Dudes don’t do fiction

“Dudes don’t do fiction” would be a far better title for a PhD study than, “Male readership and male literary identity in twentieth and twenty first century fiction.” And, “Why blokes don’t read,” is pretty much what I’d refer to my PhD as when anyone asked (anyone not an English Literature academic). Usually, you don’t really want to know the answer to, “What’s your PhD about?” Most answers to that question make no sense to anyone

This is pretty much how I’d tell it:

My PhD is about why blokes don’t read fiction. Since always and forever, men read non-fiction and biography and women read fiction. The exception being that men do read specific genre fiction like thrillers, war stories, fantasy, Sci-Fi, crime. Every fiction that doesn’t fit into a specific section in a bookshop, which is most of the books in any bookshop, gets labelled general fiction or literary fiction and that’s predominantly seen as the stuff men won’t read.

This is often met with a response of: “Well, I’m male and I read general fiction.” To which I have to point out that I’m not saying that no men ever read general fiction. Also, if you’ve genuinely asked me about my PhD then you’re probably a bit interested in literature and most likely would have read a few works of fiction.

I knew, right off the bat, that measuring “male readership,” was not going to be possible. I wrote a section on the unreliability of any ways of measuring who reads what. Nielsen Bookscan, the main source of collating information about book sales could only tell you who bought a book. It couldn’t tell you if that book was bought for someone else or bought because you had to read it for a course or bought as a doorstop. Just look at your Amazon suggestions and see if it says anything about what you’re into. It’s probably a mishmash of things you’ve liked, things you’ve tried, things your family asked you to get that Amazon now thinks you want more of. Shopping habits and reading habits are not the same. Above all else, you couldn’t say of any individual book purchase if the reader identified with what they had read or if they enjoyed it at all. Even the actual act of reading did not necessarily mean you’d identify with a particular type of book. Numbers and stats can tell you nothing. What was of interest is the practice of labelling a type of book with a type of reader. It was easier to find “intermediaries” defining gendered books and making gendered assumptions about readers.

“Intermediaries” is never a word I’d use. That one is clearly “PhD Academic speak,” and probably not my choice of word. In context it really refers to book reviews, book clubs, media coverage and any and all tools of marketing.  The research was leading to looking at how manufactured the idea of any one type of reader is. There were times when it seemed that the text was being ignored in favour of a “perceived reader” or how books were being defined by who reviews or promotes them.

Something came to mind at this point, maybe because I felt myself edging to a more academic way of thinking (God forbid). I was remembering how some academics, the ones who didn’t want to be involved with my research, would say things like, “But all of literary canon is male authored,” and “Is hawking more books to men really worthy of PhD study?” The first comment misses the point entirely and the second one is flat-out insane, almost culturally negligent and demonstrates a wilful blindness to a situation that you’d think might garner a little academic curiosity. Here’s this whole section of society that does not read fiction, although, as a TV addicted society, they are all accustomed to story telling being integral to their lives. And yet you want to tell me that you have no interest in this? Not even a little curious?

I recently saw an article by Ella Creamer in the Guardian entitled, “Do we really need more male novelists?” I groaned thinking; Why does everyone keep missing the point? Fortunately, by the end of the article I heaved a sigh of relief when I read that what’s needed more is male readers. Irvine Welsh, was quoted as saying that, “men need to start reading before they start writing. My take is that men are becoming stupider because they over-rely on the internet and women are becoming smarter because they read more books.”

And he wrote Fever Pitch!

(That line is too subtle for its own good. So, I better state that I do know that Welsh wrote Trainspotting and it was in fact Alex Garland that wrote Fever Pitch, whilst Danny Boyle wrote the film version of Nick Hornby’s classic The Beach, before one of them probably went on to direct the 2012 London Olympics opening ceremony. Tell me when you get off that merry-go-round of 90s-ness!)

Let’s unpack that shall we? Literary cultural icon and author of Trainspotting Irvine Welsh states that men are getting dumber because they don’t read books and I was once asked if I felt “hawking more books to a bunch of men was worthy of study”. Can we go back and reframe the question please? I think what you meant is, “Is the idea of men getting more stupid worthy of PhD study?” I stand by my original answer. I’ll even double down on it. Yes, investigating men not reading and getting dumber has untold value for, not only academia, but also the whole of soceity as it slides into a cultural cess pit.

I’ve been banging on about male readers for fifteen years now. I see it as a pastime really. Perhaps it should never have been a literary study. Maybe I should have pitched it to behavioural sciences departments or maybe (God help me) Marketing faculties. PhD is hours of arguing your point. The hardest thing to get across to most literary academics was that the perception of “who reads what” is not centred on the content of any work, as it should be, but rather on assumptions made about novels and readers. I wanted to bring literature back to being about the content and needed to first demonstrate that it wasn’t about content at all. If you’ve jumped in here and started reading this article without reading anything else by me then this might be new to you: Content is King. If it’s good then it doesn’t matter if it was written by man, woman or robot, you will want to read it. And by content I don’t mean it in any terms of “subject matter.” I mean that the content of what you’re reading is written in a way that you want to read it, as opposed to reading it because it was written for your demographic or marketed to you based on other items you have bought or because it is endorsed by someone you admire.

Questions like: Is this book for a male or female reader? Should be highlighted as irrelevant. What in the text leads you to believe a novel is aimed at women rather than men? It doesn’t matter! That we can even ask the question, that there is an assumption regarding who a type of reader is, that’s what I was tackling.  What is a male reader? What do we perceive a male reader to be? Why do we perceive it? How can we stop these perceptions dictating what publishers publish?

I should have called it: “Irvine Welsh says men are getting stoopid from not reading books, whilst academics claim that we don’t need to sell any more books to any more men and publishers keep pushing women’s books to women, whilst all the time society heads to its cultural oblivion. Yeah!” Who said PhD has to be overly academic? Here comes the fun version. It comes with a caveat. Sometimes I’ll write about literary theory but if I do it right then you will barely notice.