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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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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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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The eXile did a famous review about Atwood being the author for single white collar women
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A nobel prize for boring me to tears
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