comics, natch).

[Dave Hartwick]

Originally Posted by Apollyon

I note you say "in the old days"; has the M/F readership of SF changed substantially over time? Is it closer now to the norm for fiction? Are there other fiction genres that are also heavily skewed in favour of male readers? (Other than comics, natch).

Judging by the reader reviews on sites like Goodreads, naval fiction, such as the Patrick O'Brien's Aubrey/Maturin novels. There's enough of these to make up a sub-genre.

Fiction genres with a strong imbalance favoring male readers include science fiction (32% of men, 20% of women), literature (27% of men, 22% of women) and graphic novels (15% of men, 8% of women).

http://www.marketingcharts.com/direc...on-fans-14476/

ETA: I'd guess that some sub-genres of speculative fiction, like military SF ala David Drake, lean even more toward a male readership.

Originally Posted by Kimstu

Sporting events aren't any more "factual" or "genuine" than a rock concert or reality talent show, although they're considerably less scripted. They certainly don't count as "nonfictional" in the same way that, say, a documentary about the Kashmir conflict is "nonfictional" compared to a Bollywood musical. Or, say, a scientific book about reconstructing evolutionary development from the fossil record is "nonfictional" compared to Jurassic Park.

Where I live, sports is considered non-fiction enough that it gets covered by the nightly news, even on high-brow public TV.

[Justin_Bailey]

Originally Posted by Lamia

That's one more study than you've come up with, and you're the one who's been going on about how anecdotes don't count. Now that I have linked to a peer-reviewed study indicating that you were wrong about the specific statement that Lynn Bodoni was questioning, you're throwing a tantrum. So was this really about the weakness of Lynn's evidence, or do you just have a problem with people who dare to disagree with you?

Exapno isn't the world's greatest debater. He's right until he grudgingly accepts that he might be wrong (at no time are you right). But as a public librarian, I think I have to side with him here. Over the last decade, girl protagonists have definitely reached parity with their male counterparts. Perhaps not in exact quantities, but the "phenomenon" books feature girls...

The Hunger Games trilogy
The Twilight saga
The Harry Potter series (fun fact, Harry Potter actually has three stars: Harry, Ron, and Hermione)

[Lynn Bodoni]

I think (and this is just a WAG) that this is going to depend on what you consider SF. I like hard SF, though I don't like engineer porn, where the author tells the reader in excruciating detail just which airplane part the narrator is adjusting (David Palmer, I'm looking at YOU). I regard fantasy as being closely related to SF, but not the same thing. And I consider horror to be a different genre than both SF and fantasy, though horror is usually grouped with SF in the movie section, and sometimes grouped with fantasy in books. There's a new subgenre, supernatural fantasy/paranormal romance (usually featuring vampires and/or werewolves, and always including romantic or sexual encounters between the monsters and the humans), and I think that the majority of consumers of this subgenre are female, so if you group this in with the SF/fantasy/horror section, you're going to see a big upswing in female readership.

I also think that there are more female readers in ALL sections of SF and regular fantasy these days. Or maybe we're just more willing to admit it. I see more women browsing in the SF/fantasy section of book stores, and when I go to cons, I also see more women than I used to. I used to be the only woman/girl browsing in SF when I started picking out my own books. Now, I'm likely to see other women. However, I have no way of knowing which subgenre they're looking for. Maybe they're looking for the latest Twilight clone. But maybe they're looking for the latest Vernor Vinge. And if I ask for specific help in the SF section, the person who takes care of that department is often a woman. Used to be, only men seemed to be assigned to the SF section.

When I started playing D&D, I was almost always the only female gamer. It was a rare group that had two females in it. Nowadays, the females might very well outnumber the males in some groups, though it seems that males are still the majority of the players, they aren't the overwhelming majority that they used to be.

Now I'll readily admit that the above are just my experiences, but they're experiences in several states and stores.

[Exapno Mapcase]

Originally Posted by Apollyon

I note you say "in the old days"; has the M/F readership of SF changed substantially over time? Is it closer now to the norm for fiction? Are there other fiction genres that are also heavily skewed in favour of male readers? (Other than comics, natch).

Man, I wish I could answer this in a sentence. And a thousand words from now so will you.

In the dawn of time writers just wrote. Publishers just published. Sometimes the stories would have an element of myth, or the supernatural, or terror, or scientific romance. It all got lumped together. There were fiction magazines but no specialty category magazines or publishing lines.

In the early 20th century publishers discovered that readers specialized, and that they did not like paying for 20 stories in a magazine when they read only four. The specialty pulp magazine was born. By the mid 20th century, there were science fiction magazines and fantasy magazines (and terror magazines, which we would call horror and which I'm going to ignore). Most of the time these tried to maintain the lines but some magazines ran both and some writers wrote both and some readers read both but enough readers who were huge fans of one hated the other so much that it was worth making the distinction commercially. In 1949 the Magazine of Fantasy started but changed its name with the second issue to the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, because they published a true mix and science fiction was more commercial a name. It stayed an anomaly, but the field was called SF or F&SF interchangeably.

