https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/63149/1/why-dont-straight-men-read-novels-fiction-masculinity-influencers-sigma
!straggots Explain yourselves
TLDR: it's because there is a way higher expectation to be financially successful and to not spend time on "useless" things placed on men because of course there is.
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Straight men read novels. Just not the goyslop effeminate chickfluencer woke stuff that most lib-pilled critics and worse, redditors of today call good.
For example, I wouldn't read any of the above mentioned shit. The tropes are so fricking .. fricking podcaster and truecrimeshit, big bad American billionaires and woman pirate
From professional reviewers
https://www.pbs.org/newshour/arts/heres-a-dozen-books-from-2023-you-should-read-critics-say
Everything is copied verbatim from the site
1st book - The main character is a newlywed, a young wife who is pulled into this group of women
2nd book - This is set in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, around 1925, in a historically immigrant Jewish neighborhood and African American. And I'll stop there. It's amazing.
3rd, 4th, book - doesn't say anything why it's great
5th book by David Grann - Nonfiction but actually good
6th book - It tells that kind of familiar story about breaking out of a repressive childhood context into a wider world. In her case, she grew up in a strict Rastafarian household. She's a lovely writer. She's a poet. And her nature descriptions of Jamaica, along with everything else, are really stunning.
Kill me
7th - It is about a couple in 1848… They are an enslaved couple…
Holy frick, guys, have I mentioned how much I love black people?
8th book - Nonfiction
9th book - Beware the Woman by Megan Abbott
HAVING SAID ALL OF THIS, I WILL CONCEDE THAT THESE ARE STILL BETTER THAN THE HOMOSEXUAL SHIT THE CONSERVATIVE LEANING "ALPHA SIGMA CHAD MALES" READ WHICH ARE 100% BULLSHIT SELF-HELP BOOKS WRITTEN BY GRIFTERS
!chuds !bookworms I FRICKING HATE BOTH SIDES
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LMAO
More reason to read solely books that are at least 50 years+ with a few exceptions (there are some 21st century literary as well)
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ngl...these books sound like they are exactly for the type of foids who say they hate how bland/shallow/msygonistic all the wish-fulfillment Lifetime-movie airport store romance/drama novels that women crave...yet, at the same time, will still secretly crave the same thing if it was packaged into a more progressive/empowering/"artistic" form...
...at least the airport-book loving ladies aren't ashamed to read that sort of slop lol !foidmoment
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Modern society doesn't offer a good enough setting to create novels with SOVL and insight on the human condition. It's mountains amounts of shitty fantasy, shitty sci-fi, x-punk, and dystopian shit.
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I looked at a good reads novel challenge thing and every single story was about BIPOCs or some minority community. Boring as shit sounding stuff
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Goodreads is the festering place of the stereotypical white lib woman who reads fanfics and shitty NPR books. That said, there's actually a great underground reading community you can find there, which can find for books that are not part of the common Canon, longer than 300 pages, or originally written in a non-English language
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Where's it at, because it seems to be hiding darn well.
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Check out the reviews on authors with books published by NYRB (Manchette, Vladimir Sorokin, John Williams, Marcel Proust), mostly forgotten modernist novelists such as John dos Passos and Joseph Roth, and on poetry collections that don't explicitly cater to women (T.S. Eliot and Ezra Pound's stuff for example) as a starting point. The users who give those things great reviews are almost always litpilled and readmaxx for four hours plus a day
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The progenitor /lit/ has always started trying to force a goodreads group. I joined a while back, but it always dies off. Proust 100% sounds like one of their failed memes.
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A good, classical novel is unironically much better in terms of getting good lessons and morals than any "self-help" nonsense. Either that or ancient writers, Lobstercels for instance should do themselves a favor and just read Marcus Aurelius or Seneca instead of "12 rules to wash your peepee and clean your room".
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I remember getting criticized for only reading classics in high school because "they don't cover modern issues" when in reality it doesn't really matter if something covers modern issues or not, certain stories are timeless and talk about things that've been happening since your grandpa was pooping in bushes and raping the other tribe's women.
