Illiterate Men

A Feedback Loop

Hello fellow men. (If you are not a man, please, feel free to proceed to the article.)

There’s a lot, here. The tone is inevitably colored by my own personal experiences, things I’ve researched and seen in being surrounded by women in the artistic community.

I considered one piece of hypocrisy as this finally went up, which was this: I think, in some hard-to-scrutinize way, that the following article comes off as being addressed to women. Who might ultimately not be the right audience for it.

So I’m still chewing on that, but I’ll get to the meat of what I want to say right away, before this starts: If you are a man, read debut novels. Read something published in 2026 that you like, give it sales and give it support. Just by doing that, you are helping solve the problem I am detailing here.

Thanks. On to the article.

Intro: All Alone In The Wrong Book

Lately, I’ve been reading romance novels. And yes, I am a man.

That fact alone might give you a double-take, but if you know the kind of fiction I write, it isn’t particularly surprising. So I picked up one particular chonker. A five hundred-page self-published romp that really draws out the “Enemies to Lovers” plotline in a way that makes it work. By “picked up,” I quite literally mean that someone dropped it off near my community dumpster, and I rescued it.

I do not think that this book, which will remain unnamed, is worth throwing away. The length gives the transition from enemies to lovers time to breathe. What occasionally makes me put the book down, take a deep breath, then reopen it with trepidation, is the characterization of the main male character. If there was any doubt about whether this book was for me, or for anyone but heterosexual women who are attracted to certain kinds of men, he solidifies the answer: No. You are not welcome here.

He is, in short, not a believable human being. Seemingly intentionally so. If he were, his realism might get in the way of his hotness. Impossible to identify with or see yourself in, he resembles a parody of sexualized masculinity in the same way that Jessica Rabbit represents a parody of sexualized femininity.

I leave this character anonymous because I’m not here to criticize other books or authors by name, but also because he’s not unique. I am the weird one, here, a man who enjoys romance looking for male love interests I can connect to. He is one MMC amongst a sea of others.

I’ve often seen criticism like this deflected so that the critic abandons course and talks about female characters instead, so here goes: Yes, there are sexualized, dehumanized women in books written by men, especially in older fiction.

But I don’t think the #menwritingwomen criticism is so relevant, anymore.

No. The future, at least as far as which books are getting published and attracting audiences, does not belong to authors writing female characters who ‘breast boobily down the stairs.’ Instead, we face a plethora of idealized MMCs.

Because as far as publishers are concerned, only women are reading.

If this is news to you, I’m shocked. But let’s assume ignorance and break it down: Books, in general, are in a hard place right now. And yet out of the various demographics that are no longer reading, some have been hit harder than others.

When I look at romantic leads like the above one, though, I wonder what really caused this. What came first: The chicken or the egg?

Part One: The Chicken (Or: The situation)

Let’s look at a list of some big money-making novels of the last few years. What do you see in common?

I’ll spoil it: The books are universally about Women’s Experiences. Even the two books (out of twenty total) that are written by men feature female protagonists. This seems, in fact, to be the one commonality they have, as this list is pretty smartly chosen for diversity otherwise.

The publishing industry has taken notice: If books about women, almost entirely written by women, are what sell in this overall declining world of book sales, then by God, they are going to double down on them. I’m subscribed to Karin Gillespie’s substack, in which she recently stated it flat-out: Only books by and about young white women are getting picked up by traditional publishers, now, on a wide scale. Gillespie has even started keeping tabs on how many male-authored books get publishing deals, one month to the next. (two books here, three books there, etc…)

The “young, white” portion of that core, sought after author demographic is a very real aspect of all this, and may feel even more discriminatory. But remember that at the end of the day, this is all sales-driven. Fewer people are reading books. While almost 4/5s of men aren’t, not even half of women are doing it, either. Publishers have decided, in all their marketing wisdom, that it is young and white women who are buying up-and-coming novels, written mostly by people in their cohort, and this drives all the debut books we’re seeing. It’s not a conspiracy. It’s about money.

