Why men don't read books 'for women'

About a decade ago, when Marlon James was at the hight of his fame, he talked in an interview about how hard it is to write convincing women (his Booker winning novel A Brief History of Seven Killings is famously very male heavy).

He is, of course, a gay man and in the interview he mentioned that a writer friend of his had told him that the first draft of his novel The Book of Night Women read like a book about women written by a man who had never met one.

It's that last bit - about women written by a man who had never met one - that all of the column inches that have been given over to Louis Theroux's manosphere documentary reminded me of.

A horrifying number of men were horrified by the content of that documentary, while the rest of us simply said, yes, we know. Now, where Theroux thrives is in entry-level documentaries and in giving people enough rope to hang themselves. If he ever were, he's no investigative journalist and, as many of you know, Laura Bates (the founder of Everyday Sexism) has been covering the manosphere for years - in great detail - before Theroux even dreamed up the idea of this documentary.

Unsurprisingly, when it's a man at the helm, people take it much more seriously. I wonder where we've seen this before (hint: it's everywhere).

Theroux's documentary fits into the same bucket as Adolesence, also by Netflix, and I feel the same way about that show as I do about the documentary: It's horrifying and upsetting for men, but the rest of us are out here experiencing it and simply shrugging our shoulders and saying yes - we know.

Hell, within the first 20 minutes of the manosphere documentary, a hypermasculine, hyperhomoerotic (and very very very juiced up) 23-year-old let's us know exactly how he feels about the gays.

Look, I get it. I do.

When you're rubbing baby oil into other's impeccably muscled bodies and, off camera and when the lights are out, talking about how much the juice has shrunk your baws down to the size of old grapes, you've got to check yourself before one of the bros reaches over and says: just let me touch it, bro.

We've all been there, and the warmth of it in your softly tightning fist is one helluva gateway drug, I'll tell you that for free.

All of this - everything I've just said to you - and all of the discourse around the documentary got me thinking about two novels in particular: Girlbeast (Cecilie Lind) and Mongrel (Hanako Footman).

You wouldn't believe it if he were gay

Gay men deal with their own types of toxic masculinity. It's awful to be part of and it's even worse to be involved with (if you're not part of the community, you probably won't remember the 'No Fats, No Femmes' thing) but whether it's HMS TickTock from the documentary or the men in these novels, it's no grand conspiracy to say that if they were queer men (especially if they were bi, pan, or trans) you simply wouldn't believe enough of these stories to get past the first page.

We've talked about Mongrel before and as a way to preempetively prove my own point, you can see from the engagement on those posts that the men absolutely cannot stand being called out on their behaviour - and in part that's exactly what makes these novels work. It's also why, by extension, the antics of HMS TickTock and Friends are so shoulder shruggingly 'whatever' to large swathes of the population.

I loathe to strip Mongrel of all of the parts that make it incredible, but if I don't you'll be reading this for the rest of the day, so suffice to say: part of what gives the book its power and makes it so visceral is how men exert power over women - and it traces this across countries looking at how Mei's grandfather rules his house in Japan to how Mei's father rules over her life (in England) to how the man who assualts Mei tries to rule over her body. And just like our pal HMS TickTock from Theroux's documentary, they exert that power through imposition, violence, and manipulation.

If you wanted to see, or think about, how universal that experience is Girlbeast is written a world away - quite literally - from the world that Mongrel inhabits. It's even written in a different language (English trans. by Hazel Evans). Cecilie Lind's novel follows Sara, a pre-teen growing through her teenage years and captures how the gaze of men transforms from Sara from a child into an object of interest: her priest, her best friend's father, men that should (and do!) know better all hoping for a piece of her.

While, at times, she's happy to be the focus of the attention, one of the novel's greater subtexts is: how willingly can you give something to people in power? What is informed about a teenager's level of consent in relation to people twice her own age and some?

You'd be right to say 'not informed at all', but you may be among the minority and that won't frighten anyone except the blokes that learned about the manosphere from Theroux.

The intersection of girlhood and sexuality

Are you familiar with these phrases:

"Old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher"

"If your age is on the clock, you're old enough for cock"

They were popular when I was growing up.

Perhaps people still say them regularly, I'm not sure, but as an example about how language helps breed violence against women, they may be among the best out there. I'd be willing to bet that if any straight cis men actually read this newsletter, there'd be an incredibly high chance that they'd have said those phrases themselves.

Phrases about thirteen year olds and sometimes even younger.

And they're all men that would claim that they're allies.

Which, when you mull on it, isn't all that surprising. Girlbeast isn't pitched as a book about explicitly awful men. In fact, the slider of what makes someone awful is so wide and so long that these men seem passable, maybe even decent, members of their little town.

It's not Girlbeast's job to dig into the inner monologue of these men and ask why they're pursuing a teenager (especially when Sara's best friend's da start salivating over a girl the same age as his daughter), just as it's not Mongrel's job either, but we understand that these men don't have conflicted feelings about what they're doing, they don't consider themselves predators and their behaviour certainly isn't keeping them up at night.

How do we know this?

Cultural context, subtext, and reading comprehension.

We are welcome to fill in our own white space across these characters - to find our own way in and to consider why these people do the things they do. We are not reading James Patterson. We are not passengers in a black and white world of good and evil.

Across Mongrel and Girlbeast the men are often awful even if they don't recognise it in themselves, but not recognising bad behaviour in yourself doesn't make it good behaviour, it just means that you're largely protected by a social structure that doesn't have a male equivalent of "old enough to bleed, old enough to butcher".

In these novels, the intersection between girlhood and sexuality isn't an intersection at all - it's simply one big free for all for a portion of the population that's immune to gender based violence and descrimination.

If you want proof of any of that, men are famous for writing books about being womanising spies or serial killers or standing up to the establishment. Male literary fiction doesn't deal with gender based violence against men...I wonder why.

Why men don't read novels 'for women'

I suspect HMS TickTock and his gang of well oiled, juiced up, bromancers wouldn't know the front cover of a book from the back cover, in fact the god of the manosphere and former British kickboxer (who is currently on trial for human trafficking, among other things) very famously said, about reading:

"Reading books is a very cheap way to, I guess, entertain – I wouldn't call it entertainment, because my brain is far too advanced. I'm not going to sit there and go, 'smart people read'. No. I need action. I need constant chaos in my life to feel content."

Which requires no explanation or hypothesis, it really speaks for itself, but in a lot of ways the sentiment covers why men don't read these kinds of books themselves.

Men like books with explosions. Action. Men want to be James Bond. Or Tom Cruise. Or Matt Damon. Or Jason Bourne. Or Action Man. Maybe even Max Steel.

The kind of literature that invites you to find yourself in the white space, reflect on why characters (and therefore people) act and react the way they do, doesn't lend itself to a spy with a laser watch shagging a Russian.

While this won't feel new to you, my suspicion is that it actually houses something much, much, deeper: those that hold positions of structural power don't want to spend time examining why they have those positions and, more importantly for our purposes, what those positions allow them to do.

It's not women or trans or non-binary people that need to read Girlbeast or Mongrel, it's cis straight men.

That's, in part, why things like the manosphere documentary will continue to surprise a certain portion of the population - because until they engage with literature that explores the experiences of other people (not spies!) then they're able to turn a blind eye to what happens to those people, and for as long as they can do that, they don't need to start asking the uncomfortable questions, namely: "why do we let our brothers, sons, and friends behave like this?"