In the 1950s SF finally became a book publishing category. Fantasy was a tiny outlier. SF was, in the cliche, about spaceships. The field was overwhelmingly male in every part from publishers to editors to writers to readers. There were always some females, but nobody guesses higher than 10%.

That began to change in the 1960s, after the paperback reprints of Tolkien took off spectacularly. Publishers began lines of faux-Tolkien, almost all written by men at first. Eventually they saw the readership of these fantasy lines skewed female and many more females started writing it. The Science Fiction Writers of America (SFWA) changed its name to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America (still SFWA: don't ask). The overall field, however, was still called either SF or F&SF and everybody understood it internally. SF was for men and Fantasy was for women, although both now had minorities of maybe 30% and certain writers had huge crossover appeal.

In the last decade, as romance took over the publishing world, a category called paranormal romance - romance with elements of F&SF - began to grow. It now may be larger than science fiction and fantasy combined. It is overwhelmingly female in authorship and readership. The writers join the Romance Writers of America and SFWA mostly ignores the whole thing. Is it F&SF? Um, probably, depending on who you talk to and the context.

Wait. It gets worse. Children's books and their offshoot, YA books, have always been an entirely separate publishing and marketing category. The very tony publisher Farrar Strauss Giroux wouldn't dream of publishing an adult science fiction work until the 1980s even though it made a mint off of Madeleine L'Engle's A Wrinkle in Time in 1962. All the super-mega-bestsellers of today are YA F&SF - Harry Potter, Twilight, Hunger Games, and many more. Their numbers are so huge that they dwarf all the adult fields combined. And their readership skews female, and gets more so with every female-oriented blockbuster.

Can I make it worse? Sure can. There are other marketing categories that may overlap. Technothrillers. Alternate History. Steampunk. Action-adventure. Tie-in books (all those novelizations of Star Wars and Star Trek and novels about superheroes and bunches more). And horror, which had its day in the mega category but has faded almost as far as westerns. All of these probably skew male, except for some of the tie-ins. Probably. Nobody seems to play too close attention.

So what is science fiction? Which of these categories and definitions do you use? It depends, it depends, it depends. Outside the industry, SF is still about spaceships. Inside, it's a giant muddle of everything you can think of and more. Magic realism, anyone?

[Lynn Bodoni]

Originally Posted by Justin_Bailey

Exapno isn't the world's greatest debater. He's right until he grudgingly accepts that he might be wrong (at no time are you right). But as a public librarian, I think I have to side with him here. Over the last decade, girl protagonists have definitely reached parity with their male counterparts. Perhaps not in exact quantities, but the "phenomenon" books feature girls...

The Hunger Games trilogy
The Twilight saga
The Harry Potter series (fun fact, Harry Potter actually has three stars: Harry, Ron, and Hermione)

I haven't read the Hunger Games. And I only read some of the Potter series, but I'm going to sort of disagree with you. In the books that I read, Harry was the central character. Sure, Ron and Hermione were very strong secondary characters, but the books were about Harry.

I just slogged my way through Twilight (first book) (it was on the clearance rack, and I was wondering if it could possibly be that bad). I'm not going to discuss its literary merits in detail, however, I really don't consider this to be fantasy. That's a pure teen romance book. Sure, there are vampires and werewolves in it, but I could rewrite that book into a mundane story with very little effort. The vampire could be in a witness protection program, or he's a deep undercover spy, so it's dangerous for the idiot narrator to get involved with him, and the bad guys/other nation's spies are targeting his infatuation. Seriously, this sort of thing was what a lot of girls read when I was a teen, minus the paranormal elements. Vampires and werewolves just add a little bit more sexiness to it. But the basic elements of "strong male is irresistibly attracted to ordinary female" that I remember are all there. Yeah, apparently the vampires have some special requirements so that they can't do EVERYTHING that humans can, and maybe they have to make more adjustments in later books, but in this first book, I would say that this is 98% romance, 2% paranormal.

However, there ARE a LOT more female protagonists in SF/fantasy these days. Many, many more. And not all of them are WASPs, either, or straight. So I'd say that the field is getting much more inclusive, not just towards women, but towards all potential readers.

[Dave Hartwick]

Originally Posted by Exapno Mapcase

Man, I wish I could answer this in a sentence. And a thousand words from now so will you.

No worries, I already did.

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by Dave Hartwick

Where I live, sports is considered non-fiction enough that it gets covered by the nightly news, even on high-brow public TV.

Well, that's another example of the societal gender bias through which things that primarily interest males are automatically assumed to be more "real" or "important" than things that primarily interest females. But it doesn't change the fact that intrinsically, professional sports are merely staged entertainment.

Just like rock concerts, Las Vegas floor shows, or TV quiz shows (which is the quasi-improvisational format that perhaps most closely resembles a sporting event, since how it will end depends on the unscripted play of the game), sports contests are organized, produced and marketed solely to excite the interest and attention of spectators. (And hopefully to make boatloads of money for the organizers as a consequence.)