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MY grandpa shat in a bathroom and r*ped his own tribes women like a civilized man
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Blood Meridian is a novel and I'm reading it.
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Nice man, its cool to read, I liek science fiction, cyberpunk, and especially post apocalypse.
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1st book: " And without being heavy-handed, McDermott manages to make a connection between the insistent charity of these women and early American intervention in Vietnam."
Sorting out the food pantry is bombing reds?
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Birnam Wood is good actually, intricately plotted tragedy !bookworms
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Is it actually or are you frickin with me? Is it up its own butt?
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I mean it's self-absorbed and obnoxiously lib-coded (there aren't like narrator politics but she's kiwi so it can't be helped), but it's also a good novel on literary terms. If it were a play in town I would go see it.
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I hate books like that, it's like they're written for pseuds
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Yeah "intricately plotted tragedy" is a lit-fic dogwhistle which isn't to everyone's taste, but that's not a bad thing
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All them words won't bring your pa back.
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What do they think, women made Tom Clancy famous???
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Sanderson too
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More like hysterical.
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The straightest men only read the bible and brando sando.
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I've literally never heard of any of these books. Don't most male fantasy readers these days just read the witcher books and Joe Abercrombie's First Law?
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!bookworms ousted as cute twinks
Lmao, Black History. I imagine she didn't interview the chuds reading (or pretending to read) Dostoevsky and Houellebecq.
what sort of "non-fiction" is that?
!nooticers
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HE CAN'T EVEN SEE THE PAGES
!chuds
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!nooticers
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He's Black. Not like he could read, anyways
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Not me. I'm a non-fiction chad.
Ladies... please form a line.
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Lmao yes 3-400 pages on the OOB and force disposition of the Wehrmacht and Red Army, along with a play-by-play of Operation Barbarossa plz and ty. Save me I have too many of these.
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"Why don't straight men read novels?" asks woman who devours softcore porn
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Many such !biofoids
You know some of them read porn that doesn't even have any fricking? It's all just lead up to nothing!
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I've never actually met a foid who reads softcore porn
We can be just as degenerate as moids
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Oh it wasn't meant too be softcore it was a fanfic that just wasn't finished lmfao
jewish lives matter
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Sorry to break your bubble, female author, who somehow gets mad about a man reading about Mark Fisher, who should be on your side (if you count good = productive as being a capitalist idea) but the reason the majority of men don't read literary novels may have to do with the act of reading is usually seen as more feminine now. Literature that is remotely masculine or male is nearly extinct in the American literary world since over 80% of literary agents are foids who get mad when something doesn't cater to them the exact way that they want it to. We're losing out on future Hellers, Wallaces, Hemingways, and Faulkners because of this basic fact and men don't see much fiction that they would like to read now due to that.
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Just read older literature, lol !classics
Most foid authors are bad and they dominate the current market, /r/books for instance thinks Margaret Atwood deserves a Nobel Prize
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The eXile did a famous review about Atwood being the author for single white collar women
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Sadly, the next Mary Shelley/Jane Austen/Louisa May Alcott/etc (if you have any other writers in mind) would be a hard find in the crowds these days...
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!bookworms I don't know if that's a hot take but I don't think Mary Shelley was ever good.
Also, here's a contemporary review of Frankenstein
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This is something Alan Moore talks about. Like HG wells was writing boys adventure sci fi lit for kids which is now considered high minded classics for adults.
Certainly the examples he gives are a bit disengenious there was lots of pop culture harru potter level trash in the past, but I think the general point is that audeinces tastes seem unable to even handle pop stuff from the past. Alfred Hitchpeepee was a blockbuster suspense filmaker who made very popular movies which modern film students consider art house and boring. Stanley Kubrick got a ton of money to make 2001 a blockbuster success and a top popular sci fi film which most modern viewers find a snore. Like Mary's Shelley's frakenstein is a piece of gothic fiction a genre of low brow pop writing which becomes a classic in comparison to whatever booktok reads today.
