Why Johnny Doesn’t Read, An Exercise

Let’s run a little experiment together, shall we?  Open Google, and enter, ‘Why Men Don’t Read,” into the search bar.  The first few articles should be worth a laugh.

First up, Why Men Don't Read: How Publishing is Alienating Half the Population

Color me impressed!  I was ready to rip into the first five articles for their blatant misunderstanding of and contempt for men, and instead get a reasonable story from a reasonable guy.  From the Huffington Post of all places!  Will wonders never cease.

It's not perfect, or we would have nothing to talk about.  First problem is that the author feels the need to include the obligatory sop to the ladies in the audience.

I was hesitant to write this article, mainly because in no way do I want to be perceived as diminishing the talents of many, many brilliant women in publishing,

It's an article about men, and he still felt the need to talk about women.  Of course he did.  These days, you can’t say anything nice about men without covering your six by complementing women.  Compliments are a zero-sum game.   The modern religion of secularism has its forms and protocols that must be adhered to lest you be cast out as an unclean heretic, after all. 

He also downplays what we now know to be a deliberate and malevolent cultural shift when he says,

nor do I believe that there is a true ‘gender bias’. A bias insinuates some sort of malice, a purposeful exclusion of a segment of society for selfish or ignorant reasons.

1911, Courtesy,
http://www.pulpmags.org/

Give him credit, this was written in 2011.  The mask has slipped since then, and the publishing industry, in line with the rest of the coastal cultural pioneers, continually signals its desire to see masculinity replaced by a tepid uni-sexual market that presents a monocultural diversity.  The order of the day is making men more feminine and women more masculine for reasons too deep to go into here. 

Those complaints aside, it’s actually a very good article that throws stones at a publishing industry (and its media allies) who don’t understand men, who don’t cater to men, and who just plain don’t like men, but who then go on to blame men for turning their backs on an industry that has no use for them.

To use a recent example, take Melissa McCarthy’s brilliant marketing strategy for the Y-chromosome-free rehash of Ghostbusters.  The water carriers in the media leapt at the chance to write virtually identical stories quoting her disdain for potential customers when she called them friendless losers.   Good call, Mel, keep on proving the critics right, that’ll put butts in seats.

Back to HuffPo, the writer points out that most of the publishing houses are dominated by women, and that the product and the marketing serve women.  Which is fine, good luck with that.  He makes a strong plea for more resources dedicated to male readers when he says,

Publish more books for men and boys. Trust editors who try to buy these books, and work on the marketing campaigns to hit those audiences. The readers are there, waiting, eager just under the surface. And I promise, if publishing makes an effort to tap it, they’ll come out in droves.

But he doesn’t understand those women any more than they understand him.  His advice is sound.  It is logical and it makes good business sense.  Those two arguments work on logical men engaged in productive business, but the emotive women engaged in business for fulfillment rather than profit won’t listen. 

They didn’t listen.  The article was written five years ago and little has changed in the big publishing houses.

 

But much has changed down in the swamps at the feet of the dinosaur publishing firms.  They are no longer needed.  Men who read are taking matters into their own hands and producing their own works.  We’ve done what we always do – found an exposed flank in our enemy’s defenses and ruthlessly exploited it.  In this case that flank is self-publishing.

 
There is more men’s adventure fiction being written than ever before, and all the publishing apathy in the world can’t stop the onrushing tide.  It’s early days yet.  The word hasn’t fully gone out, the structures aren’t fully developed, and the filtering of the good from the drek has a way to go, but men’s adventure writing will soon make a huge comeback.

 We don’t need their help.  We’ll do it on our own.

 

 

Johnny Got His Paperback

The world needs more men’s adventure fiction.

You’ve probably seen at least one click-bait article featuring a series of garish and campy covers for the men’s adventure fiction magazines from the 1950s and 1960s.  They feature bright colors, exclamation points, and outrageous article titles, “Weasels Ripped My Flesh” being the prime example.  We’re supposed to look at those magazine covers and laugh at the naked salesmanship of their creators, and the crass simpletons who consumed them.

Well not this lug, sister.  Go peddle that smoke water somewhere else, because those who sneer at the once-popular and now maligned men’s adventure genre are fools.

To start with the easy observation, the men reading those magazines were reading.  That's a huge point in their favor right out of the gate.  Their attention wasn’t yet snared by 100 television channels, video games, the modern day news cycle, cell phones, and of course the internet and blogs like this.  Criticizing them for reading the wrong way is a lot like criticizing them for eating the wrong kinds of vegetables. 

Sure, they were reading, says the cynic, but look at what they were reading.  That was trash with no redeeming value.  Those stories represented simple fare for simple minds with simple tastes.

 Au contraire.

The men reading these magazines were former GI’s, the men who came of age wading through the surf surrounded by death and flying lead.  They spent their young adulthood crawling through mud, holding dying friends in their arms, and chasing exotic women through strange foreign lands.  They learned more about the world and about life through a year of direct experience than most college kids learn in a decade of classroom study.  When it was time to relax, they sought out reading that would help them recapture the thrill and excitement of those formative moments, and materials that reinforced their self-image as brave men fighting the good fight against long odds.

The stories in those early men’s adventure magazines, regardless of how well written they were, were not just empty brain food.  Instead, they served to reinforce the cultural ideal of hard working and (generally) honest men fighting their way through a hostile world.  These were tough men facing difficult times – as we all do – who read as a means of reconnecting with the masculine need to strive, to build, and to protect.

Today the illiterati turn their noses up at the very idea of a masculine ideal, and it is this rejection of the western approach to manhood that leads them to reject stories of violent defense of the innocent, of struggle against the odds, and of brotherly camaraderie.  The tough guy tales of the past have been ejected from the universities and the schools by weak minded people who cannot even recognize what a man is, let alone why trying to be a better one would be something worthwhile.

We’re not done here.  We’ll go into this in more depth in later posts. For now, just remember that your reading tastes could do a lot worse than emulate guys like these.

 

Be a man.  Read more manly.

Being a Better Writer

This post isn't about better writing, it's about being a better writer.

 

As I write this, the TV above my head is blaring the tedious drama of ghetto dwelling reprobates.  Two more of that ilk sit across from in in the auto shop waiting room. Their undisciplined children are doing their level best to dismantle a wire frame toddler toy, banging on it with whatever comes to hand. The second family’s kids are licking the vending machine glass, adding a fine patina of saliva and snot to the display.

 

A retreat to Twitter or quick raid before the Clash of Clans war would help pass the time in this torture hall, but there’s something else to be done first.

Write.

 

One of my major weaknesses for a long time was an inability to write until the conditions were just right.  Late at night, peace and quiet, 10 minutes of warm up.  You know the drill.

 

Those of us writing for the enjoyment of it have to carve time out of busy days, so we can’t wait.  We better be able to toss out a couple hundred words on a lunch break, on the bus, you name it.

 

The words might not be great.  They may come slow.  They may never see the eyes of a single reader.  They are still worth it.  Each one takes you closer to David Edding‘s 'million written words to proficiency’.

 

So next time you have a few minutes, no matter how loud or obnoxious the ambiance, add a few words to your novel, bang out a blog post, just get something down.

 

Prove to yourself writing is more important than social media, video games, or whatever other waste you normally use to kill time.  Writing is not what you do, it's who you are.  So be a writer, get writing, and keep writing, whenever and where ever you can.

 

This environment is about as bad as it gets.  A man who can write here can write just about anywhere.  

 

That’s all I have time for.  The mechanic is here and he has the grim visage of a veterinarian who has to tell the family it’s time to put Rover down.  Appropriate given that I drive a Land Rover.