All of them are staged performances, pure and simple. They exist only to be watched for their entertainment value. News coverage of actual non-entertainment events such as wars, accidents, crimes, etc. (discounting Wag the Dog-type cynicism about examples of such things being made up for PR purposes) depicts things that exist in real life, not just to make a profit from entertaining spectators. They are "non-fictional" compared to sporting events in the same way, as I said, that a documentary is "non-fictional" compared to a movie musical.

Of course, I'm not arguing that there's anything wrong with covering sports on nightly news, if that's what viewers like. Nor is there anything wrong with showing news footage about a rock concert, for that matter. But that doesn't mean that the content of either of those events is thereby transformed into something "non-fictional". It's all just made-up entertainment.

[Justin_Bailey]

Originally Posted by Kimstu

Well, that's another example of the societal gender bias through which things that primarily interest males are automatically assumed to be more "real" or "important" than things that primarily interest females. But it doesn't change the fact that intrinsically, professional sports are merely staged entertainment.

It's all just made-up entertainment.

Please consult a dictionary for the actual definitions of "staged" and "made-up" because you clearly don't understand them as they relate to sports.

[Thudlow Boink]

Sporting events, quiz shows, rock concerts, etc. aren't fiction. Sure, they exist for their entertainment value, but that's not what the word "fiction" means.

[Thudlow Boink]

It's been claimed in this thread that women read more than men, and also that women's reading tastes run more toward fiction than men's do. I can believe both claims, but I'd like to throw out another theory/WAG:

Omnivorous, eclectic readers—those who read books of many different types and genres, both fiction and non-fiction—are evenly divided between the sexes, or may even be more male than female. At least, of the people I've read describing their wide-ranging, diverse reading, the majority seem to have been men.

[Mister Rik]

Originally Posted by Kimstu

So it could be that at least part of the difference in female and male fiction consumption is simply the counterpart to the difference in male and female (photographic) porn consumption. Men prefer to see it and women prefer to read about it: simple as that. (Well no, the complete explanation is almost certainly not as simple as that, but I can easily believe that that's a major factor.)

I'll agree it's not that simple. While I enjoy looking at pictures/movies of naked ladies getting busy as much as the next straight guy, I've always ultimately preferred written porn/erotica. I'm not sure how much of that was born of necessity and how much is just my nature. I discovered my own personal kink/fetish (spanking/BDSM) when I was 13-14 years old. Too young to buy porn (and you couldn't get what I wanted at the newsstand anyway), and being almost two decades away from even hearing the word "Internet", I resorted to writing my own "erotic fiction" (in longhand, in spiral notebooks). Of course, most of what I wrote then was ridiculous, considering I was still a few years away from actually losing my own virginity and my only available "research" material was the occasional peeks into Variations magazine at the nearby convenience store, but it got me started. When I discovered the Internet as an adult, I thought, "Yay! I can find what I'm looking for now!". Except I couldn't, and still can't. Oh, there's videos out there that cover the topic, but the stuff that isn't completely faked is either too over-the-top/extreme for my tastes, or focuses on aspects of the "scene" that don't interest me. And so I've continued to write my own, though not as much these days. But when I was in my "prolific" period and publishing online, I seemed to be one of the more well-regarded writers in my "genre". I had a lot of female "fans" and got a lot of positive comments that my characters felt like real people with personalities and emotions, instead of the more common "cardboard cutouts performing sex scenes".

Interestingly, somebody here on the SDMB posted a link a few years back to an online tool that would analyze your writing and determine whether it was more "masculine" or "feminine", and I was mildly surprised that it rated my writing as quite "feminine". Might explain why the ladies liked my writing so much.

Originally Posted by filmore

I prefer non-fiction because it's typically real stories told with real outcomes. I feel like I learn something about human nature and the world when I read non-fiction.

I dislike reading fiction because I can feel the author shaping the world to fit the needs of the story. I feel like it's useless to try to figure out what will happen since the author can just tweak the plot however they want. Everything feels so contrived. Most of the time it seems fiction writers are writing the same stories but just changing the names of the characters and the settings.

The Seven Main Plots in All of Literature

Originally Posted by filmore

Women seem to enjoy the actual act of conversing. They enjoy the journey of getting to the conclusion. Men want to know the conclusion and the relevant details that lead to that conclusion. Fiction is a bunch of made up fluff leading to a made up conclusion. Non-fiction typically is about the important details which lead to the conclusion.

The way I see it, non-fiction is inherently limited by the "facts". "Here's what happened, to whom, and here's the result". If the writer wants to make a point about something, he/she is limited to interpreting the actual events. Might as well read the newspaper, IMO.

Fiction, OTOH, allows the writer to determine the "point" he or she wants to make from the outset, and then devise the best way to make that point. I've always liked something Neil Gaiman said in the special features on the Beowulf DVD:

"The important thing about any story where you fight a dragon is not that you're telling people that dragons are real; but you're telling people that dragons can be defeated. And that is a huge, true thing, and something that should never be forgotten."

Originally Posted by Fiveyearlurker

As a male and a reader, who stopped reading for about ten years after high school, I can say that high school turned me off reading for quite some time. There was a tendency toward books and authors (The Scarlet Letter and Jane Austen come to mind immediately. I think Jane Austen is responsible for eight of those ten years.) that I simply could not find any interest whatsoever in.

