Basically a repost pf things I said in the mega, but anecdotally I'm hearing that sales of fiction read by men are dropping precipitously, and English and literature classes in colleges are now dominated by women. It seems like young men are not being exposed to literature in the same way that they used to. Like, when I was in high school and college, you could be a "bro" kind of guy and read Chuck Palahniuk, or Hunter S. Thompson, or David Foster Wallace. For decades, authors like Hemmingway and Bukowski found receptive audiences in young men, not to mention all the crime fiction, horror, sci-fi, and fantasy that men have traditionally consumed. The "guy in your English class who loves David Foster Wallace" was a stereotype for a reason. I read in another thread that music is less culturally important to young men than it used to be. It seems like younger men just straight up see no value in reading literature or fiction, or exposing themselves or critically engaging with art and music, because the algorithms just railroad them into Alpha Gridset world.
Am I wrong about this? Am I being condescending and out of touch, or is this a real thing that's happening, where the whole "male" culture is turning into grindset podcasts and streamers?
Edit: Okay, so the impression I'm getting is that everything is worse but also kind of the same as it ever was, which sounds right.
They aren't writing in support of Hemingway, Hemingway is just an easy "Even dumb guys at least read this" example
This part is important in understanding their meaning. They aren't being narrowly prescriptive, they're just pulling at recognizable examples.
I guess so yeah. It just seems weird, the crime fiction one stands out to me, since people still love true crime for many of the wrong reasons.
Crime fiction is substantially different from true crime. Do you think a podcast about a serial killer has the same sort of content as a detective novel? Yeah, sometimes they revel a bit to much in the violence of the murder, but they really aren't the same thing. One is basically about the crime from a pretty third-person omniscient perspective and the other is usually grounded very strongly in the perspective of the detective and involves their interiority and sometimes other issues they have going on (addiction and exes are the classic ones, but there are others).
I'd also argue that crime fiction typically isn't exploiting the murders and grief of actual people, which changes how you relate to it.
I guess crime fiction has a more regular tendency to be copaganda, but I think they can both do that, as well as having that disdain for "undesirables" built in. I think they're pretty similar, myself.