You can tell a lot about people just by looking at their bookshelves. You can tell what their political outlook is. If they are sports-oriented. Whether they're romantic, ambitious, and intellectual. You can even make a fairly educated guess as to how intelligent they are.
One of the easiest conclusions to draw is their gender.
Romance novels are one of the biggest genres in publishing. Yet you'll never see a guy read one. This makes eminent evolutionary sense. Females, who historically have benefited from keeping a male around to help provide for her offspring, have better reason to long for and believe in True Love.
Self-help books tend to be the province of women as well. (I am referring here to self-actualization as opposed to how-to books.) Most men seem to feel they are perfect just the way they are. And if they actually acknowledge any imperfections, they tend to simultaneously figure, well, tough, that's not their problem. Women, on the other hand, tend to put more faith in the (false?) promise of a new you.
Military history is the near exclusive territory of men. (Barbara Tuchman wrote The Guns of August and other well known books, but she was an exception. I personally have never known a woman with any interest in military history.) My son's room is piled with books like Never Without Heroes: Marine Third Reconnaisance Battalion in Viet Nam, 1965 - 1970; Soldat: Reflections of a German soldier, 1938 - 1949; Dead Center: A Marine Sniper's Two Year Odyssey During the Viet Nam War; The Forever War; Tactics of the Crescent Moon; We Were Soldiers Once and Young; Panzer Leader; Counter-Terrorism. (Those were literally the first eight books in just one stack in his room.) This is simply not a pile you would find in a girl's room.
Sports books are also the province of males. Women are just not that interested in the inner workings of the NBA last season, or in some inspirational tale about how a young man threw footballs through a tire in his backyard until he achieved gridiron immortality.
Science fiction is also mostly a male thing: you rarely hear a girl described as a nerd. The people who used to camp out to be in line for the opening of the next Star Wars movie were almost all male.
Adventure books are mostly read by males. Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn were probably the classic American prototypes of a long line penned by authors like Edgar Rice Burroughs, Jack London, and Gary Jennings. But such books actually date back to Homer, who wrote The Iliad and The Odyssey, the original boys' adventure stories.
Blockbusters are read mostly by males. If the authors of such only received royalties based on female readership, Frederick Forsyth would still be a reporter for the BBC and Tom Clancy would still be selling insurance.
Mysteries are one of the few genres which large numbers of both sexes read. But even there, men lean towards writers like Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett, Robert Parker, and Ross Thomas, and women toward Agatha Christie, P,D, James, and Sue Grafton. Men prefer their crimes solved with brains and muscle, by tough guys; women, with brains and goodness, by clever ladies.
It goes without saying that men are not going to read books like Divine Secrets of the Ya-Ya Sisterhood or Angry Housewives Eating Bon Bons or Shoe Addicts Anonymous or The Hot Flash Club: A Novel. All by women, for women.
But the dirty little secret of publishing seems to be that for the most part men are not interested in reading women authors at all. Men don't even read classic books by Jane Austen or Louisa May Alcott or Charlotte Bronte unless they're forced to. (Even reading the Cliff Notes version of those can be exquisitely painful for some of us.)
There are simply very few women authors whom lots of men like to read. Maybe Ayn Rand; but she was sort of a man in spirit. Ann Coulter, ditto. Perhaps Ann Rule, a true crime writer. (J.K. Rowling doesn't really count, as she writes primarily for those whose tastes haven't yet been shaped by years of either testosterone or estrogen input.)
I just scoured my son's and my bookcases. My son didn't have a single female author, and I had only three Camille Paglia's and one Ann Coulter. I don't think we're atypical. My daughter's bookshelf, on the other hand, is comprised of roughly half male authors. Which is also fairly typical.
It certainly gives credence to the standard female complaint that men just won't listen to them.
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4 comments:
Most female authors just don't have anything interesting to say and that's why men don't read them.
Mr. Craig --
That's quite a coincidence that your name sounds like mine. But even though I have no idea what kind of family you grew up in, I will say that if you'd been brought up in my household you'd certainly know better than to say something like that.
What about someone who never reads any fiction at all - whose bookshelves are full of encyclopaedias, science textbooks and philosophical works. Would you be more likely to assume they were male or female?
Anon --
That's a tough one. I guess generally I'd think that person was male, but more than that, I'd just think the person was a little weird, maybe Asperger-ish.
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