Male Readership is the Culture’s Latest Moral Panic

By: Rishi Janakiraman

There’s never a shortage of problems with men. At least, never a shortage of articles about them. We are told that men can’t make friends, that men are lonely, that men are defecting from the left and finding their way into the waiting arms of Andrew Tate or Jordan Peterson or some other self-styled patriarchal life coach; we are told that men are fragile, failing, in crisis; we are told that men have been reduced to categories, easily lampooned: the Nice Guy, the Performative Male, the LitBro, the guy who posts too much about DFW, the guy who reads bell hooks conspicuously in a coffee shop, the guy who won’t read bell hooks under any circumstances. And then, inevitably, in the same anxious cadence, we are told that men—those walking bundles of crisis—no longer read.

In the past few months, we’ve all seen the recent run of “men don’t read” pieces. Van Badham in The Guardian worrying that it’s effectively a “gendered empathy deficit;” Georgina Eliott of Dazed again citing the 80% statistic on women readership; David Morris’ NYT editorial elevating men’s empty bookshelves to something of a national emergency that should “worry everyone.” These op-eds often function like parables in which the act of opening a novel is a kind of spiritual prophylaxis, a moral discipline men are failing to observe, like reading Dickens or Ferrante were akin to flossing one’s conscience or attending civic mass. The figures are cited, of course: one-fourth of American men read a novel last year, compared to approximately half of women, according to the NEA. But the figures are rarely allowed to just be figures; they are immediately transubstantiated into portents, proof that men have let themselves decay, that masculinity is in decline, that the yawning gender gap in fiction consumption is no less than a stand-in about what sort of citizens men are becoming.

Some of that narrative, however, has recently been interrogated. Vox lately took a scalpel to the figures, noting that while men may indeed be “slightly less likely to read than women,” and to read fiction in particular, the margin is far narrower than panic-mongers imply; what feels like a cultural crisis often turns out to be “a legend… haunted by zombie statistics and dubious facts.” Similarly, The Guardian, drawing on new Australian longitudinal data, finds that although book reading is declining across the board, men aren’t uniquely culpable: the drop in readership is broadly shared, and the gender gap, while present, is not accelerating. 

But the argument that these essays perform with regularity (the rhetorical one, not the statistical one) is that they begin with otherwise suspect data, then swiftly exchange it for diagnosis, until what was once a statement about consumer behavior becomes a moral axiom about empathy. The logic is rarely spelled out in full, but it can be reconstructed easily enough: if men are not reading, then they are not reading novels; if they are not reading novels, then they are not encountering difference; if they are not encountering difference, then they are not developing empathy; and if they are not developing empathy, then they are becoming more cruel, more lonely, more radicalized, more dangerous. It is a syllogism with the sheen of reason but the scaffolding of panic. Each causal link seems plausible, but we eventually reach the implausible conclusion that whether men pick up a paperback once a year bears the weight of civilization itself. What disappears in this rhetorical sleight of hand is any acknowledgment of structural changes in how culture is consumed, like time displaced by streaming platforms, the collapse of local bookstores, or the professionalization of reading as schoolwork.

The trouble isn’t that the numbers are (fully) wrong—men generally are reading less, and reading less fiction most of all—but that the numbers are repurposed by the cultural imagination. When Sarah Manavis of Prospect Magazine addresses the gap, she similarly frames closing it as a means of solving the larger problem of empathy. The cultural stakes are inflated: men do not read, therefore men cannot feel. That this conditional is flimsy at best—surely we can name voracious readers who are moral monsters, just as we can name non-readers who are decent and kind—is beside the point. What matters is that the genre of “men don’t read” op-eds requires it, demands that reading be treated as salvation, because without that leap the whole crisis collapses back into what it mostly is, which is an interesting, albeit less editorial-worthy, problem of publishing and gendered advertisement. 

The logic, admittedly, is seductive: who wouldn’t want to believe that novels, those patient machines of interiority, might hold the antidote to the belligerence and cruelty that seem to characterize so much of contemporary masculinity? And yet it is also strangely reductive, because in turning fiction into medicine we risk ignoring what fiction actually is, which isn’t a guarantee of moral improvement but an aesthetic experience, one that may just as easily confirm our biases, thrill our darker appetites, or deposit us into the consciousness of characters whose monstrosity unsettles us precisely because it is rendered with such intimate force. Writing on male readership in The Atlantic, Jeremy Gordon admits as much when he writes about Fernanda Melchor’s Paradais, a novel that drags its readers into the minds of boys plotting a brutal assault, hardly a primer in empathy, but still a work that commands attention. To read, in other words, is sometimes to become more estranged, more attuned to the fact that the human interior is a site of violence as often as it is a reservoir of sympathy. 

The hidden premise in these “men don’t read, therefore men are lacking empathy” pieces is that fiction must be flattened into something like a civic technology for empathy-production. Hence the endless refrain: novels raise your emotional IQ, novels make you a better partner, novels shore up democracy. This is not altogether false—novels can do these things, sometimes they do them beautifully—but it is also a narrowing of fiction’s possibilities, a rebranding of literature as self-help at the precise moment when what might actually draw reluctant readers in is pleasure, the promise of absorption instead of moral reform. To tell men they must read because reading will make them good is disingenuous; to tell them they might find in fiction something unpredictable, something unruly, something ecstatic, is perhaps a harder sell, but it is also truer to the thing itself. 

The irony is that once you announce this crisis in public, once you establish “the man who doesn’t read” as a recognizable figure—lazy, podcast-addicted, vaguely unfeeling—you invite men to perform against it, to calibrate their identities in relation to the stereotype. A small portion might lean into it, proudly declaring themselves allergic to novels, ostentatiously rejecting fiction as feminized drivel; others will overcorrect, curating a library of the “right” authors, conspicuously name-dropping Toni Morrison or Joan Didion to signal they aren’t LitBros, nor are they the monsters of the op-ed imagination. In both cases, reading becomes more about public positioning, creating another arena where masculinity is staged and judged. 

I think that is the strangest legacy of this panic: not that men read less, which is true enough, nor that reading itself is imperiled, but that we have come to see books more and more as both technologies to manufacture and identifiers of good subjects. We read to be observed as the kind of people who read; we assign virtue and decay to entire demographics based on their relationship to novels; we conflate consumption with character. If the “men don’t read” essay feels wearying, it’s because it stages a morality play in which novels are the Eucharist and empathy the Holy Spirit, when what the novel has always offered—at its most dangerous—is the possibility of being alone with a voice that neither flatters nor condemns. That is what all this discourse forgets: that to read is not to be improved but to be interrupted, and that interruption, for men or anyone else, was always reason enough.