I've said before that I believe English teachers get it backwards by trying to instill a love of literature. What they need to do instead is instill a love of reading first. A love of reading may eventually lead to a love of "literature". But forcing a 16-year-old boy to wallow through Wuthering Heights is liable to turn a kid with little interest in reading into somebody with no interest in reading.

Originally Posted by Lynn Bodoni

There's a new subgenre, supernatural fantasy/paranormal romance (usually featuring vampires and/or werewolves, and always including romantic or sexual encounters between the monsters and the humans), and I think that the majority of consumers of this subgenre are female, so if you group this in with the SF/fantasy/horror section, you're going to see a big upswing in female readership.

The only supernatural/paranormal/urban fantasy I've read has been the Greywalker series by Kat Richardson. It's set in modern-day Seattle, has a strong female protaganist, and I've thoroughly enjoyed every book I've read so far (first five). No sex between the protaganist and vampires, though

[Thudlow Boink]

Originally Posted by Mister Rik

I've always liked something Neil Gaiman said in the special features on the Beowulf DVD:

"The important thing about any story where you fight a dragon is not that you're telling people that dragons are real; but you're telling people that dragons can be defeated. And that is a huge, true thing, and something that should never be forgotten."

FWIW I'm pretty sure that's a paraphrase of something G. K. Chesterton wrote.

[No Wikipedia Cites]

Originally Posted by Thudlow Boink

FWIW I'm pretty sure that's a paraphrase of something G. K. Chesterton wrote.

Sounds like it's from the essay about Elfland from Orthodoxy

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by Thudlow Boink

Sporting events, quiz shows, rock concerts, etc. aren't fiction. Sure, they exist for their entertainment value, but that's not what the word "fiction" means.

Take it up with Dave Hartwick: he's the one who at the start of this page brought up this particular entertainment format by replying to me as follows:

Originally Posted by Dave Hartwick

Are you overlooking sports?

If we want to leave ALL performance arts, including sports and music, out of this discussion, then I'm certainly willing to do so. But if someone's trying to use the example of sports to support the assertion that men in general like "reality" in their entertainment more than women do, they're talking out their ass. A sports game is no more "real" than a rock concert (although, as I've noted repeatedly, it is less scripted).

Originally Posted by Justin Bailey

Please consult a dictionary for the actual definitions of "staged" and "made-up" because you clearly don't understand them as they relate to sports.

This is a gut reaction of shock and rejection rather than a rational counter-argument. What I said about sports being "staged" and "made-up" entertainment is absolutely true.

As I noted in my first post on the subject, I acknowledge that sports is a type of staged entertainment with an IMPROVISATIONAL format. That means that the performers don't know in advance everything that's going to happen or exactly how it will all end (barring some serious cheating, of course). But it is still indisputably a staged performance, in the sense that it is shown to an audience in a specially designed venue, and it is indisputably made-up in the sense that its traditional genre conventions (rules) are fundamentally arbitrary.

If a quiz show is a staged performance, then a baseball game is a staged performance. If a folk dance performance is made-up entertainment, then a football game is made-up entertainment.

Professional sports is not ultimately any more "real" or "genuine" than any other entertainment medium. It's all just people in costumes exhibiting their skills at performing particular actions which are specified by a bunch of artificially determined genre conventions in a staged performance venue. Whether they're kicking a ball towards a net, remembering randomly chosen facts about Louis XIV, or executing a grand jete is irrelevant to that basic identity.



Sports is a form of staged performance carried out for audience entertainment. So far, the only attempts at rebuttal of this perfectly reasonable position that have been presented here are "Well, but sports is covered on the news!" and "Oh, you just don't know what you're talking about!" Sorry guys, but those are not valid and relevant arguments.

[Mister Rik]

Originally Posted by Thudlow Boink

FWIW I'm pretty sure that's a paraphrase of something G. K. Chesterton wrote.

Originally Posted by No Wikipedia Cites

Sounds like it's from the essay about Elfland from Orthodoxy

Hey, cool, I'll have to look that up. Having been raised in an evangelical Christian environment, where reading fantasy was heavily discouraged on the grounds that it "promotes belief in witchcraft/monsters/false gods", I liked the Gaiman quote because it summed up my personal feelings perfectly: fantasy stories are not claiming anything in them to be "real", they're using the concepts as metaphors for real life. That the quote originated with a respected Christian writer is a beautiful bonus.

[Justin_Bailey]

Originally Posted by Kimstu

This is a gut reaction of shock and rejection rather than a rational counter-argument. What I said about sports being "staged" and "made-up" entertainment is absolutely true.

Sport is a contest of skill. That makes it COMPLETELY different from a music concert and other forms of performance art. You can dress up your argument however you want, but the argument showing that you're wrong is actually quite simple.

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by Justin_Bailey

Sport is a contest of skill.

So is a quiz show. Or, for that matter, a dance competition. Are you trying to claim that those are not forms of staged entertainment either?

