On Men's Place In The Literary World

(Ed. note: This discussion comes from an email list in which the topic was, essentially, "why isn't there more fiction for guys?"):

I too wish there was more fiction for guys. It's a curiously circular thing. If guys don't buy fiction then publishers don't think guys read so they don't produce fiction for guys but then guys don't have anything to buy so they can't show the publishers that they do, in fact, read.

I'm in the ACFW and I was on their email list for a while, but I was absolutely drowning in estrogen, so I dropped off. I have a feeling it's going to be that way in my future professional career as well.

So what accounts for this? Feminism.

I think it's silly that I should have to qualify what I say here, but I just know someone is going to think that I'm an advocate of revoking women's right to vote or something stupid like that. I'm speaking from my own personal experience in literature classes (like yesterday, so this is not many moons ago). There has been, for many years, a push by feminists to have much of literature reinterpreted according to their own viewpoint. I have more female professors than male and they each claim "women's studies" as a focus of their own professional interests (could you imagine how quickly the Anti-Christian Liberals Union would be knocking at the college's door if they created a "Men's Studies" program?), and boy are they hostile towards men. Listening to them, you'd have to conclude that men are evil, horrible, oppressive, hypocritical, self-aggrandizing, and ultimately, unimportant cockroaches of beings and not fit to wear their own skin. I come away from my literature classes thinking that the prevailing feeling in academia is that women want to crush men under their heel and not just level the playing field, but tilt it in their advantage. I have yet to be in a discussion where the male characters in a story were strong, sympathetic characters. They're either maniacal mad-scientists (from Hawthorne's The Birth-Mark), sexual privateers (Rev. Dimmesdale from Scarlet Letter), or impotent nobodies (Bartleby the Scrivener). And that was just yesterday.

So where is there room for men in today's literature? THERE IS NONE. Maleness is hated in academia. An honorable male character is relegated to historical or fantastical contexts (or, as in romance, remade in the likeness of a woman, rather than accept men as the flawed beings they are). Every where I turn in my literature classes and every time I try to put in my own two cents, I get blown off. I am one of two males in my 700-level lit class of 11. Last semester's Faulkner class was also the same demographic. It's been me and this other graduate student in these classes for a year now.

So what do I conclude? Men are not wanted except when they exhibit female characteristics. If you want to be a "real man" then you're deluding yourself because there is no such thing and even if there were, you'd be stoned for aspiring to that because it's a slippery slope to oppression and male dominance. You can't have male characters that are really men because those just aren't interesting (unless they're a watered-down, put-down-upon allegory for Marxism…then that's okay). Oh but what about Clive Cussler's books and Larry McMurtry, et al? Not literary fiction, but popular. And unrealistic—Romantic even (I mean that in the 19th-century literary tradition meaning, not Harlequin meaning). No man as flawed as we all are could possibly be those people.

Yes, I'm bitter. I'm angry at the establishment even though it won't do a lick of good and I would get tarred and feathered for ever saying these things in any of my classes. I would be accused of trying to drag us back to some Victorian past in which men were put back on top and brow-beat the fairer sex into submission because of fear over their own inadequacies. I swear I'm not exaggerating any of this. These are attitudes that I have heard expressed in discussion in class and it's nigh impossible, even in my bitterness, to misinterpret and magnify those attitudes beyond what was intended.

So what's the answer? For men to write important, literary fiction with strong, flawed, sympathetic male leads. For men to be Men and not sissies. To be unapologetic about who we are and the fact that God made us the way he did ON PURPOSE.

And to buy books and read them.