Far From the Male Reading Crowd
Crowdsource 8.26.2024
Welcome to CrowdSource, your weekly guided tour of the latest intellectual disputes, ideological disagreements, and national debates that piqued our interest (or inflamed our passions). This week: what the guys are reading, the spectacle in Chicago, and eternal life.
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Speak Your (Young, Male) Truth
Last July, our own Christine Emba shook things up with a major report about the American male, who “struggled to relate to women. They didn’t have enough friends. They lacked long-term goals. Some guys — including ones I once knew — just quietly disappeared . . .” You’d think a societal bumper crop of mopey men would at least have plenty of opportunity to turn their aimless energy into angsty art — why has the opposite happened? That is the question Katie Tobin asked in a big essay last month: “Young men appear to be glaringly absent from the contemporary canon of popular authors writing about sex and intimacy.”
They need it more than anyone. That’s what Jason Diamond writes in GQ:
The first thought that went through my head was I felt awful this person had nowhere to turn besides a Jordan Peterson Reddit forum. But the next was empathy. I was that guy in some way once. I grew up feeling lonely and isolated, but I longed to create and also figure out how to live a fuller, richer life. I’m 44-years-old now, and feel like I’ve accomplished that. Yet I truly believe that my Sliding Doors moment is that high school English teacher telling me to check out Kafka. Without a trace of pith, I can say that getting into fiction probably saved my life; it definitely made me a better person.
Fear. Responding to Tobin’s essay, Andrew Boryga claims that it’s fear that keeps young men from writing such books.
That vulnerability, that rawness that people seemingly want, may very well sound too rough, cringy, uncultured, un-PC, un-woke, or whatever the hell you would like to call it.
And he believes that mainstream publishers do not actually want such books.
“The Genius.” Also in response, Naomi Kanakia, a novelist once dropped by her publisher for submitting a manuscript about a “misogynistic Nice Guy,” published a spicy short story imagining a young male writer getting in trouble for writing an immoral novel about . . . well, read for yourself.
Missing. Back in March, Ross Barkan made a similar claim: “The louche or unabashedly noxious young man has mostly vanished from contemporary American fiction.” Last week, in a book review, Barkan takes up the same theme, with a slight change: why are the tastes of “cocky young white men” considered a problem?
Much Ado About Nothing?
In last week’s Crowdsource, we highlighted fears that the DNC would turn violent. Despite pundits’ warnings, of course, nothing happened — if there was drama, it was backstage, not on the streets. In Compact, Sohale Mortazavi suggests that both the convention and the protests are more show than substance:
The events of the week, both inside and outside the convention center, called to mind Guy Debord’s concept of the Spectacle, which he put forward in a book published one year before the tumultuous 1968 Democratic Convention in Chicago. Debord and his Situationist disciples believed that a culture mediated by commodity consumption and mass media had rendered social relations—and, therefore, our political lives—into hollow representations that have more to do with appearance than reality. . . .
Cheap pranks and hollow imagery abounded inside and outside the convention center all week. As Alexander Nazaryan recently noted in these pages, Harris and the Democrats sidestepped substantive policy discussions in favor of image and vibes. The protests were no more meaningful, and they were certainly not meaningfully disruptive in the way Debord might have hoped. In an age when political possibility and change seem out of reach, how can protest have any real meaning? How can it transcend prank or hollow representation?
From the Crowd
Commenting on Damir and Sam’s conversation with
, “Ending Summer on Violence and Despair,” the Crowd takes Damir to task for his broad categorical statements about the Greeks and their understanding of the afterlife:But why view immortality in the Christian sense (not to mention that the Christian sense does necessarily include Hell, and sometimes Purgatory) — what matters is the soul’s mission on earth is fulfilled. Yes, there are many characters who just die from the plague, but the deaths of the main characters are not treated that way. There is always an emphasis on what comes after — revenge, burial, etc. And that is not even talking about the immortality that comes with the fame and glory of being recorded by the bard — as far as I’m concerned (and I’m biased here as an atheist) — the most real form of immortality there is.
In fact, you can argue based on other myths (which may or may not have been canonical in the time of “Homer”) that what doomed Achilles was not at all his revenge of Patroclus, but his choice early in childhood to get fame and glory in a short life as opposed to a boring long life. Come to think of it, by the end of the Iliad, Achilles is not in fact doomed at all. He is just sitting there brooding. His death comes after related to us in different myths when he was shot in the heel. Given how Helen just comes back to Menelaus and is happily living with him in the Odyssey, as if nothing had happened, it is arguably anachronistic, using our (post)modern understanding of emotions, to say that despair after the death of Patroclus is what doomed Achilles.
Moreover, there is no endless cycle of violence per se, because the seminal act of the Iliad is Achilles giving back the body Hector to Priam, moved my the gods and his own ethical considerations. The man overcomes his anger. One might even call it grace.
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I haven’t read Kate Tobin’s essay but the reason there is a dearth of interesting male novelists publishing good work today is because the fiction-publishing industry is dominated by women. More than 80% of the literary agents and 80% of the editors at publishing houses are women. And these women have stopped publishing literary fiction by male writers. A few years ago I personally went to the website of one of the big-5 publishers and made a chart of the last 100 debut literary novels they published. Seventy-five were by women, mostly white women. Conversely, only like 6 white male authors.