Originally Posted by Justin_Bailey

You can dress up your argument however you want, but the argument showing that you're wrong is actually quite simple.

Well then, feel free to make it any time now.

[Justin_Bailey]

Originally Posted by Kimstu

So is a quiz show. Or, for that matter, a dance competition. Are you trying to claim that those are not forms of staged entertainment either?

Of course they're not. Any contest of skill is, by definition, non-fictional. It really is as simple as that.

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by Justin_Bailey

Of course they're not. Any contest of skill is, by definition, non-fictional. It really is as simple as that.

So you're equating "fictional" with "staged entertainment"?

Is a rock concert fictional?

[Justin_Bailey]

Originally Posted by Kimstu

So you're equating "fictional" with "staged entertainment"?

Is a rock concert fictional?

A rock concert is a separate realm. From a strict fiction/non-fiction point of view, sports and music are both "non-fiction," full stop. Plays are considered non-fiction, technically. But in the real world that's not how these things work.

A rock concert is a performance

A sporting event is a contest of skill

A play is a performance

A dance recital is a performance

A dance competition is a contest of skill

The contests of skill are clearly "non-fiction" in the librarian sense of the word. But they are not "staged" in the real world sense of that word.

Whereas performances are also "non-fiction" (to a librarian), but they are also "staged."

[Kimstu]

I think you're confusing "staged" with "scripted".

A play or dance recital is scripted in the sense that everything that happens in it is (supposed to be) pre-determined. Whereas in a competition or sports game, it is not (supposed to be) pre-determined exactly what happens or how it ends.

However, any type of show, including a competition or contest as well as a play or recital, may be staged in the sense of "presented for audience entertainment in a pre-arranged time and venue".

There's another sense of "staged" meaning "faked" or "pretending to be spontaneous when it was actually scripted", but that's not the sense in which I'm using the word.

[Justin_Bailey]

Originally Posted by Kimstu

There's another sense of "staged" meaning "faked" or "pretending to be spontaneous when it was actually scripted", but that's not the sense in which I'm using the word.

Then you need to choose a new word.

[Ellis Dee]

Originally Posted by Kimstu

I think you're confusing "staged" with "scripted".

You're confused about sports in general. The games would be played even without an audience, and in fact this has happened at a major level reasonably recently when fans were barred from a soccer match for fear of violence.

Sports are more non-fiction than other staged entertainment by virtue of being actual, honest-to-goodness competition. That's why rock concert "results" (whatever that would mean) aren't shown on the news.

Here's a simple litmus test: If you can bet real, actual money on something, then it's real.

Originally Posted by Kimstu

Well, that's another example of the societal gender bias through which things that primarily interest males are automatically assumed to be more "real" or "important" than things that primarily interest females.

Geez, bitter much? Women's fluff is represented on the news too. It's called entertainment reporting.

Originally Posted by Kimstu

Again, though, this ultimately addresses the question of why men and women tend to favor different themes in fiction, not why men like a certain fictional format (i.e., printed text) less than women do.

Why did we disallow the explanation that men are visual, women are verbal?

[Lamia]

Originally Posted by Justin_Bailey

Exapno isn't the world's greatest debater. He's right until he grudgingly accepts that he might be wrong (at no time are you right). But as a public librarian, I think I have to side with him here. Over the last decade, girl protagonists have definitely reached parity with their male counterparts. Perhaps not in exact quantities, but the "phenomenon" books feature girls...

The Hunger Games trilogy
The Twilight saga
The Harry Potter series (fun fact, Harry Potter actually has three stars: Harry, Ron, and Hermione)

Is that actually siding with him, though? Because this doesn't seem to support what Exapno was saying, and is actually pretty consistent with what I was saying earlier in the thread. As I indicated back in post #12, I would expect that the success of the Twilight and Hunger Games books has led to more YA books with female protagonists being published. While I have no idea what the current YA protagonist gender ratio is (I did some searching but couldn't find any stats on this), it wouldn't surprise me if in recent years it had become more or less evenly balanced. But this:

Originally Posted by Exapno Mapcase

Girls will read books with boy heroes; boys won't read books with girl heroes: that gives girls twice as many books to read. These are giant glib generalizations and there's a good chance they won't survive because culture is changing to allow girls to be more active (girls are nuts about archery because of Katniss) and they are getting involved in traditionally male occupations and roles.

and this:

Originally Posted by Exapno Mapcase

I'm talking about the collective experience of every child combined into a trend (not an absolute). Your experience is not a trend. No individual experience matters. There were girl hero books but you choose not to read them. Other girls did.

sure don't look like claims that "girls hero books" and "boy hero books" only became equally common within the past decade. Especially not since the "you" referred to in the second quote was Lynn, who'd said:

Originally Posted by Lynn Bodoni

That assumes an equal distribution of protagonists by sex. I don't think this is the case. When I was a little girl, I mostly read books with boy heroes[...]

While I'm not sure exactly how old Lynn is, I am fairly certain that when she was talking about being a little girl she was referring to a time prior to the publication of Twilight (2005).

