I’m not sure what your point is in saying this.
This sounds reasonable, but the question remains: why should this preference apply to reading printed narrative but not to other types of leisure activity?
Men overall do not seem to prefer watching documentary films to watching sci-fi or action movies. Nor do they seem to like reading, say, illustrated technical manuals more than comic books/graphic novels. So the “usefulness” criterion apparently doesn’t apply here.
Any convincing explanation of male preference for nonfiction over fiction in printed textual narrative has to take into account the fact that men apparently DON’T prefer nonfiction over fiction when it comes to non-text formats.
There seems to be a certain bias toward interpreting the male preference for reading nonfiction rather than fiction printed text as motivated by some kind of rational or pragmatic tendency in the male brain towards greater efficiency or cognitive value: men like facts, men are less emotional, men don’t like “fluff”, men are more results-oriented, men are more interested in what is important, blah blah blah de bullshit blah.
To make that type of rationalization, stick you’re going to have to explain, say, all the Avengers movie threads on this board that have been started and mostly populated by men. The evidence overall seems to indicate that men are just as attracted by fictional forms of entertainment as women are. They just don’t happen to like their fiction as much in printed text form.
…but there are ‘guy movies’ and ‘chick flicks’ also. Guy movies are fiction, but are action-oriented. Chick-flicks are feelings-oriented.
I guess when men want fluff, they go to visual media, because for a man, reading is work.
When women want fluff, they read, because reading doesn’t take as much effort for a woman as for a man.
On average.
But do men watch documentaries, or other informational shows/movies (or read technical manuals), more than women do?
And the action and sci-fi movies men like to watch tend to show the characters accomplishing something. At the risk of vastly overgeneralizing, I theorize that men read non-fiction because it feels like, by doing so, they’re accomplishing something (i.e. learning something about the world); and the fiction they prefer is likewise goal-oriented.
In other words, your responses here actually have no relevance whatsoever to the issue of why men on average read fiction less than women do, since “the city of Zaxitor” is just as fictional as any quaint New England town in a murder mystery. Considerably more so, in fact.
What you have been talking about all this time is the issue of why men on average prefer different KINDS of fiction than women do.
Okay, fine, but AFAICT not really what the OP was asking about.
Oh yeah, because knowing what some biologically-impossible nonexistent life form got up to in the imaginary city of Zaxitor on some nonexistent extragalactic planet is just SO essential. 
Seriously, you must see that this type of argument really has nothing at all to do with the difference between fiction and non-fiction per se. It involves the difference between, say, so-called “realistic” fiction and science fiction, but that’s not the same thing.
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.
As a man of middle years I find it almost embarrassing the way we’re advertised to or otherwise approached in the media, but it would seem to be justified statistically speaking. For instance, the Transformers film and ride franchise is turning out to be huge, and I for the life of me can’t comprehend why anyone other than boys under the age of twelve is into that. As for books, I do read a lot of non-fiction, and quite possibly more than the average woman does; at the same time, I love a good thick meaty novel with well written characters.
With that in mind, it shouldn’t be surprising that I’m sickened by the commercials for audible.com where the man says, “now I can listen to business books in my car!”. Not only does he have to emphasize the “fact” that only business books are sufficiently manly or adult-oriented, but also that he’s devoting only the time he spends sitting in his car, which would otherwise be nonproductive time. I object to the woman in that commercials, who now listens to books while she’s at the gym, for the same reason.
This relates to the socialization factors that earlier posters talked about. It may well be that a lot of men have been given the impression that “sitting around reading a book” is in itself kind of a “girly” thing to do. If it’s a type of book that’s specifically geared toward male readers (like sci-fi or spy thriller), or if it’s a “practical” type of how-to book, then that makes it “manly” enough.
It’s amazing how strongly people can be turned off from even activities that they would in principle consider worthwhile if they generate any significant social disapproval. (E.g., I have a male friend who’s crazy about knitting but who has given up knitting in public. It just wasn’t worth the antagonism he got from people who were somehow convinced that men shouldn’t knit.)
The made up fluff is there to keep the men’s dates interested. Women’s make the decisions in music, movie and TV business and their interests have to be catered to. The men only make it through the whole thing because they’re promised images of women in various states of undress and compromising situations.
If action movies were geared toward men’s interests, they’d be more like pornography. A set-up, then ten minutes of explosions and car chases. Change of scenery, set-up, explosions, wash, rinse, repeat. Look at a James Bond movie, there’s no exploration of anyone’s emotions and motivation. There’s only a brief paragraph of exposition just before the villain throws Bond into the shark tank.
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. Reading was restricted to learning things that would lead to a successful career, allowing you to get the fast cars and fast women that were portrayed in the action movies and comic books.
But all of that would still be made up fluff. Remember folks, explosions and car chases in movies are just as fictional as soft-lit love scenes and contemplative dialogue in movies. Being more conventionally “manly” doesn’t make it any more real.
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.
So why should the one format of printed text be different from the other formats where men do like fiction more than non-fiction?
Are you overlooking sports?
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):
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/mccabe/McCabeEtAl_GenderSociety_April2011.pdf
News item on this study from Science Daily: Gender bias uncovered in children's books with male characters, including male animals, leading the fictional pack | ScienceDaily
? 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.
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”).
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.
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.
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?
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 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’!”
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.
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.
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.