Over the past two years, many writers have opined on a topic that sends testosterone levels spiking. That topic is whether or not men like to read, and most of the writers begin with the proposition that men do not like to read, and then proceed to argue that, on the contrary, men do like to read. (Stephen King did this in Entertainment Weekly in 2008.) Lately, the conversation has taken a turn for the weird, as people, worried about boys' slipping grade-point averages and college-attendance rates (compared to women's), have started to wonder why, if men do in fact like to read, they don't actually buy books—not in the numbers women do. The answer some people have come up with is that it is all book-publishing's fault, because the industry is staffed mostly by women, leading to a lady-lit bias in what gets published. The argument of this sort that made the most noise was written in April of this year for HuffPo by "bestselling thriller writer Jason Pinter," who had once worked in book publishing and had a hard time getting the O.K. on books for men. Laura Miller responded in Salon that the real question is why publishing is a field that does not attract men:
It seemed to me that maybe the conversation would die with Miller's piece, because the problems she raises are not ones that can easily be solved, and not ones which, being blogged, get many hits. But last week, Publishers Weekly brought the beast back to life with an article entitled "Where the Boys Are Not." It picks up on statistics in their recent salary survey: 85% of employees with less than three years of experience in the industry are women; and women make on average $64,600 compared to men's $105,130. Then it asks, "Does the lack of men in publishing hurt the industry?" I thought that perhaps the question meant, Is it bad for the women? Or, Is it bad for the psychological health of everyone who works in publishing? But no. What Publishers Weekly is interested in is whether it is bad for the books. Some people they talk to (Jason Pinter again), think it is; some people (the spokesperson for Random House) think it's not. No one points out that, in senior positions, women hold only a slight majority.
The article does nod at the problems of low pay and "gendered jobs" (and doesn't nod at the fact that there are indeed many books "for men" published each year), but if we're going to continue having this conversation, and it seems that we are, I think we should stop conflating the issues, of which there are four, at least:
- Reading practices among men.
- What gets published and what doesn't (and the reasoning behind it).
- Low-paying, dead-end entry-level jobs in publishing (and the structuring of the entire industry).
- Women being willing to take these jobs and men not being willing and/or senior editors' hiring practices.
Each of these needs more serious investigation before we can draw any conclusions, but I'm fairly certain that, however low reading rates among men are, the blame for them can't be laid at the feet of the army of female assistants. So let's stop talking about them as if they could.
(Photograph of a male librarian: "Frequently Asked Questions (Self-Portrait #41)," by Taber Andrew Bain.)