Since I realize this is turning into a hijack, I want to tie this back to the OP's question. (So the rest of this post isn't directed at you, Justin.) I am skeptical about claims that men prefer non-fiction because boys don't want to read fiction about girls and thus wind up less keen on fiction in general. If the vast majority of children's fiction were about girls then maybe that would put boys off, but that's not the case. There are plenty of books about boys. I also doubt that anyone inclined to enjoy reading fiction would be forever deterred by the mere existence of fiction that they personally found unappealing. No one reads everything. I mostly read fiction, but there are whole genres that I avoid. There are also people who stick mostly to a favorite fiction subgenre and read little else. The fact that, say, cozy mysteries are only a small subset of all the novels in the world doesn't stop fans from finding and reading the books they enjoy.

If the existence of fiction about girls were enough to turn boys against fiction, why wouldn't the existence of non-fiction about girls and traditionally feminine topics turn them against non-fiction? While I'm sure that many young boys are uninterested in "girl books" and/or would be afraid to be seen reading one, books like this and this are non-fiction and obviously "girl books". There are also "girl TV shows" and "girl movies", but this doesn't seem to have turned guys against those TV shows and movies that are targeted at them.

That said, I don't have any brilliant alternate theory for why men tend to prefer non-fiction to fiction. I suggested some ideas earlier in the thread, but I don't really know. It's hard to say why anyone prefers anything. That's not to say there aren't reasons, just that they're not necessarily obvious or easy to articulate. I'm a woman who prefers reading fiction, but I couldn't say why women in general tend to prefer fiction or even why I prefer fiction. And it's not like there aren't any men who prefer reading fiction, so there must be non gender specific reasons for such a preference.

[Lynn Bodoni]

While I'm not sure exactly how old Lynn is, I am fairly certain that when she was talking about being a little girl she was referring to a time prior to the publication of Twilight (2005).

I'm 54, and when I was growing up, I always heard that boys could be doctors, and girls could be nurses, and all that good stuff. And this was mostly reflected in the stories that I read. Not just the SF and fantasy stories, but the mundane stories as well, both kidlit AND the stuff intended for adults. I remember reading Raising Demons or its sequel by Shirley Jackson, and how, when she was admitted to the hospital during childbirth, the nurses insisted on putting down that her occupation was "housewife", rather than "writer", as she kept telling them. At the time, I wondered why having the correct occupation put down was so important to her.

Basically, women and girls in literature at that time served to be romantic interests or goals for guys, if the stuff was written for the general public. If the target audience was female, then the female main character (and let's not call her a hero) was usually very interested in the males in the story, even if the book wasn't a romance, there was a romantic element in it, that is, it was as though a female character wasn't complete unless she was very interested in one or more males, even if she was studying to be a nurse or something. Compare that to the many, many stories that had only males, who apparently either had never heard of females or never thought about females. Sometimes a girlfriend or wife or mother would appear, usually to serve snacks, be threatened, or to protest tearfully that Our Hero mustn't put himself in danger. Of course, Our Hero would jut his jaw and declare that it was his DUTY to go and fetch the national secrets or kill the bad guys or whatever, and that she shouldn't worry her pretty little head about such things.

There were a few exceptions, but VERY few.

[Mister Rik]

Originally Posted by Lynn Bodoni

I'm 54, and when I was growing up, I always heard that boys could be doctors, and girls could be nurses, and all that good stuff. And this was mostly reflected in the stories that I read. Not just the SF and fantasy stories, but the mundane stories as well, both kidlit AND the stuff intended for adults. I remember reading Raising Demons or its sequel by Shirley Jackson, and how, when she was admitted to the hospital during childbirth, the nurses insisted on putting down that her occupation was "housewife", rather than "writer", as she kept telling them. At the time, I wondered why having the correct occupation put down was so important to her.

I think I can trace my enjoyment of female protaganists back to Arkady Darell in Asimov's "Second Foundation", who I first encountered around the age of 13-14. I always thought Asimov wrote good female characters, at least in the context of the era in which he was writing.

[coolbyrne]

Originally Posted by Nunzio Tavulari

As to comic books, people over the age of 14 who read picture books about men in tights wouldn't have been considered men when I was growing up.

While I have no doubt that this was true for you... wow. At risk of hijacking the thread, I'd like to think times have changed somewhat and offer you this link:

500 Essential Graphic Novels

Hopefully this will give you a different perspective regarding "picture books about men in tights" and perhaps even change your perspective about those who read them.

[Mister Rik]

To be fair, it took the comic book companies themselves 30+ years to realize that their product wasn't just "kid stuff".

[cmyk]

Just counting the books on my iPad, I count:

11 non-fiction.
29 fiction.

Dude, here, who loves his fiction (and non-fiction) alike.

[Apollyon]

Originally Posted by Exapno Mapcase

Man, I wish I could answer this in a sentence. And a thousand words from now so will you.

A bit under 700 actually, and appreciated, thank you.

Can I make it worse? Sure can. There are other marketing categories that may overlap. Technothrillers. Alternate History. Steampunk. Action-adventure. Tie-in books ...

