It has become clear that reading, especially reading fiction, is something that women do much more than men, with 80 per cent of the book-buying market in the U.K., U.S., and Canada, and 65 per cent of all fiction purchases in the U.K. being made by women.
This is something I’ve noticed with my male friends, reading for them increasingly needs to serve some sort of utility. Either they will read self-help and other nonfiction, or they will jump off the deep end into enormous tomes such as Crime and Punishment or Les Misérables. The archetypal examples that come to mind are a bloke I worked with who only watched GB News and only read self-help, and my pal who brought War and Peace with him interrailing, managing to read a total of two pages on the Berlin to Prague train.
This turns reading into something that should be done for pleasure, into something that resembles a second job. For a lot of men, there is a utilitarian calculus being done when it comes to their reading choices. Either the book needs to teach them something about the world, or the completion of it must be something that can be shown as a signifier of intellectual prowess, hence the obsession with reading classics.
The productivity and self-help culture we see has been aptly described by Jacob Hawley when he said that what it’s trying to do is get you to “employ yourself, and treat yourself like a poorly paid employee.” Every hobby must serve a goal, free time must be used ‘effectively.’
This inevitably leads to burnout, and hours wasted on social media. Our cultural regression has got to the point where works previously seen as low-brow such as The Da Vinci Code now intellectually tower above the ways we now spend our free time. Books that appealed to a mass-market have been supplanted in their role as quick, easy entertainment by social media.
So what is to be done? I’m not saying that men should only read pulpy thrillers, but that not every book you read needs to serve some sort of telos. Reading a novel that isn’t a classic work of literature is still going to be a much more rewarding and interesting way of spending your time than scrolling away on Reels. Whilst free time does not need to serve an end, it also shouldn’t be spent extensively on vapid short-form content.
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