But on the other hand, it is self-reinforcing, and creates a feedback loop. Men (and other demographic groups, though perhaps that’s a substack post for another time) will read even less when there are fewer options that appeal to them.

Let’s say that I take my video-game playing, sports-loving buddy to the bookstore, and say to him: “Let’s find a book for you.” Let’s pretend my friend is perfectly literate, willing to get into a book, maybe he’s even motivated to be well-read. Out of the twenty-something books that I have already mentioned, which one is for him? Which will resonate with him and mean something to him and speak to his soul?

Will any of them? Or will he just go back to playing Helldivers?

Look: I am all for stepping out of our comfort zone. Like I said, I read romance novels! I like a lot of them! I can even vibe with deeper examinations of women’s experiences. Recently, I loved Bunny by Mona Awad. (“Are women actually like this?” I asked a woman who had also read it. Her response: “Oh, I was in a sorority. They absolutely can be.”)

But if we’re already going out of our comfort zone to read when we haven’t before, I don’t know how fair it is to provide nothing ‘for’ men, to almost exclusively provide books so explicitly ‘for’ women, and then to expect men to adapt.

Oh, there’s the buzzer. Someone is pressing it. Yes! Other, more audiovisual entertainment mediums like movies and video games are like this, too. With one big difference: The genders are flipped! Yes, women have dealt with being uncomfortable in media for years, decades. So it’s great that stories that are by women and entirely for women (finally) exist.

Please keep in mind that I’m not asking for these books to stop existing. What I want, simply, is balance. Balance has always been the goal for anyone sensible, after all. And the seesaw rapidly teetering one way, as opposed to the other, is not a solution.

Because trust me, for reasons I will soon get to: widespread male illiteracy is everyone’s problem. Especially women’s.

Part Two: The Egg (Or: The Root Of It)

“Market forces,” with a shrug, tends to be the most common deflection from this issue, for people I’ve spoken to. But it’s worth considering what shaped that market in the first place. I refuse, down to my soul, to believe that women are naturally more inclined toward reading than men. It’s that kind of gender-essentialism that creates a depressing and doomerist worldview. Rather, I’d like to take a look at the forces that shaped this. Predictably, given the statistics: many more women are involved in book publishing than men.

The above is a 55 minute long video that, to its credit, does a lot of research, but which I feel comes away too tepid in its assessment of this as a real problem. If you want to dig into it, feel free. If not, I’ll summarize the relevant parts for my argument here.

The narrative goes like this: Writing novels is naturally a very good industry for those who cannot hold regular hours due to other essential life commitments. What is an extremely essential life commitment? Motherhood. And while men might gravitate toward structured entertainment industries like Hollywood that require them to work nine-to-five, women naturally, over time, gravitated toward an industry that allowed them to keep irregular hours and still get work done. Prose-writing.

There is also the issue of pay.

As books became less profitable to write, more of a side-gig, the traditionally masculine pressure to provide steadily overwhelmed any dream of being the ‘macho novelist.’ If your books net you, say, $30,000 USD a year, you are rolling in dough by the standards of most people who write books. That is extremely unattractive, outright disturbing to a man who dreams of being the sole provider for his family. But if you are a stay at home mom with a husband who works to provide an already-stable income? An extra 30k sounds really, really nice.

Everything that I said in the above paragraph might seem outdated, at first glance. There are few stay at home moms anywhere, anymore, in the English speaking world. Mostly it is a luxury for the wealthy. But again: The center of gravity is on white women. White women, who are more likely to have access to generational wealth, with a white male partner more likely to have his own generational wealth, as well as a high paying job.