So what is science fiction? Which of these categories and definitions do you use? It depends, it depends, it depends. Outside the industry, SF is still about spaceships. Inside, it's a giant muddle of everything you can think of and more. Magic realism, anyone?

So SF still skews strongly male... but only for certain values of "SF"? Fair enough. Probably still true then for the "spaceships" definition if that enompasses the "harder" end of SF and the military SF sub-genre, but I do take your point the demarkation lines get very blurry around the edges, (or overlap) of SF and F... and even other genres.

How would one categorise a steampunk + comedy of manners + romance + vampire + werewolf series? (Soulless and the rest of the Parasol Protectorate).
(Thoroughly enjoyable is how I'd characterise it... but categorise it? Errm...)

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by Justin_Bailey

Then you need to choose a new word.

I don't think so. You seem to have been the only one who was confused by it.

[Kimstu]

Originally Posted by Ellis Dee

You're confused about sports in general. The games would be played even without an audience, and in fact this has happened at a major level reasonably recently when fans were barred from a soccer match for fear of violence.

No, an occasional and anomalous exception like that doesn't really count. There are similarly bizarre circumstances (due to legal contractual obligations or whatnot) where a performance of a play may be given in the absence of an audience too, but that doesn't mean that plays in general don't require audiences. Likewise, professional sports also ultimately exists for the entertainment of audiences.

It's not that I don't understand sports but rather that you don't understand what an improvisational format in entertainment is. Just because there's no way to know exactly what the ending of an improvisational entertainment event is going to be (and therefore you can bet on the various possible outcomes) doesn't make the event somehow more "real" or less "artificial".

The whole structure of winning and losing, league standings, playoffs, championships, etc., is part of an artificially designed system to heighten drama and excitement for the fans. Sure, sincere competition and unscripted responses are built into this system just as they are into quiz shows, but that doesn't make it any less in essence an artificial construct.

Originally Posted by Ellis Dee

Sports are more non-fiction than other staged entertainment by virtue of being actual, honest-to-goodness competition. [...]

Geez, bitter much? Women's fluff is represented on the news too. It's called entertainment reporting.

Not bitter at all. Just pointing out the simple fact that (as your own post makes very clear) sports are a form of entertainment that is generally not called entertainment. This is done in order to foster the illusion that sports are somehow more serious or important or "real" than other forms of entertainment.

And in any case, if you agree with Justin Bailey that showing "actual, honest-to-goodness competition" makes sports more "non-fiction" than a scripted performance, then presumably you also agree with him that other "actual, honest-to-goodness competition" formats like dance competitions and quiz shows are also more "non-fiction" than a scripted performance.

So if men liking to watch sports is supposed to indicate a general male preference for "reality" in their entertainment formats, then women liking to watch dance competitions must similarly indicate a female preference for such "reality" in entertainment too.

Originally Posted by Ellis Dee

Why did we disallow the explanation that men are visual, women are verbal?

Who's disallowing it?

[Ellis Dee]

Originally Posted by Kimstu

And in any case, if you agree with Justin Bailey that showing "actual, honest-to-goodness competition" makes sports more "non-fiction" than a scripted performance, then presumably you also agree with him that other "actual, honest-to-goodness competition" formats like dance competitions and quiz shows are also more "non-fiction" than a scripted performance.

I do, absolutely, yes.

So if men liking to watch sports is supposed to indicate a general male preference for "reality" in their entertainment formats, then women liking to watch dance competitions must similarly indicate a female preference for such "reality" in entertainment too.

This just shows how out of touch you are when it comes to sports. If you really think that there is a comparable level of interest between men and sports and women and dance competitions, I wonder what color the sky is in your world.

[No Wikipedia Cites]

Originally Posted by Mister Rik

Hey, cool, I'll have to look that up. Having been raised in an evangelical Christian environment, where reading fantasy was heavily discouraged on the grounds that it "promotes belief in witchcraft/monsters/false gods", I liked the Gaiman quote because it summed up my personal feelings perfectly: fantasy stories are not claiming anything in them to be "real", they're using the concepts as metaphors for real life. That the quote originated with a respected Christian writer is a beautiful bonus.

I found the Elfand bit online, for anyone who cares:

The things I believed most then, the things I believe most now, are the things called fairy tales. They seem to me to be the entirely reasonable things. They are not fantasies: compared with them other things are fantastic. Compared with them religion and rationalism are both abnormal, though religion is abnormally right and rationalism abnormally wrong. Fairyland is nothing but the sunny country of common sense. It is not earth that judges heaven, but heaven that judges earth; so for me at least it was not earth that criticised elfland, but elfland that criticised the earth. . . . But I deal here with what ethic and philosophy come from being fed on fairy tales. If I were describing them in detail I could note many noble and healthy principles that arise from them. There is the chivalrous lesson of "Jack the Giant Killer"; that giants should be killed because they are gigantic. It is a manly mutiny against pride as such. For the rebel is older than all the kingdoms, and the Jacobin has more tradition than the Jacobite. There is the lesson of "Cinderella," which is the same as that of the Magnificat—exaltavit humiles. There is the great lesson of "Beauty and the Beast"; that a thing must be loved before it is loveable.

