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 because most of the books that had girl heroes were what I would call juvie romance books, where the main character was wondering which of two boys she liked more, and which would ask her out. There were almost NO action/adventure or science fiction books with a female hero, when I was a girl. I looked for them. The only one I remember, off the top of my head, was The Tombs of Atuan. There were a couple of horse books that had girl heroes, but in most of that genre, the heroes were male. So, I really didn’t have twice as many books to read…I had about as many books as any boy of my age. I mean, the boys could have read the books with girl heroes, too, assuming that they were more capable of suppressing their nausea than I was.
My daughter is dyslexic, and she hated reading for pleasure for a long time. She enjoyed it when I read to her, mind you, but the act of reading was a chore. When she got old enough that she wanted longer books, I’d only read a chapter at a time, and she finally got so impatient with this that she’d pick up a particularly engaging book and just force herself to read. (Thank you, Diana Wynne Jones). Today, reading is one of her hobbies, and she’s even taught herself to read Japanese, in both Romanji (Roman alphabet) and kanji (the Japanese characters). It wasn’t easy for her to transition from a reluctant reader to an avid reader, but she obviously felt that the enjoyment was worth it.
Don’t make bigoted statements if you don’t want someone telling you they are bigoted. The least we can do to people who have bigoted thoughts is to make them feel bad for sharing them.
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.
I knew as soon as I posted that someone would come along and try to use an anecdote to counter me. It didn’t occur to me until later because I find the notion so incomprehensible. Anecdotes don’t count. You’ve heard that the plural of anecdote is not data? What a hundred million girls and boys do control the book industry, not your personal history. This is more than a pet peeve of mine about the Internet. It’s a failure to think that infests peoples’ understanding of the world. It sets me off. It happens to be you this time, Lynn, but it could have been anyone because this is so common.
Some personal experiences are meaningful: that’s how we learn things from one another. But not all of them are and the big things in life - consumerism, voting, demographics, population - revolve around collections rather than individuals.
Yeah, this is a horrible thing to tell people. You don’t count. I don’t count. We only count when we’re aggregated into the millions. It sucks. But it’s real. End of rant.
I can definitely attest to this in my case. Once I became Kindleized my reading shot up 1000%.
Conversely I guess I don’t follow the trend with regards to fiction; as I’m male and I read fiction. However, I’m looking for an author I enjoy. I’ve been a big fan of Michael Connelly; but over the last year I’ve read all of his books. I recently started reading James Patterson. I’m not sure I like his style. I’ve only read the first two “women’s murder club” books. I just started the third one last night; I’m hoping I get away from the feeling that they’re written by a woman romance author… "I melted into arms as he held me tight. My skin tingled at his touch and feel of his breath on my neck… blah blah blah.
:dubious: Dunno if this is a sarcastic response to Rigamarole’s sarcastic suggestion, but just in case anybody is taking any of this seriously:
Come on folks, there’s no realistic reason to think that men on average are any less emotional or any less interested in non-factual fantasizing than women. Think of comic books and superhero/sci-fi/thriller action movies, which are primarily marketed to and consumed by men. Plenty of emotion and fantasy in those!
Obviously, it’s not that men are somehow less susceptible than women to the lure of the made-up narrative that engages imaginative and emotional responses.
It’s just that men seem on average to be less interested than women in a particular format of made-up narrative: namely, the all-text, purely verbal fiction format. Why is that?
Good question and lots of good suggestions for answers. I just have one comment on one of Exapno Mapcase’s recent points: you note that “Culturally, female pornography was completely forbidden”, which is true, but I think that “non-pornographic” romance novels previously served, and still to some extent serve, a very similar function to outright erotica. Passionate tales of ardent suitors, even if they never explicitly describe sex acts, are sought out by many female readers for ultimately much the same reasons that men look for pictures of boobies.
One thing that might explain the difference is how men and women view conversation. Men are typically more conclusion based, while women more enjoy the actual act of conversation. For example:
Man: I ran into Mike at the mall and he invited us to a party.
Woman: Something interesting happened to me today at the mall. You know I needed a new set of shoes because my other ones broke when we were at the movie and I needed to go to the bathroom? Well, I saw that Dillards had some on sale so I went to the mall. Oh my god was the parking lot full! It took me so long to find a spot. I almost saw one at the door, but it was handicapped. I eventually found one by JcPenny. You know I hate that store … … … … … . . . … . . (many minutes later) I saw Mike at the mall. You remember him? He and Penny have that lake house … … … (many minutes later) … They’re having a party.
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.
I give this a firm maybe. Now that romance and especially erotic romance have become such juggernauts in the industry, people talk a lot about what place they occupy in the spectrum of pornography and emotions. Mostly hot air, IMO, because I’ve never read anything that convinces me about the overall role pornography plays in the first place.
The narrow role is simple. Men read pornography to masturbate. Erotica may be read for additional reasons, which is the distinction I place between them. If you use that as a premise then romance novels are not pornography. They may play an emotional role that is parallel to pornography but if their primary purpose is not to get you to masturbate, during or after, it’s not the same role.
The actual amount of sex is irrelevant. The sleaze paperbacks I mentioned have no explicit sex in them at all, just sexual situations. I find it hard to imagine anybody masturbating to them, but that was apparently their function. The cover pictures must have helped. When you look at romance novels from that era the lack of sexual situations from a modern pov stands out. Heroines remained virgins to the end. Heartstrings were tugged instead of panties. Some women must have used them as starting points for masturbatory fantasies but that was not their purpose.
