For a while now, I have been feeling like the 10-year anniversary of when I stopped reading male authors has been upon me, so I checked (I keep a written record of every book I have read with a short summary and the month and year) and sure enough, in a few months it will have been 10 years since I read my last book by a male author!
The responses I get when I tell people that I no longer read books by men is not really varied, to be truthfully honest. Women are mainly like, “yep, I get it”. Men, however, have responded with everything from “reverse sexism!!” (lol, eye roll) to “how do you know you’re not missing out on something?” With this post, I am choosing to answer the latter, because we all know the first deserves only dismissal, if that.
I have been ruminating on this question for a while, and I have four main reasons for not reading men:
1. 80% of school curriculums (at least) are MALE. Think about the books that were required reading when you were in high school, and even college (depending your major and the classes you took, of course). In high school, the only book I remember reading that was not by a man was Jane Eyre. That’s it. I did not have many novels on my college reading lists, but my Master’s degree was in Hispanic literature. And that is when I became aware of this gaping hole in the reading lists, because 80% of my huge reading list (200+ books) was male. Isabel Allende was not even on it. I really only did the tallying after I had finished the list and my exam and had some free time on my hands, and I was disgusted. It was not at that moment that I decided to stop reading men, but the time was coming soon. (For reference, I finished my Master’s degree in 2015.)
2. I don’t trust them to write female perspectives. Since women are little girls, we are forced to think from the male perspective, and society has considered the white male perspective as ‘neutral’ to this day, which hopefully is beginning to change. But this obligation to understand how men think and where they are coming from helps women authors – any author who does not identify as male, really – in writing good, convincing male characters that are full of depth. Hopefully you can see where I am going with this. Because boys and men are not forced to do the same, and even willfully avoid it (more on that in #3), the female characters they write are often shitty and …well, shitty. They sexualize female characters, because that is what they do to women in real life, and instead of actually talking to women and getting to know them, which would help in the character development department, they simply imagine everything on their own, which leads to sexualized female characters with no depth and who lack sincerity. I am sure there are exceptions, but I am simply not interested. Which brings me to my next point.
3. Men are boring. For basically all of human history, men have said, and continue to say, if not through their words, then through their actions, that they find women and their perspectives boring, uninteresting, not valuable, etc. and etc. And now I am doing the same, which is nothing if not deserved: I find men boring. I find their work uninteresting. I find the work they declare to be interesting, not. (Think of the literary “canon”, which was declared thus by… you guessed it, white men.) I find their storylines and everything about them boring. If this does not sit well with you, consider that men have been saying this for eternity about women, and it is pretty much accepted as ‘neutral’. Lol, what a joke.
This was my original list, and then I had an interesting conversation with a student of mine about how famous men have treated the women in their lives extremely poorly, and decided to add a final point to my list:
4. Men’s behavior is atrocious and has been excused for far too long because of their ‘genius’. Many many male writers not only treated their partners poorly, but also stole their work and either stuck their name on it or blatantly plagiarized it. In summary: men’s bad behavior, and them being bad people in general, has been excused for far too long due to their ‘genius’. Instead of going on and on, I will leave you here with some examples: Hemingway cheated on all four of his wives and was violent toward them, even shooting at his second wife. Fitzgerald stole his wife Zelda’s work, and when she tried to get a divorce, he had her committed to a mental hospital, where she died locked in her room. Tolstoy married his first wife when she was only 18 (he was 34) and emotionally abused her, not to mention she was a writer in her own right. But of course, we only really know about him. All of this can be easily found with a quick Google search. And those are just the writers, and the ones we know about now. It’s an ever-expanding list.
Needless to say, with my respect for and interest in men at all time low, I feel no regret for only having read women authors for the last 10 years – on the contrary, I have never once questioned my decision or looked back with regret! In the beginning of these 10 years, I told myself that if I got bored (lol, as if) or ran out of good books to read (again, as if), I could always return to men. But there are so many amazing novels to read by women; I know I will never return.
Curious to know what my final reads by men were? As I knew I was soon planning on leaving male authors in my past, I decided to finally read The Hobbit and the complete Lord of the Rings series to see what all the fuss was about, and it basically cemented by decision: in nearly 1,500 pages of writing, Tolkien only managed to create 3 female characters of importance, while the male characters are many. (I even read that in the movies they created dialogue that did not exist in the books to help the development of the female characters, and even with this, all the movies failed the Bechdel test pretty spectacularly. However, that is a post for another day, which I will probably never write, because I simply no longer care about men and their creations.)
And so, I challenge you: when was the last time you read a book by a woman? Out of the books you’ve read in the past 1, 5, or 10 years (etc.), how many were by women and how many by men? Take count and then even it out. And as always, if you need recommendations, I post regularly here about what I’ve been reading. I find many of my reads on the Women’s Prize for Fiction short and longlists, and some of my favorite books are by authors such as Elena Ferrante, Maggie O’Farrell, and Madeleine Miller, among many, many others.