[BlinkingDuck]

I pretty much read non-fictionup to about 9th grade. I did read some fiction, like Tom Swift, but 90%+ non-fiction.

Why? Well, it was long ago...and I was CURIOUS about...things. I can even recall the rough order.

2nd grade - Bugs...nature....frogs....ponds...bugs....ants...bees....bugs....snakes....bugs. This curiousity carried over into physical exploration some of which makes me cringe to this day. I look back on myself and wonder if I was a narrowly averted serial killer...but I don't think so as it was driven by curiosity and not hate or wanting to see suffering. I still remembering getting into an 'argument' with a teacher about an anthill having only one queen. I knew they had more because I had been digging them up and snagging queens for some time. he did apologise after talking to a friend of his that was a biology prof.

4th grade - SPACE! and DINOSAURS! I know all 9 planets and their moons...all 12 of Jupiters and all 9 of Saturn's . Dinosaurs...man...they were COOL. read every book on them I could find.

6-9th grade and, well never really stopped - World War I and II.

10th grade - 12th - Space again...but more of a cosmology and physics slant. Big Bang, Black Holes and all that. Even took shit for reading a book entirely about Neutrinos. Also, History, particularly military but more ancient. Greek, Roman that sort of thing. Also took a shining to ancient military weaponry and would try to build them. Built a catapult (didn't work the greatest) but my ballistae was probably really, truly dangerous.

While I read fiction, It didn't really become >50% until late 20's.

To summarize...as a boy I was curious about the world. I wanted to know how it worked. Fiction doesn't get you that. Books on 'things' do.

[John DiFool]

I've taken the opposite tack: I simply find most fiction today to be hugely deriviative (talking specifically about fantasy & sci-fi), and the last few times I've tried to give such a novel a go I've become immensely bored pretty quickly. Non-fiction by contrast (and by definition) has a much broader scope, and I can find an enjoyable non-fiction yarn if I want to (expeditions to dangerous places and such).

[Manda JO]

As an English teacher, I have spent a lot of time thinking about this issue.

The divide is not between fiction and non-fiction. It's between narrative and non-narrative. In my experience, some people are not at all interested in narrative. Other people are so interested in narrative that they never even see anything else.

Non-Narrative people tend to, IME, avoid narrative across media: they read non-fiction and not biographies or memoirs, watch sports and documentaries, listen to instrumental music. They are, in my experience as an English teachers, somewhat more likely to be boys than girls, but not overwhelmingly so.

I teach a course called AP English Language. It is supposed to focus on non-fiction and rhetoric. IME, many English teachers (who, by and large, are narrative types) end up finding all sorts of narrative non-fiction for their kids to read. It's like the non-narrative stuff (especially if it's book length) doesn't register as "Literature" and isn't deserving of serious study. The test is you ask them "What is Walden about?" and if they start out with "Well, Thoreau decides to leave civilization and see . . .", they are a narrative teacher. If they say "Man's interaction with society . . ." they are a non-narrative type.

I try really hard to be a non-narrative English teacher because I think a lot of the non-narrative types think they are intellectually lacking because they "don't like to read" when in fact they really don't care about story. They like words and ideas.

As to why this is more common with boys? I think it probably goes back to the whole idea that women are socialized to think that relationships (not just romantic, but more broadly interpersonal) are the point of everything else. I think it's more that some people need a story to give value to context than it is that other people can't value context if it's cluttered up by story.

[Thudlow Boink]

Originally Posted by Manda JO

The divide is not between fiction and non-fiction. It's between narrative and non-narrative. In my experience, some people are not at all interested in narrative. Other people are so interested in narrative that they never even see anything else.

Non-Narrative people tend to, IME, avoid narrative across media: they read non-fiction and not biographies or memoirs, watch sports and documentaries, listen to instrumental music. They are, in my experience as an English teachers, somewhat more likely to be boys than girls, but not overwhelmingly so.

I think you may be right, to draw the distinction between narrative and non-narrative.

I teach a course called AP English Language. It is supposed to focus on non-fiction and rhetoric. IME, many English teachers (who, by and large, are narrative types) end up finding all sorts of narrative non-fiction for their kids to read. It's like the non-narrative stuff (especially if it's book length) doesn't register as "Literature" and isn't deserving of serious study. The test is you ask them "What is Walden about?" and if they start out with "Well, Thoreau decides to leave civilization and see . . .", they are a narrative teacher. If they say "Man's interaction with society . . ." they are a non-narrative type.

I try really hard to be a non-narrative English teacher because I think a lot of the non-narrative types think they are intellectually lacking because they "don't like to read" when in fact they really don't care about story. They like words and ideas.

Thank you for this. I myself love both narrative and non-narrative works, but I never read much, if any, non-narrative literature in any of the English classes I had (high school or college). It was only after I graduated that I discovered collections of essays, anthologies like The Borzoi Reader and The Norton Reader, and things like that and discovered how much I really enjoyed and appreciated those non-narrative sorts of literature.