!bookworms disscuss
!comicshitters I think this same phenomena can be seen in comics where comics written for like r-slurred 10 year olds in the 60s assumed those kids had a cultural familiarity with the Homeric classics, the bible, and ben hur among other classics as seen here
https://rdrama.net/h/lit/post/282253/rbooks-discusses-lits-top-100-books/6662913#context
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Btw the Ben movie came out in 1959, one of the comics you posted has a date of 1961. It would be like a comic book referencing Titanic in the year 2000. I feel like a fair amount of young kids would have seen that movie with their parents or heard about it.
I'm also not sure that kids would always get all of these references but who knows.
HOWEVA, I do agree with you broadly that these stories were a larger part of the cultural cache. Look at Shazam and tell me how many ten year olds today would be able to understand the references to all the people his powers supposedly come from. Or any of them except maybe Hercules!
But beyond that, I think literate society celebrated the classics more and liberal arts was more highly regarded still as simply having a college degree was more rare, so people in higher learning were exposed to The VVestern Canon. I didn't even take a literature class in university lol
And not to sound like a marble statue pfp but I think post secondary education of the past 60 years has been indifferent at best to the cultural continuity of western society, including its literary heritage. So you have generations of people who attended these places of intellectualism that never really engaged with these stories and so didn't write about them, didn't talk about them, didn't create art with them as their inspirations. They looked to movies and TV (or comics now lol) as inspiration
But hey, that's JUST A THEORY
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Even then how many kids today could sit through ben hur the movie or care about it? To understand ben hur you have to atleast have a basic grasp on the romans and the bible. Coul you imagine the MCU making any references to ben hur compared to comics which looked like this
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In the case of the Bible and Ben Hur, back in the 50s and 60s people were more religious, parents would read the Bible more often and attend church with their children. Plus Ben Hur was a Blockbuster when it was released back in 1959 so many kids would be familiarized with it, there were also other popular Biblical films like "The Ten Commandments". As for the Aeneid that would definitely be obscure for children and even most of adults lmao.
Makes me wonder how the Marvel cycle will be seen 50 years from now. But "2001" is a slow burn, Star Wars was released 9 years after "2001" and the first film is still widely popular among general audiences, though I suspect OT Starshit fans skew older.
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I think some of it is the change in technology. To a boy in the early 20th century the Iliad was the most exciting thing you could read in school. I mean a book about adventure, drama, romance, and violence? Certainly more bloody and action packed then hamlet. Then ofc a full color comic of superman tugging the cosmos is more exciting then any book. Captain video in full motion shooting down sabatouers is more exicting then any still images. A playable Nintendo is more exciting then any video and ect
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Didn't star wars definitely mark the beginning of 'modern' filmmaking, though?
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You know when you put things like this it does make it seem like fiction as a genre is somewhat stupid to act high and mighty about since it's all just slop right after another. Like nowadays the homeric classics are seen as old, classical and cool, but were just slop back then. So is the true 'revelation' the acknowledgement that it's all useless slop and that all intruiging elements are just due to people reading into things needlessly, or that the quality of slop we recieve nowadays is just incredibly shit in comparison to what we had in the past?
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It captures the incel mindset PERFECTLY. I was reading it and thinking: if it were written these days, it would be considered too on the nose.
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Honestly I really liked reading Frankenstein in its fully unabridged form when I first read it, though it definitely borrows a lot from Paradise Lost.
Though funnily enough if you read "I have no mouth and I must scream" you'd notice that it's basically the same story but with a demented, omnicidal AI instead.
Also, I liked the book, so I'm going to give it a 10/10 just because.
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A nobel prize for boring me to tears
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What do you know, the author has outed herself as fat and and lazy.
Oh look, from the same author:
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Le hecking capitalism is why i dont spend money on consumer goods
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i hate redditors so fricking much
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I think they're just dumb and bad at reading. I've seen male coworkers' lips moving when they try to read technical documentation.