Modern women’s erotica does have that purpose. Earlier, though, the functions were parallel rather than overlapping. So, maybe.
Actually, there were damn few girl hero books. The books that had girls as main characters rarely treated those girls as actual heroes. The girls would, instead, pose and flirt and generally acted passively. And, let me remind you, boys COULD have read these stories, so the boys had access to just as many books and stories as girls did. And that’s also reality. You might say that the boys would have been mocked if they read girly stories, well, what do you think happened to girls who read adventure/action/SF stories?
Now, I thought of another exception. James Schmitz’s main characters were often females. I was flabbergasted when I read the first Telzey Amberdon story “Novice”, but let’s admit right here that this story, and this author, were damn near unique. Heinlein had Podkayne, but while she was a hero, she was also turning from being an adventurous sort to thinking that she’d prefer to pop out babies, at the end of the book. And a great deal of her activities centered around her romantic goals.
Yes, my experience IS an anecdote. But talk to any fem SF fan of my age, and see what she tells you. My experience isn’t unique. In fact, I’d say that my experience is damn near universal in my age group. So there’s your collective experience. The SF publishers were targeting males, and they didn’t WANT females reading SF. They certainly weren’t going to go after female readers. The pendulum has swung the other way now, and these days fantasy stories more commonly have female main characters, but even now, we have Harry, not Harriet, Potter.
You missed the point. See my previous post: many types of fictional entertainment that are avidly and primarily consumed by men, such as comic books and action movies, are ALSO “a bunch of made up fluff leading to a made up conclusion”. Men like that kind of “made up fluff” just fine.
There really does not seem to be any factual basis to support the idea that men are somehow intrinsically less attracted by “made up fluff” than women are, or that men aren’t interested in irrelevant fictional details as well as in “the conclusion”. If that were true, then all action movies would be five minutes long and comic books would be printed on a single page.
It’s just that there seems to be one particular major type of “made up fluff”—namely, text-only printed narrative—that men are less interested in than women are.
Nobody seems to be 100% sure why. But your speculations that men are just somehow innately more factual and realistic in their masculine brains than women are do not hold water when we consider the whole spectrum of fictional entertainment media.
Men adore made up fluff leading to a made up conclusion with lots of extraneous fictional details that require a narrative “journey of getting to the conclusion”. They just don’t seem to like it as much when it consists solely of printed words.
Well, to be fair, a printed description of a car crash and/or explosion just doesn’t have the impact that a visual of the same event does. That’s how my husband judges movies…whether or not they have car crashes or explosions, and how many.
There’s no reason except my experience in life. It’s nice to want men and women to be the same, but on average, men are more action and results oriented, and women are more emotional and empathetic.
I’m not implying a judgment there - there are good and bad to both. I do agree that men fantasize just as much, but about more concrete things - they fantasize about what they could do, whereas women fantasize about what they would feel. Men are more visual; women are more verbal.
These are broad strokes, of course, and I (a man) read a lot of novels, but I do think the reason women read more fiction than men (we agree on that, right? Nobody’s disputing the phenomenon happens) on average is that women enjoy empathizing with characters more.
Fair enough, but fantasizing about “what you could do” in the context of a fictional action movie or comic book involves just as much emotion as fantasizing about “what you would feel” in the context of a fictional romance narrative.
It’s just that the emotions in the first case tend more towards “expectation, elation, anger, fear” and so forth, whereas in the second case they are more likely to include “love, wonder, sadness, hope” and so forth. I agree that men and women on average often look for different kinds of emotional “kicks”, but I’d never describe this as men being somehow “less emotional” than women.
I know a number of men who are great readers ( former English majors and teacher of English lit.) and they are also relatively more fond of non-fiction than fiction in their leisure time.
The best I can tell is that it feels more ‘useful’ to them to be reading something factual. Kind of in the same way that I prefer knitting to Sudoku. I still spend a lot of time on it, but I have something concrete to show for it at the end.
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.
Everybody thinks their experiences are universal. Everybody is wrong.
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.
It’s a different kind of fluff. Fluff in comic books, fantasy books, and action movies is fluff where stuff is actually happening. The plot is moving forward, new worlds are being described, conflict is being created and resolved. It’s all interesting stuff. But in a typical fiction book, fluff exists for fluff sake.
For example, a typical murder mystery might spend pages describing the quaint New England town where the murder is committed. I find that boring. I already have a pretty good idea of what a quaint town looks like. I don’t need the author to spend pages describing what his town looks like when it just serves as a backdrop for the main story. All those words could be cut and the story would be pretty much the same. But in a SF or fantasy setting, describing the location is more essential because I have no knowledge of the world. I need to know what the city of Zaxitor looks like because I have no concept of it.
Or maybe there’s a side plot where the detective falls in love with the lawyer. The author goes on for pages about their flirtations and discussions over dinner. I find that boring. Just get them in bed and get on with the story! I want to find out who committed the murder.
That is the difference I see between men and women. Men want just the essential information. Women are not so much focused on the facts. They find communication itself a pleasurable act. They may find more words more pleasurable, while men find it to be more frustrating.
There are many studies which have shown that women’s brains have larger areas devoted to communication than men. Also, the simple act of talking can be pleasurable to a woman. So it seems conceivable that a woman would be more receptive to reading wordy passages that don’t necessarily serve a point to the main story. Women are more likely to enjoy communication just as a pleasurable act in and of itself.