If you are not a part of this demographic and are still writing books, don’t think I’m excluding you. Hell, I’m still writing books. But it’s rough out there. It can be significantly easier, though, when you can count on a partner to support your financially risky dream. Most importantly for our topic: writers who are upper-class white women will tend to write the things that upper-class white women fantasize about, or that at least feel relevant to them. This has a natural, predictable impact on the gender makeup of their audience. That female audience, then, having a tendency to read more books, is also more likely to end up writing them. This is how the gendered feedback loop spreads reading and writing to a more diverse (though still not diverse enough) assortment of women: It might have started by being convenient for housewives, but now that those housewives have transformed novel-writing into a generally feminine space, women with dayjobs have jumped aboard. Now, unmarried working women or even wives who out-earn their husbands are doing it.

Women are also more likely to earn college degrees, which helps literacy for obvious reasons, and are significantly more likely to major in English when they’re in college. Again, this can’t be separated from gender expectations. Just as men are less willing to enter an unprofitable book publishing industry, they are less willing to take out an expensive loan for a major that bears less financial fruit than business, accounting, or engineering. To be fair: I imagine that businessmen, accountants, and engineers do a lot of reading for their jobs. But English majors are the ones who are all about the books, themselves. English majors go into publishing.

Perhaps the problem is also a curious impulse men have always had. High heels used to be masculine, before they became part of women’s fashion, and men ran away from them. Makeup has, at various points in history, been worn by men, and is still considered to improve their attractiveness. These things are part of a long-established cycle: Something becomes ‘for women,’ and then men abandon it, no matter how healthy, good, or attractive it actually is. In the same way, in our culture, men used to proudly proclaim that they read Playboy Magazine ‘for the articles,’ (even when that wasn’t true) and esteem themselves on literacy. Now reading is also transitioning to a feminine-coded activity.

“That’s their fault,” the women (more statistically likely to be) reading this might be saying. And yeah, sure, of course. It’s extremely self-defeating, in this case literally stupid. Because, for all intents and purposes, it makes men dumber on a wide scale. Let’s not bury the alarmism any further: Reading is not just reading.

Part Three: It’s Everyone’s Problem

I shouldn’t need to tell you this, but reading is good for your brain.

Yes, that was six different articles and studies linked in that one sentence. They aren’t hard to find, either.

One of the key details here sticks out to me: Multiple studies reveal that reading does not just increase memory, or connections in the brain, but empathy. Scientifically, all of these things are working together. Reading both enhances our ability to be classically ‘smart’ and our ability to feel for others.

So is it any wonder that nearly half of new applicants for ICE, largely men, have not been able to pass a written exam?

Oh, yes, sorry. If you’re new here, I am not writing these essays to play around. We’re at a very pivotal moment in US and world history, and I intend to be clear about why these things matter.

In this case, even before Trump’s 2024 victory, the US deportation engine attracted a lot of men, compared to women. Now, on a broader level, Donald Trump’s campaign and well of vast political support has been largely male-based, especially for younger generations.

I do want to be careful here, because this is often overstated. The overall gender-based vote share, when accounting for all ages and demographics, is not that different in 2024. And one important statistic to keep in mind, for women who feel too inclined to blame men entirely, is that 53% of white women voted for Trump.

Often, when I point this out, the buck gets passed. Now it is no longer gender that’s the problem, but race. Whiteness. But here’s the thing: Donald Trump’s policies are, and always have been, bad for almost everyone regardless of race and gender, benefitting only the very few hyper-rich. The real most salient identifier on whether you voted for Trump is education level. Literally literacy.

So I want to go back above, to the study that went over how gender-based voting patterns aren’t that different. Maybe they aren’t. But what we leave out of that is how uniquely bad of a candidate Donald Trump was. A convicted felon who could barely deliver a coherent speech, who had already been President for four years and done a terrible job, turning the country to chaos by the end of his reign, now promising a tariff policy that would transparently make everything more expensive (and did), nonetheless voted for by people who wanted gas and grocery prices to go down.

This lack of understanding, leading to a popular-vote win for a candidate so immensely terrible, skewed white, uneducated, but also most definitely male.