Sweaty, if you can't get through the Typescript quickstart page, YNGMI with War & Peace.
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war and peace... more like war and peachfuzz on women's upper lips
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So much coping in this thread. Reality is most moids are too dumb to read
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Knowing you grew up around and primarily associate with r-slurs makes your r-slurred perspective much easier to understand
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I move my tongue in my mouth when I talk in my head lol
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Even us !r-slurs read novels
Chinese webnovels about being reincarnated into another world as @Spiderman , that is
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Or Japanese isekai where every girl wants the super cool mysterious protagonist who knows everything
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Just look at star-, sword- & capeshit and you see tons of men who read fiction.
But those guys don't get Hinge dates, so probably not on the author's radar.
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We only read literature, like Fallout Equestria.
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And Warhammer 40 000
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I LOVE WARHAMMER
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I like 40k novels because in other spaceshit they don't gloss over or even avoid the space army men or space ships shooting each other. 40kslop will spend like a solid third of the book describing that.
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I read only the finest works on AO3
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moids dont decorate, dont talk bout they feelings, dont read books, and literally all moids do is be on they phones, watch anime, get drafted, pay alimony, and die and its EVERYTHING
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Why come white woman only read "dark romance"
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R*PE
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some of them read "Amish romance"
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Actual title should be "Why doesn't anyone read books?"
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I'm not sure tbh, I think it might be that classical literature tends to do a better job of presenting interesting ideas than interesting characters. The way characters tend to talk is incredibly formal, and lacks some of the emotional punchiness that came later on.
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It's tiktok
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Between work, training and cooking I have little time which I use for my pleasure (spreading hate online)
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I read a series of unfortunate events. Am i gay now
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hey big guy
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Hey cutie
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FRICK YEAH NO MORE FOIDS
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you're 5 years old
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BTW how many of your read real literature such as When the Side Neighbor Catch Feelings, Black Future: An Interracial Sissy Story, Dog Neighbor, and Argus the Werewolf Spanker?
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I love reading wuxia novels when I was younger, and wuxia is usually considered a very moid thing.
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why aren't men reading my omegaverse supernatural fanfic on wattpad? is it because of sexism?
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Only so many hours in the day and i'd rather read fiction and escapism than read some boring butt non-fiction iamvrysmrt material.
When it comes to fiction no, i'm not reading your i'm so quirky and pretending to be revolutionary female protaganist centered story. It's not automatically amazing because your main character is a native american, somehow also descended from slaves in Africa queer non binary mary sue.
Frick you and the trash you wrote.
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What am I? Deff?
But just started Journey to the End of the Night
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The real answer is that moids who might have read a Clive Cussler book or whatever decades ago now opt for video games or Netflix or twink porn or whatever. The publishing world hasn't catered to the male taste in decades and why would they? They're going for the yt foid market which has more disposable income than ever.
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I read chuck fiction on rdrama
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Bitches don't know about the bimodal distribution of things. I appreciate bitches, but - like the question - bitches don't know, and dudes don't know, about what it's like to see the world having grown up man or woman.
I'm old enough not to give much of a shit though, so I just have a knowing chuckle a lot of the time about this kind of stuff.
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I read Wattpad and AO3
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It was over before it began
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Based, post your AO3 acc
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You may think you're hot stuff, the Fred Astaire of this topic - but if you're Fred Astaire, I'm Ginger Rogers: Anything you can do, I can do - backwards, without looking, and in high heels.
Snapshots:
https://www.dazeddigital.com/life-culture/article/63149/1/why-dont-straight-men-read-novels-fiction-masculinity-influencers-sigma:
ghostarchive.org
archive.org
archive.ph (click to archive)
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fewer books are written about war , cars , and crime .
fiction books about stuff dudes care about are dying out, so no wonder they turn to history books lol
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Oh, for a novel about something other than brave indigenous womxn processing their generational trauma by restoring their lesbian great-grandmother's horse farm.
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The fact is that most men would rather read yuri touhou doujins off dynasty reader than bother with some female author's 'magnum opus'.
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