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.”
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.
Then you need to choose a new word.
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.
Geez, bitter much? Women’s fluff is represented on the news too. It’s called entertainment reporting.
Why did we disallow the explanation that men are visual, women are verbal?
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:
and this:
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:
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.
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.
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.
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:
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.
To be fair, it took the comic book companies themselves 30+ years to realize that their product wasn’t just “kid stuff”.
Just counting the books on my iPad, I count:
11 non-fiction.
29 fiction.
Dude, here, who loves his fiction (and non-fiction) alike.
A bit under 700 actually, and appreciated, thank you.
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? (Soullessand the rest of the Parasol Protectorate).
(Thoroughly enjoyable is how I’d characterise it… but categorise it? Errm…) 
I don’t think so. You seem to have been the only one who was confused by it.
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.
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.
Who’s disallowing it?
I do, absolutely, yes.
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.
I found the Elfand bit online, for anyone who cares:
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 :D. 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.
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).
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.
I think you may be right, to draw the distinction between narrative and non-narrative.
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.