We can’t just write this off as sexism (though it definitely has a part to play in it) because sexists used to be at least articulate! Or to hide their sex crimes instead of having been found guilty of them by a court of law. The reality is this: Americans do not understand words. They cannot comprehend what they are seeing, what they are hearing. They are illiterate. And men, statistically, are more illiterate than women. This male illiteracy is everyone’s problem.

But this is only the political reality on a wide scale. There is also a personal cost for women everywhere, especially heterosexual ones. To bridge the gap, I’ll bring in the experience of Vera Papisova, who dated sixty far-right men. If you have not read the substack post of her whole experience, I recommend it. The following is from a conversation with one of the men:

He says he’s made a list of lies liberal white women tell about Donald Trump[…]

[…] I ask, which women? He says the ones in the media. I ask, what kinds of lies? Why are liberal women like that, does he think? Suddenly, his leg is shaking, and he grabs the edges of the table. He raises his voice when he says that white, liberal women are a plague on our society.

This is a common recurrence in her story. Men with extremely fragile, yet strongly held beliefs, utterly unquestioned and breaking down immediately upon questioning. Above all else: a complete lack of introspection.

Here’s a question: How many heterosexual women are more or less forced into dating these kinds of men, if they don’t want to be perpetually single?

Not just openly far-right men. More broadly: Men who don’t empathize or introspect or know how to consider complex issues. Men who struggle to understand words and the deeper implications behind them. Men who, yes, do not read.

Somewhere out there, commonly perhaps, there is a couple that looks like this: A highly literate woman who reads dozens of books a year, with a man so unaccustomed to reading that he could not get through one book if he tried. If such a heterosexual woman were to make “must be a reader” a necessity, her dating pool would shrink considerably. So if she wants any real romance in her life, and not just the idealized male love interests in the books she reads, she’s forced to consider men who are functionally illiterate, and who have all the negative traits downwind of illiteracy.

In case you don’t remember, reading increases neural connections, memory, critical thought and introspection, and most importantly for relationships: empathy. So what does its total absence imply? At one point, Papisova asks Bryan, one of the alt-right men, a fairly apolitical question about being a romantic.

“Do you consider yourself a romantic?” I smile and ask him.

“Is that important to you?” he says, and I decide to be honest.

“Yes. Romance is a priority for me, and I live my life in a way that makes me feel like I’m romancing myself. I do whatever makes me fall in love with myself and the world. It’s one of my biggest values.”

“I’ve never heard that before,” he says. He sounds confused, maybe even disappointed.

“You don’t like it?”

“It’s not something I see for myself,” he says, shifting uncomfortably.

“You don’t think you deserve it? Men deserve to be romanced. Isn’t that the dream?” I ask him. There is a long pause.

“I wouldn’t know where to start with something like that,” he says, widening his eyes and raising the inner corner of his eyebrows. Sadness.

Papisova goes on to describe Bryan as “lost.” Unable to conceptualize love, or feeling loved, without dominance over women. To see any deeper than that, to question this need for control and instead to live in a realm in which he is worthy of being loved earnestly, would require self-interrogation, and then a willingness to indulge in one’s own raw emotions and fantasies. Things that are now rapidly being considered “girly.”

And also things that are inextricably linked to reading for pleasure.

Papisova’s precise word choice feels salient because romance is not just based on the idea of “romantic love.” Romance, in its broadest definition, means:

marked by the imaginative or emotional appeal of what is heroic, adventurous, remote, mysterious, or idealized

By that definition, any art worth its salt is romantic. Any book worth reading tells us that there is a kind of grand, often mysterious beauty inside the human soul, and reflects on it, talks about it, even reveres it. Jay Gatsby reaching across the bay for the “Green Light” would be romantic even if there wasn’t a woman on the other end.

But now, in 2026, we have plentiful examples of insensate art. Hobbies that say nothing about humanity, and give us joy disconnected from romance of any kind, love-based or otherwise.

We have porn. We have free-to-play multiplayer video games that prey on addiction cycles. We have Mr. Beast videos and Streamers who you watch play competitive multiplayer video games because they are good at those games. We have AI slop. Above all else: We have content that screams at us to pay attention. Media junkfood shoving itself into our brains, all without an ounce of romance. Without any soul to it whatsoever.

Both genders consume it, of course. But all we have to do is look at how this content is marketed to see which gender does it more. And even if the pipeline by which collective miseducation and the killing of empathy directly benefits the Far-Right is broken, you’ll still end up with hordes of illiterate men with broken souls.

Conclusion: Breaking the Loop

We got far away from the main point, which is this: Men don’t read, and so books for men are not being published, and so men don’t read even more.

Somewhere, that feedback loop needs to be disrupted. Either publishers need to learn that there is a market for male fiction, or men need to be willing to read books by and about women, or educators need to reach out better to a population of underserved boys, many of whom I have heard describe reading as “torture” without irony.

But when we pay attention to what happens when books successfully cater to men, we are greeted with massive success stories.

The books cited in the above video are “Way of Kings,” “Red Rising,” “Dungeon Crawler Carl” and the author’s own “The Legend of Uh.” These are mostly popcorn reads, yes, in the same way that the romance novel I cited from the jump is a popcorn read for women. But that doesn’t make them bad. And more importantly: they are successful.

Dungeon Crawler Carl in particular, now taking the literary world by storm, started as self-published fiction. I can’t imagine what would have happened if Matt Dinniman had taken his ideas to a publisher, or even a literary agent. Especially if he’d tried it now, in 2026. I’m in the process of querying literary agents, and they make a habit of listing their favorite reads. These favorites tend to align with mainstream success. Agents are, after all, some of the major tastemakers of the literary world. Yet it is rare, almost unheard of, for any of them to mention Dungeon Crawler Carl, despite how copies of it are leaping off of Barnes and Noble bookshelves.

This means something very simple: In a world filled with books for women, catering to a new, more masculine niche is not just good for society. It is actually lucrative. And the traditional publishing world currently has a blindspot for the payout that this represents. Where are all these new male readers going to go after Dungeon Crawler Carl? Probably, if they stick with it, they’ll read books from the 90-00s or earlier, like I often do. But it shouldn’t be so hard to court them into modernity, to tell them that a book with a more intuitive understanding of what it’s like to be a person living in 2026 should be more attractive to them.

The societal stakes are high, yes, but there’s also money to be made. Money that is being left on the table. But this isn’t the only way the loop can be disrupted. We can also break it from the other end.

Men. Hi.

Yes. This goes out to my crowd of male readers. I have a challenge for you: Don’t give up on modern fiction. Read debut authors. Read books published in the last five years. And support the books coming out that you enjoy. That can mean many things. To be honest: I read and even write books that are more traditionally considered ‘feminine.’ It’s hard to articulate why, but this is authentically what I like. And yet, remember what I said above. If I am reading romance books, I will naturally favor books in which men are full people and not just walking fetishes. I’ve found them, too. And my participation in the culture, my buying power, and my praise for those books? It matters, ever so much.

Books, and by extension book-smarts, should not be gendered. We need to break this cycle before it gets even worse. We need to get men reading, and men need to break through their own reticence to start reading, themselves. What should they read? Anything, everything, but what matters is what happens to your brain when it is forced to absorb information entirely through the written word. What matters is literacy.

I will never forget when I was teaching at an all-boys school, and I let the boys pick a book from my bookshelf to read. One of these boys grabbed Tangerine, by Edward Bloor and fell in love with it. He wouldn’t stop talking about the characters. When it came up, he would say: “That was such a good book, Mr. Maichen.” This boy had a teacher as a mother, and literacy was likely part of the culture in his house. But that alone wasn’t enough. In this novel about sports which becomes about growing up as a boy, and about the incredible violence that boys can suffer, he saw himself, he saw what was important to him. He fell in love with a book, and I believe it made him a different, better person than if he’d never even gotten to know one.